The East Penn Board of School Directors adopted a policy for suicide awareness, prevention, and response Aug. 24 in addition to lengthy discussion following a presentation on the board going paperless for its meetings.

The board’s adoption of a suicide prevention and awareness policy was scheduled after public notice and the two required readings by the board.

The policy is based on a model from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association with revision suggestions by attorneys King, Spry, Herman, Freund & Faul and the district attorney Marc Fisher, who streamlined some suggestions from the former.

Ballard expressed some concern the policy had been revised so heavily by legal advice, removing those parts of it related to warning signs and at-risk signs of suicide. Fisher explained the policy had been trimmed to contain only what a board policy should contain and confirmed, in his opinion, the policy contained more than everything necessary and mandated.

The policy will be sent to PSBA for review.

The board also approved under business operations the sale of the property at 6503 Lower Macungie Road, the former Lower Macungie Elementary School. Earnshaw later confirmed the property had not been in use as a school for some years, having been rented out to The Cambridge Schools. The property sold for $840,000.

In his report to the board, Schilder noted the district’s most recent count of students is at 8,008, up from this time last year.

Schilder also briefly discussed some recent meetings with the district’s transportation company, Student Transportation of America, Inc., assuring the board STA is ready for the new year. He is optimistic the school year will not start off as last year’s did with busing issues.

STA has installed and maintained six phone lines with operators for the opening weeks of school to respond to problems and concerns and Schilder anticipates while there will still be requests for time changes and bus stop changes from parents, the school year will be off to a good start.

Schilder did note some of the routes are still longer than might be desired, ranging from 60 to 80 minutes on some; these are the same routes from last year. He explained more buses could be added to shorten the routes but this would be at an unspecified cost to the district.

Schilder recognized the new appointment of Tabitha Rodriguez as assistant principal at Emmaus High School. Rodriguez is taking over after the resignation of Andrea Edmonds, who is moving on to become director of student services at Northwestern Lehigh. Rodriguez completed her two degrees at East Stroudsburg University, and has been teaching Spanish at Morris Knolls High School in New Jersey since 2004. Her role as assistant principal is slated to begin in October, or as soon as possible.

Regarding the issue of board members going paperless, Director of Technology Michael Mohn, explained in general how the board could engage with the district’s existing Moodle network to access board documents during meetings. Moodle is the district’s online educational environment, designed for and used by teachers, parents and students.

In this instance, Moodle’s capability for easily uploading and viewing stored documents would be adapted for the board directors’ use, allowing administrative staff to upload pertinent files to the system and then for board members to log on and view them during meetings, eliminating-or at least reducing-the need for printed paper copies for each director.

Some questions arose concerning Moodle’s capability for in-document searching, a feature common these days on other document hosting sites like Google Docs and BoardDocs.

Mohn explained the technology department had just begun researching how to accomplish that, but couldn’t provide an answer on how exactly it would work within Moodle’s platform should the board decide to move forward with the program.

Superintendent Dr. Michael Schilder summarized for the board that as far as this option was concerned, extra time would certainly be involved on the administrative level in compiling and scanning certain documents to get them uploaded into the Moodle system. It may also require some expense on the part of the district to provide back up devices in the event personal devices belonging to board directors might malfunction or be left at home.

The administration had done some research on laptops and Chromebooks, determining the latter were the least expensive option available.

Mohn confirmed that the public’s access to board documents would not change, being still available on the website for download.

For now there is no further action on the item of the board going paperless.

In further business the board elected its representatives for the PSBA: as president, Mary Birks; as vice president, Robert Schwartz; and as at-large representative, Larry Feinberg. The board’s elected officials will represent the board’s interests in PSBA, where each school entity is entitled to one vote.