Teachers of the Year Recognized

Ellijay, Ga – The October 16th Gilmer County Board of Education meeting began on the bright side with the recognition of each individual schools teacher of the year and then moved into a confrontational conversation between the Board of Education and a concerned citizen.School Superintendent Jason Kouns made it well known that he was proud of all the teachers in Gilmer county and that he was pleased to be able to award these outstanding teachers of the year that had been selected.

“I am absolutely thrilled that we get to do this each and every year. Certainly we have some tremendous educators in Gilmer County,”

said Kouns.

After the teacher of the year recognitions, the meeting moved into the public commentary. Joene DePlancke started this section of the meeting on a concerned note.

DePlancke voiced that she was upset with the board for not posting documents, such as the agenda, on the school board website for the public to have access to. DePlancke said that this hindered the public from knowing what was going on at the meetings before hand and prevented the public from being able to prepare appropriately to speak their opinions on certain matters.

“You were supposed to publish the agenda. There was no way that the people knew what the subjects were that you were going to speak about tonight,”

said DePlancke.

DePlancke continued by saying,

“On the agenda it says that you are going to approve the ELOST continuation ballet, which is a big deal, and you didn’t even tell the public you were going to vote on such a thing.”

Vice Chair Jim Parmer, whom was acting as chair in James Waters stead, answered to DePlancke’s comments by saying that there had been an issue in the past of the agenda’s not being posted for the public to see and that that issue had been corrected.

Parmer then asked for the agenda to be accessed on the computer for everyone to see. To his surprise there was no documentation of the agenda to be found and the last accessible documents dated back the meeting of July 18th.

Once Parmer saw that the documents were not available he apologized to DePlancke saying,

“That’s a problem that we have worked on and I thought that it was fixed before today and obviously it’s not. For that we do apologize.”

DePlancke finished her commentary by saying,

“There are so many things that the public is no longer provided information on and I am troubled by that.”

Moving on from public commentary to the Superintendent’s report, the board voted to allow overnight/out-of-state field trips to be taken by the school system. This will allow the Gilmer High FBLA club to go on a trip later this year.

Also, the approval of the ELOST continuation ballot for March 2015 was voted on and all approved to move forward with the ballot.

School Superintendent Jason Kouns wanted to make it clear that this vote was not the finalization of the upcoming budget, but rather that this vote allowed the board to continue the current referendum.

“At this time we are just looking for the continuation of the current referendum. There is absolutely no finalized or prioritized list at this point. This is simply for us to move forward with the continuation of the referendum as it stands,”

said Kouns.

Watch the full meeting below: