The Gainesville City School Board announced dates and times for ESPLOST meetings, or "listening sessions," at their work session Tuesday night.
The meetings will be held October 10 at 10 a.m. at Mundy Mill Academy, October 16 at 6 p.m. at Gainesville Middle School, October 24 at 10 a.m. at the Fair Street Neighborhood Center and October 30 at 6 p.m. at Gainesville High School.
The purpose of the listening sessions is to discuss any potential project or projects that will depend on the extension of the Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax for another five years. The listening sessions will gather input and suggestions from the community about how they would like to handle the strong student growth.
"The content for all four meetings will be the same, the questions will be the exact same, we thought we'd give the community four different options to participate," said Superintendent Dr. Jeremy Williams during the work session. "The general idea of how we'll operate it is to break them in to groups of four to six, have a handful or so of questions we will be developing in the next couple of weeks to gain feedback on where we as a district need to head with our programs. From the programs we offer our students then we'll start talking about more of our facilities that are needed to support those facilities and our students."
Also at the meeting, the board received an update on the Aspiring Teachers program, which has a goal of increasing diversity in their workforce, recruiting current paraprofessionals and juniors and seniors at the University of North Georgia, and has four participants out of the goal of 10; as well as approved federal budget amendments.
"These are all increases to our federal revenues and expenditures, this just brings the revenues and expenditures up to current award amounts," said Director of Finance Kathy Pethel at the work session.
The federal budget goes through September, and Williams explained to the newer board members that sometimes there is carryover mid-way through the way. This reflects additional funds received and the L4GA grant.
Additionally, a reminder was announced about the community open house for Enota Elementary is scheduled for Sunday, September 9 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
