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Matt Caban • The Madill Record Kingston School and administration meet for the monthly meeting.
Members of the Kingston School Board and administration considered items at their monthly meeting on July 8 inside Kingston High School.
Four of the five school board members were present: president Jeff McDonald, vice president Steve Beebe, clerk Michael Herndon, and member Randy Arneson. Member B.J. Bellettini was not present.
Kingston Middle School Principal Brandon Haigood and Kingston Elementary School Principal David Gill were present at the meeting. Serving as secretary for the meeting was Kathy Burnett, the district’s director of finance/federal programs.
During the meeting, all presented held a discussion about the launch of a district-wide Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) program.
The Kingston Public Schools Superintendent Brian Brister would like to eventually model Bartlesville Public Schools, who he calls a leader in the field. Brister said the program will be in effect at all levels except high school this year due to timing issues.
“There is a lot of training our teachers have to go through to qualify for this,” he said. “They have to go through 65 hours of training. I wish we’d been able to get it ready for the high schoolers this year, but we didn’t quite make it.”
The school board members agreed with Brister’s assessment that jobs in the STEM field are important in today’s economy.
Herndon, who owns and operates Herndon Construction in Kingston said he recently hosted a group from Texas to discuss STEM in the workplace.
“I met with two board members, a teacher and two students two weeks ago from Jacksboro, Texas,” he said. “They wanted me to do an overview.”
Brister said he will lean heavily on Herndon’s expertise in the coming months.
Earlier in the meeting, the board voted four to zero to pass item one, the acceptance of the consent agenda from the board’s regular meeting on June 10.
Other items the board passed unanimously were the principals and program directors reports, revising the Continuing Resolutions, a renewal quote for Property/Casualty/ Fleet Insurance with Oklahoma Insurance Group, and rolling over account for the 2019-2020 school year and renewal of the Parental Involvement Policy.
Student handbook changes
Changes to the student handbook were also passed unanimously by the board.
Gill said this year the district is adding a section on chronic absenteeism or more than 10 absences per semester. He said the state gave the school district more guidance, but ultimately the final decision is with each school district.
Gill said the state changed the way they calculated attendance.
“It is now considered chronic if the student misses 10 percent of days in that semester,” he said.
Haigood said they tried to make the handbook more user friendly. “16 pages got moved to the back to make it more readable,” he said.
Haigood touched on another change to the handbook for high school school students who are concurrently enrolled in college classes.
“We wanted to make sure parents know that the school district isn’t paying for those college classes,” Haigood said. “We dropped the standard ACT score from 21 to 20 so they can get into those concurrent classes.”
New hires made
The school board then went into executive session. Upon returning five minutes later, they unanimously approved the hiring of new teachers and support staff.
The new staff are as follows:
• Lance D. Reisetter, certified high school band director
• Andy Fulfer Ward, certified high school band assistant director
• Stacie Salyer, certified high school chemistry teacher
• Julie Clark, certified high school biology teacher
• Audra Bain, certified high school English teacher
• Katie Caraway, high school library aide/full-time sub