By Brittany Hanson/Garden Grove Journal
The wheels on the bond are beginning to turn at the Garden Grove Unified School District.
At Tuesday night’s school board meeting, there were updates of what’s going to happen next, as well as an updated policy on cyber bullying approval.
The bond, Measure A, is a $250 million bond that will be put towards the modernization of facilities across the school district. The bond was voted in on June 8 with 63.8 percent approval from the community.
Some of the new footwork involved putting resolutions in place to allow some of the bond money to pay for facilities maintenance projects already put into place before the bond was approved, therefore offsetting project debt.
The school board also approved the use of Colbi Technologies products and services to provide software that allows for the tracking and appropriate accounting of money gained from the bond.
This software system, according to board president Bob Harden, is the only one out there that is made to for building projects to manage multi-year, multi-fund and multi-project situations.
The next question posed was on how to keep the public updated with the happenings with the bond.
“We could maybe put it on the website so that people will know,” said Superintendent Laura Schwalm, “to make sure that people can keep up step by step with what will be happening in the bond approval and scheduling processes.”
The policy revision in relation to cyberbullying was in relation to the Broadband Information Act, which requires schools to educate their students about cyberbullying and appropriate online behavior in relation to social networking sites, chat rooms and other Internet based interactions.
“That’s been an issue that has been in the news and in the press, “ said board member George West. “This will give us some tools to . . . help with this.”
Cyberbullying is a trend that involves the online harassment of individuals via the use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, text messaging and email.
Often, individuals are mocked or insulted personally and sometimes threatened via these means of communication. A recent extreme but not isolated case involved the suicide of 15-year-old Massachussetts teen Phoebe Prince.
Prince was the focus of a group of older students who bullied her as the result of her brief relationship with an upperclassman football player. After three months of severe bullying via text and Facebook, she hung herself.
