As part of the continuing district's policies, the Bristol Warren Regional School Committee at its March 12 meeting gave first approval to a series of updates suggested by the administration of Superintendent Ana Riley while also removing one other from the code.

Said committee and district's policy subcommittee member Kyle Jackson, "Most of these policies that we went through haven't been looked at since inception of the district, since regionalization back in 1994." The final reads will take place at the next full school committee meeting and will be reviewed by the district's legal counsel.

At the recommendation of Riley and the subgroup, the full committee dispensed of the "Public/Parent Concerns" item.

Asked by School Committee Chair Adam McGovern to share the thought behind the move, Riley said, "This is really a procedure and this will be in all the (individual school) handbooks...So that's where this belongs and that's where we'll place it."

As for those other items being added or tweaked, the committee approved a new policy for "Homeless and Migrant Students."

Riley said assistant superintendent Dr. Diane Sanna was at the fore of coming up with the policy, which is a requirement of the Rhode Island Department of Education.

"We didn't have one on board, so Dr. Sanna did the work from a model policy from the state to draft this for us so that we have one that fits all of the criteria required."

And existing policy that was updated pertained to "Public Solicitation in the Schools," which deals mostly with fundraisers for organizations and events not directly related to the district.

"We don't do a lot of collections for non-school organizations," Riley said. "We do occasionally do things that would benefit our students. We've had some students who have maybe had some illness or something where they've done fundraisers. We allow those to happen inside of school. So anything that doesn't conflict with any of our other policies, but is a benefit to our students, we do allow within the school."

The committee gave initial support to a revised code for "Visitors to the Schools." Riley explained this policy has to do with guests and not parental or familial volunteers. Visitors to all schools are required to sign-in and wear a badge denoting who they are, that they have approval to be inside, that "they're not just a random stranger walking around the building" and that they aren't staff.

"Most of the visitors are invited by our staff. We get a request from staff that say, you know, we'd like to have a visitor come and talk to our seventh grade Social Studies class about some war," Riley said. "We have folks come into our CTE programs who are in the industry and come in to talk to kids. So this is just our policy that we don't just allow random visitors to come into the school and disrupt the educational environment. The folks who come in have been approved by the principal and have a purpose for being there."

The next policy update is for "Public Complaints about School Personnel."

Said Riley, "Some of the language we we did was to match the title and and change the language from charges to complaints. The police make charges, we don't make charges for have complaints or concerns. And then the proper parties are first to the principal, and then the superintendent, if you remember in the change in the Accountability Act, it only comes to the school committee if I recommend termination or suspension without pay. So, just cleaning up the language of what it should be."

The last update of significance was to a policy for "Relations with Governmental Authorities," which was led by committee and subgroup member Christine Barlow. Barlow said the changes, in part, were to bring the district's guidance in line with that of the state.

Barlow explained the changes, thusly, "This language here was choppy and we just made an effort to streamline it into one while keeping everything that was there...Generally this is just meant to say that we will cooperate with federal, state and local government agencies in matters that are in the best interest of our students while adhering to law. So it's just a simple statement of what we intend to do."

Barlow continued, "I think personally for me, I also viewed this as a policy where perhaps there's a neighboring district that wants to work with us, but maybe there's not a law that requires it or they have a law and we have a law. And so this gives us a policy to ground ourselves and decisions of when we want to work with a neighboring school district and when we don't want to and if we as a committee decide that it's not in the best interests of our students to work with that neighboring school district, we can ground it in this."

And also, another minor change was made to the item "Relations with Community Organizations."

Budget notes
With the fiscal year drawing to a close, Danielle Carey, the Director of Finance & Administration, ran the committee through a review of the district's balance sheet with expenses totaling $32,986,283 as of the last day of February.

Of note, Carey said the to date the cost of hiring substitute instructors had reached $333,886 due to the need to hire long term and day to day substitute teachers. Also, the line item for "Legal Services" was $87,936 for the costs of general legal services, arbitration and special education.

Carey said, as well, she was "continuing to monitor life insurance, CTE (Career and Tech Education) and Special Ed tuitions.

An update was made to personnel in the amount of $25,000 for Speech Language Pathologist contractor due to a vacancy for a split position between Rockwell and Hugh Cole elementary school. Carey said the total will cover the cost of the position for the rest of the current year and that will be posted and hopefully have the position filled for the start of the 2025-26 term.

Also from Carey, the district paid PMA Consultants/Perkins Eastman $7,925,622 for their efforts of "Stage 3" of the school construction plans. The money came from the Bond Anticipatory Note (BAN) taken last calendar year, however as of Monday, March 10, the district received $4,626,924.29 in reimbursement from the state.

Standout students
Two students who were unable to attend the initial ceremony held at the committee's February 10 meeting highlighting pupils to earn perfect scores on assessment testing during the 2023-24 term were honored last week at last week's forum.

A total of 16 students from the district recorded a perfect score in either or both of the Math or English Language Arts portions of the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System o.r the Preliminary Standard Assessment Tests

As an eighth grader at Kickemuit Middle School last year, Kaia Brown on both RICAS tests while Jessica Deal, while a sophomore at Mt. Hope High School, did so on the PSAT for ELA.