Health scare halts board meeting

PALMER — It was going to be a lively school board meeting with a full house but before the school board could get started Wednesday, a medical emergency stopped it short.

Board member Sarah Welton, who was being wheeled down to an ambulance just as the meeting was set to get underway, said Thursday that she’s fine.

“I felt some chest pain and they wanted to check things out,” she said, declining to provide further details, preferring instead to maintain her privacy.

The meeting was delayed until Wednesday and Welton said she plans to attend.

Asked if her chest pains had anything to do with what was going on in the meeting, Welton declined to say, since the board had been meeting in a closed executive session. The agenda for the executive session lists two items — the expulsion of a student and the superintendent’s evaluation and contract.

“It was an executive session, it really isn’t for public consumption,” Welton said. “If I say something that has anything to do with the meeting, I’m in violation.”

In an open session scheduled for after the executive session, the board had been set to discuss its contract for custodial work. School Board President Jim Colver said that in light of the medical emergency it didn’t seem right to go ahead with the meeting.

The contract, currently held by NANA Management, has been a bone of contention at the school district since it was signed in 2006. At one point in the board’s budget deliberation, board members seemed to be on the verge of bringing the contract work back in-house.

The board decided to offer NANA a 90-day extension to its contract, rather than renewing it for a year. NANA rejected that offer. Since then, the district has looked at the possibility of doing the work in-house in the manner it did prior to 2006

The district’s maintenance director said at the board’s last meeting that bringing operations in-house and doing them for the same $5.4 million that NANA has offered would require deep staffing cuts.

At least one school board member, Colleen Hamblin, said at that meeting that she would not support increasing the janitorial budget at the expense of teaching positions or other pieces of the budget.

But exactly how that vote will go down will have to wait for next week. All of the business on the board’s regular meeting agenda, as well as unfinished business in its executive session agenda, has been postponed to Wednesday.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.