THIS GUEST OPINION PIECE BY:
Jessica Machado is a freelance writer and former contributor to the Fall River Herald News. She is also a former radio host at WSAR and political blogger.
At last week’s K-8 school committee meeting, Somerset Superintendent Jeffrey Schoonover disclosed that the school district had begun plans to offer a vaccination clinic for students at the middle school this school year. This clinic would be in partnership with Walgreens to help provide and administer the vaccine to students aged 12 and older with parental consent.
I wholeheartedly oppose this plan.
Back in 2017, I began to advocate for the removal of Body Mass Index testing taking place in our schools. The collection of medical data from children should be reserved for the privacy of a doctor’s office and has no business in a classroom setting. While this program has yet to be completely eradicated from our schools, participation is now minimal thanks to a change in policy where opt-out
The Somerset Berkley Regional School Committee approved a 6% budget increase on Tuesday and is moving forward with a plan to redistribute how much the two towns pay to support the regional high school.
The $17.5 million budget, which must be approved by both towns at their Town Meeting, would be a $1.14 million increase over last year’s.
Ronald Tarro, the school’s Director of Business and Finance, said about $1 million of that is to cover increasing costs associated with special education, including tuition and transportation for some special needs students who are sent to out-of-district schools. Required funding for collective bargaining agreements, salaries for a handful of new positions including two new paraprofessionals and a decline in revenue from out-of-district students coming in to Somerset Berkley drove the rest of the increase.
SOMERSET American humorist Josh Billings once wrote: “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.” Thanks to the efforts of Jeffrey Schoonover, Superintendent of Somerset Public Schools and Somerset Berkley Regional High School and School Resource Officer Brendan Hague, the students at Somerset schools will soon understand just what Billings meant.
Hague first learned of the benefits of comfort dogs through a news article he encountered back in 2019, which highlighted the emergence of this resource throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Boonefield Labradors, located in New Hampshire, has donated 11 dogs to police departments throughout New England, according to its website. It is this breeder that will donate a young Labrador retriever to Hague and the Somerset Police Department.
State could make school districts eliminate remote learning in April heraldnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from heraldnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
FALL RIVER Five Fall River area school districts say they’re not interested, at least for the time being, in a new state pooled testing program that will bundle, or pool, weekly nose swabs of students and teachers being tested for COVID-19.
The voluntary program will provide weekly batch testing to groups of asymptomatic students and teachers as a means of encouraging more parents and guardians to send their kids back to the schoolhouse as opposed to remote learning.
Students who have been learning exclusively from home on a remote basis are also eligible to participate.
Gov. Charlie Baker announced the pooled testing strategy on Jan. 8. He described it as a collaborative effort between the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Public Health.