Daviess County Public Schools has secured nearly $2 million through a federal grant that will allow the district to upgrade technology devices, in turn providing a higher quality of instruction for students.
Aaron Yeiser, instructional technology coordinator, said during Tuesday’s DCPS Board of Education luncheon that with the transition to so much virtual learning last year, the need for devices and hotspots grew quickly.
“We worked hard to give every student a device, but some of those devices were less than quality,” he said. “Some of them were 12-year-old devices. That’s just not a great quality of instruction for that student and that family.”
Yeiser said the funding will be used to replace that aging technology and also expand their ability to provide after-school internet access to students.
“It is to be spent on the combination of the Chromebooks themselves and more hotspots,” he said. “Those two things combined should help us close any of the gaps we had with students without internet, and all of our students now K-12 will have a Chromebook that is at the oldest 4 years old.”
No funding match is required by the board for the grant.
In other business, DCPS Assistant Superintendent for Human Services Dr. Amy Shutt said the district is still looking to fill several positions as well as find more substitutes.
The board will vote Thursday to post positions for a public relations officer, a staff accountant position, and the district lead software specialist. There are also several jobs posted right now the district is looking to fill: seven teachers that are certified positions; a family resource youth service center coordinator at Heritage Park High School; four custodians; and bus drivers and monitors.
Sbutt said in the last 10 days, DCPS has emergency certified more than 20 of their instructional assistants who can step in and fill in for certified positions. She said there are now about 50 instructional assistants that can help out, but they can’t all be used every day due to the needs in each classroom.
“We can’t control the number of people who are applying for our jobs, but we can try to use our existing resources to better allocate those to see if we can keep our priority of keeping teaching and learning going every day,” she said. “To do that we certainly need teachers in the classroom. Those instructional assistants know those children. They know the expectations in the school and we’re finding that to be very successful.”
Shutt said finding enough subs to fill in continues to be difficult, in part because some people who normally sub have been signed to contracts.
“We normally hire 45 to 50 people a year; this year we hired 90,” Shutt said. “We pulled a lot of people from our community who would normally be subs into contracts. We’ve got a couple of things going that are working against us, so we’re trying to think differently with our existing resources.”
At Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, the board will vote on the 2022-23 academic calendar. It is expected to be similar to the current academic calendar.
