We identify their needs and talk through how we can better support them. and kind of a little uh road map here that we we get closer the road map for the first year. We've we've already completed. It's like a lot, but some of these things we kind of already um had a little bit established. We've just kind of really strengthened it. So, um to stay organized and intentional, we use data notebooks with our students and advisory. Um we have student trackers, grade sheets, um to help us monitor their student, you know, progress. Uh we email families every other week with updates on grades and progress. So, there's, you know, consistent communication. Um, and these are some other things that we've we've added in the advisory. Our periods are broken down in 9th and 10th grade, 11th grade, and 12th grade. So, we kind of have those separate and can really target, you know, certain things.
Um so it's really important to like you know make sure that everybody's on the same page with all the departments. Uh and compliance is very important as you can see for the reasons up there. Um, the biggest one for me is the reputation in the town if we don't comply with what the law says. So, on to our policy, our fee policy. Um, we updated this in June of 2025 and we created it um just to get people a little more familiar with how many requests I guess that we get um in a day or in a week or not even how many but just the amount of time it takes the office to handle everything that's coming through. Um so the state law is uh the public records law allows municipalities with a population of under 20,000 to charge for the first two hours.
There's no need to clear the room." So, apparently, I was confused. But in the multiple times that I asked for the investigation report, I was crystal clear and I've forwarded some of the emails that show the depth of clarity. Um, so I put in a Freedom of Information Commission complaint. I will happily withdraw it if and I challenge this board if you can address the issues which includes employment consequent like dire employment consequences and don't spend a dollar in legal fees doing so I am immensely reasonable. My reaction to this is very reasonable. >> I can see you laughing. I can see the uh board officer laughing.
No, we have Yeah, we have That's a great question. We have a current plan and template and we are every school utilizes that template. And then what we do is from the district level this a lot of this most of this I shouldn't say all, but much of this work falls under Mike Sealegs' leadership. And then the committee comes together. So he will go out to a school. He will look at every revision that's needed to a safety or security plan. And then help the building principal or or the safety committee because the buildings also have their teams that meet. This is this particular section is representative of the district committee as a whole meeting. So it's not uncommon that a central office staff member would join at the building level to provide input, feedback and so forth. Similarly, there's stuff there's stuff in this committee that talks about crisis response in the school that often times falls under like myself or members of my team in which we're talking about when there's we we previously reviewed behavioral regulation policies.
I don't know if they could piggy back or help each other or support each other one way or another or if they're just on different timelines or what. >> You know what entity is putting that information out? >> I just saw I just saw like um >> city >> sidewalk signs with city logos on them asking for surveys today. >> Huh. >> Okay. >> I'll look I'll check it out. >> Those were up by like the co-op today. So >> Okay. Any other questions or thoughts on the murals that bridge project? >> Okay, moving to our communications section. Uh Chris, would you like to provide a report from staff? Uh yeah. So very quickly the uh the thank you acknowledgement to our uh num I'm sorry I'm I'm I'm having um I'm I'm blanking out. the we sent out uh some uh thank you emails uh to the the people that helped us uh select our golden paintbrush uh nominees.
Uh reminder for high school families in March the senior trip is approaching rapid and GPA testing will happen for our juniors. Additionally, on the calendar front, as everyone may know, the district calendar for the 2526 school year had two snow days built in. This year we've used three thus far. As such, we have one day to make up in order to meet the 180day requirement for students. The final decision on how that makeup day will be handled will come out to the community at the end of this week as we wanted to ensure that there were no more weather days uh before issuing any guidance. So, there's a chance of a little weather this week. So, two makeup days versus one may have changed the decision. At the March 18th meeting, we will present an adjusted school calendar for the B for approval, but a tenative plan will be released to the community on Friday this week.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your commitment and staying connected. Um, but dear parents and guardians, on behalf of the Babok Unified School District board, our staff, and our entire learning community, I am honored to personally congratulate you for logging into our parent view portal a 100 times or more for this school year. Your commitment to staying informed about your child's academic progress, attendance, and school communication demonstrates what true uh parental engagement looks like nowadays. Because of families like you, we continue to move forward in achieving our district goals. Your engagement directly supports district goal one engagement. By actively monitoring grades, assignments, and communication through parent view, you are helping to ensure that our students score 70% or higher on our academic standards. When parents stay connected, students perform better. District goal number two, attendance. Regularly reviewing attendance information in and reinforces the importance of student being in school at least 90% of the time.
What what's your role in that? And then what's one thing you want to um try to strengthen? Maybe you've struggled with it in the past and what might you be able to do today. So what area you're going to try to strengthen for today and what area you're going to try to continue that you've been doing well. So I want you to think to yourself for a minute about that. And then I would like you to turn to your shoulder partner, whoever's closest to you, and share what you're going to do, what you're going to continue to do that you've been doing well, and one area you're going to try to work towards being better about. So, go ahead and turn to your neighbor and have that conversation. Is Alex did anybody get noticed? Is it Alex that sits on the end? >> She's out.
Um, monthly awards. We, um, we honor in our whole class. We have, you know, the whole school comes together during advisory. We have a student of the month awards where we recognize a variety of students strengths and attributes, you know, attendance, um, most classes complete, you know, most improvement, stuff like that. We have leaderboards in each classroom and so we like to honor the, you know, give them rewards for positive things like uh raffle tickets. They like snacks and chips and food like that. Um, we get we let them ring a bell when they complete a class. So, that's fun. >> Graduates sign sign the front door, so they get to like leave a mark. >> Oh, fun. >> Um, we host our own graduation ceremony if you didn't know over at the beautiful CPAC. And this year, we've also added more hands-on electives. So we all of these pieces kind of help build that motivation, celebrate progress, and help students feel connected at our school so they want to stay and and stay on track.
Uh municipalities over 20,000 cannot charge for that first two hours but the rate is set by the lowest paid person able to perform the task in the office and not to exceed $25 an hour. Um and the population is always based on the most recent dennial um census which ours was 2020 and we were 18832. So we do we are able to charge for that first two hours. Um so what we did do is we created it so if if we get more than one public records request from the same person within the year and it's I'm I'm not going to say unreasonable is not the word. Um it's it's going to be time consuming. we are going to charge them even if it's an increment of of 15 minutes um which is what $7.50 50 cents. Yeah. Or 625, I don't know. Um, so that's that's what we did it for.
I'm sorry on the um it's three minutes. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, doctor. >> Thanks, brother. >> Rebecca, thank you. Come on now. >> Good evening. My name is Rebecca Newman. Do you my address? 28. Okay. Brookfield. Um I'm the PTO president at Brookfield High School. I'm also the chair of the graduation committee. I'm here tonight to respectfully ask the board to consider keeping the current scheduled graduation date of June 20th along with the grad party that follows that evening. This date was announced months ago and since then families have made significant plans around it. Many relatives have already booked travel to attend graduation. A number of families have scheduled vacations immediately following that date that weekend. In addition, many families have begun planning graduation celebrations for the date of June 20th. When the date was communicated to us, there was no indication that it could change due to additional snow days.
So there might be a need to re-look at a system of response when a student is having a behavioral episode. So we would push in and have that conversation on the individual building level. We also do that. >> Oh, I'm so I'm so sorry. Another thought I had. I apologize. We also review these through our administrative council. So we will provide updates monthly. We meet as an admin leadership team. And often times many of the safety and security updates are on those scheduled agendas as we want to make sure to disseminate any changes, any updates, any protocols through through those meetings as well. I'm certainly not opposed to increasing the number there, but I just want to make sure that we are um we have a good understanding of what that specific committee is going to do during the meetings. Since it sounds like some of that the work that happens through those bullet points is sort of on a rolling basis as the need arises and there are administrative staff in place to sort of address these things as they come forward.
Uh so that has already been sent. I spoke with um um with city staff to figure out the best time to bring the golden paintbrush awards to city council. Uh I was advised to uh bring this forward after our our budget season which will likely end around June uh or um yeah I would say uh towards the end of summer June uh July um and then in terms uh which gives us some time to brainstorm ideas about a potential award if you if you guys want to give something physical. I know that this commission uh we talked a little bit about uh the possibility of um creating copies of the artistic manhole covers. Uh so if because we have time to kind of create an award uh it gives us a little bit of wiggle room to kind of uh do that. Um the second the our communication team uh is in the process of releasing a press release.
I would like to take a moment to thank both the township and the city administration and public works department as well as OEM uh for their collaboration and support of the schools over the recent winter. Uh over the last two months, I I do believe that we've worked on a number of issues outside of just the snowstorms in a very productive and meaningful way. Uh and I do believe that that has will allow us to serve the entire community well from all of our vantage points. Lastly, a reminder, we anticipate the governor's budget address to take place March 10th, which would then put the release of state aid figures on or about March 12th, and we do intend to present a ten tenative budget plan for the 26 27 school year at the next March meeting. Lastly, we would just like to say thank you to everybody who's making a donation to the school district, which will be later on agenda item 10, personnel items through second.
Your involvement sends a powerful message that every school day matters. Your leadership is also helping us move closer to achieving our goal of having 90% of parents actively logging into parent view. You are setting the example for our community. Goal 3.9 connecting. True success happen when schools and families work together. Your commitment strengthens the bridge between home and school, ensuring that we remain united um in purpose and in action. For your dedication and for seting the standard of excellent in parental involvement, you have proud proudly earned the Himaug award recognizing families who led by example in supporting student achievements and connection. with gratitude and appreciation. Um, Ruben Diaz, proud superintendent of Wiiwah. Let's give him a round of applause. >> Congratulations. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you. And You can choose between a heart, thumbs up, or number one for your picture. Do anyone you want uh board members, we'll stay up here.
>> Sorry. All right. I am uh just looking for a couple of people to share either what you are going to work on or what your partner shared that they're going to uh work on. So, >> anyone care to go first? >> You can either throw your partner under the bus or you throw yourself under. >> Thank you, Yolanda. >> I think mine's pretty easy. >> It's not a bottom. >> It worked now. Um for for my group um we kind of feel the same way on something to grow on is or the struggle is distractions because if we get a text message from work or something like we want to grab our phones and we want to answer those. So that's something that we will continue to work on. >> Thank you. It's it's real, right? stuff is happening that you may or may not need to respond to.
>> We need to remember if we ever move that you guys need to take the door. >> Oh, I see. It's okay. Nice. >> Oh, so they don't actually sign the actual door. That's too bad. >> That'd been cool. >> Hi. Um, I'm Diane Schnow. Um, so we talk a lot about being on track on our campus. For freshmen, that means they've earned six credits by the end of freshman year and haven't failed more than one class. And our campus is small. So we use this metric for all of our students. So sophomores need to finish the year with 12 credits, juniors 16 to 17, and seniors need 19 credits by the end of first semester to be on track for graduation. Um it really matters for our freshmen because freshmen who are on track are three times more likely to graduate than those who are uh who are not.
And there are exclusions to to what we charge for, which um public records that are freely available, which is meeting minutes, agendas, um, anything that you might find on our website already, contracts, um, bids, bid results, not bids, but um, and police reports are there's never a charge for. So, um, in the count, we don't charge the fees a lot. In the calendar year 2025, we only issued four cost estimate letters to requesters. Um, each one reflected at least an hour and a half or more of work. Uh, we've never build in a 15-minute increment. Um, and um, of those four, only two were sent to requesters who had submitted multiple requests for the same year. One had four and one had 14. Um, and I do everything in my power to get the requesters to narrow their search. Um, but and like the other two that were sent out, they were either like lawyers or contractors that looking for 3 to four hours worth of work.
If that was announced, then we would have not made as many plans as we have. Because of that, families reasonably relied on the June 20th date when making plans. We understand that the district now faces calendar challenges due to the eight snow days. However, I'm here to offer possibly due to my knowledge of the calendar a workable solution. To my knowledge, the school calendar includes 182 days, which the state requires only 180 instructional days. Returning two of those extra days, along with giving up Good Friday, if necessary, could allow the school year to end on June 23rd. Under that scenario, seniors could complete their final exams exams earlier. with the exam schedule for underassmen. The 23rd would be a makeup exam day and the 22nd would be the last day of finals. Um we would have enough half days before grad party to set up as we usually do given the schedule.
So when we talk about the meetings that the district security and safety committee has, what kind of business do you expect to conduct at those meetings? Sure. So those are general protocols. So for example, recently in the last two years, we've changed to a new template. And so how do we disseminate and train for example, all principals and how to update their plans and so forth. We may talk about you know, we may debrief on an incident that has happened. We may be doing a table top exercise on a potential you know, incident to practice our response. We might talk about updates to our crisis teams and how we might want to train those teams. Um we might be talking about things like let's partner with one of um our our local law enforcement, for example, to practice a drill on a particular site that we want members of the school leadership team involved in that.