The Cheatham County Board of Education met tonight for the monthly work session.

Transportation Director Cal Blacker asked about donating the old unusable school buses. After some discussion, the board decided that they would prefer to follow past practices and auction the old buses. The money from the auctions would go back into the transportation fund.

The board spent quite a bit of time discussing a request to have a rugby team at Sycamore High School. The rugby teams started several years ago as a school club with access to the playing fields and were self funded. A couple of board members repeatedly stated that rugby was only allowed to be community sport and not an official school sport. Board member Dianne Proffitt stated that it was “a matter of taking care of what we have first”. The teams are now being charged $250 for use of the fields, which is supposedly against school board policy.

Sycamore High School also wants to purchase 24 ereaders as a supplemental teaching aide since one of the books that they use does not correlate to state standards. They would like to fund the new devices with parent donations. They would prefer to get Kindle Fire tablets, which would be suitable for this task but would not meet standards for the recently released tablet RFP. Board member Dan Moore asked how this would be equitable across the district. This would be treated like a pilot and other schools could follow their example.

Once again the board debated the HHS Drumline request to travel to Dayton, OH for the Winter Drumline National Championship. The board has concerns that authorizing the field trip would open the floodgates for out of state field trips.

The work session ended on a rather heated note. The last agenda item was request from  a parent to address the board. The board does not normally allow such requests, but the request was granted. The parent stated that he had send several emails to the board and had not received any responses. He questioned whether they had received his emails and why he had not received a response. Board member William Johnson said that he read the emails, but he did not always respond. Dan Moore got defensive and said that he did not need to justify who he responded to and who he did not respond to. Board member Michele Collins made a comment about being interrogated and gavelled the end of the work session. One of the frequent complaints from parents is the lack of information from the school board and central office regarding events that affect their children. As I was leaving, I passed William Johnson and Dan Moore having a conversation in the parking lot about all the negativity.