AKRON – Tippecanoe Valley welcomes students outside of its district to attend any of its schools without paying transfer tuition, Superintendent Brett Boggs told the school board Monday night.
For the start of the 2012-13 school year, Boggs said 48 non-resident transfer students have been approved for this school year with additional requests expected. School at Valley starts Friday.
Non-resident transfer students are required to complete an application that is evaluated and acted upon by the school’s principal and superintendent.
The 2011-12 school year, Boggs said, concluded with a total of 55 approved non-resident transfer students at Valley. The prior year, 2010-11, concluded with 51 approved non-resident transfer students.
Of the 48 transfer students expected to attend Valley this fall, Boggs said 21 came from Warsaw Community Schools. The others included 12 from Rochester, six from Triton, four from North Miami, two from Manchester, two from West Noble and one from Wawasee.
It is more difficult for Valley to know how many of its own students are attending other schools as transfers, Boggs said, unless the other school corporations share that information.
Board Secretary Hal Hoffman asked if there was a common denominator with all of the students transferring to Valley.
With the younger students, Boggs said, it tends to be a child care situation. For the older kids, they were unhappy with their past situation and wanted a fresh start.
Now that the state is going to do two student counts during the year, instead of just one in September, Board President Mark Wise asked if other schools are going to allow transfer students at any time. Boggs said yes, but Valley also has been doing that.
The state provides funding for each student. The second count day of the school year will be in February.
Tippecanoe Valley High School now has an assistant principal.
The board approved Jon Hutton for the position.
His contract is for 220 days, and he will be paid $293 per day. The daily rate will increase as Hutton completes credit toward licensure.
According to information provided, Hutton has served as a high school biology and earth space science teacher, as well as a varsity volleyball head coach. He served on the school improvement team for the past six years. He has worked with at-risk students as one of Valley’s graduation coaches.
The board also approved 2012-13 teaching assignments and extracurricular assignments. However, two board members did not vote in favor of the extracurricular assignments.
“I’m OK with all of it in here except the seventh- and eighth-grade volleyball coaches,” Hoffman said. “The handling of these firings and hirings of these positions was not handled correctly so I can’t support it.”
Hoffman and Wise voted against the motion to approve them, but the three other board members voted for it so it was approved 3-2.
According to the extracurricular assignments list provided, the seventh- and eighth-grade volleyball coaches are Billie Jo Carlin and April Stiles respectively.
No other comments were made about the personnel issue.
Boggs informed the board that Tippecanoe Valley’s Boomerang Backpacks was chosen as a finalist in Beacon Credit Union’s Project Spotlight.
Voting to select the winner started Aug. 1 and runs through Sept. 30. It is taking place both online and in Beacon’s bank branches. The number of votes Valley receives during the process will determine how much money Beacon will award in October.
The project with the most votes wins $1,000.
The online voting site is at www.beaconcu.org
Toward the end of the meeting, the board approved changes to the Tippecanoe Valley Middle School code of conduct and coaching handbook.
