With the academic year now in full swing, the Nome School Board held its second meeting of the year Tuesday night. Among the business discussed by the Board was a maintenance project at Nome Elementary School and the formation of a new sports team.
Nome Elementary principal Elizabeth Korenek-Johnson says the elementary school stairs needed to be leveled.
“Yeah, the ground had fallen away from the base of the stairs, so they built that back up — just the beginning of this year — and the same thing on the playground exit. So yeah, they’ve been working really hard to correct those issues as quickly as possible.”
With that and the sinkhole near the school that Korenek-Johnson says “may become a yearly maintenance thing,” the maintenance staff has plenty of work to do.
During the School Board’s discussion of sports, Nome-Beltz High School principal Jay Thomas explains there will be the largest cross-country meet held in Nome in 12 years this coming Saturday.
Principal Thomas summarized the team’s recent tournament in Seward, where they were seeded fourth and ended up losing in a consolation round game.
Thomas went on to say that there is a new sport in the works at Nome-Beltz: e-sports.
“You don’t travel; it’s all digital. So we have a couple folks that have, at this point, volunteered time — Aaron Blankenship and Matt Johnson — who are gonna build computers, because the computers that we need to use need to be a little bit faster and a little bit more high-speed than what we have. So, they’re gonna build those computers, and they’re already getting quite a bit of interest from our high school kids.”
The last notable item from Tuesday night’s meeting was that the chemicals from the Jr. High science lab were cleaned out by hired contractors.
The Nome School Board ended their meeting by unanimously passing both action items. The first was a motion to support Barb Amarok’s nomination for a seat on the Alaska Association of School Boards’ board of directors. The other was a motion to pass the first round of revisions to the FY ’20 budget.
The board will meet again next for a work session on the 23rd.
Picture at top: Katie Kazmierski, KNOM.
