As a perk to its employees, Warsaw Community Schools is working on offering child care.

Ronna Kawsky, Warsaw Area Career Center director, told the school board Monday night about three programs she’s been working on at the WACC, including child care, automotive and the work ethics certificate.

“The first one is the child care project. That will be a perk from our corporation to our staff. I can tell you that yesterday was the first real e-mail kind of solidifying our progress that we sent out to staff. We’ll have an informational meeting that will be on Wednesday and sign-ups will begin Wednesday at 8 p.m. this week,” she said.

There will be 30 positions available, filling out two classrooms. One classroom will be infant to potty trained, and the other is potty trained to kindergarten.

“So we’ll looking for 30 full-time students and maybe we’ll be full by the end of Wednesday night, we don’t know,” Kawsky said.

Lynette Hawn, who has a degree in family and child services from Purdue University and has years of experience, was hired for the child care program. Kawsky didn’t indicate Hawn’s position or job responsibilities, but said Hawn is the wife of Winona Lake Town Marshal Joe Hawn.

“While this is a big accomplishment and it’s going to take place in Warsaw Area Career Center, I’m really excited that a competent person has been hired that I can mentor and just look to and check in with as she’ll be able to run the child care center herself and her staff,” Kawsky said.

Once the enrollment is known, she said the next step will be to hire staff for Hawn based on what the needs are.

Next, Kawsky moved on to talk about the automotive program.

“I’m finishing my eighth year as the director, and every single year is automotive, automotive, automotive, is the voice from students. This year we were able to start an automotive program,” she said.

It will be at Tippecanoe Valley High School in Akron. Warsaw will send its students down there, and Alan Hoyt was hired as the automotive instructor. He is bilingual, speaking English and Spanish.

“Which is exciting because probably 50 percent of our enrollment are Hispanic students, so I’m really anxious to see how that program kicks off,” Kawsky said.

She said a “really large” grant was written to get the equipment and program started for the next school year.

The last program she touched on was the Kosciusko’s Work Ethics Certificate.

“This is a certificate that is endorsed by the Governor’s Office,” she said. “We can start a work ethics certificate, but if it is our work ethics certificate, it’s not going to have the impact if we listen to industry and let industry develop our work ethics certificate.”

Kawsky said they had several sessions where industry was invited in and they developed the certificate. She presented the school board with a draft of it.

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She said the “loudest voice” from industry was on attendance. “They have to show up and they have to show up on time and they have to show up every single day. So attendance has a very high emphasis on this work ethics certificate,” she said.

The certificate is for high school seniors only and will be countywide.

“We’ve been working with all school system in our county. We introduced this at the same time for our seniors next year,” Kawsky said.

After meeting with industry leaders, she said they had several conversations that the only way the certificate was going to make a difference to students and that they were going to want it was if it came with perks. Kawsky said all summer they’ll be working with companies to see what kind of incentive they would be willing to give students who earn the certificate.

“They have been so creative, and there’s some really cool stuff coming out. The best one is that you get an automatic interview. And for a high school student, interviewing is really scary,” she said, adding that other perks suggested by companies were an extra day of vacation or the waiver of the 90-day wait period for medical benefits.

Students also will be evaluated by every single one of their teachers their senior year, with their scores averaged.

The WACC partnered with a group from the Kosciusko Leadership Academy who wrote their White Paper Project on the certificate. It won the Jean Northenor Award, which came with a prize of $1,200 to help get the project started.

During the meeting, the board also suspended the regular meeting to hold a hearing on an additional appropriation.

Chief Financial Officer Dr. Brandon Penrod said the project is for the renovation of and improvements to WCHS facilities, including HVAC, roofing and site improvements, purchase of equipment, vehicles and technology and the construction of the health center. The hearing was advertised in the Times-Union on May 1.

“This project fits into the Warsaw Community Schools facility plan, and the bond for this project does not impact the tax rate. The additional appropriation grants us the authority to spend the proceeds from the bond sale. Unlike corporation tax dollars, this additional appropriation of bond proceeds is not required to be approved by the (Department of Local Government Finance), only by the school corporation,” Penrod explained.

After there were no comments from the public, the regular meeting was convened and the school board approved an additional appropriation resolution and the final bond resolution. It also approved a resolution to assign construction bids to the building corporation.