May 4, 2008 — Dionne Wells has just about come full circle. Born and raised just down the street from Guy Benjamin School in Coral Bay, St. John, she's now its principal.
"It's an awesome school," Wells, the mother of three children, said.
One of her children, Kiana Athanase, 10, is a fifth grader at Guy Benjamin. Her oldest, Alexa Richards, 13, is an eighth grader at Julius E. Sprauve School, and her youngest, Ashaun Hedrington, 3, attends Methodist School.
Wells keeps watch over nearly 100 Guy Benjamin students in grades kindergarten through six, up from 65 last year, she notes. Add in eight full-time teachers, two itinerant teachers and 13 other staff members, and she has a lot on her plate.
Although her mother spent her career in education including a stint at Guy Benjamin School, she didn't start out to be an educator.
"I wanted to be a forensic scientist," she said.
After attending Guy Benjamin and then Sprauve Schools, Wells went off on the school ferry to Eudora Kean High School on St. Thomas.
Next came a bachelor's degree in biology at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Ready to return home, Wells started teaching at science at Sprauve School, a job she held for 10 years.
While she enjoyed the classroom, she wanted to move up the ladder and again trekked off to St. Thomas to get a master's degree in instruction and supervision at the University of the Virgin Islands.
"I'm more of a leader, and I'm good at organizing," she said.
She graduated from UVI in 2003, the same year she was appointed Sprauve's assistant principal.
In 2006, she was named acting principal at Guy Benjamin. The post became permanent the next year.
Wells is the first Guy Benjamin principal in a long time to actually live in the community. Previous principals often came from St. Thomas.
"It was a dumping ground. That was unfair, and I'm happy I'm here," she said of the Guy Benjamin principal's post.
Coral Bay is a small community with lots of involvement in the school. The Coral Bay Yacht Club organizes an annual flotilla to raise money for the school. Wells said that volunteers, including senior citizens, regularly help with the students.
"It's a very caring community," she said.
While the community cares about the school, Wells still faces many challenges as principal. Many are due to the school's location at the end of the Education Department's geographic road. Since St. Thomas and St. John are lumped together as one district, many services must come from St. Thomas. Wells said that repair people come when there's an emergency, but otherwise routine visits are infrequent.
"A lot of people don't like the boat ride, they don't like the drive to Coral Bay," she said.
The aging school faces many physical challenges. While it has enough room for up to 120 students, it doesn't have space to serve as a combined cafeteria and auditorium. The Legislature funded a cafetorium in 2000 but after the room didn't materialize, Wells said the money was re-appropriated.
Students now eat lunch in a breezeway between a set of classrooms and the office. It leaks, and when it rains the area gets wet — forcing parents and students to crowd into one end of the already small area for last year's Christmas program.
Wells hopes to address that problem with a modular unit to place on the front yard that will have room for the students to eat and to hold assemblies.
Currently, those events are held on the playground or basketball court, which causes problems when it rains.
She said that since it's anybody's guess if and when the proposed elementary and high school will be built on St. John, she needs a solution for right now. Supporters of the new school are pressing the federal government to lease land within V.I. National Park to the local government to build a school, but if the lease happens, it will still be quite some time before the school goes up.
The fate of the school's basketball court and the adjacent Coral Bay Ballfield also remain up in the air. Wells said both are on land leased by the Moravian Church to T-Rex for a marina. Work hasn't started, and it's unclear when it will.
However, she is sure it will have an impact on the school since it will change the entire area.
Now in her 30s — that's as specific as she gets — Wells spends her little bit of spare time reading, working on her house construction project and doing things with her children.
In 20 years?
"I'll be retired and visiting my kids, wherever they are," she said, with a laugh.
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