The Liberty County Board of Education meeting opened Tuesday night with Bradwell Institute senior Michael Hagerty reading an excerpt from his essay “The Power of the Ballot- Make Our Voices Heard.” Hagerty was one of four winners in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Essay Contest. Hagerty’s essay received second place in the high school category.
MLK coloring contest winners include: Tatianna Moses, kindergartener at Lyman Hall Elementary; Ja’Kayla Nelson, first grader at Button Gwinnett Elementary; and Ama Anim-Asiedu, second grader at Button Gwinnett Elementary.
MLK poster contest winners include: first place was Kyla Lawson, fifth grader at Button Gwinnett Elementary; second place was Ne’Miah Alston, fifth grader at Waldo Pafford Elementary; and third place was Synque Jones, fifth grader at Button Gwinnett Elementary.
The other MLK essay contest winners: first place was Honesti Stewart, sixth grader at Midway Middle School; second place was Geovanii Pacheco, sixth grader at Midway Middle School; and first place McKenna Malm, ninth grader at Liberty County High School.
Interim Chief Operations Officer Jason Rogers was approved and appointed as the Chief Operations Officer for the Liberty County School System, after the board approved the appointment in executive session.
In other business, LCSS has received a three year extension to their current LifeSkills Training Program grant, according to Executive Director for Student Services Kathy Moody. The grant is funded through The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) at the University of Colorado.
The LifeSkills program is implemented in all middle schools in Liberty County, Moody said. It is an evidence-based substance abuse and violence protection program designed specifically for middle and high school classrooms.
“Georgia law states that we have to present some type of curriculum that deals with drug abuse, prevention, tobacco, and alcohol,” Moody said. “That’s the program we use at each of the three middle schools.”
With the extension, the program will continue to be taught at Snelson-Golden, Lewis Frasier, Midway Middle and the Horizons Learning Center, Moody continued.
The grant covers the cost of all the work, including training and technical assistance for teachers, student workbooks for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, teachers’ manuals and resources, and a LifeSkills Training of Teachers workshop for sustainability following 2021-2022. The estimated cost of LifeSkills for the next three years is $26,697.
“We’re fortunate to have already trained many of our sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers already,” Moody said. “We anticipate training the newly hired teachers in late July once they are officially hired.”
The program also pays for observers, who come and sit in on the classes. Moody said that feedback received during the 2017-2018 year was positive.
“Observers felt that students responded well to the program and there was a high level of student understanding,” the comment read. Observation feedback indicated that, on average, the majority of students were actively engaged in LST lessons, Moody added.
The board approved four out-of-state travel requests. The requests are to travel to the education career fair in Columbus, Missouri; travel to the annual Edulog Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, visit Gradventure in Orlando, Florida and take an International Bus Plant Tour in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The board approved the requests unanimously.
Rogers recommended approval to purchase a scissor lift from Sunbelt. Sunbelt provided the lowest bid of $9,268 for a scissor lift, out of six different bidders. In the past, he said, the system usually rented a scissor lift when the need arose. However, the system determined it was more cost effective to purchase a lift instead of continuing to rent.
LCSS will purchase two maintenance service vans from Town Center Nissan for a total of $29,987. The purchase received recommendation for approval from Rogers, and the board unanimously approved.