School board meets before new year begins

The Wrangell School Board met for its monthly meeting Monday, a mere week away from the resumption of classes.

“We’re all getting excited for that,” new secondary principal Colter Barnes told the board. The middle and high schools both held their registrations last week, and he informed them that staff and faculty are now making their preparations for the year ahead.

“It was great for me to meet the students” and their parents, Barnes said of registration. “That went really well.”

The board voted in favor of supporting the 2014 Association of Alaska School Boards belief statements and core resolutions adopted at last year’s conference.

It also voted to approve applying for a handful of grants, including the Carl Perkins Vocational Education Grant, the ESEA Consolidated Grant, the Indian Education Grant, the Migrant Education Book Program Award, the Special Education Grant and the Upward Bound Grant Award.

Board members also agreed to apply for the Nutritional Alaskan Foods in Schools Grant. This will be the third year Wrangell Public Schools have participated in the program, which promotes the provision of foods grown or produced in Alaska.

“As it (the program) gets bigger, it really helps the people produce more (food),” school business manager Pam Roope said. This in turn further improves the selections available to state schools.

The board also approved contract addenda for six staff positions, contracts for three extracurricular programming positions, the hiring of secondary office aide Jessica Rooney and other personnel decisions.

At the meeting, Krissy Smith announced she would be resigning from her position on the school board as of Sept. 15.

The board also considered section BP-6113 of Wrangell Public Schools policy manual, concerning its school closure and lockdown procedures.

Superintendent Patrick Meyer pointed out that not all school systems are following ALICE, the current protocol for handling a crisis. The acronym stands for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate.”

“I think we need to make a measured decision here,” he said, recommending further review.

The next meeting of the school board will be held on Sept. 15.