School board accepts bid to install keyless entry system

IRONWOOD — The Ironwood Area School Board of Education accepted a bid to install a keyless entry system during a meeting on Monday at Luther L. Wright School in Ironwood.

Three bids were submitted for the project, and the board selected the lowest bid from Northstar Electronics in Ironwood. The cost is $8,842.17 and includes installing systems to the the entrance at Sleight Elementary and the main and West Pabst Street entrances at LLW.

According to superintendent Tim Kolesar, the system includes a buzzer, allowing a potential visitor to notify a staff member to gain entry into the building. The staff member would receive a notification from the visitor on a telephone inside one of the main offices. The buzzer system also includes an electronic eye to transmit photos from the outside of the building to the phone, so the staff member can see the potential visitor before allowing them in.

Currently, all of the doors are locked, and visitors have to call the main office at both locations to gain entry.

“This will help our secretaries to get back to their jobs, instead of running back and forth to the doors, letting people in,” board president Steve Thomas said.

Budget Adjustments

Kolesar updated the board about the district’s fund balance, including the addition of a $73,000 check from the Gogebic-Ontonagon Intermediate School District for the special education millage distribution.

According to Kolesar, the payment is $44,818 less than what the district received last year.

“With that payment, our fund balance is $340,652, but our revenues over expenditures is $45,043,” Kolesar said. “I would like to host a budget workshop sometime in the future, to get this straightened out before our meeting in April.”

A final date for the budget workshop wasn’t set during the meeting.

PTO Update

Members of the PTO spoke to the board about upcoming changes taking place this year, and included a list of all of the fundraisers and PTO-sponsored events that took place during the 2011-2012 school year.

“The PTO should be commended for the work that has been done,” said Ed Rickard, board vice president. “You’ve done a whale of a job.”

According to PTO members, it was decided during a PTO meeting on March 4 to not fund end-of-year field trips during this school year.

Instead, the PTO is offering four weeks of swimming lessons for students grades one through six next fall at Gogebic Community College. However, the 4-year-old program and kindergarten classes will continue to go on their field trips because they are too young for the swimming lessons, according to a letter from the PTO to parents.

One parent spoke out about the change, asking that it be delayed until next year. The parent said that many of the students were disappointed that they wouldn’t be taking their field trips this year.

The board recommended that the discussion about the change take place during the next PTO meeting on April 8 at 6 p.m. at Sleight School.

Other business

The board denied the request to pay $185 to allow members of the boy’s basketball team to travel to East Lansing this week to watch the Michigan High School Athletic Association boy’s basketball state finals.

“We don’t want to set a precedent,” Thomas said. “These funds are supposed to go to academic purposes. It’s not the $185 that would be the problem, but the precedent that we would be setting.”