Kutztown School Board passed a resolution to allow the auction and sale of the Albany Elementary School property in Kempton.
There were concerns from the board regarding the wording of the resolution, which authorizes the sale to the highest bidder but does not set a minimum bid.
“I’m a little bit reluctant to authorize a sale where we don’t have a purchase price or a better idea of what the purchase price is going to be,” said Board Vice President Randy Burch. “I just want to make sure it’s clear that this is going to be with reservation, meaning that if the bid process doesn’t produce a certain minimum bid, we’re not going to be required to sell it to the highest bidder regardless. If that’s not clear, I just question whether we’re jumping the gun by giving the authorization.”
While Treasurer David Miller was under the impression that the resolution is worded to allow for a minimum bid, the board passed the resolution with the condition that a minimum bid be established before the auction.
The auction will be held July 11 at 10 a.m. at the Albany Elementary building.
In other news, Dr. Christopher Harrington, President of eLearn Institute, Inc., gave a presentation about Kutztown Virtual Academy, the district’s online learning program.
Through a series of Powerpoint slides, Dr. Harrington gave the board and public insight on how the program works, current enrollments and ideas on how to operate moving forward.
“The main reason we have students enrolling now is the flexibility in schedule,” said Dr. Harrington. “From the perspective of the school, outside of the students themselves, a school that has a lot of online course offerings for students has a lot more flexibility in their schedule.”
Dr. Harrington said this is not only true for students, but for teachers as well.
The Kutztown School District began offering online courses in 2004, and in the 2012-2013 year began developing their own courses.
“We were able to build off of that in the 2014-2015 year,” said Dr. Harrington. “We are now able to offer more online courses, so we’re expanding those offerings. We’ve also been able to get a deeper level of collaboration between counselors, administrators and the Special Education Department. That collaboration is hugely important in terms of placement of students. That collaboration has also resulted in great supports for students.”
Those supports, Dr. Harrington says, are what KVA offers that other cyber charter schools cannot compete with.
More Kutztown students have begun moving to cyber charter schools, and Dr. Harrington’s hopes are to inform these students and their parents that KVA has course offerings and local supports that can provide them the education they need while staying in the district.
In Kutztown, the percentage of students who have chosen to do cyber charter schooling has increased 18 percent.
“That’s even with the effort we’ve been putting forth,” said Dr. Harrington. “Those numbers would be higher if we didn’t have KVA. We need to continue current and future marketing, and I say ‘marketing’ in terms of getting the word out there that we have this program.”
Currently, there are 27 full-time students and 110 part-time students enrolled in KVA. These students are strictly at the high school level with an average course size of 20 to 25 students, comparable to face-to-face enrollments. The program offers a variety of options, including blended learning and temporary enrollment.
Dr. Harrington explained that some curriculum the district uses is high-quality content developed by and purchased from larger providers, but they believe the online course curriculum must match what is being taught in the classroom. This is why Dr. Harrington has hopes of interesting more teachers in creating courses.
Board Member Dr. Alan Darion said he feels the enthusiasm has “tapered off” for teachers to create courses, and while he doesn’t know what the reason is for this decline in interest from teachers, he would like to find out.
“That’s a conversation that started about two years ago, and it needs to be revisited,” said Dr. Harrington. “What’s been expressed to me by teachers is that it takes a long time to do it, and it takes a lot of work.”
The district currently offers a stipend to teachers who successfully create and complete a course. However, there still is low interest.
Dr. Harrington is in the process of scheduling a meeting with faculty to discuss ideas and concerns about how to increase teacher involvement.
The next Kutztown School Board meeting will be held June 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the Kutztown High School library.
