NORTH MANCHESTER – Wednesday’s meeting dealt with many new changes for Manchester Community Schools and the school board in preparation for the upcoming school year.
The meeting started with a reorganization of the MCS board officers.
Sally Krouse was succeeded by Brian Schilling as the new board president. Steve Flack took the position of vice-president and Nate Trump became the new secretary. Several new-hire teachers were introduced and welcomed into the corporation.
Also new for the upcoming school year will be a higher textbook fee. For grades K-6, textbook fees will increase on average by $15. The increased fee is partly due to switching to many new textbooks that include multimedia CD-ROMs and DVDs to aid in student learning.
MCS also will be using some paperback textbooks that are only used for one year. More expensive than the regular hard-back textbooks, the paperback texts allow the student to write and notate within the text, similar to a workbook. The average life of a typical hardback textbook is 5 to 6 years.
July 12 also was the official release of the ISTEP scores from the previous school year. The scores showed that corporation-wide, MCS had higher math and English scores than from the previous year.
The news of the higher test scores stood as encouragement for the new-hire teachers. Starting with the upcoming school year, a teacher's pay will be based on their students’ standardized test scores.
