KINGWOOD — The Preston County Board of Education has changed its meeting times. Meetings will now be held at 5 p.m. on the second Monday of the month and at 10 a.m. on the fourth Monday.
Both monthly meetings were previously held at 5 p.m.
The 10 a.m. meeting will now have guest speakers who will provide information about what is happening in local schools. This month’s speaker will be Darla Moyer, who will give a technology update.
Starting in October, officials from the county schools will attend meetings and provide information about their schools.
In other business, Superintendent of Schools Steve Wotring said he is using Microsoft OneNote to provide information to the county school principals. As an example, he used the monthly principal meetings.
Wotring said he set up a folder for each month of the year that contained data, times and what would be discussed at the meetings. He said this would allow the principals to know ahead of time what information to prepare for the meetings.
In other business, Claire Jones, a visual arts teacher, was among 10 finalists for West Virginia Teacher of the Year. Jones said she believes teaching the whole student is the best practice. She said this can be broken into three subsets: focusing on social emotional learning, teaching beyond academic skills, and exposure to the world outside the students’ immediate surroundings
“To me that is the goal of education, to prepare our students with the skills they will need to succeed and create well-rounded humans. After all, the students we are teaching today are the future leaders of our world,” Jones said.
Officials will announce the statewide Teacher of the Year on Sept. 7 in a ceremony at the Culture Center in Charleston.
The board also congratulated Steve Dalton, physical education/health teacher at Preston County Schools.
“When I first started out (as a sports official) my dad worked in Terra (Alta) — he was an official,” Dalton said.
Board President Jack Keim said he and Dalton’s dad officiated many games together.
“Your dad was one of my instructors when I first started,” Keim said. “He told me to remember every time you blow that whistle, you’re 50-percent wrong.”
The next meeting of the Preston County Board of Education will be 10 a.m. July 26.
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