Time is a valuable thing to waste.

Members of the Crenshaw County Board of Education realized last week exactly how much time they had been wasting during their board meetings.

The board recently held its first meeting since implementing a consent agenda at it's November meeting. School Superintendent Kathi Wallace said the new method worked well.

"It made the meeting shorter because the minutes are long," Wallace said. "I mailed each board member a copy of the minutes ahead of time and they approved them at the meeting without having to read them. We're all in agreement that it was a very good decision."

Wallace said the meeting time was cut in half. She said prior meetings typically ran about an hour long, but the most recent meeting took only half an hour.

In other business, the board:

n Approved the county's Career and Technical policies and procedures.

"We have business and industry certification coming up this year in the field of Agri Science," Wallace said. "So one of these policies needed to be updated, but the other one is a new policy that was not in our board policy manual. We needed it in place before that program could be business/industry certified."

n Accepted the resignation of Luverne social studies teacher Gary Spurlin, who will step down Feb. 1 and begin his early retirement after over 30 years of service. Greg Pittman, who recently returned from serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, will fill the empty teaching slot.

n Announced that Pam Wood completed course work and is now a certified chief school financial officer.

n Announced that the BOE meeting is changed to Thursday, Jan. 13.