School board officers elected

Monday night, Don Gee and Brad James were reinstated to the Creston School Board following certification of Nov. 7 election results. Both were incumbent candidates running unopposed.

In addition to Gee and James taking their oath of office, the school board voted on board positions. Galen Zumbach was elected president, nominated by James. Zumbach has been a member of the board since 2011.

Amanda Mohr was elected as vice president, nominated by Sharon Snodgrass. Billie Jo Greene will serve as secretary and treasurer, a role newly combined. James was elected as Union County representative and Dee as Adams County representative, both nominated by Mohr.

Other annual business conducted included approving the Creston News Advertiser as the school district’s official newspaper, Iowa State Savings Banks and PMA Financial Network as financial institutions to be the depository of all district funds and Ahlers & Cooney Law Firm as the district legal council.

In other school board news...

The elementary school received its results from the statewide survey on conditions for learning. The survey is annual and anonymous, focusing on a variety of topics including student relationships, school rules and student safety.

According to the survey, the largest growth from the previous year was physical safety.

“[The result] at first really caught me by surprise,” elementary principal Casey Tanner said. “With all the false alarms, even with the swatting from last year, that really kind of stuck in my brain that, if I was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old, that’s something that physically I would worry about, so it was kind of shocking to me that physical safety was our biggest growth.”

However, Tanner believes the communication between staff and students regarding the various drills and false alarms made the students feel safer and well taken care of.

The area that needed the greatest improvement was emotional safety. Tanner explained this is normal, usually the lowest scoring area throughout the state.

“It’s kind of the one little outlier that, it’s an interesting one when you look at the scoring,” Tanner said. “It asks the student if you’ve even seen somebody get called a name in the past month… If you mark anything other than a zero, we get a negative score.”

However, this is a topic the elementary school is constantly working on.

“We just try to point out and target being respectful to other people and the staff as we go back to consciousness of mind and making classrooms feel like a safe place,” Tanner said. “We have routines and procedures in place that help those students learn to be nice human beings, but that’s one that we always try to improve on.”

The English learning department has had students coming in and out of the district recently. ECC principal and director of English learning services Callie Anderson explained this is larger due to the end of funding for factory workers.

“Our families are very transient right now,” Anderson said. “There was a big rush into Creston about three months ago from families that received jobs in a neighboring community, but there was no housing, so the factory put them up in our hotels here, but the funding was only for three months, and these families are scrambling looking for homes.”

The district is currently teaching about 30 English learner students speaking a variety of languages. Anderson said communication can be hard, as in the Spanish speakers alone there are four different dialects. However, resources like ParentSquare have been helpful.

“We have been very fortunate with our new ParentSquare system that it can translate into multiple dialects,” Anderson said. “The key is knowing which one. All of our forms, we’re able to translate for our new families. We’ve been translating forms for our new daycare center, because we’re serving the same families.”