The Pickett County School Board approved changes to the K-8 handbook during Monday night’s meeting.
K-8 Principal Emily Bilbrey said one change focused on forms of student punishments. Bilbrey said the state’s new recess law will not allow the school to take away free time or recess time.
“We’ve changed that around a little bit to where now we are doing things like lunch detention,” Bilbrey said. “So they will have to eat lunch by themselves, maybe in the office, maybe in the classroom, with one of us kind of taking some of that social time away. After-school detention is something we are adding. That’s not something that we have had a lot of in the past.”
Bilbrey said another change, prohibiting energy drinks. Bilbrey said energy drinks became a big issue among K-8 students last year.
“We had students sick because they had guzzled energy drinks,” Bilbrey said. “We had one whose heartbeat was racing one day because he had just downed one, and that was during TCAP testing too, so we just decided to take care of energy drinks from the get-go.”
Bilbrey said any drink that has the word energy on it will be prohibited.
Another change to the handbook is the punishments as part of the cell phone policy. Bilbrey said previously the punishment was confiscating the phone and keeping the phone until the student fully served their after-school time. Bilbrey said the school is not comfortable with keeping phones until the punishments are fulfilled.
“I think the phones are typically owned by parents,” Bilbrey said. “As long as a parent comes and picks it up, the student will still be assigned the consequence from the Warning Board for the first offense, and then, of course, the second offense, five hours of after-school detention. So we just don’t like to keep somebody’s phone up there as our responsibility ot take care of.”
The final change to the handbook was changes to after-school pickup. Bilbrey said parents will be advised to stay in their vehicles while in the student pickup line. Bilbrey said the change is designed to speed up the traffic in the pickup line. Bilbrey said parents who want to stand outside to pick up their children can do so, but will have to park their car in the parking lot.
In other business, the board approved several policy changes on second reading.
The board approved the high school football schedule, junior high basketball schedule, high school golf schedule, high school baseball schedule, and junior high football schedule. All schedules are for the 2025-2026 school year.
The meeting was the first school board meeting for the new Director of Schools, Melissa Robbins.
