BUCYRUS—The Bucyrus board of education held their monthly meeting on Thursday.
Treasurer Mr. Ryan Cook informed the board that a community member whose father was a 1940 Bucyrus grad, is in the process of donating one million dollars to the school to be put towards a scholarship for Bucyrus students only.
The individual who is donating the money would like the recipients to be going into geriatric medicine, nursing programs, internal medicine, specifically air force, but there will be flexibility with trade programs as well.
Until everything is finalized, the name of the individual will not be made public.
Bucyrus City Schools is working with OIP (Ohio Improvement Process) and SST7 (State Support Team Region 7) to survey staff, students, and parents regarding culture and climate with the panorama instrument that was purchased.
“Panorama has been very agile in redeveloping and redesigning those survey instruments to include education during the pandemic and addressing social and emotional issues with all three stakeholders,” Superintendent Mr. Matt Chrispin said.
Phase one was a survey that was sent out to staff to complete this week, and phase two will be the student and parent survey when they get back from break. The district leadership team will do an analysis and look for common threads that the district can set some goals around some action plans and go to work on things that can be done to improve the district’s culture and climate.
Also, at the meeting, Mr. Chrispin discussed the school’s educational format.
“Remote and split-sessions are no substitute for in-person learning. We are starting to see more data come out that district’s that have been at it longer, that supports that statement,” Chrispin began. “My conversations with our teachers, the barrier of not being in the physical presence of our students has made it more challenging to teach, collect assignments, to provide timely intervention and feedback, and to account for student attendance. It’s improved since we made the switches, but we have a lot of improvement to go yet.”
The decision on whether or not the school will resume in-person is not an easy one and will be made at a later date after careful consideration.
The board accepted the resignation of Mr. Mark Fiske, the current band director. Fiske has been with the school district since 2000.
Board members offered their congratulations to Tanner Alsept, who signed his letter of intent to wrestle at Tiffin University, and Caleigh Rister, who signed her letter of intent to play softball at California U of Pennsylvania.
The next board meeting was moved to January 7 at 5:30 p.m.