By Dave Vrbas

The Wauneta Breeze

Grand Island Schools could have avoided a media firestorm recently if it had the newest member of Wauneta-Palisade’s bus fleet. Earlier this month, a 3-year-old Grand Island preschool student was left alone on a bus for three hours after the bus driver had made his rounds.

With WP’s brand new 2009 Collins bus, an incident such as Grand Island’s is virtually impossible. Arriving just this week, the bus is equipped with all the bells and whistles including a red button at the back of the coach that requires the driver to walk to the back, checking the entire bus for pupils along the way. If the button is not pushed, the bus will begin honking shortly after shutting off.

The bus also comes equipped with integrated child safety seats, perfect for a preschooler’s ride from Wauneta to Palisade and vice versa. In addition to the child safety seats, seatbelts for adults and children were also installed on each seat.

Steel in structure, instead of aluminum, the bus boasts a couple other safety features as well, including a guard bar that sweeps the area in front of the bus to make sure no wee ones are in front just out of the driver’s field of vision.

WP board members were told of the safety features by an exhuberant Nelson Dahl, superintendent of schools, during their regular meeting Monday, where they commended the school’s transportation supervisor, Kenny Lawless, for his continuous work on updating the school’s fleet.

“He’s not just replacing things,” board president Jon Anderjaska said. “He’s changing our fleet to what we need for our students.”

Cook resignation accepted

During the meeting, the board also got into the nitty gritty of the lunch program. Accepting the resignation of the Palisade Attendance Center’s head cook, Deb Rathe, and thanking her for her years of service, the board voted to promote Nichole ‘Nicky’ Sramek from second cook to first cook at Palisade and to hire Deb Alberts as second cook. Alberts will also assume Sramek’s preschool room duties as well.

Tracy Sramek will join WP’s head cook, Cindy Brunkhorst, as second cook in Wauneta.

While Nicky Sramek learns the ins and outs of her new position, Brunkhorst will be in charge of the menus for both schools, which prompted board members to consider both schools serving the same menu week in and week out.

Dahl said he would talk to the cooks and see if it would be feasible, simpler and more cost-effective to serve both schools the same menu. He also went into great detail about the school’s lunch program and noted that the state department of education commended the school’s variety of foods served.

In a letter shared at the meeting from Shawn Vondracek, a nutrition services program specialist with the Nebraska Department of Education, the school’s lunch program was lauded: “I particularly like seeing the fresh fruits and casserole type items,” Vondracek wrote.

Board members also addressed the need for cooks to allow students to get their fill during lunch and breakfast. “The school lunch program always operates in the red,”Anderjaska said. “I’m okay with going a little more in the red to make sure all the students are full when they leave the lunchroom.”

Dahl will meet with school board personnel committee members Allison Sandman and Brenda Anderson to make a recommendation on a pay rate for the cooks at both schools at the November regular meeting.

Other agenda items

Also discussed and/or voted on during the meeting, were the following agenda items:

• Dahl had hoped to have school board members sign the contract for — and make official the appointment of — their new secondary principal Troy Holmberg. Meeting on the night of the Columbus Day holiday put them a day ahead of the mail however, and his signed contract arrived the next morning in Wauneta. Dahl said Holmberg, who was recently released from his teaching contract at Columbus Public Schools, is aiming for a start date of Monday, Nov. 2, at WP.

• Hoping to wait until after Holmberg is officially in his new position at WP so he can be fully involved in the program and not simply an observer, the school has decided to have the first phase of the Target Bullying Program — the ‘Train the Trainer’ phase — done sometime next month. Led by Dr. Sue Swearer of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the comprehensive program helps schools effectively reduce bullying and victimization by utilizing data-based decision making, and includes three steps — Training the Trainers, data sharing, and a ‘Stories of Us’ phase which includes classroom discussion. Board members have chosen to have all staff members included in the training, including cooks, bus drivers and aides. “Bullying is just as likely to happen outside the classroom as it is in the classroom. Perhaps more so,” explained Dahl.

• The board voted to hire a Spanish Language Aide on an as-needed basis since the need arose this year with four pupils now in the district whose family use Spanish as a first language. Dahl said he believes grant money could be used to pay for the position, but not immediately and with the caveat that as the state legislature goes back in to cut the budget, grant funding may be lessened substantially.

• The board was informed of the approval of a Rural Education Achievement Program grant in the amount of $16,025 for the 2009-10 school year. “This might be one we keep in our back pocket until we know more about the cuts coming in the legislature,” Dahl said.

• Board members voted unanimously to allow the Palisade Attendance Center’s involvement in the American Red Cross’s Pint-Size Hero Program, which gets third- through sixth-grade students involved as blood drive sponsors and creates a school-wide community service project.

• Dahl gave the school an update on the Statewide Report Card, which showed the district meeting adequate yearly progress. An in-depth Breeze story on that report will be included in next week’s edition.