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Date: 5/13/2020
SOUTHWICK – The Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District School Committee met for a remote meeting on May 5 to discuss plans for seniors and read three policies.
Much of the discussion during the meeting was based around what the plans were for graduating seniors. In her first student advisory report since the pandemic began, Gabbie Gould discussed some of the ways students are dealing with the virus along with the graduation changes, including their sign out day and senior parade. “We’ve worked on and created senior banners for the students, and those would depict a picture, a name, and the Southwick Regional School name and it would be put along the fence line of the school property,” she said.
Gould added, “We want to have a senior parade after the sign-out, which would be led by the Southwick Police. That was approved by both our admin and the Southwick Police and we are now working on creating a route and getting the information out to the students.”
Along with the parade, she explained that the district is also doing an Adopt-A-Senior Program. “Senior parents will put up their child for adoption by giving a post with a picture of them and talking about their likes, dislikes, interests and future plans. Community members then adopt a senior, some of them have been giving gifts while other have been giving nice letters,” she said.
One of the ways the district reached out to seniors was through a survey to see what they would prefer to do during graduation. During her regular report, Superintendent Jennifer Willard said that 160 students responded to the survey. “Ninety-nine percent of the people are in favor of an in-person graduation. Our interest is in making sure we hold the graduation before students enlist in the service. We’d like to hold the service in June but make sure all of our graduates are in attendance,” she said.
After discussing the graduation plans, Willard continued her report by saying that because the district may not meet its contractual deadlines to approve the budget with the Southwick Town meeting being postponed it may have to adopt a one-twelfth budget. “We are anticipating our budgets being approved at the FY 2020 amount and they are going to disperse 1/12 of the budget every month so we can continue operating until a budget is passed by all three towns,” she said.
As part of the committee’s regular business, it read through three policies, a first reading of an unpaid meal policy, the second reading of the automated external defibrillator policy and the third and final reading of the physical restraint policy, which the committee unanimously approved.
During his regular report, the district’s Director of Finance and Operations, Stephen Presnal, said he was keeping an eye on the state budget. “We got word today of a presentation about closing the FY2020 budget and navigate through all of the challenges of the FY21 budget as well. I’m sure Jen and I will view that presentation and come away with any counsel or guidance we can get out of that,” he said.
The Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District School Committee next meets on May 19.