Warsaw Community School Board of Trustees Monday approved a proposal for purchasing iPads. Brad Hagg, WCS chief technology officer, said the proposal is for the purchase of 2,810 iPads for elementary, middle and high school students. There will be 580 mini iPads and 2,230 full-size iPads purchased. The school will purchase them over a four-year period through a lease with Apple. Students in grades sixth through eighth currently take home iPads, but under the new program students in every grade from fifth to 12th would get them. In other business, the board approved a 2016-2017 school year price increase for school lunches. Elementary school lunches will go from $2.35 to $2.50; middle school lunches will go from $2.55 to $2.65; and high school lunches will go from $2.65 to $2.75. The middle school salad bars will go from $2.80 to $2.90, and the high school salad bar will go from $2.90 to $3. The board approved publisher Pearson to be used for social studies curriculum. The board approved Hagg to attend the International Society for Technology in Education 2016 annual conference in Denver. Also during the meeting, the board heard a presentation on the high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp program. Jessica Marion, JROTC battalion commander, said there currently are 91 cadets, and it is projected there will be 87 cadets next year. JROTC will do an Adopt A School program where they will go into middle schools to teach about JROTC. The board also heard a presentation from fourth-grade students and teachers Katie Abshagen, Carol Allebach, Holly Grossman and Jane Zellers. They demonstrated a slow boat race and how they learned about gravity and speed. The students were given a task to design and build a boat to move slowly through the water. They started with $12 to purchase different materials to add to their boat, then tested them in the water. They had constraints they had to abide by or they would be disqualified: The boat could not touch the sides or the bottom of the container, it could not flip all the way over, and they could only build 3 inches to the side, 6 inches above and 2 inches below the boat. Hoffert reminded parents to register their students for kindergarten roundup at individual schools if they were not able to do so last week.
