The Culver School Board has formally accepted Superintendent Vicki McGuire’s resignation. She’s leaving Culver to take over as superintendent at the Eastern Hancock school corporation in Central Indiana.
During Monday’s meeting, school board vice president Jim Wentzel thanked McGuire for her two years at Culver, “Vicki, good luck. Thank you very much. I know you’ll be happy where you’re going. It’ll be closer to home. I’m sure you’re going to do great down there, just like you did great here, so thanks for helping us get our feet on the ground here and get things going in the right direction because it has been improvements, and we greatly appreciate that.”
McGuire also had the chance to say goodbye to the school board and others involved with the Culver Community Schools Corporation. “I want to say thank you for the opportunity,” she said. “Good luck to everybody. Chuck, if you ever need anything, you know how to text me. And Shelly, thanks for all you’re doing. Thank you to everybody, all of you.”
Effective today, Director of Operations Chuck Kitchell takes over as interim superintendent. That makes him the third interim superintendent appointed at area school corporations in recent weeks, following other superintendent resignations at North Judson-San Pierre and Oregon-Davis. Additionally, Knox Community Schools Superintendent A.J. Gappa was notified earlier this year that his contract will not be renewed. Kitchell says there hasn’t been any discussion at the board level of administrative consolidation, but it may become a possibility in the future, as Culver Schools looks at potential cost-saving measures.
For now, the school board’s next step is to hire a permanent superintendent. For that purpose, they put together a committee consisting of school board members Jack Jones, Ken VanDePutte, and Ryan Sieber.
This change in administration is also providing the school corporation with an opportunity to update its Administration Guidelines. The corporation’s attorney Jeff Houin says the changes are meant to bring certain rules in line with the administrative positions that currently exist. “As we started preliminarily talking about the process to replace Dr. McGuire, we discovered that the guideline was outdated and listed within the chain of command the principal of Monterey Elementary and the principal of Culver Middle School,” Houin says. “This applies if the superintendent is absent, who makes decisions and going down the line.”
He says the positions that no longer exist are being removed from the chain of command, leaving the high school principal, then elementary school principal in charge, in the absence of the superintendent. The updates were brought to a first reading during Monday’s meeting.
