001All right. I'll to order this meeting of the Stoughton Area School District Board of Education. Ms. D'Amore, will you call the roll? Ms. Mia Croyle. Here. Ms. Allison Sorg. Here. Ms. Lisa Pugh. Here. Mr. Jim Moser. Here. Dr. Mr. Zach Masemeyer, sorry. Dr. Sharon Mailen Bartlett. Here. President Jill Patterson. Here. And Mr. Tim Buban and Ms. Dawn Garcia are absent. And student rep and and student rep Michaela Becker. Very good. Okay. Next item on the agenda is public comment. There were no public comments submitted prior to the meeting. I see no members of the public approaching the podium. So, we will move on to the legislative update. All right, here we go, guys. The gov- the governor has signed six education-related bills into law and he vetoed 12 others since last time we met. I'll
002quickly summarize what is now law. Act 185 requires DPI, the State Department of Public Instruction, to include in their online licensing portal information related to license holders that have been investigated by DPI. Act 186 prohibits education employers from entering into confidentiality agreements that cover the immoral conduct of an employee and the new new law in turn provides civil immunity to education employers for reporting that information to a prospective employer. Act bans the operation of drones over school buildings while school is in session. Act 160 formally allows installation of audio-visual recording devices on school buses. Um, the school board has to adopt a policy regarding that usage if they choose to do that. Act 95 uh creates and funds a pilot program for professional development of science teachers. Uh, this could be available in the current
003school year and in 20 26-27 school year. Finally, Act uh 101 changes which medical professionals can write a written note for absence from registered nurses and expands it to advanced practice registered nurses. The 12 bills that were vetoed um would have eliminated the governor's 400-year veto, would have allowed schools to transport students in 15-passenger vans, um would have expanded eligibility for the state's school choice programs to siblings of current choice pupils regardless of family income or student's grade level. Uh, would have altered regulations for the state's dual enrollment programs. Um, one which would have required school boards and independent charters, private schools participating in the school choice program to to designate teams or sports as male, female, or co-ed mixed sex based on the biological sex of participating students. Another veto was uh would have
004required notarized parent sign-off before a student can change their name or pronouns used within school. Uh, another veto would have required the governor to adopt to opt Wisconsin into the federal education scholarship tax credit program. Another uh was regarding a teacher's authority to manage the teacher's class, parental notification of disruptive or violent behavior at school in a school district's code of conduct. Um, the final four include allowing individuals who hold a substitute teaching permit to substitute teach at private schools participating in the choice program. The conditions under which a school district might adopt a resolution to exceed its revenue limit. Participation in inter interscholastic athletics and application of the public records and open meeting laws to interscholastic athletic associations and finally another veto on race-based higher education programs and requirements. Uh the legislature has concluded
005its session. So uh these are the final bills expected to be signed into law or vetoed by the governor. However, the uh governor has asked for a special session of the legislature to discuss um to eliminate partisan redistricting. It's not known if the legislature will actually come back in to discuss that. Also, there has been discussion over that compromise on use of the state surplus. Um and the last note on this from the School Boards Association says that people should continue to call on their legislators and the governor to ensure that additional special education aid is provided through the surplus to school districts. Again, we don't know what direction that will take. In other sort of important political news, uh Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu has announced he will not seek re-election. He's one of
006four Re- Republican senators who are not seeking election this fall and that's in addition to um Assembly Speaker Robin Vos who has has it has announced his retirement. That means there'll be two brand new um Senate and Assembly leaders um after elections this fall. Uh since the legislature is uh has completed their business for the time being, uh basic understanding of what they actually do now is they often host legislative study committees or they will be hosting study committees um and some of these are expected to address K-12 issues. We do not know the topics yet, but there are there's an opportunity for the public to participate in those and to actually be um considered as appointees once we know the topics. Often those um study committees turn into bipartisan legislation out of the legislature.
007Um many legislators might also be considering drafting legislation. Um so this uh the school boards association suggests this is a good time to really connect with your legislator about topics and issues that are important to you or your school district. A reminder that next Tuesday, April 7th, is the date of the spring election. Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. on election day. Um remember to bring your photo ID. Uh if you can register at the poll, but you have to bring um proof of residence with you in order to do that. Uh on your ballot, several important things including state justices of the Supreme Court. We have some court of appeals, other Dane County circuit court judges, uh the county supervisor, Stoughton mayor, and alderman districts in Stoughton, as well as um
008there are three seats for the school board that you will see on your ballot here in Stoughton. Um if you want to find out information on uh where you vote, please go to myvote.wi.gov. Again, that's m y v o t e {dot} w i {dot} g o v. And that's all I have. Thank you. Any questions for Lisa regarding the legislative update? Seeing none, we will move on to work group reports. Yep. So finance facility met before this to discuss the personal transportation device update policy. Um so we can expand upon and discuss uh uh the different types of transportation that's occurring now with that we see with the scooters uh that did get approved, so you'll see that at the April 20th um board meeting for discussion and approval, but just establishes guidelines for
009how it's used on school property and then um, takes the responsibility away from the board for damage and theft and things like that, pending any questions. Questions for Zach or the the committee? No? All right. Uh, next item is student representative report, which we will skip tonight with Michaela's absence, so we are on to item three, Dr. Keys' report. All right. I have a short report, um, this time of the year, in addition to spring elections is getting close to, um, op- open enrollment, so we those of us who have been in education while open enrollment used to be about 3 weeks, now it's almost 3 months. Um, it will be closing at the end of the month here. At this point, we have, um, 12 applications for open enrollment in the district, 18 applications
010for open enrollment out of the district, so this is very, um, being very close to to equalizing. Um, as um, these are applications, these will not be acted upon until after, um, the the period closes. Then we review applications on both sides, resident and non-resident, and then families ultimately make a decision on whether or not they want to open enroll their kids. Mind you that this is, um, a snapshot in time because open enrollment actually happens year-round because once open enrollment is finalized, the alternative open enrollment period happens, um, starting in the summer on July 1 and goes basically until open enrollment opens for the following year, So, in a nutshell, open enrollment is happening right now. Alternative open enrollment will happen in the summer, and the open enrollment costing um gets prorated depending on
011when students open enroll in, open enroll out, if they move, and and so forth. You you can see in the table um our open enrollments in and out um based on our IC data for the last 3 years. And that gives us a rough estimate of of where where we've been. Questions? Yes. Regarding the alternative open enrollment period, uh do you have an idea about how many kids come in through that alternative time of year? I can take a look at that and give give an idea. I don't have it off the top >> it small. >> Not off the >> Okay. off the top of my head. It would just be a a blind guess at this point. >> Sure. Any other questions? What makes the alternative alternative? Maybe I Maybe you suddenly just
012didn't process. >> Alternative is simply it's outside of the normal open enrollment period. There's like six different criteria. DP >> There Yeah. There are Yes. So, within that application for open enrollment, they you have site um criteria. So, I will get um I will find out numbers and I'll give a synopsis of open enrollment and alternative open enrollment to the full board. Any other questions for Dan? No? All right. Is that all you have for an update? That's all I have. Okay. Um Hold on, let me make a note. No worries. All right, that moves us to item four, the consent agenda. Move approval of the consent agenda as presented. Second. Is there any discussion? Lisa. Seeing no discussion. All right. Uh I'll call the question. All in favor? I. >> I. Any opposed? Any
013abstentions? The consent agenda is approved. We are on to item five, which is a discussion item, uh regarding fees. So, annually, um there is a review of fees. Uh review of fees for our facility rentals, pool rentals, um programming, and so forth. And um this goes through again the two-step process, and this is our first time through for for this year and taking a look at. So, yeah, we we've we used to look at this on an annual basis with our finance and facilities committee, and we decided a few years ago just to bring it right to the board because it become such a routine part of what we do every year planning for the next year. Um we use a um a tool that was created by the federal government to look at the
014cost of our our um lunches, and it's it's called the paid paid PLE paid lunch equity calculator. And so, basically, it looks at um what we're charging, how much we're getting reimbursed, all those different pieces to figure out what we need, excuse me, what we need to charge for the next year. And that would really indicate that a 10 cent per meal increase we wouldn't be required to do it for next year, but it's recommended. And with the food costs has just continued to go up quite a bit, and there's some uncertainty around what that might look like for next year. So we feel that it would be prudent to do that for both our lunch and our breakfast for next year. And then we we recently increased our milk prices. I think last year
015we increased it 10 cents, so we're going to hold that steady for next year. We feel like that would be reasonable. So our recommendation would be to just to do a flat 10 cent across the board increase for both breakfast and lunch for next year. Our goal within our food service program is to operate in a a way that's not a deficit. We try to cover our costs, and if we do have revenues that exceed our expenses, there's a process in place that we use to evaluate that to make sure that we can use our fund balance to address any equipment needs or you know, just things like trays and silverware that that we need to replenish. So we've been able to successfully do that for a number of years using this process. So I
016think I'll pause before I go into the next one to see if there's any questions. Any questions? Mia, Do they still do in the elementary's a lunch milk break as well? Are those prices where are those prices? >> Yep, so that would be the the 50, I think it's 50 cents or 55 cents that we're charging for milk. And that's if you get a milk at either the morning milk break or if you get just like kids that bring cold lunch might take a milk at lunch. >> okay. Yeah. Is that a is that cost a change this Nope. We would we would leave that alone. Yep, we would leave that the same as it is this current year. Any other questions specific to the meal fees increase? I have one. Go ahead. Um and
017the the ala carte items Mhm. are are is the district involved in the setting of the prices for those for the ala carte items as well or is that driven mainly by Taher and their pricing? >> We do get a list of pricing from them for their ala carte items. Um but I'd have to look at that. There is a tool for that as well. And if I remember correctly it's been a while since I've looked at it, but if I remember correctly the the pricing in that in a way is encouraged to the items are more costly to try to encourage kids to take the actual meal versus ala carte items. Um DPI is not really excited about kids eating a lot of junk food. Well, it's not even junk food. Some of it
018it meets the requirements for the lunch program that the federal government sets. However, you know, we do get kids that like to buy bubble gums and and some of that kind of stuff. So and I know that we do work with parents because often times kids might start taking those things and they use up their lunch money pretty quickly when they're buying some of those ala carte items. So Yeah. I think I've heard that concern from parents that you know, how is my kid spending $10 on you know, a couple things and Yeah, lunch money's gone for the week and Yeah, we definitely have had some parents that when they find out what choices their kids are making, they definitely have some conversations with their children about what their lunch money is intended to purchase.
019I wonder if the ala carte prices need to be shared more um proactively with parents. I don't know. Like I've never been able to find them on our website or anything. I think things change. Yeah. >> Um so I don't know if I mean I can talk to Melanie and see. I I I I don't know. I can talk to her. To see if that's even a possibility. >> wonder if like how often things change. Yeah. Um I mean there's certain things that that will be you know that probably are there every single day. Yeah. Um Okay. Yeah, I can talk to her. Questions about meal fees? Nope. Okay. On to the facility rental. All right. So, um we have a lot of community use of our facilities and the when you look at the
020statute it basically talks about schools making their facilities available to the community in a cost-neutral way and that's what we really try to do. So, we essentially look at the cost of things like our utilities per square footage to determine um what goes into the cost of renting some of those spaces. Also in that is some custodial cost because we do have to have people here in the buildings when we have community use and we look at that every year to see whether or not we will need to increase um those fees for the following year. We try to I even with doing this is that the the cost is pretty low. This year we're looking at needing to increase and I really think a lot of that's because of a very very cold winter
021that caused our utility cost to go up a bit. So, um most of these spaces are going up a little bit. If they're if they're not specifically listed it would stay the same for next year. So, we kind of look at what we're currently charging, what those costs would be, um and then and look at bumping them up as needed to make sure we're covering those costs. Lisa. So do we we don't make any money on renting out facilities? Not really, no. So okay, cuz this looks like a really good deal for people who need a space to meet. I wonder if I mean I suppose if we're our goal is always just cost neutral, so it wouldn't make sense to advertise that come meet at the school district. No, and and even if you
022want to rent the space, there are required requi- I can't talk tonight. There's requirements within our policy for making sure that they have like a certificate of insurance. We're supposed to be listed as an additional insured. There's certain requirements. So it you do have certain things you need to do and we we don't rent our facilities during the summer months because we don't have weekend custodians on hand and that's the time of year in which we're doing a lot of our major cleaning and and maintenance type work and we have weekend staff on hand at the high school both Saturday and Sunday and on Saturday at River Bluff. So if you want to use any spaces outside of those time frames or in other buildings, you have to pay overtime for custodial costs, which would
023be added on to the the hourly rate. So that can get a little bit more expensive for like some of our youth groups in town. Any other questions about facility rental? All right. Pool rental. >> And the next one. So the pool this is to actually rent the pool by the hour and again we kind of go through the same process where we look at the cost of having lifeguards and then the number of lifeguards changes based on how many people will be in the pool. We don't do this very often. It's usually only for or a community group that would have maybe a swim meet or something like that. And again, just like we do for all the rest of spaces, we look at what we have to have on hand, how we recover
024that cost. Um and I again, this is this is not done very often. Can someone pay to make the pool warmer? Nope. The swim team likes it cooler. They say it's cold to make you swim faster. Yeah. Any other questions about pool facility fees specifically? I will also add that we did we typically evaluate our um in addition to the pool rental fee, we look at the fees we charge for pool activities like um swim lessons, open swim, all that kind of stuff because the pool has been shut down so many months with all of the the renovation work. We're just really going to try to focus on, you know, bringing utilization of the pool back up to what we would like to see versus trying to charge more. So, um uh we are recommending
025any increases in those costs for next year with the hopes that having the pool open again, we can actually get people back in it cuz that's really what we want to see. Okay. All right. I'll ask one more time. Any questions about pool fees? Seeing none. Uh this should come back at the next meeting for discussion action. Correct. All right. So, we are now on to tonight's discussion action section. >> No, we got one more employee uh Oh, employee wages. Yes. So, we put a new structure in place um we I think it might be 2 years ago at this point to try to streamline how we're paying the different positions at the pool and we did a pretty comprehensive look around at other area facilities to see what um what what typical rates were
026being paid out for these kinds of positions. and I think it's been pretty successful in terms of being able to to hire people and we wanted to stick with sort of that cost of living 25 cent an hour increase effective July 1st as we're building our budget for next year. All right. Any questions about that 25% in or 25 cent increase? Seeing none. All right. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Now we are actually on to item six and I need a motion for this. Move approval of the 2026-2027 special education staffing recommendations. Second. Seconded by Croyel. Is there any further discussion? All right. Seeing none. I'll call the question. All in favor? I. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Item 2B, we have some policy updates and I need another motion. I move to approve
027the policy updates for PO 1213, PO 3213, PO 4213, and PO It's 8462. 8462 as presented. Okay. Second. Seconded by Pugh. Uh We need a roll call. We discussed this at our last meeting. Is there any further discussion this evening? All right. Then policy updates are roll call vote, so Ms. D'Amore, will you call the roll on this? Mr. Massemeyers? Yes. Ms. Sorg? Yes. Ms. Croyel? Yes. Mr. Moser? Yes. Dr. Milan Bartlett? Yes. Ms. Pugh? Yes. President Patterson? Yes. Policies are approved. We are on to item seven, which is the meeting recap. Uh for recap of action items, I have number one, tomorrow is election day, please go to your polling place and vote. Uh then after that, Dan is going to check the number of students um that are coming in during open enrollment
028versus alternative enrollment window and provide a definition of the open enrollment category of time versus alternative open enrollment. And then Erica is going to look into a la carte item pricing and whether that can be communicated to parents. And what am I missing? I think that was it. All right. Well, that is it for action items. Uh future meetings, we have a governance work group on April 8th at 5:00 p.m. That's a virtual meeting. And then our next regular board meeting will be April 20th at 6:30. And on April 27th, we will have a board reorganization meeting at 6:30 as well. Do we have outreach on the calendar, firm or not? Yes. Outreach work group is scheduled for Yeah, yeah, you moved it to like 4:30. 15th. Okay. Outreach work group will meet April 15th
029at 4:30. Mhm. All right, if there are no other recap items. I need a motion for contemplated closed session. Move to convene to an executive session pursuant to Wisconsin 19.85 sub 1 sub C considering employment, promotion, compensation, performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility and sub 1 sub F consider financial, medical, social, or personal histories or disciplinary data of specific persons, preliminary consideration specific personnel problems, or the investigation of charges against specific persons except where paragraph sub B applies which if discussed in public will be likely to have a substantial adverse effect upon the reputation of any person referred to in such histories or data or involved in such problems or investigations for the purpose of discussing employment or certified staff members. Second. Moved by
030Massamyre, seconded by Pew. Okay. And this is a roll call. Mayor Coyle? Yes. Mr. Moser? Yes. Zach Massamyers? >> Yes. Lisa Pew? Yes. Allison Sorg? >> Yes. Sharon Mylan Bartley? Yes. Joe Patterson? Yes. For members of the public joining us this evening, we will reconvene in open session if we have an action to take though I don't anticipate that. So, um that's it for the public