Highland County School Board elects officers

Monterey, Va. –

The Highland County School Board elected new officers at its meeting earlier this week. Bobbi Hefner is the new chairperson and Joe Neil is the new Vice-Chair. When the Board’s attention turned to paying the bills, there was some concern about the budget and Superintendent Crawford had some comments.

“Madam Chairman, I looked at the budget lines and we’re going to be fine,” said Dr. Crawford. “In looking at the percentages and sort of figuring it out for the period of time we have left, we’re going to be fine,” he said.

In other business, Sarah Harman, was recently hired as a grant writer and community outreach coordinator for the school. Dr. Crawford discusses Sarah’s duties.

“Let me just give the Board and the public an overview of what Ms. Harman will be working on,” said Dr. Crawford. “The purpose of the grant writer, community engagement person – the grant writer part is pretty straight forward and obvious. It’s to secure resources for the school that we don’t currently have available or access to. The community engagement part is so that we can possibly encourage individuals in the community who are home schooled or otherwise involved in schooling other than Highland County, to participate in our school system,” he said.

The Highland Schools plan to offer additional classes that will be of interest to families in the county.

“We want to offer sort of an ala carte menu of things like Drivers Ed, carpentry, agriculture and FFA,” said Dr. Crawford. “Things you can’t necessarily get access to online. Even things like AP Calculus – if you are taking AP Calculus online but you need someone to talk to and say, I don’t quite understand this’. We can provide the AP Calculus online without the individual having to come into the building except when they need that person to talk to,” he said.

Dr. Crawford goes on to describe how Sarah’s work will help the school system.

“Now, our motives for this are obvious,” said Dr. Crawford. “It’s to help to build our enrollment and headcount. If we can get individuals enrolled into two courses, we get to count them on our ADM and it helps our enrollment in the system. And so we will be looking for ways to engage with members of the community to invite them in to participate in this ala carte menu of educational opportunities. Sarah will be leading us in that and, of course, as I said before, she will also be writing grants. A lot of those grants will be in concert with what teachers might want to have in their classes or what the principals might want to have in the building,” he said.

Stay tuned to Allegheny Mountain Radio next week for more news from the January Highland County School Board meeting.

The next meeting of the Highland County School Board will be Monday, February 11, 2013, at 7 PM in the High School library.