After Newtown, School Safety Is The Issue At The HFCS Board Meeting

by Alex Brooks
After having a packed auditorium for the athletic celebration which began the Hoosick Falls School Board meeting on December 20, the regular meeting itself took place in a nearly empty auditorium.
Superintendent Ken Facin said it had been a tough week following the Newtown school shooting, trying to reassure apprehensive students and holding meetings aimed at improving school safety. Facin said the State Police will be visiting the school once a week, getting to know the school and consulting on security issues.
[private]Facin also said, “We’ve made great strides in school safety,” citing the new entrance protocol for visitors – a monitored entrance where visitors must sign in and be buzzed in by school personnel – which has been in place for some time. The school has in recent years added security cameras, conducted emergency drills and developed a relationship with the Hoosick Falls Village Police, among other things.
Chinese Students
An agreement has been finalized between the Hoosick Falls School District and an organization in Beijing, China, called DK Education for a three year period from next July until June of 2016, which would allow up to 20 Chinese students to attend the Hoosick Falls school each year as tuition paying students.
Facin said working out the academic agreement was an extensive process. Aligning transcripts, grading systems and academic credits between two very different school systems presented many difficulties. He said the next part will be to figure out how to handle housing for the students. They might go the route of having students stay with local families or DK Education might buy a building to serve as a dormitory for its students. But before getting into that they would need an academic agreement in place, and he asked the Board to approve the agreement. He said they may not be able to work out the housing issues in time to have students here for the 2013-14 school year, but, if not, it would start the following year.
Board Member Don Skott was not enthusiastic about the idea, saying he wasn’t sure about the wisdom of “educating our competition.” Facin replied that he didn’t think the District has anything to lose and a program like this would be “beneficial to the District both culturally and monetarily.” The other Board members saw the matter as Facin did, and the agreement was approved with only Skott voting against it.
Capital Project
Facin said the District is continuing to research elements of the capital project, which is aimed primarily at safety, energy efficiency and renovation of aging infrastructure in the building. The big ticket energy projects that the District was looking into, such as geothermal heating, solar electricity and biomass heating, have proven to be impractical and not affordable for the District, so they are no longer part of the project. But now that the elements of the project are becoming clearer, Facin would like to hold some public meetings to present the project as currently conceived and solicit public comment on it. He said he wants to have a two way communication with the taxpayers in the District about the project before committing to it. To that end, he told the Board he plans to schedule public meetings to talk about the Capital Project.
At this meeting the Board approved closing down the account which held the remainder of the funds from the previous capital project, which amount to $126,151. Business Administrator Pam Hatfield said her understanding is that those funds were kept in reserve in case further work was needed on the Bus Garage remediation project. But Facin said he is hopeful that the DEC will soon declare the remediation finished and close the project. The funds were first released into the General Fund, and then transferred to the existing Capital Project fund.
The next meeting of the Hoosick Falls School Board will be on Thursday, January 24, at 7 pm in the High School Library.[/private]