001our assistant superintendent for finance and operations to lead tonight's during tonight our budget for 2627 will be approved our general fund community services food service and our student activities so a lot of this information for those that have been here with the full ride since February will look very similar, but for anyone that's in the room that hasn't seen this information before, I'll run through some of those in a little more detail. Starting with the governor's proposal, this is the budget that we based our budget on. Um, so in the presentation, there is a Senate House proposal. Unfortunately, we don't have a full approved state budget at this point, but since we're basing our budget on the governor's proposal, that's what we'll present tonight. So in the governor's proposal, she proposed a $250 foundation allowance
002increase for all districts. Her proposal also provides overall funding increases for both at risk and special education categoricals. Special education categorical increase is really to cover additional costs that the state's required to pay local districts. So it's not really an increase. It's just providing enough funding within that bucket to cover their their needs of outlay of funds. At risk, funding is up, but they're changing how it's calculated. So, at this point, I don't know that our district will be receiving any additional funds. Hopefully, it allow us to stay flatline year-over-year. We have seen a significant reduction in that risk funding the last two to four years to the tune of probably between 150 and $200,000 of lost revenue. So, it's been substantial. So hopefully the the bleeding is stopped um and this increase maybe allows
003a little bit of increase but um I think best case for us right now is kind of flat funding overall. The governor did in her budget continue funding for the retirement UAAL rate stabilization funds. Uh just by kind of way of refresher for those that aren't familiar with this, these are funds that the state provides to local districts. We then have to turn around within seven business days and remit them to the state retirement office. So we're a flow through. Back when this came gosh in play, it's probably been oh 15 years now. The state wanted to write a check directly to the retirement system, but since the school districts are the members, they had to give the money to the districts and then we have to be the mechanism by which those funds flow.
004So there's not a bottom line impact the districts, but we do for budget purposes have to reflect the revenue and the expenditures. Unfortunately, there was an elimination of one categorical. was the employee healthcare categorical. I speculated back to December with the budget amendment that I that this was going to go away because I also speculated that the retirement rate was going to go down and this would be a way that they could remove some funding. Um but say, hey, your retirement rate is not as bad as it was. That is exactly what we saw going into 27 is that the retirement rate is declining. Um and fortunately, what you'll see in a couple slides is that it wasn't a one for one wash. So the revenue that we lost that's a little bit more of
005the reduction that we're seeing the governor also proposed a reduction of funding for cost offset categorical you'll see the impact of that a couple slides and then uh the governor has continued funding for certain categorical. So the first one is the mental health and school safety categorical but unfortunately it comes with all the same legal risks that we wrestled with in the 25 26 year and then finally the governor has continued funding for the transportation categorical as well as providing free breakfast and lunch for all students. So as we look at this um kind of diving into the numbers kind of high level again I'm only going to focus on the governor column but you can see how the Senate and House versions would stack up to the governor's budget. uh we start with 2526.
006So if nothing changed, we walk out the door on June 30th, which is our last day of the fiscal year. We walk in on July 1st. That becomes our starting point for the 2627 year. We have a board approved deficit for 2526 to a,687,000 and that becomes our starting point. We are looking at a decrease of about 23 student FP from 2526 to 2627. state does provide some funding to offset some of that loss, but it's not enough to cover the full loss of funding. So, we are looking at about $171,000 of lost revenue when you combine the lost students with some some uh funding from the state for enrollment stabilization. The foundation increase of $250 per pupil will about $772,000. The elimination of that retirey healthcare categorical as a loss of $36,000 and a
007reduction in that category plus another reduction of about $65,000 of revenue. About two weeks ago, we received word officially from our ISD that we were going to be um losing $40,000 of special education funding at the ISD level. So, we've got $40,000 less of revenue in than we do in 2526. And then as we continue down now, we start looking at some more district specific things uh more on the expenditure side. So, we had some off schedule payments in the 2526 year that don't continue into the next year. There's about $431,000 savings there. Looking at proposed estimated wage adjustments, there's about $357,000 of cost built in there. And then our teacher steps longevity and federal pay is projecting out about $418,000 for next year. if we move our our medical uh cap amounts up to
008the state allowed and then some adjustments for dental and vision increases year-over-year about $61,000 of additional cost on the insurance components and then moving more into um I guess the retirement expense that I mentioned that decreases about 263,000 which I think if you compare above we're losing 36,000 we're only saving about 263,000 so you've got about a $40,000 gap um the funding loss versus the the savings. And then looking at a couple staffing pieces, um as of today, we're we're aware of six teacher retirements for those positions will be replaced and there's a savings of about $394,000 there. And then finally, a couple pair of professional positions, adding one on the gen parasite and decreasing one on the special ed parasite. So we take that subtotal, that million242. We got a few more items to
009run through here. Uh we have a part-time tech assistant position that's it's currently vacant. It was never uh posted. Uh removing that out of the budget. And then operationally, we've got some increased cost for utilities, increased estimate for property cas. We don't have our official rates yet for next year as of today. Uh and then uh an estimated increase for some additional sub costs. So that updated subtotal, that,290,000, that's basically what you're going to be approving tonight in the general fund as a deficit. Actually works out to be about $287,000. But as we talked the last several years, there's some onetime costs that are built into our budget. So it's also important to look at structurally where are we at. So when we remove those onetime equalization expenditures, structurally we're at a deficit of $387,000
010which is up a little bit from where we were this year. Structurally for the 2526 year we were at $354,000 structural deficit. Diving a little more deeply into revenue. Board approved revenues in December were about 41.4 million. We're projecting about 40.8 million with the initial 2627 budget, which is a decrease in total revenue of about $598,000. And as we dive into that, our revenue is made up of four different buckets. We've got our local source revenue, our state revenue, our federal, and then transfers and other. U there's no changes um with the initial 2627 budget on the local side at the state level that revenue is down about $289,000. The first four bullet points we covered on the budget projection slide. So it's wrapping in the foundation increase our enrollment decrease and then the elimination
011of the retirey healthcare categorical as well as that decrease in the mixers offset categorical. That fifth bullet point I want to talk about just in a little bit of detail. You didn't see that on the budget projection side. there's some lost revenue there because each of those line items comes with a reduction of expenditures in a like amount. So it does not have a bottom line impact on the budget, but we have to remove those revenues and those corresponding expenditures as we get to an actual approval of a budget. So the largest one is an education compensation category that the state provided with the budget that was approved this past year. was $452,000 and it was intended to and it did flow to our staff members and form a one time statement. So that was
012the intent of the state and then carried that out here in the spring. The other two items are kind of the winding down of the 23G my back on track funds and the inflate healthcare reimbursement funds. That's state revenue kind of all rolled into a lot of different areas. On the federal revenue side, we're down $65,000. uh we were the recipient um along with most districts in the state of the um filter first healthy hydration grant fund. So there was a new state law that was put into play gosh they've been out three years now uh where basically all districts need to become compliant um and part of that process um was filtered bottled water stations and they provided some funding at the state level through some federal dollars that they received uh so that
013districts could purchase bottle filling stations as well as cover the installation costs of those. So that revenue for the most part is going to be gone. I'm hoping that a little bit of money we have left and allow us to carry forward. But the majority of that's backed out. Similar what we talked about on those one time categoricals. The expenditures are also removed. So that has a zero a zero bottom line impact to our budget. And then finally our transfers and others kind of up 143,000. First we've got a reduction of $40,000 related to that special ed revenue decline from the ISD that we talked about just slides ago. And then we've got another um amount that the revenue goes, the expenditures go and that's related to the copy release that we entered into in
014the 2526 year. So accounting standard required us to record it a certain way. We're now employing that one time recording off on the revenue 23,000 as well as on the expenditure side. We shift to expenditures with the general fund. Board approved expenditures in December was about 43.1 million. We're currently projecting for 2627's initial budget about 42.1 million. This is a reduction of about $998,000. Major adjustments. I'm not going to go through all of them. I'll just kind of talk in groups because we covered them on previous slides, but the first bank of of bullet points here gets into the the wage side of things. So, the off schedule payments, wage adjustments, all of that stuff. Then we move into things like um employee benefit rate changes, retirement rate pieces. Then you move into the staffing
015positions that we talked about. You shift into the operational things with utilities, sub costs and property casualty insurance. And then we finish up with the three bullet points that were tied to the state revenue side which was the one categorical. And then we finish up with 12 grant and then the recording of that release. So a lot of information but we roll all that in. This is the format that we need um officially approve the budget from the state. Um, and it takes everything that we we just talked about and rolls it into functional areas. So, total revenues $40.8 million. Uh, this is a little small. Total expenditures about $42.1 million. We've got excess revenue over expenditures of a negative $1,287,56. We're looking for fund balance to start the year about $7.6 million. We're looking
016to end the year at about $6.3 million and that puts us just a hair under 15% fund balance to close out the 26 27 year. But with fund balance, we always like to talk a couple things. One, we like to talk about the structural side of just our revenues over expenditures. Um, this is just a little bit different format of what we talked about on a previous slide. But then we also like to dive into the the areas of fund balance. So we've got assigned fund balance and we've got unreserved fund balance. The assigned fund balance for us came into play three or four years ago, I want to say, when we were able to receive those 11t federal dollars based to allow us to frontload them. And we've been using the dollars over the
017last few years to pay for certain positions within the district. Specialists originally four, now it's three specialists, a dean position, assistant principal position at the high school. We've got three pair of professionals that have all been covered by this uh these funds. Two of the positions officially worked into the budget, but we still have about $500,000 of cost that we've been using to apply against these these funds that have been assigned. So, we're looking to end the 2526 year with about $868,000 of assigned fund balance, $500,000 of costs we'll use in the 2627 year. So, we're still looking at having about $360,000 of assigned fund balance as we close out the 2627 fiscal year. And so, then as we break down our fund balance on a dollar and percent basis. That leaves us with about
0185.9 million of unreserved fund balance, just over 14% assigned fund balance about 360,000, just under a percent and that makes up the 6.3 million you saw in the previous slide for that just under 15% total fund balance. That is our general fund. Shifting now to our community education budget. Um, and obviously when we look at community, food service, and our student activities, they're all kind of vanilla budgets. Not a lot of changes year-over-year with community ed budget. One thing I want to highlight which I think is a positive is that we've only adjusted our kids program and our preschool rates twice since the 202021 fiscal year. So I think that's a that's a win for our community, win for our parents. We've been able to kind of keep our budget in line as we made
019those changes and we've also been able to keep our pricing competitive with other daycare facilities or preschools in the area. So again, the community budget, not a lot of change. You see about a 2% increase in revenues, about a 2% increase in expenditures. So our revenues are projected to be about $996,000. Our expenditures about a million22,000, a small deficit of about $26,000. And we're looking to end our 26 27 years. So June 30 27 with about 549,000 total balance in budget. Shifting to our food service budget. Um, we are concluding free breakfast and lunch for all students. This was a statewide initiative that started in our 2324 fiscal year. Uh, the governor, house, and senate budget versions also have free breakfast and lunch for all. So, it's pretty safe to say that that's kind of
020how our budget should be built. Uh, the one thing that we don't know is what meal prices will be. So, we still need to set meal prices for breakfast, lunch, meal, milk, and adult meal prices. You might ask why. Uh, if a student or a second lunch that isn't free. Um, also a student come they could purchase a milk separate from a meal and then obviously we have to have staff meal prices set for staff that purchase meals through our food service program. Unfortunately the USDA food nutrition office has not provided us with a tool that we have to use to calculate what those will be. This tool you input a bunch of numbers once they do release it and it sets a floor. basically says you may not charge less than X for these
021meal prices and then from there you make decisions about what your pricing will be based upon what that calculator does. We're told that will come out in July. Um we've seen delays and other things but um our food service director will will be on that as soon as the tool is released from the feds um and we'll get those calculated and commun communicated out to our staff and families. And then finally with our food service budget as we've done probably for the last six to eight years um as we we carry some some dollars for capital outlay to account for equipment needs that we might have on an ongoing basis within that fund. So again as we look at the dollar side of things it's it's less than a percent overall increase in both our
022revenues and expenditures. In this case, our revenues and our expenditures match at about a million493 both. So, we're balanced and our fund balance will likely end about $475,000 when we close out the year for 2627. And then our last budget that will be approved is our student school activity fund budget. This is something that came into play in 2021. There was a new accounting standard that basically required us to set a budget for this fund. Um, it doesn't change anything that we do structurally dayto day. Um but at a really high level, you just have to talk about your total revenues and your total expenditures. And um just for those that might not be aware, these are the funds that house like our um our class of 2026 accounts um society kind of internal accounts
023that that each building would have to handle some clubs or things like that. So it doesn't change the dayto-day of how we do that, but we do have to set a budget for it and we base the budget by looking kind of three to five years and we've really kind of hung in that $800,000 range for both the revenues and expenditures. So, we've just carried that forward really year-over-year ever since we've had to uh put a budget in place for this this fund. Uh and that means that again balance and the funds available for those different activities at about $85,000. Now, the last thing I need to mention tonight is the proposed tax levies. So um we're at 18 mills for operating purposes 1.7ultural property on commercial uh and then 10 mills for debt. That
024would conclude my presentation. Um if you go back to the it's up at the very beginning there's um it shows the governor Senate and House budgets um budget projection and under the atrisisk categorical increase you show a positive 54,000 under the Senate component but if you look at the slides above prior to that it talks about that atrisisk categorical increase being it's described similarly for all But only the Senate is showing 54,000. So I was just curious. >> Yeah, the Senate put more dollars into that categorical. So because they've added more than what the governor or the house did in their increase um there actually would be a projection of some dollars more additional. >> So each of the three slides increased overall funding for this just quantifies it to show that the >> Yes.
025>> Okay. And then do we know why um our special education funding from CC is dropping by 40,000? >> Um they would say that it was a set of onetime dollars that flow to their local districts that they were not planning to continue beyond the 256. We don't know. We know that there was a special request last year from multiple districts to help out with some of that funding and then we were funding, >> but we were never under the that we did move around some staffing and started up some special program and some different to ensure that we could support our students appropriately. So >> I think it was around,000 across all across all >> and then so under the general fund budget um there's a under support services and then business. It looks
026like there's a 227% >> y >> reduction. How or why are we able to do that? >> At $23,000 that's where that sat that's a good call out. That's the one kind of outlier when you look at Wow, you really um and then what is the food service capital outlay? It says there's a 20% increase. What does that entail? >> Yeah. So that so that's going from 50 to $60,000. So those those are things. So when we need to purchase an oven or a hot cart or just some of the equipment needs within the food service program, that's where where that falls. >> And and that's just like anticipatory. It's not necessarily like we didn't identify kind of like here's, you know, replacement cycles of some of the things that that they know they're going
027to need to replace. So, it's kind of a combination of the two. >> Um, and then there's a category called other expenditures in food service for 2026 and 27 92,900. >> Yeah, some of that is we there's some some changes with how the state wants us to record certain food service expenditures. So, you'll see there's some some swings within different categories there. It's really realigning to match up with how the state wants us to record things. I think as we've gone through with more and more of the free free for all um they're just recognizing that the way things may have been classified before it just fits better for how they're reporting to the federal government. So again, when you look at that there's only an overall increase but I would say make some changes
028within how c categorized perspective. >> Yeah, it just looked, you know, having it be other expenditures almost $100,000 a percent change of 19.56%. >> It's kind of the catch all of things like from a state perspective like that's that's their category. So if it doesn't fall into anything there. So some you get into some things. So some of the management fees that we have with um with Chartwells, some of that stuff falls in there. um some of the miscellaneous costs that you can't put under like they're getting more into like supplies have to be like food related but if you're purchasing utensils or some of the other things they want that in other so we've done actually Nicole has done a really nice job um in her time last year here of really focusing in
029on okay this is really what the state is saying this is really why they want it she's done a really nice job of realigning those for us to measure again more consistently what the state's looking for. >> So we're shifting and adjusting and aligning. Perfect. >> Um and then this is probably similar. I was just curious. It showed a reduction of 127,000 in food service supplies like 17. How what supplies did we get? >> Yeah, some of it is sliding down. Some of it is I think when we looked at our budget last year so for 2526 we're anticipating just continued a lot of increases on blue cost >> and we did see some but it didn't come to the level that we were anticipating but again we needed to move some of the manage
030some of the other lines we needed to adjust and slide up and down. It really is just a new class within um but the overall budget just didn't have a lot of changes. You just see some categories. >> Okay. One last thing student school activity fund. >> Yes. >> Um there's a mention of teacher internal accounts. >> Yep. >> Can you give me an example like what would you use a teacher? >> Yeah. So some of our teachers will work like uh concessions and the boosters will give them 100 300 depends on the event that they work and those funds will go into an internal account that that they can use to supplement things within their classroom. So might be supplies or other needs that they have. So that by and large that's what those
031teach I'm not sure. Melanie, is it was it for this or the >> Oh, then >> we will close public communication and round. If nothing else, we will adjourn this portion. We will move into our regular meeting now. We'll call that to order. Please join me in standing for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please take the roll calls >> Here we >> have. >> Great. You have an agenda in front of you. Do you have a motion to approve the agenda? >> Move to support any discussion. All those in favor, please say I. Motion carries. We will start on that agenda with our first presentation tonight from Calvin,
032the director of athletics. Welcome. >> First, want to say thank you. I'll try to respect you guys' time tonight uh and move through this, but there's a lot of stuff. I really enjoyed putting this together, kind of following the blueprint that Mr. Bry had prior to this, but um there's a lot of stuff to brag about with our student athletes. So, we'll get started here. Um again, my name is Kelvin. I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure that this is real and I am the athletic director. Um but, uh Aydah is our athletic assistant. She started this year as well. So, we have two people running the department. Um, our enrollment, we uh settled on on count day at 9:45, which puts us in class A. We are in the blue division of
033the CAAC, that's the Capital Area Activities Conference. You can see the other schools that are are listed on there. Um, through our communications, all right, we are alive and well on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Um, to give an idea of growth, it's about 200 to 250 followers uh that we've grown over the last year. Uh, as far as hosted events, we have hosted over 250 athletic events this year. Um, that's six MHSA tournament rounds, 10 MHSA competitions, uh, and 12 invitational events. That that would be, uh, cross country, wrestling, swim and dive, track and field, baseball, and softball have a invitational as well. Um, so Before we get started into the meat of the presentation, some of the numbers, I have just some shout outs. Looking at by the season, um we have uh 27 athletic
034programs, 47 teams, and 75 coaches. If you see on the bottom line, um as well, all those are trending in the right direction. And so each season, uh, we have growth showing as far as student athletes, which doesn't surprise me as I've been able to work with our coaches, seeing how they go about their business. Um, that's no surprise that we're able to continue to show growth. Um, for our athletic staff, okay, this is a slide that I added, but something that's really important um, to me is the people that work with the athletic staff, our Akers, our game admin, uh the workers, whether it's the PA, clock, scoreboard. Um these are the workers and the reason why athletic events run so smoothly here. And sometimes they go unnoticed, but they're the front line. If
035there's an issue, they're going to those people first. And a lot of them volunteer their time and they bleed blue and gold. And it's it's impressive. There's a family environment. Um Again, I'll respect your time, but just uh the one of my first seasons here during the winter, we have triple headers in basketball, right? Games that start at 4. You don't get out until 9. Um those triple headers, all of the uh ticket takers, they'll get together, they have dinners those nights. So, they supply, they make dinner, they get excited about it, and they feed our event staff. Um which I thought was such a cool thing. As I go to other schools, they're talking to me about, man, we can't get workers, we can't do this. Um, here we have people that embrace that
036and and go above and beyond. Um, our athletic training staff, our head trainer, uh, Steve Jenkins. Uh, just a little note here, since my first day on the job, there's been 189 calendar days. Okay. Um, we've had 136 home events. I have seen uh, Steve more than my family in the past couple months. Um, and it's been awesome. work with him. He's a great guy. I can tell by how the student athletes engage with him that he does an amazing job. So, I just want to give him a quick shout out because he's at everything. Um along with Dr. Sh who stepped in during our MHSA wrestling tournament. He came and did skin checks. Does not charge us a thing, but you'll see him frequently on the sideline of different events that we host. Um
037another just quick shout out. This is my family. Okay. My son on the right. His name is Cooper. Hopefully, he'll turn into a basketball player. If not, maybe we picked the wrong name. But Marjorie is on the left and uh my wife there in the middle with the regional championship trophy. Just wanted to just quick bring light to how welcoming the community has been to us. Uh very thankful for that. So, thank you. Now, let's dive into some numbers here. Um I'm not going to go through each line item, but I do think it's important to track uh some of the trends. Uh and they're positive. Okay, if you look on the right here with totals, you see a lot of green. Uh numbers are up. That has to do with a big senior class
038this year and a big incoming uh group of ninth graders. Um but the impressive part to me is the uh percent of student athletes. Uh to get to a senior class with over 55% or 55% participation in athletics is very impressive. Um the junior and sophomore class and then freshman is typically pretty high with having freshman teams. It's tougher to maintain those higher percentages as you get into JV and varsity. Um but we've done it. We've done it with u with class and and across the board female and male athletes. Um looking at three sport, two sport, one sport athletes broken down by grade. Uh we still see a a heavy trend of growth uh across the board. Um one area I want to point out, the the seniors had some growth as three sport
039athletes. Um I think that's awesome and a commitment from a senior class to say, "Hey, we're going to buy in more. We're going to do more things." Um you know, I had a couple athletes do that. Uh one trend that I'm just keeping an eye on and and get to talk to the coaches about is having uh an increase in in single sport athletes. Um and as you get into high school and um whether that's you know from our youth sports growing up or or everything that they get involved with, we can see some um some sports specific athletes start to appear a little bit and just being one sport athletes. We want to try to encourage two sport athletes, three sport athletes to get a well-rounded experience. Um, I think some of the numbers
040of that probably have to do with our awesome choir, band, extracurricular opportunities that are available. Um, so but just keeping an eye on that trend of of single sport athletes. Um, our GPA for student athletes is a cumulative GPA of 3.56. When you look at the general population of 3 375. Um, that's pretty awesome for our student athletes to take on extra responsibility. Um, and then be held to a higher standard. Uh, we had 329 CAAC academic all league student athletes. Uh, that is earning a varsity letter and having a GPA of 3.5 or above. We had 329 student athletes accomplish that. That's 74% of that athletic population. And when you look at above a 3.0, it's almost 90% of our student athletes above a 3.0. So, really awesome work in the classroom. Um, as
041far as championships, we had four league championships this year and 10 MHSA championships. I'll get into more detail of the league. Okay. In the fall, volleyball won their second uh consecutive CAAC championship. Football won their second in a row. Uh winter sports, boys swim and dive has really controlled the CAAC the past seven years, winning their seventh in a row in swim uh boys swim and dive. And then our girls soccer, their first since way back in 2024. So awesome job by them. When you look at MHSA, okay, our football team made a big splash at the beginning of the year, winning a district regional and their second state title in the last six years. Um, most impressive I think on there is the fact that we've won seven regional championships in the last eight
042years and how tough that is to do as you continue going. Um, and then obviously nine of the past 10. Volleyball had uh has won their fourth consecutive district championship in division one and then girls cross country uh won their second regional the past two years. Uh winter sports, our girls basketball team won um a division one district, okay, and regional. Uh if you notice prior to this, they did not win the league, okay? So they had to go through those same teams to win a and a regional. Um, I can't pass up this slide without talking quickly about the quarterfinal game against Belleville. Okay, that was played at Mason. Uh, we were nominated for the moment of the year by WLNS. Um, that will take place uh later this month to see if we
043won that moment of the year. But beating Belleville in the quarterfinal to go on to the Breland. To give you an idea of what kind of upset that was, uh Belleville just had three girls get offered. One was offered by the University of Connecticut in girls basketball. If you follow, that's as good as you can get. Uh another player was offered by MSU this week. And then two other schools um offered two other players on the team at the division two level. So you get an idea of just what kind of team power uh they had. Uh and we we were able to overcome that and go on to the Breland Center. Um continuing in spring, our girls won their fourth consecutive district. Boys baseball won their first division one district championship. Um our boys
044golf team won a division 2 regional. And just recently, hot off the press, we had an individual state champ, Justin Simon, uh won in uh a playoff. He won the division 2 state championship in golf. Um for the CAAC scholar athletes, in order to be nominated for this, you need to have lettered in two varsity sports. And then from that pool, we take the top 10 GPA. As you can see, I won't I won't read you the names here, but you can see we had an awesome night at Fowlerville, Mr. Dodson and I were able to uh present the awards to the students. Um, and that was a great recognition. Um, Mr. Carson Sculpt, if you heard him speak at graduation, uh, I'm sure you took it all in. He was the first person I
045I I had to ask, okay, as I got to know these kids, like, what are your plans, right? Where you going to school? were your plans after this? Carson was the first kid that I asked and he was going to the naval academy to study nuclear engineering, right? And I was like, that's tough to follow. But just to give you an idea of what what kind of kids that we have and are recognizing um athlete of the year, you can see the nominations uh on the left hand side there. Our female athlete of the year was very deserving. It was Carly Dennis. Uh and our male athlete of the year was Lucas Brandell. Uh both awesome student athletes, great kids, great um great leaders within the school uh and very welld deserved. Um signing day,
046we had 25 student athletes that are going to continue their athletic and academic careers at the college level. Um their combined GPA is a 3.71 with five of those having a GPA of a 4.0 or higher. Very impressive group. This picture was taken uh had our winter signing. We also had a fall signing and a spring signing. But 25 student athletes being able to continue their academic and athletic career is pretty impressive. Um just a couple shout outs here as we go through. I mentioned the boys golf state championship in division two. That's Justin there. Finals rushing record. Tra our quarterback. Uh you probably heard this a couple times as as football has gone through their their parade of championship, but uh he rushed for 397 yards in the state final. That was just one
047game. Okay, that's there's probably a few quarterbacks that didn't surpass that all season and it had four touchdowns. And then Carly Dennis, um our girls basketball program is is very well recognized right throughout the years. She has the most varsity wins of any player at 92. Um, we had two wrestlers. Okay, we got Coach Buyers in the room here. Okay, two wrestlers eclipsed the 100 career wins this year. Tegan Thompson and Tyler Bashore. And a couple new school records in track and field. The boys 4x1 team pictured there on the left. Girls 4 by 200. And our girls paball record was set this year at 10 foot by Alys. Um we revealed our banner, our state championship banner during the um in between games uh for basketball this year. Um if you were there, it
048was an exciting event. Uh there was actually two reveals that night. We won't talk about the first one. Um but it was an awesome way to celebrate a year. Then just throwing this up here. We're coming up on a year of our Nike contract. Um, our athletic director or yeah, our athletic department, okay, uh, hands out AEDs to each, uh, team throughout the year. So, each team gets a bag at the beginning of the year, they hand it back in once their season's completed. We actually did have a situation this year uh when we went to Everett where that came into play. All right. Our coach uh was notified that someone in the park wasn't a student athlete, but they jumped right into the situation, started giving chest compressions. Um unfortunately, it was a was
049a non-s survivor situation. But, uh, to have a coach that was CPR certified and an AED on, um, you know, on the bus, we were able to jump into action without without hesitation. Um, paid coaches are CPR certified. So, the MHSA only requires you to have head coaches CPR certified. We require all coaches on staff to be CPR certified. Uh, I am proud to say that we are one coach away having 100%. Uh, but next year that's kind of the goal. I know that we'll get there. Um, some improvements here. I took these pictures today. All right, that is inside of the uh the swim. Uh, the pool is empty. Okay, it's not uh anything a little unusual to see the pool that way, but we are fixing up our pool as well as we
050just got eight new starting blocks. Okay. Along with a that are tied into a Colorado timing system for swim program. Uh baseball is back on their home field after being moved last year. Uh so those renovations are done. Uh the back stop should look a little different if you're used to baseball. They dropped that I believe a couple feet from what I'm told. Um the nets in the background are all new. The dugouts had some renovations done. Um and it looks really really beautiful out there for the season of baseball. Um, so some new improvements there. Uh, a couple new things as I wrap up here. New for 2026. Okay, we are going to partner with Vertical Race for this year. Okay, this is a one-year contract that we are partnering with them uh for
051online donations, online digital discount cards. Um, they do some popcorn and foam blitzes. It is This does not mean that we can't still have our Uker tournament, right? uh for baseball or or purse bingo for softball. Some of those more hands-on involved in the community fundraisers will still take place, but the online um donations will go through vertical race. All right. Um one part of that decision was our dedicated point person is Ryan Anderson. He is a 2013 alum. Uh he is in our athletic hall of fame. Um I snapped a picture quick today just to kind of show you that. Um as well as the fact that Vertical Rays is going to um front the cost and setup fees for a new app. Okay, we are doing kind of uh unrolling this in the
052fall, right? There's a D Panthers mobile app. The the thought process behind this is if I'm a parent right now, uh if I have more than one student athlete, I may have to download two or three different apps to communicate to the coaches and programs. Um, all of our teams will live in this app. Okay. Another thing that we really liked about this was you can get real time updates as well as there's no one uh or excuse me two-way communication. So, there's always a third party involved in that communication from coach to student athlete or coach to parent. Um, that way we can kind of monitor some things a little better and make sure everyone's doing the right things. Um other things you kind of get an idea of kind of how that looks.
053Uh you select your team. Okay. You can you can uh off of notifications get notifications for for different teams or turn them off if you don't want your phone constantly going off. Uh other things within the app, you can't really see that. I'm sure it's a little blurry, but you can purchase tickets um through the app. You can get to our website. um just a a really all-incclusive kind of unveiling of hopefully making communication a little easier um and more accessible for for families. Um other than that, just a couple more thank yous is this being my first year. Um so so so many things have kind of taken place. It's kind of been a little bit of a whirlwind, right? My head's kind of spinning still. Um but our transportation department, Lisa Smith, the
054bus drivers, Teresa Salsbury, they've been awesome. There were countless times where maybe one or two things slipped through the cracks and they were they jumped in right away to help. Um, maintenance and grounds, Rick, uh, and Brian Brandon have been awesome to work with. Um, our tech department, I don't know if you know Adam Zarziski at all, but he is a wizard. Okay. Uh Jason has helped out a ton as well with onboarding uh new new coaches. Uh community ed, what they do over there is amazing. Michelle Wilcox, Mallerie Salsbury, uh they they schedule all of the youth stuff. If you drove by here on any given night, any day, you see stuff going on, right? Um they work through all that stuff. They've been great to work with. Um our sports boosters, coaches, parents.
055Um, again, I would be a fool not to at least recognize Mr. Bry and everything that he has meant to Dwit and to myself. He is like a family member. I swear I call him all the time for for help. Um, and the first thing he asked me is, "Are you okay? How are the kids? How's your wife?" Um, so I really appreciate him and the relationship. Um, thank you to Rob, Kevin, school board. I don't think I've missed anybody. I'm sure I probably have Mr. Dodson. I forgot about you. >> But no, thank you. >> Thanks. >> Any questions? >> I have uh two. So, first off, um participation of like student fans. Do you have any sort of barometer on on that? I I went to varsity basketball game this year. I was
056kind of surprised that the the lack of student >> Yeah. fan participation. I know Bri's got some or buyers has some ideas on on just different things that we can do, but not necessarily a question, just a comment, I guess, of let's let's see what we can do to increase student participation. >> Yeah. >> As much as we can. >> Uh to answer your question, there are numbers that I've seen as far as like student body coming to games. We have identified that came up throughout my interview process kind of on the student panel uh as well as throughout some other areas. Um brainstorming on ideas. I have talked to Miss Anderson who leads student government. Um I think she has some good ideas in place. I think we can expand on that. Um I
057believe that we have to find the kids that are influencers, right? the kids who have that power um and the popularity and get them to get on board with supporting others. I I've heard time and time and time again about like, well, they show up to football, right? And they don't show up to the other sports. Uh we got to change that narrative. The amount of times that I've heard u well it's not like football. I think like it's been a little alarming and um I I think that that starts with just being transparent and understanding like to our coaches what that means, right? And um and then getting our student athletes to jump on board and go support other areas. But there's there's some thoughts um you know, I'm open to, you know, if
058you coach buyers has some ideas. I think Stephanie Anderson is a great place to kind of start with student government. Um but My vision is to have this student athlete le and then to go through student government. But I want our student athletes, we have the numbers, right? We need to support each other. >> Yeah. Second question. Um, so we have to make a contract for a year. Been asking for just the shirt for a year. So I just formal request. >> You can buy a shirt. They won't sell them. He only gives them to the athletic department. >> It's It's true. We did have to get permission for that shirt from Nike. >> I've personal it. >> Don't leave it anywhere. >> So, I have some questions about the vertical partnership. Was that put
059out by Can you >> um the open competitive bidding process? >> Uh no. >> And what's the value of that contract? >> I don't know if there's a specific value there. There's a number to hit within that of $100,000 to be raised for not to um I think we're going to be able to hit that number with ease with the sports that are already doing vertical race. Um, this this decision was made to protect some of our community as well. Uh, the amount of times that I've I've seen uh other platforms come and say, "Oh, they only take this percentage." Uh, I think sometimes when you look at that route, you can open up the door for any information to be shared out that you don't want to be shared out. >> Do we know
060what percentage >> it's 15%. >> And then in terms of the uh fees that they're going to pay, those upfront fees and cost startup costs. >> Yeah. >> You know what the value of that is? >> It's just shy of 10 grand. So I'd like to have further conversations on that. Um in terms of theming cost there's potential for discount but does that process are really important. I think did go through the contract. They um they made some revisions and that was the revisions were signed by all parties. So they go through the process service. >> Yeah, it's a service. >> It's not a service. If it's not a service, >> I feel confident in vertical again with Ryan being an alumni from here, working with a lot of our programs from the beginning >>
061and that's part of the concern. They have a number of other schools that are are doing as well. So, >> thank you very much. Congratulations on a highly successful year. all you're doing here. Glad to have you. Thank you. >> It's quite the ride. >> All right. Next presentation is our capital planning update with Jeff from plant. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Jeffary point. Um long conversations so I will be brief. I will be interesting and I will be seated. Mr. Rob had a lot of direct involvement in this conversation capital. So please feel free to speak up. interject. >> All right. So, tonight we're going to talk um provide an update on the overall capital plan um and all the exciting work that's been going on over the last
062several months. We'll talk a little bit about the background of the proposed timing for the capital projects and then we'll really dive into the capital project recommendations that came through our staff and community engagements and then we'll review the next steps. Okay. Um the district has really done a great job working on um so people say how did this come to fruition. The district engaged GMBB architecture to perform a facility assessment and they have architects, engineers, and construction managers on staff to review all of the buildings. You did an enrollment projection study that forecasts out the next five years. You did a preliminary budget planning with Clark Construction and financial modeling with the district's financial advisor, PFN. And most importantly, you did multiple stakeholder input events and engaged the community in a community survey. Right
063now, as you can see on the slide there in the red, we're in the program validation phase. We've compiled information to determine the goals and objectives for public schools. We've aligned community input on project scope and developed a proposed budget. We've looked at cash flow modeling for the next five years. We've developed a phasing approach which we're going to spend some time on tonight going through subsequent slides and more importantly if desired and place on the ballot. That is where the bond mill campaign and support will take place. There's a lot of work as you can see here that's going to take place and I won't drill down on every single column but most importantly is work together on communication with board of education staff and make sure that we're all aligned and most importantly
064engage architecture construction all right on this slide I'm going to talk a little bit about considerations that this After engaging community board members, staff and administration and community survey in multiple forums, it was determined that the pillars of the proposed capital plan state and system and continue to address the buildings, technology as well as investments in the arts, athletics, extracurriculars. We also heard that we need to continue to make DIT schools a destination district for continued academic excellence paired with upgraded state-of-the-art facilities. The community would like expansion as well as improvement in existing facilities across extracurricular activities and across all student groups. Lastly, we heard that strengthening the learning environment for every student is the overarching goal. Okay, what you're seeing here is our developed proposed approach. The approach generates 157 million in capital funding
065and maintains the current mill of 10 mills with no tax rate increase and it's delivered in three phases which we'll dive into next. All three phases of the district as you see at the bottom have districtwide improvements. These can include updates to technology, updates to fix, equipment, which is furniture, and also updates to instruments and classroom furniture. All right. Now, we're going to go into each phase that you just saw on that previous slide. in phase one with your seniors to the high school. What we're proposing in phase one, which is about $17 million, is an addition to the auditorium as well as some updates to the middle school. These include exterior updates, which facade, the roof, and exterior of the building. In phase one, we're also going to look at some districtwide improvements, security
066technology, musical instruments, as well as As we move forward into phase two, this is the largest of the three phases, about$und00 million. At the high school, you can see a majority of the work taking place. We're going to look at roof and exterior building improvements, buildings about 27 years old. It's due for some updates. Um, we're looking at a new multi-purpose fieldhouse, a new auxiliary gymnasium addition, new tennis courts, domestic water piping replacements, interior remodel of classrooms, some updates to the pool, kitchen renovation, and parking lot reconstruction. You heard from the community that there's some concerns over traffic. You want to look at that, it's safe. In phase two, we're also going to be looking at the middle school. We're going to do two additions as you can see there in yellow. We got a
067kitchen edition as well as the cafeteria edition. We're also going to look at domestic water piping replacement at the middle school as well. We're going to touch those classrooms we didn't hit in this current bond. Um so for the interior remodel, we're also going to look at the exterior improvements and a new technology districtwide improvements over Phase two will include site lighting for safety, additional roofing needs as proposed, security and technology, furniture playgrounds as well as musical service. All right, move on to Phase three is going to include the elementary schools. And in this phase, we're right around 30 million. First up is Herbison Woods. We're looking to expand the parking and reconfigure the parking. Going to reconfigure the bus drop, expand the playground areas, domestic water replacement as well here at the school and
068interior remodel classrooms, cafeteria. Next, we'll move into David Scott. We have cafeteria edition in yellow there on the north part of the building. Um update to the playground areas, also domestic water piping replacements, interior remodel classrooms, cafeteria, kitchen and counseling areas and site replacement. All right, next up is Shady Road. In Shady Road, we're going to do a gymnasium edition, which you can see on the part of the school. Domestic water piping replacement as well, interior models in classrooms, kitchen, cafeteria, class areas as well. And first off, early childhood center. We're looking at a partial roof replacement, domestic water pipe replacement here as well. Interior remodels of the classroom and corridors and pavement reconstruction lighting replacement. Districtwide improvements for phase three will include buses, equipment, site lighting, security and technology and playgrounds as well. All
069right, this gets me to the end here. Um, so what could this bond represent for public schools? Again, this is really investing in both new facilities and also renovating your existing facilities that you saw through the three phases to create spaces for the community wants. What we heard through the community forums, the proposed plan is not just one grade. It's all from prek to high school. The plan addresses your crit critical infrastructure, your needs and technology needs, including to make DUI public schools a destination district for academic excellence in state-of-the-art facilities. And it generates 157 million in capital funding while maintaining the current mill rate of 10 mill. Next up is our next steps here and tonight is the board's opportunity to approve the pre-application to move forward in July. We'll come back to the
070board for your approval to move forward resolution and then a ballot information campaign will take place between July and election day. Take any questions. Rob, you want to put a pre-qualification application process? >> Yeah. So, um it's basically taking three years of facility assessment input. Um all the things that Jeff mentioned tonight, put it into application that gets submitted to the state. The state goes through review process of that. So, it's the projects phasing um breaks it out by building. You have to do your enrollment study. Uh some things they'll look at is if you're, you know, in our case, we're basically looking to do flat, maybe a little reduction of students. They don't want to see that you're adding 20 classrooms across the district because your enrollment study doesn't mirror what you want to
071do. So they basically validating some of the things that you're putting in there. And ultimately the state will stamp it, sign off on it, say yes, we believe that this is a a viable project uh that you can then bring before your voters. So, we met with um representative from the state a week ago. Um she had very few questions overall. I think she was impressed with all the work that the team has done um really the last couple of years. Uh we made a couple of minor revisions uh that were incorporated into the application that's in the board packet tonight and with uh approval tonight then we will officially submit that to the state and then they've got 30 days to finish up their review. Um, that's why we have to go to the
072July meeting for the actual call of the election because it's just past that 30-day review window for the state. >> Thank you. >> Any other questions? >> Thank you. Thank you very, director of curriculum of instruction and assessment on the 2526 spring benchmark assessments for grades 8 through 8. I was feeling a little sad back there about going fourth and last. Um Mr. Dawson is a big baseball guy. That's clean up here. So very brief tonight. Um I teasing. Uh good evening. It's always an honor uh to be in front of the board. Thank you for having me. Um and I'm here to update you on those spring benchmarks as we've done for so many years. Many times I was most recently here in March um to talk to you about those winter benchmarks. Um
073so you'll be very familiar with the format um and we have some good information. It's amazing to see talk about destination district u see the wonderful things going on in athletics the amazing things that are on deck and facilities. Um, Rob, the budget's not as exciting, but that's what makes everything possible, right? I mean, that's, you know, so >> lead off. Anyway, so wonderful stuff. And I'm happy to report we've got good uh healthy looking charts and graphs here tonight, too. So, a lot of this is uh things I still include in here more for when we post online. I'm not going to go into great detail about what NWA is. Basically, it's our benchmarking system. um shows us how our students are responding to the common core curriculum, the curriculum in math and in
074reading. U one piece I always do and I know it's a broken record here, but I have to say again you saw many of the things that you know just in athletics that's a sliver of what makes it what uh what it is here. I always going back to when I was a high school principal as well used to talk to kids about test scores, right? test scores are a sliver of who kids are as a student and who they are as a student is a sliver of who they are as a person, right? So, we want to keep that perspective, but also have hold those two truths kind of steady here that that's true, but these are also very important metrics for our district. Um, and some of these tests are when we get
075the SAT and so on will be some of the most important tests they take. So, hold those two things constant. Um it can take a nimble mind to do that but we uh we have a lot of uh smart kids around here. So I'm confident they can do that. So um again this is how the national norms break down obviously in the quintiles and we pay attention to where our students are scoring where they're placed in those quintiles. Um and then what I've done the last few years is compare spring on spring on spring. Like when I met with you in March I showed you winter to winter to winter to winter. We have about five years of comparison data. This will probably be the end of kind of one longitudinal study. I'll explain in
076a minute. We'll kind of probably start over next year um just based on some pieces that NWA has provided. So our goal had been when we started this office and if you recall this was originally um a mandate by state law during co we were supposed to um give we first first time mandated to give these benchmarks. There were about four choices we were already giving um NWA and had been for the better part of a decade. we were well situated there and then we were supposed to uh create goals and we were getting some uh advice from our different agencies and and people we go to for that. They were saying, "Hey, just keep it simple. Say you're going to show growth. That's all you got to do." And we were like, "Nope. We're
077going to set the bar high here. That's what people expect. That's what our teachers expect. Um, that's the ethic here. Culture of excellence and all that, right?" Um, and so we said, "Hey, not just showing growth, but we want to get to the point where we have 80% of our students at average or better, which is pretty remarkable when you think about that versus the national average." So, and again thinking being that if 80% of in any in any given class um can respond to the grade level curriculum in front of them, now we're at the right proportions where we can intervene both at a strategic and intensive level uh from that tier one curriculum. So, you see here all the way from on the left hand side, okay, this is the spring of 22
078where we were and you can see slowly but surely um our green and our blue, right, are what uh they call um high average and high, right? The green and the blue growing, growing, growing to the point now where we have uh 65% of students in those two, you know, so the goal was 80% in green, blue or yellow and we have 65% just in the green and the blue in reading and this is K. This is K8. So 2,000 students represented. Um now one caveat that I did give in March as well. You may remember the NWA this bar over here is a different set of norms. So that's an outlier. The norms before were from the 2020 study where they were taking uh data from students 2017 1819 obviously pre- pandemic and then
07922 23 24 all over the country and us included were being compared to prepandemic performance. the 2025 which are operational this year norms um study how students did nationally in the years 22 23 24 um and again I my line lately has been to we can celebrate as as locals here in dipo maybe we for our country and that um scores have gone down nationwide um as an artifact of of co 19 I think some of it's from the homebased childhood and some of these other things um but we've held ground and even um excelled based on our peer group. So some of this I think we would be um close here right to where we were before but but now we look even better. So from now on probably starting next year we'll be
080looking at the 2025 to 2025 norm so we have apples to apples and we'll start a new set of comparison perhaps a new goal there. Um this is again based on our goal way way back in 2122. All right, we want uh our goal was 80% of kids to be at those first three tiers at least average nationally and you can see how that's grown over time. That's the type of chart you want to show board of education, right? So now you see I did uh make the y ais small here to increase the dramatic effect of the of the graph here, right? But anyway, it's it is I mean the 10point gain over 2,000 students is significant, right? So I want to make sure that the graph that sign So that was reading. Again,
081this will be math over the same time period. And you see a similar story um again where we're now having 72% of students um in that high or high average range. Um these are slides that if I show colleagues in other districts that they kind of have their mouth open, there must be a mistake here, right? So these are um not only do we succeed on the athletic field, these are representative of thousands and thousands of hours and efforts and conversations at dinner tables with with parents and teachers making the extra effort, students being dedicated, um you know, the the curriculum team helping coordinate, the principles making sure that the quality control pieces are there and things are aligned and on and on and on, but it's not one person's thing. It's not one building's
082thing. It's it's the the collective whole and the quality of the community that leads to numbers like this. So, it's it's an exciting thing. And of course our chart based on our goal um looks excellent there too. So but again the last number slightly inflated by the change in norms but I'm just showing you what the the program kicks out again next year we'll start over. We'll compare this uh spring to next spring and start over with the 2025 norms. So um what will be posted online? I'm not going to go over these in detail here. I can hit a couple of high points here. I do have the buildings and their achievement um listed here. Anything you see in that kind of golden color is reading. Anything you see in math is is blue.
083Um you can see we have some really high this the number on the lefth hand side again is the median students. So in grade one there's 204 students who took this test. The plum middle student um is scoring in the 78 you line them all up by scoreing in the 78 percentile nationally which is pretty impressive. So that's that's a that's a grade that's doing some great things. Um see math scores a little higher overall. Second grade math the median student was scoring in the 82nd percentile nationally. So the middle student was was achieving above that threshold that we wanted. And uh and we see a couple of couple lower scores here in reading. Um relatively speaking we're still in the 63rd 67 percentile nation. So those are still strong places to be. Um so
084we'll be looking at areas of strength, areas of weaknesses. Our buildings have been doing that um all spring and we flow that into our continuous improvement process where they're um identifying gaps and talking about how they might improve uh those scores even still make sure that we're doing all we can for our our students and their achievement. Um last thing here this I skipped this slide last year in the spring because we had switched from a product called the Padience to a product called Dibbles. Um very similar there are universal reading screeners and they show the kind of health of our earliest readers or K5 readers um as far as are they at grade level, are they at what we call benchmark or not and then that will allow us to intervene with our early
085reading intervention teachers and pair professionals try to give those kids the opportunity to catch up in those early grades and the earlier the better we know from research. Um and we see some healthy looking trends here as well. So along the bottom um each set of three bar graphs is each grade level K through five. So the six grade levels there. Um the kind of uh orange color is the fall benchmark fall percentage of students who were at benchmark in that grade level. The blue is the winter. So they took it again when they came after Christmas break. And then the green is the spring that was just took place about a month ago. And you can see especially I mean highlighting here in Shady Road. Um and then we know that's where kids um
086just the brain uh science you're going to be able to make the biggest impact with our youngest youngest learners. And you can see they inherited a kindergarten class at the first uh pass through was less than half at benchmark. Um and by the winter our staff had gotten those students on that composite measure um to close to three quarters at that number and that continued to rise. Again the pointing out um you know another strong here in first grade we got almost 99 n and 10 students were at or above benchmark in those early core reading measures. So again, some really um excellent numbers. And again, I want to give credit u to our um ERRI teachers. That's our early reading intervention. Obviously, our tier one classroom teachers, the parents who are paying attention to
087all the reports that come home that can be very busy time to read through sometimes, right? And parents make that effort to make sure that um that their students are are doing those extra pieces or cooperating with our reading interventionists um and those students for determined uh to improve. So, um a lot of good things here and that's again the state of the district when it comes to benchmarking and are there any questions? >> Brian, thanks. Uh I know you don't necessarily like to get up here and show test scores to everybody, but I think it's a great practice. I think it's a good thing that we do as a community and we have a great story to tell. Um what what I it's it's kind of being really nitpicky here, but >> um why
088are we and I realize we're testing two different groups of students here, but I look at the drop from spring, your dibbles spring score in first grade, and we dropped 24 points to the fall in second grade. Is that typical? I know we're testing two different groups of kids, >> but summer dropped, but is there anything we can do just messages to the community of get your kids to read over the summer? I know we have some great folks from the library here that would love for kids to stop by the library more, but what can we is there anything we can do to help that drop off that naturally happens over the summer? >> There's no doubt. And that's actually one question just like that when we were in our data reviews. I can
089think of a couple times this year where people were, you know, really good questions like that came up. Like we see that drop, right? We see the progress we made drop off. Again, now we're comparing against every student that comes in in the country at that next grade level. And as you say, these are different cohorts of student, right? But the summer slide is a real thing, right? So when students um are out of school for two or three months, it matters a great deal how much they're reading, how much text uh they're coming across, the vocabulary they're encountering at home or not. And I know our building principles do and our our classroom teachers do reach out to families and give packets or ideas or you know suggestions about going to the library just
090ways that we can mitigate that summer slide as much as possible. So I know that's something that they do uh do at those grade level but we can always improve for sure. >> Thank you. questions. >> Could you just touch base really quickly on letters training and just some of our teachers accomplishments in that area? >> Yeah, that's it's an exciting thing. I know you may have heard about letters L E T R S. It's a national it's gotten some national renown. It's been around for 20 odd years, but it's really the kind of um uh flagship most famous, most effective as far as results uh training and what we call the science of reading. Um so again, that's getting back basics as far as phonics instruction and less whole language which was which was
091a really uh a method that that a lot of schools practiced for for several years about 20 years ago started to really take shape and we just as we know more we do better now that we really you see some of the legislation that's come out of the state of Michigan is really even explicitly saying you can't you shouldn't be teaching with these methods of like one example is using context clues to make a guess about a word right the science of reading says that it's the It's the decoding. It's the actual um the brain learns best um by actually doing the hard work of decoding each word um and and breaking it down and having kids read rather than making educated guesses or using context clues, things like that. And so letters again is
092is a not um insignificant time um commitment and it's something like an 18-month program. It ends up being kind of like a half a college degree commitment or a couple college class commitment that and it's free from the state of Michigan. But I think we're getting up to the point where we have about half maybe 40% to half of our 60 or so um K5 classroom teachers who have taken this up on their own. And you may have seen on our social media um about once a quarter we honor our new graduates um in letters. There's also letters for administrators and I went through that too. So I got to be in the I'm going to be in in the next Facebook um post along our teachers who are doing that. But that's something the
093state is pushing. The biggest the biggest question is how do you get you know we have about five uh calendar days or thereabouts a year where we can do professional development. This is 18 months. This is a college course. How can you require um the teachers in the state of Michigan to do this? And the state government's kind of really been wrestling with that question. Most notably uh the state of Mississippi did a lot of letter training and they really really big gains um in reading proficiency. So I'm proud of our staff without any monetary um inducement just as a sense of pride and doing the very best they can um for the students and families in front of them. About half of them have taken on a commitment um and I know we've got
094more in the pipeline. Um every quarter we have seven or eight folks who are finishing that letter training. So kudos to those staff. Every every staff member that comes through that I hear consistently two things. One, that was a lot and and uh they're glad they're done and two it's it's an amazing piece for their instruction and they're so glad they did. So thanks for teaming up on that. It's really really good. >> We appreciate your leadership in that area. >> Aaron Surac the specialist has been really key. Um she does a really nice gift basket and does really just makes people feel really uh important and special and thanked and appreciated when they have gone above and beyond like that. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Lots of good news tonight. So, thank you all for
095the presentations and the audience for your patience. Uh, next we will move into public communication for items found on the agenda. Okay, we will close public communication and move on to our consent agenda. It is the recommendation by Superintendent Kevin that the board of education approve, adopt, and accept the following items for immediate implementation and appropriate action as presented. The approval of minutes from regular meeting May 11th finance committee meeting June 2nd policy committee meeting. Treasurers reports for payment for the month of May 26. Treasure has confirmed the checks debit card for the month of May. Professional hires of Katherine House teacher Page Multi of Woods Elementary teacher and Randall for Woods Elementary teacher out of state overnight field trip for high school Spanish students to Costa Rica. Tenure recommendation for Logan Elena Aar Moses
096Kirsten Olsen Alissa Wright Megan Goldman. Finally, it is for annual approval which is the property tax levy of 18 mills and the 2027 High School Athletic Association. Do we have a motion? move forward. Any discussion? First, I know we have two of those professional hires here, correct? Welcome. >> Oh, we have three. We have all three of them. Congratulations. Welcome all of you to do it. We're really looking forward to being up here and teach our kids and get started. So, congratulations. >> Oh, fantastic. Even better. Love it. Love it when they come back. >> Congratulations. That's fantastic. Also congratulations to the teachers here as well. Any other discussion? All right, we have a motion. All those in favor, please say I. >> Motion carries. We will now move on to action items. And the
097first one is the bond preliminary qualification application. The recommendation public schools board of education approve preliminary qualification for bonds application number 1910 4 K122901 as presented motion move any discussion okay all those in favor please say I >> oppose motion carries uh next we will move into the adoption of the 2627 budget for public schools. It is a recommendation by assistant superintendent Robo and superintendent Kevin Ro to the board of education adopt the following budget for the 2026 2027 fiscal year for public schools general fund total revenues of 40,829,365 with expenditures of 42116721 expenditures exceeding revenues by 1.287256 resulting in estimated fund balance June as presented. Community education fund total revenues of 996,000 expenditures 1.022500 million with expenditures exceeding revenues by 26,500 leaving an estimated fund balance of June 27 of 549,539 food service fund
098total revenues of 1.43500 million total expenditures of 1.493500 500 with revenues equaling expenditure resulting an estimated fund balance of June 2027 of 474,698 is presented and the student school activity fund total revenues of 800,000 expenditures of 800,000 and revenues equaling expenditures the estimated fund balance June 2027 is 815,516 as presented we have a motion moved and supported any discussion on the budgets All those in favor, please say I. >> I. >> Any oppose? Motion carries. All right, we will now move on to public communications or any thanks. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm here for the library. I first want to say it was so interesting to come to these meetings and hear the reports and know the data and stuff because I talked to a lot of people in the community and I'm able to
099tell them that and I did a lot of door canvasing and I can't tell you how many times I told people that this district puts the most money of every dollar in the classroom than any around the area. So, I'm I'm out there rooting you on. >> Thank you. >> But I'm here tonight because your natural partner is the library. And Mr. Weaver has set a great example because he has become a member of Friends of the Library. And it sort of made the light bulb go off in my head that I should invite you all and actually anybody that listens you that's here that you need to join because it's no meetings. your money goes and what we do is we provide funds for the library so they can do things for kids that
100are not in their budget. So the reading challenge that just k the summer reading program that just kicked off on Saturday. There were hundreds of kids. They had the obstacle course there and all kinds of fun stuff. The friends of the library helps raise the money that makes that possible. So when you join friends of the library, you help us support the library better. So I'd really like you to think about that. And also the one that really amazes me is team scene because if you think about all the kids when they get out of school, a whole bunch of them go right down to the annex at the library and they're there's activities, there's food, they're keeping them off the street, they're doing great things and fabulous role modeling. So by joining the library
101building community. And if you stop to think about it, libraries, schools, and parks are the last bastion in community. And it's up to us to support them and keep them going for generations. So, thank you. I have applications or you can go to the library friends.org and join online. >> All right. All right. So, I just want to take this moment sincerely thank our board of education, our families for the incredible support you've shown throughout this year to me, but also to the entire district. Your partnership truly makes a difference. I feel blessed to be part of such a dedicated team from our administrators to our teachers to every support staff member. The district is filled with people who generally care about students and tonight absolutely shows that. Looking ahead, our administrative team is already
102hard at work preparing for next year, relying on our program and planning professional development so we hit the ground running this fall. Finally, I want to congratulate all of our teachers who earned tenure this year. It's a significant milestone. It's welld deserved. And thank you to the board for recognizing and supporting these outstanding professionals. It's been an honor to serve this community this year and I just feel honored and blessed to be part of such an amazing district. I also want to welcome our new teachers. Uh thank you for choosing and we're excited to have you. Thank you. Any questions for Kevin? Okay, we'll close that portion and move on to board me. Seeing none, I will entertain a motion to >> support. Was