Kenton City School Board Hosts Online Meeting

Topping the agenda of Monday night’s meeting of the Kenton City School District Board of Education was the introduction of provisional calendars for the 2021-2022 school year.

Schedule “A” begins Thursday, August 26, with only Monday and Tuesday of Fair Week off, and Schedule “B” begins Monday, August 23, with the traditional holiday for the entire Fair Week. Both schedules are slotted to end on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. Further developments on the choice taken by the district are to be expected by the end of the month.

While around two-thirds of Monday night’s two-hour-long meeting was held in executive session, the remaining 45 minutes viewable by the public via YouTube livestream saw a multitude of subjects undergo discussion.

Financial matters included the district’s $4.4 million tax valuation increase, coinciding with an $18 million drop in agricultural and $21 million increase in residential values, and potential uses for pending stimulus money, including new busses (and/or one special-needs bus), the addition of more social workers to fill the vacancy in the budget, and movement from the Student Wellness Fund into the purchase of new band instruments.

As yet, the teachers’ union has not finalized an agreement for making calamity days remote-learning only instead of making them up at the end of the year, but Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Penczarski hopes such an agreement can be finalized before the exhaustion of their calamity-day allowance. Due to the inclement weather, Tuesday, February 16, will be a total calamity day.

Both Friday, February 19, and Friday, March 19, will be remote-learning days across the district, as around 200 employees–approximately 58 percent of the district–will receive each dose of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine at the Kenton Elementary School gymnasium.

In her closing remarks to the board before the resumption of executive session to close the meeting, Dr. Penczarski praised each building’s teachers and principals for their implementation of the district’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) system, and announced plans to follow legislative measures to relax the requirements for substitute teachers by deputizing classroom aides as teachers for the rooms they cover, while the district continues their standard interview-and-referencing process for prospective substitutes.

Kenton City School Board next plans to meet Monday, March 15, at seven p.m.