GLASSBORO, N.J. – Thomas E. Bowe Elementary School is no longer without a principal, as the Glassboro Board of Education has approved the hiring of David Kelk as the interim principal of the school.
Kelk will serve as the school’s principal for the remainder of the 2013-2014 school year. He is standing in for former principal Ron Ferraro, who recently requested to go back to his previous position of vice principal. The Board of Education unanimously approved Kelk’s hiring at their October meeting.
“Earlier in the year Mr. Ferraro had requested to go back to being vice principal and we accepted that letter and immediately opened up a search,” said superintendent Mark Silverstein. “This time of the year is a very difficult time to conduct a search, but I was committed to getting leadership in the building ASAP.”
Kelk is taking on the position as an experienced school administrator. He is coming out of retirement after previously serving as Clearview Middle School’s vice principal for 13 years and principal for 10 years. Earlier this year Kelk served as the interim principal of Overbrook High School.
According to Silverstein, Kelk will be introduced to the staff on Friday and will officially start at the school on Monday.
The meeting also saw the Technology Department give a presentation on the technological updates being implemented in the district’s schools.
Although the presentation was listed as the department’s “annual report,” presenter and Glassboro Public School Director of Technology George Weeks noted that it had actually been several years since the last technology report was given. As a result, Weeks’ presentation covered the technological updates in the district over the better part of the last decade.
“In the last 9 years there has been a lot of stuff that we’ve done,” said Weeks. “For example, we’ve centralized the phone system. When I got here we had seven buildings and six different kinds of phone systems; if you called from this building [Beach Administration Building] to the high school it was a local phone call and if you spoke to the guidance counselor for four hours that was a four hour phone call that you paid for. Now it costs us nothing because we use our private fiber network to interconnect everything.”
According to Weeks, the private fiber network also connects the seven public school buildings to Rowan University as well as Glassboro’s municipal buildings.
Weeks also listed the recent additions of shared Internet services to increase Internet speed, leasing programs to constantly refresh equipment and an academic content management system called Schoolwires, which gives every teacher his or her own website where students can post blog and pod cast entries, as some of the biggest changes of recent years.
“We’re beginning to get to the tipping point where more and more teachers are beginning to utilize the tools that we’re bringing in for them,” said Weeks.
Other recent technological advancements in the schools include a more efficient printing system that, according to Weeks, is saving the district a minimum of $40,000 a year in comparison to the previous system, updated emergency contact systems that allow the schools to immediately notify parents of “anything and everything” through things like text message and email, interactive classroom technology such as SMART Board interactive whiteboards and a new cafeteria tracking systems that allow parents to put money into a student’s account online to pay for lunches.
“We have all kinds of stuff going on now that wasn’t 10 years ago,” said Weeks. “Pretty much now if it plugs into the wall, we have something to do with it.”
In other business:
• Silverstein gave a presentation on violence and vandalism during the 2012-2013 school year which included 25 total offenses consisting of 20 acts of violence, one act of vandalism, two weapon related offenses and two substance abuse offenses. This represents a drop of 32 total offenses from the previous school year.
• Silverstein also gave a presentation on standardized test scores from grade to grade over the past two school years in the district. Results showed needs for improvement in grades three through six, where scores either dropped from 2012 to 2013 or did not notably improve. Results from grades seven and eight through high school, however, showed considerable improvement culminating in the highest language arts and math HSPA test scores in Glassboro High School history for 2013.
• Glassboro High School senior Breanna Willis was sworn in as a non-voting board member. It is a policy of the district to have representatives of the student government at every board meeting and Willis is currently Glassboro High School’s vice president.
