Solar energy, school security considered by Highland Board of Education

By Randa Wagner -

Energy cost sav­ings through solar energy and on-site secu­rity were two of many top­ics dis­cussed at the Feb­ru­ary 13 High­land Board of Edu­ca­tion meeting.

Board mem­ber John Mess­mer said the pos­si­bil­ity of solar power for the three school build­ings is being exam­ined by the board.

“We’ve met with a solar out­fit over the past month sev­eral times and it looks like a good oppor­tu­nity for every­body in the com­mu­nity,” he explained. “We’ve got some more work to do on it but we hope by this time next month, we’ll have some­thing to share that we’ll be mov­ing for­ward with.”

Mess­mer said it would pro­vide a great cost sav­ings for the school dis­trict and the board will keep the pub­lic updated. Solar Planet of West­er­ville and Con­stel­la­tion Energy are the two com­pa­nies that have been contacted.

Supt Dr. Bill Dodds said the school is get­ting closer to hav­ing a resource offi­cer on cam­pus full time, and the goal is to begin that in April.

“Our part­ner­ship is with the Mor­row County Sheriff’s Office,” he said. “They have an offi­cer in school resource train­ing who will fin­ish up in August. That is what we have found to be the safest and most secure way to pro­tect our stu­dents beyond the mea­sures we already take.”

Admin­is­tra­tors’ reports

Board Pres­i­dent Eric Thacker said he sat in on a pre­sen­ta­tion given by Mor­row County Hos­pi­tal CEO Chris Truax regard­ing the pro­posed south­ern Mor­row County urgent care-type med­ical center.

“He gave sort of a vision of what they’re hop­ing to do with it, and it ties in nicely with safety and secu­rity for our kids as well as health,” Thacker explained. “They’re going to have around 4,000 sq. ft. of ther­apy space and bring in spe­cial­ists. If your chil­dren or grand­chil­dren have par­tic­i­pated in sports here, some­times the very first care­givers they are with are the train­ers asso­ci­ated with Mor­row County Hos­pi­tal. It will be nice to con­tinue that com­mu­ni­ca­tion, hav­ing spe­cial­ists that will be based out of that new facil­ity near the free­way and hav­ing licensed phys­i­cal ther­a­pists there.”

Supt. Dodds said Gov. Kasich has come out with his new bud­get for schools, and it sounded very appeal­ing to school dis­tricts at first, but that changed when fig­ures were released.

“We shouldn’t be too dis­ap­pointed yet, because they have a long way to go,” Dodds said.

“We were excited lis­ten­ing to the gov­er­nor speak the other day because it sounded like lower wealth dis­tricts, such as ours, would see a sig­nif­i­cant increase,” added Trea­surer Jon Mason. “We were dis­ap­pointed when the num­bers came out. All the county schools here saw no increase over last year. So I went back to 2009 when we had a bud­get based on enroll­ment – the last sev­eral bud­gets were based on the pre­vi­ous year. In plug­ging the governor’s new bud­get into what got in 2009, it’s actu­ally a $500,000 decrease for us. But we’re a long way from June and this is just the governor’s pro­posal that still has to go through the Ohio House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. We’re still hope­ful – good peo­ple are work­ing hard to solve the issue. It’s very com­pli­cated. We’ll just work with what we can get and we’ve done that for many years.”

Supt Dodds com­mented about tech­nol­ogy updates, say­ing they are look­ing for a 1:1 oppor­tu­nity for the stu­dents at the high school and sig­nif­i­cantly increase the ele­men­tary schools with computers.

He also remarked about the idea of solar energy as ‘an oppor­tu­nity for our dis­trict and our tax­pay­ers to save money and put more into edu­cat­ing our students.’

Dodds noted the main focus for the admin­is­tra­tive team has been to tran­si­tion next year to the stu­dent growth mea­sures: how stu­dents will be assessed and how schools will be evaluated.

“There’s a lot of school dis­tricts wait­ing to see what every­one else and the state is going to do, but we are going to press for­ward, and we have a great plan in place,” he said.

Eileen Ruff­ing pre­sented two trios who per­formed at the Solo and Ensem­ble Con­test and received supe­rior rat­ings at the con­test. She pointed out the stu­dents’ prac­tice is done out­side of band class in the stu­dents’ own time. A flute trio and sax­o­phone trio per­formed for the board.

Prin­ci­pals’ reports

Ele­men­tary School Prin­ci­pal Shawn Winkelfoos said a bake sale fundraiser for a staff mem­ber was held Feb­ru­ary 13.

Start­ing March 7, stu­dents in grades 3, 4 and 5 will be iden­ti­fied for extra assis­tance in read­ing and math after school for an hour on Tues­days and Thursdays.

Parent-teacher con­fer­ences will be held March 5 and 12 from 4 – 7 p.m.

The Harlem Wiz­ards will be com­ing to play at High­land March 19 at 7 p.m. and there are still open­ings for play­ers on the ‘High­land Hoop Stars’ team.

Mid­dle School Prin­ci­pal Rob Ter­rill said he and Guid­ance Coun­selor Joe Oder and Dean of Stu­dents Lynn Thomp­son have col­lab­o­rated on a plan to help stu­dents study more effec­tively for tests through a Study Skills Class. Start­ing Feb. 12 and the next two Tues­days, the sixth grade will be coun­seled the last half hour of the day. On Wednes­days the sev­enth grade will receive instruc­tion and on Thurs­days the eighth grade will be coun­seled. They exam­ined the national aver­ages for sug­gested study times, and also wanted to let the stu­dents know what would be expected in the way of study when they get to college.

For the past five years the mid­dle school has had a SCOTS pro­gram (Stu­dents Com­mit­ted to Suc­cess) with 120–140 stu­dents involved. Ter­rill said the con­fi­dence the pro­gram gives the stu­dents trans­fers to the class­room. The stu­dents ride home on the ele­men­tary buses, which makes for some full buses, so the admin­is­tra­tion is re-evaluating the situation.

Vex Robot­ics has a middle-school only tour­na­ment com­ing up Feb­ru­ary 20. High­land is send­ing six teams to Tri-Rivers to com­pete in the World Qual­i­fier and the top four can go to Ane­heim to compete.

“We’re talk­ing about how fea­si­ble it is to make that trip,” Ter­rill said. In com­pe­ti­tion, the High­land Mid­dle School team has always been the top or sec­ond place mid­dle school team, even against high school and col­lege teams.

Parent/teacher con­fer­ences are Feb­ru­ary 21 from 2:30 – 8:30 p.m. The county spelling bee is being held at High­land Ele­men­tary March 7 and the Spring Con­cert is on March 11.

High School

Asst. Prin­ci­pal Chad Car­pen­ter reported nine BPA mem­bers will be com­pet­ing in Colum­bus March 14 & 15. BPA will also be tak­ing a team to the JA Titan Chal­lenge on Fri­day, March 22 at the Uni­ver­sity of Akron.

Megan Oder and Kyle Minyo are mov­ing on to the Dis­trict Pub­lic Speak­ing and Job Inter­view con­tests for FFA on Feb 21 at Elgin High School.

Stu­dents Isaac Ver­mil­lion, Andrew Jack­son, Andria Nel­son and Nathan Clarke par­tic­i­pated in the Brain Game quiz com­pe­ti­tion two weeks ago against Berlin Hiland. The match will be shown on Chan­nel 10 in Colum­bus on Sat­ur­day, May 18 at 7:30 p.m.

A final meet­ing with Pear­son regard­ing cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal acad­emy will be held Feb. 27.

There was a girls’ bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment at Utica on Feb. 16; wrestling sec­tion­als at Lick­ing Val­ley Feb. 16; Parent/Teacher con­fer­ences Feb. 21 from 2:30 – 8:30 p.m.; a high school band con­cert at the ele­men­tary school on March 1; early col­lege night will be March 4 at 6 p.m. in the high school cafe­te­ria; and OGT Week is March 11.

Amber Clay Mow­ery reported the Race to the Top pro­gram will be reviewed in March. Also, admin­is­tra­tors are look­ing at stu­dent growth mea­sures to pre­pare for the changes com­ing up required by the state for school evaluations.

The dates have been set in March, April and May to final­ize the My Voice grant, which is about mea­sur­ing stu­dent per­cep­tion, their learn­ing envi­ron­ment, what they have to say and then doing some­thing about it.

Mike Hoyng rec­og­nized the wrestling team for win­ning the con­fer­ence for the sec­ond time. He noted the girls team placed sec­ond and the boys bowl­ing team placed first for the first time.

Hoyng spoke about the new MOAC league and said it’s going to change over a two-year period of time. Next year Highland’s divi­sion will con­sist of the four county schools, Fred­er­ick­town, Cen­ter­burg and Ridgedale. The sec­ond year Ridgedale will be leav­ing and the league will expand. High­land will play all the teams in their divi­sion twice.

Main­te­nance Super­vi­sor Todd Belcher reported secu­rity sys­tems are work­ing prop­erly. All win­dows on the perime­ter of the build­ing will have a 3 inch num­ber on them indi­cat­ing in case of an emer­gency where per­son­nel unfa­mil­iar with the lay­out have to get into a par­tic­u­lar area of the building.

Belcher said the num­bers on elec­tric­ity con­sump­tion over the last five months are encour­ag­ing, indi­cat­ing the build­ings are begin­ning to oper­ate in sequence as they should. There has been an 11% reduc­tion over the same time period the pre­vi­ous year.

Other busi­ness and personnel

The list of grad­u­ates for the 2013 class was approved by the board, as was the 8th grade trip to Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

A res­ig­na­tion by sup­ple­men­tal con­tract from Pam Mosier Arnold as high school prom advi­sor was accepted.

The next reg­u­lar board meet­ing will be March 13, 2013 at 7 p.m. in the high school cafetorium.

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Feb 20 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.