The Nome Public School’s Board of Education first meeting of the summer discussed accreditation, audits and repairs, that the district will need for the 2022-2023 school year.

The Nome School District passed its school district wide accreditation as well as a maintenance audit to receive funding, Jame Burgess said in her superintendent report. The district will be funding three maintenance projects with the 100 million dollars of major maintenance funding.  

Burgess is also working on updating the district’s COVID-19 mitigation plan for the upcoming academic year.

Another topic of discussion was the recent review and revision to the school district’s background check process or hiring new staff. Burgess explained how the revised background check clarifies what crimes make an applicant ineligible to work for the Nome school district.

“We just made some minor adjustments to help us to clarify some things that would come up…If you look specifically at the adjustments that we made in the AR. Sometimes we would have an individual that would have a violent crime in their background, and we wanted to make sure that that specifically didn’t always have to exclude an individual from employment. But we wanted to make sure that the crimes involving violence against minor persons was something we would have concern about. And then, we wanted to make a clarification that, when we were talking about the things that would come up sometimes that previously had been used to screen an individual out, that after a five year period had elapsed that those individuals would still be eligible for employment,” Burgess said.

With the price of fuel so high, the negotiation of a fuel purchase for the upcoming school was also a topic of discussion. Chief Financial advisor, Genevieve Hollins, pointed out that fuel prices are likely going to climb even higher with time, and so it might be wise to lock in on a fuel purchase now rather than wait in hopes that gas will get cheaper. Locking in now, would require increasing the fuel purchase budget by $216,000 according to Hollins. The Board approved a higher budget to cover the district’s fuel purchase.

The Nome School Board passed four other action items.  One of those was the approval of the first reading of some, slightly changed, board policies. The revised policies were the policies on harassment, public complaints concerning school personnel, and certificated staff development, teacher aides/paraprofessionals, school discipline and safety, intimidation and bullying, child abuse and neglect, sexual harassment, family life/sex education, aids instruction and high school graduating requirements.

The Board also approved a classified association negotiation agreement, the replacement of a 17-year-old school vehicle and repairs to the Nome Elementary School playground and surrounding fence.

The Nome School Board does not have a regular meeting scheduled for July. Instead, the Nome School Board will meet for their next regular meeting on Aug. 9. As always, the public is invited to attend and comment.

Image at top: The Nome Public School’s Board of Education. Photo by Miriam Trujillo, KNOM (2022).