Policy will align expectations across all school activities
In addition to its regular handbooks for students and parents, teachers and so on, that were approved at this month’s school board meeting in Hampton, the district has added a new handbook to its collection. From now on those involved in the school’s extracurricular activities — everything from football to the one act play team — will also have a handbook to guide their conduct and set consistent expectations across all activities.
High School Principal and Athletic Director Carson Klute was the point man on developing the handbook, which he said came out of conversations with students, parents and coaches.
“There was just feedback that said, ‘Well, this sport or this activity did this,’ so this is our attempt to combine, if you will.”
While admitting it is impossible to have the same expectations or forms of discipline across many widely differing activities, Klute said the manual attempts to bring continuity across all those various extracurriculars.
“As I’ve mentioned, there are different nuances with different sports and activities,” he said. “You know, you have three one act play performances, you have 30 volleyball games and eight football games. There’s going to be some differences still, but our idea, especially when it comes to expectations about if someone’s late to practice or they skip practice or a game, etc., what is the standard consequence we can expect across all activities and sports?”
“This was collaborative,” Klute emphasized. “I had sent it to most of our coaches and some activity sponsors, so there’s some give and take with that, because missing a basketball game is a big deal, but you also have 23 others of those potentially. Whereas our football coach, Jereme (Jones) just said, ‘Hey, you know... I’m all for consequences, but missing a football game is a lot bigger just as a percentage.’ And then we tried to balance too, like track, how do you miss half the track meet? Because some kids are doing one event, some do four events.”
Klute said under the new points system, if a student gets four points he or she will have to sit out the entire track meet, a whole basketball game or half a football game.
“And percentagewise, that was about the same,” he said. “It’s not quite the same, but it’s pretty close.”
Klute said formulating the handbook was a collaborative effort not only within the school community but also with other schools in the area.
“I wish I could claim that we were the first to have the idea, but we had talked to several conference schools and they had this point system,” he said. “So I’ll give you an example; if the student misses practice for a reason that’s not excused, that’s one point. And if that student in that particular sport earns up to four points, they miss the next contest, or in football’s case, they miss half a game. Because, like I said, there are way less football games than there are basketball or volleyball games. So then every fourth point, they would miss another contest up to a certain point. So that’s kind of the gist of it. But the whole idea is to kind of solidify everything you do, while it’s not going to be perfect by any means, hopefully it gets more clarity across the activities and sports that we offer.”
Klute said figuring out how to apply the points system to speech and one act was especially tricky because at Hampton they are actual classes.
“So we’re just trying to have common expectations,” Klute said. “I mean it makes everybody’s job easier when (expectations are the same) across all schools in the area. And for instance, we updated our drug and alcohol policy, and we looked at High Plains, Aurora and Giltner’s policies and kind of meshed them so we’d have similar days as well, so one of us wasn’t having one that was way too lenient or too stringent on the kids as well. So it really brings us in line with a lot of the teams we play and the schools that are around us, and then you get continuity across sports and activities as well.”
“We don’t have near the activities that Aurora does, so why not be on the same page?” he asked. “We share. Most of our speech kids do basketball, most of our football kids do basketball and track. I mean why not have the same or similar expectations as much as we can?”
Klute said while the various activities will still have their own unique rules and expectations, those documents should be shorter in the future because of the global guidelines set out in the handbook.
“If you’re a freshman parent and you’ve never had a kid in high school before, I can see how you would think, ‘But wait, in football, they did this; but wait, in volleyball, they did this. Why is it different?’ We talk all the time about we’re under one roof, Pre-K through 12, why not do things as similar as we can to make it easier on everybody?”
“It’s going to look different based on your sport or activity, but our overall expectations will be the same,” Klute continued. “So maybe they have to make up the running that was done at the practice they missed, or maybe they’ll have to have some extra time... If we have 80 percent of the expectations the same and kids and parents only have to adapt at the 20 percent change, that’s a lot easier than, ‘My fall looks different than my winter, which looks different from my spring. So now it’s just the same.”