THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606220119
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 17 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Vanee Vines
LENGTH: 92 lines
A look at several items discussed at Thursday's School Board work session. Items with an asterisk will be voted on at this Thursday's meeting. Trumble's contract on the table
* The board will vote Thursday on a new contract for Superintendent Richard Trumble.
Details of the new contract have yet to be publicly disclosed. Trumble, hired in 1990, is now paid $111,193.20.
His current contract expires next year. Vocational ed a priority
* The board will consider recommendations to rebuild the district's vocational-technical program over a three-year period.
Vo-tech education - the paucity of it, really - was a key issue in this year's board election.
Here's a look at several recommendations from the Vocational Planning Committee:
Require all high school students to pursue one of only two paths: ``Tech Prep,'' a program that combines academics with vocational training; or college prep.
Establish a vo-tech center at the new I.C. Norcom High, scheduled to open in 1997.
Increase the vocational education program's ``supervisory staff'' from one specialist and one secretary to at least two specialists and two secretaries.
Add an ``Industrial Co-operative Education'' program. Generally speaking, the district would seek local businesses willing to employ students in production-related jobs.
Students would be paid for their work and also would earn academic credit in an accompanying class.
The committee also endorsed the board's idea to set up a business that the district would operate; students would work at the establishment. Character ed to be unveiled
The administration will present its ideas Thursday for a districtwide ``character education'' program.
Last year, board member Charles H. Bowens II, a minister, urged the board to look into the programs, which stress the teaching of basic values.
The administration's ``Character Education Action Plan'' said the program would ``not be taught as a separate course or curriculum.''
Instead, nine character traits - citizenship, responsibility, honesty, integrity, respect, self-esteem, loyalty, compassion and self-control - would be integrated in lessons ``across the curriculum,'' the plan said.
A group of city teachers in elementary, middle and high schools would write the program's lesson plans.
The administration wants to begin offering the program during the second semester of 1997. Auditors may study controls
* The board may hire Eason, Lawson & Westphal P.C. to review ``the internal control of all segments'' of the district's budget. The price tag: $19,500. The accounting firm would wrap up the work this fall. Last August, the board told Trumble to look into hiring an independent auditor to size up the district's financial checks and balances. The board then said it wanted to prevent the kind of multimillion-dollar deficit the Beach district recently faced. Hunt-Mapp wants students in uniforms
* Hunt-Mapp Middle wants to see its students don uniforms, starting next school year.
If the board approves the school's plan, Hunt-Mapp will be the district's first middle school to embrace the idea.
Hunt-Mapp's student uniforms - navy bottoms with yellow, white or light blue shirts or turtlenecks - would be mandatory.
Principal Carroll R. Bailey Jr. said the school would set up a system to help families that couldn't afford uniforms on their own.
Parents who would not want their kids to participate might be urged to transfer their kids to another school, he said.
A group of school staffers and parents studied the idea this year. LPT class considered
* Next school year, the administration plans to offer a special class for eighth-graders - and some seventh-graders - who haven't passed the state's Literacy Passport Test.
The basic skills test is first given in the sixth grade. Students must pass it to get a high school diploma.
The class, designed to help kids beef up skills and pass the LPT, would be offered at all middle schools.
Students with dismal scores on the reading comprehension section of a standardized test and those who had not passed all parts of the LPT would be targeted.
The class would be an elective. It wouldn't replace required courses.
This year, 52.9 percent of city sixth-graders passed all three parts of the LPT on the first try, up from 50.3 percent in 1995. by CNB