New Pottstown Super and Walking School Bus Kudos

Photo by Evan Brandt

Just some of the many volunteers who make Pottstown's Walking School Bus a success were thanked by the school board during Monday night's meeting.

As most of you no doubt know from reading your Tuesday morning Mercury, Acting Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez dropped the "acting" last night and became just Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez.

So I won't waste your precious reading time by focusing on that. Go buy a newspaper!

But something else that happened Monday night is also worthy of your attention.

In case you've missed in the pages of The Mercury, Pottstown is experimenting with something called The Walking School Bus.

The idea is adult volunteers accompany students walking to Rupert Elementary School and pick-up students along the route so they can all walk together, improving safety and getting exercise.

The problem is 95 percent of those programs fail in the first year, as Rodriguez noted.

But not in Pottstown. Here, the program has increased in size, as is evidenced in the photo above, which shows just a portion of the many volunteers whose names were read off Monday by wellness coordinator David Genova.

Congrats to all.

Also of note last night, the board voted to raise by 10 percent the fees charged for renting school facilities and to charge parking fees as well.

The Foundation for Pottstown Education announced the final arrangements to fund a program by which teachers and other district employees would be provided with a $10,000 forgivable loan  to buy a house in the borough.

There were a few other things of interest as well, and you can find them here among the Tweets, rife, as usual, with typos.