Crawford County R-2 Board of Education members and staff were quick to bring up successful recent events, despite going through the dog days of the third semester. 

Cuba Elementary School (CES) Principal Tess Green spoke about multiple successful events that took place at CES. Title Night is an evening where school administrators provide information to families, and CES overlaps the mundane information session with the excitement of bingo. 

“We call it bingo for books,” Green said. “We had it for the first time last year, and had a decent turnout for its first year. But this year, we were able to embed some title information into that and count that as one of our meetings. We had 74 total show up for that event. That’s anything from moms, dads, grandmas, siblings, students, teachers and lots of good people. (Assistant Superintendent Dr. Myra) Siebert came and spoke. We greatly appreciate that,” she added.

CES held its annual kindergarten expo and 46 students who will attend next year attended the event.  

Numerous board members complimented Green’s students for their attendance and participation in Cuba’s “Daddy, Daughter Dance” at the high school. Green was quick to note that although it was mainly her students who attended the event, it was the high school student council who were the ones who helped make the evening a success. 

Cuba Middle School (CMS) Principal Marie Shoemaker also highlighted the positives of her students, while giving an honest take about getting through the third quarter.

“We’re just kind of in the grind right now, pushing through the third quarter. We always call it the third quarter slump, because it seems like it’s one of the hardest quarters to get through,” Shoemaker said. “And not that I’m complaining by any means, but only having two snow days.”

Shoemaker quickly moved on to highlighting her student’s family trees, which are on display in the CMS hallways. 

“We’ve got our family trees up and our photos up down in the hallway, if you get a chance to look at them, they are really cute,” she said. “They turned out really well and the kids are leaving it alone and they’re not pulling the leaves off or anything like that. So it looks really good.” 

Shoemaker added that her students have begun preparing for MAP testing, which will begin in mid-March.

As she concluded, multiple school board members touched on the success and creativity of CMS’s “Anything but a backpack day,” where students were encouraged to carry their belongings in an unconventional backpack. 

“Somebody brought in a tire,” Shoemaker chuckled. “It was just such a gamut of things I would have never thought of and some things worked out really well. Some not so much.”

Cuba High School Principal (CHS) Michael Clutts said that CHS’s courtwarming week was a success, and wanted to thank his staff for allowing him to go home early to deal with the flu. 

Superintendent Dr. Scott Davidson was quick to highlight Siebert for being nominated and selected for South Central Assistant Superintendent of the Year Award. 

“There are only a handful, single digits in the state nominated, so this is a big deal,” Davidson beamed. 

The R-2 board voted to authorize Assistant Superintendent Siebert to advertise and seek bids for consideration of two new buses that will be included in the 2026-27 budget.  Davidson said that the district hopes to make those purchases every year to prevent having buses over 10 years old. 

“So it seems like it might be a lot of buses, but we run a lot of buses,” Davidson said. “It is some sense of district pride too, when we see our buses out and about in other communities, and they’re well kept and in good working order. Sometimes you don’t always see that in other

locations.” 

Lastly, the R-2 board unanimously voted to approve the purchase of math books for students from Kindergarten through 12th grade from SAVVAS Learning Company. The price for the books are close to $300,000 for six years of books, which would come out to $48,000 per year.

 “I think that it would really be a unified approach, and everything is aligned to the Missouri Learning Standards,” Siebert said. “It’s vertically aligned, and it’s aligned in the buildings, and so that just makes it that much easier with common vocabulary and procedures and processes.”

  The next meeting will be held at 6 p.m. on March 17, and attendees were encouraged to wear green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.