Retirement incentive leads MAC board discussion
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The Mount Ayr Community Schools board of directors faced two significant issues at their meeting Monday, December 14.
The first pertained to the imminent departure of long-time Spanish teacher Gilberto Castreje. (See accompanying story).
The second issue concerned the decision to offer a voluntary early retirement incentive for long-time teachers and staff.
Over the past several years, the district has offered the incentive as a budgetary tool to decrease its labor costs by trading high salaries for long-time employees for lower salaries for less experienced employees.
Past practice offered the incentive only for those employees aged 55 and older who had served the district for a total of 15 years with a minimum of 10 or more consecutive years of service.
The board debated the relative advantages and disadvantages of continuing the incentive for the 2020-2021 school year.
Discussion points included the potential savings offered by the incentive, the uncertainty of available funding due to decreased enrollment and reduced revenues related to COVID, and the best means to offer the incentive if it were to continue.
After considerable discussion, the board voted 5-0 to discontinue the incentive for this year.
Other business
In other business the board:
• approved a policy by which students must provide valid medical documentation to qualify to receive full-time remote instruction in the second semester. Superintendent Jason Shaffer said some students are currently not performing up to expected standards in a remote setting. As a result, they could be considered truant. In the first semester, students and their parents could simply choose full-time remote learning for any reason.
• approved the resignations of bowling coach Mike Zarr and co-head baseball coaches Chris Elwood and Kelly Klommhaus.
• approved adding an hour per day to the assignment of cook Aimie Larson.
• approved an agreement with the Creston school district to reimburse the cost of a substitute whenever Mount Ayr head wrestling coach Eric Ehlen needed to leave early from his teaching position in Creston.
• elected Brandi Shay as board president and Kim Lutrick as vice president for the coming year.
