Royall has renter for Kendall school

By SARAH PARKER | County Line Reporter

Now closed, Kendall Elementary School would again accommodate children if a local woman’s plans come to pass.

At the Royall School Board meeting Monday, Karinne Overton of Kendall proposed establishing a daycare center, which would encompass only some of the rooms in the school. The balance of the classrooms would be used for storage.

Facing declining enrollment and budget cuts, the school board voted to close the building last spring.

The school district will charge Overton $1,500 per month, though it will heat the building and pick up the tab for water and sewer service, Superintendent Mark Gruen said in an interview Tuesday.

The rent income would cover the school district’s annual upkeep for the building, Gruen added.

Gruen projected that Overton and the district would sign a lease effective Dec. 1.

Royall’s $1.6 million PEP grant

The board began putting into action its recently awarded Carol M. White Physical Education Program grant, a federal allocation of about $1.6 million.

The grant is designed to fund health and fitness objectives and can be used to retool the school district’s physical education curriculum and lunch program, for example, plus the money can go toward fitness equipment.

To meet a requirement that it hire a grant coordinator, the district has run help-wanted advertisements in local newspapers and at www.wisconsin.gov.

In an interview Tuesday, Gruen said his drive to pursue the grant had its origins in his “strong passion for fitness, health and living longer,” though he added that “academics were first.”

Besides Gruen, high school principal Jeff Van Lannen and physical education teachers Marcia Sullivan and Andrew Dahl worked on the grant application.

After school staff had completed the application, the school district recruited a consultant, whose fee the Royall Booster Club paid, to review the application, Gruen said.

To meet the grant objectives, the Royall School District will enlist the help of community partners; e.g., the Kendall Lions Club, the Elroy Lions Club, the Kendall Fire Department, the Elroy Fire Department, Viterbo University, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Western Technical College, Fort McCoy and a host of other entities.

The community partners’ contributions, of which volunteer labor will make up a large part, have an estimated monetary value of $400,000, Gruen said.

As part of the project, the board’s preliminary plan is to create an exercise room in what is now the high school art classroom.

High school art classes would then be taught in the elementary classroom. The district eliminated its elementary art teacher position last year, assigning all K-12 art classes to high school teacher Dane Trodahl.

To serve as a fitness room, the high school art classroom would be remodeled, an expense that wouldn’t be covered by the PEP grant, Gruen said. He suggested that a private donor, a “real friend of Royall,” would cover construction costs.

Lauding the PEP grant, Gruen said at the board meeting Monday, “We know that it’s going to be transformational, that it’s going to be a once-in-a-lifetime piece.”

Other business

• Because fourth- and fifth-graders now attend school in Elroy rather than at Kendall Elementary School, the food-service staff has been overburdened, Gruen said. As a remedy, the board agreed to allocate an additional 30 minutes a day to food-service employee Tracy Miller.

• The school district’s new mission statement is, “Achieving excellence together … whatever it takes!”

A committee consisting of staff and board members devised the mission statement, which will be printed on signs throughout the school buildings.

• The district’s nondiscrimination report, a state Department of Instruction requirement, revealed that the school’s cocurricular programs weren’t evenly targeted to all students; i.e., girls and special-needs students, along with middle-schoolers, have fewer choices.

To fix the imbalances, the board will consider forming a pep club, an activity in which special-needs students can get involved. Additionally, the district may at some point reintroduce the cross-country program, which would be for both boys and girls, plus a coed middle school track program.

The board eliminated the cross-country program several years ago, citing budget cuts and low participation.

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