By RANDI BJORNSTAD/Correspondent/The Herald — It took the Pleasant Hill School Board just two minutes to close the public hearing on its proposed 2021-22 school district budget, the first item on the agenda at its regular monthly meeting, held virtually via YouTube on Monday.
Chairman Jeff Bernardo called the meeting to order at 7:01 p.m. by asking district superintendent Scott Linenberger if there had been any comments submitted by members of the public since the board last discussed the proposal at its June 7 meeting. The answer was, no.
“With that, then, do we adjourn the hearing?” Bernardo asked.
“That’s it unless board members have questions,” the superintendent replied. They did not.
“Then, at 7:02 p.m., I will adjourn the budget hearing,” the chairman said.
Later during the 90-minute meeting, with no further public input having been submitted, the board voted unanimously to ratify the budget figures as well as necessary accompanying resolutions.
As reported previously by the Highway 58 Herald, the general fund budget for academic year 2021-22 will be $15,149,390, an increase of 2.21 percent over the current budget. In addition to state support, part of the funding for the Pleasant Hill schools comes from property taxes in the district, based on a permanent tax rate of slightly more than $4.64 per $1,000 of assessed valuation.
The rest of the meeting was dominated by a presentation on a combination in-person and online approach to education that the district is considering in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The non-profit program, called Florida Virtual School, or FLVS, has been in operation since 1997 and has the status of a public school district. It offers more than 170 courses to serve students in kindergarten through 12th grade, including core classes, electives, advanced placement courses. It also offers “credit recovery” coursework, which gives students who have failed a class an opportunity to retake it, either in their usual school setting or via online learning.
FLVS representative Biff McCabe spoke with the board online from Colorado about the program and the way it might mesh with and augment the Pleasant Hill School District’s educational offerings.
The FLVS program is quite flexible in terms of accommodating local district’s needs for a combination of online and in-person offerings, McCabe said. “We’ve been around a long time now, and we work with school districts in 50 (U.S.) states and 83 countries.”
The program can be tailored to suit local school districts’ needs in terms of blending local and FLVS teachers as needed, as well as developing local course content or using FLVS-developed content, he said.
Linenberger told the board, “We’ve been looking at an online approach, and we’ve gotten through the community input portion and feel that FLVS is the best product out there.”
Board members raised many questions about the logistics and costs of using such a program as well as whether it could mesh with existing state education requirements but also expressed interest in pursuing the idea further with input from teachers, parents and students.
They also supported the possibility of “starting small and seeing how it goes,” as chairman Bernardo put it. “I also would like to see how it would fit with things we have learned through the pandemic,” he said.
In other news, Linenberger told the board that the final enrollment figures have been tabulated for the 2020-21 school year, “and it looks like we have held pretty strong, despite the pandemic,” he said. “We started at 975 students and ended at 1,006, and I think we are officially at 1,019 now. I think this indicates that the folks in our district have maintained confidence in our schools.”
Linenberger also reported several changes in the faculty in the district. Shawn Swick, formerly of Beaverton, has been hired to be assistant principal at the middle school, replacing Brandon Haberly, who is moving to Dayville in eastern Oregon. Laura Gerick has accepted an administration job in the South Lane School District. And advanced math teacher Matthew Thornton will be teaching math and coaching basketball at Sheldon High School in Eugene.
The end of the Pleasant Hill School Board’s meeting represented the end of an era of sorts with board members bidding farewell to two of their number — chairman Jeff Bernardo and member Curt Offenbacher — who between them have put in nearly a half-century of time on behalf of families in the district. They did not seek re-election in May.
As a result of the May election, Rusty Rexius and Drew Gottfried will join board members Wylda Cafferata, Stephen Hammond and John Oldham on the school board.
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