Nine personnel items for NA

The fewest number of personnel items in many months – just nine – were approved by the North Adams Community Schools Board at its October session.

The votes were 5-0, with members Michelle Stimpson and Dave Hill absent. Assignments Vaughn Starks and Kati Silance were hired as high school custodians.

Jacob Haviland was named the seventh grade boys’ basketball head coach. Resignation Sandra Thorn left her job as a high school custodian.

Leaves Three women will take child-rearing leave: Brean Gage, Glenna R ose, and Jenna Schmidt.

Overall, said NA superintendent Kim Hiatt, five employees are taking maternity leaves. Retirement Susan Raudenbush will retire on Dec. 23 after 10 years as a bus driver. Hiatt said she wants to spend more time with her grandchildren, but the superintendent noted that several current teachers have shown interest in becoming drivers after they retire from the classroom.

In a related matter, Scott Miller, the district’s operations director, said a bus driver who’s worked since the 1990s was told by an unidentified state police trooper while she was driving her route one recent day that she must use the bus’s stop arm when she stops along US 27/33 to pick up or drop off students.

Miller said the driver told the trooper that all the drivers in her long career have never used the stop arm when the bus is pulled all the way over to the right side of the highway when the road has four lanes separated by a grassy median. The drivers do always turn on their flashing lights when people are getting on or off the buses.

That’s the policy because the students getting on and off the bus are going to and from their homes that are on that side of the highway and are never crossing the median or the other traffic lanes,.

The trooper disagreed with the driver, so Miller said he and a lawyer looked at the Indiana Codes and found that the bus driver (and the school district) are right: the stop arm does not have to be extended in such a situation.

Miller added that when driving on US 224, for example, which does not have any medians, the stop arms are always uused so vehicles going both ways stop to let children cross the roadway.