The Vance County Board of Education looks to have a fairly routine meeting tonight.
Much of the meeting will be spent on spreading praise around the school system:
* Rick Norwood, the Vance County coordinator for the American Red Cross, will make presentations to the school system.
* Students in the Academically and Intellectually Gifted program at Zeb Vance Elementary School will be recognized.
* The Purple Hands Club of Eaton-Johnson Middle School will be honored. Their cleanup and environmental work helped the Purple Hands and their sponsor, seventh-grade science teacher Janet Lloyd, win a $1,000 grant from the state Department of Transportation. The North Carolina Soft Drink Association provided the money. The Purple Hands Club finished first in the state among school and youth groups in the sixth annual competition. “Entries were evaluated on the basis of the response to the litter problem, use of litter prevention methods, public education techniques, partnership involvement, innovation of the project, effectiveness of the program and future use of the award funds,” according to a state news release on the grant last month.
* Yousef Saleh, an AIG student of Inez Bostic’s at E.M. Rollins Elementary School, will be honored for being named a national finalist in the book-publishing program of Nationwide Learning. Bostic has participated in the program, which takes stories written by students and turns them into bound books, for about five years, and Yousef’s “My Journey to America” is the first story to win national recognition.
* Aycock Elementary School and Eaton-Johnson Middle School will receive the attendance awards for the eighth month of the school year. The elementary schools were tightly packed, with only 1.04 percentage points separating Aycock from 10th-place Zeb Vance.
As far as action items go, the board will consider scheduling a special meeting for June 24 at noon to close out the budget for the fiscal year that ends six days later. Finance Director Rudi Ligon told the Finance Committee last week that the North Carolina School Boards Association and the state’s association for superintendents are holding meetings during the final week of June, forcing the close-out meeting to the previous week.
If the school board agrees to hold that meeting, the Finance Committee will meet at 11:30 a.m. on June 24 to review the year-end budget amendments.
In other matters, the board:
* Will be asked to approve the typical monthly list of hirings, resignations, retirements, leaves and transfers.
* Will vote on seven pages of budget amendments.
* Will be presented a proposed contract to keep Holden, Moss, Knott, Clark, Copley & Hoyle as the school system’s auditor. The Henderson accounting firm would be paid $23,500 and would be required to submit the audit report by Oct. 31.
* Will act on revised policies on the administration of medication to students during school hours, including strict procedures for self-administered medicine, and will have the first reading of a new policy on the use and disclosure of health information.
* Will consider two requests to transfer into Vance County schools and six requests to transfer out of the county for the next school year.
The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. at the central office on Graham Avenue. At 6 p.m. the board will honor student artists whose work has decorated the building.