Bessemer awaits electric school buses

By MEGAN HUGHES

news@yourdailyglobe.com

Bessemer — The Bessemer School Board voted March 20 to approve the list of 2024 graduates, and heard a brief update regarding the electric buses that the district is expecting to introduce in the 2024 school year.

Kassi Huotari, the district’s business manager, said that the board has officially paid for the buses. “We did pay for the electric buses, that cost us $10,000. They are completed and built now, but we are waiting to take them until after our charger is installed, so sometime during the summer.”

The plan for the buses is to use them for daily bus routes, she said.

“We could get them tomorrow if we wanted. They are completed,” she said. “But I don’t want to take them until we have a way to charge them, so they aren’t just sitting around uncharged.”

The school is waiting on some electrical work to be completed, including the installation of the bus charging station.

The board also approved the district’s two-sport policy, which limits students to participating in two sports at one time. The limitation was pitched in order to prevent students from being gone every day of the school week due to practices or competition.

Specifically at issue are the three sports offered in the spring — baseball/softball, golf and track.

Board chairman James Partanen raised concern with the possibility of sports suffering should students be forced to opt out of participating one sport in favor of joining the other two, most notably his concern was regarding track.

“How do you win track meets?” Partanen asked. “Why are we discouraging people from participating in our extra curricular.”

He also raised questions about students that might want to switch sports after realizing that they were not thriving in a particular sport, which the remainder of the board believed would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis at the coach’s discretion.

At this point, the numbers for all three currently offered spring sports are holding strong, according to Superintendent Richard Mattrela. “If all of the sports had low numbers, or if one of the sports were low, I would have not brought it to the table.”

The board after further discussion, voted to ap-prove the two-sport policy.

The board also:

—Approved the State Science Olympiad tournament overnight trip for May 2-5.

—Heard a brief update about the critical incidents mapping project, which is nearing completion.

—Heard a brief update about the Spring 2024 class trip to Europe.

—Discussed the superintendent’s evaluation and the method by which they will be performing it at a future meeting.

—Discussed the purchase of 100 student laptop computers to replace ones that are in need of replacement due to age.

—Approved Nicholas Heikkila’s amended K-12 Dean of Students contract.

—Heard Washington School head teacher Maxwell France report that third graders have been writing to pen-pals in Watersmeet, and took a field trip to learn about Ojibwe culture before they entered that part of their history class.