School board talks maintenance issues at South Putnam

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The South Putnam School Board held a special school board meeting on Tuesday morning to discuss several issues relating to maintenance.

Representatives from Schmidt Associates came before the board with information regarding the exterior brick of the high school, in particular the brick around the gym walls.

"It was reported that moisture gets behind the bricks and the freeze and thaw pops the faces off," South Putnam Superintendent Bruce Bernhardt said.

Bernhardt also noted that schools built in the middle 1960s did not have the same code requirements for structural bracing that buildings currently have.

"Buildings in the mid 1960s didn't have the same precautions as they do now," Bernhardt explained. "The walls tend to move enough to cause the bricks to crack, especially around the gymnasium areas."

Schmidt Associates were asked by the board to develop bid documents, to be presented to the board at an upcoming meeting. The board will examine the documents and hopefully obtain approval to being the advertising process to have additional bracing installed in the gym walls.

"We are going to look at installing stability bracings on the gym walls," Bernhardt said. "We will look at that and go from there in terms of stiffing up the walls. The next step would be some type of coverings to put on the exterior of the walls to cover where the bricks popped off."

The project is estimated to be within the $120,000-$135,000 range. The project will be paid out of the Capital Projects Fund and should be completed within the next few months.

"After that project is accomplished, the next step at a future date, will be to design an exterior covering to place over the damaged brick areas," Bernhardt said. "That will happen maybe next summer or some time after that."

In other business, the board also discussed evaluation plans in the corporation, in particular the new superintendent evaluation.

The Indiana School Boards Association recently developed a rubric for superintendent evaluations, similar to the RISE evaluation rubrics, which are used for teachers and principals at South Putnam.

"We looked at how it would be used for my evaluation," explained Bernhardt. "We went through the document and just had discussions on all those items (which Bernhardt will be evaluated on)."

In the past, superintendents did not have a grading rubric to help with their evaluations like teachers and principals have had. The Indiana School Boards Association designed the rubric to similarly match the RISE evaluations in hopes of making the process easier.

The board spent the majority of the meeting discussing the different items being evaluated along with developing a plan to make sure all members are currently on the same page.

The next meeting of the South Putnam School Board is scheduled for 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 19.

Respond to this story

Posting a comment requires free registration: