The Eastern Pulaski School Board approved a policy revision Monday that allows extracurricular activities to take place as scheduled, even if school had been canceled for that day.
Superintendent Dan Foster said the change was made at the request of school administrators. “You’ve all seen how difficult it is to reschedule sometimes, and you have all seen by the time buses need to be rolling, the roads may not be very good yet but by one or two o’clock in the afternoon, we’re in pretty good shape and the sun’s out, where we could possibly have that ballgame,” he said. “So it is basically giving myself and [High School Principal] Mr. [Rick] DeFries and [Athletic Director] Mr. [Bill] Ball the opportunity to say, ‘We can still have that event.’”
This week’s policy revisions also included a clarification to the process of determining who gets laid off, if a reduction in force is needed. “That came from a lawsuit in a corporation in Indiana that had to do with the language of a tenured teacher being a victim of reduction in force and the court basically saying, ‘They were already considered a tenured teacher, so you can’t take tenure away from them.’ So that has to be considered a factor.” Another main deciding factor is teacher effectiveness over the past three years at Eastern Pulaski Schools.
Meanwhile, the school corporation’s drug testing policy for staff members with commercial drivers licenses was updated to specify which specific drugs are being tested for. Additionally, references to e-cigarettes and similar devices were added to Eastern Pulaski’s tobacco free facilities policy.
