The new Dean of Students is Dr. Jeff Wead and yes, he has heard all of the jokes. Or, at least most of them.

“If you want to tell me a joke about my last name, you are allowed to. But if I have heard the joke, you have to do push ups, and if I haven’t heard the joke, I’ll do push ups,” said Wead.  “But there are three rules. It needs to be high school appropriate, it needs to make sense, and it does have to be funny.” 

Wead is excited to start working with Cactus Shadows and making it a better and safer place for students and teachers. 

“I don’t know exactly what was done in years past, but I know we have a lot of good students and staff here. We’ll just try to do what we can to make it easier for everybody,” said Wead. 

Many students have already met Wead. The first few days of this semester, he was on campus before school started, standing outside greeting kids at the front gate, and went into classrooms to meet students. 

“He came and introduced himself to my class and he seemed very nice. He also has a good sense of humor,” said Queenie Goff, a senior.

One of the things Wead likes about his job is the opportunity to get to know the students around school. Even if they’ve made mistakes and ended up in his office, he’s happy to get to talk with them.

Wead is definitely not the type of administrator who sits in his office behind a desk. He is very easy to spot around the school, often walking around campus; students might even be doing pushups with him. 

Before coming to Cactus Shadows, Wead was a P.E. and Health teacher, and then a Vice Principal for fifteen years. 

“I was a vice principal in Missouri at Willard Highschool,”said Wead. ”That was a little bit smaller than Cactus Shadows, we ran about thirteen hundred kids.” 

At Wead’s first school there was no Dean of Students, so he worked as the Vice Principal and focused on freshmen and sophomores at the school.

“Procedures are different in every high school, so you learn more working with kids from other places,” said Wead.

Wead plans to spend the rest of this semester watching and learning more about the school. This will help him come up with new ideas for next year. He has been taking notes on what we could do for everyone to be safer. 

In his time off, Wead likes to spend time with his family, which includes five daughters, one of whom attends Cactus Shadows. 

“Kids hesitate to be my friend because my dad is the dean and they think of me as a Goody Two-Shoes, but I’m just like every other kid,” said Elizabeth Wead, freshman and daughter of the new dean.

He also loves to work out, and he is a man of faith. Wead welcomes anyone to his office that has any questions or just wants to introduce themselves.