Partly cloudy. A stray afternoon thunderstorm is possible. High 92F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..
Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable.
Jeremy Swofford, left, Katie Lockamy and Alyson Beavers.
Jeremy Swofford, left, Katie Lockamy and Alyson Beavers.
The school board named three new principals Monday night during its brief business meeting, promoting two current assistant principals from within Moore County Schools.
Earlier this spring, board members signed off on organizing the district’s all-virtual learning option, which launched in the fall of 2020, as a standalone school for the upcoming school year. So the Connect Virtual Academy will get its own principal: Jeremy Swofford.
Swofford is currently the assistant principal at the Community Learning Center at Pinckney. He taught, and coached track and cross country, at Pinecrest before a promotion to assistant principal at Southern Middle in 2018.
At West End Elementary, Katie Lockamy will replace Shaun Krencicki in the principal’s office. Lockamy has been an assistant principal at Pinecrest for the last two years. Prior to that she served in the same role at Southern Pines Elementary.
Krencicki is moving over to Southern Middle School. He had led West End since 2018 and before that spent four years as the Community Learning Center at Pinckney’s principal.
Southern Middle principal Marcy Cooper will move to Moore County Schools' central office this summer as director for exceptional children's services.
A newcomer to Moore County Schools will lead West Pine Elementary next year with the board-approved hire of Alyson Beavers from Cumberland County Schools. Beavers has been principal of Raleigh Road Elementary, a 200-student school serving kindergarten and first grade students, since 2017.
Beavers replaces Mary Frances Tintle. Tintle moved to the area to lead West Pine in 2016 and will resign at the end of the school year.
In other business on Monday, the board unanimously approved the district’s three-year plan to identify and serve academically gifted students as administrators presented it at the board’s work session last week. Other matters approved by a single vote on the board’s consent agenda included agreeing that state evaluations use an alternative scoring system when assigning performance grades to the Community Learning Center at Pinckney; and a $65,800 contract to repair modular building roofs at Pinecrest and Union Pines.
In a separate vote, the board approved a pair of contracts for school psychologists to help screen and evaluate students with disabilities. Lucinda Dedmond, Moore County Schools’ interim director for student support services, told the board last week that the district is behind in performing that testing, partly because it hasn’t been able to fill vacant positions for school psychologists.
Though board members decided to vote on the proposed contracts separately from the bulk of its business items, the board unanimously agreed to them Monday night.
‘I support this because I do concede that we have a need for a certain level of psychologists in Moore County Schools to administer the testing,” said board member David Hensley.
Hensley has previously been reluctant to sign off on school staff taking on roles that he considers to be beyond the district’s “primary mission,” from COVID-19 testing and contact tracing in schools to offering facilities where students can wash their clothes.
“As silly as it sounds, I’m here to tell you that within the next couple of years there's going to be a movement afoot to expand our public school system into laundry services. As a board, we need to guard against that,” he said. “We need to make sure that whether it’s having a private police force, one of two districts in the state, whether it is becoming a social services provider for the entire county, psychological services for everyone, or doing people’s laundry, that is not the mission of Moore County Schools.”
Both of the psychologists are former Moore County Schools employees who will be paid $90 per hour for up to 90 days of work over the upcoming school year. Each of their contracts is capped at $64,800, which the district will pay using COVID-19 relief funds.
Their primary function will be to help identify which students qualify for an individualized education plan, or IEP, as required by federal law for students with disabilities.
“School psychologists are the only ones that are able to do the cognitive testing that’s required,” Dedmond told the board last week. “They are trained to do adaptive behavior testing, educational testing, they work with speech and occupational therapists and physical therapists to evaluate the students to determine eligibility for an IEP.”
One of the psychologists will be based at Robbins Elementary to perform evaluations on native Spanish-speaking students throughout the district. The other will be assigned to Southern Pines Elementary.
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The percentage of Moore County children attending Moore County government schools has dropped from 84% to 72% in the past decade. The peak in MCS occurred nearly a decade ago and has been in decline since. Enrollment in area private, home and charter schools is booming and more options are in the pipeline. The MCS Board and Commissioners should be planning for significant budget cuts and should freeze any new capital projects or hiring for at least a year to gauge the impact of enrollment declines. Taxpayers will demand this and have legislation on their side.
Kent, our population is expected to grow by at least 30,000 in the next 10 years or less. Do you think that won't mean another 6,000 kids, most of whom will be enrolled in the public school system? They will be and we will be building more schools and adding more teachers.and support staff. Let's hope there will be some commercial and industrial development to balance that residential growth or you will see tax increases that you really don't want to see.
I’m curious about the “laundry services” David Hensley mentioned. What is he talking about?
Yes, I would like to know also.
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