001Feel good. Good evening and welcome. My name is Taylor Kingman. As president of the board of trustees of the St. Angelo Independent School District, I would like to welcome all of you who are present at tonight's pre-aggenda board meeting. We appreciate your interest in the activities of our students and the business of SISD. All items that will be discussed at our meeting this evening have been posted as required by state law. Also, you may be aware our board meets a minimum of two times per month and most of the items on our agenda this evening will be discussed tonight and voted upon at our regular board meeting. As members of the SSD board of trustees, we are here to set goals, listen to reports from our superintendent, approve budgets, contracts, and personnel appointments, and to
002make policy for the district. Please keep in mind that the meeting is a meeting of the board of trustees held in public, not a meeting of the public. However, we do have a public comment item on our agenda that allows anyone present who wishes to speak to our board team on an item that is not on our action agenda or an action item on the agenda an opportunity time an opportunity to do so. Please provide your name and contact information and the specific topic you wish to address on a public comment form located in the back of the room prior to the start of tonight's meeting. Should you want to offer public comment, please listen carefully and comply with the following rules so we can move through this part of the meeting efficiently. Each speaker
003will be given a total of three minutes. The district will provide an official timekeeper. Please respect the privacy of others and refrain from identifying students, employees, or other community members by name. Disruption of the meeting will not be tolerated at any time. Comments on any subject, whether positive or negative, must be courteous and respectful. Comments are limited to the specific topic you indicated on the form and filled out. Any speaker with a specific complaint about a district employee decision or operational issue should present that complaint through the appropriate mechanism, which is the district's formal grievance process. Also, please understand if you offer public comment that the board cannot reply to you except to thank you for your comments since the matter has not been posted for discussion. I ask that you please refrain from talking
004while others are speaking. And I also ask, as I remind my fellow board members to please turn off or silence your cell phones. Again, thank you for being here in your support of SISD. We do have a quorum this evening. All of our board members are present, but Mr. Gagos, who had a work commitment and will not be able to be here this evening. Uh, with that, um, if everyone would stand and join me, we'll do the pledges to the United States and Texas. All right. Next on our agenda is public comment and no one has signed up this evening. So we will move forward with conducting our finance and audit committee workshop and I will turn that over to Mr. Dindle. Thank you Dr. Kingman. start off with reports tonight and the first report
005we'll have is a management oversight report on transportation and Mr. Livingston is here to help us with that tonight. Welcome Mr. Livingston. Okay, good evening everybody. There I'm live now. Good evening everybody. I'm coming to the end of my uh first year here at the head of the transportation department of uh St. Angelo ISD. Uh thank you for having me here this evening. I'm going to try to tell you a little bit about uh the transportation department. Talk to you a little bit about some of the uh events that we celebrated in the department this year. Um August 8th was our annual inservice training uh that's required of our bus drivers prior to school opening. Um October 21st through the 25th was National School Bus Safety Week and we did do a lunchon for our
006folks during that week. Um November 20th we did our employee Thanksgiving meal. We had some uh folks uh uh join us. I believe Dr. Brandon and Dr. Moran came over and helped us celebrate Thanksgiving with our folks. Um December 18th, we had a holiday meal for our folks. uh prior to getting out for the Christmas holiday. Um February 10th through the 14th, uh we celebrated uh transportation employee appreciation week and that's during uh love the bus month during February. Um, I believe it's Wednesday. We're having the uh annual Easter egg hunt over at the transportation complex. And May, I believe I didn't have the date when I did these, but we have set it. I believe it's the 14th we're doing uh an end of the year cookout for our folks. I wanted to put
007a uh add a little bit of uh national statistics uh about student transportation and this is just a very uh uh small snippet of what those uh uh statistics are but daily more than 480,000 yellow buses travel the roads in the US carrying students to and from school. Um they carry more than 25 million student passengers daily. Um that makes it the largest mass transit system on on ground. Um saves uh an estimated 2.6 billion gallons of gasoline each year and that's comes from the American School Bus Council. Um, and the yellow bus meets 48 federal safety standards, which is more than any other vehicle on our highways. And here's some St. Angelo ISD statistics. Currently, we have approximately 3,900 students uh routed to buses here in the district. Um, those are eligible students. We
008actually have a lot more that are eligible, but those are the ones that have signed up for transportation. Um, our daily average riderships about 1,400 and this does not include our transfer students. It does not include uh special activities uh sports and those kind of stuff. Um, we do carry them on 35 general education buses every day. Those buses run a two-tiered system where they carry elementary students to school first and then they go back and take secondary uh children to school. Um, we have currently 17 uh specialized vehicles uh carrying our uh most precious cargo and those are our students that uh uh have some special needs. Um I believe about 300 of them. I didn't put them on put it on the slide but that's what uh the number uh sticks in my
009mind. um from August 1st of 24 through uh April 4th when I pulled these numbers together, uh our vehicles traveled 293,000 uh miles just with sports and activities. That's not our home to school mileage. Um, currently as of the 11th, we have six bus driver positions, four monitor positions, a shop supervisor, and a service manager available in transportation. Uh, we currently have about uh four people in training. A couple of those will probably have their license before schools out. So, we attended the the St. Angelo ISD job fair on Saturday and uh was very pleased with the results that we got from that. Um talk about the fleet a little bit and the additions that we made this year. Um, we've got two 72 passenger general education vehicles that will be coming sometime between now
010and June and one new uh special uh transportation bus coming that is wheelchair equipped. Um, we added uh two new transit style uh school bus constructed travel buses which is uh somewhat new to San Angelo ISD. Um, one of them I believe we had here for your meeting last month. So, um, we did, uh, purchase a new freight liner, ultra coach liner for that out of town travel. And we do have a couple of new Ford Expeditions coming sometime next month for uh, student travel. So looking into the future a little bit um we have begun with our transfinder upgrade and that is our uh routing uh software that we use. Um routeinder pro that we currently have and has been around for years is getting ready to uh go to bed so to speak.
011So in the next couple of years we'd be forced to make the upgrade. So we are doing that. We had our kickoff meeting a couple of weeks ago and my routing uh folks are going attending Transfinder University on Wednesday and Thursday this week I believe to learn how to use the new product. Um, with that service finder is also going to be upgraded and that's our uh service uh the the program that they use in the shop to keep track of all the uh repairs and so forth that we do on our vehicles. and uh stopfinder implementation is going to come with that upgrade to transfinder and that is our parent app and uh parent communication app I should say and there's a lot of different ways we'll be able to use that and uh
012I'm excited to be able to uh give our our parents a little bit more uh at at ease when they know when their kids are on the bus and we'll be able to send messages to them a little well a little easier, a lot easier uh to get those notifications out when uh you know we have buses that are running behind and so forth or buses that we need to double up or double back or whatever the the situation may be. So, I think that's uh um something that's been lacking here and that's something I'm excited to to bring. It'll be sometime during the next year. I'm hoping it'll be fully live by the time we come back from Christmas, but uh with the uh all new things, we want to make sure it's running
013well before we put it out there to our folks as well. Uh something that we have not had on our buses um is live GPS. Uh we've had uh with uh smart tag we've had passive GPS where uh we can track a bus as long as the tablet's in the bus and it's turned on. Uh if the tablet's not on, we don't have any way of tracking that bus. So, um, we're talking to vendors right now and I think next month we're going to come back with a recommendation to move forward with that live GPS. Um, because with the upgrade to transfinder, uh, smart tags no longer going to work with transfinder. So, we also have to find a a a new option for that as well. And this will all be in one package.
014Um, and then August 5th, we've got our back to school meeting planned. And, uh, this coming school year, we do have, uh, a day at, uh, the semester break in January where our folks are uh, scheduled to work that day. So, we're going to have a midyear in service that day as well. So, I'll open it up to questions if you have anything for me. Questions for Mr. Livingston? Our bus that's in Fort Worth being repaired. Any update on that? The one that was t-boned? Um, it it's actually up in Tulsa. It went back to the U. Uh but uh it's been about a week since I heard anything on it and um I get the same answer that we've had, you know, couple more weeks. Couple more weeks. So, uh they've uh had some
015issues. The new doors don't fit on the older buses exactly the way that they were. So, they have to revamp the door mechanism. Um, as of about a week ago, they had all the parts in necessary to do that. So, hopefully this time it'll be the last two weeks, uh, estimate, I hear. So, hopefully it'll be back by August. Mr. Livingston, we do have some more vehicles coming in in the next year, the way it plans out. Is that correct? Correct. And we we have that in the budget for the upcoming year as well. So, okay, good. Additional questions. All right. Thank you, Mr. Livingston. We appreciate your your input for sure. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Next up is uh Mr. Walters and he is going to give us a summary findings of
016the TEA intruder detection audit constructed by the ESC staff. Dr. Moren, Dr. Kingman, and members of the school board. Uh, as always, I'd like to thank you for your time and effort supporting SISD. Uh, for the last two weeks of March and the first two weeks of April, we had uh two IDAs or intruder detection audits. Any findings and corrections, if any, have been addressed by campus administration. All right. Thank you, Mr. Walters. Mr. Walters, I understand you're on a short lease right now. Will we get to see you next month? Yes, sir. All right. Good. Good. All right. All right. With that, we'll move forward to our financial reports and our bills and accounts. If you'd like to turn to page nine on the uh financial reports, shows our uh currently shows our committed
017uh fund balance of 11,699,987. Most of that is committed to construction projects, 8 million of that uh that which will be coming out probably of our of that committed fund shortly. Uh we still maintain a steady uh $53 million prox of an unassigned uh uh balance at this point. There no questions on that. We can move forward to page 12, which is our revenues and expenditures report for March. We're in our seventh month of the budget cycle which should put us somewhere around 58% uh completion of that uh budget right now. Revenues stand at 65%. Which is slightly ahead and that's because uh normally we see all of the local funds collected basically December uh January February and so all those funds come in uh so we we'll run slightly ahead for a month or
018two and then the state's going to come in and make us whole over the rest of the year as we move forward. Our expenses right now stand at 61 a.5% which is slightly ahead of where we should be. But there are some contracts uh that we pay yearly and they have already already been come out of our budget. So that should come down in the next uh couple of months as we move forward through the through the uh budget cycle. There's no questions on the revenues and expenditures report. Can move forward to our checkbook report for March. That's on pages 14 through 31. Not sure if anybody has any questions on any of those. If you've got uh questions at this moment, we can uh query uh uh Dr. Brandon. If not, make sure you
019include those in an email to them and we'll they'll be explained obviously uh pretty post. He gets back with me uh quicker than I usually read my emails. So, that's that's a good thing. So, anyway, thank you for that, Dr. Brandon. If anybody does have questions, make sure you get with Dr. Brandon on that checkbook. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary uh for this month. If not, we can move forward to page 32 through 36, which are our March investment reports. The first report shows a comparison between February and March. February 25 and March 25. Our February earnings were uh 32,000 procs and our March earnings were 322,000 procs. Uh the next page shows our March 24 through March 25 comparison. March 24 showed a uh earnings of 387,000 which we had slightly
020more in our account at that point because we were still paying out of our uh construction projects. We had about 90 million our account at that point uh invested and in March 25 we've got 81 million invested and again uh with earnings of approximately $322,000. No questions on that. Uh pretty straightforward. we can move forward to our February tax report. Our uh 2322, excuse me, 2023 collection rate right now is at 93.42%. Uh and our collection rate for uh 2024 is slightly ahead at 93.97% about half half a point uh quicker. uh our tax collections in 2023 approximately 55 million and tax collections in 2024 approx approximately 56.5 million. So good coming in slightly faster but uh solid solid figures for our tax report. Any questions on that? We can move forward to our PO
021report for any POS over $20,000. Lots of things in that uh report uh this month. Our firewall uh our SRO contract. We purchased a significant amount of band instruments coming for this year and next year coming up. There's facility assessment fee in there. Also, there's some legal fees paid. Uh fire sprinkler inspection report that's due annually. Uh there's some fiber optics purchase in there. Uh bus fuel or fuel in general. uh some network equipment, some occupational and physical therapy. Uh hard to believe we're $20,000 worth of juice for this uh uh PO. Uh we've got some bus purchases in there that'll be coming in here in the next year. Uh there's a little advertising and also uh some Kate computers in there. There are not any questions on the uh PO report. If not, uh,
022that concludes the, uh, budget and finance report for March. Dr. Cayman, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dentle. Uh, we do have one action item to discuss this evening on before we go through our proposed agenda, and it's bid 25-003. And Mr. Henry is going to help us with that. Thank you for having me here tonight. Tonight I bring forth bid 25-00003, charter bus travel services. Over the past several years, the transportation department has seen an increase in the need for contracted charter bus use uh for out of town travel. With the addition of more travel buses and additional drivers, this need has gone down, but the need still exists. To lower the cost and increase the efficiency of this process, it was determined that we should designate weekends when the need is high and bid
023these trips out. Seven high volume travel dates were picked and an RFP was sent to charter bus companies capable of this service. We received nine bids with eight capable of performing all trips. The scoring criteria was applied and safe charters of TAI Texas had the lowest price and the highest score. The administration recommends approval of safe charters of TAI as our primary vendor for charter services. Total cost for safe charters to charter 42 42 buses on seven high volume travel dates will be $126,6942. Do you have any questions? Mr. Henry, it seems like it's a valuable uh tool that we use to get these quotes out in front of knowing when we're going to need these buses uh in in the fall. Having to bid them on a short-term basis would cost us a whole
024lot more. And even varying reports here vary from our our bid at 127,000 approximately all the way up to 236,000. So, could be a even wider swing if we had to do this on a short term. So, thanks for the planning effort to to identify when and where we need buses cuz it saves the district a bunch of money. Absolutely. This is the third year now that we'll do the pre is it second or third? We didn't do it last year, but we've done it this will be the second. Second year. Yes. And if we need additional buses that weekend, they've agreed to help us on that as well. Yes. We had language in there for that as well. Any further questions? I guess just a quick question. There's no local companies. All these are
025from out of town. No, there are no local companies that do charters here. None to our knowledge. Anyway, and just to make sure, this is the style, the travel bus style that we've been getting. Right. Right. These are travel charters, right? Not the not yellow school buses, right? No, no, I know that, but I meant um they're not the ones with like the restrooms in them. They're the other the newer style that we've been getting. Is that right? Or are they the uh it would depend on the on the charter company whether or not they had uh restrooms in them. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And I think Dr. Dr. Kingman, just as a clarification, when we uh every once in a while we run into a situation where we have like uh Lake View and
026Central out of town at the same time and it takes 23 23 charter buses to get everybody there and some of those leaving to be there uh by game time or the band to be there uh when the game starts. And so that's one of the needs. uh we still have route drivers that drive until 5:00 in the evening um you know delivering students so to get buses there. So it's not sometimes it's not even about having the number of charters, it's about having the drivers as well. So uh that's kind of the early the early play to the charter companies to make sure we can get them all there and get them there on time. Also, Dr. Bren, is it true that these charter buses can travel at the speed limit and like a
027yellow bus can only travel at 55 miles per hour max? Is that correct? So, saves the students some time in getting here and there in the distance that we travel out here in West Texas. So, all right. Any further questions regarding bid 25-003? Dr. H. With that, I'd recommend the approval of Safe Charters of TAI as our primary vendor for charter services. Total cost for safe charters to ch to charter 42 buses on seven high volume travel dates will be $126,6942. All right. Do I have a second? I'll second. Isn't that crazy? I have a motion from Mr. Dendle and a second from Dr. Mills. Any further board comments or questions? All right. All in favor say I. I. All against say the same. Motion passes 6. All right. Before we do our proposed agenda,
028we are going to go into executive session um under uh 551.074 which is personnel matters and 551.072 which is real property. Um, and we'll be back as quick as we can. All right, we are back from I wonder where that went. Uh, we are back from executive session. We took no votes. No action was made. So now we will proceed with our proposed agenda for our April 21st, 2025 regular board meeting. So A is invocation. and then we'll do our pledges um recognitions and then we will get an update on Head Start programming considerations. Dr. Gomez, Dr. Brandon, do you all want to give us anything on that this evening? Yeah, I think you'll have some. Yes. Just continuing conversations and we'd give you an update. So, that's more just an update for everybody. Okay.
029And I'll make I'll make a quick comment. So uh on the Head Start programming um the council of governments and SISD have been talking about the current facilities that they are in which are our facilities day elementary Rio Vista Elementary and we're just talking about how we can provide uh better facilities for them and try to turn this into a win-win. It also involves some discussion about the uh related services provided by West Texas Rehabilitation um because they have not been able to provide those for the last uh probably six to seven months. Yeah. Due to um some guidelines that uh that the auditor became aware of and so they have not been able to provide services for those students there that are third uh three and four year olds. And so we're working on
030a combination that can help this become a win-winwin really for the kids, for facilities, for West Texas Rehab. And we're we're excited to uh to offer you all information next Monday that I think you'll you'll see as a a really great and bold plan going forward. Okay. And our update on academic programs and our summer programming. Dr. is I'd planned to just give an overview of all the programs, an update on where we were with hiring um so that everyone was aware of there's multiple offerings. Sometimes people think just the automatic elementary summer school. Well, we run elementary, middle, kinder, jump start, ESY for special ed. So, just to give an update. Perfect. Um, and then update on the SASD teacher incentive aotment expansion application. That's the easiest one. I do think you would probably
031want that in the regular meeting, but an update before that is our applications, our expansion applications are due um no later than tomorrow. Ours has already been submitted. So, we already have an um our once your application is accepted, then you can add to it. But we do have to formally hear that the additional grades we've added um have been approved. So we are excited about additional opportunities for compensation for a number of teachers. And Dr. Gomez, when you do that next week, I think just because the TIA is new to the district as a whole. I think it's important that we go kind of through why we started where we did with program the limited and I'm sure you're going to do all that, but maybe just so everyone understands. Yes, sir. you know,
032not just the update, but maybe what it is in its entirety. Um, all right. And then the next will be uh we're going to get an update on TEA accountability rating, you're going to help us with that again next week. Yes, I know that you all received information in Friday facts and um know that the only thing new with this information is the actual rating from the state that we've had data for almost two years now. And I know that all of you are aware that we are currently this week and next week testing for the 25 school year and this is information from 22 23 and even from graduates from 2122. So it's multiple years old at this point. Perfect. We will get that from you next week. Um, I'm in charge of the
033annual required hours of continuing ed for schoolboard members and after our training session today and tomorrow at lunch, everyone will be up to date on that and we will report that next week as well. Um, so then we have consent items, our donations and our minutes. Um we'll have so let's look at our action items and talk about um what we need to do there. Bills, accounts, and financial statements from March. We'll continue that as a regular. Um Dr. Brandon, do you want to give us the presiding judges? Um and um we'll have a list of that for next week. Yes. Yes. Okay. So, we'll keep that regular as well, just since we don't have the the list. Um, let's talk about the Lake View chiller replacement. Um, you can talk about this right now,
034but I wonder does the board do y'all want to I mean, we don't have a lot of consent and regular items. Do want to just I think that's a big item that's do we want to just keep that as a regular item just so we talk about where we are and so the board knows that we've had a problem with Lake View Chiller. We'll save your time this evening. We'll let you do regular next week. Um we can do but come back up curriculum and instruction materials. Um this is just one added vendor I believe. Yes. Um any comments? Just a standard adder to a current existing bid for a curriculum uh vendor. So consent that can be consent unless there's no other consent. And then um the super Dr. Skelton, the superintendent's recommendations for
035the 25 26 teacher and other professional contracts. Um, we'll get that list. Oh, that's right here on this. Good evening. You guys got the the green folders with the list. There's several of hundreds of names in there uh for you guys to preview. We wanted to give that to you a week in advance so that you could go through those and preview them before we actually had an action item on it. So that list is uh everybody that we're taking to the board to you guys uh for the April contracts. Um so do we you want to does the board want to make that consent as part and then if if someone reviews it this week and has something we need to pull we can pull? May consent consent for now and then if in
036reviewing of them if there's any questions um email Dr. Skelton and then also let me know that y'all want to pull it from consent so that we can do that before next week. Um so right now that will be consent. Um other than that we'll have announcements that early voting will start on the 22nd um the day after our meeting. Election day would be May 3rd and then we'll have finance pre-aggenda workshops and the regular board meeting May 12th and May 19th of next month. Any further board questions or comments pretty as far as action items or anything else that needs to be added to the agenda? No. All right. With that, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.