Three major policy changes were approved Tuesday by the Kingfisher Board of Education.

The board made the moves during their final meeting of the 2018-19 fiscal year and they will affect lunches, credits and free passes to sporting events.

The school credits will involve athletics.

Currently, a student enrolled in athletics receives .25 credit per semester, or two credits if they are enrolled for four years.

The new policy bumps it up to .5 credit per semester, or one for the entire year.

“This was the only course in the school that was like this,” said high school principal Todd Over-street.

Overstreet and Superintendent Jason Sternberger noted multiple student-athletes who were in jeopardy of falling short of necessary credits for graduation because of taking college classes and the low number of credits offered by athletics.

“I searched our manual and I can’t find where it’s even in there,” Overstreet said. “Nobody even knows when it began, just that it’s always been this way.”

The board also approved charging all students $10 for an activity pass.

Current policy offered free passes to athletes in grades 7-12 while students in grades 6 and below were charged $25.

“We have some students we give passes to that say they’re going to play soccer in the spring, but they never end up playing a sport,” Overstreet noted. “This way we can receipt and track these passes and require them for admission.”

Overstreet said the passes will have the students’ names on them. If they’re not presented at time of admission, it was agreed the student should be charged to enter the event.

While the $10 is an increase for athletes in grades 7-12, it’s a $15 decrease for the younger students.

Sternberger said the policy isn’t a deterrent or a tool to generate revenue.

“We want as many kids to come to the events as possible,” he said. “But we also don’t want people continuing to take advantage (of our current system).”

Money collected from the passes will go into the athletic director’s fund.

Board members asked about families who can’t afford to purchase passes for all their children.

“We have different funds available to assist them,” Overstreet noted.

The board also took on Overstreet and Sternberg-er’s recommendation to open campus for juniors and seniors at lunch.

“Last semester we had approximately 160 juniors and seniors who were either enrolled in Career Tech or college classes that come and go at that time anyway,” Overstreet said. “Those numbers keep going up, so I would like to try this for a year.”

The campus has been closed at lunch since the early 2000s unless parents checked out their children for the lunch period.

Freshmen and sophomores who are checked out in the future have to be taken from the campus by a parent and cannot leave with a junior or senior, Overstreet said.

Certain exceptions could be made if the upperclassman and underclassman are siblings, he added.

The final wording for all three policies will be added to the handbook, Sternberger said.

After a 40-minute executive session in which board members voted on a salary increase for certified personnel (see story on Page 1), the board also moved to hire Tracy Stephenson as a sixth grade teacher.

In other actions Tuesday, the board approved:

• Renewing the Qualified Zone Academy Bond (QZAB) lease-purchase agreement that began in 2015 for $900,000, a move that’s required each fiscal year;

• Declaring a list of 10 items from the Gilmour Elementary library as surplus;

• Fundraising requests by band, baseball, FFA, KMS student council, the KMS student account, special education and vocal groups, all of which also took place last year;

• A service agreement with Opaa Food Management of Oklahoma for food service and a contract with Oklahoma Schools Risk Management Trust for school insurance, a policy that costs $204,294.