The Camanche School District’s Board of Education held their regular monthly meeting on Monday, June 17th. Please note that these are not the official minutes. The official Agendas and Minutes from the Camanche Community School District school board are available and posted on our school district website (camanche.k12.ia.us).
Items to highlight from this school board meeting would include:
- The Board entered into an agreement with Bray Architects to develop a Referendum Planning and Assistance Plan. This is the next step of the district’s facilities improvement plan. The Board’s Action Committee interviewed three architectural firms and recommended Bray as the firm to partner with. Bray’s plan includes a significant amount of time devoted to gathering input from the Camanche community regarding the development of a final school district facilities improvement proposal. Key components of this process will include a survey sent throughout the school district and meetings for community members. Once a final proposal is developed, the Board will conduct a referendum vote to ask for approval from the school district’s voters. People having questions are encouraged to contact the superintendent or any school board member.
- The Board approved having the elementary school move to the concept of departmentalization of 3rd grade and 4th grade. Basically, teachers at these levels would divide the responsibility of teaching reading, or math, or science and social studies among themselves and during the school day students would rotate between teachers in these subject areas. This option will be used instead of having one teacher teaching all of these subjects to one class room of children all day long. This will allow teachers in these grades to focus on a specific academic area, which will allow our students to receive more specialized instruction in these key academic areas.
- The Board approved the proposal to end in-take conferences at the elementary school on the first day of school and to replace these conferences with a back-to-school night program. This action was based upon the feedback received from elementary parents and staff regarding how to best set the stage for our elementary students to have a good start to the school year.
- The Board heard the Second Reading of, and approved several policies that were reviewed, revised, or replaced to comply with new state laws or requirements.
- The Board amended the 2019-20 school calendar by moving a teacher professional learning day from January 20th to August 20th. This will not impact students’ schedules, as both of these dates were not scheduled school days on the original calendar. These dates were changed to allow the teachers to make more timely use of the information being covered during this professional learning day.
- The cost for adult lunches at school was increased to $3.75 to meet the minimum amount required by federal regulations. There were no other increases made that would impact the cost of student lunches or fees for the upcoming school year.
- Student handbooks for the 2019-20 school year were approved by the Board. There were a few changes made in these handbooks this year that mainly revolved around updating or better clarifying information for students and their families about school rules and procedures.
As is usually the case, the school board completed the meeting by approving administrative recommendations regarding personnel and also approving open enrollment requests into the Camanche School District.