Oakdale High School senior Madison Lane was sworn in and took her seat on the Oakdale Joint Unified School District Board of Trustees at the Aug. 13 regular meeting. Sworn in by board president Mike Tozzi, Lane was selected as the student representative to the board for the 2012-2013 school year and will vote on matters before the board, except for personnel matters.
Lane said at the meeting that she plans to “do as much as possible” to be involved in school and the community and looks forward to her role on the school board. She is a competing team member of the OHS Academic Decathlon, and also competes on the OHS Science Olympiad and Model UN teams.
“She’s a very astute young lady, so you can have high expectations. She has high expectations for herself,” said OJUSD Superintendent Marc Malone.
Lane is the daughter of John and Tina Lane of Oakdale and also has a younger sister.
In other business, following closed session, Tozzi said that the board did not take any action but noted that they had an extensive discussion about the Leo Volz scholarship. He said the board is discussing the Volz will and scholarship thoroughly and there will be future discussions.
Also in other business, the board voted unanimously to approve three policy additions and/or changes.
One was a new policy regarding bullying in response to California Assembly Bill (AB) 9 and AB 1156, which are aimed at preventing and acting on student bullying in schools. The bills require that schools adopt a specific bullying policy, amend the definition of bullying, include bullying prevention in the safety plan, that procedures for discipline be defined, and that bullying victims be given priority or additional consideration for interdistrict agreements. The school district has a program already in place called Power of One, which addresses character and alternative dispute resolution, but the bullying policy is more specific.
The other policies have to do with conduct and uniform complaint procedures and tie in with the language of the new bullying policy. The conduct policy update included requirements from AB 9, AB 1156, and AB 746 – which expands the definition of bullying to include cyber-bullying. The uniform complaint procedure update includes requirements from AB 887 and Senate Bill (SB) 559, which expand the bases of discrimination to include genetic information, gender expression, and gender identity, and a revision of informing complainants about procedure details when filing complaints.
The next regular meeting of the OJUSD Board of Trustees will be at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 10 at Oakdale City Council Chambers, 277 N. Second Ave.
