Pleasant Valley’s Bears Academy has its first principal.

The Pleasant Valley School Board approved the assignment change of Jason VanVoorhis from principal of the middle school to principal of the Bears Academy Thursday night at its regular meeting. His salary will be $111,353 and the position change will be effective July 1.

Three school board directors, Todd Kresge, Delbert Zacharias and Teresa Greggo voted against the move. Director Michael Galler was absent from the meeting.

“I have no problem with Mr. Van Voorhis,” said Director Todd Kresge. “I just can’t wrap my head around the position.”

Greggo said, “What are we really doing to bring students back into the brick and mortar. That’s what really need to focus on. That’s the best education, the best opportunity.”

School board director Melanie ZIpp said, “There are students that - no matter how great we are - are not going to come back to brick and mortar, and they’re going to stay in cyber. … If they have to be cyber, we want someone who can focus on making them our cyber.”

The idea for a principal position for the Bears Academy first came before the school board March 9. It was removed from the agenda.

The proposal included the creation of the principal position and moving Kendal Askins, principal of the intermediate school to the middle school, and Sabrina Albright, assistant principal at the elementary school to principal of the intermediate school.

Instead, only the new position was officially created at the March 23 school board meeting.

Superintendent James Konrad said he wanted to create the position in order to grow the district’s own cyber academy and bring back students who have left for other cyber charter schools.

The school district has to turn over funding it receives from the state for each student to the charter schools for each district student attending a charter school.

“There’s efforts and discussions being had with the board and also with our administration team to figure out what are the resources that are necessary to reduce the $6 million going out of the district, that is actually tax payer money, going to charter schools,” Konrad said at the March 9 meeting.

Konrad has overseen some changes to the district’s cyber academy since coming to school district in December 2021. The name was changed from Pleasant Valley Cyber Academy to Bears Academy. The contract with VLN Partners LLP for cyber curriculum and management was ended, and Seneca Valley School District’s cyber program was brought in, which uses a curriculum by Edgenuity. The program also gives students the ability to attend classes both in a school building and take an online course or two. And a teacher and guidance counselor were assigned to the Bears Academy.

Since the beginning of the school year, the number of students in Bears Academy has increased from 123 in September to 288 as of April 13. The number of PVSD students in outside charter and cyber charter schools has also increased from 370 in September to 383 in April.

In addition to Zipp, several school board directors voiced their support for the Bears Academy principal position including President Susan Kresge, Diane Serfass, Robert Clark and Norman Burger.

Burger said, “I looked at the other Monroe County school websites to discover what they are doing. What I found is they are dedicating more resources to their cyber academies than we do,” Burger said. “My read on this is they decided their district needed to do more to keep students within their educational environment. This is beneficial for these reasons: 1. Reduces money outflow, 2. Retains more funds for the district initiatives, 3. Provides more job opportunities for district employees, 4. Gives more insight into student achievement/progress, 5. Makes any future transition back to (bricks and mortar) easier, since we have the student’s records that are often sparse or missing.”

Burger said he thinks that if PVSD “provides timely and quality administrative service coupled with quality curriculum and instruction, the Bears Academy reputation will grow making it a primary choice of those seeking an alternate to (bricks and mortar).”