TIMES UNION REPORTS – Warsaw School Board approved a resolution Tuesday to accept the redistricted map for the school corporation.
Bill Holder, Kosciusko County GIS director, explained to the Board why changes to the districts were necessary.
Every 10 years, he said, “We have to redistrict or at least look to make sure we’re in compliance” after the Census.”
There’s been some growth with residential developments behind Kohl’s and Walmart and skewed some of the numbers when it came to districts, he said. The largest school board district and the smallest school board, he said, had to be within 10% of each other. Because of the growth in that part of Warsaw, it was actually 15% or 20%, “so we were way off,” he said.
Target population per district is calculated by dividing the total population by the total number of districts.
Board President Heather Reichenbach asked if the difference is what Indiana statute required being under 10% after the redistricting was done. Holder said yes, he believed the difference between the district with the largest population and the district with the smallest population was 9.7%.
“It’s always a challenge to be able to, because we’re trying to work with the whole precincts that are pretty good sizes in a lot of cases. There’s not like little pieces you can move around. To keep those districts and the current Board members in those districts is definitely a bit of challenge,” Holder said.
A couple different scenarios were reviewed with the help of Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert. “I think we’ve got to a scenario that’s definitely within that 10%,” Holder said.
Hoffert asked Holder if a precinct couldn’t be split. Holden said unless there was no way around it, precincts wouldn’t be split.
“We almost would have to petition the state to be able to do something like that,” Holder said. “Probably work with the clerk’s office. They work with the Indiana Election Commission or something like that, but that wasn’t necessary.”
There were some pretty big changes in “some areas to get this to work,” Holder said.
Hoffert thanked Holder and said redistricting isn’t easy work. There definitely were large shifts that saw an increase of population on the north side of town.
Hoffert said the map will be sent to Election Commission.
In other business, Dr. David Robertson, assistant superintendent of elementary education, updated the Board on WCS’s Raptor system.
Robertson said the Board was aware that since about five years ago, WCS has used Raptor for its visitor management system. About a year ago, the Board approved the school corporation to expand to using the full Raptor suite, which includes Drill Manager and Raptor Emergency.
Robertson said WCS has fully implemented the Drill Manager aspect of the Raptor system, which allows certain school corporation administrators to run and manage WCS from a simple location and keep data on the drills. One of the things that can be tracked is how long it takes to do certain drills. Robertson said one of the aspects he likes is he gets text messages when a drill has started.
Next semester, WCS will be rolling out Raptor Emergency Management, which is an app staff’s devices will have. Staff will be able to access all their building safety plans through the app, as well as the ability to ask for help from a certain location in the school.
Also, Chief Financial Officer April Fitterling said it was recommended the Board approve on Monday end-of-the-year stipends for support staff. WCS has done the stipends the past couple of years. The stipends will be pro-rated on how many hours the support staff members are expected to work. Fitterling said full-time support staff will be expecting to see $250.
Finally, Fitterling said the material to do work on the Tiger Den roof has arrived. She said she believed the roof is currently be working on and believes the work is expected to last eight days.
