School Board Weighs Adding Committees, Bringing Substitute Teachers Back In-House

The Warren County School Board, during its Wednesday, January 17 meeting, unanimously approved the district’s 2024–2025 calendar and then went into a work session to consider several items, including whether to add more committees to the board and if Warren County Public Schools (WCPS) should once again oversee the process for hiring substitute teachers.

Warren County School Board members (above, left to right) Andrea Lo, Kristen Pence, Antoinette Funk, Melanie Salins, and Thomas McFadden on Wednesday, January 17, held a meeting and work session. 

School Board Chair Kristen Pence, Vice Chair Antoinette Funk, and members Andrea Lo, Thomas McFadden, and Melanie Salins were present for the meeting and work session. 

They voted 5-0 to accept the new calendar for the 2024–2025 school year. The first day of school will be on August 13; the last day of school is May 22, 2025. Other highlights include closures on November 25–29 for Fall Break; December 23 through January 4, 2025, for students’ Winter Break, with teachers returning on January 2, 2025; and April 14–21, 2025, for Spring Break. 

WCPS Assistant Superintendent of Administration Buck Smith also pointed out that the calendar includes 11 professional development days, provides 48 bank instructional hours for inclement weather cancellations, and updates the times and dates for Parent-Teacher Conferences.   

During the School Board’s work session, Pence opened up the conversation about adding committees to the board. 

The School Board’s current standing committees are the Facilities Committee, the Budget Subcommittee, and the Mountain Vista Governor’s School Governing Board seat.

Salins said some school boards in surrounding communities do have additional committees, while others are trying to reduce the number of committees they have. She suggested new committees might include a discipline committee, a hiring committee, and a grievance/complaint resolution committee. She also suggested creating a Parents’ Bill of Rights.

For instance, rather than just having the superintendent handle the review for decisions regarding the more serious student offenses that require a 10-day suspension or even expulsion, a discipline committee would also be involved in those decisions, said Salins.

Likewise, a hiring committee could sit in on the interview process, while a grievance/complaint resolution committee could “start dealing with some of these grievances right away before they’ve exploded and just snowballed into something bigger than it needs to be,” she explained. 

“I’m not for just creating work for us to do,” Salins said, “but I think at this point in time, with some of the issues that we’ve experienced over the last year especially, we’ve got to get our hands dirty and get more involved.”

Pence and McFadden suggested that WCPS policies should be updated first, while others said that consideration of additional committees could coincide with the development or update of district policies.

“I think Dr. Ballinger brought a stack of policies to start review back in September, and I think that’s the last that we talked about really going through,” said Pence. “We did the camera policy but as far as actually moving forward with some of these policy revisions and reviews, we haven’t made any headway. I see all of these as things that maybe we could streamline a little bit.”

“We can establish these committees as we’re rewriting the policies,” said Salins. “But I think this is an urgent matter, and we need to dive in head first and get started on this. On at least those areas.”

Lo (above) also agreed that policy reviews and updates have to be done first. “I don’t think we can just create committees and just assign them duties without some kind of policy backing,” she said.

Lo also said she reviewed neighboring school boards and their committees, specifically the seven closest ones to Warren County, plus Winchester.

“I found that four of them don’t have any standing committees,” said Lo. “One had three, one had five, and one had nine listed, although at least two of those are advisory. So I don’t know that we necessarily are out of step with the other surrounding counties.”

Funk suggested having WCPS staff start by creating a bill of rights, begin reviewing policies and then determine what committee needs might be from that review. 

In the second work session item up for consideration, WCPS Personnel Director Jody Lee (right) and WCPS Deputy Director of Human Resources and Finance Kendall Poe (left) provided School Board members with a substitute presentation focused on bringing subs back into the school system, overseen by district human resources (HR) staff.

Currently, WCPS contracts with ESS, an education staffing company headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn.

To appropriately run a sub-system within WCPS, Lee said three additional personnel would be needed: a supervisor, a coordinator, and an administrative assistant. Other budget items that would be requested included funds for recruitment, office supplies, training, and software.

In total, Lee said the WCPS substitutes plan would cost roughly $1,846,757, compared to the ESS contract of $1,002,565.

Poe and Lee would like to grow an in-house sub program so that WCPS has a larger pool of available substitutes than what’s currently provided through ESS.

“ESS limits [subs] if they don’t work a certain amount of days in a particular time frame,” Poe said. “They’re eliminated, and they have to go through the whole complete rehire process. We would give them a whole year, communicate with them at the end of that year to see if they’re still interested to be on that list and work with them that way. But we’re looking to retain these individuals, grow the program, and hopefully get them into a full-time position in our schools if that’s what they desire.”

“It’s going to be a board decision on whether we stay with ESS or whether we bring it in-house,” said Lee. “We’re just having the conversations right now because this is going to be a big piece of that budget pie.”

Lastly, WCPS Special Services Director Shamika McDonald, WCPS Senior Deputy Director for Special Services Christina Lee, and specialty teacher Kaitlyn Erdman discussed changing a teacher contract from a 10-month to a 12-month contract to better support the school district’s Pathways and Connections to Classrooms programs. 

“For organizing and continuing to support programs with fidelity, we are proposing a change to our current teaching position,” McDonald explained. “The new title would be Specialized Program Coordinator. This is not an administrative position. It’s more of a teacher support position.” 

The Specialized Programs Coordinator would be responsible for the coordination/training/support of the WCPS specialized programs, which are designed to address the needs of students with significant disabilities who are educated within and/or outside of the general education classroom. 

The coordinator also would advise school principals about special education programs to ensure that the needs of all students are being met and would focus on helping children with disabilities to maximize their learning in an inclusive setting, the presenters said.

Additionally, the proposed coordinator would be tasked with starting innovative new school programs aimed toward the implementation of specialized supports and to ensure the quality and integrity of all aspects of those programs.

No actions on the work session items were taken by the board, which will take up the issues again at a future meeting or work session.