The Poplar Bluff R-I School District on Thursday inducted three board members for new three-year terms.
Dr. Michael Price won re-election to a full term, having served out the remainder of the term vacated by Alana Robertson, who resigned last summer.
New board members Dr. Larry Kimbrow and Dave Elledge were elected to the open seats vacated by John Scott and Jerrod Murphy, who did not run for re-election.
Superintendent Dr. Scott Dill said, “We’re thankful for everybody who put their name in and the community for coming out and voting, regardless of the of the outcome.”
Dill said he will work with the new board to “embrace the candidates the community selected, advance the good work of the district, and setting everything up for (incoming superintendent) Dr. Aaron Cornman, ensuring the transition goes smoothly.”
All three newly inducted board members said they looked forward to participating in the transition process with Cornman, but they also had their own priorities for the district.
Price stated teacher retention was an important focus.
“We have to try to do a little better job retaining teachers,” he said. “We lose a lot of teachers after three to five years; either they quit being teachers or they move somewhere else, so that’s a high priority.”
Price added, “We have to keep an eye on finances. What I keep hearing time and time again is the school does a good job watching our tax money, but we’ve got to keep our eye on that.”
Kimbrow said keeping students, teachers and staff safe is an important issue to him.
“As I said in my campaign, safety and security is a high priority,” he said. “The kids, the teachers, and the staff are first and foremost, so I’ll be part of the reviewing those procedures and participating in the process.”
Dave Elledge said one of his top concerns is mental health, an issue that was brought to the national forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“One thing I keep hearing over and over again, talking with principals and teachers and administrators, is mental health,” Elledge said. “That’s something we need to focus on, because that’s a huge issue in our schools for students and staff both.”
Once the new board was sworn in, Ken Davis was elected as the new board president, with Roger Hanner chosen as vice-president.
This year, the Poplar Bluff School District will experience many changes.
Outgoing board president John Scott reflected on his nine years on the board, eight of which were as president, and all the changes he witnessed.
One of the most transformational experiences in the school district was the bond issue that led to school expansion and reorganization, which Scott recalls as a very interesting time.
“I wasn’t necessarily a proponent of the bond increase at the time,” he said.
“My position was to make sure to spend the money wisely,” Scott said. “One of the things I’m most proud of is those projects all came in on time and under budget.
“That’s one thing I promised to do was to make certain they wouldn’t squander the money.”
In retrospect, he now sees that the process and projects were successful.
“To see the Early Childhood Center move out to the Kindergarten Center and some of those longer term projects, I think it’s done very well,” he said.
“The big projects that were controversial at the time, like the new football stadium and the new gymnasium — a lot of people weren’t real high on that, and I was not a huge proponent of that at the time,” Scott said.
“I will say the folks who had that vision were correct, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive public reactions,” he said. “We have become more of a hub because people see that we really have great facilities.”
The other challenge that Scott helped lead the board through was the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Poplar Bluff managed to keep their schools open when many others chose to stay closed.
“I don’t know that people truly will ever know the effort that went into keeping our schools open,” Scott said.
“Once Dr. Dill understood that the board was very adamant that we were going to be open, he fought for our district, and we all did.
“We knew locally that closing school was terrible for the kids,” Scott said. “The risk to the kids was far outweighed by the downside of kids trying to do virtual learning, which we all know does not work.”
“There are a lot of kids who look forward to getting out of the house and seeing their teachers and friends in school,” he said, “so we fought hard, and we had we did a lot of things to keep our schools open.
“It was very difficult, and nobody will ever know all that we did to do it,” he said. “But we managed to put together what became known as the Poplar Bluff model, and people called me from all over the state wanting to know how we did it.
“Our board and our administration were in the right place at the right time when all that happened, and here our education was disrupted about as minimally as it could be.”
It’s hard to reflect on a legacy so soon after one’s service coming to an end, but Scott did offer some insight about his term on the board.
“Over the nine years that I was there, I think that we did transform the school into more of a regional hub where not just teachers want to be but kids want to be,” he said. “Other schools want to learn how we do things.
“When I came on the board, it seemed like people asked a lot of questions, like ‘What’s Cape doing?’ or ‘What’s Jackson doing?’”
“I like it better when Cape and Jackson are asking, ‘What’s Poplar Bluff doing?’ he said. “I feel like we’ve gotten more to that point.
“I loved it one day when I got a call from a board member from another school asking how we were doing something, and I thought, ‘Hey, this is the way I like it,’” he said.
“I like to be on the front of things rather than on the back end of things.”