Welcome to the new Board of Education (BoE) column! In this column, student board reps will be sharing with you all the current news from the latest BoE meetings.
This school year’s student representatives to the board are Abia Smith ’16, Max Fink ’17, James Whitehead ’16, and Lisa Yoo ’17. We represent IHS at biweekly BoE meetings, informing the board members about what is happening at the high school. We also get to see and hear issues that are brought up and discussed with the community at these meetings.
For the past several weeks, we have had a plethora of happenings at IHS to report to the board. These include club recruiting, Link Crew welcoming freshmen to IHS, Open House for high-school families, and fall sports. We also spent time encouraging board members to come to games and talked about homecoming week, from spirit week to the pep rally to the homecoming dance.
We don’t just talk at these board meetings—we open our ears to matters the board discusses that influence the whole community.
One of the most important topics brought up has been the district’s independent audit, which assesses how it has been doing financially in the last year. ICSD’s revenue and expenditure are evaluated: if revenue is greater than expenditure, that means there is leftover money, but if expenditure exceeds revenue, that means there must be a loss of money from the fund. In the past couple of years, expenditure has exceeded revenue, partially because of the plateauing of the state budget but also in part due to ICSD’s high ambitions and personal goals.
Another topic is the Athletic Placement Policy (APP), a state policy that requires middle-school students to pass certain tests in order to participate in high-school level sports
The APP includes not only tests of athletic ability, but also ones for physical maturity and size which are seen as unreasonable in the eyes of many. In fact, many parents have come to the BoE to express complaints with the current state of the APP.
One of the tests gives the evaluated student a Tanner score from 1 to 5, which rates physical capability (height, weight, strength/endurance, stage of puberty). Under current policy, any given student needs a Tanner score of four in order to play up. The BoE agreed that such policies were unfair, and decided to bend the limits as far as possible with compromise: under the tweaked district policy, students wishing to play up JV sports can be judged on a JV–freshman Tanner test, while a varsity Tanner score only applies to students applying for varsity sports. The new requirements stipulated for noncontact and contact sports make it easier for middle-schoolers to play up in sports that don’t necessarily require kids to meet a physical size limit.
We encourage you all to participate by sending in suggestions for what to talk to the BoE about at meetings, as well as to attend meetings yourselves. Board meetings are brightened by the board members’ dry humor and snappy comments. If you can’t come to the meetings, they are live-streamed on TV, and archived videos of past meetings can be found on YouTube.