001I call this meaning shorter this is a regular meeting of the Northfield Public School Board today is Monday February 27th and the time is 6 pm this meeting is being live streamed and recorded the recording of this meeting will be posted on the district website as soon as welcome members of the community here tonight to observe the important work being done on behalf of all districts stakeholders Dr Hillman we have some items in the table file yes there were several items in the table file there are some Personnel items including appointments increase decreased change in assignment there's a leave of absence and uh some resignations as well and also retirement and then we also have an updated version of policy 808 since the packet was published on Thursday thanks thank you very much if there
002are no objections we will add these items to the agenda as we move forward is there a motion to approve the agenda as presented second that means thank you all those in favor say aye aye opposed motion carries we are now on to the public comment portion of our meeting and I have a script that I will read in a second this is an opportunity for residents business and property owners for the board to hear your comments you are prohibited from making comments about specific students staff and administrators the board respects and values input but when it relates to a specific individual or a specific matter this input must be heard by the appropriate personnel including the building principle or superintendent and not during an open meeting at the school board you will be gaveled
003out of order if your comments are accounting config please address the boardroom William after being recognized by the board chair identify yourself and if you represent a group we require that you limit your remarks to three minutes you are not allowed to yield your time your time to another person it is expected that members of the public will address with Civility and respect for General attacks by anyone addressing the board are unacceptable the board has allotted up to a total of 30 minutes for public comment at regular school board meetings I will not begin to call those who have signed up to speak in the order in which they signed in Vice chair Corey Butler will be monitoring the speaker's time he will signal each speaker with the time they have remaining at one minute
00430 seconds and 10 second intervals again please make your comments as brief as possible but no more than three minutes okay we have a number of speakers tonight we have five speakers and our first vehicle speaker is Hazel um shuffleton Malcolm Hazel can I move the mic down hi my name is Hazel shepleton and I am a seventh grade student at Northfield middle school this fall and winter I did knowledgeable and speech I had so much fun being with friends and also learning things that I might have not necessarily learned at school activities and sports like these mean so much to the students in the past two days when the news about the cuts came out during lunch in class and in the hallways kids were talking about the activities they were going to lose
005I'm so sad I can't do football next year I hope they don't cut bowling I really want to do it I'm really upset that there won't be knowledgeable these were all real things I heard from friends and foe alike the truth is Middle School isn't that fun it's a really hard time for social and mental health as we become adults but for many students like myself after school activities are something to look forward to they're a place to meet with friends and learn about new things and most importantly have a lot of fun also structured school activities keep us out of trouble in social studies we've learned that as Citizens it is important for us to speak up when something needs to happen I'm speaking for not only me but the hundreds of current and
006future kids who will do or will do extracurriculars activities um we need you to help us to keep them running thank you thank you Hazel okay now we have a Xander uh staple you help me with your name thank you welcome my name is Andrew stabina and um as we are growing up I'm a seventh grader student at Northfield Middle School as we were growing up we need uh constant changes to learn adapt and evolve as a person to take away these valuable tools and sports to help us keep certain changes to who I am I have learned that it means to be part of a team how to deal with winning and losing how to follow a game plan and most importantly how to get treat others when they lose or win I feel
007like and Studies have proven that school uh after school activities lower anxiety and depression lower amounts of stress higher self-esteem and keep kids grades higher during the season thank you our next speaker is Ricky Druids welcome hi my name is Ricky Xander is my son I also have a daughter in the Northfield school district in elementary and I wasn't going to talk tonight but I thought if Xander could stand up and do it so could I so we'll see um I spent a couple days looking up all sorts of studies on extracurricular activities and how important they are to our children and I could go through pages of those that you'll probably already know and then today I went online to sign Xander up for track and field and on the Northfield Public Schools website
008it says Northfield middle school activities programs aim to provide top-notch co-curricular performance opportunities for secondary schools student School students we believe that a Stanley conceived and executed program will provide substantial education outcomes for participants in addition we believe that an individual Improvement and the achievement of personal and team goals are determinants of success beyond the secondary school years our programs give students the opportunity to develop socially emotionally intellectually and physically coaches and advisors Foster important skills such as leadership teamwork create creativity time management self-expression goal setting and more we strive to provide a positive experience for all participants parents and the community so right on our website that that's what it says and to take that away from these students is very sad thank you our next speaker is Stace lipner hi my name is
009Stace klumnauer I was now planning on speaking so I don't have anything as beautiful as Hazel or Xander but I think they said some really important things I want to first thank you all for the work that you do because I know that the work that you do is really important I'm also on the city board and it takes time and energy and so thank you for that um we have two kids in the schools one in the Middle School one in the high school um I worked for the past couple years to get my youngest to get active in the community and who and he won't leave the house for reasons I know but anyway um uh finally I got him to agree to Jazz Band and he came home the other day and
010said don't think I can do it because of the cuts and they got to tell you that makes me really sad but I also take a look I'm a social worker okay and so I take a look at everything that's written down on these cuts and I get it I get that there's not a lot of funding but I have worked with thank you I have worked with a lot of kids before and a lot of adults who don't have access to all the resources that we do in this wonderful school system and they're going to struggle and they're going to struggle hard and they're all some of them are already struggling and so it's just really super sad to see all of that kind of laid out here okay so thank you very much
011for letting me talk and I hope my kid can do jazz band hey now we have Stacy when good evening um I also would like to say I know this is not easy for anybody um I used to be a full-time teacher I used to be a knowledgeable coach for a number of years before having my own kids um used to teach Spanish and once upon a time I could see when changes were constantly made to schedules between block periods and regular periods and back to this and back to another thing that when gaps were created in language learning because oh now I can't take Spanish next semester or I can't take it next year or something like that skills get lost I I am a I'm proof positive that with language it's use it
012or lose it um so when I saw that amistadis at the middle school was looking to get basically cut to about half time um my my oldest daughter was in it my youngest daughter is still in it they've been in um they've been in Spanish since they were little and I'm really hoping that that can continue because it's so crucial for language skills I mean with the culture that we live in these days if we can't learn to communicate with each other I don't know what's going to happen to us having The Amity interns is also a huge part of that I believe um some of these kids this is their chance to meet somebody from someplace else so um I'm hoping that can also stay I'm also hoping that Transportation isn't charged for within
013two miles of the school because I looked on a map and that's from the Middle School all the way up to Ziggy's um that's a long distance for people to have to either pay for busing walk ride some of us can't necessarily always get our kids to schools on opposite ends of town on time with that so um thank you very much I'm also hoping knowledgeable and things like that can stay on the roster because there just aren't enough things for kids who don't do Sports thank you Cece okay that it that is all of the speakers that we have signed up for tonight thank you to all of you and we're going to move on to item four on the agenda announcements and recognitions Dr Hammond do you have any comments just give me
014one moment and we have no announcements or recognitions this evening okay well we have one and Amy is going to be presenting we couldn't let there be an empty time spot so it's wonderful uh last month I had the great pleasure of accepting this award on behalf of Matt because he was out of town being interviewed as one of the possible National superintendent of the year and I accepted this floor this award at the Minnesota School Board Association conference and they are recognizing Matt for his achievement as the Minnesota superintendent of the year for 2023 and they said such nice words that I actually went the man who presented the award to me which his name is Kirk schwein dewind schwim schneiderwin that's it and he's the executive director of the Minnesota school boards Association
015and I asked him to send me his comments so I am going to be his proxy and read what I got to hear and everybody a room full of people got to hear about Matt so here it is in Minnesota we have a legacy of quality leadership in the administrative ranks Minnesota's 2023 superintendent of the Year Matt Hillman is known as a strong leader who is committed to equity and Excellence for all students and staff he has been with the Northfield school district since 2016. he has also been a director of administrative Services Director of Human Resources and technology and started his career as a computer education teacher at Madelia schools he has also served as Dean and principal with Belle Plaine schools under his leadership he has closed achievement gaps between students of color
016and different socioeconomic Levels by strengthening District Child Care preschool programs and supporting parents seeking services for their preschool children we are proud to honor Matt Hillman as Minnesota's superintendent of the year and lovely school bell that works and it says trouble now I've got a bell and it says msba congratulates Matt Hillman 2023 superintendent of the year thank you congratulations good job thank you very much it's very kind terrific I appreciate it thank you one additional announcement so there was one announcement that came through so I will read that right now Maybe is it an award for Amy it is not an award for Amy we have one announcement about Down syndrome day so World Down syndrome day is marked each year on March 21st and beginning in 2006 uh the 21st day of March
017was selected to signify the uniqueness of the triplication of the 21st chromosome which causes Down syndrome Northfield Public Schools may have the opportunity to view a locally made video and the importance of inclusion of children with disabilities such as Down syndrome so that's our one additional announcement for this evening and thank you very much Amy for doing your best Kirk Schneider when invitation there thank you I appreciate it very much all right thank you any other comments recognitions Awards nothing else okay we are on to our um item for discussion and reports we have two items tonight the first is our proposed budget reductions and Director of Finance Val murdersdorf and um superintendent Hillman will present the proposed budget reductions for fiscal year 23-24. so Tim I've plugged my laptop in if you could bring
018that up on the screen be great thank you so uh I'm gonna work through the recommendations and Val is going to assist me as needed as we walk through them we want to just start with we always appreciate people sharing their concerns about any budget reductions um I would be disheartened if people didn't come and share the concern about programs that we are proposing for reduction because everything that we have in the school district has value it means something to someone and school budget reductions are painful whenever you have eighty percent of your budget like all schools in Minnesota do have salary and benefits as 80 percent of your budget you can't reduce the school budget without impacting people it is not possible and we are victims uh in a couple of ways of uh
019some chronic state underfunding so we have 30 years worth of State underfunding uh we're only a handful of times the Minnesota Legislature met uh the rate of inflation to give you an idea of how much more money we would have in our budget today if the state had kept pace with inflation since the 1990-91 school year Northfield schools would have around 6.75 million additional dollars in our Revenue budget this year just having by kept pace with inflation another serious issue that we face is the special education cross subsidy and the special education across subsidy we always Define it so people know what it is it is the um it is the amount of money that we spend from our general fund budget for legally required and I argue morally imperative services to students with disabilities
020for which we are not reimbursed by the state or federal government on an annual basis Northfield school spaces a five million dollar special education cross subsidy a third part is that we are facing uh declining enrollment and we've been facing declining enrollment for some time we were able to fill that Gap in and avoid reductions for many many years through the generosity of our local community by passing operating levies and other ways that they have supported us financially and we have been a major winner in the state's open enrollment program we bring in Far More public school students from other traditional public school districts than go out so we were able to fill in that budget gap for several years by having an influx of students from other school districts those are the brutal facts
021that is the reality that we face as a school community and so being good stewards and being responsible with the dollars that we have we need to make sure that we have a financial responsibility to the community I'm going to give you just an example of the of how declining enrollment impacts our annual budget so since 2018-19 we are down 2 245 students that equates to roughly 2.45 million dollars worth of Revenue and so declining enrollment has a substantial impact 245 students sounds like a lot and is but they don't all leave in nice neat packages right and so we still have the need for much of the services and the Staffing that we have when you think about 245 students out of nearly 4 000. so these are difficult times they are difficult recommendations
022and we would all prefer not to be doing this but we also have to make sure that we are stewardly of the district's funds so we can ensure that the district continues to have quality programming overall as we move ahead the reductions that we're talking about are painful there is no two ways about it and we're not going to try to sugarcoat it we're not going to try to say um that it will get better soon our current enrollment projections and I'm usually Mr Sunshine but the current enrollment projections continue to show that we will face declining enrollment for at least the next three years there are two reasons for declining enrollment the first is a lowering of the birth rate we're seeing that across the country and here in Minnesota particularly and then in
023our community our housing just has not kept up with the people who would like to live here so we know we have a housing issue which anybody who's listening if you pay attention to our local circumstance we all know that we have a housing issue in our community I'm hopeful that some of that will open up as you know we have been widely lauded for our financial management practices Val Mercer is one of the best Finance directors in the state we have a double A Plus Bond rating that's a very high praise from standard and poor so we have managed our money well but no District even with the support that we have from our community uh can outrun the declining enrollment and the chronic state underfunding that we're talking about now some people have
024heard me say that a hundred thousand times probably and I'm going to keep saying it because new people come to this discussion every single time and we need people to understand why we got here how we got here and then what are some of the things that we need to do moving forward to truly prioritize public education in our state we have also been facing this past year uh while school districts have known about inflation for decades and we've been telling the legislature about it for decades many other people learned about inflation in the last six to eight months as we've seen a lot of the things that we see in our daily lives go up substantially one example of how inflationary pressure has impacted Northfield Public Schools is in one year the replacement value
025of our school property increased by 62 million dollars to 315 million dollars now we don't have any shiny new buildings as a result of that that is just what the marketplace says the replacement values of our schools are how that is impacted in our property insurance so we in one this is one bill we pay it went up fifty thousand dollars in one year now we did what we always do we were good stewards we renegotiated we increased our deductible and we paid a little bit less about twenty three thousand dollars but if you think about all the different things that the school district pays that's how inflation uh in its current context has an impact on all of the work that we have done so we made some substantial reductions last school year and
026we brought together a wide-ranging group of stakeholders over four meetings to help prioritize what are the services um and the programming that we should make sure that we prioritize there were over 70 people involved in that in a variety of different ways and this year uh the administrative team used the 2022 budget priorities to develop these recommendations and again we told that budget team and the community last year that we were looking at two years worth of reductions and so that's why we felt that we were able to use those priorities for the 23-24 school year um so I'm going to come back to some pieces here but I want to next we're going to walk through and this is important so I'm going to walk through each one of the proposed or the recommended
027reductions that will help me um with some specifics on a few of them so at our Elementary uh the first piece just is that you'll see both in the elementary and secondary package we are recommending to eliminate our Portage all the time online program we built the Portage all the time online program for the Long Haul at the beginning of the pandemic we really felt that there was going to be a substantial market for an all the time online system post pandemic and we were wrong as we all know many many people prefer their students to be in person in school now that is just we still have around 85 students who have selected that that's important to these students we just don't see how we can sustain that program in the long term as
028a school district despite some intentional marketing we just have not been able to recruit open enrolled students to that program partially because we think that that market is frankly flooded many districts are in this similar scenario so we are right now working with three other at least three other Regional districts to look at a Cooperative program similar to how we start of the cannon Valley special education Cooperative where one District would potentially be the host our students would have access to that program and we would pay on a tuition basis for students to access that program that is still in progress it is not something that we have all of the details as of yet but we have confidence that is something that will be able to happen we'll be able to talk about here
029in the coming weeks second part of the elementary uh package and I just want to go back to Portage for one moment people in our community should be proud of how amazing our Portage staff did work they did great work they built an amazing program it's high quality people who are in it love it we just this is not about the quality of the program it is just about the sustainability of the program so we can't talk about that without talking the people who did a really great job and unfortunately we just can't sustain it so I just want to thank the Portage families and the Portage staff members who really did a good job to build a great program it just we aren't able to sustain it at those numbers moving ahead we are
030seeing the declining enrollment at the um I was just going to clarify that it the 88 or 86 is total Portage not just Elementary total ported yes 13 for roughly 13 for elementary yeah but I was talking about both of the programs at the same time but to hear what balance there's 85 86 students in the program only 13 of them were Elementary students at the elementary school we that is where we are seeing the initial waves of the declining enrollment and so we are looking to reduce six Elementary general education sections due to declining enrollment and if you're looking at this chart you'll see that our projected average K3 class size would be at 21.5 it is slightly above uh the priority statement that we had of trying to max out at 20 but
031not too far off from that and 22.5 in grades four and five which would be within what the recommendations of the prioritization teams were and so the key part there is there will be some variability an average is an average there will be some grade levels where you will see a section that falls outside that Norm that's just the way it is in in our district a lot of times that depends on the companero section size so that is the one variability but when we look at the averages we'll be very close to what uh the projected K3 recommendation was and again within what the four or five recommendation was so those are the two reductions at the elementary level at 820 000 Val that you have any other further comments on the elementary package
032as we move to the secondary package beginning with line item three the high school is looking to reduce will be required to reduce around 3.1 FTE roughly three hundred and ten thousand dollars um those specific course sections are yet to be determined because they are continuing to work through the registration process and so the registration process at the high school has come into conclusion here very quickly and we will be able to share with the community in the coming weeks what uh reductions would happen in those courses at the high schoolers they're just not quite there yet but we know that there will be 3.1 FTE in reductions at the high school we are looking to reduce a credit recovery educational assistant position at Northfield high school and so we have a credit recovery program
033there's a teacher and an educational assistant uh this is looking at that educational assistant position we have struggled uh to hire in special education but we have had greater success in hiring special education teachers than we have had in hiring special education educational assistance or what some districts call paraprofessionals so both at Northfield high school and Northfield Middle School we are seeking to post a special education teacher position that would essentially take the place of three educational assistant positions there's a small Savings of twenty thousand dollars each and then in addition that should help uh balance out some caseloads of our special education teachers so not I not ideal or perfect um anyone who looks at that and says well how can one person do three persons three people's worth of work it's a challenge
034but we are looking at how we can try to best serve our special education students these are positions these six special education educational assistant positions are jobs that have gone unfilled this year so we have not been able to so the line item is still in the budget but we are not able to hire for those positions so this is part budget reduction part adjusting our strategy uh to try to serve our special education students in the best way that we possibly can um I talked and holistically about the secondary Portage program and so a lines seven and eight look at the secondary Portage program costs for Staffing and for the software so you can see that's just more than four hundred thousand dollars uh the next item is nine and ten uh Science Olympiad
035and the math team at the high school those two activities have not had participants since before the pandemic so they were items that were still in align items within the budget but there hasn't been a program in a few years and so those are recommended for reduction at this time uh we are looking at how we might increase some fees as well so you'll see that the recommendation is to increase activity fees by five dollars per each activity that will increase uh six thousand dollars increasing ticket prices for admissions to activities by one dollar does put us at the top of the big nine conference in terms of what our um admission fees would be but it does raise around twenty five thousand dollars so you'll see some of these are reductions and some of
036them are additions uh through those fee increases looking to reduce the use of Coach buses for activities at the savings of sixty thousand dollars there are some high school activities where the nature of the sport or activity necessitates having greater storage so for example a football team needs to bring equipment with it to its uh away site uh Benjamin bus because of the way that they prioritize safety will not pull a trailer you might watch sometimes you might see on Highway 35 a school bus pulling a trailer and Benjamin bus has just said they won't pull a trailer they don't believe that that's safe so we are looking at different ways that we potentially can transport some of that equipment but this would drastically reduce the number of Coach buses used um going to just
037regular school buses for most activity transportation uh uh discontinuing the after school activity bus this co-curricular expense of about twenty five thousand dollars does a rotation it does a loop through the school district dropping students off at various sites where activities are being held uh at one time one of the reasons that we had the activity buses that it was not safe for students to be Crossing at Jefferson Parkway prior to the implementation of the roundabout now with the roundabout and the underground passageway it is safer for those middle school students and high school students to transfer back and forth certainly we would lose a substantial amount with the activity bus going away there's no question about that students would be required to get to their practice site um either walking or we have some
038students who do drive themselves depending on their age which some of that happens already and we are working on getting the data of how often has that activity bus been used in the past you'll notice that we are not recommending reducing the additional counselors that we added uh two years ago with our covid relief funding so the middle school the high school and the area Learning Center all added a full-time counselor uh beginning last school year and one of the ways that we're offsetting some of that cost is part of our counselor's contract had been to have 15 extra days beyond the 187 contract days for things like wrapping up the school year helping with schedule changes at the beginning of the school year we're going to reduce those extra days from 15 to 10
039and again with an additional counselor if you think about it having three counselors or four counselors at the high school as opposed to three and three at the middle school as opposed to two that does provide more service so we felt that we would be able to reduce those extra days for the counselors because we have an additional FTE at both the middle school and high school the area Learning Center counselor will also stay uh we are proposing to reduce a High School attendance Administrative Assistant basically coming down to the days of the school year that's generally what we're looking at so now there's a little bit of time before the beginning of the school year and after um this would take it down to basically um not perfectly but basically uh the school year
040line 17 uh last year we talked quite a bit about the Randolph AG program uh and we we had proposed that for reduction uh the board uh decided to keep that last year and over the last year we've done a lot of learning about agricultural education and what we are going to do beginning next year is start a process toward having a more robust AG program within our school community so we're going to start off by offering one section of AG Ed at the high school we're going to seek an out of field permission for an existing teacher as part of their already 1.0 contract to do that so therefore we would end the relationship with Randolph those students can take up to two courses but the practicality is that by the time they have
041to leave to get back for their class period here in Northfield they really get about one and a half class periods worth of instruction in Randolph so bringing them back and having that course here on campus and we do know as we move ahead we see AG playing a larger role in our high school curriculum for a few reasons one of which is that there are four universities in Minnesota that are offering licensure for AG Ed teachers and in our tech ed area there are no Minnesota colleges or universities that are offering that license at this time you have to get your license to get a Minnesota teaching license and tech ed you have to get it from Wisconsin I'm told that Saint Cloud will offer a specialized program but the AG license allows you
042to teach many of the courses that you would also get in tech ed so for example rather than the small engines you might end up with something like AG mechanics I'm not saying that's what would do that just an example of some of the crossover that we have there so again starting to bring AG Ed back to Northfield through offering one section at the high school and dissolving The Cooperative that we had with Randolph that would save around sixteen thousand dollars we are proposing to reduce one administrative assistant at the area Learning Center part of this is due to the reduction of Portage the alc office uh was really the administrative arm for Portage and so we feel that we are able to do that at this time there's also some additional partial reduction in
043software costs for credit recovery just reducing the number of licenses that we have for credit recovery um we have had an academic Advocate position at the area Learning Center as a student support position uh that is a one that we are proposing for reduction a restructuring of the middle school schedule to a six period day currently it's a seven period day uh really the savings there comes from right now we have five teachers on each sixth grade team so they teach five different core subject areas so we would take that from 10 total FTE to eight there's a couple of different ways that we can accomplish that schedule change with sixth grade um one involves combining a couple of core classes uh into one course another is another creative scheduling methodology of how people would
044teach those courses that is still uh being worked through as to what that approach would be and then there's some other for example sixth grade music would go to every day as opposed to every other day under a sixth grade or under a six period day at the middle school so uh that isn't uh the way that the middle school is looking at achieving some of their reduction uh as we have heard tonight we have proposed the elimination of middle school activities the exception of student council and Webb do you want to clarify that uh there are some music extracurricular co-curricular kinds of programs jazz band Division Street singers chamber orchestra that is not part of this recommendation because those are funded through a different pathway so those are not included uh in this particular
045recommendation but it would be things like knowledgeable speech football volleyball wrestling golf those are some of the activities now I think it's important to note that we understand totally how important it is to have good productive things for middle school students to do after school there's no question we subscribe to that wholeheartedly uh we are currently reviewing options to where Community Education could run an intramural program after school in replacement of interscholastic competition so the concept would be that we would be able to offer some athletic activities after school but they wouldn't be the normal kind of interscholastic competition playing Lakeville or Farmington so that we will work with our Community Partners to make sure that there is a strong program for students to select from after school but it will be different in addition
046some of the non-athletic activities are natural carryovers to be run through Community Education last year we did shift two high school activities from uh the general fund to Community Education chess and cheerleading and both of those programs have some of the best enrollment that they have had in some time the costs are more there's no way around that right we have the costs are more than what they were when they were in the activities Department uh the parents in those areas in those two activities did step up and do quite a bit of fundraising to provide some of the opportunities like traveling to another school uh to participate in chess but we have had some success in that limited experiment with that over this past year and as we know our Community Education Program is
047excellent and has the ability to to do a number of those things and to do them very well um our current uh school psychologist at Northfield Middle School uh currently has an overload for a couple of different pieces including some supervision we would reduce that back to just a regular 1.0 position uh the Northfield Middle School Spanish elective the amistades elective would just would move from every day to every other day and so those students would still have access to that but it would go from being every day to every other day and different programs have had that every other day component for several years uh looking to move the will program educational assistant out of the general fund to achieve an integration funding the will program as a student support system at the middle
048school it has a teacher and there's also an educational assistant and in this case we are using some of our achievement and integration grant funding uh to be able to capture that from the general fund so those 1.48 million dollars those are the reductions that are being recommended at this time for the secondary package Bell are there clarifications or things that you'd like to comment on with the secondary package oh you're very thrilled when we get to the district Services package um and as as many people know in District Services we are routinely looking at how we can combine roles and do some budget adjustment through attrition or other kinds of lower cost lower achieving lower costs in a number of different areas so that's what you're seeing in here uh we are looking at
049we did reduce this has already happened but we'll realize the Savings in next year's budget uh reducing the Child Nutrition administrative assistant and combining the duties from that position with the district office respect receptionist this is a common strategy that we use when someone from the district office leaves to look at is there a different way that we can provide that service in the last four years we've combined four administrative positions into two and then this administrative assistant position is just another example of how we look at are there ways that we are able to be more efficient and people still do the same amount of work right it's just it's just done in a little bit of a different way um and and doing the best that we can to keep up with all
050of that what is expected HR and finance are moving to a new absent management and time tracking software it's a savings of around six thousand dollars uh it's one of those cases where the software is less expensive and actually looks like it's better software so that is the kind of thing that we do regularly your people are just seeing it very clearly this year uh transferring some buildings and grounds equipment costs to the capital projects Levy and so again most of our equipment is usually in our operating Capital account there was some equipment still in the general fund for buildings and grounds that will be shifted as we expand and extend the amount that we have in our operating Capital through the capital projects Levy increase we are proposing to discontinue our membership in schools
051for equity and education that's a group that we have been a long time part of part long part of for a long time really focused on tax fairness and looking at lower property wealth districts like Northfields to try to Advocate at the state level as we look across the board we have valued our membership with C we just this is we feel that this needs to be on uh the recommendation list this time we are planning to discontinue our financial forecasting software we have the ability to do that in-house and a little bit more work but Val feels that she can put together a spreadsheet forecasting system that will replace what we have been paying for for the last few years uh we are allowed to charge a percentage of the finance and HR software
052to operating Capital most of the time our software has to be coded to the general fund but there are some specific exceptions and ways that you are able to be because of the way the software serves that we are able to assign that to operating Capital so that portion will be done next year we're moving our buildings and ground work order system in with our existing technology work order system that's a savings of two thousand dollars we're looking to reduce our Communications and public relations budget by about seventeen thousand seven hundred dollars uh we are reducing during the pandemic we helped fund a number of hot spots internet home access for families who were not able to secure that uh access which was so important during the pandemic and we are starting to phase that
053out uh we are having the amount right now we've typically had twenty thousand dollars in the budget the last few years uh we're gonna have that to ten thousand and then we are working to help transition families to a new team mobile program that is intended to connect 10 million students to the internet for free so our goal is to be able to transfer all of those students that were reserving some of that yet to make sure that people don't go on people's internet access isn't interrupted if they still need it and qualify under the system that we had during the pandemic uh we have had a volunteer coordinator position that specifically ran the accelerate Northfield program this was a program that was designed by some community members to match volunteers with specific academic needs
054uh and so we have been paying for that for some time and now we are looking at again discontinuing that and what will happen is our buildings already do quite a bit of volunteer coordination they would add this portion to their the coordination of the volunteers that they have and then finally in the district Services Program I'm sorry I'm not quite there yet um we also are looking at changing the process for backing up our Google Suite data so what we have done for some time is we have use the Google backup and then we had paid for an additional backup so that we were backing up the backup that was when we initially moved to Google Apps um our technology services department has enough experience with Google Vault to where they feel very comfortable
055that their the data is secure there and that we don't need to do the backup to the backup if you will so we do like a backup to the backup but we just can't afford it anymore uh for many years we have used eduvision it's a paid service to do some video streaming and of course archiving of these board meetings goes back to when we did a Northfield Middle School daily news program of course since that time a video streaming has changed substantially and uh we are ready to move to YouTube we actually have already archived all of the existing board videos going back about a decade and we're getting ready to be able to make that shift here fairly soon we're also looking at eliminating STAR testing at the middle school so STAR testing
056is one of the pieces of data that we used to judge are we moving ahead with academic performance um reducing this means we'll just need to rely more on the state testing data for our instructional analysis and then finally The Amity intern position um this of course is a position that we have that is um to support the companeros program and often they are if you'll think of them as kind of an Americorps volunteer but there's small payment for it so we would reduce that we have struggled in the last few years to secure people to host those students as well and there is also variability each year in terms of who we get and so some years it's outstanding in other years it's a little bit more work than normal and there is a
057charge with it so we are looking at eliminating that as well so those uh total around two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to hit our grand total of 2.5 million dollars that we are proposing for reduction about our do you have comments on the um recommendations for district service any clarifications um the only clarification I have is on line 37 um that is actually a three-year contract and I missed the little asterisk there so that would not be realized till fiscal 25. okay thank you that was line 37 the STAR testing okay thank you and then people also saw uh at the end of the budget here and under the proposed reductions you're seeing uh some additional reductions planned for the 23-24 uh year these are uh reductions that were already approved by the board
058last year but were delayed in their implementation we used uh quite a bit of our covid relief funding to try to Stave off some of these reductions and one of the ways that we did it was by paying for these services for one additionally you're using our federal covet relief dollars so we just wanted to remind people that those items had already been approved by the board but that they would go into effect for next year and the transportation budget I do want Val just to talk briefly about the concept that we are looking at with uh some potential paid Transportation I want to be very clear we're not proposing that yet it is something that we are under consideration if we were to propose it even though the board had already approved a 10
059reduction in the transportation budget there are a variety of ways that we've been looking at trying to achieve that if we did choose to look at a pay for Transportation uh model the board would obviously have to approve that portion but Val would you please talk about what we're looking at with transportation sure so um I've been meeting with Benjamin bus over the last couple months just to look at different efficiencies or ways we could go about this and they are very efficient already so this has been a challenging ask um but one of the options that we've looked at is increasing the walk boundaries we are required by law to transport if students live two miles or more from their building we currently transport at about 0.75 for elementary and 1.0 or secondary so
060this um one of the the strategies that we're talking about is charging if you are in that two mile radius so we would still provide transportation as it is currently but we would charge if you're in that two mile um Highway 3 would still be considered a hazardous Crossing so if you're on the other side of Highway 3 and coming to the high school or middle school that would not be considered in the chargeable area and then the other the other option we've looked at is just increasing lock boundaries but due to the two-tier system we have that actually does not generate savings by reducing routes because those buses are being used twice and we do need them due to the um square mileage that we cover in our district so those are some of
061the things that we're kind of walking through and looking at so we'll we'll go back to where we started which is all of the things that on the are on this list that are recommended um are things that have value to people in some way shape or form I mean even uh the the one that we taught the backing up of the backup right that that is has been an important redundancy and it does mean something we we can't afford all the things that we have wanted to do um as we move ahead and so please know that uh the thought process and the thoughtfulness of how a budget is constructed our administrative team has been working on this for about a month um again reviewing the priorities that the prioritization team set last year
062really being thoughtful making sure that what we're recommending does its best to align with those priorities and understanding that we are now at a point where some of those priorities come into conflict right so when we talk about trying to maintain class size versus some other things you're starting to see where some of those conflicts come into play so there's nothing easy about any of this I am sorry that we have to do this I really am um but it is our responsibility to make sure that we can continue um maintaining as high quality of a program as we have for as long as we possibly can do it and to do so these reductions are necessary I do want to just answer a couple of things that sometimes people ask so okay uh you
063just passed that capital projects Levy last November where's that money well the truth is that first of all that those dollars aren't realized until the 24-25 school year sort of waiting for that influx of additional revenue for another year remember that the capital project study is primarily designed to make sure we are able to keep up with maintaining our facilities maintaining things like our parking lots things that aren't very exciting right but that you need to do to make sure that the system can run well it's about purchasing materials and curriculum for our staff it's about making sure that our technology is continuing to be up to date other kinds of equipment so that's what the capital projects Levy is for it's for those materials and curriculum material curriculum and materials for students and teachers
064as well as making sure we're able to maintain our facilities and equipment we very rarely buy anything brand new right we bought a used plow truck last summer we try to be the best stewards that we can about a half a million dollars of that new Revenue will be used um the law does allow us to pay for a specific set of employees salary and benefits from the capital projects Levy and those are our computer technicians and so beginning in the 24-25 school year we will pay all of those staff members salary and benefits from the capital projects Levy so there will be about a half a million dollars of general fund relief but that does not come in play until the 24 uh 25 school year and then I'm going to talk specifically about
065the legislature and my superintendent update so I'm going to stop here I want to enter we want to entertain questions that board members have Val and I will do the best that we can to be able to give you as detailed of an answer as possible and if we don't I mean these are not we're not asking you to take action on these until April 10th um so we want to make sure that people have plenty of chance to hear about it we have two public hearings scheduled in March for the public to be able to come and share their feedback as you know we believe in public participation and this is the beginning of this process so we thank you for everyone's attention and we know that these are difficult things to talk about
066and we look forward to answering our questions um I talked about those three uh the final three we did talk explicitly about Transportation um I didn't highlight the other three that were that are already scheduled for next year um the high school parking lot and security monitor is scheduled to be reduced at the end of this year again that was something that was already approved by the board last year um Bridgewater has some additional small group reading support and that is scheduled to um to sunset at the end of this year and Greenvale park for a period of time every elementary school has at least one Behavior coach and Greenville park for a number of years has had two so there'll be sun setting uh one of the FTE for the behavior coach at Greenville
067park at the end of this year again those three budget reductions were part of the package that the board approved last year but we're just we put them on here so people recall that those things are going into effect for 23.24 thanks for clarifying that Claudia thank you so much Matt for your presentation and bell for helping and we recognize the amount of effort it took everyone um all the administrators um and yourself and and Val um to put this together for us um and so we will um it's just it's heavy and so we'll just have our questions and have our discussion um but I just wanted to appreciate the effort you put into uh um difficult situation so uh board members if you have any questions I'll call on you I'm sure you
068have lots and so if you could keep it to two and we'll Bounce Around okay Robert and then Ben well I'm a new and temporary member of this body and haven't had a chance to get to know all of you very well yet uh but one thing I have learned about everyone up here is that you all care about the children in the schools and I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that the necessity of budget reductions are hard on all of us because we we want our students to have every opportunity to be successful it's one thing to talk about declining enrollment and full State funding for schools in the abstract is quite another to see this detailed list of programs across the district that truly benefit our students up
069for possible reduction all of these proposed Productions will cause pain and be a loss to our district and several several of them have the potential uh to impact a great number of our students families and staff a couple of them middle school activities and transportation and I know that the transportation piece was approved in the last budget process but it'd be really helpful for me and perhaps other board members to learn more about the the possible Alternatives I I would appreciate knowing more about what a Community Education based model would look like for middle school activities including what activities might be offered and what fees would be Associated and for the transportation piece if we are to look at a pay model uh I would like to know know what kind of numbers of families
070are would be impacted and the proposed fees and seek assurance that our FRP students are are going to be exempt from this and I I know that our registration is working through the logistics of this I would just these details would be helpful and uh and seen during this budget process well do you want to start with some transportation um so I don't know I'm not going to get incredibly specific because we're still talking through whether or not this is truly an area that we want to recommend um the initial concept um I did not bring the the file that has the number of families and students impacted but I do have that data from Benjamin bus but we were looking at um potentially between like a 200 and 250 annual fee um and if
071you qualified for free reduced lunch there would be no fee at all um so it would only be full paying families and we would certainly look to partner with any entity to help offer scholarships and support to make that easier for families that's kind of the initial concept um I'm not going to guess on the number of families because I do have that number but I'm not gonna try and pull that one out of the back of my head um but that that fee range roughly equated to I think three hundred thousand dollars or so so um we would still be able to provide the transportation that we're providing currently um it would just charge a fee for some of the families that are utilizing that um anything in more detail you want on a
072transportation just when we get the the number of families unpacked it that'd be nice to see absolutely and I I think it's fair to say it while it is not something that is I don't think it's fair to call it commonplace yet but we do know that there are some other districts that have adopted this model um I can't say whether successfully or not but we do know that other districts have used this model it is not regular it is not commonplace but it is one way that some districts have used to try to accomplish some similar um goals that we have as well related to budget and then in terms of the the Community Education based uh intramural program that is a part that is still in development but if you think about any
073Community Education Program it is really based on interest so you will find out from the students what are the interests that they have in terms of I'm specifically talking about intramural Athletics right now so the truth is that that could change substantially over time what we offer next year could be very different than what we offer three years from now if you are a regular uh viewer of Our Community Education brochure if Community Education knows how to do something it's build programs and they built some excellent programs those programs obviously are popular and then weighing over time for quite a while the most popular Community Education Program was lightsaber dueling that was a class that they did in Community Education was very popular for some time and then it waned and so our vision of
074any kind of after school intramural program would be to provide an opportunity for students to engage and exercise and do all of those things that we know are essential to their mental and physical health what you would lose it you would still have be able to have competition um in whichever athletic sport that you participated in but you're going to another school you know to compete against Farmington or those kinds of things that would not be the same way one other option that we will certainly explore which we have a template from previous years and this does not apply in every athletic activity I can't um but 10 years ago yeah 10 years ago now we eliminated 7th and 8th grade basketball and the Northfield Youth Basketball Association took on the administration of that program
075and they still run a very successful seventh and 8th grade program so that does not apply to every single sport right we have some of the sports that are offered at the middle school do have strong local youth associations others do not and so that is a part where we would have to continue to work with so the possibility for that what you would con if isn't intersclastic but Inter-Community competition potentially could be uh through a local a ramped up local Youth Association um component can't promise you that right now or we're still working on that part but when I think about a Community Education based program Community Education based programs are based on what this the people's interests are so what those interests would be are what would generally drive that program it'd be
076an immediately after school kind of program but it would lack that um intersclastic feel if you will the non-athletic activities so things like knowledgeable things like speech those kinds of things could be run in a very similar way to what they are now but the registration and the fees going through Community Education so in some examples there are some strategies that we've used where an advisor for example gets a certain percentage as their salary they get or their stipend they get a certain percentage of the registrations as their stipend that's how you end up paying for the coach if you will or the advisor and in some cases you will start to see parent groups who form almost a booster club like groups to continue to support those activities so I can't tell you what
077activities would be available because we aren't that far yet but what I can tell you is they would be based upon what is the student interest uh through the Community Education athletic components we also have to acknowledge that when we reduce Middle School athletics you do and you change it you do change the way that you have a pipeline for High School athletics and so that is something that we just want the board in the community to understand uh the potential impact there as well all right thank you Val quick question on line 54 for the transportation piece is that you said 300 is it 350 is that certainly anticipated if you were looking at the change to two miles or am I reading that right so the amount that was approved and targeted last
078year was 350 000. um we when we're looking at the range um depending on how much the charge would be it's we can get to the dollar amount but the the amount that seems most in par with what other districts are doing would generate roughly three hundred thousand dollars okay does that make sense yeah no that does thanks targeted as part of these reductions is that what's the total participants for this past year do we have that number we do 717 717 and so that would be not necessarily students but participants duplicate yeah participants that would be a duplicated count but and that represents about 70 percent of the middle school would it's a duplicated account so it that's not necessarily the case because someone could have participated in two activities right so the summer
079original say 50 to 70 percent there's no question a lot of middle school students participate in these activities right okay sounds good thanks those are mine thank you yeah um I would just like to make the comment um of you saw the letter that came across from the mom um that uh Carlton graduate and also went to Northfield high school which I mean I obviously bring that up a lot because I graduated from here and I'm very proud of that very proud of that and uh she was writing the fact that she moved back to Northfield um so her middle school kids could get the same opportunities that she had on Sports and things like that and I mean I've been involved with the sports and activities for many years and uh we're lucky to
080have a guy that knows how to win games as our Bubba in there now and I think that uh um one thing if you really start cutting back in the middle middle school sports and you don't have any activities and you don't have a feeder program by the time you get to um you know Senior High you know you're going to be looking at some you know just you're kind of disadvantaged I think a bit and how you're going to compete with some of the other school districts but that's just my opinion I think that there's many creative ways that we could go back and look at that and see what that budget is like and how we could you know tweak things and I I also don't want to well I want to thank
081all of the speakers we had up here some kids that are good speakers and uh I made some very very valid points and the parents and bringing that stuff up so I think we need to maybe take the deeper dive on on uh the Middle School sports and activities and and try to be creative and how to minimize that and also at the same time with anything else on this reduction list I don't want to minimize anything so it's it's your opportunity um if you see for some things that are on the list to speak up and out to the board to get your points across so you're you're you feel represented here in in this process um and I think with that I'll pass thank you Jeff Amy so thank you to all the
082administration and people involved in this because I know that this is hard for everyone to go through um I want to continue the conversation both on the middle school activities and transportation um so with the middle school activities uh I think I would like to see an actual list and we know what's being cut but what Still Remains because when you mentioned that some of the music activities still remain um I would like to actually see what those are and if there are others that are funded from different revenue streams as well because I think it's it's confusing to me it's going to be confusing to all of the parents to understand why we're keeping jazz band but we're not keeping soccer so I want to understand that um and I'd also be interested in
083hearing from Aaron to see what activities she would um pursue whether she'd try to pursue everything that would be reduced or whether she would start out in a different area and I'd also be interested in some feedback from The High School coaches or whoever it would be who are at the other end of this pipeline if they have any concerns of of what would happen to their programs if we move things to the Community Education so those are some of the questions I have but then I also went through all the numbers and I came up with my with my own little number on the activities and that was I took the net gain flash loss and they were all losses so I took in that loss and I divided it by the number of
084students that participated and I came up with a loss per student and I realized there was a tremendous difference between the subsidies that we provide for the different activities ranging from 577 dollars per each student in the speech team to 23 dollars per student in the drama slash musical area so that's you know more than 20 times more for the speech participants and so I'm also wondering if there's a number of you know whether we need to eliminate all of these or maybe we should look at how much we're actually subsidizing for students the the four least expensive ones all well under a hundred dollars subsidy for students were track and field drama which is the plays musicals girls tennis and the fitness center and maybe because they cost less per student and they do
085involve a large number of students maybe we should be looking at those and saying we don't have to get rid of everything we can keep these at least because we know we're spending less per student to maintain them and they are affecting larger numbers of students so just just an idea another way of splitting it apart so those are my comments on the activities if you want to respond I'll stop before moving on to transportation uh yeah so uh that's fair about getting uh making sure there's the clarity of what's in and out I think that what my understanding is you'd be talking about web uh which is our support for sixth grade students coming in program and student council would remain in addition to Jazz Band Division Street singers and chamber orchestra but I
086will do a little deeper dive to make sure that there aren't other programs of similar nature like for example I think some people might look at the middle school youth program the Middle School Youth Center as an after school activity that's not included this because it's not under the activities budget but I think most people colloquially would think of it as an activity so we can clarify anything that happens after school here's what's in and here's what's out no matter what funding source is from so we're talking really about what you would typically think of as co-curricular extracurricular activities in the traditional Sports and non-athletic activity module but we can get the specific details for you for the next meeting I have already heard from a number of the varsity coaches so I can assure
087you that they are paying attention and expressing their perspective while also understanding the big picture right that we have a lot of difficult decisions to make and that's something I do want to just say right now is that I've been very appreciative of as I said at the beginning I I would be disheartened if people didn't come here and share that these things concern them right that would mean that it didn't mean something to someone I also on the flip side appreciate that most people you know and all of the people here tonight including all board members understand the big picture right they understand the part that we do have difficult decisions to make and that none of these are easy but they impact us an individual way and I just want to thank people
088for that because it is important that we understand how each of these potential reductions impact us personally but also about the challenge that we have in the big picture so that's on the coaches and then um we can do some analysis on the on the cost for student and what I would say is that I understand that we frame it as a net loss or gain but these are programs right we're not a bank we're not trying to make money right we're trying to be able to have enough money to be able to pay people to do good things for kids and to be able to have a solid budget uh Surplus or budget Reserve excuse me to be able to handle a number of um unanticipated things example when this board approved a million
089dollars for health insurance to make sure that our hard-working staff members did not have a massive increase uh in their premiums like many people did during the pandemic right that's something that we can do with fund balance to support our staff members so I understand that we when we look at it there's a more amount spent per student on some um and I understand we frame it as a loss but in actuality if we looked at it that way all of our programs right would be that way there are always going to be some programs that are more expensive to run per student and we always look at that what's the cost per student when we do get into activities we do have to consider Title IX as well so that's one of the parts
090where it becomes difficult in terms of looking at all of the different sports especially and saying this one can be in because it costs less per person than this one that's something else just for people to understand that we have to take that into consideration um as we're moving ahead too so we can get you some additional details on making sure you're specific about what's in and what's out um and then just of course the coaches are in the loop and I understand the way we look at that from the cost per student um but it is part of what we do right and just hearing your response made me think of two more questions that I have for the middle school first is the admission fees for the play we don't show any admission
091fees and revenue that way and I'm thinking the play musical might actually pay for itself if we're charging there's admission no you can't come up with twenty three dollars at admissions to fees per student that does not pay for itself um but it does obviously have a small offset okay and um that was my main one and the second one has left my mind right now uh so I also wanted to follow up on Robert's comments about the transportation um I think that's a really big question for all of us um for me uh I I think safety is always a big concern and I know it is for everybody else here too um and I just want that to be Beyond to be sure that's part of your conversations and I've talked to the
092Benjamin bus people a lot too I know they're very very safety conscious so um but I just think from a perspective of someone who lives on Woodley Street and I see the kids crossing Woodley Street um it's fine for teenagers but I crossed Woodley Street every day at least once and I can easily wait for 20 cars you know to go buy me without stopping and no one no no one stops on Woodley Street I shouldn't say no one but it's very few people stop on Woodley Street um and during the time when schools are about to start and schools are ending those are the busiest times on whibley Street which would so I worry you know making the students have the elementary school students especially walk farther I also worry about you know if
093you have a 200 to 250 dollar annual fee I assume that's per student so if you have two or three students yeah there would there would be a family cap I don't have um the number off the top of my head I want to say 700 I think we I think in my calculation I mirrored it off the activities family cap that we have in place currently so I would wonder how many families would say 700 I'm just going to drive my kids to school and then we have a new problem or a worsening problem at the school of pickup and drop-offs so we might just be kicking the problem into another Direction yep all the things you're thinking about okay all right great I shouldn't have worried because I know you're on time for
094thank you and then I was also for the transportation wondering about Arcadia and Prairie Creek I assumed they those parents would also be paying for transportation or is it because it's longer this how does that work for them um in in theory yes um and the analysis that we did um I don't think any of the families actually were within the two mile um it was maybe one or two families for them um and so just based on their their locations and how it worked out there was not really any impact there from what I can recall on the data that I looked at thank you yep thank you Amy great questions um let's see Corey had a question Jenny I have a few questions and then I have a comment one question is for
095Dr Hillman regarding the public hearings that we'll be having in March over the budget reduction recommendations what would be the method of announcements that we're going to have to inform the public about these two hearings so when we have done this in the past what we typically will do is we use a variety of different tools including our direct messaging from skylert to our families that we would do that from the district level we also Cascade that to the building level weekly emails from the building principles we would include it in the Northfield news we would include it on Kym and radio as part of our regular follow-up those are the typical Pathways that we have used in the past and they have been fairly successful at getting people to come to our events also
096in these cases we would also use our social media accounts to announce them and then I have a question about the actual hearings themselves how is it that we're going to be able to be open to new priorities or ideas that haven't already been established here um with the funding priorities of folks that come in just so that you know they'll have the confidence to know that not only is their voice going to be heard but that there's a pathway for change or revisions and things like that can you just kind of explain what that pathway of change would be absolutely so I'll give a couple of different examples of how that public hearing last year uh helped modify some of the recommendations to the board so just so that people understand how we have
097done that this was very successful uh last year anyone who comes to the public hearing we have an initial presentation to bring to give everybody to ground everybody in what the data is typically in the Middle School auditorium then we I believe had four three or four Middle School classrooms where people divided out at least one board member at least one administrator typically more than that in each room and we gave everybody in that room an opportunity to share what their particular perspective was about the budget process so it wasn't just something for people who are comfortable coming to the podium people who are more comfortable in a smaller group setting had an opportunity to share their perspective within that smaller group setting then we come back to the auditorium and then people have a
098traditional um public comments style opportunity to share either something that they had or something that they might have heard within their smaller group so that's the way that we try to involve people to make sure that as many people get their voice heard as possible last year things that came out of that public hearing were around Portage one of the things is around Portage to where that program continued on for an additional year based upon some of that feedback and then people understood that we were going to need to see some increase in the enrollment and we did some marketing um it just it just did not get us to where we needed to be another very hot topic last year was our relationship with Randolph around the AG Ed program and those folks a
099lot of number of people who spoke as part of that have been involved in a number of committees this year as we have continued to look to how can we start moving toward an AG program so you see a small step here tonight that I shared where we're bringing AG back but that's an example of how we can show people that your feed back does result in in things that are changing in terms of if people bring forward new ideas or things that as you might imagine we are pretty thorough and trying to think through things but we also recognize that we don't have a monopoly on good ideas and so if we have new ideas that come forward with that I can't give you a specific example of the public hearing from last year
100though in our prior priority based budget teams last year those priorities were the result of what the community and staff members who are on those teams said so that's one example of or two examples of things that made a difference with the board's decision making I would also argue that we also heard very clearly about wanting to extend the high school security monitor for at least one additional year and so that uh you know was already scheduled but um to be ended at the end of this year that was something that we've heard so we have a couple of things that we can point to to show that when people share their perspectives that it may not be immediate but we take those things to Heart and they can be things that come down on
101the Pike in the future I think Dao has a comment too that she might want to make on that um I was just going to comment the the one thing that was really um kind of eye-opening for me last year during the public comment process was the they brought up that the Randolph a program was eligible for some state aid reimbursement through the CTE Levy which we were not aware of um the state had no communication about that and so we looked into it and we were actually able to generate Revenue last year um that we weren't anticipating and so that's one example of where that was a positive impact for the budget in that year okay thank you both and then uh I'm not sure if these questions will be for Val or Dr
102Hillman but on the item 12 The increased ticket prices for admission are those for high school activities only or middle school and high school that's just High School okay we currently don't have um ticket pricing for we're not charging admission for the Middle School I don't believe we are um I can't say that for with certainty but I know that the calculation for the 6 000 was specific to high school and I I agree I I don't believe that we charge um admissions for Middle School athletics something like the Middle School play um we have a Charged admission for but most middle school activities don't have uh an admission fee for the games if you will sure I and that's understandable and now that we're in kind of a different position financially is that something
103that could be considered to increase Revenue with the Middle School sports yes with something we can certainly talk through and see how much revenue that might generate okay and then with the Athletics and Coach busing do we own our do we own utility trailers right now that would normally be used in transporting sports equipment with a bus well I I know no we don't own any of that um that's 100 provided by Benjamin bus okay um and then I just wanted to make a comment um on this overall recommendation it was really difficult for me this weekend to go through these as I'm sure it was really difficult for anyone just taking a look but I I kept coming back around to the middle school activities in sports because I think that there's one factor
104that I don't want overlooked here and that is the inclusiveness especially of of team sports and activities that really require the kids to work together um or else you know it they can't succeed and and I I really want to stress that because that's one of the reasons that I was in Middle School sports myself I I didn't know much about the sports that I was actually in and so I was I probably performed not very well but I I was in it for the social aspect absolutely and I'm so glad that that I was um it it taught me a lot about um and it it really helps with Social Development and I think that that's something that we are really looking to push from both the community aspect and a school aspect is
105we want the kids to grow socially and not just academically and in fact that's that's one of our Strate in our within our strategic plan is that we prepare kids not only academically but but socially so that they'll be socially ready um to enter the world after graduation and so I I was really surprised about that potential for elimination and it it kind of made me think about something that I heard um I think that kids playing team sports and team activities they get to be with their classmates and it's outside of the classroom which I think is also really important for that development not only for the development but for um harmonizing they're actually harmonizing together and I think that in the world that we have right now experiencing a lot of divisiveness um
106I think that that's really critical right now thank you thank you Jenny okay Corey thank you I don't really have a comment on anything specific I do Echo some of the comments from fellow board members here specifically around specifically around middle school activities um I do want to have a request and then a comment I Echo what Jeff said earlier about engaging in this process that's critical to this conversation we have two more board meetings before we vote on this we have two more public hearings so please come engage email us call us let us know what you think about how it impacts you and your families um so just want to Echo that a question for either Matt or Val I know there's been some conversations around obviously we're looking at two and a
107half million dollars which is roughly four percent of our budget it's not insignificant but we just had a year-long conversation about a high school building which could have been 40 60 80 100 million dollars can you explain School financing 101 here and how these buckets differ for those who maybe aren't as clear on that and are wondering how we could push forward with the high school while also looking at a second year of cuts you want me to take that one I'll let you take it um so probably take an hour to answer it you'll take five years I'm glad to take this one so the the difference there um any building project that the district would do there would be an Associated bond for um and so we the voters would have to approve
108it we would bond for the money and we would receive that money specifically for that project and then pay that back with our debt service Levy over time the the general fund budget is for our operations um so the common phrase that you'll hear people say is levies are for learning bonds are for building and so the levees and the state aid and the revenue that we have pay for the great people we have doing good things for kids and any project we do has to have an outside funding source because we do not have that kind of capital just lying around and so there's specific funding that's restricted and can only be spent on that um so if that was something to come up in the future it would be voter approved well publicized
109um and would be a completely separate pot of money that we do not currently have access to that sum it up well enough thank you anyone else any other questions or comments okay Amy so I have questions on other parts that have been suggested um the restructuring of the middle school schedule I would be interested in finding out just what that means um and getting more details on that I am curious if the drop from seven um periods to six periods would mean that the students would all have one less chance to take an elective and um whether that would be meaning they only have one elective then they would take or do they still have two um also since those electives such as industrial technology and um choir and band all feed into the
110high school as well how a sense of how that might affect what's going on in the high school because um my doc when my daughter was in Middle School which was a decade ago at this point um there was already concern as kids went to middle school that they had to choose between band and Orchestra you know and the kids who are very musically inclined do both and if you choose I'm not Banning well abandoned choir you still had to choose between band and Orchestra but Banning choir and if you love to sing then you might not play your instrument anymore or you know the opposite away so I would hate to have to have kids have to decide between mean industrial technology and art or you know so that I want to know what
111the impact of that is I would like to know what the impact of that would ultimately be on the other end of the pipeline for the high school foreign so without getting in the into the details of Greg's scheduling um if there will be an impact you will have less things that you can take right when you had seven periods before and you have six periods now um You will have one last class period to take and norfield unlike a lot of other places that I have been we have a lot of kids who do take I can't give you the number right now but we have a number of students who do take a course every period of the day and don't ever have a study hall right and so certainly uh it would
112impact people's ability to fill seven class periods because you'd be at six the main part of the Savings in FTE is that right now in sixth grade we have 10 teachers between two teams now remember sixth grade under Minnesota law is still governed by Elementary School licensure requirements so right now we teach Reading Writing social studies Science and Mathematics is the five core subject areas one way I mean I'm not there's a couple of ways that you can get to how that would work and I'm not I don't know which way they're going to look at it one could be to potentially combine the reading and writing into an English six course that's one way that you get there another way would be to have individual teachers specialize in one specific you know subject and
113then have everybody teach you know one specific course because they're Elementary licensed and able to teach all of those courses that decision has not been I'm just giving you a couple of ways of how you could get there I'm sure there are others as well so as Greg is still Mr Jones still working on the schedule your logic is correct we are not necessarily looking at uh fewer elective areas but you would there would be some more student choice that would be involved and we can have Greg come and share with you specifically how he sees that schedule working for next year so one question I would have is do we need to drop to six periods to be able to have the savings on the salary side of it or can we maintain a
114seven period school day and still not have to if they combine the writing and the reading together it's just an example I'm just giving you an example yeah so so that would be a question I mean is are we just trying to throw the for lack of better phrasing throw the sixth period day in while we're doing this other reduction or can it be actually two separate questions uh well my understanding is that the six period day is one of the ways that we can continue to prioritize maintaining class size so that is part of the way that you're going to do it we will have Mr johno come and explain to you his specific vision of the sixth period day okay that would be great um I also just want to mention I I
115have some misgivings about discontinuing our C membership because there's an irony there C is our group that's trying to help us get the legislature to provide more funding for our schools and it's a small amount and yet we're saying we don't want to support that now you know does that ultimately affect how much money we get down the road so are we sort of cutting off our nose despite our face or are they really ineffective at this point and as they're winding down or whatever it is so I would be interested in talking about that more at some point um and uh I'd also be interested in with the Portage question having a sense of would that be available for if we did The Cooperative online program would that be available as soon as next
116year for our students okay then I don't have my for my other questions don't matter that would be great thank you thank you Amy anyone else any more comments or questions um I have a couple um the will program um they okay it was an EA reduced um the will program right yes and so um Val will talk about this because there was a change in this very late in the week related to our achievement in integration funding so Val do you want to talk about that and that's at the middle school it's at the middle school yes yeah there we will not be reducing the EA um we're just moving the funding into our achievement and integration budget so we're reducing some things in the achievement integration budget which are on the list already
117and transferring that position into a I then will save the general fund so it's not an elimination of that position so there'll still be a staff member there is that what I'm understanding okay yes paid for from a different bucket of funding okay um and so I just wanted to hear you Dr Hillman talk about um some of these items are reductions in staff um some of them are unfilled EA positions and so we already have a staff member who is not either being supported or doing the work of that other individual until there's a higher um so those positions those unfilled EA positions are being proposed not to be eliminated in a full-time teacher be hired and we're still in the same situation waiting for someone to apply and then hiring that person so
118you still have the current staff member the current instructor um potentially not being supported or doing additional work so I think if I understand your question so let's talk about specifically about those special education parts and then I I will also move to that yes there will be times where when there's a reduction where other people do pick up that work right in terms of in the special education piece specifically lines three and four uh with the high school those three EA positions my understanding is that they are positions that we have booked on our potential expenditures there isn't a teacher there yet for those we're looking at saying we can't hire these three educational assistants we're looking to put out a posting for a teacher to be able to provide special education services to
119students instead of those three educational assistants so they will have to think about it differently in that way special education teachers can provide direct instruction educational assistance can reinforce instruction so we our special education we've actually tried this already once this year because of our inability to hire EDU educational assistance we have been very lucky that while we here across the state the just real difficulty in hiring special education teachers overall we've been pretty lucky that we have gotten quality special education professionals to apply for our positions and we're looking to see can we make that happen again and serve these special education students in a different way than what they would have with an educational assistant so this is a case where we're creating a position from the funding that is already existing for
120three positions but your point is well taken in any of these cases where we are replacing multiple people with one or we are taking people's we are cutting people's hours back very in fact um you'll hear me in a few minutes talk about unfunded or underfunded mandates and we have a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done and when we cut back people the expectations do not go away um we have learned to be very efficient um I think contrary to a lot of sometimes things you might read in social media or even in the media schools our school is actually quite efficient in terms of how we Implement our staffing and whenever we cut back someone else will have to do that work and um it can sometimes it can affect it
121in a number of different ways so the work still has to be done it's either done with less people or sometimes with more people so for example when you cut teaching positions almost always does class size go up you're seeing some approaches here that are intended to mitigate that but whenever we lose people in the system it has a direct impact on the services that people receive yeah I just wanted to acknowledge that that reality that we are currently stretching many of our staff members then um and and because of the you know the financial situation that we're in we're gonna ask many more to to take on additional duties or to go without support until we hire someone um so I just wanted to acknowledge that and hear you um talk about that so
122thank you for that um and then finally I wanted to um well it sounds like many of us are in agreement regarding the middle school activities and I have to be remind myself that this is um a proposal and you know there is space for for us to say um thank you for the suggestion but we can't see these items go um so I think that I I would Echo several of the comments that were made tonight um I just can't see the Middle School losing um all of those activities though again appreciate the the effort that was put there um I feel personally that the middle school has a lot of items on here that they have um proposed a lot of cuts in that program and so um I'll look forward to hearing
123from um principal Delano on his thinking with the reductions there um I think Val would you just talk briefly to about how we arrived at the targets because I think that's important for people to understand sure um so I did it slightly different this year um knowing that we made a really significant impact in our non-salary budgets in the last process I took the total budget items for unrestricted salaries so I excluded you know special ed salaries and things where there's a you know everything Capital I'll say all of that stuff was totally separated excuse me and then I took a percentage um so whatever the secondary total salaries added up to Elementary and then District services and did a percent basis um off that total so looking solely at the unrestricted salaries knowing full
124well that wasn't going to be the full cut was not going to be solely salaries but knowing that that was going to be our bigger Target impact for this round is is where that calculation came from thank you and do you want our our job is to bring you a set of recommendations that allow us to meet this target so we can maintain our fund balance goal and we are as you can see we're thoughtful and we certainly understand that um when we bring these things forward that it is the board's responsibility to tell us yep you're on the right track here or that here's an area that we want you to look differently you are the elected representatives of the community and we provide you recommendations and then your job is to help guide
125us as to what is the best way um for us to be or the the most effective way for us to be able to do this at this time so um we will always take what you tell us to do and we will go back and try to figure things out in a different way and bring you something else I I just do want to share that again coming back to what I start with is all of the programs that we have have value and so that that no matter what we end up with we are going to have things that you um vote to reduce that means something to someone and so I just we we can't escape that and I just think it's important for us to just to face that reality here
126um tonight so we will certainly take your feedback and and look at the drawing board and say are there different ways that we can accomplish some of those things from what we've heard from you tonight and you when you tell us to do something differently we find a different way to try to make it happen okay well thank you so much a last chance to make a comment or ask a question and we'll move on okay I think thanks again for the um proposal and these are exceptionally difficult decisions we're getting ready to take um okay we'll we'll move on to Item B which is Dr Hillman's operation and strategic Plan update so I will uh keep this brief um but I'm going to start with the last part so we can finish on some
127things that are happening happening with our staff um but I do really want to emphasize how important this part about the legislative advocacy is to the budget process so if you are a person who is interested in saying how can I make a difference and how can I help this for the future this is what you can do so we did several of us here um Amy Claudia myself and Robert we went to the Capitol as part of the schools for equity and education uh day at the Capitol program this past Tuesday we had a chance to view the entirety of the House Education finance committee meeting for that day I've been to a lot of hearings over the years I had never sat through an entire hearing just never had the time I think
128we learned a lot about that committee and how it works and there was some real heartening things like bipartisan support for uh tax Equalization and for additional local optional revenue for expanding long-term facilities maintenance Revenue to cooperatives like this Canon Valley special education cooperative and so we had a chance to observe that committee wait a chance to visit with representative Purcell uh we did have an appointment with Senator liske unfortunately was canceled due to a conflict with a Committee hearing we have another meeting scheduled with him um coming this week which sounds like we'll have to reschedule again but we'll we'll get there and so we these are the bills that that people heard um or that we heard and so I encourage you most of these uh most of these hearings are live streamed
129where you can watch them as you just go to the house or Senate website you can see and I've learned if you play them on 1.5 times speed you can watch more in a shorter amount of time and people don't quite sound like Mickey Mouse quite yet well we need to advocate for unequivocally is adding five percent to the basic formula and indexing it to inflation so five percent in year one of the biennium and year two of the biennium and indexing into inflation we just had with the finance the new Financial forecast came out today and even when they added finely added Glacier inflation into the financial forecast they are still projecting a 17.5 billion dollar Surplus this needs to be the Minnesota miracle that we had in the early 1970s under Governor Wendell
130Anderson we have a once in a generation chance to structurally fix how we Finance education in Minnesota this does not solve all of our issues right here because declining enrollment is but if we can't get this done now it will not happen so we all have to speak with one voice anyone interested in joining our legislative action committee we would be happy to have you just let me know and we'll get you on our list of 50 some people that meet every other Saturday number one five percent on the formula in each year and indexing into inflation then finally fully funding the special education cross subsidy not 50 like in the governor's proposal 100 like in representative wagamot's proposal every penny of the Cross subsidy paid for by the state Full Stop Those are the
131two things that we need the legislature to do now to give us the foundation for the future then as we continue forward we also have to understand that there are over 2 000 bills introduced in the legislature already 2 000. it's a lot of bills right in our board packet tonight you can see the bill tracker um that gives you the education bills and there is no such thing as a policy bill that doesn't cost money so many of the policy bills I think most of us would agree with or there's a lot of things that are very good but we have to recognize that when we Implement new policy that does erode the benefit we might get from additions to the general fundament I've given three examples of my report uh one bill house
132file 1348 would require school districts to fund 83 percent of single employee health insurance premiums now our district right now pays around 80 percent of the single employee health insurance we of course this board voted to put a million dollars toward employee health insurance to keep premiums reasonable um for us the 144 people who take single insurance that mandate costs us about thirty seven thousand dollars more and you say well that's not a big deal thirty seven thousand dollars well remember how I told you there are two thousand bills right now in the let so even if a hundred of them are for education and each one of the policy bills has even a small amount of of impact that is how an underfunded or unfunded mandate happens I've talked to some smaller School District
133where they're talking millions of dollars to come into compliance that again a laudable effort but just something that we have to acknowledge and understand that it's going to cost us additional dollars um again something like hf2 which is the Paid Family Leave bill it's an excellent benefit for families right and we already offer paid leave for many of our employees this would extend that um and it is about that there's additional costs employed or that are realized by the employer a third one is increasing the minimum starting wage for non-licensed school Personnel to 25 now or an HF 13448 all good things all we're saying is that if you're going to give us a new mandate please make sure to fund it right put funding an example of that is the literacy Bill the read
134Act they are putting funding in that they're requiring every District to hire a literacy literacy specialist but they do have a line item to help pay for the literacy specialist another example where they've given school districts the opportunity to raise some funds is there is a bill that would allow hourly School Employees in some circumstances to Garner unemployment or Insurance over the summer again they've given local school boards the authority to Levy for that again there's a funding mechanism all we're asking we understand that there has to be Statewide policy for Statewide issues but if you're going to give us new mandates fund them because some people will say well if they give you five percent on the formula each year index it to inflation and they cover the special education costs shouldn't that be
135enough I would say no that's our back pay that's what you have been shorting us for 30 years so don't give me that right right now you are paying us back pay and now we're back to appoint a foundation now as you add new requirements you need to make sure that you fund those in my humble but deadly accurate opinion and so those are some pieces about we cannot democracy is not a spectator sport people need to be involved you need to write a letter to your legislature you need to go to the Capitol you need to call the Legislative Assistant you need to tell them that this is a Moment In Our Lifetime where we can substantially have an impact on public education and therefore on our nation so if this is not a
136rallying cry for us to do what should have been done a long time ago I don't know what it is and if the time is not now I do not know when when you have 17 and a half billion dollars of surplus a time for another Minnesota Miracles now and I encourage everyone to join me in loudly voicing at the Capitol to be able to help us not for next year but for further down the line so that is my legislative report that got a little bit more passionate that I had intended it to um really excited about our February 20th professional development day so we had a great opportunity our staff we need to invest in our staff not only in their salary and benefits but also in their professional growth and so on
137February 20th I'd like to share with you what we did um we worked with the Minnesota Department of education's Dr Makari trainum she's the director of the diversity equity and inclusion Center and there's a Minnesota teacher licensure renewal requirement for cultural competency training we've provided that to our staff several years ago we're standardizing to provide that each year on part of the standards each year so that we are able to make sure that we are continuing to increase our cultural competency to serve every student and to help prepare them for lifelong success and we'll focus on a couple of Standards each year so that by the time teachers renewal comes up that they have gotten those CEUs that they need for their license and that we're continuing to grow our cultural competency which we know
138is so important in a more diverse Society we worked on some things with our Elementary staff our own conscious discipline it's an approach it's not a curriculum it's not a but it's a an approach to how we think about discipline um that has gotten rave reviews from our pre-k through fifth grade staff Middle School uh did some continued work about Avid implementation you've heard about Avid before from Mr johno and then I always love a good Ed Camp so the high school had a great Ed camp and Ed Camp is a participant driven event so staff determines the the topics they want to discuss the high school has 15 different sessions I gave you some examples of things like creating a classroom engagement plan poverty and its hidden culture Costa's level of questioning and thinking
139so a range of different things for our staff to continue to learn so that is what happened during our professional development day on February 20th so that is my report this evening fantastic thank you so much any questions or comments for Dr Hillman okay very good um item six on our agenda is committee reports do we have any that were submitted okay um item seven we move on to up the approval of the consent grouping as a reminder there were some Personnel items in the table file added to the consent grouping is there anything anyone would like to pull from the consent grouping for separate consideration okay is there a motion to approve the consent grouping Move by Jenny second my query all those in favor of approving the consent group being say I I
140opposed hey motion carries um items for individual action we have four tonight um director murder starf will review the 2324 operating capital and long-term facilities maintenance budgets presented at the February 13th board meeting I will take a motion vowel presenter offer any um additional comments then we can discuss it is there a motion to approve the 2324 operating capital and long-term facilities maintenance budgets as presented in the packet move by 40 second by Robert um okay um well would you like to make any comments um there have been no changes since uh what I presented so all of the data is exactly the same um as the last meeting and so if you have further questions I'm happy to answer them but otherwise it's all the same yep thank you any questions board members okay
141seeing none um we have a motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay motion passes long-term facilities maintenance 10-year plan and the indoor air quality management plan was presented at our last meeting is there a motion to approve the long-term facility's maintenance 10-year revenue and expenditure plan and the indoor air quality management plan as presented move by then second hi Amy thank you um board members you have any questions or comments on this item okay we have a motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay okay motion passes letter C we have four policies to take action on tonight all right we'll take a motion first then we can discuss and vote is there a motion to approve the policy committee's recommended updates to policies
142644 721 807 and 808s presented and 808 does have an update in the table file would like to move Robert okay is there a second ready thank you um I just want to make a comment on 808 So based on hearing feedback from board members at the last meeting just about some concerns about seamless operations during the school day and talking with a couple of Staff members we did add some language um around some very limited circumstances where an employee could provide their badge to another employer substitute who is completing a specific task to ensure seamless operations of the school day so this example would be I I'm a teacher on the playground at an elementary school with a substitute whose badge does not open a door I am staying here to watch to supervise
143the students while I hand my badge that will open the door to the substitute who's walking to the door uses it to open the door and then the students walk in the badge is handed right back to the regular employee if that makes sense another example could be if there's a sense of urgency about getting a copy and the the teacher can't leave the classroom because we use our badges for the copy machine as well so we've actually laid out a couple of specific examples but the bottom line is we've really emphasize that it's limited circumstances during the school day to facilitate seamless operations so it isn't here's my badge go open you know the door for this this is I see you basically with my badge you're taking it and coming right back and
144then we've also indicated in the policy that it should be promptly returned to the staff member and that if you do give your badge to someone else even in this limited circumstance you are responsible for that other person's actions that's right super any comments or questions hey this is very minor and it may just show how old I am but shouldn't we be saying lending their badge and use lend instead of loan I'm going to defer to Corey what's the current I got loaning in there is that okay yeah loan is well loan isn't down land is a verb I I look at it as um I look at those as very well I understand that the dictionary would indicate some different a different definition I think that they're very similar and would cover Us
145in this particular case oh I think they would too I just like being correct okay I don't think it's incorrect okay Corey just for a little background in seventh grade that was the one question I got wrong on one English test it still plagues me to this day well it was Len versus borrow not lend versus loan 99 out of 100. versus borrow so I don't have any expertise on loan though oh I have book loans phones from the library the definition okay yes Ben I was just gonna say as long as it's not borrow good distinction I'll borrow you something it is all right the whatever place online says that that loan means can mean to lend so so I won't I won't press it any other comments or questions okay we have a
146motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay motion passes okay our final item is additional online learning day authorization for 2022-2023 this um school year Dr Hillman will present I'll take a motion first then we can discuss and then vote is there a motion to authorize the superintendent to shift instruction online when weather conditions necessate School closure disclosure for the remainder of this school year move by Jenny it's okay bye Ben thank you okay so we are in a circumstance where we have obviously had quite a winter so far we have had two blizzard warnings uh we have had an ice storm uh we have had a number of things that have prompted us to have to to close school to this point by law there's two parts of the
147law that allow schools to facilitate online learning during a weather related incident one of which is the traditional e-learning day statute that e-learning day statute allows all school districts in Minnesota to shift up to five days into online learning um again for in in one school year so that's the e-learning statute you have no specialized approval a board has to be presented with the plan we present the plan to we've done so since 2019 you have to make sure you communicate it there's certain other requirements that you have to follow which we have followed to this point uh the second part is any school district like norfield who has approval for an online learning program like Portage Also may offer online learning to its families at any time the way that that particular program approval
148comes through is that you're not allowed to require it but you are able to offer it uh to families in that kind of circumstance now truthfully our e-learning days also are something that are offered because in our documentation we share with families that if you do not want your child to participate in the e-learning Day activities you can contact your school and it'll be an excused absence so in practicality we're looking for an insurance policy to be able to continue to offer online learning should we need to for the remainder of this school year using our online learning program approval moving forward so we would shift the language from saying it's an e-learning day to an online learning day my understanding based send conversations with mde is that we are able to do this through
149our online program approval again it's a slightly different set of terminology we prefer not to do this right we prefer to have students in school but having the flexibility and the bill the ability to do this for the remainder of the year we will come back and as we always do we will take a look at our e-learning program at the end of this year we have had a lot of positive comments we've had some very critical comments about it as well and so um we haven't used a number of e-learning days in several years right in terms of this e-learning part in terms of getting through a winter weather event so we have a chunk of e-learning days this year that aren't right in a row this is not distance learning let's really really
150clear about that but this is does give us the ability to continue to shift online instruction again I'm also bringing it to you for approval because our local plans said generally we would limit ourselves to five days of e-learning and the point is so we bring it back to you for you to be able to have that option and discussion as we consider if we have a winter like we've had this year if we don't have that online learning program or that if we don't move forward with using additional days through our online learning approval program approval those days would simply become canceled days and then we could decide whether or not to make them up at the end of the school year I would not recommend that this year because we didn't give families
151dates on the calendar to approve that but we are only on February 27th I'm hopeful that I'd be happy to not have any more snow for the rest of this year but it is Minnesota and we need to be prepared for it so again in the interest of transparency making sure you understand there's a difference between e-learning and our online learning program approval they they function in a similar way but not exact and so we wanted to make sure that you had the opportunity to weigh in on whether we should move forward using our online program approval to continue offering online learning on days when we have to cancel in-person learning due to weather events okay questions Ben do you have a question how often is that online learning plan reviewed and approved by MDES
152that that's a good question I don't know the answer to that I believe it's a i it's a several year approval I don't know I I don't have tonight when that's up for review okay but we can find out that's just one additional question so if Portage were to go away and let's say we're still under that approval window would that have any effect on I mean I understand that this is just for this calendar school year but in the future so as we review the online learning program approval there are districts that do have some uh there are several levels of online programming approval and so we have the most comprehensive one right now I don't know the answer to if we have a lower level of approval if that provides us the opportunity
153to do this I do know there's a lot of discussion across the state right now with this because there are the vast majority of school districts do not have online program approval so there's many districts that are running into this five-day limitation and I do think that there's going to be some movement at the legislature to try to seek and they get some extension there question someone else Jeff yeah just as a point of information for you to comment on how our funding days are done and then how this Edition um passed or not passed would affect or not affect that that's a great question Jeff so um we have a 173 scheduled school days and the minimum in the state is 165. so we start with eight days above and e-learning day counts as
154an instructional day and so that we are still even though we've had seven total cancellations we're still at 171. and my understanding is that we're able to offer that online learning we would St so even if you didn't count online learning the rest of the year we still would have sick have to cancel six more days before we would hit the minimum in 2019 when many districts hit the minimum or went below um it does not appear that they had withheld State funding so there's a minimum of 165 that was a unique winter there was some snow day relief that year if you remember in the legislature but we still in all practical purposes where we're at right now we are still quite a bit above what the minimum is Jeff there's also an hour
155requirement which we also are well above that hourly requirement I knew that was the case but I wanted to make sure we got that on the public thank you any other questions comments yeah Robert with the with the change in terminology from e-learning to to online learning will would the framework of how this works at would it look the same for our parents and students at we plan to use a consistent methodology of delivering this um with some slightly different language very good item nine is items for information oh I'm sorry yes we haven't voted um okay we have a motion in a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay motion passes thank you thank you um I don't have any items for information do you have something to add Dr Helen
156I do not okay then item 10 is our future regular meetings they are all at 6 pm here in the district office boardroom those dates are Mondays April March 13 April 10 and April 24th that is all of our business tonight if there's um is there a motion to adjourn motion by Jeff second bye hey Robert thank you all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay motion carries we are adjourned