Pocahontas Schools Still Trying to Fill Teaching Vacancies

At the June 6^th Pocahontas County Board of Education (BOE) meeting, School Superintendent Terrence Beam told the members that there are still some teaching vacancies unfilled for the upcoming school year. Among those are a Drivers Education, a Physical Education and Science Teaching positions at PCHS, as well as a music teaching position and an ELA teaching position at other schools. Beam said they are going to continue to try and fill them.

He said they have filled four first grade Aide positions, and teachers are leaving other positions in the schools to go to those positions, but if the school can find anyway to not back-fill any or all of the positions those Aides left to fill these four first grade positions, they will.

Beam also said they have posted Lynne Bostic’s position as Director of Curriculum, since Bostic will become the new Superintendent on July 1.

Sherri Radcliff presented a video to the board members about Computer Science at PCHS. The short video was filmed at PCHS’s Computer Science classes, and featured students’ and teachers’ activities during the classes, as well as their comments about the benefits of these classes.

Radcliff also said the Major Improvement Project awards will be announced by the state on Monday, and they are hopeful their request will be awarded for repairs at PCHS.

Additionally at the meeting the board approved routine financial payments and reports.

The three board members present at this meeting also approved an insurance proposal for Travelers Insurance to provide their Workers Compensation insurance this year.  The cost went down slightly over last year’s coverage from the Wesco Insurance Agency even though the schools’ risk factor went up due to several large claims last year, according to Radcliff.

They also took up the following miscellaneous matters.

• The members approved an extension for one additional year of the COVID-19 carry-over vacation days for 261-day employees. If employees don’t use them by then, they will lose them.
• They approved an MOU with the MIT Noyce Fellowships Project related to Jennifer Nail-Cook as the Cohort 1. This supports improvement in the mathematics teaching and learning. This will be the 4^th year of the 5-year program.
• The board also approved an MOU with the West Ed, American Institutes for Research to conduct an Education Innovation and Research grant-funded implementation and impact study. This is one of the Math Grants that Joanna Burt-Kinderman, the schools’ Math Coach had discussed with the board at their last meeting.
• The members agreed to participate in the “Project for Education Research That Scales.” This has been applied for but not yet awarded. The goal of this grant is to help educators apply evidence-based strategies to advance educational excellence and equity on a large scale. This is also one of the grant projects discussed by Joanna Burt-Kinderman at the last meeting.

The board members also approved the recommended personnel actions, and you can view these by going to following link to the board’s official agenda 6-6-23 Official BOE Agenda PDF