Board Meeting May 20

Sometimes (most times?) it feels like the School Board doesn’t have all that much to do. Especially when there is no one at a meeting except the 5 board members, the principal, superintendent, assistant superintendent, and minute taker, it can feel more like a little committee than some powerful Board of Directors (at least this keeps the public comments period short:).

To show how exciting it was, even with the agenda, I can’t remember what exactly was in the Principal or Superintendent’s Report except a handout on the Final Legislative Report of the 2008 Session which showed that not much changed in Montpelier, except the resignation of the Commissioner and a crucial civil rights law allowing kids to be exempted from dissection labs if they so choose (who says the legislature doesn’t take on important issues?).

We received a “paperpoint” on The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Act, telling us that kids who are homeless have special rights to transportation, free meals, etc. that all makes sense. The one cost of all this to the district is for transportation (half of which for normal busing is reimbursed by the federal government I learned). The big trick here is identifying homeless kids (what do they do in big districts?) and then determining when they are no longer homeless.

We did actually do some larger social good actions—allocating funds to install circulation fans in the heating system that can save $2000+ per year and should cost about $6000 after a $2000 rebate from Efficiency Vermont. Good for savings, good for energy, good for the climate in school and outside.

We also allocated money to buy books for students for summer reading, purchasing through the local bookstore—supporting independent bookstores, local business, and helping develop a reading culture among the kids.

On a less positive note, I learned of the Special Ed Audit of the 2004-2005 Schoolyear that disallowed over $1.6 million of charges throughout the district! This is being appealed but it is hard to know how this could happen and to this degree. Even if spread among all kids in the district, this works out to about $1000 of charges per kid. I will have to look at what the whole special ed budget is to find out what percent of the whole budget $1.6 million is. And who is responsible for this when it happened? Yuck!

Finally, we approved an unpaid leave day for a para whose son has been in military service in the Mideast and is on leave in the states—not a tough decision (Good newspaper headlines—School Board Denies Leave for Mother to Visit Iraq Veteran Son).