Jonathan Alder High School (JAHS) is looking into Project Lead the Way for new biomedical science courses.
At a Jonathan Alder board of education meeting Monday night, Assistant Superintendent Misty Swanger said the district has been looking into incorporating courses from Project Lead the Way, a national STEM curriculum program, into the high school. She said officials are in favor of having biomedical courses available so it wouldn’t directly compete with classes offered at Tolles Career and Technical Center, and “this seemed like a good progression for us.”
“As we’ve been studying new science options, we’ve been studying curriculum options for a year and a half,” Swanger said. “We decided to go with the biomedical because it’s not in competition with the Tolles program.”
School board officials were interested in the biomedical courses the program offered, specifically the class featuring a forensic crime scene lab simulation for all students to take. That would be the first class introduced with the program.
Swanger said these biomedical classes would replace two science electives offered, forensics and vertebrate zoology.
She said the biomedical classes would offer more compared to the current forensics class while the zoology class would be cut to not interfere with the zoo program at Tolles.
“We had too many electives, so we wanted to narrow down the amount of electives we have,” Swanger said. “We’re just trying to focus so we have specific electives.”
She said Project Lead the Way was a good program to incorporate into the high school because of how interactive its lessons were. She said it would be a “good start” for the high school to encourage “inquiry-based learning.”
These changes will be implemented in the new high school course handbook for board members to approve.
Later in the meeting, the board approved to replace the security cameras at Monroe Elementary School.
Superintendent Gary Chapman said the change will make sure the elementary school will be able to synchronize its cameras with the systems at JAHS and Jonathan Alder Junior High School (JAJHS). He said this will allow those schools to view camera feeds from the other schools.
He said the school went with Trithium Solutions for its camera replacement, as “it met our needs.”
“We projected to have this budgeted for next fiscal year and not this year,” Chapman said. “With the events of December and how much success we had with the video camera system and the bomb threats, we wanted to push this one through.”
JAHS Assistant Principal Mark Fenik said the benefits to the camera system would be if a student forgot their items in one of the buildings, another building could communicate with that school and help locate the item.
Board member Tom Bichsel asked if eventually, will Canaan Middle School and Plain City Elementary School have their camera systems upgraded to be able to synchronize with Monroe, JAHS and JAJHS.
Chapman said right now, that’s not an option because of the expenses associated with that, and “they currently meet our security needs.” He said those schools’ camera systems were recently renovated and function well enough.
“It would be nice to have them all on the same network, but there would be a cost associated with that,” Chapman said.
Also at the meeting:
-Chapman announced that Fenik has been working with the transportation department to handle the bus driver shortage. He said the district will be re-routed to accommodate for the lack of driver, as well as the combination custodial/ bus driver position discussed at December’s meeting.
Fenik said he wants to incorporate computer software to assist with transportation. He said he hasn’t finalized logistics and financing for which program to pick, but is interested in Traversa and Transfinder Corporation. He said it would take several months to incorporate and would cost around $10,000 to $16,000.
“It’s not just routing,” Fenik said. “It’s communications if we have breakdowns. There are so many different aspects, and that’s where the difference in cost comes in.”
-JoLynn Wheatley, the district’s social worker and student support specialist, said the district is ready to teach younger grades about suicide and prevention. She said in order to teach it to fifth grade students, staff will be trained on this at the end of January.
“In this district, we started with eighth and 10th graders, and last year we started with sixth grade,” Wheatley said. “I’ve gotten referrals from fifth grade students who have experienced suicidal thoughts, even as young as fourth grade.”
She said it’s “alarming, but good” that the district is focusing on younger students to teach suicide awareness and prevention, as “we need to reach younger kids before they get a lot older.”
-Council member Steve Votaw was nominated and voted in as the board’s president and Bichsel was nominated and voted in as the board’s vice president.
The next meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 11, at JAJHS.