Daniel Prince
May 24, 2023
New course added to high school curriculum
The Union County Board of School Trustees voted to add a new elective course at Union County High School. Incoming principal Karen Petty presented the proposed course, called UC Success. She said it would be a half-credit course each year that all students would take from 9-12 grades. She said it would help to foster community, relationships, and unity within the school. She said it would cover social and emotional learning, character traits, and other things. The idea is to have the same group of students and teacher go through the course from 9-12 grades, with each grade focusing on something different. For 9th grade, Petty said the focus would be on adjusting to the high school. The 10th grade focus would be on team building. The 11th grade would focus on community, and the seniors would focus on career and college readiness. She said the course would be held for 25 minutes between first and second blocks every day all year, with the time being pulled from 2nd block announcements, other transition times around lunch, and possibly starting the school day 5 minutes earlier, at 8:05 rather than 8:10. The board unanimously approved the new course, which will begin this coming school year for all high school grades.
The board approved two overnight field trips—one for the State FFA Convention in Greenville on June 6-8, and another for a wrestling camp at Allen University, which will be June 15-17.
Finance Director Linda Griffin stated in the monthly financial report that revenue for the district so far is $32.2 million, with $23.9 million in expenses, leaving a net operating result so far of $8.2 million.
Personnel Director Jeff Stribble presented several board policies for first reading, with final approval to be voted on by the board at their June meeting. He said the first policy deals with electronic communication. He said the major change is that electronic devices will not be prohibited for elementary school students, but they will be under the same restrictions as the middle and high school students. He said there are also some changes to the first, second, and third offense provisions. He introduced a new policy for weapons detection. He said it comes from the model policy from the School Board Association and addresses the new weapons detection system the district will put in place next year. He proposed a policy change regarding expense authorizations, moving to a $40 per diem per night with no receipt turn-ins required, which is a policy that other districts use. He said the current policy hadn’t been updated in a while. Two policies dealt with retirement of support staff and professional staff. He said wording has been changed in the policies to refer retirees to the retirement system website so that policy changes won’t be needed every time there is a change to the retirement systems in place. Finally, a policy was proposed to cover the district’s clear bag policy that it implemented this school year. It takes the policy that was approved and codifies it into the school board policy. Stribble noted the School Board Association is doing this statewide.
The personnel report was amended to exclude employee A, and the board unanimously approved it.
We’ll have more from that meeting in tomorrow’s newscast.