School board looks at graduation requirements, other policies

The Kimball Board of Education looked at several policy reviews at Monday’s meeting.

Though they voted to clean up the graduation section of the handbook at the meeting, the board will further review the graduation requirements at a future meeting.

“This is graduation requirements. What does every single student need to demonstrate?” Superintendent Marshall Lewis said.

Requirements may be updated to include certain requirements for life skills as part of the 110 elective credits.

Lewis believes that if changes are considered, a committee that includes both principals should be formed.

“I think we need to make some adjustments,” board member Jarrod Schnell said. “Like adding in technology and basic life skills. If you graduate a kid with these 260 credits are you expecting them to be successful? I think we should require personal finance, someone that can balance their own checkbook, and understand how credit cards work.”

Board members agreed to review the requirements to further ensure that students are armed with basic life skills.

“The clean up is necessary, but the bigger picture is certainly worth that conversation,” Lewis said.

Activities Director Ken Smith presented the board with a breakdown on the number of students who participate in extra-curricular activities in high school.

“Overall we have 72 percent of our student body participate in extra-curricular activities,” Smith said. “The one thing I didn’t put on here that is kind of neat is that 65 percent of our kids participate in multiple activities.”

Schnell asked if the board could see a cumulative grade point average comparing those students who are active and those who are not. Smith said that solid numbers could be presented with input from guidance counselor Chauncey Pedersen, who would have grade point average information.

“I could tell you right now that those who are not active, 90 percent of them will have a low GPA,” Smith said. “Those that are not active, there will be only a handful of them that have a decent GPA.”

Smith also said that Kimball may be moved to Class C-1 in all activities other than football and cross country.

“We’ll be moving back up to play Chadron and Ogallala and all those schools after this year,” Smith said.

Along those lines, Smith he was concerned with the deterioration of the all-season track surface.

“The issue is that if we decide to do it we are going to have a very small window,” Smith said. “My concern is that if we get to the point where we are not finished by the end of summer, I’m going to be scrambling to look at different places to host our track meets, especially our conference track meets.”

Smith said the district would then be faced with hosting the meets at another facility such as Sidney, but that presents issues with having enough people travel to work the meet.

Ending on a positive note, Smith recognized the efforts of Jenn Dillinger, teacher and sponsor for both one-act plays and speech in the school district.

“The participation went up hugely, and we have had a lot of success we haven’t seen before. I think Jenn Dillinger has done an amazing job,” Smith said. “In the 15 years I’ve been activities director at Kimball, I have never seen one person turn two programs around to the degree that she has.”

The district’s credit recovery summer program is complete, according to Special Services Director Jamie Soper, and that program was a success with the changes that were made.

“We had 31 students attend (in grades 9 through 12), and 23 classes were recovered. There were some students that recovered more than one class, but no more than two per student,” Soper said. “We had much better attendance this time than we had last summer.”

Soper said that para-educators who have worked summer school for numerous years advised her that the new one-week schedule worked better, but perhaps the schedule could still be improved.

“They said that mornings were well attended but in the afternoon that kind of fell off,” Soper said. “They asked what if we went two weeks of half days. That is something to think about. There were some frustrations (about the program), but there were definitely some positives about it.”

Soper said students can attend part-time and complete their work at home, while they must attend to complete quizzes and tests.

“There were more students recovering credit this year than prior years,” Soper said. “A lot of time procrastination gets in the way and this was a one-week deal. They didn’t have a month, we had more kids show up on the first day versus in the past.”

Board president Lynn Vogel and board vice-president Clint Cornils did not attend the meeting.