The Devils Lake School Board had their meeting on Monday, Oct. 23. Here are some highlights from the meeting that happened.
Vanessa McLaughlin, a special education teacher at CMS, was awarded Teacher of the Quarter. “She’s a teacher who does it all for kids,” CMS Principal Dan Kaffar said at the meeting. “She makes learning fun for these kids.” Kaffar mentioned that he had a meeting with a family and said the student was quite shy. Kaffar was told by the mom the student loves coming to school because of McLaughlin. “She’s a true leader at Central Middle School,” Kaffar said. Mclaughlin said of her award, “It means a lot because I know how many great teachers that I work with every day, and since I wasn’t a teacher before I came to Devils Lake, I feel like I’ve learned everything from the teachers around.”
The school board said they are closer to the cutoff mark for the agriculture building for the high school which is the end of October/beginning of November. “As far as donations, I met with the county a second time and the second time they told me they did not have dollars for this project,” Superintendent Ned Clooten said. Clooten told the Journal that he is still “optimistic” they’ll get funding for the project. “We think this can benefit the community in the long run. Ag is the number one industry in the Devils Lake area, so we do think that this is a program we would like to have… I’m still optimistic.” Board member Sheri Olson said during the meeting about the project, “I’m all for an ag center if we can get the funding, but if we don’t have people helping us with it… we have other needs at Praire View and other schools in our district that need to be taken care of. I feel like those needs have to come before starting a new program.”
The distance learning survey results were made public. “What this survey was, was to get a feel for where certified teachers were just in the idea of using virtual or distance learning for storm days,” Clooten said. The first question asked was “Do you have high-speed internet at home?” 130 responded out of 160. 97% of those who responded said they have high-speed internet while 3% said they didn’t which is 4 of those 130 who responded. The other question of the survey was if the respondent supported distance learning if necesssary. 78% responded yes and 22% said no. “I see this kind of as a green light to look forward and start to define some of those questions and what does this look like if we choose to use distance learning,” Clooten said.
Lisa Garza, a paraprofessional at Praire View, was awarded Classified Employee of the Quarter. “It’s an honor to have this. I want to thank [Principal] Sara Thompson and everyone else. It’s an honor.”
