ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The staff at Liberal High School will see a pair of new positions in its ranks thanks to action taken by the USD 480 school board Monday evening.
The first of these positions was for a scheduler, who will collaborate with school leadership, department chairs, and counselors to develop the master schedule, ensuring appropriate course offerings, teacher assignments, and room allocations. This person will also adjust the master schedule as needed throughout the year to accommodate staffing changes, course demand, and other unforeseen factors, ensure the student schedules are structured to maximize instructional time, academic support, and enrichment opportunities while balancing teacher availability and facility resources.
The need for such a position had been brought to the board’s attention at a special meeting in January by LHS counselor Stacy Scripsick.
“I create the master schedule, put it in PowerSchool and handle all those requests.” Scripsick noted at the January special meeting. “I run the load, I fix all the errors to the best of my ability, and I’ve done that year after year. It’s a truly time-consuming process, and for one person to build everything and maintain it, it is a full-time job on its own that would eliminate a lot of the stress of what we do now. My concern, however, is there will be someone needed in that role going forward. I’ve done it for seven years, and I’ll be retiring, and I’m concerned about coming in, building a FlexMod schedule for next year and make those adjustments only starting now. Typically around this time, I’m already running a load and fixing errors so we can start looking at schedules. We haven’t even started pre-enrollment yet. We’ll be lucky to have a master schedule ready to go by the beginning of May, and my contract is up May 29. I hope to have run all 1,500 schedules, but then I would be leaving everyone in a bad position, and I never want to do that. In order to have schedules ready in August, it’s going to be hours upon hours. I’ve done it in the summer for years, and very rarely have gotten compensated for it, but it’s a situation where, if you had someone doing that full time, they would be able to take on a lot of that, and the counselors will stay longer since they’re not dealing with such a large added burden. We all do this work for the children, but we’re there at 6:30 every morning and staying until 6 or 6:30 every night and even taking that work home on the weekends. Having someone responsible for the master schedule will help retain people. I’ve done it for seven years, I love what it can do for the students, but for the counseling department, we give up a lot of time and effort. It scares me knowing I’m leaving LHS and the teachers with essentially an incomplete project, and that’s not me.”
After a quick discussion, the board ultimately unanimously voted to approve the LHS Scheduler position.
Also up for consideration was an activities secretary for LHS. This person will provide administrative support for all school activities, clubs, and events and oversee social media, digital signage, student recognition, financial processing, and logistics for school-wide activities. This person will assist in the planning and execution of school-wide events, assemblies, dances, and club activities, work with custodial and maintenance staff to prepare facilities for major events, arrange for necessary security, ticketing, and permits for large-scale student events, and collaborate with student leaders and club sponsors to support student-run events.
“There’s a lot we do for our athletic programs currently, but I feel we’re rather slacking on the activities side of everything,” LHS Athletic Director Kerri Miles said. “If you look at our social media, we do a lot of posts about our athletic events and letting people when game days are, but for our activities, we can definitely do better. Some of the things we do for our athletic programs I would like to do for our activities is like with our home game day events, we create a special post and program that includes one of the athletes, but for, say, a band or choir concert, we don’t do that. If you go to a band concert now, there’s a barcode you have to scan in order to see the musical selections, but we want to do more for those types of activities and help promote those more. Right now, our athletics secretary does a lot, and there are times when she’s not able to keep up with everything that goes on. We need someone in this activities secretary position to help take on some of that load. The athletics secretary we have now, she’s been with USD 480 for 15 to 20 years, if I’m remembering correctly, so she knows the ropes and does a lot for the athletic side. I hope we can get someone in to help with the activities portion of everything because again, I feel like that’s an area we can improve on.”
“Are there any students who can help out, say, during their Personal Learning Time (PLT), or something like that?” Board President Brad Carr asked.
“This is definitely more of a full-time position, so it’d be way more than what just a regular student would be able to handle,” Miles said. “We could have student help occasionally, but for what we’re wanting the person in this position to do, that’s way more than we should ask from a student because of the time and everything else involved.”
Board member Mike Brack then emphasized the need for a social media presence.
“I feel like this is really about improving the overall ‘advertising’ for the district, and LHS has a big hand in that,” Brack said. “And I would definitely agree there is a need for some more assistance in that regard. People usually don’t hear about a band concert or choir concert or student play or similar event until the day after, and a lot of that is because it’s not being advertised as much as it could be. Social media helps with that a lot, and like Mr. Miles said, there’s some work that can be done in that area.”
After some more brief discussion, the board ultimately approved the position 5-1, with Carr voting no and board member Jesus Baeza abstaining.
In other business, the board unanimously accepted a proposal from Johnson Controls Inc. in the amount of $14,301 for a HVAC Connected Controls service agreement renewal and also approved a renewal subscription for history curricular resource in the amount of $16,443.60 for the middle schools. The board also unanimously approved a contract with Marzano Resources for professional development district-wide in the amount of $125,885.40 and ended the agenda’s new business by unanimously approving the purchase of 30 desks and 30 chairs for the LHS math classroom.
