The Centralia City School Board of Education approved a Threat Assessment Guide for the upcoming school year at the meeting on Tuesday.
The guide provides reporting methods for students and staff at Centralia City Schools to report potential threats to administrators and outlines plans and procedures for responding to those reports. This was created to comply with Illinois’ School Threat Assessment Law, which requires all Illinois school districts to create and implement threat assessment protocols. Superintendent Craig Clark said that having these protocols in place would make for a safer school environment.
“It will give a mechanism for teachers, support staff, administrators, students, parents, community members, to report possible threats against the school… if they see that there might be a student or an adult that’s acting in a way that we need to be made aware of… It’s an anonymous mechanism. They can go to our website and fill out a form. Maybe they saw a post on social media, maybe they heard a kid say something… it could be a host of many different things. Now there’s a way for them to report that without feeling like, as a student, there might be repercussions… We’ve seen lately with some of the issues that have happened in other schools that there have been warning signs. This gives us another tool to catch those warning signs in an early enough stage that we can intervene.”
The board authorized the superintendent to sign solar project contracts with Utopian Power pending review by the district’s attorney. The solar projects, which Utopian gave a presentation on at last month’s meeting, would see the company build solar panels at Jordan and Schiller schools and sell the power from those panels to the district at a fixed price for a twenty-five-year period. If the agreements are signed, the projects could benefit the district by guaranteeing affordable energy bills regardless of the future volatility of the energy market.
The construction project at Schiller School has faced significant delays due to weather over the course of the summer. According to Clark, wet conditions have set the project two months behind schedule in total. Though the construction is still ongoing, Clark said that it would not cause any problems for Schiller’s students as the school year gets underway.
“We’ve worked very closely with Shores. They’ve done an excellent job accommodating what we would like to see in order for our kids to stay safe. We’re working on having six-foot chain-link fencing in other areas to keep kids out, but they’ve also gone above and beyond by helping us with our bus drop-off areas to actually pave them, putting down temporary sidewalks so our kids have an area that they can walk to the school and to the door without being in the middle of a construction zone.”
Resignations:
- · Kylan Hallam, 6th grade Math Teacher
- · Emily Piercy, 6th grade English Teacher
- · Krystal Foley, Jordan Mental Health Support
- · Lucas Krutsinger, Junior High Boys Track Coach
- · Amber West, Junior High Girls Track Coach
- · Roy Heinrichsmeyer, Bus Monitor
- · Janice Wuebbels, Bus Monitor
New Hirings:
- · Kaitlin Keeran, Jordan Third Grade Teacher
- · Angie Blair, Schiller and Jordan Music Teacher
- · Jessica Hughes, Schiller PE teacher
- · Russel Schmitt, Transportation Director
- · Stephanie Smith, Schiller Classroom Paraprofessional
- · Amanda Barbee, Classroom Paraprofessional
