Financial consultant coming to NG district
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By Carmen Ensinger
The North Greene School District will be having a financial consultant coming to the district to spend three days to help clean up the district books.
“We talked about this last month and you gave me the go ahead to hire someone so I have,” Superintendent Jackie Kuchy said at the October 18 board meeting. “Her name is Sherry Countryman and she will be here from Oct. 30 through Nov. 1.”
Since she lives three hours away, Kuchy said she will put her up and their AirBNB that they own in Winchester.
“She gave me her hourly rate, which is $45 an hour,” Kuchy said. “I don’t think that is an atrocious rate since she already provides support to three different school district.”
Countryman will spend three full days in the district.
“She knows she needs to spend some time here and she wants a list from us so she can see things that need to be addressed,” Kuchy said. “We have quite a few inactive account and she feels she can clean that up rather quickly.”
The district will also pay her mileage and maybe in the future she can help the district remotely.
Kuchy said that the School Report Card will be coming out on Oct. 30 and the preliminary designations are commendable.
The district’s application for the School Maintenance Grant has been sent to the Regional Office of Education for their approval. This grant is a 50/50 grant for up to $50,000.
Kuchy said they are proposing the purchase of a new steam table and dishwasher at the high school and the water heater is leaking in the boiler room. Total cost of all of this is right at $106,000.
In the building reports, Jr./Sr. High Principal Brett Berry said that a lot of good things are happening at his building.
“Attendance is a big push for us right now and we are starting to notice where the troubles and gaps are,” Berry said. “We have implemented a competition between the different grade levels and the staff and we are tracking the daily levels.”
Berry said they have seen attendance jump tremendously from the first day of October until now.
“The first week of October we had a daily attendance of around 94 percent,” Berry said. “The second week it jumped to 94.5 percent and this week we are at 96 percent. We had several days with 100 percent attendance which is almost unheard of. “
The senior class has been having the lowest attendance of all.
“They are the ones who struggle with jobs,” Berry said. “The seventh and eighth grades seem to have the better attendance. We make an announcement each day and announce each grade level’s attendance percentage for the week so they know where they are at.”
There will be a reward for the class which has the highest daily attendance at the end of the month and then they will start all over again.
Berry said they started a new program with the freshmen called Adulting 101.
“We had training on social media which is dealing with the digital well being which we are pushing out to all freshmen this year,” Berry said. “This class deals with the appropriate us of social media, especially with the social/emotional element going on. We are also introducing Go Guardian and have training scheduled on that.”
Elementary Principal Samantha Bushnell reported that they have purchased some new curriculum along with some additional subscriptions for some interventions and some additional licenses for some intervention pieces that teachers are using in their classroom.
We are starting Peer Buddies for some of the younger students who are struggling,” Bushnell said. “We have started using seatbelts on the buses for pre-school students and that seems to be going very well.”
Bushnell said that they have gotten more Ipads for the kindergarten students and that they are working on getting the sound tiles installed in the band room.