SYRACUSE — During the regular monthly meeting of the Wawasee school board Tuesday evening, May 9, in Syracuse, the board heard recommendations from Kim Nguyen, Wawasee High School principal, about changes needed in some programs.

Nguyen noted the alternative to suspensions and expulsions program needs to be restructured. Currently it is an all day program but he feels it needs to be only a morning or afternoon program so the time can be utilized more effectively. “I feel the time is not being used as efficiently as it can be,” he said.

The previous director of ASE retired and was replaced this school year by a substitute. Nguyen wants to hire a professional to run the program and also the ECO challenge classes in the summer for at-risk students. In conjunction with this, a freshman and sophomore level shop class will be created where students build boards of different types such as wakeboards, snowboards, paddleboards and others. A PE teacher with an interest in these types of boards and who had split time between Syracuse Elementary and Wawasee High School will be used to teach the class.

Nguyen said the class will be used to help at-risk students who may struggle with the more academic type classes in their first or second year of high school and get discouraged. “We want to encourage them to stay in school,” he said. The board approved Nguyen’s recommendations.

The board also approved hiring a teacher to teach welding classes in the afternoon for high school students and also some evenings when the welding facility will be open for community use. The former VFW building on Chicago Street in Syracuse will be renovated this summer and used for welding classes beginning with the 2017-18 school year.

Other teacher recommendations were approved including making Ken Brower a full-time band teacher at the high school and increasing one of the PE teaching positions to full-time at Syracuse Elementary School.

In other business, the board heard a brief presentation about the Wawasee Middle School Culture Club. Deb Connett, media center paraprofessional, led the presentation and was joined by students Norah Miller, Laurel Kelsheimer and Vanessa Wright.

Connett said the club was created during the 2015-16 school year in response to several books received about different world cultures. She said some students read those books and were later given Accelerated Reading tests about the books. They also did projects in the media center about world cultures.

This school year the club focused on Indiana since 2016 was the bicentennial year and have studied Native American history, statehood and Indiana poems. The club also studies different world cultures.

Also on the agenda, the board heard from Jim Rhoades, a school bus driver, about an incident occurring in late April. Rhoades was driving his bus on SR 13 when an SUV crossed the centerline and hit the bus close to the front wheel and caused significant damage, eventually totaling the bus.

The bus went off the road at an incline, but Rhoades managed to bring it back on the road somehow. Although the bus was totaled, no one was hurt and Rhoades and the students stayed calm. He said he has replayed the incident over and over in his mind and still wonders how the bus wasn’t flipped over. “It wasn’t anything I did, it was a God thing,” he said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

Rhoades was thanked by the school board for his efforts.