Board updates policy l

anguage SHAWNA KONIECZNY

At its July 28 meeting, members of the Medford Area school board met to review district policy. People in attendance included Board Vice President Paul Dixon, Board Clerk Cheryl Wibben, Board Member Jodi Nuernberger, and District Administrator Pat Sullivan.

Throughout all of the policies reviewed, whenever it read “he/she,” “him/her,” or “his/hers” was changed to say “they,” “them,” and “their.” Along with that, acronyms were added throughout the policies to save space. Common language such as “Board of Education” and “Medford Area Public School District” was being referred to as “BOE” and “MAPSD” respectively. There was also a large number small edits to make formatting consistent and to help reduce the number of pages the policies took up.

The committee started with the second reading of five policies: JO, JOB, JP, LBD, and LEA.

Policy JO-R offers guidelines for the maintenance and confidentiality of student records. Wibben presented changes to the policy that included removing references to other parts of the policy within the text and instead providing the necessary information through bullet points and additional sentences. The committee agreed that this made the format and structure of the policy easier on the eyes to read. Other changes made were minor format and word choice edits.

Dixon continued the meeting by going over the remainder of the second reading policies. Policy JOB explains that the district’s counselors, teachers, staff members, and administrators are mandatory reporters and are required by both state and federal law to report cases of harassment and discrimination against stu- dents. The changes proposed included changes in word choice and making it clear that counselors, teachers, staff members, and administrators must report incidents, regardless of if they inform the student that they are a mandatory reporter.

Policy JP covers the district’s responsibility and requirements in terms of children of divorced or separated parents. It was suggested to change the definitions listed for behavioral records and progress records to the definitions used in Policy JO.

The Rural Virtual Academy (RVA) is Medford’s online charter K-12 school. Upon its creation, Policy LBD was adopted to talk about the establishment of a charter school and the conditions around charter education. When discussing the listed reasons for why the RVA may be revoked by the Medford school board, Sullivan asked if the charter school could be taken from the board without their permission. Dixon said that he didn’t believe so. The reason Sullivan asked such a question was because he knew of other districts who have expressed interest in wanting to take over the RVA, but Medford has every intention of continuing to renew their contract with the RVA. Only minor word choice and format edits were made to this policy.

No changes were made to Policy LEA which covers student teaching and internships.

All proposed and discussed changes were approved by the committee. They then moved onto the first reading of policies AA, AB, ABA, ABB, AD, AEA, AFB, AFC, and AFD.

For Policies AA, AB, ABA, and ABB, only minor sentence structure edits were made. These four policies were first adopted in 1979 and are the school district’s very first policies. They cover the district’s legal status as well as community and staff involvement and decision making.

Wibben asked if Policy AB and ABA could be combined into one policy. “The people and their school district and the other one is community involvement and making decisions. I was just wondering if there was a way to combine those into one. They’re kind of saying the same thing,” said Wibben.

Dixon felt that the two policies cover different subject matters and that the difference between them isn’t enough to warrant the effort to combine them. Policy ABB covers staff involvement and decision making so it’d also fit into the themes of AB and ABA. Nuernberger said that she felt that these policies feel very historical and that she may prefer to leave them as is. Wibben said that she’ll play around with the policies for the next meeting since this was only the first reading. When talking over these policies, Nuernberger asked if their goal was to make as little policies as possible, or to keep them short and direct.

“What we struggle to do is keep them relevant as to what’s going on in today’s world. And that changes. It takes six years to get through these things and in that six year period, things change so these are constantly changing,” said Dixon. “The other big thing is to make them so that the Joe-average citizen can walk in here off of the street and be able to actually read and understand almost any policy that he wants to look at.”

Policy AD covers the district’s educational philosophy and their vision and mission statement. Nothing was changed other than one minor grammatical edit. The title of Policy AEA was changed from District Goal Setting to District Strategic Plan.

The evaluation of the district administrator is under Policy AFB. Currently, the policy states that the district administrator evaluation is supposed to be scheduled for either December or January. Sullivan suggested that they change the policy so the evaluation is done in January. He explained that the December board meeting is right before Christmas so if the board decides to not renew the district administrator’s contract, it would be devastating news to receive right before the holidays. The committee changed the policy to say that the evaluation must be conducted at least annually to give the board flexibility.

No new changes were made to Policy AFC, which covers professional staff evaluations. For Policy AFD, which covers the evaluation of support staff, two sentences were combined to make the policy easier to read.

The next policy committee meeting is set to take place on Wednesday, Sept. 1 to continue to review the district’s policies.