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More than 150 Hamblen County students will partake in intense tutoring in the fall due to the new third grade retention law Superintendent Arnold Bunch said at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

During his director’s report Bunch discussed the results of summer school for students who fell in the Below Expectations or Approaching Expectations categories after taking the TCAP tests.

With the 2023-2024 school year approaching, three weeks away, Bunch explained the reality that many rising fourth graders will face in the new school year.

“One of the rules for those students who were below or approaching expectations were they had to have 95% attendance at summer’s school and it was mandatory,” Bunch said. “Those in the approaching category took a retest at the end of summer school to see if they had adequate growth and if they did show growth they then would not have intense tutoring for the fourth grade year.

“We had 109 students tested and we only had 36 students show adequate growth. We now believe where we are at is that we will have 158 students that will need intense tutoring for the entire next year.

“We will be sending letters out to parents for those who are in the below and approaching that made the criteria and for those who didn’t meet the criteria so they know how were are moving. We will send those to the principals early next week so we can get them to the parents as soon as possible.”

Bunch then discussed those parents who chose to appeal their student’s test scores.

“We had 75 appeals submitted to the state to try and get students to not fall into the category having intense tutoring,” Bunch said. “Two of those parents submitted appeals but their students were already proficient and so they didn’t have to get approval.

Two parents submitted appeals but were not eligible to appeal because they were not in the approaching category.

“Of the other 71 that were eligible to appeal, 100% of those were approved. We got the last of those last night and all of 71 were approved.”

With the upcoming year there have been many personal changes within the district Bunch said.

“There are up to 320 personal moves that we have worked through our personal shop,” he said. “We told you before that it would be a bigger year than we historically had.

“We have 104 new employees to the district that have come in this year so that’s quite a bit of influx of talent from other places and we are still working very diligently to fill seats.”

He then announced several leadership changes in the schools.

“We’ve made quite a few leadership changes,” Bunch said. “Dr. Sarah Cooper is now the principal at Russellville and John Watkins is the assistant principal. Dr. Sarah Cates is going to move from Witt to be the Principal at Manley, Heather Drinnon moved from Central Office to be the assistant principal at Manley. Dr. Christy Walker was the assistant principal at Manley and now she will be the principal at Witt. Summer Moore will be moving from Westview over to be the assistant principal at East High. Dr. Lindsey Cochran is going to be the new assistant principal at Fairview-Marguerite. Dr. Chris Sharp is coming out of Greene County to be the assistant principal at Meadowview. And Krista Christian is coming from Lincoln Elementary to be the new Learning Loss and Acceleration Supervisor.”

At the end of the meeting, school board chairperson Carlyon Clawson presented the yearly superintendent evaluation where Bunch received a 9.92 out of 10.

The board members rated the director on six categories, relationships with the board, and relationships with the community, staff and personal relationships, educational leadership, business and finance and personal qualities.

“One of our responsibilities as a board is to select the director of schools and then to have an annual evaluation each year thereafter,” Clawson said. “We have seven members on the board and seven scores we average out and Mr. Bunch scored a 9.92 out of 10 which is an excellent evaluation.”

Based on the evaluation, Roger Greene made a motion to extend Bunch’s contract for another year including a 5% raise. The motion passed unanimously.

In response to the evaluation, Bunch gave credit to the staff at the central office and the school board for his success in the district.

“I want to say that I am humbled by the evaluation and I appreciate everyone’s kind words, but I have not done anything as the superintendent by myself,” he said. “There is a whole team and great group of people that I get the opportunity to work for and who have done a lot of great things over the past year and I greatly appreciate the board and their efforts.”