Verona Press The
Thursday, February 7, 2019 • Vol. 54, No. 38 • Verona, WI • Hometown USA • ConnectVerona.com • $1.25
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Verona Area School District
Verona Area School District
Middle schools will get Chinese
Weather days leave high school short
Everyday classes for VAIS grads at SOMS in ‘19-20, BRMS after 20-21 and beyond
Eliminating late starts among options to meet hours requirement
SCOTT GIRARD
SCOTT GIRARD
Unified Newspaper Group
Unified Newspaper Group
Graduates of Verona Area International School will be able to take Advanced Mandarin Chinese in middle and high school. And the language instruction eventually will be available to students new to Chinese. T h e Ve r o n a A r e a s c h o o l b o a r d approved a plan Monday that will allow graduates in sixth-grade and above to take an advanced section of the language every day. A key to the decision was the projected cost of the plan, $14,000 above the current allocation for Chinese instruction outside of VAIS, which teaches K-5 students in both English and Chinese in a dual-immersion format. The offerings for VAIS graduates will only be at Savanna Oaks Middle School in 2019-20, and they will move to Badger Ridge Middle School in 2020-21 and beyond. Eighth-graders at both middle schools who did not attend VAIS would be able to take an introductory Mandarin class beginning in 2020-21 as part of an expansion of the language’s offering. Sixth- and seventh-grade VAIS graduates who wish to continue Chinese instruction would have to give up either music or the quarterly rotation of art, family and consumer ed, technology and
Verona Area High School will be short of its instructional hours requirements after three weather-related closures over a week-anda-half stretch at the end of January. While the elementary and middle schools are fine, district administrators are working this week on options to make up the nearly three days’ worth of hours necessary to meet state standards, superintendent Dean Gorrell told the Press in an email. “I will be getting something out to parents in the coming days once we have finalized what our plan will be,” Gorrell wrote. The state requires at least 1,137 hours of instruction for grades 7 through 12, and at least 1,050 for grades 1 through 6. Gorrell said “one of the leading options” under consideration would be to forgo late starts for high
Turn to Chinese/Page 7
Photo by Kimberly Wethal
From left, Ahyanna Brenston, Destini Patterson, Janiyah Green, Shania Frazier, Badger Ridge Middle School teacher Shayla Glass, Tae’Javiean Bey, Ma’lahja Johnson, Emani Embry, Diani’Zabell Acevedo and Sacora Berry are members of the Black Girls Circle of Support group that Glass mentors, where the girls have a space to be themselves and discuss issues specific to them.
BRMS teacher wins humanitarian award Educator honored for work toward equity in district KIMBERLY WETHAL Unified Newspaper Group
Badger Ridge Middle School teacher Shayla Glass received confirmation last month that she’s making a difference. Glass, now 26, was awarded the City-County Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award for her work to promote equity and address academic and disciplinary disparities among Glass African American students. Hired by the Verona Area School District in 2016, Glass has since co-founded the Black Equity Council at BRMS, is a Circles of Support
program leader for seventhand eighth-graders as the Black Girls group facilitator and is a coach for the African American History Bowl Challenge, according to a news release from Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. Glass told the Press the award will help her “keep going” with her efforts, and shows “the work that I’m doing is necessary.”
Turn to Award/Page 16
Turn to Closures/Page 14
Verona Area School District
‘We had a chance to build a neighborhood’ 25 years ago, district considered putting a school in Fitchburg’s Jamestown
considerations like population growth, busing, access for walkers and – sometimes most importantly – available land. Twenty-five years ago, most of those considerations seemed to work in favor of building a school SCOTT GIRARD in Fitchburg’s Jamestown Unified Newspaper Group neighborhood. The district Where to build a school had three sites in the area can be a complex question. under consideration, and it T h e r e g e n e r a l l y a r e moved close enough to two
that there were petitions in opposition and support. By the end of 1994, the school board set a referendum to purchase land that would become home t o S ava n n a O a k s M i d dle School. That school is in Fitchburg, but it’s far enough away from the major population centers of Jamestown and Maple Grove to leave those neighborhoods without a
neighborhood school. And now, with Verona facing difficult options for setting new attendance boundaries when its new high school opens in 2020, it seems unlikely those areas ever will be able to avoid busing of children elsewhere. Pat Sweeney, who was the Fitchburg representative on the school board at the time, said not putting
a school near the more than 450 students that now reside in that area west of Verona Road is his “greatest regret” from his nine years on the board. “I’m a believer in neighborhood schools, especially at the elementary level,” Sweeney told the Press this month. “A school in there with established younger parents would’ve done a world of good for
everybody that attended the school.” The three options considered were on King James Way near the Wingra Stone quarry, Maple Prairie Park and the Fitchburg side of Jamestown-Huegel Park. VASD business manager Chris Murphy recalled discussion on each of the sites “became very contentious.”
Turn to Jamestown/Page 8
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