School board has first meeting of new school year
By Adam Thomas
Before the Washburn School Board could get down to business this month, the board members had to put on their best smile for the group’s yearbook photo. It took some coercing and a whole lot of luck but after several bursts of the camera’s flash, photographer Deb Torkelson got a picture where the members were both smiling and had their eyes open. With the hardest part of the night behind them, the board meeting was able to commence. Besides taking the group photo, School Counselor Deb Torkelson was also on hand to talk about upcoming ACT testing and new college scholarships. She informed the board that the state has announced it will pay for all juniors to take the ACT on April 28th, but that they were still working out all the details for the organization for such an undertaking. She explained that ACT WorkKeys, a job skills assessment, would be given to high school students planning on entering the workforce straight out of high school. The WorkKeys program is designed to determine the level of workplace readiness teens coming out of high school possess. The scores from both the regular ACT and the ACT WorkKeys will be cornerstones of two new scholarships available to high school seniors this year, the ‘ND Academic Scholarship’ and the ‘ND Career and Technical Scholarship’.
