Amery Board of Education - January 17, 2022

001yeah they're first responders there but then they're on avery ambulances i'll reconvene now an open session and uh this is the emory school board of education and uh we're gonna start out this evening with the esser funding information and the answer is elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund and i'll turn it over to sean portion of the meeting that's scheduled for the beginning of this meeting and the beginning of the february meeting is specifically earmarked for a opportunity to gauge feedback from the public on esser dollars now i know not everyone is familiar with esser and in education we've got far too many acronyms but what esser stands for is elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund e-s-s-e-r the code word for it is in so many ways the coronavirus aid or kovid aid

002so we've talked about this before so some of the slides you're going to see are familiar there are three rounds of s or three rounds of ester plus an a and a b in the second esser so as you see on the screen here ester one ester two a and b and then s or three s round one uh has been encumbered long time ago now hundred and thirty five thousand hundred and seventeen dollars one of the very long list of things you could spend that on was on payment for staff so we use that money to pay for clubhouse staff sr2 it lined up it wasn't the most fortuitous happening but our hvac system at the elementary school uh failed or was very close to having failed so that money for sr2 one of

003the allowable expenses was to improve ventilation systems and remember the hvac system at the elementary was original to the building so by my math that makes it 54 years old so it was way overdue so we spent every dime that we had in sr2 on that hvac system that is thankfully been complete and the ventilation at the elementary schools probably never been better since it was first installed some 50 plus years ago so that brings us to sr3 our very most recent total for us or three dollars is 1.229 million and 433 and change there that's up slightly from uh when we met last last week we got a upgrade on the amount of dollars we would receive so that's the new total so for rester three we must encumber that or spend that by

004the end of september 2024 uh remember in lieu of state aid we've received esther dollars we don't get any state aid for per pupil this year or next year until the next biennium budget which is 2023 2023-2025 so we have to spend that money basically in the next three years emphasis on assessing and addressing learning loss we missed some five months of instruction with the spring of 2020 in the fall of 2020 we were not in school so we were not able to educate kids in the same way we ordinarily would because obviously they were remote they were at home we need to gather feedback from the folks that are our stakeholders students families school administration teachers principals school leaders etc that is one of the focuses of this evening esther timeline the window opened

005on the 6th of december and they gave us 90 days so they have basically rounded it up if you will they are giving us until march 11 of 2022 which is some six weeks away from today to document how we're going to spend that money possible esser expenditures what you see here on the screen is a very long list of items isn't new these are all items that we already have in-house in most cases this is not an exhaustive list but nearly an exhaustive list nearly every single one of these is an instructional resource for kids so if we wanted to you could use esther dollars to pay for any number of these things this year and next year if you wanted to get something entirely new altogether we could do that too but if

006there was something newer and better it's likely that it would already be on the list because we wouldn't be waiting around we would have already tried to grab it but this is a list of possible ester expenditures these are all again if you want to use another acronym the dpi these are all ebis evidence-based instruction staffing considerations there's a couple of items that i threw on the list that are very new in the last couple of weeks an additional third grade teacher we've got a third grade population in a third grade staff that doesn't match as in we have more kids and more need than we do the number of staff in third grade here at the intermediate school so we could use these dollars to pay for an additional third grade instructor if we

007wanted to this year and next year we're looking at doing a change in the high school schedule to a year-long math in a year-long english model we would need additional math instructor to make that happen so we could do that and then lastly student success coordinators yes we already have those in district but we could use this money to pay for those folks remember student success coordinators they're not career counselors but rather they're working with kids directly on social and emotional needs and frankly the bigger hurt if you will from colbit might very well be the social and emotional uh impacts on kids as opposed to the academic ones because oftentimes the social and emotional comes first and then the learning comes next so those are staffing considerations and lastly there are some technological considerations

008and i do have to apologize for a mistake on this slide cyber security is an option there are entire districts that have been hit by cyber security attacks and have been shut down nina actually has been closed down for almost a week meaning they don't have any technology on campus whatsoever in any of their buildings indiana is a very large district so that's something we could do to have better security here and the mistake i made was staff computers i found out late in the day today from clint we can't use this money to pay for staff computers because the e rate from the federal government doesn't let you mix the two dollar pools but you could do a better wireless with this money so that's an option as well so these are potential expenditures

009these are not anything that's been decided these are just suggestions so i'll turn it over to you if you have questions or feedback and then certainly to the public if they have suggestions of what they would like to see us do do any of our administrators have anything to add to this that they'd like to comment on as it pertains to the need for more math instruction obviously it's one of the main areas that we're assessed on one thing we have to look at is the ebb and flows of the number of students that you have in the building at any given time so that does impact things a little bit as well currently our algebra classes which make up a significant part of our ninth and tenth grade as well as the the act

010assessments algebra is a huge focus you know our average algebra class right now is 28 this spring we're going to have an algebra class that'll run twice with 30 students in it so to be able to not only instruct algebra but also to get around and work with those kids on individual basis is very challenging um you know sometimes it doesn't work out that way where the class sizes are always at large but math has been pretty large this year and so you know we're doing the best but it's it's a large class so i guess do you guys have any questions about that as it pertains to the high school why is math i mean it said talked about hiring another math teacher but why not english we already have four english teachers we

011only have three and uh decimal math teachers mr bosley teaches about 80 science and 20 math so thank you yeah um and so you're talking about putting matt making math and english year round just for just for ninth and tenth graders or so so the probably with ninth grade only probably next year and i would say from a math standpoint pre-algebra and algebra and english 9 and then possibly a english or i'm sorry a 9th grade social studies class just to mix and match the schedule a little bit the 10th grade gets a little bit more complicated because some students we have for instance 9th 10th and 11th graders that are in geometry which is the next class after algebra that complicates things a little bit and if we if we make too many changes

012it's hard to hold together the integrity of the block so i think we're leaning towards sliding in with the ninth grade checking the data see what the results come out with and then possibly working our way in one other thing that we're possibly looking at doing which really maybe doesn't necessarily impact the assessment score so much is 10th grade ap united states history the possibility of running that as a year-long course for our 10th graders and then we would have to pair that up more than likely with like a 10th grade english class or something so we're we're trying to be creative solving some problems talk for a moment josh about freshman kid takes math sophomore kid takes math same kid what could be the gap and when they get sure if you take algebra

013as a first semester freshman and then you don't take geometry it's possible that you wouldn't take it till the second semester of your 10th grade year or let's talk in terms of a ct let's say you take algebra one as a ninth grader let's as the first semester you take geometry your first semester of your sophomore year but then you don't take advanced algebra two until the spring of your junior year that's so that's a big gap between your math sections and that huge a.c.t test on in march we've actually heard the concern from students themselves sure i have i'm sure you have as well kids are very strategic and where they place their their math because of that yeah um because it's it's happened to some kids that i know that just for whatever

014reasons other scheduling issues they couldn't they couldn't get in so moving forward to make that into a year-long back to a year-long course the way it used to be years ago that would be then skinny courses back to skinny courses we wouldn't have that on a block schedule then for the algebra course in the pre-algebra yes it would fit into a skinny schedule that i've kind of mocked up it it works out pretty well at least on paper and then that would guarantee that all ninth graders go the entire school year and have year-long math have we had feedback from teachers or even some of the students i know some of the students are frustrated with having that gap but then the good thing about black scheduling especially especially in a math setting is you

015get that time to be in the classroom to get the extra help that you need if if still warranted and to have that time to work on it versus where you're going to eat up a lot of instruction time with the 60 minute 45 minute class 44 minute class yeah you're going to eat up all of that 45 minutes almost in instruction yep there are positives and negatives to both of those schedules and there's there's many wonderful aspects to the block schedule and this is one of those areas where it's son of a gun is there a better way that we can go about doing this and we're gonna we're gonna try to figure out a way to blend those two together is it something you're gonna consider just on a trial basis to see

016if we went back to that to see how it would work how many years would you give that just as an assessment i i think from uh from a fairness standpoint to data you have to give a minimum of two years and also not only just looking at the data but also talking to the students about their experiences in there as well it seems like really you know there's a there's several classes i think some classes were great as block scheduling but it seems like there are several classes that would benefit from being year long and so you know like you may even mention with some ap classes if you take it in the spring it's hard to take the test when you haven't been in the class for four months it is a challenge

017um but at the same time those ap courses because the ep tests are taken generally the first week of may you lose an entire month of instruction when you run those courses in the spring and as someone who taught ap for you know 16 17 years it was never a stressor getting through the material in the fall it was a stressor in the spring but the stressors were changed for me it was having review sessions and other times with the kids to come in whereas in the spring it's about getting the material done in a timely manner um so the esser dollars would help pay for hiring that teacher um or teachers if that's the route we chose to go but for how long well you have esther dollars that run through september of 2024

018but after that it would become a budget item if you want to continue that i don't know that you want to do something for two years i would think you'd want to do something for a lot longer than that particularly if it works and i'm pretty certain it's going to the middle school ran the schedule josh is talking about for nearly 15 years and 15 years in a row we were first in math and first in english we went away from that schedule for four years we moved to the bottom half of the conference if we move back to the schedule we're first again so we got a lot of evidence in the middle school right and so is that something that we could long term look to the budget to support then yes uh

019but i can't say what's gonna happen with the state budget if i could i can't tell what's gonna happen with the state budget next month let alone three years from now so yes absolutely we would have to make it work you can't you can't do it any other way if you're just gonna do something for two years i don't think that's gonna be sustainable anything else on the high school part of it not at the moment i can speak to the third grade staffing consideration so currently at the elementary the second grade section is one of our larger sections it has 6.5 sections transitioning here next year we have four teachers half of us one section would stay there that's our montessori our third grade stays there so we would have 5.5 transitioning over here

020and we have four third grade positions here this is a historically low academic class challenging they are our first covid kindergarteners and so i i would speak to and in my opinion it probably has impacted them the most kindergarten really is where you're learning your phonemic and phonological although all the foundational skills that you hear about that really is where they learn them so last year i was part of that first grade teaching staff that taught them it was a decision to add another section so the class sizes could be smaller if we wouldn't have added a section it would have been in the low 20s adding a section has enabled us to stay between 16 and 17 per classroom so sean and i have just had the con had the conversation even looking at

021their fall data they are tracking lower academically and so i had a conversation with sean just out of concern with them transitioning over here to for teachers what is that going to look like for us how can we how can we support them what would the class size look like with four teachers well the class size that they start at 119 which is where they are right now and then you pair off about 30 kids that go into montessori and aim that puts you down at 89 89 split with four teachers is 22 23 24 if you had a fifth teacher it's more like 17 or 18. i don't teach third grade and i never have but i am guessing there is a world of difference between 17 and 23 in a classroom and especially

022with a kid a group of kids that have a documented need from a worldwide pandemic they are they're being called in the literature over kids they missed five months of instruction when they needed it most it for them it was probably one of the most sensitive times of their early education of learning how to read and then really that impacts their writing the elementary last year we implemented a lot of things i can speak to i know that cheryl is i know we really upped title i know there was very purposeful classing when when they made classes it was very purposeful so that supports could go in and push in students some of the ideas that were up on the board earlier actually were adopted at the elementary for those students hegerty is a program

023that we implemented middle of last year once we saw what the test scores were on fastbridge we immediately responded it's something now that is being used universally at the elementary we're actually using it here universally as well just to do some backfilling that's really what we're finding is we're having to go back and do a lot of backfilling you guys have any other questions about this incoming third grade group not surprising yeah i agree totally not surprisingly i agree well and you tend to have classes certain classes that do have more need right you know and so it could be that they have more need and you had the covid it definitely could be that combination absolutely all right thank you yeah yep so what am i gonna say so i guess if we're not

024getting if we're not getting the state funding how much of this money do we need to use just to make budget we're going to need to use a large portion of it but the law says you must spend at least 20 percent of it on learning loss i don't have a calculator right in front of you but 1.2 million at 20 it's about 250 000 and the rest is going to be used to fill budget so we've already got ideas on how to do that because there's already known expenses that go on and on and on for year after year so we're not talking about necessarily trying to figure out how to spend no all that you know we are not familiar we are not you're marking 1.2 million dollars here in the next two

025months i think that would be unwise we have to use that to correct your ordinary budget expenses right right which is disappointing because it would have been nice to use that for well you know extra things but that's and then the way it worked and then a lot of these things were already using so yes so the ester dollars i mean even that 20 that we need to use towards learning less we can say we're using it for these things that are already in our in our budget now you just have to you just have to declare that's what you're doing with it yeah yeah right yes but i mean i don't think it's gonna be hard to find that twenty percent because that list of fifty is is a big sum a big sum

026of money i don't know exactly how much but a lot right and we're we are redoing the ela yep curriculum so that's going to be that's the curriculum order the curriculum orders 140 000 the timeline on that doesn't line up real well because we won't have that decision until the end of march and this needs to be declared by march 11th but it could still be done if we had to the 1.2 million is for the two years yes not not each year two years yeah and i will say yes the budget's due on that date but they're allowing for like any other grant revisions to a budget so i mean obviously we're gonna have an id and a framework or where we want to do so but there's some flexibility beyond that date so

027i think that's good too so so do are we just opening the microphone to anyone that wants to speak from the community as far as recommendations or things that they would like to see us address yes whatever if anyone has anything yeah if anyone would like to add on that this is the time to talk about this and this is for the esser dollars it's not for any other issue before the board is just this time frame is what we put out for that i think the administrative people have done a great job of laying it out sure the things that we can use to spend it on and the things that uh we need to spend it on i mean i think we could spend like four times i mean really just probably you

028know especially with just having most of it needing to go to our budget i would love to see us you know hire another math teacher and hire another third grade teacher and and look at our cyber security and see if that really needs to get shored up and i mean i'd love to do all of it but i you know i don't know that that's we can do all of it so i don't know but honestly that was probably the intent of the federal government for schools to use it obviously to address you know the pandemic and things stated other ideas so that's kind of right just really discouraging yeah because roughly we'd be looking at about 110 000 for the loss of the 150 per people state aid i'd have to run the math

029on that i'm just thinking about 1500 students at about 8 000 roughly it doesn't quite work like that but no it doesn't quite work like that you know you you could safely say 100 150 200 000 in state aid you could say that yeah not just for us for everybody everyone yes yeah and others the price tag is different river falls has more kids than us right yeah right so feasibly what how much of this can we tackle i guess is i'm kind of well the goal is to address the 20 percent after that you don't have to declare any of it you simply use it where you need to use it so we're focused on the 20 percent right and just to clarify a little bit there is some other small percentages a little

030bit for summer school you've got it for summer school and then i forget the other little bit you have to use for some other after school program whatever school that was it yes five percent for after school programs yeah a little one percent for like the summer school so okay yeah so reasonably can we do we have enough to hire you know i mean i guess it would cover for two years because that's all it's gonna be if you did a third grade teacher and a fifth in a high school math teacher through s or dollars it depends on who you hire but if you wanted to guesstimate you could say a teacher is salary plus benefits call it somewhere between 65 and 75 for each of them double that and then double it again

031because it's for two years you get yourself out right around 250 275 so yes that would be clean that would be quick math to do that but by no means are we ready to make that decision here this evening but yes we could looks like we have a comment i'm looking for some clarification um for the on the dpi website it says that the lease are required to reserve at least 20 percent of sr3 funds evidence-based intervention strategies and ensure that those in interventions respond to students social emotional and academic needs and address the disa the disproportionate impact of covert 19 on under representative student subgroups what are the student subgroups that we have to cover in this 20 percent and why is this is calling that out specifically for the for the second grade

032okay julie can you pull your microphone down a little bit for the second grade students moving into third grade third grade we have benchmark testing done throughout their first grade year their second grade year and they are very easily identified i would imagine we could print a list as quick as you could get to fastbridge for the high school kids you could document that need in the same way by looking at their performance as 8th graders and 9th graders we could print that list out just as quickly very likely so the student success counselors will be helping out who then if we have teachers covering those specific needs the fast bridge data would be academic performance data but i imagine the social and emotional data for second grade students would probably parallel that very closely

033because they're probably having struggles there too but there's not data if you will that have social and emotional impact that's not as quickly as identified as an academic data point so what is the student success coordinator going to be doing then with the children the student success coordinator would continue doing what they've always been doing which provides academic social and emotional support at school but the conversation we were having was about identifying kids via academic need social and emotional learning via student success coordinator i didn't know that that was part of the conversation that was simply a consideration under staffing considerably sure that's a consideration but i didn't know that we were talking about that quite yet we already have those folks in place we could simply pay for their salaries through lesser dollars but

034if we're doing in third grade teacher and you're doing a math teacher you're already out to 275 if you're then going to do student success coordinator salaries for the people that are already here you're probably looking at more likely another 300 to 350 we're probably going way beyond where we need to have all of those staff through esther dollars we don't have that kind of money to do just through esther dollars thank you we want to be mindful i would think when we're making this decision about staffing that this is sustainable within the budget for several years to come instead of just what this covers um so that we can have a real impact i would think so um that's obviously more that we're going to have to look at moving forward with hiring people

035i i have a real issue with hiring people just out of grant money and and hope you know covered money or wherever the money's come from and then we have to let them go because it's not sustainable in the long term budget because that's that doesn't seem like a good sustainable plan so that that into your question about those specific problems yeah i was wondering how that's the same concern with you as well so i kind of look at it from that from a financial standpoint i look at because that's my i'm sorry my area from the first part of that oh i said i share your concern of that too with with the being able to support that going forward and it's you know my my uh area of hopefully expertise to know hopefully

036with the stakes and gonna do the next biennium and and i'm hoping that they're gonna restore things but there's nothing for certain so thank you yeah okay thank you thank you something i don't know exactly how many years how long have the student success coordinators been uh four or five i couldn't say exactly like middle school or how you have three of them to go between the four schools two there's two now you're saying if we wanted to add another one we're not we're not proposing adding any yeah we're proposing if we used esther dollars you could pay for the two existing ones with us or dollars they're not proposing adding anything so we don't then we lose those coordinators then nope no they're in the budget we pay for them through the budget in

037the same way we have for the last four or five years esther just gives you another option of how you pay for them but we're not adding anything we're using the dollars to cover that salary and then we'd have that money in the budget to cover other things so so then you're just but you're not then you're not necessarily doing anything new you're just allocating the money and if that's the route we went it wouldn't be new that is true yeah well that's kind of the end of our uh presentation there with yes or funding how how do we proceed as far as like who makes the final decision and how does you know well we're going to meet again here in february same format allow people to give feedback in between the february board

038meeting and the march 11th date andy and i need to get into the portal and put in what we're going to put in you have to have a narrative justifying the expense right now if you're asking for my recommendation i would go with the recommendation to add a third grade teacher and the recommendation to add a math instructor because we have academic data that can tell you exactly why we should do that if you're telling me you got a third grade kid coming into this this building next year that missed five months of instruction i'm going to show you a kid that's probably got an academic need and that's exactly what we have well they i mean all the kids missed basically five months of in-person instruction but it seems like it's hitting this class

039it is hitting this class harder yes just speaking of what mr ambrosia said that this that was that that cornerstone of the foundation of how everything gets built is in kindergarten of learning how to to read and sound those things out and so that's and then now we have that real evidence based fact that we can see over the last couple of years we could have guessed that that was going to happen i mean just if we're educated enough to know how how it works but then to see it actually happen with the fast bridge and what what a great program that's been for us as a district to purchase because we've really been able to key in on on the deficits that we have and act fast the learning loss that's been demonstrated statewide

040elementaries and intermediates have seen a ton of learn learning loss in english language arts middle schools have seen a ton of learning loss in math because it's about direct instruction if they're not here you can't provide direct instruction in reading is a direct instruction activity and that didn't happen for almost five months yeah um and obviously we're gonna we'll look at this again just like we have with the first esser round of dollars in the second round of dollars and the board will approve it whatever we do going forward in a in another meeting so and also just one final thing in order to be lost in the fact that we budget for this but it's going across a couple of school years just remember that too so right actually three school years so you

041need to go see if there's anything for the community comments yeah well now we'll move to our regular meeting uh first off we'll have the consent agenda items um i have the consent and agenda items this month so i will make a motion to approve those items and a second all those in favor say aye aye aye that was done i'm waiting for becky to find out if we have any community comments due to a drive and that we'll have uh before our administrative uh team jonathan sherwood from clifton larsen allen will give us our audit report you meant to say because everyone's so excited about the audit report that's what you meant to say what's that i like the man thank you thank you yeah so thank you for having me here tonight my

042name is jonathan sherwood i'm a manager with clifton larson allen i'm in charge of the the day-to-day running of the typical field work of the audit uh help pull together the whole financial report form for you and then guide everything through issuance so i do have a big level of people that are both above me and below me um people who work below me definitely help me accumulate all of the information that we use to compile the financial statements and issue our audit report and then the people above me keep me out of trouble and make sure that there's any glaring errors in my mistakes hopefully all of them get caught before we issue our final audit report for you so if there's any questions as i go through my audit report i'm going to

043use a two-page summary that we usually pull together every year that way i don't have to go through the full 88 pages of your financial statements and keep everybody here until a very late hour so to get things started i guess again if there's any questions from board members as i go through things please stop me as i go through a couple of items here for you just to before i start on my comments on actual financial information i just want to highlight a couple of the individual reports that we actually issue as well as the management letter findings that we issue on an annual basis as well for you but first off i want to thank andrew and all the admin staff that i come in here once a year and kind of harass

044a little bit to you know kind of get in their way and say i need this i need this and they do a great job of pulling everything together for us and maintaining and whatever dpi requirements are they definitely help us in completing our job in an efficient manner for us so very much appreciated uh so on-site work this this year went as smoothly as possible with the ever um you know issue of cobid impacting on-site visits masking requirements are we allowed on site are we not we've made tremendous strides in working remotely as well which is definitely um you know kind of the silver lining in my book dealing with covid uh because it definitely does reduce the some of the travel that we need from our end and then basically does speed up

045the process overall working remotely believe it or not so from that standpoint i really appreciate everything that the district's done to help us issue our audit report so the first item that i have for you on our two-page summary here is the actual auditor's report or the opinion so that's the only part of the audit report that's actually ours of cla is we issue what's known as an unmodified or a clean opinion so that's the highest level of assurance that we're able as an extra external auditor to actually issue which is our goal that's what we strive for and honestly that's what dpi is going to require us to do for the district to achieve that level of independence uh opinion so we're happy to report that that's the opinion that we were able to

046issue again this year along with our audit report we also issue what's known as a management letter management letter comments so these two items that i have here listed they're known as material weaknesses in the auditor world or other speak but these are recurring items that have been uh very common to most people on the board here and it's something that we've we've issued time and time again these items are required for us to be commenting on to the the board of governance here neither of these two issues are going to be any glaring red flags by any means but they're required for me to at least discuss briefly here for you tonight the first item is limited segregations of duties for a school district your size school district of memory size very very common

047uh just goes to look at how many folks are involved in your financial reporting department your admin staff even with as many duties of the transaction cycle separated as we have them we don't have backups in place for multiple multiple people so your admin section your finance section is so small that you're saying we have to have compensating controls in order to oversee and review the type of work that they're performing so this is the time that i usually highlight everybody that's sitting around in a school school board chair and saying you're an integral part in the district's internal controls every time that you do your agenda items where you're approving vouchers approving administrative reports that is a key internal control that if there are questions that they're being raised by the right people and

048definitely give andrew a little bit more of a hard time and say we need to see some support for certain invoices or all of your budget discussions that you have you know the the great community input that we had here on how esser funds are being discussed and how they're ultimately going to be spent that's definitely integral in your internal controls of the district so from an internal or external auditor's experience of showing up to board members or board meetings we appreciate seeing things like that so keep those things up the other item on here is material audit adjustments that basically simply means that through the course of our audit work we're proposing adjustments to the district's books in order to compile the 88-page or almost 90-page audit report here for you in order to

049get things into dpi's required prescribed forms as well as following generally accounting accepted practices to make sure that everything is you know on the up and up i'll obviously highlight a few things here for you going forward in that regard overall as far as the terms of the number of adjustments that we've made uh pretty it's pretty standard of what we're what i've experienced for a school district of memory in the last number of years slightly up this year that's kind of due to some of the changes and accounting principles that took place during the year as well as some major changes of dpi's required reporting changes as far as account structure and a bunch of boring stuff that you don't have to worry about but that's one of the reasons why we had slightly

050more journal entries this year as compared to years past so ever the continuing strive of improvements i know andrew and i will have quite a few comments or emails flying back and forth throughout the year and i can definitely help along with uh interpreting any dpi final changes that come up through the year as well so moving on from there since the district also gets a certain level of federal funding we have to issue what's known as a single audit report or a report over compliance and that takes a look at both your specific federal programs including esser and that kind of things coming up as well as all your state programs as well so we have to do a compliance audit to make sure that what we're spending that money on at the district

051level is approved and is in compliance with the overall program guidelines so we're happy to report there that after out of all of the federal programs and state programs that we were required to test we didn't have any compliance findings that we need to report to those reporting agencies which is obviously your goal a couple other other items there for you to move through quickly is again i mentioned a couple of changes in accounting principles that took place and you'll see some of those kind of the impact of those numbers on page two here so just catch your breath on that one you'll see that going forward and then some of the other reports that we actually have to issue and just some of the technical things that we have to take care of you'll

052see on the pi 1506 that's a dpi required annual filing it's a very technical one that andrew and i have to make sure we're you know balancing out to the penny his records match my records so that's a fun one that he and i get to file annually and then lastly is the federal data collection form so again i mentioned that single audit that's required we have to have a separate reporting package that's you know an annual filing with them to make sure that all of the federal funding is properly documented and reported on our financial statements uh and again on all of those reports we didn't have any additional findings to report for you so that's a highlight for you as well to move into some of the actual finance and financial figures here

053item number two is we're going to start with the general fund and in my cases when i say general fund for the report i'm referring to both fund 10 and fund 27 which collectively is your regular and special education activities are all reported in these balances below here so a couple of things that we look at we've got a four year trend here when it comes to your balance sheet so this is a snapshot as of 6 30 20 21 and the year end balances so from a perspective of what i look for is trends which way are these items going from one year to the next so something that definitely is going to look or jumps off of the page at you that can be explained is that top line for cash and investments

054you can see as of 630 2021 you've got 4.1 million dollars sitting in the bank but the reason for that is kind of a cash flow timing issue if you go down a little bit further under that short term notes payable you've got about two million dollars that was taken out as a short-term loan with the line of credit with the bank that there was a big draw that actually occurred right on 6 30. so the reason that you have kind of a bump up in cash is because we just took it out at the end of the year and it hit our bank account more or less you know showing accounting wise the cash came in and we have to you know we owe that balance to the bank and as you can see

055that short term payable has been outstanding at the end of the year uh going back to at least the last three years so that's been a recurring item that we've had another new item that you'll see on there again just from accounting transaction this is the way it needed to be reported is that land held for resale the balance isn't very large but it is a new item so worth talking or mentioning real quickly so during 2021 the district went out and spent 350 000 to purchase that land parcel and due to the nature of what that land parcel was going to be used for some of it was was earmarked and said this is what potential future expansion so that's known as a capital asset edition that's not showing up in that balance this

056land held for resale where those those lots essentially that were carved off that the future use was to you know build a house on sell that off or whatever however that program exactly works that's what that number on there represents so it isn't a balance sheet asset at this point and as soon as we do those developments then that will fall off at that point so as far as looking at the general fund and when we say what is the financial health of a district there are those three highlighted rows there on this handout that basically are some metrics as to see how we're doing from one year to the next so the first line being in the fund balance section so those are the true reserves of the district and then we compare that

057to the total expenditures of what does it take to actually educate or run the district for all its general operations and then we compute this ratio this ratio excuse me of general unassigned fund balance as compared to total expenses for the year so we come up with that ratio and in 2021 we have a ratio of 16.2 percent so again that represents this is what our true reserves are at the end of the year how long could we basically operate the district out of our reserves so we're saying about 16 percent of the year of the total expenses we could fund directly out of fund balance and not take in grant dollars not rely on any borrowing not rely any additional property tax collection that ratio is when you look at it as okay where

058do we fall as compared to our other peers in western wisconsin so in our experience at cla we do quite a few districts in the area 25 27 in this part of the state the district average that we see is usually between 25 and 30 percent and that is techn typically what we would recommend also from an external auditor perspective of what would you consider a healthy district that would be anywhere between 25 and 30 percent you know ideally as a goal it would be you know three to four months of operating expenses in your unassigned fund balance that you could quote unquote live on if that need would rise so that would be you know that would we consider that to be a very healthy or financially stable district the the amory school district

059has a district policy has that that that limit should be at a minimum five percent and in the district policy this goes back i'd have to look at exactly when that was adopted many many years the the actual terminology in there is that if you would get anything five percent or below it would be cause for concern and immediate action would need to be taken place at the budgeting level so you're clearly meeting your district policy of at least five percent and you're actually exceeding that from an external auditor standpoint i don't have any concerns that you're at quote-unquote only 16 percent so i would say you are financially healthy at this point you know you're able to fund your operations however as a goal is what i would say is kind of what you

060you should strive for would be to to increase that to about 20 uh 25 percent overall the reason that i would say that from my perspective that that would be important in future budget cycles if you're able to get to that level it would definitely eliminate or reduce the need to short-term borrow throughout the year so you can see obviously like i mentioned earlier you've had short-term borrowing needs just to due to property tax collections and grant allocations and that that sort of thing so that would eliminate that which to the tune of i think maybe thirty or forty thousand dollars in interest at times can be paid out during the year so that would be an interest cost you would save uh then the other issue or the other um benefit of increasing your

061fund balance is it opens up the world of liquidity for you as far as gives you options if you have any future capital needs so if you've got some big capital items that need to be taken care of in the future you could partially finance that then you know yourself potentially reduce the amount that you would need to borrow ultimately interest savings down the road so that's the reason why you would kind of shoot for a target at 25 to 30 percent if in future budget cycles it's possible i just want to make sure i don't have any other things to say on the general fund any questions about the general fund before i move on to everything else all the other operations then moving out of page two here for you uh item number

062three is what's known as your special revenue funds so these are separate activities that are tracked separately and they have a special or a designated revenue stream that's restricted to use for those specific operations and you will see right off the top that that education trust fund or fund 21 if that's how you know that fund uh that significantly increased during 2021 and that is a direct result of that change in accounting principle that i mentioned earlier it's also known as gas b84 if you want to go stay up late and read the whole 72-page announcement pronouncement but basically what it means is we had a lot of funds tracked into fund 60 years your student activity funds as well as your your scholarship funds this fund 72s that they they used to be allowed

063to be tracked there for accounting purposes and under dpi regulations well the gasby came in the accounting standards setting board agency and they said you have to track these differently we have some different reporting requirements basically what that meant is we dissolved all those funds and we have to track them separately and dpi said they go into fund 21. so there are you know that's part of the a lot of the conversation that andrew and i had during the year is how do we make this work how do we still track these separately but follow dpi's guidance well we moved all the funds into 21 so you can see that there's a significant balance sitting there but those are restricted balances set aside for those specific funds and they're all being tracked within within your

064skyward system and they can only be used for those specific purposes so that's the reason why that one increased significantly uh your other uh two funds here the two types of funds there food service is obviously your fund 50. so long as that is making money or keeping itself afloat that's what dpi is going to require and also that's what the federal government is going to be requiring with those free and reduced lunch programs flowing through there as well then the other one is your community service fund or funds your fund 80s so that comprises of your adult education your theater program and then your daycare program so really the the two of them that are in the negative as you can see those were operating at a loss for a few years there definitely

065covered reared its head in 2020 there and your your day care facilities really did take a a very big hit in 2020 so you can see that was significantly down in 2020 and that change it's moving towards the positive here in 2021 and the reason for that is that first round of cares funding and that's where those funds were received in and that's where that activity was recorded so in your specific daycare fund in your fund 80s it was about 135 000 in federal funding that went into that fund to help it recover from its losses it experienced in 2020 i don't believe there was very there's very little activity in the theater fund overall and then the other one is your adult education fund which when it comes to these funds they need to

066be breaking even or making a profit otherwise there should be additional discussion as to what type of services are we providing if they're operating at a loss do we need to increase our fees to support those or do we need to abandon some of those services those are the tough conversations that a board would have to have in your fund 80s specifically the other option is you could also then support those if they are operating in a loss and they are desired activities you could support those with additional property tax levy directed specifically for those items so that's how you would increase improve the operations of those funds moving on to the debt service fund is item number four here for you uh this is all of the principal and interest payments are recorded separately

067and recorded to be tracked uh in its own standalone fund so this is the reserves at the end of the year is about five hundred thousand dollars so that balance is restricted and will be used to meet future debt service needs uh you'll see it did dramatically decrease from the 2020 balance and that's simply a function of when the bonds and when the the notes are due as soon as one debt issuance falls off it's very common to see that balance significantly decreased and that's exactly what happened in 2021 is you've had one of your long-term bond issuances and you'll see that later on was paid off and it fully matured so you didn't have to have any future payments now in 2022 because it's all it was completely extinguished so you didn't have to

068have any reserves on hand to be supported in order to make those payments so again this debt service is both your referendum debt and your non-referendum debt fund 39 and fund 38 are together in this report here and you only have one issuance i believe left in your referendum debt at this point of 630 21 the next item here for you is item number five or your capital projects funds and in this case this is your long-term capital projects fund that was started a number of years ago i think six or seven years ago when that first became an option with dpi you set aside these funds they needed to remain in here for a period of time you couldn't touch them until you had a long-term capital plan on file with dpi and a

069certain time period had expired i believe now you are able to actually access those funds and use them for capital replacement items the only activity that occurred in 2021 is just the interest that was earned on that balance uh the last item i have here for you then is the long-term debt obligation so this is just a summary of all of the debt that is outstanding as of 6 30 20 21. so a couple of items again just to highlight your general obligation bonds uh that there was that one debt issuance that fell off so the remaining balance is three hundred thousand dollars in that category that that'll be due through 2023 is when you'll have i believe two more payments two more annual payments and then that one will be completely extinguished and then

070you have the general obligation notes and you did have some activity in that general obligation note category as i mentioned earlier that 350 000 was taken out to purchase the land parcel so that's the category that that fell under and then obviously you had additional payments that were due throughout the year on some of those other issuances so the the net result is you've got 547 thousand dollars outstanding in general obligation notes and those notes are due those payments will be good through 2024 on one issuance and then the 350 000 that was taken out during the year is going to be due in 2028. so in total as far as debt payments go during 2021 uh you paid a to to the tune of 1.56 million in principal and interest payments were made during

0712021 so your your required debt debt obligations were met during the year which is obviously a requirement a couple other items to highlight then for you as far as what else is out there for debt obligations very active here at uh school district of emory is that capital lease line uh you can see that it did ultimately decrease from last year's 2020 balance of 353 000 but you had 184 000 that's due at the end of 2021 with that there was a new lease that was signed during the fiscal year and that was for the purchase or the police agreements of um i believe uh computer equipment i.t equipment and that lease will expire in and those at that time will either be assets of the district or turn back in with very little residual

072value at the end of those when it comes to debt the other thing to keep in mind the last section here for you is the state of wisconsin has that statutory requirement as to what your legal debt authorization limit is which is 10 percent of all the equalized value within the district from a school district standpoint it's very unlikely that you would ever get to 100 percent of that limit tax rates would just obviously not fall in line so that's why typically when you look at any district a highly leveraged or a district with a lot of debt would be around 20 30 percent 35 percent even of that debt limit and that typically occurs when you have a very large new school uh building or something like that with a lot of renovations a

073lot of debt that's issued you can see here at emory we're actually in a very luxurious position of 0.8 percent of that legal debt limit so from a standpoint of looking at the statutory limit you have capacity available should you need to have any long-term capital needs based on that that concludes all of my quick items i wanted to highlight from a you know high level here for you any questions or anything that i could potentially address for you yet i guess my question on the previous page was under the percentage of unassigned fund balance at 16.2 percent is that it's up above it says change in fund balance is that where our fund balance is as far as dollar amount right now or so the total fund balance that you're looking at is that

074first unassigned fund balance of 3.7 million compared to the total expenditures for the year of 23 million okay so that's where we get to the 16.2 the change in fund balance was just what what did the total fund balance change from 2020 into 2021 that would be that 2.7 up to 3.7 correct okay if you want to look at it from a business standpoint say that's we made that much money net income would be another word you know yeah how much we have in reserve correct yeah so i guess i was just wondering like if we went up about four percent that was about a million dollars so just kind of kind of keeping in mind of how much we would need to try to continue to go up to get up to 25 that

075seems like whew and it's a moving target because our budget seems to go up every year so you know it's i like to look at the dollar amount increases more so than percentage even though percentage is important but we made strides this last year for a number of reasons but then but uh definitely that's the goal and one of our strategic goals is to increase our fund balance yeah so i'm obviously very cognizant to know like obviously you've got esser funding that's coming in you know you've got budget needs there's a bunch of constraints looking at it to your point in order to get to that 25 percent goal you're looking at roughly 2 million dollars to add to your unassigned fund balance so i know it could be an unpopular discussion to have of

076well we've got the surplus how do we spend it you know now you've got an auditor that's standing here and saying well don't spend it let's sock it away and not spend it on anything there's obviously pluses and minuses for doing it that way overall but just keep in mind that you know if you look at your peer districts in the area most of them are also at that 25 to 30 percent for various reasons and some of those are actually spending that down for different reasons as well you have to dip into it for for covid funding and whatnot so and i fully think that the fund balance might be a little volatile the next couple of years so just keep that in mind depending how fast your money is spent and saved and

077so we'll see while we come out of it yeah in a couple years thanks you stated that the average um i guess of our peer school districts are around between 20 and 30 percent and it seems like our policy says a minimum of five percent what are what is the typical minimum percentage of our peer districts sure yeah as far as the wording of those fund balance policies goes they're kind of all over the board um usually it's still they'll say that our target is 15 percent or 20 percent as far as what their target is and then uh my recommendation is still going to say no matter what your policy would stay from an external reader or financial statements i would still say that my measuring stick would be 25 to 30 percent but

078yeah to your point as far as what are what are your other districts saying uh it is all over the board as far as what's their minimum policy usually somewhere in that 15 percent is what their minimum policy would be um in my experience the wording of the of the school district of amery's fund balance policy five percent is probably one of the lowest that i'll read uh in my experience yeah and i don't think that policy has been revised in at least since i've been on the board for nine years forever yeah yeah again that's my experience is too on those is it was a requirement again one of those fun accounting principles that changed at one point in time uh i believe it was gasby 54 so we've come a long ways that

079what that requirement was you all needed a policy and all the districts needed a policy one was adopted and then nobody's changed them since so how are they generating a 25 to 30 percent fund balance the other districts how are they generating it um i mean obviously there are different levels of their operations when it comes to what what are their revenue streams coming into it a lot of its property taxes or the other side of it is just during 2008 time frame going all the way back then as far as when they had to lean down their operations they really made some significant cuts in expenditures so that their revenue streams were you know given or stated in those state budgets and then the way they built up their fund balances they reduced expenditures

080uh fairly dramatically yeah so they may have over taxed depends i mean however you want to however you want to look at it sure that's that's one way of obviously answering that question just putting you on the spotlight here no problem you know i mean the state obviously limits how much we can carry over too when it comes to the fund balance policy there's not a there's not a limit from a statutory requirement of what you could end up in reserves where the state would step in is your levy limit requirements how much you could levy in terms of property taxes yeah so that's where their their controlling thumb gets into that equation and they're going to tell you how much you can bring in into that equation versus how much how you actually or

081how you could actually spend it okay yeah thank you jonathan anybody else thank you thank you appreciate it thanks john safe trip home [Music] now we'll go back to our administrative reports all right we're getting back into the swing of things just a couple of events that recently happened outside of the norm january 10th our high school honors band we had a number of students close to a dozen participate in a concert at somerset did a wonderful job january 11th we sent nine students our global global scholar students went to minneapolis-st paul as part of their certification program we've got the end of the semester coming up this friday so everybody's working hard to take care of the last details in their classes future events we do our teacher in service on monday night or

082i'm i'm sorry monday during the day one of the focuses at the high school will be ninth and tenth grade ninth and tenth grade curriculum and double checking the alignment of that with our state assessments and the state standards to make sure that we're doing the best there february 7th and 10th we have our acp parent-teacher conferences the primary part of that conference format is so that students and their parents and teachers can all get together to look over course offerings for the upcoming school year next year and help the students make good choices about what they want to take for courses it's not the actual scheduling day or more or less an exploration day to look at all the options for parents to become acquainted with what the actual requirements are and it makes

083for a good conference between student parent and child we have snowy coming up january 31st through february 4th we've got a bunch of fun events scheduled for that in the immediate future we are hosting and i've mentioned this before a number of huge events coming up we have the sectional wrestling coming up in february sectional hockey final in february we have a girls basketball sectional final and we have a boys semi as well as sectional finals so we have some significant events coming up february 22nd we've got our act boot camp day for our 11th graders uh ninth and tenth graders will be at home as virtual learners that day we we're going to do the full court press on our 11th graders giving as much support as possible and our 12th graders will be

084going through some presentations in the auditorium so that's the high school any questions all right at the middle school in intermediate school we just got done with um a pretty big event prairie fire theater in the wizard of oz i want to give a lot of credit to tracey henderson who really coordinates that program along with all the students who pull off a show in in one week and i'm always amazed at how hard they work and and the great job they do we also just finished up boys basketball and we are heavily into now girls basketball and middle school wrestling so that's been fun to see those kids perform josh joshua just mentioned some of the registration things happening at the high school we have freshman registration night which is for eighth graders and

085their parents and that's on january 31st and the evening and invites went out already for that for parents it's kind of a three-step process we have high school counselors that come over and discuss how registration works and some of the ins and outs of the high school schedule and they do that during 8th grade during the day about a week before and give out some materials for students and then we are taking 8th grade over for a tour of programs towards the end of the day on the 31st and then the parents come in that evening with their child and learn even more and can answer questions and understand exactly how credits work in the registration process so they can make the best decision for their child so excited about that we're going to be

086kicking off our mid-year goal setting with students again students have been setting some individual goals and things that they want to accomplish and they process with advisors on different things that they feel that they can do academically and also just personally to work on improving in themselves and meeting the goals that they have chosen so we'll be going through that with our warrior time advisory groups on february 9th we kick off genius hour and we're really excited for that again genius hour is a program that basically says we want our kids to learn to research develop present on various topics and rather than sit down and say well here's the topic you have to present everyone go and research it we the program just basically says these students all have passions and things that they're

087interested in and things that they love and things that they find amazing let them pick their own topics and so basically we go through sessions with the kids to help them understand what genius hour is and help them find a and develop a guiding question it has to be something that they can't just google and get in 15 minutes something that's going to take them time to research and develop and then work at the sum a lot of them work in teams of three to four and then they gather their data and put together a presentation and then we have a genius hour expo in the spring and the cool part about it is then we have 350 kids that are all individual experts in their field they're the smartest in our building on their

088topic so we're pretty excited for um genius hour to be kicking that off again and it's really fun because you tell kids here's what you want to do when they're like well what what can i research on whatever you want okay but how do i present it however you want you figure it out and to be honest with you major online 90 percent of the time they go way and above what we would have asked them to do and so kids can do a lot of amazing things when you set them free in that way to just today and then tomorrow we're going to be we're still diving into our screening data on reading and math taking a look at how kids did at our mid-year our mid-year evaluations and then also what are the

089classroom teachers seeing and then we have students that started intervention groups at the beginning of the year some of them are going to be exiting and we have recommendations for parents some new kids that we think would could come in and get some extra help and interventions in math and reading and we're in the middle of that process josh benson manson parent-teacher conferences on the 7th and the 10th and in addition to that we'll hold some additional parent meetings on standard-based grading for parents that have questions um it's probably going to be my 12th meeting now so over the last four or five years so anyone who wants to come in parents into middle school and be invited and we'll get some information out on that and then uh we have a middle school solo

090one ensemble contest on february 10th which happens to also be the night of parent-teacher conferences and in service so it's a little bit more difficult but we don't set the date for the regional so we're um we're gonna have a very very busy building any questions for me is that being held in america i don't believe so i can't answer that yeah i think it's somewhere else yeah it is not in america but i'm not sure where it's being held but uh it's like a 10-year rotation so yeah it's not likely to be in america because it was in america a few years ago right yeah right like every 10 years you get it so i'm not sure i i don't have off the top of my head where they're going but i can find

091that out but i have it down on my calendar no okay yeah and unfortunately i think that may hold up parents but and conferences will be sending out um invites to families i think we're all doing a similar fashion where parents sign up for their time slots that they so choose including the method if they want to come in in person or do it remotely in a different way to be honest with you i don't see us ever moving away from giving those parents that option having either you can come in and meet one-on-one or we'll you can call or we'll call you and we'll set that up has been um a game changer and it's increased percentages and i think meets the needs of a lot of different people so um parents will probably

092if you know they're having to go to um the solo ensembles obviously we'll try to sign up the first session so all right thank you it is great it's much better than waiting in line outside of a teacher yes it is a classroom that's true all right thank you thank tom i would echo tom's thoughts i know just last fall having parent-teacher conferences our turnout rate is 99 and so if our goal is to connect with our families and we're doing a really good job of offering what works for them benchmark assessment so intermediate school was the first to go when we returned from christmas break so our assessment through fastbridge ran january 4th through january 10th it went really well it went really smooth so right now our grade level teams and our specialists

093are looking at all of the data to then create intervention groups so those are tier one tier two and tier three the great thing about fastbridge is it actually provides prescribed interventions which has been a huge asset so that's for both ela and for math pbis celebration on january 7th we welcomed over four high school students who read or who participated in a wonderful celebration those four high school students and then our fifth grade leadership team had to complete an obstacle course in here for all of our students and then the four high school students stayed and did a question and answer panel discussion on empathy and they answered questions about what is empathy who's modeled it for you and how has it been really important in your relationships and and our students were in

094awe of the high school students and to get a message across we will definitely utilize high school students again because it was very quiet in here csa math standards rollout myself and three district math representatives went to turtle lake and attended a 2021 wisconsin math standards rollout so we looked at the shifts we looked at um how they would be changing and possibly affecting our math curriculums or our math rollouts our essential standards um and then it allowed some time for some district action planning so we were able to kind of form an action plan these will be implemented in 2024-2025 so we do have some time there's two additional virtual sessions coming up in january there's a k-8 virtual session so myself and a team will attend that here at the intermediate school and

095then in february there's a high school session and we'll have a high school team and a middle school representative and then myself i'll also be there i'll say what tom had said about prairie fire theater that was wonderful another thing in addition to the two performances that were put on friday night and saturday and all the practices that were put in is prairie fire actually comes to the intermediate school and i believe the sixth grade as well and does acting sessions for our students so students that are interested were able to come into this space and receive a one hour workshop session and it was it was wonderful the english language arts adoption process is ongoing cheryl and i are working collaboratively with that in december before we went on christmas break cheryl and i

096met with a cesa 11 educational consultant that just helped us review what our plans were reevaluate our rubric i'm going to report to you out on hmh cheryl and i both are tag teaming on on the two different curriculums really organizing what our teachers need getting them access so i'm working with hmh interreading our next steps with hmh are that are in service teachers that teach reading will complete a two hour training our intent with hmh is to pilot in february so it'll be a one week pilot all teachers will be piloting the same module and after piloting we'll come back and we'll have a conversation on you know how did it go did it meet our needs do we foresee it being something that we would want to adopt upcoming events as no service

097or no school in service day on monday the ipo is hosting a winter ball on january 29th parent-teacher conferences we have a new event that we are in the works of planning here at the intermediate school on february 22nd it's called love your library event so i'm working with our ar committee and annie brayton and deb anderson it's going to be event here in the evening where we welcome families into our library to browse our books complete a scavenger hunt snuggle up and read some books with a loved one a parent or guardian and then also to have a treat our hope is to welcome families into our library see the wonderful books we have and the great resources that we have here finally february 24th fourth graders will have an iditarod presentation so we're

098going to have two guest speakers that will come in and talk to fourth grade they've experienced or worked the iditarod so that's something exciting for them any questions tonight was the love your library event sure 2 22 22. oh yes it's a tuesday it is two lots of twos in there by the way and what time um six o'clock to 7 15. couldn't go two o'clock yeah we should can we arrange that hilarious hilarious we could serve tacos nice yeah thank you oh we're getting carried away yeah we just feel you know we have so many great books in here we just to be able to highlight authors and for families to come in and see the beautiful space that we have to read books we're going to actually do some book talks mrs brighton

099myself a couple of other other educators in this space are going to do some book talks so talking about some favorite authors some favorite books that we have and then actually we're going to have grade levels vote on book recommendations and we'll share that out after that event fabulous yeah and then what grade level teachers will be doing the pilot for the hmh all grade level teachers will yeah so i know at cheryl's building k through so both of these curriculums don't have a pre-k component so it'd be k5 you got it thanks thank you i'll try really hard not to repeat too much of what has already been said i'd like to start out by talking about our reading program at the elementary school it's called the sky is the limit it kicked off

100on june 6th with a family event in the evening and we had 185 children and adults that were registered for it but if you if you remember january 6 it was very very cold and so we had about half of the people in attendance but it was a fabulous evening it started out where our children were grouped into cohorts we tried to keep them in their grade level cohorts as much as possible and they were exposed to a bingo game which talked about the variety of genres in our reading in our library and then at the end they so they play bingo and then once they got a bingo they transitioned into the cafeteria where mrs shu our reading specialist and our title one teacher did a remarkable job of gathering books from all over

101our community including the library that was giving away books families that were giving away books so our entire cafeteria was filled with libraries library books of different genres and the families could go in and each student could take home 10 books yes and they were free of charge to us but we were able to share them with our families and we believe it or not had enough books that our the next day the students could go in with their classmates or their um their classroom and they were also invited to take home books so kudos to mrs shue and her i'm going to say mrs xu and her company mrs schuen company who plan the event for our families the purpose behind the reading program again is to encourage families to read together we want

102kids to read 15 at least 15 minutes each evening or have family members read to them or siblings read to them i had the first this week where a little girl had a new baby brother and she told me that she read her new baby brother five books so it was fabulous and she was even able to give me the the titles of the book so when the children read they turn in a reading slip the reading slip powers our air plane and our airplane takes them throughout our country so it's pretty exciting and it's a month-long process a month-long reading program we have as jessica said we are tag teaming the work behind this pilot and she's focused mainly on holt mifflin and i'm focused mainly on reading american reading company learning both both

103of us are learning together with our teachers the american reading company the focus is on the science of reading and the components the explicit instruction and that's it's not anything new it's you know been around for a long long time but the five reading components of the american reading company is really explicit instruction and phonological awareness phonics fluency vocabulary and in the end comprehension so it's as you know a very big decision for our school k through five this thursday i'm actually gonna get something that jessica didn't talk about is the and it's her thing it's um the curriculum coordinators meeting but i'm gonna join her in the afternoon because the whole focus is on the science of reading so we just continue to learn about it and we're really pushing out a lot of

104information to our staff because we want them to be in the know when making that big decision as jessica said on the in-service day they're going to be exposed to holt mifflin and the ark portion of that day is going to be very explicit instruction for teachers at their grade level so both we've had k-5 presentations we've had building presentations and now we're really honing in on their grade level which we're really excited about and i think the teachers are excited as well february 3rd in family folders we have program option forms going home program option forms provide families information about the variety of different amazing programs that we offer in our district including montessori project-based learning aim and then we call our traditional programs legacy so there will be information that will go home

105families can write that their child they can sign up for whatever program they want some of the programs fill up so there's a lottery with them if families are interested we offer opportunities for them to come in and observe but you have to call ahead of time that information will be going home on february 3rd as well as to the process for that but we really encourage families to come in and see what those programs look like and kudos to the teachers for opening their classrooms so that families can do that we have our own little mini what did you call that tom your little where did he go his little focus you know what you do what you talked about genius hour thank you we have kind of a genius situation where children can

106research in first grade and second grade first grade focuses strictly on the ocean dive creatures and second graders biographies and they both have evening presentations where they share the information that they gained so that's something for our families to look forward to and mark your calendars march 4th is the elementary school calendar or carnival it's called the theme is down on the farm and i really want to give a special thank you to power up which is sponsored by health partners because they provide the food for that event and that has just been a a wonderful thing for our school and district and last but not least we have our music concerts starting at the elementary school the kindergarten teachers that's more in the spring they have individual concerts but first grade second grade and

107lower elementary have concerts that will take place in the auditorium so families should keep their eyes open for those dates any questions [Music] you know what we've had cows are you suggesting that you would like to are you volunteering they've been in the lobby little calves oh see what i've got okay okay march 4th i have one question so you're doing this pilot program with the houghton mifflin are you also doing a pilot program yes with the science fiction yes we are piloting both mifflin and arc we're trying to do the same and give each program the the same attention so is that later on then ours the arc one is january 31st and what's different than in the past is in the past the company sent us all the materials now it's a lot

108of downloading the materials and which isn't as teacher friendly but we're trying to make it as teacher friendly as possible but yes they will be piloting each for a week good question thank you thank you good evening just a few quick updates from people services um a name you've heard before uh we'll be collaborating uh continuing to collaborate with chris crowe who's a school-based mental health facilitator and next steps are really to look at you know if the district we are certainly invested in trauma-sensitive practices in schools what are the next steps where are we going with our school-based mental health grant and you know how can we increase services to support students with their mental health and staff with their mental health really anyone in the district so some of those ideas you know

109are going to be put together on a spreadsheet that's going to be shared with as many of our at-risk data teams or special ed teams or general ed teams it's really what do you envision for some ways that we can better support whether it be students or staff particularly within schools so that could be uh direct counseling it could be professional development it could be a referral process for for uh student based mental health so this is a really kind of exciting first step uh to this and a really important one because this is where we gather ideas about what are going to be the relevant ways that we can support kids and that staff are really going to buy into to support kids and it's an important aspect as well because the school-based mental

110health grant is a wonderful resource but it doesn't provide for direct mental health counseling or support so if we're looking down the road at doing that in the future it's something where we need to work with local agencies and providers and find some sort of sustainable funding stream um complete with you know sliding scales um develop um some sustainable resources is that we can support kids with if we're going to look at direct counseling because that is a would be a new line in the budget so to speak or something we would need to plan for with grant funding or another way so it's really exciting work though when you get an opportunity to really just reach out to staff with ideas to support kids emotional behavior disability criteria has changed officially those include demonstration

111of behavioral concerns in academic and non-academic school settings the inclusion of a trusted adult staff member chosen by the student in the course of an evaluation process for emotional behavioral disability and just to focus on you're going to hear it again and again evidence-based practices and that comes up here again in the updated emotional behavioral disability criteria myself and our school psychologist will be making the rounds at staff meetings to provide teachers and administrators the information they need to know that will affect them in terms of the change in this criteria dynamic learning maps we're getting towards forward testing act this is just a you know a yearly assessment that we do for just a small handful of kids with disabilities we've got a couple new teachers one new teacher at the high school who

112is new to this assessment in the school district family so we're getting her through training um just so you're aware of that and then finally other other trainings of course just want to mention the director of special ed trainings they happen monthly those are important things that that certainly i participate in and share relevant data with our school psychologists it gives me an opportunity to network with other directors in the district since there's only one of me love to collaborate with all my administrators but there's only one director of pupil services so it's a helpful format for me to learn about things that are happening in other districts and the federal federal uh conference federal funding conference is happening here in february 28th and we work pretty closely with mr deeb i don't think either

113one of us are going to feel comfortable attending in person this year but we'll be looking for the guidance it releases with the federal funding conference because there's always new updates in the in the grant world to to be concerned about thank you thanks braddocks now we got a new one john mcbride with our school nutrition report good evening everybody uh my name is john mcbride i'm the director of school nutrition for amory this is my fourth month uh here new to school nutrition i come from restaurant worlds and culinary background um so i'll try to keep this uh brief and sweet um so the first thing i just wanted to go over obviously school year 21 or 2021 all of the key performance indicators of a school nutrition department can just be thrown right

114out the window with cove enclosures all that sort of stuff so the important parts to kind of talk about really here are just our adp or average daily participation has increased throughout the district both breakfast and lunch but the bottom line is that our daily participation number is still relatively low at 68 percent um which is something that we're going to work on on bringing up um as of last year uh the ladies in the department they had served just shy of 320 000 total meals district-wide so you know that's a it's a pretty sizable number for 181 student contact days a year so it's uh it's it's pretty pretty impressive when you kind of break down the numbers moving on to the next portion is just kind of our free and reduced numbers for

115this year um obviously we use this as our benchmark uh across the district for our purposes during this time because we are getting paid full reimbursement it is universal school lunch these numbers are not super important outside of the trend and the trend that we're starting to see is a 2.6 there's a two to six percent increase at all the schools and there's kind of been a two and a two to four percent increase in just the school year and are up in our numbers um so our our free and reduced is on its way up and as you can see we're at about 42 district-wide uh as of the look back period which is in september october comes around that's our deadline so then we start to kind of trail up from there so

116grand totals from all programs for last year again i know stacy nelson over the past has presented on a lot more detailed numbers problem is is there's half of them that are artificially high due to having two months without in-person learning and then there are some numbers that are artificially low because of the same our fund balance did grow quite substantially in last year uh you know we started off at 242 with revenues and expenditures were started the year at about 412 000 uh in the red so the hundred percent the the reason behind this is that the usda reimbursement rate during this period uh is about twice what it was prior plus we have every student in the district on this program so the current reimbursement rates actually just switched over on january 1

117so each student for breakfast is 2.60 and lunch is 4.56 so it is quite a bit more substantial than in previous uh school years so that trend will continue through this school year and hopefully onwards from there currently this year we have some interesting challenges that change daily uh currently the big one is just supply chain uh limited deliveries of bulk products to manufacturers have really bogged down the entire industry delivery and routing issues with all of the vendors continue on a daily basis uh today for instance cesa 11 wide it was 1700 cartons of milk that just didn't get delivered this morning and that's kind of a daily thing what we're starting to see now is decades-old product lines from reputable manufacturers are either being reduced or the manufacturers are saying we're done we're

118not taking in any more product from usda we're not selling it to schools because the retail market is so much better uh and then ultimately it just leads to decreased availability in the historically well-received products from all school uh the products most of us had regardless of when you're here like italian dunkers and dippers and that sort of thing labor continues to be a little bit of a challenge i think everybody is experiencing it with substitution shortages i do have to say that the three substitutes that we do have in our department i have folk have basically become you know full-time fixtures and it's been amazing seeing them do it uh and then we're obviously dealing with some constant outs from illness as well um and then we'll talk about aging equipment here in another

119slide the big ones right now milk cartons uh milk cartons is the current struggle uh there is believe it or not only three manufacturers of milk cartons in the united states and none of them are able to produce enough to keep up with demand so at some point we're either going to be pork bulk pouring milk or there is a dpi waiver to not serve fluid milk whatsoever for a certain period of time i know the dairy farmer over here yeah there's no shortage of milk there's a shortage of vessels yes and and i don't know how much you guys i don't know how much everybody knows about direct diversion programming through the us department of agriculture but essentially we get bulk raw materials delivered to manufacturers to reduce our cost of the end cell

120product and a lot of those companies are starting to drop out so that last year we had i think there was 14 in this year or it's already down to 11. likely to drop below 10. uh and then as similarly the sisa as a cisa 11 update uh the purchasing manager decided to focus on family so there is currently no cecil 11 contract and purchasing manager uh so myself and bobby from new richmond have stepped into that role so hopefully if if all goes well kemps will try to keep us happy since i hold that contract over the next person moving on to some department changes since i've been here the biggest ones increased all card offerings at high school we do fluctuate this up and down in communication with some of the the teachers

121and administrators based off of if kids are earning it or not in in essence and ultimately just availability of products we did return the salad bar which was a controversial choice at the time but now every school in cecil 11 is doing it returned that at the high school in the middle school we started reducing waste by limiting choices in the schools where choices only take up time such as elementary and intermediate school i think about half the teachers at both schools were question mark about it and now that it's taken time now everybody is happy with it we introduce additional scratch cooked items to our menus and we changed our focus on just feeding students to feeding students what they need to thrive not just survive which is ultimately my my goal uh we've

122rewrote menus to include offerings as students enjoy with pairings that make sense such as serving a chicken patty sandwich with potato fries instead of sand selling a chicken patty sandwich with baked beans and broccoli makes if it makes more sense to your students makes more sense to everybody we're continually searching for additional permanent and substitute staff we are trying to return to the idea of wholesome well-sourced ingredients although that is incredibly hard right now and my staff has started go undergoing training uh on how to cook from scratch again next slide is just the ple tool or the paid lunch equity tool which is used to measure what we need to charge for paid lunch it's not something obviously were used that we're using this year but as you can tell by the chart there

123it is obviously we are way above the line for what we need meaning when paid lunch returns if it does we can set our price unfortunately next year we don't know what will be happening there is some legislature through the state and through the federal government that is trying to make its way through for universal free lunch which i believe is the goal of every school nutritionist since u.s you know introduced the child nutrition program if that happens that's great if it doesn't my guess is this next year will be a higher reimbursement rate but just on the free and reduced side versus universal free lunch is kind of what we're hearing right now so the next big thing is equipment needs and i know you know the two main topics right now are referendum

124and covid through everybody's minds this is kind of separate just based off of some equipment needs that we have that will help utilize some of that additional overage that we have currently in fun 50. steam kettles at the elementary school were last replaced before 1990. the vent and hood system believe it or not is original to the building the intermediate school is we do have equipment that's starting to drop off on that list as well i know it's only 20 years old but that's a long time for an oven to run five days a week if you look uh on the far right picture that's actually the two new ovens that stacy had talked to you guys about last year uh unknown to everybody at the time is as soon as you introduce those ovens

125then the hood fell out of compliance so whenever amy corbett opens up one of those ovens the entire elementary school cafeteria floods with steam i think you've probably noticed that cheryl sometimes it's something to be seen so that's something that george sigsworth and myself are starting to work on at the high school this is where we have the most equipment that is starting to drop on a daily basis we actually have two different convection ovens that are plus or minus 20 years old they have very limited to no additional working tables or workspace to in order to do a lot of the things that i'm asking those kitchens to do we have a steam kettle that was last replaced pre-1990 and then we also have a steamer that is going bad there so our equipment

126needs are much more advanced at the high school than the other schools but there are some that are needed through the others this slide just kind of shows the the thing there the steam kettle on the far right is actually two components that eats up a lot of square footage in a very small kitchen if you've ever seen it so then uh the last couple slides here i just wanted to address some kind of future plans of myself and where uh we would like to kind of start taking um the school nutrition of amory um it is a very robust community here filled with a lot of wonderful home growers a lot of dairy farmers we've got ranchers we've got cattlemen we've got a wealth of resources here that are somewhat untapped however since 2008

127scratch cooking has come out of the kitchen in schools equipment was replaced with equipment to reheat versus cook labor was slashed because it was went from ready to basically the focus is now on ready to eat foods you pull it out of the freezer if your kid needs to suck on it like a lollipop they still get the same nutrition quality so i mean that's that's the that's kind of the the where a lot of schools are so the goal in the next 12 months is really to return to about 25 total scratch cooking um excuse me to start purchasing about 15 from local sources based off of proteins and produce which of course is incredibly seasonable up here um increase our participation across all districts to 70 percent uh i will be applying for

128a large farm to school grant in collaboration with derrick meyer to establish a one acre school garden hopefully that will yield us plenty of produce for at least the several months where we can do that so the 24 month goal is just basically increasing all those numbers again getting to 35 scratch cooking 25 local purchasing increase our participation is 73 percent and utilize five to six different product types that are actually from the district garden three years if we look out three years the hope is to be at fifty percent scratch cooking thirty percent local purchasing increase our participation is 76 and utilize 10 to 14 different produce types from district garden which would allow us then to completely leave the usda direct diversion program and no longer serve any sort of ready-to-eat pre-processed foods

129i know that sounds a little bit scary um but there are several districts throughout the u.s that have successfully done that uh and have seen their participation have seen their uh how student health all that sort of thing start to really increase excuse me and then finally i just wanted to recognize all of the team leads that we have that do such a wonderful job our permanent staff substitute staff uh twyla sicknick and becky schmidt for continually helping us to um uh find new good people and michelle moore the school secretary uh who is the one who trained me in so if you guys have any questions feel free um moving out of processed foods and the typical warm up how would then the equipment needs that you're looking at then fit if we're replacing

130those then how would that fit with the plan of moving out of that realm and into the scratch cooking yeah so it's it's a great question actually if we go back a couple slides to either of the equipment ones so on the far right picture there that's what's known as a steam jacket kettle or a steam kettle those are deep that one in particular is 60 gallons that's mostly used in school nutrition for things like pasta soups sauces but the majority of those products now come in boiling bag packaging so they fill those up with water bring them to a boil hang what's ever in there it gets cut open put on the line it is served to our students from there so being that that is there the replacement would not be replacing a

131steam kettle with a steam kettle it would be replacing a steam kettle with what's known as a tilt skillet which is a square version but it is a 30 30 to 40 gallon capacity but that particular piece of equipment kind of has dual action you can use it for making soup sauces anything or you can completely clean it out you can season the two inch thick steel plate and you can use it as a flat top for making sandwiches grilling chicken grilling i mean basically it's just a flat top grill at that point so when we're starting to talk about utilizing equipment better we wouldn't be adding things like open face broilers or any grease latent type foods deep fryers that sort of thing it's more using equipment and technology to our advantage to get

132more bang for our buck and each one of those steam kettles believe it or not it's about 35 grand they're not cheap versus a tilt skillet which is a multi-tool is about 20 to 22. so you could use then the new piece of equipment to make soups and stews whatever from scratch yep instead of having them boiled and crushed plastic correct literally cooking them in the plastic correct yep shoot okay so then how is that being received in amongst the staff members that you have of scratch cooking versus we only have so much time to get meals out to kids so how is that a factor is it a factor or so it's it it really it's not uh it's not a large factor there is a large percentage of my staff uh that worked

133here the last time scratch cooking was here um you know where people remember a time and cheryl might remember you know the the cooks in the kitchen at the elementary used to bake for the entire district every day and that was not that long ago we've got a lot of this stuff really started changing with the smart snacks initiative in 2007-2008 and is kind of just steamrolled from there so it wasn't that long ago where we had all the equipment necessary to make you name it that's not deep fat fried in house so a lot of those staff members remember those days and they want to go back to those days because it's more the scratch cooking that we're talking about is not making sous-vide duck breasts for for 4k students it's making i mean

134we could it's making spaghetti sauce that's based off of diced tomatoes and fresh tomatoes instead of buying it in a pouch and that's really you know those pouches are where little pallets do not like they just don't so i think participation would increase based off of it's more just more flavorful it's just better in my opinion in the one-acre garden i'm sure this will be we'll probably see this again several times before this actually happens yep um just wondering obviously we look at harvesting from garden one acre is a lot yep that's a lot yeah um and we look at harvest time that's always in um august usually i mean your year i mean through the growing season depending on what you're growing um but obviously not when school's in session other than summer school

135so are we planning on preserving that those items then is like canning tomatoes and doing those kind of things yeah so in in and that's kind of where the collaboration with derek meyer comes in uh is because he wants to put this as part of his ffa academy um and then uh also similarly emily larson with the fcs leadership academy it'd be kind of working as kind of a group for coverage of planting maintaining that sort of thing but then ultimately like you said for whatever crops that we grow we would want something that we can a utilize in the moment and b that we can package and process for later consumption so the the example here would be doing carrots over squash simply because a frozen squash breaks down over time in the freezer

136versus a carrot stays the exact same molecularly so that's what we would kind of do and that process has just kind of started i know we have a small currently school garden at the elementary school that's kind of somewhat been utilized over the years and the ffa students have produced microgreens several times throughout the years as well but microgreens are a novel thought they're wonderful but that doesn't do much for filling bellies more than it does just adding a little flare and flavor so all right all right well i um have a senior in high school this year and she says that in amongst this recognition that you should also um that she sees you there quite often filling in so clearly we're so short-handed with our subs that you're filling in as well yes

137so thank you to you for doing that and she says you're killing the school lunch game she's a girl like steve probably goes after her mom but she says you're killing it well thank you thank you thank you thank you thanks next we'll have the library media presentation um good evening and thank you for having us here i'm annie brighton and i'm the library media specialist for lien elementary and amory intermediate and i'm greta mccarty i'm the new specialist for the middle school and high school and we just like to thank you again for having us here tonight to provide some more information about our media centers over the past several years we have been implementing a library plan that is lined with a future ready librarian's framework as a future ready library we focus

138on all of these wedges to help align our library program with the mission of the school district and to help prepare our students to be future ready at the core the future-ready framework is centered around empowering learners with diverse skills and literacies collaborating with peers and leaders to promote innovative practices and ensuring equitable learning opportunities for all students today we want to talk about the center of our framework which is as you can see is all about literacy and the learner and is where we spend most of our time one of the biggest ways we support the literacy of our learners is through the library collection so we thought it would be helpful to share how we build those collections to meet the needs of our students so there's a lot of work that is

139involved with building our library collections and a lot of factors are consulted with making purchases when developing our collections the following policies and guiding principles are at the core of our decisions the emory school libraries are to provide a wide range of materials at varying levels of difficulty with diversity of appeal and which represent different points of view in order to meet the needs of students and teachers it is our professional responsibility to provide an up-to-date collection provide materials on various sides of topics to provide representative materials of both our local community and our global community we're to provide a comprehensive collection appropriate to the school community as well the core of our profession is centered on literacy and one of the best ways we can support that goal is to promote a love of

140reading in our students selecting books that spark imagination fulfill a need for information provide stories in which students see their own realities stories where they can learn about someone else's experience and learn about the world around them is how we help promote a love of reading and is a bit of an art form all of these different types of stories are what spark a student's love of reading at different stages in their own lives and while the process to select those books is a bit of an art form we also apply a form of science to help guide our selection process by using district policies guiding principles and professional reviews to make sure we are selecting books that meet the needs of all learners while maintaining an age-appropriate collection when selecting books for our libraries

141we use the following resources to guide our decisions we use professional reviews such as the school library journal common sense media book list weemta the junior library guild fallit teaching books and many others we also use award-winning and recommended lists for our school librarians and from the american library association and the young adult library services association we use the recommended age range by these professional sources to determine if the book fits within our collection guidelines for each library in fact when we came into our roles as media specialists a few years ago we added additional guidelines stating there must be multiple reviews indicating the books fit within the grade levels of each library after receiving the books it's still not uncommon for us to re-evaluate the books and shift them to different collections this is

142an ongoing process and we are continually discussing where books may fit best within our libraries students have access to books through looking in the physical libraries collections in our buildings and through destiny discover which is our online catalog for books the database includes titles of both physical books and ebooks students in grades 3 through 12 are taught and encouraged to use the catalog the physical books in each library are selected based upon the age range varied interests and curricular content of each school sora is our online catalog for ebooks it is a subscription service governed by the wisconsin dpi csa and wisconsin library services this collection is selected by overdrive like overdrive librarians who specialize in developing k-12 library collections the wisconsin school digital literacy consortium board and selection advisory committee set the direction for

143this collection at this time local librarians are not able to remove ebooks that were added by the consortium this service allows the district to have access to over forty thousand books ebooks and audio books for about twelve hundred dollars per year students in grades three through twelve are taught how to find and check out ebooks using the soraa app or by searching in destiny discover the collection is divided into three edge age categories pre-k through five six through eight and nine through twelfth grade when searching for books in the soar app students will only see titles in their age collection or lower however because destiny discover is a different catalog system than sora it doesn't recognize the three age level collections that means if a student searches for a specific title in destiny discover they

144will be able to see the title even if it's in a collection above their age range however once a student logs into sora to check out the book they will be given a message that says this title is not available for your age level so just like our physical collections have some safety measures in place for students having access to titles appropriate to their age level sora also has some built-in collection into their collection as well the library also recognizes the importance of maintaining a collection of current appropriate and useful materials and as trends in literacy student population and curriculum change and as best practices and selection guidelines are updated it's important for us to re-evaluate books in the collection therefore periodic evaluations of the collection are performed in order to remove or replace materials

145that are no longer useful or are no longer appropriate while the weeding process goes through an extensive and thoughtful thoughtful process by utilizing many different reports collection analysis and review sources many books are weeded based upon their date of publication their circulation statistics and appearance for example we typically revalue books that are worn out dirty have missing pages outdated or inaccurate information fall outside of the age demographics of our students or have had a low circulation over the past five years this is a continual process in the library and one which is never complete the ability for us to maintain an updated and robust collection to meet the needs of our students and staff is in large part because of the common school fund which is our state funded library budget the common school fund

146is a constitutionally created trust fund created for public school libraries in the state of wisconsin when wisconsin became a state the federal government granted wisconsin 1.5 million acres of land wisconsin's early leaders dedicated these lands for public education to support and maintain public k-12 libraries when these lands were sold the proceeds were deposited in the common school trust fund the net annual earnings of the common school fund are distributed to each wisconsin public school district to purchase library materials such as books instructional materials online databases and technology this fund helps reduce local property taxes because the school district does not look to local taxpayers to fund these purchases we are really fortunate that wisconsin's early leaders prioritize the need to provide equitable services and resources to all staff and students no matter what district they're

147in wisconsin is the only state with a common school fund collection development and literacy is an important part of our job and the information covered today just scratches the surface of the process involved in developing our collections but we hope it gives you a little understanding of the practices that we follow as librarians we love it when people ask us questions we are more than happy to talk to anyone who has questions about the policies and the guidelines we follow or about specific books that we have in our library please feel free to reach out to us if you have any further questions and we would also like to thank you for having us here tonight and we welcome another opportunity to come back and share more information about our roles and the different programs

148that we have going on in our do you have libraries questions for us i'm really excited to um see the february 22nd tuesday event for the lovelier libraries i think they'll um really open the doors to give people time to come in and ask questions and for you all to be available and see what's in our libraries and just have that really good open honest communication that with the community and the school i think that's just a really great event that you guys are putting on and i appreciated that you spent some time talking about the the common school fund um that you know we were gifted the fourth thought of people putting a real stock in our reading education for our kids so it was pretty cool that they were the only state yeah

149it's something that a lot of people don't know and it's an incredible gift that we have here very cool yes thank you thank you thanks next we will talk about legal expenses okay you asked me to bring a breakdown of legal expenses the item that you see before you and then there's an itemized list that's been provided to you or in your red folder gives uh four columns month and year then your total expense for legal expenses that vendor is weld riley who has been our vendor for the longest time then expenses specific for open records requests and then lastly a column specifically for book challenge expenses and then at the bottom you see a grand total the way this works is you get billed typically on the 24th of each month and then the

150item you see here is paid in the following month so november 24th is paid in december et cetera et cetera so if there are questions about what you see here i will do my best to help well we have an often a wide range of needs for the legal council questions sure anything that's not under the second or the third and the fourth columns you can assume is an other expense that's uh attorney's fee for whatever that might be for instance when we purchased land we hadn't done that in this district for 50 plus years we need someone to draw out that documentation to make that happen so that would be another expense that's not in those two columns that you see there so there are other things yes i think you know we've had

151open records requests since i've been on the board for multiple things um i just we typically incur those expenses due to ongoing litigation or or personnel action items we expected to see those expenses kind of dropping off and obviously we're seeing this uptick here with the open records request expenses and asked for this in the interest of the community knowing exactly what that money is being spent on uh been requested that there's open and transparent communication for that um and so we've incurred these expenses and has any of those expenses been passed along to anybody else at this time well let me respond to your your couple of remarks there when i first arrived in this capacity in the month of november december of 2018 there were certainly legal expenses surrounding the departing district administrator

152and there were two lawsuits that were depending that took all of 2019 on into early 2020 during that time frame there were open records requests for information up to and including from the ambry free press then it was pretty dormant for most of 2020 and into 2021 and since april of 2021 there have been 17 open records requests reflecting the sums of money that you see here the money that you see here spent the total of three thousand and fifty seven dollars and fifty cents for open records requests and 45 dollars for book challenge expenses none of that money is has been recouped by the district that's an expense of the district and then they're thereby inherently an expense to the taxpayer so it's three thousand fifty seven and fifty dollars we satisfy that request

153but there's no money that's been received to offset that expense no okay um and any appeal to the uh book challenge decisions that were made that would uh possibly incur any further legal my hunch is in the month of january because most of those all of those challenges were lodged in december and that was work that was done in december billed at the end of december and then received here in the month of january simply haven't received that yet so when we do that amount would be known anything else okay good information next we will talk about the school board election okay the school board election is april 5th by law you need to do what's referred to as a draw so we had some five or so individuals with witnesses and so forth uh

154do a draw the candidates in ballot order meaning the order they'll appear on the ballot have been listed there for you on the screen and on the sheet in front of you so that's the way they would appear on the ballot in april pretty simple and straightforward okay that takes care of our informational items next we'll go to the action items the first action item are resolutions for referendum by law they need to be stated here as in their titles not stated in full you have those here with you in your packets the first of the three items that you need to make a motion to approve if you so choose are first the initial resolution authorizing general obligation bonds in an amount not to exceed 35 million dollars item 2 or resolution two initial

155resolution authorizing general obligation bonds in an amount not to exceed eight point five or eight million five hundred thousand and then lastly resolution providing for a referendum election on the questions on the questions of the approval of the two initial resolutions authorizing issuance of general obligation bonds in an aggregate amount not to exceed 43 million five hundred thousand dollars so if you wish to proceed forward you would need to make a motion to do so now it wouldn't occur on the on a ballot this way right around on the the uh in your packet in the back you should have a actual ballot question there's a lot of paperwork there so let me fish it out myself second to last page of course second to last page page but they're just just in two separate

156so how would that how would that look that would they need to vote on there are two different questions you would need to vote for each question right and those questions are on page seven and eight yeah seven and eight this has been run through greg's law firm which is who baird financial works with they write referendum questions for a living this is not a legal expense to us this is not work that we do we don't have that resource in our office but greg's law firm there have been at least 10 iterations of this if not more so it's been seen and then some and this these resolutions as written will be presented at community meetings to be further kind of explained what people are voting either for or against yes the the battery

157of meetings has only just begun so to speak none of that could have occurred until tonight occurs then after that it's presenting that information at things such as community club lions club township meetings meetings other meetings within municipalities we'll have information meetings here at school there'll be lots of information that folks will have up to and including an explanation what it is they're voting for because the ballot itself when you go to the ballot it can certainly look to be overly verbose because there's a lot of stuff there that's happening the presentations would lay that out i've done one such presentation already to the high school staff last week i believe well received and pretty clear so that has only just begun okay it's a lot of paperwork a lot of protocols to fill in

158and there's a resolution i guess we've talked about it a lot and i guess the the choice is for us to go for one go for the both however you would like to try through our assessment with lisa voison from baird we're in a good position and we have good support we're going to do this our debt load basically fell off and so now is the time to to do this i was approached by constituent about you know trying to do it within our budget and and i said well let's go go to the high school wall flashing that's four million dollars how do you budget for that and to get the project done you know if we took the 700 000 it would take us four or six years to finally get that money

159together in order to do that one project the the deferred money that we spend to it goes fast to use the 700 000 to address 35 million dollars of maintenance needs in the district takes you 50 years yeah and if you're going to be here in 50 years congratulations i don't think most of us are going to be in this lot of work in 50 years and 50 years of nothing else going wrong correct or nothing else being fixed which is not likely to occur yeah so you can't do things of this sort through the budget if you will yeah i think it's always a concern when you sit in this position to um ask these resolutions for these referendums but that's where we're very fortunate that we get to put it on a ballot

160and let people decide for that and i think in the spirit of that it would be not prudent for us to at least move forward to give the taxpayers voice to say what they what they feel on this i thought that the community surveys showed some very good support for um at least the 37 and a half million i've i feel very good about the eight and a half that we've looked at in order to get a lot more done um with just a little bit more money than we were looking at for just seven million dollars for a daycare so um in that spirit of myself and and seeing that this is going to go to the taxpayers in april then i would move to approve the resolutions for referendum as presented oh second

161that is there any more further discussion i think we've said a lot we we have to plan on the community support and we'll go ahead with this all those in favor say aye aye opposed no we're going to the resolution press referendum that was quicker than i thought next will be school calendar okay the 2022 2023 calendar it's gone through a couple of versions we have a calendar committee and staff is uh have also chimed in some of the highlights i'll walk through with you month by month beginning with the month of august we've got three days of in-service the triangles 23 24-25 very similar to years past august 31st we are looking at doing a day on august 31st again with students present it is a optional day of attendance we are looking at

162a name change so people better understand it orientation day for some was confusing so we look at that and a name change for that day september 1st is your legal first start day of school then you can require attendance you get labor day right after that in-service day out towards the end of the month the first week of october are your parent-teacher conferences and in-service days mirrors what we presently are doing and we are about to do here in february then we have end of term and then an in-service day on the 7th we have off three days for thanksgiving we did survey staff there was mixed reviews in regards to three days off two days off no days off um if we have school we're gonna miss kids there are folks that are in

163the woods and traveling be with family we get it so it's what we have done in years past presently then we have christmas break a change on christmas bake break we have put a circle around december 23rd we hadn't done that in years past for family to travel so we've got those days off there the week of the 26th and the 23rd we come back to school end of semester sort of paralleling where we are right now uh is the 20th we have an in-service parent-teacher conference during february we don't have a full-fledged spring break like we have this year though we do have an opportunity folks to get away if they so choose that 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th is sort of half of a spring break april 7th is good friday we have

164to have that off and then we put a day on as the 10th folks can choose to get away there if they want to memorial day at the end of may and then the last day of school is june 1st so we have um a proposal of a calendar here for you if yours feedback you might have i'm all yours and the committee's good with this uh well there's no way you could gather a committee of folks and say a hundred percent absolutely we agree on every item but we've looked at it and looked at it and looked at it for the better part of two months um i i think we've gotten some good feedback and i think we're this this would be a proposal i would recommend that you approve but no 100

165on every item no that doesn't exist but the majority majority okay yeah and um what is the do we have issues about just days off or do we have issues about teacher contracted days or no the number of days required isn't really days but rather instructional minutes and this calendar satisfies that requirement of instructional minutes middle and high school is one thousand 1137 hours of instruction middle school and high school make it with three days built in as in three days for snow days or weather days if the middle school in high school make it the elementary and intermediate make it because they have less required so yes we meet our requirement we've been as high as 189.5 we've been as low as 180 4.5 this comes in at 185.5 so you would need to

166make a motion to approve the calendar if you want to do that which day is a half day of of teacher in service and last day of school oh but we have been very flexible building administrators have allowed them to do that that night in this case that friday or the monday after being not everyone is ready to hit the books and get her done that day some do it the next in the morning got it well i would make a motion that we approve the 2022-2023 school calendar second here in seconds all those in favor say aye aye aye suppose no all right all right we've got it next we talk about the open enrollment space limitations perhaps all right a yearly agenda item here so we're charged through a state statute at deternaming

167open enrollment seats available or are essentially not available for students who would open enroll here into the school district as in the past kind of reviewed numbers really the only recommendation that you see here is listed for our early childhood special ed program that's preschool to kindergarten at this time there are openings if a student were to open enroll and be accepted tomorrow we would have a space available for them there are available slots of about 15 8 are currently filled so this recommendation puts a cap of that number 15 for next year so essentially we have 15 seats open for early childhood education about half of them are filled i don't have a crystal ball really this is just you know numbers ebb and flow and uh so we do our best main making

168it a you know a calculated guesstimate in terms of what the capacity of our program is and really the focus in has been early childhood historically it's because we only have one teacher and so once that caseload gets to it to a certain amount of size it's difficult to go in mid-year and you know hire another especially a teacher who's specialized in terms of early childhood um so that that's kind of the barrier there so this simply says that we would cap our open enrollment any open enrollment that would you know push us above that 15 and we would say i'm sorry there's no space available here in the district to serve you and it could certainly apply again in the future if numbers would change we would open it up again any questions on

169space availability um i think we do this every year with a cap on if we ever turned anybody away for special needs that we've been so if if we don't have the staff to satisfy the need that's articulated in the iep yes and others have turned our kids away too i mean there are only so much there's only so much we can do with one staff person in a room so yes not often but yes okay do we have a motion i'll make a motion that we approve second chelsea all in favor say hi hi there we go thank you thanks brad uh next we have the uh participation at board meetings policy that we've tweet policy 186 you asked for us to make a change uh in regards to what constitutes political speech you'll

170notice there there is blue the change the addition is in green so it's near the end and that sentence reads political speeches which are not materially related to board decisions policies adopted by the board or are not about board meeting agenda items are strictly forbidden so that was the only change added to the policy that you saw last month oh sorry on the next page the rule that goes with it the exact same thing was changed not to read it to you again it's the exact same it's item number four on 186 exhibit we have a motion for that policy 186. i guess i just um i have a comment first before we move forward with that that again this this public participation at board meetings this policy revision in no way prohibits people from

171coming and talking and still having um say an input and what happens in the district in a specific manner um that we're just in the interest of saving time and being specific to what's happening in our own district i think it was a good reason to kind of just shore this up especially in where we see so many districts now moving away from just taking public comment off of the agenda i don't think that anybody is interested in moving in that direction so um i think this will really help us just kind of hone in on on what we're doing here and there's that's in no way regarding anything that's been said that i don't feel that any public comment has been terribly out of line or unfocused to to degree of of having to

172shut anybody down ever so um i think i just want to i want to clarify that before we decide to go ahead and pass this or vote on this policy revision i think it's always been a priority of the board and administration to always look for [Music] exchange with community members i mean if you look on our website my phone number's on there all of us are on there you know so you have to talk to us i i'm not clairvoyant none of us are so you know when you have questions and things like that please call that's that's the key yeah i think we appreciate having people come and speak at our board meetings and to understand that you know dialogue doesn't usually happen this is our meeting and that we take care of

173business but we do appreciate to hear opinions and that's how this process this process works we represent those people and if you have suggestions of items that we have on the agenda especially that evening or moving forward that you'd like to see heard that's especially doing a second reading like this to have a a specific suggestion brought in that's our job is to bring that at this time to the to our colleagues here and to discuss those things and to tweak these policies as necessary so like it's um we'll just shore things up and just wanted to make sure that nobody feels like they can't come and talk at these meetings so right absolutely with that motion for the policy or i'll move to approve the public participation at board meetings policy second and dale

174all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed no okay get down the list aren't we it's a long list tonight it is yes next uh change or review are coveted okay the first slide shows you your numbers of covid cases in district from january 1st through the 7th again blue is staff and red is students so we had a total of 16 cases in that first week that was on the heels of christmas break where we really didn't have a lot of contact with folks last week the number was significantly higher that's the 8th to the 14th there were 33 cases 27 students six staff you'll see a breakdown of the staff cases from september 1st through january 16th listed there on the next slide if i could make a word of mention about

175today in that we have real numbers from today we had 10 cases in district and i got a special message from the county that the county will only be at this point testing and vaccinating they won't be doing any other duties besides those two that came from polk county health mid afternoon today and what precipitated that is they had 512 cases over the weekend in the county from saturday sunday through monday our high mark for cases in the district when we went close back last november was 848 cases in two weeks we had 512 in three days not in the district in the county in the county 512 in the county 10 in the district so obviously there's a lot of covert going on at the county and we're in the county so we're not

176really alone so any decision that we would make we would have to be mindful of that reality so with that being said we have a matrix that's still in place uh we have not moved from green since we adopted it also long ago and then the last bit of information is substitute pay rates a substitute teacher pay rates these are our neighbors in essence any district that touches us or we would share subs with we are sort of right there in the middle of the curve other than the richmond slightly higher than us so we're fairly competitive we have reduced or increased this recently from uh 15 up to i think it was 1 10 or 115 up to 125 within the last two years and lastly i don't have any magic answers here are

177some ideas that others as of this past friday are choosing in sisa increasing their daily rate for substitutes they're contracting a certain number of subs meaning you three people just to give an arbitrary number you're here every day report we'll get you a spot and that wouldn't be a problem we had uh 17 subs today eight of those coveted related and four of those were not covered one teacher wasn't covered in three paris wasn't work covered parent volunteers in classrooms to sub or to aid bonuses four subs certain markers these are dates again are arbitrary 10 days you get a bonus of x dollars 25 days 50 days free lunch for subs and higher substitute rate for fridays we tend to have more people out on fridays and lastly paying teachers to cover for teachers

178this gets into all sorts of contractual issues and further we have to be careful that we don't over tax our teachers who are seeking to cover for others and then we compromise the integrity of the class that they actually are supposed to be in because everyone needs a break at some point during their day and to sub in addition to your regular duties might be a little daunting so these are just some of the things that others are trying one of our neighbors just went virtual as of middle of the afternoon today at the high school so they have the same sub rate pay as us basically and they're the same portfolio as us they're in polk county they just in the the message basically said due to subs shortages they don't have enough teachers

179and that's effective immediately for that effective and they hope to be back on back here in action on monday just at the high school but i don't wow i don't know where it all goes that is not a lot of notice i mean like they did it over the weekend for today so over the weekend and said you could come to school today but the rest of them no today they went virtual as of today for high school okay and their hope to be back in person next monday so they were given the weekend for notice based on my understanding of the message wow i mean it's high school too there's still not a lot of time no i wouldn't say but no i think we've you know done a good job trying to when

180we when we were doing that giving the the notice that we're looking at those things but obviously i don't think anybody thinks that that's a grand idea as long as we can to not be virtual so i think we've prided ourselves on giving parents some forewarning and we've done that via a matrix there are districts that haven't done a lot of forewarning are making a decision on wednesday for a monday we did that for the better part of a year now our decision would be for a friday for a monday we've been very telegraphic about posting our cases i mean anyone that wants to know at any point in time can just look uh there isn't any secret about it we're making our decisions based on our own numbers by building we've made some changes

181good changes you only have so many subs uh today was an okay day because if the record is uh completely accurate five of the people that were out today were doing testing at the elementary so those people were here they just run in the classroom that's a normal thing we do testing got to have someone do it teachers do it so we were okay today i don't know what tomorrow looks like we'll all know about 7 45 tomorrow morning so do we need to really look at one or more of these options to address the sub shortage you can if you feel that one of these choices would make a difference i don't know if they would or wouldn't i mean i guess that's what i'm wondering like uh my estimation based on the taking

182the pulse of the room on friday from the cecil 11 superintendents no one's making any changes at this point in time because they don't think any of these things are going to matter but i can't speak for you and i certainly can't speak for them re increasing the rate from 125 to 135 is that going to make someone sub here as opposed to solving clear lake giving them a free lunch or giving them i think it would reward the people that are already here which they deserve a reward by all means yeah i think i share that that sentiment um that i mean just out of no fault and no blame we've lost a lot of our older subs that were retired teachers just because of covid um and that's totally understandable um but then

183to have teachers that substitutes that do show up um in lieu of that same circumstance of kovid and being here and taking that risk and and being pretty um faithful in that i i would like to see some kind of uh incentive to keep to keep them here i mean obviously the incentive for them to be here already is that this is like they like the school district they like what we have to offer here they like being in our classrooms they like being with the students here um it's familiar for them as well um but to see that having a contract of a certain number of substitutes um each day at kind of a long-term rate um i think makes a difference you know and it's certainly a an extension of a gratitude for

184for the board if you contract them out it's a difference of about a hundred dollars a day difference for the amount that they would be paid if you long if you entered into a contract with them then they would be paid at that different rate from moment one so to speak the only item on here sorry the difference is 100 a day if they're long for long term versus short term yes wow if you feel that would make a difference but again i think you're rewarding the folks that are here and yes they deserve a reward i don't think you're picking up new subs and our problem is we need more people to satisfy the fact that we have more people gone if it picks up new people i i don't think it will but

185maybe the only item on here that's not financial is parent volunteers in the classroom to subvert to aid if we have parents that are interested in doing that we would gladly accept them i mean there's the ability and the interest to do it issues but if there are people that are able and willing and want to absolutely that's a great idea and it wouldn't cost us anything but i don't i don't know if there is or isn't we haven't asked that question sorry who would those people need to contact you you would you can contact the district office certainly we would put you in anyone that wants to sub we would contact the district office um at extension 272 and then at that point we would get you patched in with pam robarge and you

186would get sub jobs absolutely and if they're volunteering then are is the dpi requirement for licensing not an issue i think it would still be an issue because if you're subbing you have to have a sub license if you're volunteering i'm not so sure that this is clean and easy i don't think you can just be a volunteer we would have to go through some paperwork on that right and then it ends up being if it is a sub issue you end up having to pay them so it does become a financial issue at the end and they couldn't just i mean as a parent volunteer you can't just step into a classroom and take it over you have to have a sub license right yep so it technically at the end of the day

187is not without a cost i wish it was you could help in a classroom but you can't speak that absolutely true we'll always be sure then we'll always take help in classrooms by all means they can give me an aid substitute right that we're getting at which comes with a price unfortunately yeah i mean we want to pay our people but having free options there's not many of those yeah having three options free options as in we don't have to pay for the coverage of subs we don't want we don't have that what we have to have is less covert and less absence and less problem but i don't know when that's going to be 500 cases in three days seems like a lot to me all right well i kind of scratched off the

188review of the kovit we decided no one decided they wanted to change that matrix or that system has anybody got any idea on if they want to change the substitute staff i guess you know i'm open for hearing from our subs um or hearing from you know as far as suggestions you know maybe if we try to look at a higher rate on fridays if that's really our day that that is hard to get subs right now it's every day of the week it isn't fridays yeah in normal times it would likely be fridays yeah and i mean a free lunch would be a nice reward for people that are here sure but i don't think that's going to attract new subs but it would be a nice maybe thank you absolutely right no the

189cost is small i don't know that it increases the sub pool certainly i don't think so but be nice thank you sure and other districts do that maybe a bonus i mean i don't know i kind of like the bonus idea for you know maybe five days 10 days whatever the number is you could also combine it with you can track them in for a period of time you people are and then you get a bonus on x number certainly yeah i think even if you contracted these you wouldn't necessarily have to well i'm not sure i guess i shouldn't i shouldn't say that do we have to pay them long-term subpay well you can pay them whatever you want you can't pay them less than short-term subpay right right because you couldn't you you

190didn't because the day the day once you get past your 11th day past 10 consecutive days that's the point at which you need to pay them long term sub rate that's typically for things like maternity leave is that if you're in the same classroom or if you do if you do because if you're more than ten consecutive days you have to move into long-term suffering one assignment in one assignment because if you did 11 days in a row you're not necessarily getting long-term pay if you're switching classes typically it wouldn't right if it's a long-term situation it's typically going to be a maternity leave because then you're taking over a lot more of the duties of of the teacher you're not just filling in for the day you are doing lesson plans you are keeping

191track of grades you're not doing all those kinds of things right right thank you so much right because basically after the 11th day they are getting that bonus of a long-term sub in that assignment so the other ones are floating all over they're they're here the 10 15 days within two months or whatever and and there should be some kind of a thank you of some 25th day you get 100 bucks or whatever it is right right yep so should we can we keep talking about that or like well i think what you i would recommend that you simply give me permission to go ahead and institute a plan we uh to work out those specifics right now i think would be unrealistic yeah but for me to work with pam an administrative team to

192come up with a plan of how to incentivize this sub situation and the way we're talking about yeah yeah yeah and i obviously still being open to parent volunteers um for you know in the classrooms or subs or aids or things like that i mean obviously that would we always open to that so i think one thing you have to be careful of you're probably gonna have to do a background check on being volunteer yes oh absolutely you know some parents said do you realize that this parent and they were with my son or daughter you still need to stay against all of that yes i believe that's anything that we actually take volunteers for that's going to be working with the students i think even when i volunteered coached we had to go through

193a background check and things like that so that wouldn't be anything different so yeah good point so yeah it'd be nice if you could move ahead with together getting into that and discussing it well i've already put pen to paper i will do more tomorrow by all means and have it in place rather soon that sounds great okay you want to bring it back to us sure absolutely you'll see it in february please okay all right next donations okay the saint croix valley foundation donated one thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars to to the intermediate school ukes for youth project did i say that right yeah okay because i've never seen that title before what's a youth i was going to ask you yeah please explain it's ukulele oh yeah they're ukuleles yes catherine bartow

194wrote can you kind of see it right here she's our music and band teacher she came in i didn't even look at that part of our initiative here is to get instruments in students hands so catherine bartel who is our band and music teacher wrote a grant to the saint croix valley foundation and the the title of the projects was yuke's for youth and so with that money we're going to purchase ukuleles for our students to use during during music class super cool why not drums we have those we already did that big part of the grant was they had to play outside first no no yeah and then the other donation is the deer park lions club made a donation of 450 to the angel fund which will be split up into the four

195buildings within the district and you would need to make a motion to accept those if you wanted to do so i will make that motion with a heartfelt thank you to the the saint croix valley foundation and the deer park lions club yes we appreciate your support and your donation and a second second dale with a huge thank you to both that's yeah that's awesome yeah our angel fund is is uh how much is a ukulele okay well we have a motion made and seconded all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed none good and last but not least personnel okay we have new employee contracts for riley johnson club house assistant or letters of appointment clubhouse assistant teacher re-assignment travis bauermeister from montessori teacher to paraeducator jana ullman from paraeducator to montessori teacher

196resignations from aaron christensen special ed para janna ullman clubhouse worker denise robbins school nutrition jessica swabati for clubhouse assistant teacher and i may need some help from cheryl to come up and talk about retirement notices from teresa haynes and kathy peters i have a little note here from each of those individuals we've got from kathy peters the number of years in the district so we've got 27 years of teaching all of them in amory first two years in third grade and then she was at third grade when third grade was still at lean then the next year she spent as a second grade teacher she spent 19 years as a kindergarten teacher and the last five were spent in the montessori teacher role my favorite placement with an exclamation point my favorite moments have been

197witnessing a child's aha moment i love it when a child looks at me and with absolute confidence tells me what they have just learned or figured out is they themselves are the first one to have discovered it i treasure my relationships with my colleagues and being able to share this amazing profession with my daughter having her next work next door to me this year has been a gift and in retirement i am looking forward to spending more time with my grandchildren and traveling with my husband theresa haynes been in the district 22 years seven years as a sub 15 years as a early childhood special education teacher favorite memories when i think of this question the best memories are always around the christmas sing-along in the gym with all the children so excited for christmas

198first one my first year when all the new teachers have to wear reindeer antlers and dance while their kids sing they're going to do that at the middle school next year second when one of my very disabled children saw santa enter the room he was beyond excited third when one of my children sang let it go from frozen it brought tears to all the special ed staff and his mother and of course i will never forget the staff in some of the fun times we have created over the years i couldn't have made it without them retirement plans my husband retired in 2020 we plan to do more camping bike riding riding in as many states as possible fishing spending more time with our grandson and in general just enjoying unstructured days so brad or

199cheryl if you wanted to speak about either of those two by all means have at it come on up if you want to you know if you don't want to it's fine kathy and teresa are superstars it's going to be really hard to replace them they are dedicated to the children in our school district they are excellent at everything that they do and i'm grouping them together because i will have an opportunity at our retirement to talk individually about each one of them and i didn't know i was going to do that this evening but my heart bleeds every time we lose an amazing person in in at least elementary school and they they are both phenomenal so thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that they are amazing so you really don't

200want us to approve the resignation no no no no i have to say about a week or two ago the elementary school staff person that was pitching the hardest for a snow day the next day was kathy peters interesting only three months or four months in the finishing you want a snow day she's like one of the seniors there's something magical about a snow i day it's very fun 49 years is a lot of combined years there service in the district and a lot of experience that's hard to replace and it's a lot of dedication and that's a lot of thank you to both of them yes yes change but good change for them and we'll we'll make do we'll have to i know every year we see these wonderful people with such longevity leaving

201and it's hard to see you should have told him the window was like last december very early in the window all right a motion to accept personnel items i'll make that motion to approve the personal items and a second a second chelsea all in favor say aye aye aye aye opposed no there we go and we don't have a need to go into close so a motion to adjourn a second all in favor say hi all right here we go thank you