The Crookston School Board approved a five-day preschool program and a reconfiguration of the administration at the high school with a 4-2 vote at a special meeting on Tuesday. The proposal eliminates the academic counseling position at the high school. It increases the Dean of Students from a .67 FTE to a 1.0 FTE Assistant Principal, encompassing the duties of the academic counselor. The .33 band instructor position also becomes a 1.0 FTE music instructor for both elementary and high school.
The plan is a cost-neutral shift in staffing across the district and allows for required prep time each day for the preschool teachers explained Superintendent Jeremy Olson. “We want that allows five-day preschool moving forward for next year,” said Olson. “I believe this is something that meets the need of our community and prepares us for meeting the World’s Best Workforce (WBW) for kindergarten readiness, which is one of the WBW goals. Basically, the gist of it is to allow this plan to work we have to allow some prep time to our preschool teachers because, obviously, teaching kids all day long without any break is very difficult. In our elementary grades, for instance, we utilize PE and Music to give people prep times. As a result, we’re going to have to hire additional music FTEs to make this happen. This also has another piece that our current Dean of Students has a .33 music combined position. Moving that .33 music off his plate in with the additional resources to provide for the prep time for preschool combines into one music position. Those music duties would then be distributed through our music department to provide preschool music. On the docket, we’re looking at a college in the high school music class with reshuffling some duties as far as lessons to make sure it’s a little more efficient.”
Olson also said that while finding a cost-neutral way to expand preschool was a little difficult, it will provide consistent administration at the high school level. “That would take our Dean of Students from .67 to full-time, and the recommendation was to promote that position to a principal assistant position,” said Olson. “There is a couple of reasons for that, one, is providing consistency in administration at the high school. We have some duties that would be shuffled over from our academic counseling position that would be moving into that position as well. Trying to make sure we could put this plan in place at a neutral budget cost was a little difficult, but I think we were able to find a way to do this.”
Dave Davidson and Adrianne Winger voted against the change. Both said they supported the five-day preschool time but had concerns about not having an adequate level of counseling available. Davidson said he stands by the board’s decision but would like to see if there is a way to increase counseling across the district. “I really support the preschool program and the efforts Dr. Olson has put into this,” said Davidson. “But, I’m still not comfortable with the way it washes out at the high school. I would like to see if there isn’t a way to do both things. In other words, to increase the amount of counseling services that our high school and elementary school students have and doing preschool programming at that time. The board didn’t go that way, and I support the board’s decision, but there was a caveat that was we’re going to take a careful look at it again and see if things are going the way we hope they do. If they aren’t, maybe we’ll change things.”
Olson said he doesn’t believe the plan will interrupt services for mental health or counseling. “Right now, the position that would be shifting, that we’re not renewing for next year would be the academic portion,” said Olson. “That would move into the high school office, particularly into the assistant principal position. That position, reshuffling responsibilities, would be eliminated. I think the concern really came around, we don’t want to take a step backward in counseling, and I echoed that as well. What we’re looking at is not interrupting our current counseling program at the high school, which, Mrs. (Leah) Zimmerman does a lot of the social and emotional counseling at the high school. We don’t want to interrupt that. She does a great job and we want to maintain that. So, we’re trying to maintain the services there with direct student contact. There was some talk about if we’re to add another counselor, looking at an elementary counselor. As the superintendent, I told the board I stand ready to add mental health. Mental health is the item we continue to talk about in schools, and as we’ve done in the past, we continue to grow that mental health support through Northwest Mental Health. We stand ready to, again, grow that if the need arises for students. At the end of the day, what we need, is we need to make sure we don’t interrupt the services to either mental health or counseling.”
The board also approved a bid to upgrade lights across the school district to LEDs. Those cost to upgrade the lights is $144,000, and the district will receive a rebate of $68,000 from Otter Tail Power Company for making the switch. The remaining $76,000 to install the upgrades should have a payback of just over one year as Otter Tail Power Company estimated an annual savings of at least $60,000 with LED lights.
Olson also updated the board about planning distance learning over the next eight days, providing school-age child care, and the meal service on Monday. Information on meal service is available here. We will also have more details updating the work on all three of these areas during Focus on Education Saturday at 8:35 a.m. on KROX.
