School officials said good-bye to an old friend and hello to
some new improvements at Thursday night’s school board meeting.
School officials said good-bye to an old friend and hello to some new improvements at Thursday night’s school board meeting.
After 33 years of public service, Marlene Hughes, administrative assistant to the superintendent, will retire this year. While superintendents and trustees come and go, Hughes has been a permanent fixture at the district office for decades.
“You’ve been the calm in the storm,” Board President Rhoda Bress said.
Hughes listened quietly – something she’s always been good at, board members said – as Superintendent Deborah Flores and a string of speakers remembered her years of faithful service to the district.
“She’s done everything she can to help me be successful and for that you have my eternal gratitude,” Flores said, turning to hug Hughes. “There is no person in the district who has supported me more.”
Hughes accepted plaques and flowers and introduced several of the family members who have waited up until all hours of the night for her to come home from Thursday night board meetings.
Following the board recognition, trustees accepted the recommendation of the calendar committee to bump the school calendar up a week and end the first semester at the high school before the winter break.
The calendar committee met for months to hash out the pros and cons of overhauling the calendar versus keeping it the same. Either way, school has to be in session a total of 180 days. To find out what staff and families thought, the calendar committee distributed 11,077 surveys. Of the 2,236 surveys that were returned, 54 percent of respondents favored the traditional schedule and 46 percent were ready for a change. Parents were tied but nearly twice as many teachers preferred the traditional calendar that has school starting the last Thursday of August. However, the vast majority of high school teachers preferred to start the school year two weeks early.
The committee reached a true compromise, and recommended a calendar that starts a week earlier than usual, halfway between the two opposing factions’ preferences.
The adopted calendar has school starting Aug. 20 and ending June 11. The high schoolers will complete their first semester before the two-week winter break at the expense of eight days of instruction making the first semester 82 days long. The second will be 98 days. The longer second semester will even out after spring standardized test days are factored in. The board adopted the compromised calendar but, like many teachers, weren’t completely satisfied.
Although Student Trustee Mark Foley said that the majority of high school students preferred getting semester exams out of the way before break, Trustee Denise Apuzzo said the weeks in between Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the most hectic of the year and don’t make for good studying habits.
“You can’t be studying for finals if you’re on the road to Reno,” she said of the myriad trips sports teams and clubs take leading up to the holidays. “They’re focused on the holidays and making decorations and all the things we haven’t taken away from kids yet.”
Apuzzo also expressed her disappointment that the final compromise was not in line with the survey results.
“The minority got what they wanted,” she said.
However, Flores’ goal for the committee was to reach a compromise.
“It’s important to adopt a calendar that reflects a consensus,” she said. “We believe that this represents the best of the two calendars.”
The body unanimously approved the 2009/2010 calendar.
Trustees also approved the allocation of about $20,000 to a new school bus routing system that is supposed to make the routes more efficient and manageable, according to Emil Frates, transportation director. Edulog, a transportation and demographic consulting firm based out of Missoula, Mont., offers a automated system to develop and maintain school bus routes. The company loads the district’s street grid, school boundaries, bell schedules and student data and spits out routes that take into account safety issues like dangerous street crossings and the residences of sexual predators.
The system requires a $10,000 installation fee and a $833 monthly maintenance fee.
“Edulog is a tool I need as a manager,” said Frates, who has used the system in previous districts. Although he believed the feedback from his employees regarding Edulog to be generally favorable, bus driver Linda Figone told a different story.
“The majority of bus drivers are not for this program,” she said.
Fellow bus driver Rebecca Scheel agreed. Scheel said that when bus drivers’ hours are being cut and routes are being eliminated, the time isn’t right to purchase expensive routing software.
“We’re scared about our jobs and our hours,” she said. “I don’t want to say ‘don’t buy it’ but a lot of our concern is the money that’s being spent and how it’s going to affect the big picture.”
The meeting ended on a high note as representatives from Glen View and Las Animas elementary schools gave a presentation about a new program being piloted at their schools called Character Counts! Supported by the six pillars of trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship, Character Counts! is an initiative that will spread throughout the entire community, school officials hope.
“I’m a believer,” said Glen View Principal Scott Otteson. He learned of the program at a previous district where it drastically reduced the rate of discipline problems. The program was met with wide approval from trustees, community members, the superintendent – who also witnessed firsthand the benefits of the program in a previous district – and the police department.
The program is easily integrated into the regular curriculum, and establishes a set of core values that permeates the entire school. And the program is quickly catching on, Otteson said, giving examples of how a student reminded his teacher to assign a homework lesson to the dismay of his fellow students and how a boy bumped into another student, promptly apologizing and giving the student a hug. In addition to plastering the school with reminders of the six pillars, the students recite a pledge each morning.
