So, thank you for tell I saw what you guys did with the budget just this year and I was you know you guys have done a great job. So, we appreciate all of you. >> Thank you. >> So, any um any other questions for my uh committee members? Now, do we need to make a a motion to >> I just would like to ask a question. I don't know if it's going to go to a bike or the superintendent. Uh and looking over the budget, my question is, and I heard it last week, I think we was at a presentation, a surplus. We're asking for to support the budget. And ever since I've been on the board, our theme has always been keep teachers in front of students. So my question is in this budget once it's put together and I don't claim to be uh no magical person with my length on the board and I just don't think it's it's good to understand the budget but as a finance person that's the finance person job.
>> Good evening. Um, so we're here tonight to welcome Wildflower Open Classroom to share a little bit about their charter. They're currently petitioning for renewal. So they gave us their petition in January and so this is our opportunity to showcase and have them share some of the highlights of their school, things that they're focused on and and open it up to the public. They'll come back also in March, right? We're in February. So at our March meeting will be the final where we um look at the full petition and currently ed services is going through their renewal and looking at all the details of it. So I'd like to welcome uh Tom Hicks who is the director of wildflower. How do I click through this? Am I doing that? Just right there. All right. Thank you. >> Hello, Chica Unified Board and Administration. My name is Tom Hicks and I'm the director of WildFlower Open Classroom.
It's the availability and the procurement process to get the product. If it was readily available, did you have any issue with that? >> Oh, not at all. We would support local. >> Okay. So, it's not about local. It's about being able to get through the paperwork and the availability, >> the quantities. Yes. That we we use on a daily basis. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. >> Question. Okay. How does the procurement process itself prevent you from doing this? You seem to say the process keeps us from doing this. What how is this process of procurement which every agency uses keeping you from doing this? There's um the basically the lowest cost vendors that we need to procure with and the fact that I think some of the more local smaller farms just don't have the quantities. >> That's not a procurement pro process issue.
Notionally at Monoa um it's about 60% is not our non-resident students and 40% are resident students. Notionally >> it's the same charge for both students resident and >> yes yes. >> Thank you. No other questions. Thank you very much. We're are going on to uh Senate Bill 2802. Uh this appropriates monies to establish a bachelor's degree programs in education and in agriculture science at Leeward Community College and fund two FTE positions and supplies to support the program. Uh Carlos Penel penalta welcome. >> Aloha Chair Kim, Vice Chair Kidani, members of the committee. Carlos Pyosa Leward Community College Chancellor and uh West Dahu interim chancellor. Uh on behalf of the university, we stand on our written testimony, but can elaborate a little bit more. Um with this bill appropriating positions and funds to established balorates in teacher education as well as agriculture at Leeward Community College, the university's position is to uh redirect the efforts to what we've already been investing in from uh last year through now.
They added an music and audiovisisual program which is being very well received. They've had started a volleyball and bowling program where the students are playing other schools and this is a first and they really wanted the kids to connect with other kids um just with the sports and they're also looking they had the shop program and they're looking to change that into a beastro program where they can uh order food, prepare food and serve food for people who come in for meetings as well as students in the program. Uh the second goal is marketing. That is if you look at their website, they have everything that you could ever want to know on there. Um goal three was buildings and grounds. And three of the four goals have been met. And those three that have been met are they've installed safety cameras, uh networking infrastructure has been updated, and training for the maintenance personnel.
So, it's important to understand it's a complex situation and a complex thing. And as our schools grow, it becomes even more complex. I know when teaming started uh many years ago in the middle school level, I'm sure that middle school central didn't have 1300 students and I'm sure that middle school north didn't have,00 students and that's where we sit today. Going on to the next slide, here's some of the data associated with the top 30 middle schools in teeming. So, When we compare ourselves, we want to compare ourselves to the top performing schools. Um, not necessarily central Indiana schools, not necessarily Johnson County schools. We want to compare ourselves to the top 30 performing middle schools because that's where we expect ourselves to be. And currently, we are right now. Middle school central's at 18 and MSN's at 20. Um, as you can see there at the bottom.
But then what I've also done is not able to accommodate everybody's um request. So, and I'm not necessarily sure exactly how things are going to look at the end of the year regarding some of these things. So, for example, like if you're in fire and police, you're going to budget for a certain percentage of the overtime that is eligible for. So, like if you got 30 officers, you know, and you would take the maximum exposure, if you will, the vacation time that you would have to fill with OT. And so, you're not going to you're not going to budget for all of that because you got to assume all of it's going to be used. So, you try to come up with some kind of percentage. Um, so to give us a little bit of flexibility, I created the strategic reserve line item. Um, that has $60,000 in it.
>> Oh, January financial. >> Yeah, you want to second. >> I second. >> Um, any discussion on that? >> All those in favor of consent agenda say I. >> I. I any nays? All right, it's unanimous. Thank you. >> All right. Thank you, Emily. >> Okay, >> enjoy the game. Go Brookford. New business, school improvement update. >> Do I get to pick who goes first or you guys want to decide? >> Okay, we'll start at the top. Mr. Belinda, >> work our way down. Thank you, sir. and help you. >> Oh, there it is. >> I like went on and off. >> Thank you. >> Try to Turn on projector >> seemed fine. But >> all right, give it a second to come up. >> No, wrong one. Sorry. >> Does that help at all? >> No. >> Is that better? Can we still see?
I think we got to get this ball rolling and I think we we've got to do a better job selling it to the public because it's, you know, it's a major concern because that is that is the field and, you know, you look at an event, any event on a Friday night in Cheshure, I mean, that half the town's there. I mean, it's it's it's everything. and you take that away and tell them they got to play day games over at at Bartham, that's going to be kind of a depressing thing. Or play play at Bartam at night with no stands. That's going to be a problem. I >> I think you just need to mitigate the potential increase in costs later on, period. you know um and I would prefer having the more up-to-date data um with the 7500 so that we can forward to the town uh because like the both of you uh you know there's some frustration in that it just showed up >> on the referendum without any actual forget the conversations that need to have had but we couldn't even sell it because we didn't have the data to really promote it in a sense you know, we had old data based on what Emily is saying or, you know, what was presented.
So my question is out of this budget, it goes down to city hall in a committee. Is there anything in there that's going to show up where we have a surplus and what isn't and can we account for it? So in in so it's a good it's a good question. So I'll take that kind of in two parts. Um, so the budget that we put together for next year and then address the surplus issues that we've had in the last couple. And I'll start with the surpluses that we've had in the last couple years. And so being behind in in audits for multiple years means that you really can't see the bottom, right? You're you're you're treading in kind of murky water. So you only see what's above. And so you operate within a bubble that it doesn't necessarily paint you a picture of and give you a road map to let you know how you're spending, you know, what you're spending it on, are things being charged appropriately, um where you're high, where you're low, and your trends and patterns are.
uh and I'm with you this evening to highlight some of our school's successes uh in our past uh since our past charter renewal which was about seven years ago now. Uh as an FYI before I get started um I wanted to let you know that I'm going to skip through a few slides to um help us stay on time tonight. I know you guys all have a busy evening. So um first we'll start with our mission at Wildflower. Our mission uh is to be an innovative and progressive school. We strive to be collaborative community. Uh we are also a democratic organization that welcomes input from all stakeholders. In addition, we on a daily basis try to celebrate the adventure of learning. Got to get with it here. Sorry, there it is. Confirming my staff's um suspicions that I don't know how to use a remote control.
that the farmer is not having the quantities isn't the but you see what I'm saying >> we're trying to track down the real roadblocks if we keep saying it's this code this process is causing it >> but it's not it's just the fact that we have a supply problem right we have a farmer supply issue right >> okay [clears throat] thanks appreciate >> okay yeah >> has food safety in any way hindered some of these farmers that you not able to purchase from them to meet that >> oh I'm not aware of that. >> Oh, so you guys have to deal with the food safety stocks? >> Not not that I'm aware of. >> No. >> Really? Wow. Okay. Okay. Um, Dan, please. >> Okay. Thank you. Thank you. >> Thank you. Serg you, as of today, do you guys have enough local suppliers to meet the requirement that 30% of the produce purchased by the five departments um consist of fresh local egg products or local value added processed egg by January 1st of 2020?
A couple of the key uh uh investments are uh a pretty robust uh uh exploration of the articulations between Leeward Community College and uh West Oahu and the university as a whole to align teacher education to be a more true 2 plus two uh without necessarily duplicating uh uh programming at adjacent institutions. Um, additionally, uh, the recent appointment, my appointment over both Leeward and uh, West Oahu to help alleviate some of the barriers that exist administratively to make it work. Um, in both of these areas, we're seeing opportunities. We see the capacity that uh, West Oahu has. And so, the university's position is to uh, focus in that effort at this point rather than uh, creating duplicative programs. >> Okay, your time is up, but we're going to have questions for you. So, we're going to elaborate. So, none of this fire. So, we'll do that.
The one they haven't been able to do, they have an outside area for the students when it's when the weather is nice and they're looking for sun shades, but it's so expensive. They're either look they're looking for new vendors or different options. Um the fourth district goal is specialed transportation and that has the 6.5 increase because it's such a large program now. um they're hiring two new employees and they're streamlining the software to logic 54 which will make everything run much smoother. The last presentation was was the governor's education of the year presentation which was very nice, very wellreceived. Um the superintendence report really kind of went over some of the goals again, but this is the final year on the mortgage for the old building and they have the career center mortgage has eight more years. So, they were happy with that. And that is it.
But when you take a look at those 30 middle schools, the top 30 middle schools in the state of Indiana, 47% of them use a teaming structure. So 47% of them put a student on a team when they enter middle school. Um if you remove middle school central north, that would obviously drop to 40%. 27% of those um 30 middle schools have an additional team prep in their schedule. If you take middle school central and north out of that, it it then goes to 20. And then the stat we were talking about earlier with h offering high school courses, it's 70% or more high school course uh courses. And right now, like I said, we're at 40 and 42% of uh high school courses offered at the middle school level. So again, teaming again is just one piece of the puzzle. Um we know that these schools use many instructional strategies to obtain the success that they have.
Um, we have 7,500 going into the town accountant uh budget to have an additional staff accountant. So some of the decrease that was in that um that line item before we added in the current position um that had actually shown a decrease before um with the assessor's office. We're moving towards uh more efficient software. So the current software we're using there's only five other communities left in the Commonwealth that that are using it and it's not getting support um which is becoming increasingly more problematic. Is that also I know that the schools were looking for software. Is that including that too? Wasn't there like a software? >> Yeah. Their student maintenance system. Yeah. So they're they're moving forward with that. >> Okay. >> Um so 01192. So that's the public buildings department. Um and you'll see that there's a pretty significant increase there of almost $200,000.
>> No, that's better. >> That's better. >> Okay. >> All right. Well, thank you. Um, forced me to set the standard here, Mr. Fetto, in terms of length. We had a conversation about keeping it short. I have a tendency to go a little long, and Mr. Pepsoski uh continually reminds me of that. Um, so I'm going to do my best to provide uh the uh an update. Uh, you'll see a couple different things here. There's two different sections. The first couple slides are going to be about the school improvement plan as a whole. Uh the next >> the second set of slides will be about uh the specific school climate improvement plan which is a much longer plan um but that there's just two slides each um for each of these sections. So broke the school improvement plan into a couple different sections. The first being educational outcomes.
Um, but I I feel more comfortable if we move forward, get the most, you know, up-to-date information from the design team here, SLR. Um, and then take the next steps and and map out a plan. Um, I do want to see them kind of a comparative if we potentially can get, you know, what is a Lumis Chaffy quote versus where we would ultimately probably meet in the middle. >> Yep. >> Because I think the public needs to see that, right? Um, if you're if you want the the field and the quality, here's the price tag versus what are you willing to accept in the lifespan that we're looking for, too. What's the What's the actual lifespan typically, Mark? I know you know >> it's between eight and 12 years. I know the >> Okay. >> that the same year that we put ours down, Chester Academy put their turf field down and that field was replaced four years ago.
And so you're only operating with information that you have in front of you. The audit allows you to see what's beneath you and your operations and your efficiencies and your trends and patterns. And so I'd say we were probably flying blind for a few years in that. And so as we were asking um our asks were based on only what we could see and what we were feeling and not necessarily the reality of our financial power underneath. And so that's where the audits were, you know, for as much of a difficult situation that is um so needed to be able to help us navigate and steer the school system. the budget as a result of learning about those audits, understanding where we have where we've been budgeting too high or not enough or wherever in this case our staffing right in benefits and overbudgeting in those areas led to this pattern of surpluses.
But um this is our mission statement that should have been up last time. Um we're on to uh our guiding principles. Um these are our guiding principles. Um they are core values that serve to guide all of our actions. Um the founding uh members of Wildflower developed eight value sets that guide how we do business on a daily basis. Um and so these are the eight eight things that guide um our decision-making processes. Um how we act as a board and how we act as a staff too as well. Um I'd just like to highlight a couple things recently. Uh, as a staff, we've um tried to highlight being respectful and positive. Communication and honesty have been stressed at our school as of late as it seems to be increasingly important in our society. All right. Above all, our school adheres to the open classroom model uh with a wildflower twist.