Uhling set to supervise reading curriculum

“I’ve never woke up any day and not wanted to go to work. This just provides me with another arena and it was open and available,” Larry Uhling said of his new position as District Curriculum Director and Facility Manager for Carbon County School District #2 (CCSD#2). He began the position on July 1.

“I was the principal for 14 years at Saratoga High School and I loved, loved being the principal,” Uhling said. “It was an opportunity for me to kind of be in a position that interested me. Facilities interest me and so does curriculum. Over the past four years we’ve had an outside consultant come in and I worked with him really closely and pretty much was the district person. It was just what I did inside being the principal of the high school … Professionally I find it rewarding.”

“This year I’ll be involved in supervising the adoption of the reading program,” Uhling says of his new position as District Curriculum Director. “And if we go into any kind of a writing program, or if we look at curriculum materials in the high school, I’ll guide that process.”

As curriculum director, he will work to bring CCSD#2 curriculum up to state standards under the adoption of the Common Core. “The state standards really bring more rigor at lower levels. And a deeper understanding, I think, is what the goal is, of math, writing, reading comprehension. I look at the assessment stuff that the students do now and it has changed immensely from 20 years ago, 25 years ago, 30 years ago. It’s amazing what we expect the kids to know.”

“Most all the reading you do once you’re out [of school] is all technical. Our students need to be able to read a technical document and glean information and be able to put it to use,” Uhling said. “Our focus and, I think, the Common Core focus and the Wyoming state standards focus is more towards that type of informational text.”

“It’s really amazing trying to get an understanding of all the processes for the facilities,” Uhling said of his position as Facility Manager, citing the school facilities commissions department on the state level. “They’re not getting funded quite as much as they were prior to the coal situation in Wyoming. But the other thing is that they’re concerned about the monies they have for school facilities. We give them projects that we think need to be taken care of and they provide us funds. But to do that, they have really stringent guidelines—which are good … but everything takes time to work through that system.”