At the recent West Central Board of Education, the budget for fiscal year 2023-2024 was passed with an operating fund of around $10 million. One focus of the board this year is taking a deep dive into their facilities and laying out a five to ten year plan, shares Superintendent Stacey Day:
“You can do all these little projects, but if you don’t know where you are going in the end, then you are just piecing things together. We will give the board a chance to walk through every building and create their list and our staff will start doing theirs and really seeing where we want to go and how we want to move forward. One of the things that I think of first is the aesthetics side of things. Sometimes it might seem frivolous to spend that kind of money, but I am a big believer that if we want our kids to be proud of where they are at, we need to give them spaces that look really sharp. We are small. We are very rural, but that does not mean we can’t provide facilities and opportunities for them that they can be really proud of. We did a lot of work this summer, especially in our Middle School, we did a lot of painting this summer.”
The Board also revisited their current cell phone policies in the Middle School and High School, making sure staff and administrators were all on the same page; cell phones are to be turned off and remain in lockers in the Middle School and are left up to each teacher’s discretion at the High School.