With state funding for the 2016-2017 year settled in July and the budget passed earlier this month, the Baldwin City school board approved at a special meeting Wednesday a teachers contract for the coming year. Superintendent Paul Dorathy said teachers were given a raise averaging 1.79 percent. Raises of 1.79 percent were also given to administrators and support staff, he said.

The one exception was for bus drivers, who received a raise from $12.50 to $16 an hour. That reflects the district’s difficulty in filling its bus driver positions, Dorathy said. The district started the year with Russell Harding, district transportation director, driving one route, and it has no substitutes this year.

The 1.79 percent raises were what the district could offer this year with its budget frozen the past three years, Dorathy said. On the plus side, the district was able to avoid cutting back its teacher corps on support staff, he said.

The district had a head-count enrollment of 1,429 students on Thursday, Dorathy said. That was 43 students more than 1,386 recorded on the official state enrollment census date of Sept. 20, 2015, but Dorathy said he was uncertain if Thursday’s numbers included the peer students in the early-childhood PEP program, who would not be counted in the official state enrollment. Either way, it appears the district would report enrollment growth this year after a slight dip a year ago.

Although its enrollment total won’t affect this year’s state funding, which is frozen at the level the district received three years ago after the Kansas Legislature scuttled the existing state school funding formula, it is a concern going forward should the Legislature reinstate the old formula or something like it, Dorathy said. The other big unanswered question about future state funding is the Kansas Supreme Court’s looming decision of constitutional adequacy of K-12 education funding, he said.

The Eudora Public Library’s numbers for summer reading and lunch programs make the case for a new library, said Lindsey Sanchez, the library’s children’s librarian. The lunch program served 1,200 children during its two-day-a-week, 12-week run. It benefited from $650 in community donations and the help of 120 volunteers.
Plans are already underway to add another day to the program next summer and to name a volunteer coordinator to run the program, Sanchez said.

A total of 562 young readers registered for the children’s summer reading program, and an additional 138 signed up for teen reading, Sanchez said. There were 4,500 books and 90,000 pages read and 32 summer events, drawing 3,228 attendee, she said.

The Baldwin City Public Library will be the host of three events to celebrate its centennial and that of the Pulitzer Prize with its selection by the Kansas Humanities Council to participate in the 2016 Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative.

The first of the events will be a panel discussion Tuesday at the library, featuring 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer and Baker University graduate, Harold Jackson, Kansas Public Radio Statehouse bureau chief Stephen Koranda and Dave Helling of the Kansas City Star. Baker mass media professor Joe Watson will moderate the discussion “Today’s Media in an Election Year: Information, Insight and Finding Truth.” Jackson will also be the speaker at Baker’s opening convocation at 11 a.m. Tuesday in Rice Auditorium on the Baldwin City campus.

The other events in the series include the writing workshop “Flying through the Alphabet: A Poet’s Tools,” led by Baker assistant professor of English Marti Mihalyi at 7 p.m. Sept. 27, and a presentation by University of Kansas professor emeritus Jack Wright at 7 p.m. Oct. 25. of selected scenes from a one-man theatrical production “The Sage of Emporia,” about William Allen White, the state’s first Pulitzer Prize winner.

Eudora High School will have an open house at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the school. Parents are asked to bring their students’ class schedule and meet at 6:30 p.m. in the EHS Performing Arts Center.