My vacation has drawn to an end and I will be back tomorrow with regular updates and recaps.
The meeting of most interest on is probably the Appleton Area School District Board Of Education Meeting. They are meeting 08/23/2021 at 4PM.
At 4PM they will be meeting in closed session to discuss compensation increases for staff and substitutes.
At approximately 4:45 they will return to open session, and at approximately 6PM they will move on to the the public comment portion of the meeting and take up the issues of mandatory masking in school and the appointment of two new board members to replace Barry O’Connor and Gary Jahnke who both resigned at the end of July, bringing the number of Board resignations up to three in less than a year.
As you may remember, last year the district stated that school would start out in person only to move to an all virtual format only a couple of weeks before the start of the first semester after parents had made their plans and could not easily make other educational arrangements. In something of a repeat, on July 26, the administrative team had recommended and the Board of Education had approved, starting this year out with masking optional, but now, again, shortly before the start of the semester, after parents made educational decisions based on this stated plan, the administrative team has once again done an about face and now is recommending that the Board of Education vote to make masking required.
[I’m personally baffled that they were taken by surprise by increasing cases. Did they really expect cases to remain low? Even without the Delta variant, I would have thought that an autumn rise in cases would have factored into their original plans, but apparently not.]
The Board will also be appointing two new members. They received 18 applications, but Yvette Dunlap, former AASD employee and widow of Ron Dunlap, withdrew her application possibly as a result of a parent filing an open records request for her personnel file. Another candidate Maude Gasman also withdrew her application. That still leaves 16 additional candidates including including Appleton’s former Assembly Representative Amanda Stuck as well as perennial candidate for public office Rahb Kettleson. I am curious to see if Mr. Kettleson actually shows up to the meeting this time instead of simply not appearing like he did the last time he put himself forward as a Board of Education candidate.
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=C5QTRW78613E
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