School Board To Hold Special Friday Meeting

The Paulding County School Board’s typical two-meeting-a-month schedule is a little different this month, as board members will gather during a meeting this week on an atypical day for them—Friday.

The regular board meeting/work session, which is open to the public, will begin at 8:30 a.m., with the majority of the agenda taken up by four presentations to be put on by district officials. One presentation is a district improvement overview while another is an update on Paulding County High’s School Improvement Grant. A third presentation will take a look at Board Policy DJED, which covers bids and quotations handled by the district; the policy was last updated in October 2009.

“A lot of the meeting is going to focus on instruction and where we are as a district on student achievement,” Associate Superintendent Brian Otott said Thursday. “We’re also going to touch on a policy that the board has some interest in seeing in reference to local vendors preference in the state of Georgia.”

Paulding this summer saw prescribed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act in the initial Adequate Yearly Progress report released by the Georgia Department of Education. Four elementary, four middle and all five high schools in the district fell short of required benchmarks in the report, though a final AYP report, likely to be released later this year, could improve the district’s results.

Not to be confused with…

The fourth presentation board members will hear Friday concerns board redistricting, which could see board members’ districts undergo changes. That form of redistricting, Otott said, is not related to as officials prepare to open a ninth middle school. The under-construction facility, , has not yet been given an official name.

Parents, students and community members will get their first official chance to speak up on the school redistricting process during three forum set at simultaneous times—7 p.m. on Nov. 3—at East Paulding, Hiram and North Paulding high schools. The goals of these forums are to introduce the redistricting process and for district staff to gather stakeholder input for review before moving forward in the process.

“It will give our community the opportunity to give us some feedback about redistricting prior to any maps being developed,” Otott said of the initial forums.

Subsequent forums will be held Dec. 12—again at the three high schools—with a final forum set for Jan. 12, 2012, at East Paulding High.