Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation will pay stipends to special education personnel who qualified yet were excluded from School City of Mishawaka’s (SCM) disbursement of Annual Performance Grant (APG) monies last December. Set to receive the one time stipend are those special education personnel whose employment is shifting from SCM to P-H-M, following the dissolution of Joint Services, the two districts’ cooperative staffing agreement for special education.

 

Annual Performance Grant funds are state dollars intended to reward teachers whose performance is rated as effective or highly effective. P-H-M could not apportion shares of its 2013-2014 APG to the personnel who were employed by SCM, but assigned to work in P-H-M schools. The Indiana Department of Education’s policies stipulate that only the district that employs the personnel can issue the stipend.

 

Joint Services will be officially dissolved on July 1. At that time 57 special education personnel will become employees of Penn-Harris-Madison for the coming 2015-2016 school year. The new division will be known as Exceptional Education to coincide with how the department is known currently within the P-H-M district.

 

In a good will gesture that serves to acknowledge the contributions of this group of educational professionals to student achievement, the P-H-M Board of School Trustees approved stipends at the Board Meeting held Monday, June 22. P-H-M will reward each teacher with a one-time stipend of $1096.96, which is the equivalent of what P-H-M personnel received in the December 2014 APG payout.

 

“We are so happy to provide this group of devoted and hardworking special educators a signing bonus to express how much we value them and their incredible devotion to students,” says Director of Exceptional Education Gena L. Todd. “We look forward to many more years of their exemplary level of service, always striving for excellence for every single student we serve.”

 

Posted June 23, 2015 / 9:00 a.m. EDT