Verona Press The
Thursday, February 28, 2019 • Vol. 54, No. 41 • Verona, WI • Hometown USA • ConnectVerona.com • $1.25
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Verona Area School District
Verona Area School District
Four attendance options remain Committee asks to see how plans would affect middle school SCOTT GIRARD AND KIMBERLY WETHAL Unified Newspaper Group
Photo by Scott Girard
Vaishnav Kumar, a Verona Area High School junior, works in the lab at Promega’s BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute. The class he takes there along with other area high school students is part of the Youth Apprenticeship program, through which he has a job at a UW-Madison laboratory.
Career experience Apprenticeship program helps students get early start
Area High School building and finds his crew. It’s around 1 p.m., and the VAHS senior already has a half-day of classes at the current high school under his belt. Now, it’s SCOTT GIRARD time for his youth apprenticeship and learning about Unified Newspaper Group the construction industry Five days a week, Isaac the most direct way possiSanderson walks onto the ble: being there. “I’m just a hands-on job site for the new Verona
guy,” Sanderson told the Press. “I’ve always worked on stuff since I was young. “It’s awesome.” He and the other eight s t u d e n t s i n t h e VA H S Youth Apprenticeship Program Pathways this year are required to both find an employer and take classes related to their career path as part of the program. Their work is paid, a big
benefit some of the students involved pointed to, and it’s during the school day. “ I t ’s k i n d o f d i s a p pointing that not that many people know about it,” said junior Vaishnav Kumar, who takes classes at Promega and works at
Boys hockey goes to state Page 9
job posting open until the right person is found. Verona is looking for a successor to Jeff Mikorski, whom the Common Council asked to resign in January, five days after starting its annual review process. His lone completed performance evaluation, for 2017, pointed out deficient communication in several areas. The council reviewed
The
Verona Press
but did not vote on a job description for the position prepared by human resources coordinator Mitch Weckerly and requested one adjustment Monday, Feb. 25 – requiring knowledge and understanding of state and local laws. Mikorski came to Verona from Morgantown, W. Va., which, among other differences, relied on business taxes to fund its
government, rather than property taxes. The council also changed the previously discussed time frame of 30 to 45 days. Both suggestions came at the behest of Ald. Evan Touchett (Dist. 4), who pointed out that he is in the midst of hiring at the engineering firm he works for and has had the
Turn to Hiring/Page 13
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The hiring of the next Verona administrator has no specified end date. To reduce the risk of a limited talent pool or having to reopen the process and extend it, as happened in 2016, the city will set two preliminary review dates – the first being April 7 – but keep the
Inside
Inside
Admin hiring process will be ‘ongoing’ Verona Press editor
Turn to Attendance/Page 14
Turn to Apprenticeship/ Page 8
City of Verona
JIM FEROLIE
Before recommending new attendance boundaries for elementary schools to the school board in the next few weeks, the committee that’s been studying the issue since last fall wants to see how they would be affected by middle school boundaries. The complex decision involves several competing factors, including ensuring as much racial and socioeconomic diversity as possible, keeping neighborhoods together, busing efficiently and minimizing disruptions to existing students. No
matter what, it seems, there will need to be compromises beginning in fall 2020. The committee narrowed its options from six to four at Monday’s meeting, its first since Jan. 8 after two meetings were postponed because of inclement weather. Two of those are variations of one of the plans, known as Option E and E2, both of which would direct much of the growth over the next decade to two schools in anticipation of a future referendum. One is a variant of one of the first maps the committee looked at, known as Option A1, which, broadly speaking, focuses more on keeping neighborhoods together and students attending the closest school. The other, Option D, would split grade levels at two schools. Two options that had been