By Tom Gilchrist
For The Advertiser
CASS CITY — Classes at Cass City Junior/Senior High School will start and end five minutes earlier beginning Jan. 6, as administrators try to improve efficiency following dismissal of students there.
Currently, classes at the Junior/Senior High, 4868 N. Seeger St., end three minutes before classes are dismissed at Cass City Elementary School, 4805 Ale St.
“The high-school kids sit there and wait while our buses go down to our elementary school and pick up our elementary kids, and then come back,” said Cass City Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Hartel.
“So there’s a 15-minute wait outside (the high school), and it’s just a bunch of confusion, with kids all over the place,” Hartel said. “It’s just a recipe for bad news and for something to happen.”
Hartel informed Cass City’s Board of Education at the board’s Dec. 16 meeting that — starting Jan. 6 — classes will start at 8:05 a.m. and end at 2:58 p.m. at the Junior/Senior High.
Currently, class starts at 8:10 a.m. and ends at 3:03 p.m. at that school.
Under the new schedule, buses will pick up Junior/Senior High students first and then travel to the elementary school to pick up students. Cass City Elementary’s start and dismissal times will remain at 8 a.m. and 3:06 p.m., respectively.
“We’re hoping the five-minute difference in dismissal times (at the Junior/Senior High) is going to help alleviate a lot of kids just standing around for quite a lengthy time after school,” Hartel said.
In other discussion at the school board’s Dec. 16 meeting
See SCHOOL A10
, board member Jeff Loomis addressed district employee Randy Schuette — who maintains school grounds — about improving safety for spectators at Cass City High School’s softball/baseball complex.
The softball and baseball diamonds are built near each other and Loomis suggested workers could place a net above the area between the fields to cover spectators like a canopy.
“Whenever I go down there for a game, it always seems like it comes (very) close to somebody just getting nailed by a ball coming from the opposite field,” Loomis said. “I wonder about actually going over top of (spectators) with (a net) so the balls actually land on top of it.”
Schuette said he improved the softball-diamond backstop so “it’s now twice as tall and twice as wide as it used to be,” and that several people have told him that has made the spectator area safer.
“The issue with trying to have some sort of canopy type of thing is it would have to be designed where it could be taken down for the winter because otherwise the winter would just destroy it,” Schuette said. “The snow and ice would hang on it.”
Loomis responded that his suggestion of a canopy net is “just an idea,” adding “I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”
Hartel told The Tribune that Schuette’s expansion of the softball-diamond backstop has helped curtail the problem.
“We’ve had some people hit with foul balls from the softball field; you get hit by a softball and it still hurts,” Hartel said.
In other developments, Cass City district leaders on Dec. 16 suspended a 16-year-old 10th-grade student at Cass City High School. The student will be suspended until the end of the current semester on Jan. 20, and won’t be allowed to return to school except to take tests and exams, according to Hartel, who didn’t specify the youth’s behavior issue.
“I can’t get into it but it didn’t involve violence or weapons or guns,” Hartel said. “The three main (concerns) are sexual assaults, weapons and threats of violence and so forth, and there were none of those things.”
In other action Dec. 16, the school board voted to accept students from nearby school districts under the state’s Schools-of-Choice legislation, agreeing to take students from kindergarten through 10th grade but not students in 11th and 12th grades.
Board President Craig Bellew explained the reasons why the board doesn’t want to take students in 11th or 12th grades.
“At certain times, there are seniors who come over and they get booted out of another school, and we don’t want that here,” Bellew said. “Also, there are the superior students — the ones who arrive here with a high grade-point average — and they only attend school here for one semester or one year, and (could) be eligible for … valedictorian, and that’s not fair to our program, either.”