Increasing recruitment and replacing old buses were the main topic of discussion at the Board of Education Meeting on Monday afternoon.
Superintendent Jon Bret Smith led the meeting with his regular superintendent’s report where he said the county has made efforts to step up their recruiting program.
“ Some of the things that we’ve changed are like the hashtag #WeaAreLawrenceCounty, we’ve increased our social media push,” he said to the school board. “We’ve also changed the way we have been posting jobs in that we’re able to speed some of those things up, doing them in blocks instead of waiting till a job’s posted works much better.”
He said the board goes to multiple job fairs around the state at small and large universities like Athens State, the University of North Alabama, Alabama A&M and Alabama State.
“Several people participated in the job fair on April 29th at Pleasant Grove. We had a year before when we had one table. This year, we had not only tables for the school system as far as teachers but we had one for maintenance and transportation,” he said. “We were well represented at that job fair.”
He said they’ve also been holding retirement seminars to get a good look at who they might need to soon replace. They’re also looking into creating promotional videos to help increase engagement and applications.
“ We have a gentleman at East Lawrence High School, a man that has his own company and does promotional videos,” Smith said. “I would like to entertain hiring him in the near future to do a couple.”
There was also talk of increasing incentives to come teach at the county.
“ One of the ones that came up from the February notes and also in the April notes is what are the different types of incentives that we can do?” he said. “Obviously, we can’t do millions and millions of dollars, but I want us to strongly consider moving the number of personal leave days from three to five. I think that would help us out as well.”
As for the buses, Smith said they already have a bid to replace some of the older buses in the county that were originally bought in 2017.
“ We have 22 of those and we already have a bid, a price to replace those,” Smith said. “It would be 18 traditional and four special needs buses that will put us almost to a hundred percent what we call the fleet renewal rate.”
He also discussed adding air conditioning to the buses that aren’t already equipped.
“ We’re already close at about half of those (older buses) being HVAC,” he said. “With the addition to the 22, it’s going to be about 75 or 80%, and I think we’ll look at possibly retrofitting the remaining 20 to 30 buses with HVAC.”