MINOT – School Union 29 Operations Director Gordon Murray told the school committee Tuesday night that the days when it seemed every classroom at the Minot Consolidated School was operating in a separate time zone are over now that a new satellite clock system has been installed.
Principal Margaret Pitts said she is delighted with the way they work. “When power comes on after an outage, they all just zip back to the same time, the right time. I’ll tell you, clocks out of sync in school cause some real problems; students out in the hallways before they ought to be.”
Noting that although the clock system cost less than $6,000, school committee member Steven Holbrook said he had heard talk around town that the system had cost more than $25,000 and that the school committee had gone ahead with the purchase, using money from this year’s budget, after town meeting voters had rejected funding for it.
“It made it sound like we went and did something like what the Poland School Committee got in trouble for, and I want the record set straight,” said Holbrook.
School Superintendent Nina Schlikin pointed out that the two situations were not the same. Voters at Minot town meeting cut the request for capital improvement items in half but never identified the satellite clock system as something they didn’t want purchased.
“Margaret Pitts identified the clock system as a high-priority need around the school. It came out of this year’s budget and I approved it,” said Schlikin.
School committee member Lisa Sabatine noted that there are a number of citizens who are used to seeing a very detailed line item budget and keep a close eye on what the school buys.
Referring to the two outside storage sheds the school recently purchased, Sabatine said, “I’m sure some people will be upset, but we are just solving a school’s storage problem with a bandage.”
Murray added that the school has been cited for lack of adequate storage space, and in fact had been acting illegally by not storing some materials properly. The storage problem had to be resolved, he said.
Pitts announced that the eighth-grade celebration will be held at 7 p.m. June 18 and that while specific plans for the evening are still fluid, there will be some changes. In the past, there was an evening event, generally running for three or four hours, that included a meal, an awards ceremony and a slide show, in addition to a second evening with a formal eighth-grade graduation ceremony and a time for more awards.
This year, there will be only one evening to celebrate the eighth-graders’ departure from the school.
The school committee agreed to eliminate its regular June and July meetings, setting its next regular meeting for the fourth Tuesday in August, and it gave Schlikin the authority to issue letters of intent to hire, should the need arise. At this point, there are no vacancies in school personnel.
In other business, the school committee accepted the resignation of English language arts teacher Cindy Rideout and learned from Special Education Director Barbara Hasenfus that it appears the school will have to contract out for speech therapy services, as she has been unable to find someone willing to accept a part-time position at the Minot school.
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