WACO sees a surge of open enrollments

By Brooks Taylor, Mt. Pleasant News

WAYLAND ? Open enrollees are flooding into the WACO Community School District.

Flooding may be too strong a term, but the WACO School Board approved 21 enrollments into the district and five open enrollments to other districts Monday night during its regular monthly meeting.

Two of the open enrollments into the district are for the current school year while the other 19 are for next year. The open enrollments out (all to the Washington Community School District) are for the 2017-18 school year.

Eleven of next year?s open enrollments into the district are from the Highland Community School District, primarily Ainsworth-area residents. The Highland School Board recently voted to close the Ainsworth Elementary School, leaving the school district with just one elementary school ? in Riverside.

In personnel matters, two resignations were accepted. Resigning were Dyann Graber, elementary associate, and Linda Wilkerson, Family and Consumer Science (FCS) teacher.

Wilkerson has come full circle. She began her teaching career in 1973 as a part-time home economics teacher at WACO Middle School. Throughout the years she has been a middle school science and sixth-grade teacher. She also was an elementary principal in the Mt. Pleasant Community School District before returning to WACO in 2012 as the FCS instructor, basically the same area of instruction that Wilkerson handled in 1973.

School directors also approved the course offerings at the high school and the fiscal 2018 budget guarantee resolution.

The budget guarantee resolution guarantees schools with declining enrollments 101 percent of the state supplemental school aid they received the preceding year.

School officials said they don?t anticipate an enrollment decrease during the 2017-18 school year but passed the resolution as a precaution.

Final action had the board approving the purchase of three volleyball net systems ? two for the main gym and one for the practice gym at the secondary building. The equipment will be purchased from BSN Sports of Cedar Falls at a cost of $11,250.

The school board moved its April meeting ahead one week to Monday, April 10, at 6:30 p.m. in the media center of the secondary building.