By Angie Prencipe
INDIANA — The Indiana School board voted to appoint a new district superintendent at its meeting Monday, April 30.
Michael Vuckovich was voted by school board to be appointed as the next district superintendent.
During its meeting, the Indiana school board held a special session and unanimously elected Vuckovich as the next Indiana District superintendent.
Vuckovich said that he is in agreement with the Indiana Area School District overhauling its website and updating it to a new design.
According to board members, Indiana residents had issues with the website and said it was difficult to find event lists. Even sports playoff schedules were difficult to locate on the current platform.
He joined the meeting of the school board’s Outreach Committee to discuss this idea and shared his background in working with school websites.
Vuckovich currently works as substitute superintendent at the Greater Johnstown School District. Part if his job is that he is in charge of the district’s landing page online.
He agreed with Indiana’s upgrading to a site designed with the same software he currently uses in Johnstown. The software is also the same one used in the region by the Altoona and Richland School districts.
Vuckovich offered suggestions to the school board on how a school district could best use various social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to get message out to various faucets of its audience.
He also recommended using pop-ups to promote current school district news and events before website visitors get to see the homepage of the website.
Vuckovich first official day in office will be Sept. 1, at the beginning of a new school year.
During a question-and-answer session on April 11 at the Indiana Senior High School auditorium, search consultants introduced him as the main candidate for the superintendent position.
During that session, Vuckovich had said he would spend his first month on the job listing to the people of the school district to get an understanding of how the Indiana community and school district operates.
The school board also hired Vuckovich as an assistant superintendent for strategic planning and staffing starting on July 1. This will give him more time to get accustomed to Indiana and how the district operates.
During the question-and-answer session, Vuckovich introduced himself to the audience as being a data-driven analyst and a decision-maker with a firm management style.
He also said said he was a believer in offering digital learning as a choice and an advocate for personalized learning plans that do not follow a traditional one-size-fits-all teaching model.
By the time Vuckovich will join the administration at Indiana, the district will have adopted a fiscal year budget. He said that Great Johnstown, he did a lot of work to bridge a deficit, including closing a school, increasing class sizes and cutting programs.
Vuckovich said that he thinks the commonwealth has short-changed public education by not meeting the state mandate to provide one-half of the funds required to operate the schools in the state.
School board member Terry Kerr praised the search consultants for recommending Vuckovich for the superintendent job, saying that they work closely with the school board to find the best possible candidate for the job.
The school set Vuckovich’s salary at $135,000 on a unanimous vote. The terms of his contract were not available at the time of the meeting.
During the school board meeting, several head coaches were hired for various Indiana district sports.
All coaches were approved by the board on a 7 to 2 vote in favor of hiring them =.
The board hired Brandon Overdorff as the varsity football coach for the Indian’s. Overdorff was formers the Purchase Line High School football coach.
Matthew Reed was hired as the high school’s head golf coach.
Dana Kundla was hired as the head coach for the girl’s volleyball team.