The Fairbanks Board of Education has a new policy on College Credit Plus (CCP) programs for the school district.
At Monday night’s meeting, the board approved of a policy change regarding how students take CCP classes if they happen to fail them. CCP classes allow high school students to take college classes with financial scholarships.
Fairbanks Superintendent Bob Humble said the law has changed to allow to district to put students on academic probation should they fail a CCP class.
“Students in the past who have failed College Credit Plus Courses, there were really no other repercussions, other than… we could bill them for the cost of the course, but they could still participate in the course,” Humble said.
Humble said since the law changed a couple of months ago, the district can now make sure students are “not allowed to continue” CCP classes, or “suspend their ability to take CCP classes for a given time” if they don’t pass.
Also at the meeting, for the first time in at least 10 years, the board voted to not approve phone allowances for administration personnel for the 2018-2019 school year.
Board members Derek Nicol, Angie Bouic and Brian Phelps voted no to the allowances. Nicol said he didn’t support the phone allowances because there are too many areas that didn’t necessarily need to be compensated for phone use.
Nicol said he supports compensating educational expenses, but saw there were more personal expenses covered in the allowances.
“We were very open to revisiting the issue once we get more information,” Nicol said. “We want to make sure everybody who uses their phone currently, in excess of a high amount, that they are compensated for it. There are certain areas where they need their cell phones and we need to visit that.”
Humble said though the decision was unusual, he will be looking at other options among various school districts and gathering more information to present to the board.
He said the stipends help personnel offset the costs for how much time they spend on their cell phones for work outside of school hours.
“It’s disappointing that I could have done that a little sooner, but that’s okay, we do what we need to do,” Humble said. “I’ll get them the information we need and they’ll make their decision.”
He said he plans to talk to individual board members about this and maybe revisit the issue in June.
Also at the meeting, the board approved a resolution involving the next step to transfer ownership of the Milford Center softball fields to Union Township.
Humble said the legal paperwork process has been started, and lawyers on each side will be contacting each other to eventually transfer ownership. The issue was first brought up at a February meeting.
He said the situation began when the bus garage moved to its current location, and the parking lot for the softball fields was deteriorating.
“During that time, the parking lot continued to deteriorate a great deal, so we started trying to figure out what we were going to do,” Humble said. “Are we going to spend an inordinate amount of money to upkeep a parking lot, fields and other properties when we’re really only over there two and a half months a year?”
Milford Center and Union Township are involved with the negotiations.
After discussions, it was agreed Milford Center would help pave the parking lot with its asphalt mixer. Union Township will handle maintaining the softball fields.
In the meantime until Fairbanks gets its own softball fields, Humble said the district will help maintain the fields with Union Township.
Humble said it was key to make sure the summer ball program could “absolutely continue to use those fields,” and the district wasn’t going to do anything until those fields were “going to be available to them as well.”
“We’ve been good partners with those folks for a while, but we wanted to make it official,” Humble said. “I think it’s going to work out well for everyone.”
High School graduation is set to begin at 10 a.m. Saturday, and there will be 94 students graduating this year.
The board will meet again June 25.