Penn-Trafford High School honors retiring teachers; Newsome credited with building robotics program

The Penn-Trafford School District meeting included recognition of two retiring staff members, Jeff Newsome and a teacher identified only as Nancy, with colleagues praising their long service and work with students.

Board members and colleagues recounted Newsome’s career: he earned a bachelor’s degree in technology education and a master’s degree in multimedia technology from California University of Pennsylvania, taught in Virginia, and joined Penn-Trafford High School in 1999. Newsome described bringing a robotics course to the high school around 2008–2009 after attending a presentation at Carnegie Mellon University and said the program grew from a handful of students to teams that reached the world championships and later competed in VEX robotics, which he said has expanded to over 20,000 teams worldwide.

Newsome said COVID interrupted the program’s momentum: two teams that qualified for a world championship lost that opportunity because of the pandemic, and the team competed virtually in 2021. He added that he expects a young group of students who competed this year to do well next year.

Colleagues also recognized Nancy, who the transcript identifies as having been inspired by parents who were educators, earning a teaching degree from Central Michigan University and beginning classroom work in 1977. The transcript states she taught in Michigan and Ohio before moving to Pennsylvania and that she returned to the classroom in 2010 as an English language arts teacher at Penn-Trafford High School. Nancy described speech and debate classes and a focus on interpersonal “soft skills” such as firm handshakes and face-to-face communication as among the aspects she will miss most about teaching.

No formal personnel action on these retirements is recorded in the transcript; the remarks were recognitions and reflections on their careers.