The Bell County Board of Education declared facility emergencies due to roof damage caused by hail at Bell High, Bell Central and the Bus Garage at their regular meeting last Tuesday. During a special called meeting on Monday, they amended that declaration to include hail damage at the roof at Page School Center.

They approved a resolution authorizing the Bell County School District Finance Corporation to issue revenue bonds for a total of nearly $5 million to replace the roofs at all four buildings.

“This was all caused by hail damage,” Superintendent Brian Crawford said.

Finance Director Steve Silcox said he was hopeful that work could start on the roof replacements within two weeks.

Board member Larry Elliott said he was concerned about safety with having the roofs worked on while school was in session.

Silcox said they had little choice because the roofs are currently leaking.

“When they redone those roofs originally, it happened during school and we didn’t have any issues,” he said. “We had designated areas where they stored the materials and designated areas where they lifted the materials up on the roofs. . . we were able to manage it last time.”

Board chairman Doug Ramsey added that they couldn’t wait for an entire school year to replace the roofs.

Silcox said it would take about two full months for the new roofs to be completed

“This time all of the insulation has to come off because it’s completely saturated,” he said.

The emergency declarations and resolution to issue bonds all passed unanimously.

Separate BG-1s were approved for each roof replacement as a separate project.

In addition to approving the roof replacements, the board approved pay applications for work completed on various other projects throughout the district and the BG-5 for the Yellow Creek HVAC project.

Silcox said the work at Yellow Creek has been completed.

In his report to the board, Crawford spoke about the administrators’ retreat he had hosted last month at Southeast Community College in Middlesboro.

“I thought it went really well this year, we used the community room over at Southeast. We met over there and took care of all the things they have done in the past away from here,” he said.

Board chairman Doug Ramsey asked why they didn’t go to Lexington.

“To be honest with you, I talked to all of the principals and local administrators here and everybody just felt like they would be better off to stay here,” Crawford said. “I did want to get them away from their offices and get them over there so they would feel like they didn’t have to answer every phone call.”

Ramsey said he had always felt like going away on the retreats was a waste of money that had to be spent on hotels.

“It was a good meeting. It was productive,” Crawford said. “It ran a little long, but we were able to get everything done.”

Jonathan Defevers told the board that everything was up and running with the district’s new ParentSquare communications app. He and Chris Warren were setting up a meeting so all the teachers, coaches and administrators could be trained on exactly how to use the new program for communicating with students on July 30 or 31.

Crawford explained that ParentSquare was by far the most user friendly option the district found to get in compliance with SB181 that requires all teacher and staff communication with students to be done on an app so the correspondence can be saved and pulled up if requested by parents.

“We looked at three different ones and this was the best one for the district,” he said.

“By far it was hands-down more intuitive and more in line with what we needed to meet the senate bill,” Warren said. “All of the districts around us are using it — Casey, Knox, Middlesboro, Pineville, Harlan City. We may have parents with one kid at Yellow Creek and one at Middlesboro High School so they won’t have to use two different platforms. Also, if a kid comes to us from Middlesboro or another district their parents will already know (ParentSquare).”

Defevers said a big deciding factor was that ParentSquare is the parent company for Remind, which most teachers and parents in the district are used to using.

“We’ve got a waiver form in place in the district for coaches that will allow parents to give them permission to communicate with their kid directly through text or a phone call,” he said.
Crawford said each individual coach has to have a waiver signed by the parent or they can’t use texting or any form of social media to contact the players.

In a separate matter, the board voted to keep the current board policy in place regarding employee dress and appearance as is. The current employee dress code prohibits visible tattoos and facial piercings.

Crawford said the administrators had asked him to bring it up to the board to see what their feelings were about possibly making changes.

“I told them that I realize that it’s hard to hire young teachers who don’t have those things, but if we’re going to have it as a policy I want it enforced,” he said. “It’s a serious issue and it’s going to get worse with hiring new people. . . Honestly, I’m indifferent on this. I want you all to make the decision.”

After some discussion the board determined that changing the policy to allow some tattoos or some piercings would lead to an untenable situation of having to draw a subjective line of what tattoos or piercings qualified as appropriate or not. They agreed it was best to leave the policy in place as it is currently written.

“If we were like Fayette or Jefferson counties where we were short 300 teachers, then you might say, ‘we need to loosen up certain qualifications,’” Board member Wayne Mason said. “But I think as far as our hiring we’re probably pretty stable and not losing too many applicants.”

In other business, the board:

— agreed to set age requirement for substitute teachers, they must be at least 21 years old to sub at the high school and at least 18 to sub at the elementary level;

— approved the 2025-25 Elgin Academic Agreement to allow all schools in the district who choose to accept Elgin’s offer of a reading program, a reading coach, principal support and MAP testing. Last year Yellow Creek and Lone Jack were the only two schools in the district to contract with the Elgin Foundation and Crawford said they posted the top two reading scores in the district;

— approved the Partners for Rural Impact Memorandum of Understanding for AmeriCorps, the Save the Children contract and the UNITE Tutoring Agreement for the 2025-26 school year;

—  approved the second reading of 2025-26 KSBA Policy updates.