Students will be walking the halls of Jim Thorpe Area School District buildings again on Aug. 27, but they won't be alone getting back into the swing of things.

It will be the first school year Superintendent Brian Gasper leads the entire district as opposed to only the Penn-Kidder Campus, where he was principal for the past seven years.Gasper took the reins July 1, completing a career goal."It was always my intent to become a superintendent at some point," Gasper said. "When I found out our superintendent was retiring, it all fell into place. It's a great school district. I worked with the former superintendent for seven years and felt a part of many great things that happened here during her tenure."While Gasper is excited about the new venture, he acknowledged several key issues facing the district in the 2014-15 campaign.Contracts for Jim Thorpe teachers, the Teamsters union and district administrators are all expired."We've been without a teachers' contract for over a year, since June 30, 2013," Gasper said. "I don't really feel like that's anyone's fault. It's at the front of the plate. We're hopeful to get that done soon."A fact-finder's report released in May recommended a four-year contract with a salary freeze in the first year, 1 percent raises in the middle two years, and a 2 percent raise in the final year, along with increments. The teachers union, however, is pushing for step movement increases each year, determined by years of service, and a 1 percent increase in each of the contract's last three years.The other issue facing Jim Thorpe is whether as many as 70 coed students from a Penn Forest Township treatment facility for troubled youth will be educated in district schools.The Youth Services Agency, which oversees Camp Adams, is in negotiations with the school district over how much money it needs to be able to continue on-site classes.Gasper said the matter is in the hands of legal teams on both sides and the situation holds "a lot of unknowns.""If those students end up coming here, they will go through a registration process, just like any other student," Gasper said. "Those students would be coming from an alternative education setting, and we would like to keep them in a similar setting."Students are sent to Camp Adams through the court system. YSA has said it receives only half the per-student funding than a student in one of Jim Thorpe's schools."We continue to try to work with YSA and hope to get some clarity pretty soon," Gasper said.On the education front, Gasper said Jim Thorpe won't be looking to implement many new programs this year, instead trying to build upon and expand what it already has in place.The district's Response to Instruction and Intervention program, for example, will expand to sixth grade in elementary school and ninth and 10th grade in the high school.Previously, the program aimed at providing academic and behavioral support to struggling students was only running in kindergarten through third grade."It is also our intention to start the planning process of a schoolwide positive behavior support program in the high school," Gasper said."It is a state-promoted program, which we already have in our elementary buildings, aimed at projecting positives and using discipline data to track students' behavior and intervene behaviorally. The goal is to lessen behavior problems. We want to amplify and extenuate the students' time in the classroom rather than deal with behavior issues."