This week’s A Portage Life in the Spotlight is Michelle Stewart, principal of Willowcreek Middle School. Michelle has dedicated her entire adult life to education and for the past six years, led Willowcreek Middle School in a new direction.
Michelle has been an administrator for 20 years, previously working as a teacher for seven years. In her 20 years as an administrator, Michelle has worked as an elementary principal in Portage for seven years and she spent six years in Munster. She previously worked at Willowcreek as an assistant principal and has worked her way back to her current position in Portage.
“My favorite job ever was Assistant Principal at this building [Willowcreek], mainly because I had a lot of interactions with kids,” Stewart said “the wonderful part about being in that position is you get to change those [bad] behaviors, especially in middle school kids who are at the developmental age when they are crazy, they are absolutely out of their minds. You get to see that progression.”
Stewart spent 13 years as an elementary school principal and recalled what was special about that job, and how it affected her life.
“In the elementary schools, it was more of a nurturing environment, more motherly,” Stewart added “I could go down to kindergarten and read them a story when I was having a bad day.”
Being involved in education her whole adult life, Stewart has devoted countless hours and her whole heart to something that she loves doing.
“It is the only thing that is of truly any lasting value,” Stewart said “anything else that you can do in life, wears out, breaks and goes away. No matter what it is that you can get involved in, the only thing that lasts is that education. You get that knowledge, you get someone to think differently and you get yourself to think differently. It is always yours and it always builds upon itself.”
In her past six years as the principal at Willowcreek Middle School, Stewart has helped to shape a transformation in the way teachers interact with each other and the ways the teachers interact with the students.
“We have changed up how sixth grade is so it is more of an elementary on steroids where the kids have teachers for a longer period of time to make for a smoother transition,” she added “the FISH program that we are doing, which teaches kids how to get along. It is the whole idea that is in the newspaper all of time about how to get rid of bullying. Well, you get rid of bullying by teaching kids to be good to one another. There are just tons of things.”
Now that her children are grown, Stewart said she is not as involved in the community as much as she would like, mostly because she is a Willowcreek 12 to 14 hours a day working on how to make the school better as well as the educational process better for each student.
“I have to have a day where a kid makes a decision that he normally would not have made,” Stewart said in response to a question about what a good day entails for her “if I have been working with a kid about making better decisions, and four times out of five he slides backwards, but that fifth time, he gets it. It is like, thank you, thank you. That is the funny kind of inverse thing that we do. When we have no problem, it is a good day.”
Over the last six years Willowcreek has begun to grow and Stewart attributes that to the teachers and staff of the school, as well as the students.
“It is the feeling of the adults around here,” she said “it is absolutely, when you walk in this building, a good warm feeling. There can be no learning without relationships. If there is no good relationship, nothing happens. Think about the people that have impacted you, they are the one that you want to go to their classrooms and you wanted to see them during the day. That is what makes the difference.”
Because of her tireless commitment to the students of Willowcreek Middle School and her devotion to education, Michelle Stewart is undoubtedly A Portage Life in the Spotlight.
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