The February Meeting for the Sevier County Board of Education was almost as uneventful as usual. During “Old Business and Comments from the Director,” Dr. Parton revealed that the teacher and student population was at 14% absenteeism for Friday, February 8. Absenteeism had dropped 1% for Monday morning but had climbed to 16% by Monday afternoon. He acknowledged that everyone seems to be coming back to school before they are completely well and simply repeating the virus.
Unfortunately, no leader on the board stepped forward to ask if the problem may lie in the community's understanding of the excused absence policy, BP619, which stipulates that only 5 occasions may be excused by a parent's note. One problem may be that parents may wish to use “their” excused absences for family emergencies. Another problem may be that most parents know that viral ailments cannot be cured by medicine and that they have to run their course. A school nurse or another faculty member of the school can see that the child is unwell rather than the family shelling out a $30 copay to doctor or a $60 bill for those without insurance. Moreover some parents feel that their children may miss out on a teacher's lecture for which the child may not receive instruction upon returning to school even with an excused absence.
A presentation which lasted five minutes and forty seconds by students was next on the agenda. Alex McCandless opened the presentation. He said that the drive started with a petition to research problems. He named overcrowding as the major concern. He recognized that the building is not conducive to expansion and mentioned that the group investigated several other high schools.
Chucky McDaniels continued the presentation by bringing out the highlights of the study.
Sevier County High School is 640 students over recommended capacity.
Technology for instruction is lacking.
Most computer systems operate with the now-canceled Windows 95 and 98.
Library does not meet SACS and TCET requirements.
Sevier County High School expects growth by 300 students in 5 years.
The schools are lacking in nutritional choices compared to other schools.
SCHS is out of code for sprinklers.
A positive was that the school was average in class size by comparison to other overcrowded schools.
However our schools are lacking in sections of education.
Some of the groups’ suggestions were to add 600 to 800 seats to the SCHS gym for the possibility of holding a full student-body assembly. They also would like to see a fine arts assembly as approved by the fine arts teacher as well as an additional 10 to 15 new class rooms at Sevier County High School.
Zack Bowles finished out the presentation by mentioning the need for better traffic flow through the cafeteria and asked for a legacy for a better community.
The high schools that were compared were Sevier County, Seymour, Bearden, Farragut, Jefferson County, Morristown West, William Blount.
Becky Barnes praised the children for being under five minutes even though the presentation lasted almost six minutes. Then again, Mike Oakley was not staring at his wrist watch timing it as he had another parental presentation.
Jerry Huskey asked for a change in the Fair Use Policy for the Internet. The meat of the policy was not discussed. If the public was there to hear about it, they would have found very little about this policy. Becky Barnes asked how our filtering system was applied. We (taxpayers) pay for e-mail filtering and internet filtering through two different companies. Education Networks of America handles internet filtering. Another company handles e-mail spam filtering.
Field trips were approved with no discussion. Just once I would like to see a board member take the initiative to say, “Are these really necessary? I mean, the average citizen makes around $7 an hour and we ask them every six weeks to pony up another $10 to $30 for another field trip!” Just because a field trip meets the board's minimum requirements does not mean that the trip is necessary.
The Board will have a meeting to approve principals as more positions will be opening. They will be taking suggestions to re-elect principals to their positions.
Before the meeting was adjourned, Dr. Parton noted the winners of Teacher of the Year.
Pre-K - 4 Pam Thomas of Pigeon Forge Primary
Middle School Betsy Elliott of Boyds Ck Elementary
High School Kristy Wallen of Seymour High School
Upon adjournment, I spoke with Alex and Chucky from the Student Group. In technology they mentioned that the computer ratio should be 1 computer to 100 students. Sevier County High School has 1950 students so it should have 195 computers available to the students. This discussion is where they clarified that many systems are using Windows 95 and 98. As a sidenote, Microsoft discontinued support of the Windows 95 operating system in 2001 and Windows 98 in 2006.
One of the board members even expressed a strong desire for more parental involvement through a strong Parent Teacher Organization.
My congratulations to Toby Ward, the interim principal at Sevier County High School. In discussing the SACS problems in the library, he noted that the school was lacking in the number of books as required by accreditation. He noted that he was engaged in updating the library already.
The student group deserves a big hand from the community. They verified the Sevier County schools, particularly Sevier County High School, have suffered.