In Monday July 28ths meeting: - Mr Walker announced the Elementary Open House will be August 26th from 4 to 6 PM. (The High School open house will follow that next day, August 27th also from 4 to 6 PM.) - Mr Green reported that Kingston ranked #2 in the county overall on MME test scores. We were #1 in science, #3 in Social Studies, Reading and Math, and #5 in Writing. Mr Green also introduced for a first-read a series of amendments to the high school student manual. The proposal changes graduation requirements by adding an earth science elective credit requirement, and allowing more flexibility for the completion of the states foreign language credit requirements. It also revises terminology in disciplinary action policies especially in reference to out of school vs in-school suspensions. There is more latitude for students to use their cell phones at designated times/areas, but the term cell phone has been replaced with personal communications device (PCDs) so as to have the rules apply to all of the new gadgets on the market today. I scribbled numerous comments on my copy as I read through it, but most of my ideas concerned sections that were not effected by Mr Greens amendments. As such I plan to vote in favor of the amendments next month, but will put my notes in my back burner project stack to dig into later in the year sometime, as I think in policy committee we could probably streamline the manual quite a bit if we put some effort into it. Frankly though, theres a long list of more pertinent things to contend with so that will have to wait. - The Board thanked the Kramer family for a generous $10,000 donation for the purchase of high-end computers for our robotics program. - Richard and Jan Peter presented their latest publishing from The Depot Committee, They All Became One. This is a thick and hefty book containing an enormous wealth of research and photographs from Kingstons local and school history, as it goes through the history of all of the old township one-room school houses from which we emerged as a consolidated district. Flipping through their production I must say I was quite impressed. I moved to recognize Richard and Jan for the countless hours of research and effort they clearly have put into this project, and commented that having such a unique and extensive compilation of local Kingston history is a valuable resource in achieving our district vision component of Fostering a Love for Community. In discussion the Board authorized purchasing 6 initial copies for teachers to make use of at will. Once we get a feel for how our teachers might desire to make use of such a resource within the academic program, Im confident we will have no objection to buying additional copies as needed. You may purchase your own copies for $30 each for local pickup or $36 shipped. Checks should be payable to the Village of Kingston. I understand they will be available at Kingston Days as well. For more information call Jan Peter at 989-683-2711. - The board gave unanimous approval to the purchase of a new school bus from Hoekstra Transportation, not to exceed $81,255. I was somewhat disappointed that the new bus purchase was not included in the budget proposal we approved last month, but I see this was a result of a lack of clarity and follow-up on the boards part. (We had Mr Drake search for federal grant opportunities related to school buses when he asked before about whether wed be buying a bus. No grant opportunities were found, and the board failed to take any action to inform Mr Drake that we would still be interested in making the purchase using local funds so it was a simple misunderstanding. While I generally am quite hesitant to make these sorts of high-value purchases in deficit, I feel we have learned the hard way that buying a new bus each year is simply a necessity. The board attempted to defer the bus purchases for a few years following the economic downturn, only to have it come back to bite us last year with a perpetual headache of repair issues. There were points back in the winter in which it seemed by the time we could fix one problem, two more things would break. We did purchase two new buses last year in an effort to play catch up, and that helped a lot. Hopefully with this new bus purchase we are making now, we should be in pretty good shape for the coming school year. Eventually I hope we can get back on track to where a new bus is purchased every year such that the age of the buses never exceeds in years the number in our fleet. The Board additionally authorized getting bids from financial institutions for financing the new bus purchase. We expect the interest rate to be very low (probably around or perhaps under 2%). - There was a motion carried to authorize purchasing a subscription to a periodical-based curriculum for Social Studies and Science Weekly for elementary grade levels. This I understand is an alternative to having actual text books. The publisher sends new sections on an ongoing basis which are used on a week-by-week basis as they arrive. I have serious concerns about this approach as a curriculum model because the board never has an opportunity to see or approve of the content before it is utilized in the classroom. There was a lot of talk about keeping things current, but I question how having the curriculum be a continual moving target from vendor publishers as a subscription periodical makes it in any way more productive in its educational value. Purchasing durable text books in place of these would cost a whole lot more but would also last several years. I understand internal staff committees have put time and effort into deciding on going this route, and frankly in my mind we need to change the process somewhat because I dont like the idea that we are only being asked as a board to approve of the purchase after all of the merits have already been discussed as far as which direction to go with things. We need something in place in time for school to start, and this was the only viable proposal that our administration offered the board to consider. A significant change of direction right now would put us all in a time crunch and be a time consuming effort to even tackle, so I did vote in support of the purchase subscription with a high degree of reluctance. Im hopeful that next year the new board will be more proactive in digging into curriculum approval processes. Sarah Schuler, who is a candidate in our school board race this fall, entered a public comment of suggesting that a box be kept in the teachers lounge or copy room so that after they are done with each issue in class, one copy could be placed in the box for board members or parents to review the content. Itd be after-the-fact, but would at least give us a feel for what we think of these materials when future purchase decisions come up. The board took no formal action to assign that such be done, but Im hopeful I might get a chance to see some of these as they come in. Im especially curious what the social studies periodicals are going to do in tackling current events when we draw near to the November election. - The Board posted to take applications for Varsity Baseball and Junior Varsity Volleyball coach positions. Were also searching for a High School Student Council Adviser. - The Board confirmed the hiring of Jaime Pruett, our new Secretary for the Superintendent. - The Board approved spending $4944.95 in deficit from general fund / reserve equity for 20 new football helmets. This was an oversight that didnt make it into this years budget proposal. Mr Drake indicated he intends to make up the cost elsewhere in the budget somehow, but did not have any specific proposals of what he would cut right away. These were a need because got a lot more students signed up for football this year than we have had in previous years, which is a good thing. We have been buying a handful of helmets each year, but over the last few years during state mandated helmet safety inspections, the inspector required us to decommission a lot more helmets than we had bought. I questioned the notion that the states licensed inspector making us discard helmets also works for the company selling the helmets, but Scott Boyl had a few good reasons for why we would want to go with that particular brand including that the parts are interchangeable with other helmets already in our inventory. I was a bit set back by the price of helmets these days, but these things are pretty advanced. I understand the helmet now measures the intensity of any impact force. This way if a player is subjected to a head injury, the coaches will know immediately whether they were hit on the head hard enough to be at risk of a concussion, or not. There have been too many cases in public school athletic programs across the country in which a player is thought to merely have a minor bump on the head but then turns out to have actually had a concussion without realizing it. As such in my mind Im looking at part of the cost as being likened onto that of insurance somewhat--it insures that if someone is hurt enough to have a concussion they will get the medical treatment they need immediately. - The board authorized purchasing 5 Bright link Interactive classroom smart board systems. Over a year ago we had planned to buy two of these systems for the high school each year, and two for the elementary school each year. This year we transitioned from an art special to a technology special among the elementary teaching staff, and Mr Drake felt it was important to have one of these systems in the elementary technology teachers classroom, so we authorized 5 instead of just the 4 that had been planned. - The board also authorized purchasing 20 more laptops for the high school. This brings the total count to 95 laptops district-wide. The laptops combined with the Brightlink smart boards wiped out most of the $25,000 we had budgeted this year for technology equipment. There is $1400 left. In discussion I asked what other purchases might be on the horizon. Renee indicated that some of the $1400 would be used to buy a couple of WiFi access points to get us through the year. Next year we anticipate federal funding to be available for a more expansive wifi deployment, although theres a couple of directions we could go with that, one at 10 times the cost to that of the other. I favor the low cost solution, but the technology staff seems leery of it for some reason. That discussions been tabled pending what happens with federal funds. I do wish to comment though that we approved 100% of the budget our administration proposed for this school year, and the laptop/smart-boards just wiped that out to the point where all of what is left is below the $3000 limit for board approval. As such if we get any more technology purchase requests before the board this year, outside of donation/grant funded items, Im going to be very reluctant to approve more purchases in deficit. - In closing remarks, I shared with the Board that I had uploaded the full text of the US Constitution to the Lexile Reading Level Anaylizer tool and was astounded to learn it scored the constitution at 1503L which is a few hundred points higher than the Common Cores standard for reading proficiency levels for high school seniors. I remarked that the old township 1-room school houses taught through the 8th grade because the Constitution was written so as to be read and easily understood at an 8th grade reading level, so I find it quite concerning in my mind to realize that Common Core would not have our kids at a reading comprehension level sufficient to understand the constitution until they are in more around that of a college sophomore level. It would seem to me that our state standards are quite inferior and weak. One of our teachers commented after the meeting that Lexile gives the constitution a higher reading level score because it uses some old English words, or words with more syllables than we use in common speech today. To me that is not a sufficient justification for such, but rather an excuse for having weak standards.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 23:16:15 +0000
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