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Wlaf1450By Charlotte Underwood
JACKSBORO, TN (WLAF)- Campbell County Board of Education members met on Tuesday afternoon for a policy committee meeting, approving several policies for the 2026-2027 school year. These included the attendance policy and the homebound instruction policy, along with multiple others. These policies then went on to the full board for approval. The majority of these policy changes came handed down by the Tennessee School Board Association. According to Jamie Wheeler, Chairman of the Policy committee, some were minor changes and others had been redone.
The alternative education policy was drafted by Secondary Education Supervisor Chris Enix. He was asked to briefly explain the change which dealt with online education opportunities and virtual instruction.
“A big part of our conversation has been opening our online school and having an online option for students. There have been a variety of reasons for that. When students come to the office and want to go to home school, they don’t say they don’t like their teacher, they say they want more options and that provides more flexibility for students. One of the things we were looking at is to make our online school North Cumberland a full online school, which is still an option. However, when we looked into it, and we had a lot of conversations with the state, which has been very helpful with this whole process. When you open up an online virtual school as an LEA, it has to operate just like a brick-and-mortar school, just in the online world. Something we were concerned about, among other things, is that any students that wanted to enroll in the district, we had to let them. We would not be able just to recapture home school students or other students that had gone to other online schools. Our concern is that we would exacerbate the problem and lose students to online and to be quite frank, it would just make the problem more challenging because those students would be pulled from Campbell County High School, reducing the students and reducing our ability to staff it. So, what we looked at was operating an online pathway through our alternative school, so that students who qualify would have a pathway online. This policy revised the alternative policy to add that. It would be a much more limited number of students who would qualify and there would be a more selective process to enroll under East LaFollette Learning Academy in the Alternative program…This would allow us to accomplish both of our goals to retain students potentially that we would lose to home school or other programs, but to also not be so restrictive with all the requirements that are within the state of Tennessee for an online school,” Enix said.
Another policy that was approved was for the meeting time for the Board of Education. This was approved to keep meetings at 5:30 pm throughout the year.
Charter School renewal is a brand-new policy that was handed down by TSBA, the next policy was for fiscal management goals and that policy has been completely redone, according to committee chairman Jamie Wheeler.
Other new policies approved included a policy on extracurricular activities along with several others.
On the grading system policy, the only change is some difference in dual enrollment and how they are “weighted.”
“They had some Advance Placement classes that were weighted differently, so they have made changes. The AP classes will still be weighted more,” according to Wheeler.
The promotion and retention policy had minor changes, according to Wheeler.
Equal opportunity employment policy had some changes, as did the application for employment. These changes had to do with electronic verification.
Teachers on a 10-month contract will no longer get 10 days of sick leave. That goes down to eight days. Board member Brandon Johnson said he wanted to clarify that this was handed down by the state, not the local school board.
According to Director Charlotte McCoy, this gives certified teachers a little more flexibility on their days off.
The policy change gives certified personnel and professional teachers four personal days, instead of two, so no days are actually lost, according to McCoy.
There were also updates to multiple other policies including the admission of suspended or expelled students, emergency allergy response plan, the cyber bullying policy, among others.
“The state did a lot of changes,” Wheeler said.
The committee approved all these changes unanimously to go on before the full board for approval. (WLAF NEWS PUBLISHED-07/15/2026-6AM)