The Bermudian Springs school board welcomed the district’s new assistant superintendent, Dr. David Beard, to his first meeting on Tuesday evening. Beard joined as the board approved an Act One Index resolution and heard presentations on its high school feasibility study and how to close grade-level skills gaps.
During the time for public comment, two speakers voiced concerns for the way students’ sexual assault allegations were handled by the district.
One of the two speakers alleged that two female students were “questioned in a roomful of men, without a female staff member there to support them,” then were returned to their classes. She also felt the investigation process was unclear for her as a parent and called for the board to conduct an independent review into the situation and the way it was handled by the district.
The music booster president for the high school thanked the district for resolving transportation difficulties to enable the band to attend events.
High school feasibility study
Ken Phillips, managing director of Raymond James Public Finance, provided the board with a presentation that covered market conditions and financing overviews as the board continues a feasibility study centered on Bermudian Springs High School.
The board’s Act One Index of 4.8% for 2027-28 was another piece of the puzzle. During Tuesday’s meeting, the board signed the Act One Resolution, a standard annual document that affirms the district will not raise taxes above the index, which was calculated by the state at 4.8% for Bermudian Springs in 2027-28.
While districts may have tax increases that fall at or below the index, or no increase at all, the resolution agrees to put a cap on the potential increase rather than request a higher limit from the state.
Phillips said the index is an important part of the picture as it provides a framework for the way the district could potentially raise taxes in order to fund the high school project. Combined with current rates – which Phillips predicted will remain elevated as high inflation continues – he outlined potential financing options for the board. Phillips pointed out that borrowing $50 million would take about 70% of the index.
Business manager Justin Peart cautioned the board to keep in mind the long-term commitment. He said that should the board borrow $30 million and increase taxes to the full 4.8% index, a full 2% would go towards debt service for five years.
Board president Daniel Chubb questioned whether funding the board has set aside for the construction of a new facility for the Adams County Technical Institute (ACTI) could be used for the high school instead should the ACTI project fall through.
Peart said that while the money could technically be moved, setting aside the $600,000 for the project has taken the district up to the 2027-28 budget cycle. He cautioned the board that the money would be difficult to replace if the ACTI project does become ready for individual districts to contribute their funding.
“I think if we take that money that we worked hard to get into the budget and redirect it to this now, then what are we going to do when we’re on the hook for what was $600,000?” Peart said. “Now it could be $800,000 and now that money’s not there. I just think that’s not a wise thought.”
As part of the study, the district has been evaluating its financial options, enrollment projections and current needs, facility conditions, shortcomings of the building’s current layout and more as it considers what choices may be available for the building.
“The whole purpose of doing that was to see, to get an evaluation of our high school and to see what shape it’s in and what the concerns are,” Sterner said. “Are they immediate concerns? Are they five years from now concerns, 10 years from now concerns, or like, yesterday concerns?”
Sterner also apprised the board that two turf fields, one in the stadium and a multipurpose field, are at the end of their useful lifetime.
In December, the architectural design firm the district is working with, Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, will bring the board plans with initial options for the high school.
Sterner said many concerns will go beyond what is most visible.
“When we’re looking at a building project, just to remind you, it’s not the way the building necessarily looks, it’s what you can’t see,” Sterner said. “That’s what we really talked about at our last meeting. When it comes to our HVAC system, when it comes to our roof, when it comes to our electrical systems, it’s so much more than just the way the building looks.”
Whether or not the board judges the high school project to be of imminent concern, Phillips encouraged the board to begin setting aside money. Then, tax increases could be smaller over time to generate the funding.
“Regardless of what you decide to do with the feasibility study, I would implore you, knowing how long it takes to get stuff in place, even if you don’t have an immediate project, let’s say it’s 5 years away, start to fund it now,” Phillips said.
Student data
The board heard a presentation from Dr. Ronald Wales, director of curriculum, on how students are performing in core subjects based upon PSSA and Keystone data.
The district can track grades year by year, following cohorts of students throughout their school experience to judge how they are performing as a whole and what gaps might exist.
Wales noted gaps in math and ELA core skills. The district is adding a screener to provide additional information on what gaps exist in order to find out why the gaps are there, Wales said.
Wales pointed to data on incoming kindergarten students, many with a red indicator showing that they are scoring at or below the “lowest 20th percentile of all kids nationally on a predictive scale that they will meet a benchmark to read,” Wales said.
“Now, I want – we’re not talking about PSSA stuff, we’re not talking about the test, we’re not talking about the question types or any of that,” Wales said. “We’re talking about kids can name letters, kids can read words or sound them out.”
The data showed how well kindergarten students measured for reading nonsense words, naming letters and more.
Wales said one contributing factor is the lack of preschools.
He similarly pointed to fourth-grade PSSA data, which he said was more helpful as a measure of the schools and district than of individual students’ abilities.
The data is focused enough to examine how well students in each grade are able to perform basic tasks such as comprehend sentences.
Wales followed the data through the eighth grade.
“When you get into students that are in the yellow or in the red, which historically we’re not digging into, you’re going to see a lot more of these basic underlying reading tasks, like decoding words,” Wales said. “And I don’t care if you’re going to be a plumber, a doctor, if you’re going to be a stay-at-home mom, you need to know how to do this to access anything in society.”
Without basic phonics and computational skills foundations, Wales said students will be unable to fully comprehend information from grade-level texts, continuing to put them behind.
He identified a multi-pronged approach that includes student support and teacher training, including helping teachers know what to do when middle and high school students still needs phonics support. Teachers should be able to access the data and know specifically how to handle gaps. Additionally, he wants families to have information on what children should know when starting kindergarten so they are not starting behind.
Wales compared the situation to a health problem, providing a “dosage” for cures such as phonics instruction.
“You do it through the screener, and then you flag the student who’s red or yellow and they move on into the diagnostic phase and you diagnose based upon the lesson sequence you already gave,” Wales said. “And where they struggle, you give them another application of that lesson sequence. And if that doesn’t work over the treatment time and you’re progress monitoring to see if it worked by continuing to give them those little – and those assessments take about a minute or two, three minutes – if you notice they’re not working, then you go back and you apply another intervention.”
Wales said there are ways to help students in higher grade levels, but starting from the base level at kindergarten will help other grade levels from the ground up.
“When kids can’t read, they can’t access things,” Wales said. “If you give them an eighth-grade textbook and they’re not reading on an eighth-grade level, they don’t come in with a background knowledge. They don’t come in with that understanding and getting through a text, even a paragraph – if they’re struggling to decode words, they’re not thinking about what it actually says. They can’t comprehend it.”
Ultimately, Wales said there is more than enough data to pinpoint the problem, diagnose students, and prescribe phonics, computational skills and other ‘cures,’ and some immediate progress can be made, but building teacher training and systems will take time.
Sterner, who was a kindergarten teacher years before becoming superintendent, reflected on his first year teaching in 2000. He said he has noticed a stark difference in fundamental skills and expectations of kindergarteners over recent decades.
“But if you would have asked me 20 years ago if students would be coming to kindergarten not knowing their letters, not knowing colors, I would be like, ‘Oh, that’s not the way it is,’” Sterner said. “But it is right now. And that’s what we’re receiving. We want to make sure that we can help those students as quickly as we can.”
The board held an executive session prior to the open meeting in order to discuss personnel matters.
Board meetings are typically held on Tuesday evenings, but the next regular meeting will be held on a Monday.
The next meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 7.
Meeting recordings are also posted to the district’s YouTube channel.
Imari Scarbrough is a freelance journalist.
