CAMBRIDGE — The Dorchester County Board of Education voted unanimously to elect board member Sheri Hubbard as its president and board member Talibah Chikwendu as its vice president at a special meeting on Thursday.
Hubbard and Chikwendu will hold these roles until December 2024.
These votes come two weeks after the resignation of board President Mike Diaz and about one month after the resignation of board Vice President Susan Morgan.
“Before we adjourn, I just want to say, as a board, we would like to thank the two board members who recently resigned for their service,” Hubbard said before the end of the meeting. “And we wish them well in whatever endeavors they choose to pursue.”
Currently, Hubbard, Chikwendu and Chris Wheedleton are the sole members of the board. On July 18, Brandy Dawson Cumberland and Christine LaMonica — who were appointed by the Dorchester County Council to fill Diaz and Morgan’s seats — will be sworn in as the District 1 and District 3 board members, respectively.
At the meeting on Thursday, Hubbard said the board welcomes Cumberland and LaMonica and looks forward to working together “to help make Dorchester County Public Schools a place where students are safe and get the best education possible, a place where teachers look forward to coming to work and want to serve their entire careers here, and a place where parents are happy to send their children to us, knowing we will do our all for them.”
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
After electing its new leadership, the board unanimously approved a one-year contract with Transforming Lives for an alternative education program for elementary and middle school students.
The program — which will be housed at The Judy Center at Sandy Hill Elementary School and at the New Directions Learning Academy — will cost the district $950,000, or about $79,000 each month for 12 months. The program will serve a maximum of 48 students at one time.
At the meeting, DCPS Superintendent Jymil Thompson said the district looks at this program as one stop in a student’s education journey. He said it is a place where students can remedy behavior and improve academics before going back into a “regular educational setting.”
Thompson also said the district is looking for a new term to replace “alternative education.”
“We’re going to change the term to something more positive in nature,” he said.
Alternative education has been a hot topic in Dorchester County this past school year.
In June, the Board of Education voted to terminate its more than three-year contract with Vision Quest, an alternative education program for district high schoolers that has been met with criticism from residents since the contract was approved in September. The district had been paying Vision Quest $93,363 per month for services, which would have added up to over $3.3 million over three years.
One day after the vote — and a tense discussion leading up to the vote — Morgan resigned from the board. Morgan was the only board member to vote against terminating the Vision Quest contract.
At the meeting on Thursday, Hubbard said the Vision Quest program will be available to district high school students for the first half of the 2024-2025 school year.
“And then we will make a determination somewhere in that timeframe (of) how to proceed,” she said.
One thing Hubbard likes about the Transforming Lives program for elementary and middle schools is that the professionals from Transforming Lives will train teachers, she said.
“So that eventually we will be able to do this on our own without having to look to a third party,” she said. “So I think that’s a very positive step forward.”
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