By Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Carter County Schools Superintendent Dr. Paul Green welcomed everyone to the board of education meeting on Monday night, and said they were doing everything they could to get students back in school while dealing with uncooperative weather.
“We have gone thirteen in person school days since the middle of December 2024,” Green said. “We are going on a very long time without in person school, and we need to get back in.”
Green said that hopefully the bad weather would break soon, and students could return to a more normal school attendance.
The board met for their February meeting at East Carter Middle School and learned about the school’s Mentor Monday program. The program gives students a chance to meet with their teachers in a non-classroom setting. The goal is to expose students to social emotional learning (SEL) skills and point them on another path beyond the traditional classroom experiences.
To this end teachers created a board that didn’t ‘reveal’ each individual teacher but rather compiled a list of different things that would be done during the Mentor Monday time. In turn this allowed students an opportunity to choose based upon their own interests rather than a group made up of their friends or ‘favorite’ teacher. This placed students with other groups of students with whom they might not normally interact. And the results were very positive.
Some of the successes of Mentor Monday were one group designing a Christmas float that ran in the Christmas parade, while another mentor group provides combined snacks outside their room for all the other mentor groups, with the kids participating in actually making the snacks. One mentor group is an art group that meets and does numerous projects such as carving pumpkins and making Christmas ornaments. There are also several groups that travel to different places, with one going to the high school and taking culinary classes there.
Mentor Mondays also serve as a time for students to practice their SEL activities. It facilitates conversations students might not be having outside of school, such as how to manage their anger and build connections with other people, and learning how to deal with the ups and downs of life. Along with the teachers who participate, members of several community organizations have also taken part in the program.
In other business the board gave the final approval of the new school name, mascot, and colors. The winner in the voting was the Carter County High School Coyotes, and the colors are royal blue, black, and silver.
Board member Chris Perry said that he served on the committee that helped put all the voting processes together, and he commended them for all their hard work and dedication.
“They did a great job,” Perry said. “They did a lot of research and went through a list of over a thousand mascots and narrowed it down to two.”
The board voted unanimously to approve the result of the voting the committee presented to them.
The board also voted to approved bids for relocating utility lines on the site of the new high school construction. The companies involved in the relocation of lines were Spectrum, Windstream, and AT&T, with both Spectrum and Windstream having already submitted bids. The cost of the Spectrum bid was approximately $22,000 and the Windstream bid was approximately $44,604, and the board voted to approve those. The board also voted to authorize the superintendent to approve the AT&T bid, when it is submitted, up to $50,000.
The board of education also voted to renew superintendent Green’s contract for an additional four years.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
