SENECA - The Seneca Area School District Board passed a motion at a meeting held on Wednesday, Dec. 18 supporting a statement outlining the mission and vision of the Crawford County Healthy Roots Initiative.

The Healthy Roots Initiative’s statement approved by the board declared the following–

Mission:

Promoting healthy living across the lifespan for all residents. 

Vision:

Crawford County has a culture of wellness where everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy. 

The board in a brief discussion decided it was important for the school district to show support for the vision and agenda of Crawford County Healthy Roots Initiative, a program that is designed to improve the wellness of citizens and is funded by county.

The board also approved supporting a petition of small schools to the WIAA (Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association) designed to make the situation more competitive between the smaller rural schools to ‘smaller’ urban schools by having free and reduced lunches used as a factor in size of schools. The idea is to reduce size of school enrollment by a certain factor based on amount of free and reduced lunches.

Seneca School District Administrator Dave Boland explained the proposal is aimed at addressing the ongoing urban/rural issue, when it comes to the smaller school divisions. Small urban schools typically have a much larger pool of students to draw from than the rural schools. This causes an imbalanced situation in some cases. Is a school of 175 students drawing from a metro population of over one million equally matched with a rural school with very few residents living in the district? 

The free-and-reduced lunch proposal was made because the small urban schools typically don’t have the free-and-reduced lunch numbers that the rural small schools have.

In other business, the Seneca Area School District:

• learned a new van purchased by the district had not yet been delivered, but was expected soon

• agreed the recent holiday music concerts were well-attended and a smashing success 

• conferred the Seneca Area School District Monthly Recognition Award on Phil Davies the K-12 music instructor for the excellent holiday concerts

• learned the CARE group had delivered 300 gift baskets to people in need in the area

• acknowledged the kindness of Design Homes for their donation of winter clothing for students in need of it in the district