The Board of Education met on Monday night at the Mary E. Devin Center with a stacked agenda and the hopes to carry out the district mission: Preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s world.

Much of the first half of the meeting was spent approving existing budgets/contracts that will carry over in to the 2016-2017 school year.

Early Childhood Education Princiapl Stephanie Bogenhangen and Junction City High School Principal Melissa Sharp dialogued with the Board about their day to day and past school year strengths and weaknesses in their respective schools.

An emotional Sharp says that one thing the high school needed were “targeted at-risk strategic plans/interventions for students.”

Sharp and Bogenhangen both agreed on a shared a passison for the children.

High School Athletic Director Matt Westerhaus propsed an idea that could affect students in our community that don’t attend schools in the school district.

USD 475 Junction City High School has cooperative agreements with schools in various sports to allow athletes from different schools to compete under the JCHS umbrella.

The proposal was to include a fee for the students who chose not to attend schools in the district yet compete in sports with the high school.

Board members ultimately didn’t like the idea of charging a fee to community members – specifically, the students at Saint Xavier Catholic School.

“The Board of Education – what they want to do is the right thing; this is a very solid Board [that] thinks through things,” said USD 475 Superintendent Dr. Corbin Witt.

Witt did say that with each student that doesn’t attend our schools, the district ends up paying those costs.

“It all adds up because as [you all] know we are not getting extra money from the state – the state has flat-funded us for several years in a row, so there are alot of things we can do that continue to drain our funds so we’re looking at all different aspects,” said Witt.

For every athlete in a sport, the district gets a “kickback” sum that isn’t accounted for with students whom are not enrolled in district schools.

One area working in a very postive direction for the district is the energy conservation initiative.

In a partnership with Cenergistic, the school district netted $274,016 in an overall reduction in energy consumption of 18.2%.  Seventy-six percent of the energy usage in the district is electric and with the partnership with Cenergistic there were total avoided costs of over $440,000.

Amongst the big issues, the Board took an assesment of the subsitute teacher shortage and heard ways to counteract the problem.

With the current shortage teachers are often covering for each other and the subsitutes that are present are sometimes in the building on break – not working, although they’re being paid for a full days work.

Bridget Seeman, Executive Director of Human Resources at USD 475, proposed hiring a person specifically for recruiting and retention with an assistant/secretary as well.

USD 475 Superintendent, Dr. Corbin Witt agreed:  “If we’re doing things to shoot ourselves in the foot we need to address those and try to rectify those. If a substitute is there for one day and they have an 80 minute planning period and we have a teacher that has to be gone during that 80 minutes it makes much more sense to put that subsitute in that space than pull another teacher out of the classroom.”

In the comments from the public portion of the meeting, Robert Foreman addressed the Board on the grading scale that exists in the middle schools.

Foreman argued that the current scale that doesn’t allow below a 50% failing grade no matter the situation isn’t giving students a realistic idea of the way the high school, college and the workforce works.

Dr. Witt argued that the scale is reasonable.

“There’s that hope,” Witt began, “If you miss one assignment you don’t want to say well this class I’m going to flunk, or I’m not going to be able to make it because I missed one assignment – there’s gotta be that hope.”

And that’s exactly what the meeting adjourned with – “hope”.

With the dark cloud of the Kansas Supreme Court hanging over everyone’s brain the sentiment was definetely optimistic for the new school year and that the correct measures would take place before June 30th in order to keep USD 475 in tact.