Smokebusters, a student organization educating the public against smoking, lobbied the School Board to make the entire school smoke-free. They did a presentation at the Worth County School Board meeting in which they presented figures showing that sitting in a smoke-filled restaurant for two hours would be the same as smoking four cigarettes. They have done public presentations, a hoop shoot, raffled off t-shirts, and persuaded people to take pledges not to start smoking. They have also went into the elementary, where they did an activity with second graders where they breathed through a straw after running to show them what smoking was like.
Janice Borey, the group's sponsor, recounted their trip to Bethany where they taped some public service announcements for KAAN Radio, which will be airing on the station for the next few months. At one point, the students were in charge of the radio station while Station Manager Stuart Johnson was off taping the PSA's from the students.
Citing statistics showing that workplace exposure to secondhand smoke was a leading cause of death and that 1,200 Missourians each year died of second-hand smoke, Smokebusters students asked the School Board to make the school smoke free. Board member Richard Mullock asked about enforcement; Borey said that the answer was positive encouragement. She said that if people were to smoke in their cars at school events, that would be their business, but that the school would still be smoke-free. North Andrew is another school in the area which has gone smoke-free.
Board member Kevin Austin said that as an ex-smoker, he would like to see the group take their efforts across the county. He said that he was allergic to smoke whenever people lit up around him and that efforts to restrict secondhand smoke were taking place all over the country. Participating in the presentation were Kylie Reynolds, Cody Straight, Rebecca Moore, Montana Rush, Eli Mullock, and Kacey Smyser.
High School students Jessica Borey, Brooke Gilland, and Zach Harmening gave certificates of appreciation to the school board members for School Board Appreciation Week. The CTA also gave appreciation cards.
Amy Garrett reported on the recent hard drive crash that occured at the school which affected both the school and the library. She said both the hard drives went down and that neither the school nor Midwest Data could recover much of the lost data. Lost were the school's webpage as well as the library card catalog, forcing librarians and volunteers to enter 20,000 lost titles into the system manually to restore the library card catalog. Garrett said that the crash did not affect either the school's e-mail or the online grades.
Superintendent Matt Robinson reformatted the school's annual report in a way that he said would help recruit more teachers and that he said would be more complete. Board member Richard Mullock said that the most impressive stat that jumped out at him was the fact that there was a high number of teachers with Master's Degrees at the school.
The school board approved the 2009-2010 calendar after discussing December snow dates. Superintendent Robinson said that he wanted to coordinate the calendar with other schools as well as the area vo-tech schools. Added to the calendar will be August 13th for first-time teachers for the district; Robinson said that day would be an orientation session. Christmas break will end on January 4th next year. As usual, the school will have six snow make-up days built in; if there are more than six, the school has to make up half of the remainder.
Board member Terry Green successfully pushed for the school to have two optional snow make-up days in December, given the long Christmas break for next year. He said that if there were a disaster like the Ice Storm, the school could use those at the discretion of the Superintendent and then get back on track for January. Robinson said that he would give teachers plenty of time to make plans; for instance, if the snowstorm were to happen right before those two days, he would go ahead and use Martin Luther King Day as a snow make-up day. But if it were to happen well before the break, he would go ahead and use the December make-up days. If there were only one snow date, the school would still wait until Martin Luther King Day to make it up; the change applies to two or more days of snow.
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