Posted: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 1:41 pm

Revising policy will be the topic Thursday night at the Rutherford County Board of Education meeting.

The board will review policy changes stemming from changes to state law and policy, as well as just clarifying existing board policy.

To be implemented, new policies must be approved on two readings.

The following policies will be considered:

• Policy 3.206 – Community Use of School Facilities
Committee will consider whether to allow certain types of for-profit businesses (such as children dance studios) to use school buildings. As of now, only non-profits can use schools.

• Policy 4.600 – Grading System
Two items need to be cleaned up in relation to the new state academic standards. They both deal with how semester averages are used.

• Policy 6.409 – Child Abuse/Neglect
Policy needs to be adjusted because of a new state law about reporting requirements for child abuse/neglect that happens at school.

A new state law says schools have to report it to parents (when it involves their children). The previous law did not make this mandatory, even though RCS does report alleged abuse to parents.

Policy 1.808 – Registered Sex Offenders
This is a change based on a new Attorney General’s opinion about when registered sex offenders are permitted at school.

Previously, registered sex offenders could only come on campus to drop off or pick up their children. The new opinion saws that can come on campus for parent activities when there are school officials present, such as parent-teacher conferences, performances, etc.

Policy 5.109 – Evaluation
This is a cleanup item from the policy manual that was adopted last year. A deadline date for teacher evaluations was not included in the Tennessee Schools Boards Association policy.

• Adoption of new policy regarding employee participation in recreational and/or
fitness activities
This policy is to clarify that unless instructed to do so, employees should not participate in recreational/fitness activities during work hours and that worker’s comp will not cover them if they do and are injured. For example, during field day competitions at schools, teachers don’t need to be doing the sack race.

• Policy 6.204 – Attendance of Non-Resident Students
When the board first adopted a policy about no longer accepting students from out-of-county, a list of students from out-of-county who were already attending was generated. That list is no longer applicable because those students have long since graduated but a reference to it is still in the policy. That reference will be removed.

• Policy 6.314 – Corporal Punishment
This one may be deferred to a future policy meeting. Most school districts in the state have adopted the TSBA policy on corporal punishment.

Part of the language says that principals may take into account things such as gender, size, and emotional wellbeing, and so on when deciding how much corporal punishment to give.

Some rights group has filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights against any district who uses the TSBA policy because on the surface it could be construed as being discriminatory.

TSBA has contacted OCR to work a way to fix the language so that it is not discriminatory and once that is done, TSBA will send out the new language for school districts to adopt. TSBA has suggested deleting that entire portion of the policy, but OCR has not responded yet.

The board may defer action on this policy until it hears back from OCR.