Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Money, Policy and Hard Questions in Pottsgrove



Tuesday night the Pottsgrove School Board covered a broad range of topics, nearly all of which can be boiled down to money, policy and some hard questions for the administration.

New (and former) board member Robert Lindgren, a lover of data, was pretty hard-charging in echoing frequent complaints by other board members that the administration is not providing enough information to make an informed decision.

"I don't have a box, I have a thin piece of paper," he snapped when Superintendent Shellie Feola described a proposal to train some staff in "Restorative Practices" methods for dealing with behavior as "thinking outside the box."

That particular proposal was tabled to gather more information. Of particular interest to other board members was experience from other districts who have used the method.

(Hint, Pottsgrove's neighbor on three sides, the Pottstown School District, has been using it for almost 10 years and saw a distinct drop in behavior problems. Shouldn't be too hard to get them to talk to you about that ....)

There were also some hard questions about change orders for the $30 million Pottsgrove High School renovation project.

Although the project remains budget and, at 84 percent complete, has only used half its contingency costs, board members wanted to know why project designers had not accounted for the need to buy a new control system for the new HVAC system being installed in the administration building.

It also looks there are some interesting policy conversations pending about having naloxone on hand, and using it, in case of an opiod over-dose in a school building, as well as facing the national conversation on schools developing policies for transgender students.

It's all below in the Tweets man, look in the Tweets.


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