For Anthony Pestello, the end of the school year comes with an exhale, not a goodbye. For the past eight years, the Language Arts teacher at East Community Learning Center has hosted a June cookout at his home with both current and former students.
It’s a way for him to continue the care that his students receive when they walk into his second-floor classroom.
“They come [to East CLC], they know we’re going to be here, they know they’re going to be safe and cared for,” Pestello said. “And I think they’re going to miss that.”
Pestello said he’ll miss providing that care and structure for the students. That’s a sentiment shared by teachers and staff across the district.
The routines for Deshawn Fraser, a safety team member for the past several years at East CLC, are a bit interrupted at the end of the year. There are fewer students around, especially once seniors are finished for the year. The ones who are still in the building, she said, try to push the envelope a bit when teachers and staff loosen up.
Nearly every student who passes through Fraser’s metal detectors gets a word of encouragement or a hug. She knows them well after a full academic year, and that’s clear in their interactions. The students at East CLC have come a long way this year, and that doesn’t go unnoticed by Fraser.
“They did it,” Fraser said. “They’re happy. They accomplished something [this year].”
And for her? The work doesn’t stop. She’ll spend her summer working at a couple of summer camps, keeping that line of care and support she provides to students in Akron strong.
Butterflies (and students) transform at Schumacher CLC
At Schumacher Community Learning Center, Principal Chris Haynes is winding up the last of his seven years working in the building and running the campus. Next year, he’ll move to an administrative role at Buchtel Community Learning Center. It’s a way for him to continue to move with some of the students who were under his care at the elementary school and build on the success he’s seen at the school.
“I saw a need based on looking at the trend data,” Haynes said. “And since I’ve had an influence here at elementary, why not go over to see if I can continue having that support in the middle school?”
Before he dives into the work of improving academics at Buchtel, though, he said he’ll spend the summer working on a “honey-do” list of projects at home put together by his wife.
His decision to transfer buildings is made easier by teachers such as current 2025 Akron Education Association Teacher of the Year Tracey Robinson, who sets the building’s overall tone with the work she does in her kindergarten class.
Sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor, her students listened intentionally to her read “Caterpillar to Butterfly”as a refresher of everything they’ve learned the past month as they observed caterpillar metamorphoses as they changed into Painted Lady butterflies.
Why butterflies?
“Living in a city, urban population, it’s rare that they get the opportunity to interact with nature in such an up-close way,” Robinson explained.
The entire butterfly experience was an exploratory process, she said. Instead of just giving the kids information, she wanted them to go through a hands-on process.
Besides learning about the life cycle of butterflies, 91% of Robinson’s students are reading on level and 82% of the students are on grade level for mathematics, which means the class in Room 108 is ready for first grade.
Solar race cars, birdhouses and trumpeter swans
The National Inventors Hall of Fame Middle School in downtown Akron is cavernous in parts, and the former museum is laced with technology that students take full advantage of for their school year projects.
Andrew Thompson and Ang Paing, who both just finished their sixth grade year, said their favorite projects this year were building solar race cars and birdhouses for endangered species, respectively.
“We didn’t get to choose our groups, which I thought was really interesting,” Thompson said. “Because we didn’t have as many fights, actually, many arguments.”
That speaks to the collaborative nature at NIHF STEM Middle School, something building principal Amanda Morgan said is intentional.
Sydney Flohr, a fifth grader at the school, and her classmates helped the Akron Zoo improve the environment for its trumpeter swans. It was her favorite project of the year, and her team’s proposal to get the swans into the deep end of their pool was selected by the zoo.
“We had a tote and food and these big balls that they could play with and they could eat,” Flohr said. “And so they could hang out on the deep end.”
Matthew Kaminsky, a seventh grader, and Santana Gooden, an eighth grader, will see each other on the baseball diamond during the West Akron Baseball League’s summer games. Gooden will attend Akron Early College next fall, where he said he’ll use his social skills to help him overcome any struggles he has in math.
Kaminsky also wants to head to Akron Early College, but he has a year left at NIHF STEM Middle School. He won more than $1,000 in scholarships this year and visited the University of Akron’s campus for the first time. It expanded his idea of what a school can be.
“It was a lot bigger and more spaced out than I would imagine,” he said. “Because, like, I’m always thinking schools are one building.”
