Former Plymouth music teacher Bob Pickell was honored during Tuesday’s school board meeting. Plymouth School Board President Todd Samuelson called for a moment of silence at the beginning of the meeting. “Before we get into the rest of the agenda, just recalling the last meeting that Mr. Bob Pickell was here, we were congratulating him on his retirement – a stark example of how precious life is,” he said.
Pickell died July 1 when he fell through the attic at his Plymouth home onto the cement garage floor. He taught in the school corporation for 38 years before his retirement last month, first as the high school choir director and later as an elementary school music teacher at both Webster and Menominee.
Later in the meeting, Superintendent Dan Tyree decided to forego most of his usual superintendent’s remarks to thank members of the Plymouth Community School Corporation for their efforts in honoring Pickell. “Usually at this time, I go through our core values and talk about things that have happened during the past month that illustrate how we use our core values to drive the work and decision-making that we do,” he said. “This month, all I really could think about was how in the corporation we saw all the core values used in the tragic loss to our colleague and friend Mr. Pickell.”
Several of Pickell’s colleagues and former students gathered in the high school auditorium last Thursday for a remembrance service hosted by the school corporation.
