Hubble happy with smooth start to school

To say the start of the 2018-19 school year was a headache for Greencastle Superintendent Jeff Hubble would be an understatement.

Last August and September were plagued by the discovery of mold growing in Tzouanakis Intermediate School, more questions than answers and trying to figure out where to place 400 or so students until their regular school building was considered habitable again.

Although Tzouanakis students were back in their classrooms in October, that didn’t mean the work was over.

The intervening 10 months or so has meant testing, new equipment, more testing, further adjustments and even more testing.

While close monitoring remains, Hubble was happy to report during the first school board meeting of the new year that he’s been able to focus on ­all the schools in the corporation, not just one with serious problems.

“If you remember what I was doing a year ago, I wasn’t visiting all the schools. I was visiting one school and spending long hours there,” Hubble said.

Hubble reported no major problems in the first few weeks of school and is pleased with the number of requests to transfer into the school system he has approved.

“I’m happy to report that people want to bring their students to Greencastle Schools,” Hubble said.

So far, there have been 113 transfer requests, up from 111 during the entirety of last year.

One new development in the new year has been the addition of curriculum director Jennifer French, who came to GCSC from the same position with South Vermillion Schools.

French said she has been busy getting to know the system. She has visited each of the five school buildings and is starting the process of visiting each classroom in the district.

“I did reiterate to teachers that these visits are in no way evaluations,” French said.

She said instituting a curriculum plan is a multi-year process, with the first year largely focused on gathering information.

“Year one and especially semester one is a focus on the ‘what,’” French said. “In year two we will look at the ‘how.’”

French pointed to some alarming statistics regarding literacy in the United States, where just one of three students read at grade level. Looking at students in poverty and the figure plummets to one in seven.

For that reason, one of her main areas of focus is kindergarten through second grade education in order to “close the gap” in the most effective way possible.

“It takes only about 16 weeks to remediate a kindergartner and for a fourth-grader it takes 3-4 years,” she said.

In other business:

• The board granted permission to advertise the 2020 budget. The budget has already been approved by the Putnam County Council, which has to give its stamp of approval since Greencastle’s school board is not publicly elected.

• The board also approved revisions to the GCSC crisis plan, specifics of which were not publicly discussed for security reasons.

Board members and Hubble commented on the size of the plan at several hundred pages. Hubble said this thoroughness is by design.

“It really is a blessing to have that much detail when you get to the day of a crisis,” Hubble said.