Union Public School Trustees are hoping to add a second nurse to the district’s staff beginning with the 2019-20 school year.
In a regular monthly meeting of the Board of Trustees last Monday, Superintendent Tyler Hansford said the district was applying for two grants, each of which would pay a school nurse’s salary for five years. UPSD had been a regular recipient of a similar grant previously, but the funding was lost about 5-year ago.
“This is the grant we lost 5-years ago that basically pays the nurse’s salary,” he said.
While the district already has one nurse, Hansford said the district was hoping to receive two grants, allowing the board to hire a second nurse. Mississippi Department of Education wants districts to maintain specific staff-to-student ratios, he said, and Union needs a second nurse to meet those regulations.
“They want a nurse to student ratio of about 750 students,” he said. “We’re at 975.”
The board agreed a second nurse would be ideal and approved the grant applications. However, Trustee David LeBlanc advised Hansford to tread carefully. When UPSD lost the previous grant, he said, it was a huge blow to the district.
“The whole thing was shocking,” he said. “We used to get it every year, like clockwork. Then, they changed the metrics, and we lost it.”
LeBlanc said the board had come to rely on that grant to pay the nurse’s salary. After learning they would not receive the funding, the board had to scramble to find the money elsewhere.
“It was one of the worst board meetings I’ve been in,” he said.
LeBlanc said he fully supported applying for the grant again but advised Hansford to learn from the past and have a backup plan.
In other business, Hansford told the board he had scheduled meetings with school administrators for the coming weeks to begin building a budget for the 2019-20 school year. In the coming weeks, he said he and bookkeeper Abby Winstead would be meeting with principals to plan out spending needs for the next year.
Once the schools have given their input, Hansford said he would get in touch with the board to schedule a budget work session, which would probably take place in late March.
In Monday’s meeting, the Board of Trustees also:
● Approved the 2019-20 school calendar;
● Held the first reading for policy changes for policies JCDAB, JQN, DJEC and LAAA, which are being updated to reflect wording changes in federal policy; and
● Approved changing the date of the March Board of Trustees meeting from March 11 to March 7.
