Cadillac Education Association: Eye on Education

05/06/2025

05/06/2025

May 6, 2025 - VOTE!

04/30/2025

Congratulations to Tom Ouwinga & Lori Goodrich, this year's Outstanding Person in Education recipients! Tom is a 5th grade teacher at Franklin Elementary and Lori is an administrative assistant at Mackinaw Trail Middle School. This year's Friend of Education award was granted to Kelly Whitman.

Please join us in celebrating each of them; they go above and beyond each day and have been recognized by their colleagues and the MEA 15-B association for their noteworthy contributions to the field of education.

Photo Cred: MEA 15-B

02/25/2025

Congratulations to Heather Trowbridge, CEA Member of the Month for January 2025! Heather is a dedicated and hard working educator; her students are incredibly lucky to have her!

02/07/2025

We invite you to support Lawson Wistinghausen by purchasing a bracelet and wearing it throighout the month! 100% of the proceeds go to Lawson’s cancer treatment and related expenses.

Bracelets available TONIGHT at the CHS high school basketball games! Students can also get them at Mackinaw Trail Middle School, Cadillac High School, and Cadillac Innovation High School.

01/27/2025

Congrats to CEA Member of the Month, Mr. Steve Hall for the month of December!

Mr. Hall teachers 8th grade history and has taught for 27 years.
Additionally, he coached track and field (24 years), wrestling for (12 years) and is currently on the Cadillac Wrestling Club’s board, as the Coaches' Chair.

Steve's roots run deep in the Cadillac Area. He loves the sense of community and people's willingness to help one another when things get tough.

Mr. Hall would like to remind everyone that we are lucky to live in a gorgeous, outdoor wonderland! Get out there and enjoy it!

12/16/2024

Project Christmas 2024 was hugely successful, serving over 760 families in Wexford & Misaukee
counties!

A special thank you to math teacher, Laurie Erikson, for organizing book distribution for infants-teens. Throughout the year, Laurie orders books with grants and donation money, stores the books, recruits staff for the day that families come to shop Project Christmas, and then immediately begins restocking for next year. She does an incredible job!

It was great to see many educators, their families and friends volunteer their time to help shoppers choose books for their children!

Thank you to:
Liz Becktel & Family
Marsha McGuire & Family
Judy & Dave Simons
Keri Powell & Family
Gracie Porter, Cadillac Senior
Anne Koschmider & Family
Jolene C., 8th Grader
Russ & Nicki Helsel & Family
Terri Anderson
Angie Gebhard & Family

Photo cred: Project Christmas

Happy Holidays!! 🌲

12/06/2024

Congrats to November 2024 CEA Member of the Month, Malinda-Martin Baker!

Mrs. Baker teaches science courses at Cadillac High School and she goes above and beyond to provide and rigorous and engaging education to her students every day!

12/04/2024

Congrats to October 2024 CEA Member of the Month, Sherry Neifert!

Mrs. Neifert teaches the outstanding 4th grade students at Forest View Elementary School. This is her 6th year with CAPS. She serves as the chair of a women's service organization in Manistee County near her home. Sherry enjoys teaching in Cadillac and says she loves the way CAPS comes together to support families and individuals. There's a strong sense of community, with traditions that promote pride in Cadillac.

Sherry believes that building strong trusting relationships are key to successes at home, school and in the community. Focusing our time on people first, and programs that support those relationships second, we promote greater confidence, happiness, skill and hope in people.

12/02/2024

Exploratory and Lab classes at Mackinaw Trail Middle School are designed to give students a rich, hands-on experience. Mrs. Nicole Helsel, 8th grade Science teacher, has provided just that for her students. They are busy learning to use their laser engraving machine and software!

Mrs. Helsel owns her own laser engraver and came across a grant to use it in the classroom. She thought it might be fun to learn new ways to use it alongside her students, so she wrote and received the grant. Her STEM-based exploratory class was the perfect opportunity to apply it, but she is still looking for ways to incorporate it into general science classes as well so she can expose more students to it.

The vision is to eventually create something self-sustaining where the students create and sell projects to return funds to the school and the program. This will allow them to learn skills like how to use the equipment and software, giving back to their school with service projects, and entrepreneurship. I hope that students can take this experience and build from it and find new career opportunities. Students will eventually learn how to create vector files to sell for others to engrave, which means that they don't even have to own a laser engraver to earn money from it and can do it from their own homes. This is a relatively new technology and a blooming field of online creating. The fact that we are able to offer this to our students puts us among a very short list of schools doing this sort of thing.

Shout out to Mrs. Helsel for not only going above and beyond to search for and write a grant while balancing regular instruction and teaching duties, but also leading, inspiring, and bringing relevant content to her students!

11/27/2024

Congrats to CEA Member of the Month, Christina Baird!

Christina teaches English Language Arts in the Special Education department at Mackinaw Trail Middle School. This is her 3rd year at CAPS and the start of her 24th year of teaching. Outside of school, will find Mrs. Baird supporting the community and her students by working at Project Christmas and attending her students’ sporting events.

She enjoys walking downtown Cadillac to visit the businesses in all four seasons. Warming up by the outside fire at the park is a must in the winter!

Her motto is: "Success doesn't come to you, you've got to go to it."