ISD 110 School Board Meeting Feb. 24, 2025

001Okay, I'll talk very slowly but it is Approximately seven o'clock. So we'll call the meeting to order Calling a seeking motion to approve the agenda all in favor Noting that we have all members in attendance tonight. We will now say the Pledge of Allegiance and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. A list of upcoming meetings can be found on the agenda as noted, and I don't know that we have any other announcements to bring to attention. Jessica, to confirm, we have no public comment tonight? Okay. Seeking a motion then, item four, to approve the minutes of the previous meeting. So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Moving on to item five, consent agenda. Do we have any items on the consent agenda that

002need to be moved for separate consideration? Okay, I knew we couldn't vote on it yet, but... Sure. I'm happy to highlight the items in the consent agenda. Always wanting to appreciate the generous donors that we have. I want to thank for a $5 donation from Frontstream Connect Global Fund for Southview Student Activities. $500 donated by Jeffrey and Christy Widseth for the Widseth Scholarship for Waconia High School Graduate. $1,000 donated by the... education support professionals for the ESP scholarship for a Waconia High School graduate. $100 donated by Structural Design Concepts Inc. for our high school robotics group. $600 donated by Breakdown Sports USA for hosting the wrestling breakdown event. $513.74 donated by the Bayview PTO for a playground blue bowl spinner seat. $1,500 donated by Rattal Foundation for scholarships for Waconia High School students interested in

003business, golf, or trade school, and $10,554.01 donated by the Waconia Basketball Boosters for additional coaches for both the boys' and girls' basketball programs, thanks to our generous support in the community. All right, and I will say that I was happy to read about the dissolution of the bread machine when I first read that item It sounded very you know, it's picturing somebody with a zap ray disintegration. So it's nice to know that's moving on to better hands Seeking a motion to approve the consent agenda Second all in favor. All right moving on to our reports item a student report riding Hello, how is everyone tonight? I hope you're doing well. I'm getting myself signed in here. Just sign me out. Hold on, sorry. Earlier this month, Waconia High School's Conservation Club was highlighted for its

004own Star Tribune news article. It mentions the yearly fifth grade ice fishing trip that the club hosts and details about how the club has grown. Conservation Club also does many service projects throughout the year and is a great addition to our school. This upcoming weekend, Show Choir has their annual spectacular performance, which is hosted at our high school, which brings Show Choir to an end for the year. And as for sports this week, we have boys basketball against Chaska this Tuesday night. Wednesday, there's a boys swim and dive meet, followed by girls basketball quarterfinals against Minnetonka. So a tough opponent. And Thursday night, boys swim and dive has their diving semi and finals. Last but not least, Friday will be boys basketball versus New Prague. and boys swim and dive team varsity finals. I hope

005everyone has an amazing evening and spring break coming up. Thank you very much. Moving on to item 6B, the PBIS presentation, and we will welcome up Jamie Heiss. Good evening. Thank you. So my name is Jamie Heiss, and I am a part of our PBIS team. We have several other members here tonight. Jessica Rose, Britta Deviney, and Marnie Pauley are all just a portion of our PBIS team. So we're going to start out with just what is PBIS, and it stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and it's a research-based, it's proactive, and it's... goal is to improve student behavior as well as create a positive culture in school. So it focuses on consistent expectations, teaching them explicitly to students, reinforcing that positive behavior, and then really focusing on making data-driven decisions. As we have

006really implemented that, we found that it really does connect to our strategic plan, which was brought in after we started our PBS goal in supporting academic success, social-emotional success, reducing disciplinary incidents. So if we look at the actual line from our strategic goal, it talks about fostering a community with collective sense of belonging and well-being, making sure that we have a place where all individuals feel welcome. So there's three main key components to PBIS, and consistency is key when we're looking at creating a positive culture within any school. And so all PBIS programs rely on common expectations, common language and practices, and positive recognition. And as this framework was put into place in our school, we found there's quite a few things that already existed. Our core values were... common expectations that were already in

007place. We had school-wide strategies. Now we've been able to refine them and create some specific targeted interventions to work for students and groups that might need a little extra to help them. We had some positive recognition already in place. Character counts was one of them. And then we brought in our Wildcat Way. recognition program. So Jessica is going to talk a little bit about where we started on year one. I apologize for my voice. So during year one, we went to six total trainings throughout the school year. We began gathering data by trialing a new behavior ticket tracking system that we developed. And our behavior tickets are written warnings and behavior reteaching for our students. And then we also launched our new recognition system, which are our Wildcat way tickets during fourth quarter after spring

008break. These are given when we catch students following our core values of respect, responsibility, integrity, and kindness. And then they can turn those into a drawing for rewards like the coveted front of the line lunch pass. And the reason why we have both the reteaching and then also catching them while they are showing our core values is that research shows that it takes 28 times for a child to unlearn and relearn expected behaviors. And now I'm going to send it over to Britta to talk about what we did during year two. All right, last year as a PBIS team, we continued our training as a team through the Minnesota Department of Education. We also, our training through the Minnesota Department of Education focused on targeted strategies to work with smaller groups of students on more

009focused behaviors and how to incorporate PBIS strategies into the classroom. As a PBIS team, we led teacher trainings throughout the school year, starting with workshop week in the fall. The goal for our trainings with staff was to introduce common language that all teachers can use throughout the school day and throughout the school building, and to empower teachers to use this common language with students when they're reinforcing positive behaviors, such as giving a Wildcat way ticket, or when we're addressing behaviors that need improvement. We implemented school-wide tools and strategies that both staff and students could use. In Connect classes, students were explicitly taught and modeled school-wide and area-specific behavior expectations using our common language. This common language was found on posters throughout the school building that students knew and that staff could use when addressing student

010behavior, as I previously described. We also strengthened our data analysis tools through staff feedback. We continued to track Wildcat way tickets by grade level, and we adjusted the way we... tracked our behavior tickets so that we were getting data that will help us make the best data-driven decisions most efficiently and effectively. And now Jamie will talk about what's going on this year. So this year we have continued our staff training, really reinforcing that common language and what tools are out there. And then we've also created, each teacher has created a classroom. expectation to infuse that PBIS language within their classroom. So it's throughout every space in our building, which is fantastic. We've incorporated some additional positive incentives. In the past, we had character counts and that kind of went on pause for about a year

011and a half. And we brought that back this year, along with our Wildcat way tickets. We've really emphasized that. Positive recognition can also be in the form of emails, high fives, a hey, great job. And then also we are working on implementing new incentives for whole grade levels starting here in Tri-3. So we're pretty excited about that. And then we've continued with data analysis this year. We are looking to continue looking at... making sure that our teachers know how to analyze the data. So we trained teachers last year on how to look at their grade level data. And then this year trained them on how to write goals in order to do that. So that as we're looking at influencing their behavior, we're really using what are their specific needs year to year and grade

012level to grade level. And Marnie Pauly is going to talk a little more about that and how the impact has been on our building. I get the good slide with all the proof, right? As Jamie said, grade level teams are reviewing the data, and so they're taking all of this real-time information and taking a look at what needs to be retaught, maybe reinforced, and doing that specifically for their grade level or their group of students. And what this does then in turn is it increases the amount of positive... interactions that you're having, right? Because you're taking a look at what do we need to reinforce, and then you're actively going out and you're reinforcing that. And that is pushing those positive to negative ratios up. So as you can see, in year two, we tracked

013that we had three positives, so three Wildcat Way tickets to every one office referral or behavior ticket. Now, this, and just trimester one, but we're at five to one. And as you can see, the increase in positive acknowledgements along with the non-exclusionary practices, which would be things like teaching kids to work on reflection and to really... focus on conflict resolution and that learning piece so they can actually understand the impact of those behaviors and move forward, right, in a way to understand how to make changes in their behavior, not just here's the behavior, it wasn't okay. Putting those things together, we believe, has helped really have an impact on the reduction of the office referrals, as you can see at the top of the page here. And I am going to send it back over

014to Jamie. She's going to talk about our next steps as we continue to work. So as we move forward, you know, this is a three to five year process moving into a middle school and we will continue with staff development. This year we trained ESPs. In the future years, we're hoping to incorporate more staff throughout the building, kitchen staff, possibly bus drivers. could be as far reaching as we want it to grow. And then we'll continue to work on consistent language and tweaking what works and what doesn't work based on our data that we gather. Each spring, we have gathered data from our staff to say, where are our holes? What do we need to work on? What do we need to strengthen? And then we'll continue to do that year after year. We also

015are going to be enhancing strategies for targeting behaviors, so building that toolbox to make sure that we have the best tools possible to reteach as opposed to punish. We also are incorporating down the road student leadership on our PBIS team as a goal and strengthening family and community engagement. And those are things that we haven't started looking at yet, but it's definitely on our radar and on our task list to do. So I've linked a few things on here. We've got Minnesota PBIS, which is where our training is through. It's got some great resources on there. Minnesota Department of Education PBIS. We have to give a shout out to our PTO, too, for supporting us. We've been able to do a lot of what we've been able to do, the posters and everything, because of

016grants through Minnesota PBIS and then also additional support through our PTO, which is fantastic. So if you have any questions, these are a couple of places to go. Otherwise, all of our team members are listed on this slide, and any one of them would be happy to talk to you about PBIS. We're all pretty passionate about it. So if you have any questions. tonight? I've got a couple actually. So you had talked about incorporating student leadership. So up until this point, then it doesn't sound like you've had a lot of student input as far as maybe what the reward should be. Because when you talked about the coveted, you know, front of the line, I mean, that's something that sounds like it'd come from a kid. Yep. So, right. Some of those ideas were gathered

017through Connect. But when we talk about student leadership, we'd like to actually add a member or two to our actual committee. And they wouldn't meet with us monthly like we do, but they would probably meet with us every other month or once a trimester. But you have had input from the kids, though, to say, hey, we like this. This is what we would like. Like what kinds of rewards would we like? Yep. And the other question I had is, you know, have you seen like a rags to riches story? That's the only way I can think of it, where you have a kid that was a habitual offender who, you know, PBIS turned that person into an angel. I would love to say absolutely. I can think of times, though, where there are students who...

018And it wasn't necessarily like the Wildcat way tickets, but that PBIS language and those expectations and asking for those expectations and then reinforcing positively. I think a lot of times it's that reinforcement with contacts home. For some kids, it is that Wildcat way ticket. And yes, like I have students that stay in the lunchroom to put tables up every day. And that really increased after that contact home. So there are those PBIS. style interventions that we've done that definitely we've seen specific students have improvements through. Thank you. Have you integrated this into the web program? I'm not sure how, I'm not sure the question. Well, you were talking about student leadership, and I know that that's one of the very first introductions that kids have is with the web program coming in. I was just

019wondering if the kids are using that nomenclature, the same language and stuff. The eighth graders are using that with the sixth graders if that's integrated or not. When they're going into their web groups in the beginning of the year in that transition, we have those posters and they're using and pointing to those posters, yes. So they're using that same common language and expectations all throughout. As far as leadership goes... Those leaders, those eighth grade web leaders would likely be students that would potentially be on this committee, but it wouldn't be limited necessarily to eighth graders. So this could be also an additional entryway into leadership. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have the class size report. Welcome up, Dr. Sean Wise, whose name I remembered this time. All right, well, we all know class

020sizes are very important, and we monitor and manage them all of the time. Last year, we did a presentation about the class sizes for the school year last year, and it was very well received, and we decided after that we were going to do it annually. So we're going to give you an update for the class size status that we have for this year, the 24-25 school year. We have Ann Swanson for the elementary and Shane Cosson for the middle school and Paul Svarby for the high school. So this is 2024 Elementary Homeroom. We have different ranges for kindergarten, first, and second grade. I'm going to focus a little bit on Bayview just because I'm more comfortable with those numbers. But we really focus on keeping our class sizes in the range, especially when it

021comes to our core subject areas, such as math, reading, science, and social studies. You can see that at Bayview, we're pretty right in the middle, which is fantastic. Sometimes we'll have a hot spot like fifth grade where we're in the dark purple, but that has not changed over the last few years. We've always had a class or a grade here and there throughout the district that's fallen in the dark purple. So really, ideally, it'd be great to be all yellow, but sometimes with the cohorts that are coming through, that doesn't work out just perfectly. So there's some history with this. We started with, before even budget reductions, we always worked on classroom sizes, trying to keep them consistent across the district. Then due to budget cuts, we made an effort, or our choice was to

022cut in the specialist areas. That was on purpose to keep the class sizes smaller in the core classes, their homerooms. There was a challenge with that because then if you looked at... the colors or the ranges and made our ranges look all purple, which was a choice, but yet it didn't help us find the hot spots and things like that. So we came up with a solution that was a hybrid solution. I'm going to show you those slides in a moment. With specialist classes, we found that we need a little lower in the... primary and then it's okay to have a little larger in the upper. So that's why we have the two ranges in our hybrid, but it was a choice we made when we did the cuts. So we weren't surprised by that.

023So this is what our specialists look like, meaning media, art, music, and art. So you can see this is if you just took and went with We had four sections before, and we put them into three specialists. So you can see that our numbers got larger, but that was not a surprise to us. That was a choice that we made with the budget cut. So then we tried another option, and it... Made all the classes didn't quite work with the math that we were doing so we ended up going with the hybrid model And this is the hybrid model so we have a range for kindergarten through a second grade We have a range for through through fifth. You can still see like looking at Bayview We have fourth grade's a little bit bigger. It's

024just that's still consistent with what's happened in years past. But it's just a way for us to see where the hot spots are, high or low, and we can make those adjustments. Here are a couple graphs that show us what our class sizes have looked like over the past two years. So you can see I'm looking at Bayview. I have a cohort that is lower in second grade. second grade well I'm looking at 2023 to 24 you can see the remember that the cohorts move up is what I'm trying to say we have a couple that have moved up and are a little bit bigger but really We've always had a couple, so that's just the way it is. We do work really hard to keep them consistent across the schools, but when we have

025three elementary schools, that consistency is harder, or that efficiency is not there like it was. If you only had one elementary school, that would be an easy thing. Specialists, you can see how our class sizes have changed a little bit. And then we're moving on to middle. Do you have any questions for me? Was I clear on any questions? Great. Middle school's up. All right, this first slide is sixth grade numbers. And you'll see just a couple things to point out is throughout the slides, six, seven, and eight, you're going to see lower average numbers in English language arts classes and math classes. Some of the reason for that is... Students that receive special education services are typically pulled out of those classes and not out of social and science. And so those numbers will

026be a bit smaller. And where there's opportunities to invest in lower class sizes, I'll typically move towards math and language arts to invest in lower class sizes. So you'll see that throughout all three slides. You might notice why there was 11 sections in sixth grade there. One of the sections in sixth grade for incoming sixth graders is an intervention ELA class. So it's a small group class. that we're able to use general education dollars for to offer a smaller group to help them develop as they jump into the middle school. A couple other things to note is you see the music sections down on the bottom? Those three music sections are 50 plus. Those are our choir sections. Our choir sections are pretty high. We have lots of interest in music. And we have our

027one choir teacher, Sue, who works with an accompanist as well. On to seven. Again, you'll see the numbers for language arts and math are lower, and you'll see that they each have an additional section there as well to help keep those numbers down. One I'll get into that in a little bit here, but the again that's for some pullouts that 33 you see that 33 plus in language arts That's an enriched language arts section. We're going to run into challenges from time to time of whether to run two or run three This is in that sense of where we ran two with higher section numbers and that's that changes each year in seventh and eighth grade Again, you'll see choir down there are 50 plus Our choirs in seventh grade are 41, 49, 53, and

02861. And they vary because of scheduling needs and just how scheduling constraints work. Real quick, enriched language arts was the enriched part. Yeah, it's an elective option that we start in seventh grade. So students it's challenged by choice So it's typically a more rigorous course that gives students exposure to pre AP AP classes to see what that feels like and see if that's a track they want to Follow as they move into high school. So it's you yeah eighth grade Again, you'll see that the ELA and math have lower numbers That section of 33 in math, that's also an accelerated section. Math at the middle school is still placed. We don't allow challenge by choice in math. We only do that in language arts. But that is one of our higher sections, our accelerated, faster-moving

029sections. You'll notice that in our encores, that those, Encore and Phi Ed, has high numbers in eighth grade. And some of that is due to we had some late summer adjustments in our offerings. And trying to adjust and get things moved around in our schedule late in the game made it quite a challenge to get those class sizes balanced out. I do have a plan to have that corrected next year. You'll also see high numbers in music. Choir in eighth grade is 53, 55, 58. Again, high numbers, which is a good problem to have. And then band has two sections, and one of them has 63. But band also is running with two staff members. That last slide on here for the middle school, you see we went down. I mean, we decreased 1.5 or

030greater in almost all areas except for music and fiat. and that was intentional. That was to bring our class sizes down after that first year of cuts was a goal. We were pretty high when we compared ourselves with other comparable districts, and this year we were able to bring them down. You can see, like in language arts and math, we're down three to four students on average, which is pretty great. Now, one thing about that is in 23-24 is when we first implemented the cuts. Prior to that, in 22-23, our numbers this year are better. Our numbers, our class sizes are down comparatively before budget reductions, but core teachers did take on more sections of students. So they previously had three, and now they have four, potentially five sections in language, arts, math, social studies,

031and science. And so although their class sizes went down, they're seeing more students. Questions? Thank you. Good evening. for the high school. The first slide here, you can see our core courses. The vast majority of these courses are all courses required for graduation. There are some electives sprinkled in here as well because these departments all do offer electives as well, but the vast majority of these courses are going to be core courses required for graduation. We try to make our living in that yellow column. Just so you know, as we do sectioning, we're knee-deep in that right now. I always use 30 as kind of a rule of thumb that we try to create sections of 30, knowing that if you create sections of 30 when you put the whole puzzle together, some of those

032are going to drop to 25 or 26, but some are also going to go up to 33 or 34. So you try to stay as close to that 30 as you can. What these numbers don't show you is that as we do the sectioning, we also put into, we take into account, we wouldn't put the same number of... I wouldn't use 30 for a number if I am using Algebra 9 or a freshman algebra class or an English 9. However, if I'm running a calculus or a trigonometry class, they're going to be at 32 or 33, right? Because those are your older students, more advanced students taking more rigorous courses. The other reason we do that is that over the past four years, I track the data every year so we can see how many

033kids register for a course. And then at the end of the year, I can go in there and enter how many actually took the course because PSEO comes into play with this. And that impacts what some of our courses are. So you try to look to see because the students that are doing PSEO courses are taking from this pool right here because they're taking core courses required for graduation for the most part, taking their math, their English PSEO courses. So you try to kind of see what trends are. It's not a perfect system, and there's been years that it's worked out perfectly, and there's been years that I got burned by it. But you kind of try to figure out where you want to put those sections. And when you look at the percentages, you

034can see, like especially in our cores, the top four departments were pretty consistent with their numbers, right, throughout all the way through there. But that's also because I'm running sections of anywhere from 8 to probably 12 or 13, depending on the course, right? bigger courses, which means you have more flexibility with scheduling. So when you have conflicts, you can move student schedules around to still make it work because of the vast number of sections that you're offering. This slide is with our elective courses. And on the flip side of the previous slide, there are some courses in here required for graduation as well. But the vast majority of these are going to be more into your elective areas. And if you look on the flip side of the previous screen, our percentages are kind of

035all over the place. That's because for a lot of these courses, they're not running 8 to 12 sections. They're one section or two or three sections. A lot of times, you know, like I always say as we're doing this sectioning, like the number 50 is like the worst number you can have because you know that's got to be two sections. But if you drop 10 kids from that course as you're getting through conflicts, you got 40. That's still too big for a section, but it's not great two sections either. So that's where these numbers get. a little bit more up and down and all over the place, just because we don't have as many sections that are being run there. So that's why the percentages are going that way, kind of all over the place,

036but we do our best to try to balance it because we also want to make sure that when it comes to like our AP courses or our elective courses, that's what students come to high school for. They want those opportunities to explore different things. So you want to make sure you stay strong in your elective areas and your college courses and your AP courses that you can offer. And the last one, again, just the comparables to what the elementary and the middle school has. You can see from 23 to 24 to this past year, 24, 25, a lot of them went down by a little bit. You know, some go higher. And every year you're going to have, you know, like to Ms. Swanson's point, they have it by grade level. We'll have a bubble

037every now and then. It'll go through by department just with the number of students that are taking courses or electives. But it is nice to see that those numbers are staying pretty consistent or going down a little bit. And it also puts us comparable with our neighbors or our comparable schools, whether that's conference schools or the schools that we use as comparables, such as, you know, the Montemita and Monticello's, you know, et cetera. And then the last thing on there, that's something that, as you know, a part of our strategic plan is something that we are continuing to focus on is how do we get our PSU kids to stay on campus by highlighting what we offer for AP courses, CIS courses. You know, our students can get a lot of college credits without ever

038leaving our campus and making sure we continue to highlight that and promote that with our students and with our parents. Questions for me? I have a question. With the amount of elective courses that are being offered, are there, like, between, like, this year and last year, like, are they staying the same? Are less elective courses being offered or more? Like, what's the, how is that going with the high school? That's always driven by student registration every year. So for example, a department will have, depending on how big a department is, but if you have a business department, they might have 18 different course offerings. You're never going to run all 18 on a given year because it depends on what you get for student registration. So these courses that come in with 13 kids that

039registered or eight kids that registered, those get redlined. And then we reassign those kids to other electives they've taken. So for the most part, the courses stay pretty consistent, but that's because that's what the students have registered for. We have some courses in our catalog that just for whatever reason, they never go. And then we have some electives that you can just guarantee they're going to go every year. And I can probably tell you every year how many sections we're going to have. But that's based every year based on, or every year that's based on student registration and what they select for courses. How many students do you need to have registered to make sure that the elective goes forward? Great question. That largely depends upon the course. If it's an AP course or a

040CIS or a college and school course, we always try to make sure we offer it because those students are taking that course for a specific reason. But for the most part, if I can't get to 25 in a course, we won't run it. Now, that's not going to say that we haven't run a CIS course or AP course at 22 or 23, because we have, especially if it's a singleton or a one course, right? We always want to make sure that, you know, a student taking a CIS Spanish is doing that because they worked all the way through the ranks to take a college credit Spanish course. So we want to make sure we continue to offer that. But for the most part, we try to be in the mid-20s or above. And then it's

041also that crystal ball of, you know, if I have 25 who register, that doesn't mean once you go through, if it's a singleton class, you know you're going to have conflicts, that 25 could become 12 in a hurry. And then we have to go back and redline a course and reassign those kids again. But like I said earlier, we try to maintain those as much as we can because that's what makes a high school strong, and that's the draw for students to come in. is to have those elective opportunities. Can I ask one more? Sorry. Sure. About the CIS courses, right? That's the college and school. Is there an effort to bring more of those? Because I know you were saying that we have a desire to have them do those more or AP more

042than the PSEO. Are there other college and school courses that we're looking to add to our catalog? So there's two different, two distinctions there. And we use a lot of acronyms here. CIS is college and school. Those are classes that a student will take over the course of a semester or two trimesters, and it's like a college class. It's run through the University of Minnesota, Southwest State University, I mean, a variety of schools. And it's like a college course where you take that over the course of the two trimesters and you earn your grade all the way through. There's pros and cons to that. You know, it's nice that you can do that work over the course of two trimesters. but you're also working through a college or university, and over the years they've continued

043to up the ante as to what they require for licensure to do those courses. And it's become very difficult to maintain those because when they first came out with them, any math teacher could teach it. And now they've said, no, you have to have a master's in this course in order to teach that type of thing. So that's become very tricky to manage. The other thing we have is AP, or advanced placement courses. an advanced placement course they will do over the course of two trimesters. At the end of it, they have to take a test, and they have to get a three or higher to earn the college credit. So it's not as nice in that you're putting all of your eggs into that test, but it's also nice from the fact that AP

044courses are a national test, so they're more widely accepted across the country when students go to college. And also, I can take any teacher and send them to the AP Institute in the summer and get them certified to teach a course. That's not going to require them to pay for graduate credits to be certified. The college and school courses are great, but when a teacher leaves or retires, it's really hard to find somebody to replace them to maintain that course unless you have somebody on staff, which isn't always there. Sorry. Can I just add on to that real quick? Because one of the things, though, because it is a part of our strategic plan, is to find an increase in the percentage of students that are taking both those classes we're talking about, CS and

045AP. as well as courses designated for like tech ed or vocational kinds of stuff. So higher ed type coursework has been a goal, and there has been an increase over the last couple of years of some of those offerings. And even though there's not necessarily one in queue right now, there's also the how can we continue to expand the number of students taking those rigorous courseworks. True statement? Yeah, and also to your question, yes, we're always looking at opportunities that if we can fit it into our system, how we could do, whether it's in a world language or a business or, you know. art something that we can continue to offer those college level courses that might keep students on campus. Is there more of a requirement from the colleges than just having the teacher

046have a master's degree? Or is that basically like they have to have a master's degree in order to teach those CIS courses, or is there more? Typically, it's that they have to be, for example, if we're going to do a college and school speech, the university is going to say they have to have a master's in speech. And a lot of teachers, when they go and get their master's, it's, you know, in education or, you know. variety of things. Rarely do you go get just a master's in speech. And of course those colleges and universities offer a great program for our teachers to take those credits through them. But it's just hard to maintain that. Can I just offer one quick comment before they move on? Just an acknowledgment, I think Shane talked about this

047earlier, that kind of year over year there's a decrease in the average class size for middle school. But again, that was a part of the board's acknowledgment and willingness to carve out and add some additional FTE kind of back in. I realize it wasn't add. It was a hold them while a smaller cohort moved in or was moving in and moving out. And certainly the impact was lower class sizes. But I think we want to acknowledge. even though you didn't make this statement that compared to two years ago, average class sizes down with student contact number of offerings or courses, sections that that teaches up. I just acknowledging that was a year when our middle school teachers did have to deal with significantly increased class sizes. And as we were talking about some comparisons that

048put us towards the higher end of comparative school districts when it came down to average class sizes, meaning thank you to the middle school who I think last year went through a lot of those larger class sizes. Hopefully they're seeing the impact of that investment of FTE comparatively year over year. So again, an acknowledgement of the investment because it looks like, on a numbers perspective, it had an impact. Thank you. All right, now we'll welcome up Pam Carman for our finance report. Okay, good evening. So first I'll just go through a couple of quick highlights. The first page here is, again, the general fund. So on the revenue side, I just want to go back to federal again, and I just want to make sure that everyone understands what we actually get in federal revenue

049and then just kind of understands how we operationalize that. So basically about 1.5% of our revenue is coming in federal revenue, and basically it's two buckets, federal, special ed. which is 88%, and then 12% is our title funding. And so we typically will draw this down historically twice. year from mde so the money gets allocated from the federal to mde and then mde distributes it to the local school district so we haven't done any drawdowns yet this year for just a little bit that we have that you see there for 3755 so that's why you see it being light the other thing i want to point out in the other two previous years we did have some esser funding so some of that is reflecting some of those coveted relief dollars that you're seeing when

050you're comparing it to january 31st of 24. and then also January 31st of 2023. So I just wanted to give you that context. The other one I want to point out in revenue, and I've mentioned this before, is our local. And a lot of the increase you're seeing there in local is related to our interest earnings. And we haven't had a lot of interest that we've earned in the past. But the other thing that I found out is operationally. That is all of our interest earnings across all funds. So typically that hasn't been allocated until the end of the fiscal year. So some of those interest earnings will also go to fund two and four. So I just want to make sure you have that context. On the expense side in the general fund, I

051think the thing I want to point out to you is what's happening in other financing uses under the program series. So what I want you to understand there is that is where our property and casualty insurance lives in the program series, and it's also where our work comp lives. And we've seen increases in both of those. And so you're seeing some of that here when we're looking at where we're at as a percentage of our seeing it as the increase because you're seeing that increase in both of those line items. It is something I'm keeping an eye on because we got the renewal for work comp for fiscal year 26, and it looks like it's going to increase again. So there's some additional information we'll have for you as we start planning for fiscal year

05226. And then going into the other funds for funds two and four and looking at fund six and seven and some of these other funds, the one thing I want to point out that I'm finally happy to report is our community education fund, our revenue now is lined up. So we are no longer, we've got everything done now through the end of January, so we're getting everything in about 48 hours. So we're getting that all trued up. So you're seeing really good. solid numbers there as it relates to our revenue for community education. I don't really have any other highlights unless there's specific questions about the finance report. Any questions? All right, thank you very much. All right, moving on to our action items. Oh, nope, sorry, I saw it. We've got the 6D1. All

053right, thank you. So are we ready? Yes. Okay, so next we're going to go over just some of our general fund financial projections, looking over some of the long-term planning, and then also we'll get into a little bit more details of the fiscal year 25. I'm calling it preliminary revised. In April, we'll actually bring the final revised budget to you, but these are just some of the preliminary numbers that we've pulled together so far in working with all the department managers and the building principals. So before I get into a lot of the details of the numbers, I want to make sure that everyone really starts to understand these different fund balance categories. And so I just am listing through the different ones here unassigned. Everyone's probably the most familiar with. That's the one we

054can pretty much use for any general use operating instructional administrative purpose that we need. Non-spendable, that is the money that is money that isn't in liquid form, meaning And insurance premiums are a really good example because we will pay our July insurance premium for medical in June. So it's not in our cash in our June financial statements, but we can't spend it because we already spent it, so it's going to hit in July. So that usually on our fund balance report goes in our non-spendable. Then we have our restricted and reserve fund balance. Our restricted and reserve fund balance is basically made up of the revenues that we get from the state for restricted and intended purposes that we didn't spend in that fiscal year. So the money carries over to the next year and

055gets set aside because it can only be spent for those intended purposes. And the last one is the assigned fund balance. So this is if we choose, you choose as a board to take money and set it aside for a specific purpose for future year. a future year or years, you can choose to do that. And a good example of that might be if you decide to do a schedule or programming change and you know it might have additional costs. You might want to set some of the fund balance aside to cover that. Another good one is when you have contract obligations in the near future or in the far future and you're like, I want to set this money aside in fund balance to make sure we have the money there for those. future

056contract obligations. So I want you to understand that as I go through some of the next slides so you can see what's happened historically and where we're at, and then I also think that will lead into some of our longer-term planning and discussions. So this slide you've seen before, this is looking at our audited unassigned general fund balance. This is going back from fiscal year 13 all the way over to fiscal year 24. And you can see here was fiscal year 18 when we started to have a negative 4% in our unassigned fund balance. What you haven't always seen is what has our audited, non-spendable, restricted, and assigned general fund balance looked like over the same time period. So here you can see we had assigned, restricted, and non-spendable about $3.1 million. Then you can

057see... Here in fiscal year 19, it went down to $100,000, and now we're in the process of rebuilding this back up. This is where the superintendent often talks about not only did we have no money, but the cupboards were bare, and that's really what this is starting to show you. And then I put the two to... Yeah, go ahead. Can I make one comment on that one? Yes. Just because that final number looks larger than all the previous one, making sure that we also provide the context that over that same period of time, our budget has grown. So if you go back to 2013... That was roughly 7% of our general fund, which we were spending about $33 million a year. And if you fast forward to 24, it's a bigger number, but it still

058represents roughly 7% of our $50-plus million budget at this point. So from an apples-to-apples comparison, those are similar numbers 10 years apart, if that makes sense. Even though the number's bigger, as a percentage of the whole, it's roughly the same. Thanks. Yeah, no, thank you. And then in this slide, I put the two together so you can start to see what our audited total general fund balance actually looks like. And this is what you'll see on the balance sheet of the audit report when you look at the general fund on the audit report, which is also why I want you to start to understand some of these numbers. And so this is what's happened historically, the dark purple being the unassigned, the light purple being the restricted and non-spendable and assigned. And so I just

059want to have you have that context now as you start to go forward and we start to project out what those differences are in some of those funds and what it looks like when that money is coming in. So before I get into the projections, I want everyone to understand the assumptions. So during these projections, when we'll go forward, I assume that we were only going to get a 2% general formula allowance increase. State statute says it's a 2% floor, a 3% ceiling. I have assumed the 2%. So I want you to have that information. The other thing I want you to understand is for now, I assume that we were carrying the same staffing levels from fiscal year 25 forward. We aren't making any changes in any of our staffing for declining enrollment or

060any shifts. I've also assumed that the salary and benefit increases are based upon what we've agreed to contractually. For those groups that aren't, aren't contractually approved at this point, I assume similar. Similar assumptions based on the contracts that were approved. And that added across for everything for salaries and benefits through fiscal year 28. So I want to make sure you have that context. And then the last thing is on the unassigned fund balance, I am assuming that we are continuing to spend the restricted... the restricted revenue that's coming in, we're spending it the exact same way we were intending to spend it in fiscal year 25. That may or may not be the case as we start to do our planning. So I just want you to have that context as you're starting to look

061at some of these long-term projections and looking at our non-restricted and our restricted revenue and expenditures. And then these are the enrollment assumptions I'm using. So I am assuming an enrollment, slight enrollment decline from 3883 and 2425 to 3729 and 2829. And these are end of year ADM enrollments. So these are the enrollment numbers that I'm using as I'm projecting the revenue going forward. And then here's what the numbers look like. So you can see I started with our actual audited results for 23-24. So the numbers I'll point out is here was our general fund revenue at $56 million. Here was our general fund expenditures at $48 million. And so here was our total fund balance at that $4,555,000 combination of restricted and unassigned. And then here it's broken down between the non-rependable, restricted, and

062assigned at that 4.2 and those 304. So that's our starting point. Then I'm bringing in the revised budget, and I'll get into some of the revised budget numbers later, but I am assuming this is our revised budget number that I'm sharing with you this evening, and I am showing that we are going to have an increase in our unassigned fund balance to $3.2 million. I'll get into some of those numbers later. And then I'm projecting that out for 26, 27, and 28. And the things I want you to notice is you'll see that when we get out to 27, when that final year of that contract settles, contract settlements hit, we are actually, our expenses are exceeding our revenue by $1.7 million. And the reason this is important is because as you think about our

063planning and our budgeting for fiscal year 26, we have to be very intentional about what we're looking at because if we even project that out another year, then we're looking at expenses exceeding revenue by $3.4 million. So this is a perspective I think that we want to make sure we have as we do our short-term planning and we need to see what the impact is over the long term. And I'll stop to see if the superintendent, if you have anything you want to say before I get into Fiscal Year 25. Just briefly, thank you, Pam. This is essentially putting numbers to conceptually what we've been talking about from the beginning. And this arc is kind of playing out in the projections when she starts to use some of those assumptions. Granted, yes, there is some

064of the ability to take a look at the restricted and non-spendable and how we can level things off a little bit faster. But the point is, yes, there is a deficit spend coming down the road, and we're going to have to take some time to manage our way into that. Correct. And that's a good thing to point out because if you can see or you can see our general fund, I was talking about my assumptions. So you can see our general fund restricted revenues here in 26, I'll use this, 4.3. You can see our general fund restricted expenditures are 3.3. So we're adding to our restricted, and that's the part that the superintendent was just talking about as we start thinking about how do we look at shifting or looking at these resources and leveraging

065those restricted dollars. Can I ask a question? You know, on the assumptions you said that there's no, you know, there's no right sizing, if you will, for like the declining enrollment. If you look from the last audited years to 26 or 27, 28, you know, you're down nearly 200 students. So I would assume that as, you know, if people are retiring or they go to new positions, what kind of impact will that have to our numbers? Will the April numbers have any kind of those assumptions in place so that we have more? accurate numbers is what we're looking at in deficits? I'll let Pam talk about the assumptions she's going to use. We are going to monitor our class sizes. We heard the class size report earlier and adjust our staffing. to the degree that

066we can to stay within those class size parameters. That's not a perfect science that if you lose exactly 20 kids throughout your system, you can exactly cut one to FTE, especially at the elementary level. But in concept, yes, we do plan to make some of those adjustments as we would any given year. And I just think that is part of managing and monitoring this budget is to make sure that if students go up, staffing should go up. If students go down, staffing should go down. Sure. I'm just wondering, will we see any kind of... you know obviously we have some history on like okay you need this many staff for this many students so if will we have any better indication of what that looks like with in april numbers yeah my intent would be

067in april um so we'll get the the final Fiscal year 25 budget, final done. We'll start looking at a preliminary fiscal year 26. When we start looking at a preliminary fiscal year 26, we are going to always have to bring these long-range years of 27 and 28 forward. We always are. So we can understand what that looks like, and then, yes, I can start making assumptions for assuming we continue to make adjustments for fluctuations in enrollment. That will be coming forward when we start looking at fiscal year 26. Absolutely. If I could just put one little... piece on that as well. Our enrollment, when you look at it year over year, cohort survival is very predictable. We know based on how many second graders we have this year, how many third graders we're going to

068have next year, that's fairly stable. But it's always a guess when you're starting with kindergarten. There's always projections and there's room for error. And so that is something we have to pay attention to. Every year, every district has to use projections to figure out their kindergarten enrollment. And just to piggyback on that, I pulled data from the state of Minnesota looking at births in the state. And in 2019, we had 66,033 births. In 2020, we had 63,462. 2020 are the 2025-2026 kindergartners. So that's 2,571 less kindergartners across the state. And in 2023, which is going to be 2028, they're projecting, I mean, they're saying we had 61,671, which is another 4,362 from 2019. This is an ongoing state issue with our birth rates. and low kindergarten. So about that, still talking about the estimated enrollment.

069So we were looking at the projected for 28, 29. And of course, they're going down as we go. Is that because of just statewide birth rates going down? Or are there other things that you're adding into that besides that? There's also some, so you have to look at mobility across the state in addition to the birth rates. And so I'm looking at that as well. And then also, I look at, and I don't know if you remember the enrollment. presentation I did but I'm also looking at what's happening with with families coming in and out of Waconia Public Schools either from other districts coming in our families going elsewhere either through parochial private or so all of that is factored in as we look at these enrollment projections long term and specifically kindergarten. So just

070looking at like what has happened historically with that movement and assuming that it's going to be similar. Correct. But the majority of our decline, to the superintendent's point, is the lower kindergarten classes coming in and then those migrating through the grades. We have a really solid, solid retention. Once we get the kids in kindergarten, they typically stay. Can you back up a couple slides to the AMD enrollment one? Mm-hmm. When you do this one in the future, could you add percentages of decrease? Sure. Above there, that would be. Yes. I was just looking at it. Like, we're adding 2% income on the income side, and we're going almost 2% or 1% to 2% decline on the admins, which is why our budget is staying exactly the same. I mean, if we look across all of

071these years, the revenue is the same exact dollars. Yes. Because those are. Essentially balancing each other out. That is correct. And the other thing to note is, you know, we're declining more in the elementary than we are in the secondary. And the secondary has the 1.2 waiting for the adjusted pupil units. So you're seeing a little bit of both of that. Yeah. But yes, I will definitely do that. That would just be helpful as we're projecting. And anything else like that, there's feedback that you think would be helpful for clarification, please let me know. Okay, on to the fiscal year 25 revised budget. So here I'm showing you again your actual audited results from 23-24. Then I'm showing your original 24-25 budget. And then I'm projecting where we're going to be at on a preliminary

072basis for a fiscal year 25 budget. On your original 25 budget, there was an assumption that we were going to have revenue in excess of expense of $2.3 million. Now, based on a revised budget, we're going to look at a little bit higher number. And part of the reason for that, just so everybody understands, is when the 24-25 original budget was built, the settlements were not finalized. And so there was assumptions made in the revised 23-24 as well as the original 24-25 that now we have that information, it is now known, and so now we're kind of rolling that forward. And so that's what we're seeing coming to fruition in this revised 24-25 budget. So I just want everybody to have that context. Then if I just drill a little bit deeper and start looking

073at the revenue breakdown, so this is looking at the difference between the restricted and the unrestricted in our revenue for fiscal year 25 revised. And then it's looking at our percentages of state revenue, federal revenue, and local revenue. And again, you'll see there the federal revenue is about 1.5%. The local revenues are 20.7%. That's our property taxes, our student fees, donations. And then obviously our... State revenues are the highest at almost 78%. So that's just the breakdown of our revenue sources. Then this is looking at our uses of those general fund dollars. And so here you can see that our restricted expenditures are about $3.3 million. And again, I want to just point out, so we're saying $4.5 in revenue, but $3.3 in expenses. That may change as we start to do and continue our

074planning, but that's where we're set right now. And then we can see that the majority of that is salaries and benefits at $56.4 plus $20.9. So just under $70. Purchase services is running about 15.8, supplies at 3.5, and capital expenditures at 2.5. And then other expenditures is a very small percentage there, under 1%. So that's for the general fund. When I get into nutrition services, you'll see our revenue is about the same. Our expenditures are going down just slightly. Now, you will see we are projecting a negative, or our expenses exceed our revenue. The food service fund has been running. Running at a fund balance that's a that's an excess of six months of expenditures and MDE doesn't like that and So we are purposely trying to spend some of that fund balance down and

075so we've been doing that this last year I think we were about 58,000 over what where we needed to be so that's some of what you're seeing in some of these numbers and we're going to continue to monitor that and get that in alignment And then you can see the breakdown of federal revenues, state revenues, local sales. Local sales is really coming from our a la carte at our middle school and our high school, vending, and then sales to adults. So that's where the majority of those local revenues are coming from. And then the last one is looking at our community education budget. Our revenues might be going up a little bit slightly, and we are also making a slight adjustment and an increase in some of our expenses associated with some of our contract

076settlements. So these are the projected. We are still projecting a profit, though, in community out of about just slightly under $200,000 for our fiscal year 25 revised budget. And with that, I'll open up to questions on the fiscal year 25 revised. Any questions? I think we peppered you pretty good with the last presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Now, we move on to action items. So, where is Matt? He's got to come out from behind the curtain. Here he comes. All right, item 7A, approval of community survey proposal by Morris Leatherman. Matt Thomas presenting. Yeah, thanks for having me back. So at the work session a couple weeks ago, we talked, we had Peter, obviously, to explain to you a little bit about what a community survey would look like. You guys had some questions and

077just were looking for some more information. So obviously in board book this week, you see three different documents that I just want to go through a little bit. And then if you have questions, obviously feel free. So what I was able to obtain from a school district in the metro. was a 30 question version and a 40 question version that were given a year about a year apart so they started with the 30 question version in 2023 and then decided to i believe after a failed referendum decided to go back add 10 questions in 2024 so that is from the same school district and then you also got a large Kind of results packet this would be exactly what you would receive from Peter when he would come to present our results And this is

078from a different school district that actually Does a Morris Leatherman community survey the 70 question version? Barely semi regularly about every other year you can see in the results how they had kind of four different bars looking at 2019 2021 2023 2024 And so just pointing out a couple of the differences you'll notice in the 30 and 40 question version But there's some, just as Peter talked about last week at the work session, how it starts with demographics and then kind of gets right into tax impact type questions. And you'll notice in the results packet from Prior League Savage. There's more of those atmospherics that Peter talked about. Satisfaction with various aspects of our system, right? So quality of education, their satisfaction with decision-making, communication aspects, financial stewardship, safety and security technology, all sorts of

079different areas. And then also I think the difference that I see in the 70-question version compared to the 30 and the 40 is that they're able to dig. kind of one level deeper on those tax impact questions, whether that's testing key messages that you might use in a referendum or framing questions differently. It's kind of in a positive aspect and a negative aspect, right? So you could ask a question about class sizes in a positive standpoint, right? Have you been satisfied with the class sizes your student has been in? And then you could also ask it in a negative version. If this were to fail and your class sizes went to 30, would that change your opinion on whether you would support this or not, right? So it's kind of asking a similar question two

080different ways and seeing if you get a different answer. And it's really not, they're asking questions not just how they feel, but then also why they feel that way. You saw that in a couple of the results. You know, why would you not support it? Is it because of inflation and cost of living or taxes going up or you think schools are already adequately funded? And so it just gives us a little bit more data to work with to understand how our community is feeling. Any questions? First, seeking a motion to approve the community survey proposal by Morris Leatherman. The decision is between a 40 and a 70 question survey. Take a position. Change that. So, yeah, so that raises an interesting point. I move that we approve the 70-question survey. Okay. What is the

081cost difference between a 70 and a 40 again? The proposals Peter gave us, the 40-question survey came out at about $16,000, and the 70 question was right around $25,000. So I guess one thing that I would just point out is that this first district that did a 30 and then a 40 within a 12-month span. I'm assuming they paid about $32,000 to do those two times right after a failed vote. So that could be one aspect you would look at and maybe why doing the 70 right off the bat might be worth the while. Do you have an example of what, I mean, can we ask questions now or do you want to do your? You should actually. We need a second. Either we need a second or it needs to die and then somebody

082else needs to make a motion. I'll second. Okay. Now we can discuss. Okay. So we have the questions from a 30, the questions from a 40, and then the results from a 70. So I guess what I'm struggling a little bit was, like, what does the 70, you know, what are the results of a 40 get us? I can see the benefit going 30 to 40, but what does that get us? And that's, like, confusing to me. I mean, I'm just trying to be, you know, fiscally responsible. I'm sure there's other places we can use $9,000. So, you know, does that get us? And I guess the other thing I'm struggling with a little bit is, you know, we're looking at testing different messages. Like, I mean, I'm newer to the board. I'm not, don't

083recall all the other discussion, like, but we talked about a technology levy. And like when you, you know, is it that or is it something else? Because I think that there has been a lot of distrust in the past. with the community. So if we're not upfront what we want this money for and then we're testing like, oh, would you pay $13 more or would you, how much money do we need? And then we test that in versions of that versus let's, we're not selling like, you know, a new kind of chip to a consumer, right? And testing what they want and doing market research to figure out what is the product. Like we need to say, this is what we need and then is the community gonna support that? A lot of these things

084are all coming together kind of at once, right? Some of the work that we're doing as an admin team that Brian can talk about, where we're figuring out our priorities and what things could fit under a tech levy, if that's the direction we decide to go. But there is a lot of things coming together at once. And so that's how this possibly could be helpful because it could steer us in a direction that our community feels is the right direction. If you feel like you want that feedback from the community to say, yes, this is the direction we want you to go or we think that we would support you to go. So I think... You can also ask questions about trust. You saw some of that in the Prior Lake results, right? About do

085you trust our decision-making? Do you trust us to make a good decision? And this might be the right time, being that we haven't done one of these in our district since 2018, to find out where people are, right? With that trust aspect. So are you saying that we would use the survey to also just even figure out what type of levy we're doing? Like we wouldn't already know what type of levy we're doing before we do the survey with them? Yes, because we don't even necessarily know if we are doing a levy. So yes, I think it would help us decide should we do a levy and then what type, how much. I think it would just help get the community's value. It's like, yep, this is something I think that we need to invest

086in. So I do think that there are still, in my opinion, a lot of different options on the table. And I think that there are different ways we could go. And so I think I would find it helpful to kind of find out what do people really want us to do. And just as a refresher from the last discussion that we had, hypothetically, if we would move forward with a 70-question survey and invest that money, do we as, or does the admin team, or do we as a board have some kind of say into what direction we want to go with the questioning, and do we kind of inform the surveyors what we're looking for? Peter would definitely sit down with Brian and I, for sure, and if you as a board, wanted to give

087some feedback on what questions you thought would be asked. I'm sure we would for sure take that under advisement. We did talk about that in the work session, and I think the asterisk on that one is trying to do that as a full board is going to slow the process down because you have to do that at a posted meeting, and I'm not sure that all that would be in place by the next meeting, which means now you're waiting until late March. If we wanted to collaborate on that one, and I'm not looking to close the board out of that conversation, but there may be... you know, chair, officers, or one of our otherwise committees that perhaps would want to join and have some input on that one so that we're working on that together,

088but without the clunkiness of what it looks like to do a seven-person board meeting to go through a 70-question survey. It might be complicated, but that is something that is at the discretion that Peter did talk about where there might be some of those questions that are specific to, you know, referendum questions that he's used before, but when it comes down to the atmospheric, they can tailor questions to what it is we're trying to learn about our community and the support for the schools. Did Morris Leatherman have any sort of statistics on levies that passed using a 40 questionnaire versus a 70 questionnaire? Like, do they have a higher pass rate with a 70 questionnaire? They don't necessarily have a higher pass rate, but I believe Peter proclaims that it's within a lower margin of

089error when you get the results back. I just wonder if, because 40 questions is still a lot of questions, right? Like, that's a lot of questions. I wonder if that's sufficient to kind of really get a sense of how people are feeling about a levy. With a lot of those atmospheric questions, couldn't that be something that we could just do as a district, you know, something that we send to everybody, the type of questions like, how are you feeling about the district in general? Like, what do you think is going well, right? Like, is that something that we need to pay somebody else $9,000 to do? Is that... Are those extra 30 questions that more valuable in helping us get a sense on whether or not a levy would be successful or not? I wonder

090if, I don't know. My feeling is that if we do it ourselves, we're going to not get a scientific survey. Like it's not going to. Parents are going to answer it. It's going to be skewed, skewed pretty heavily. I'm much more interested in the voters than the parents. I mean, parents are a section of the voters, but for me, deciding whether we're going to go forward with a levy or not, I want to know where our voters stand, and I don't know. I have a much better idea where our parents stand. I am a parent. I talk to lots of parents, but I don't know where our voters stand. from a larger standpoint. And there's been so much churn since the last time we did anything like this. I mean, politically, as well as COVID,

091as well as SOD, like, I don't trust anything that we did earlier. Now... I was speaking a little bit with Brian. I feel a 70 would be better now. And then if we decide that this is not the time, definitely following up with a 30 later because now we have an idea of what questions to ask. The 70 just gives us a little more ability to ask more questions so that we can figure out what's going on. Right? I don't know that we know the questions that we want to ask right now. You know, all the questions. And part of that is timeline, too. If we were having this discussion possibly last year, setting this up, we might have a better idea of, like, are we specifically wanting to go for a tech levy? Well,

092I don't know that. I don't know that that's what we want to go for. Then we can narrow those questions better. Part of what I understood also from the presentation was that even with 40 questions the demographics burned through a significant portion of those questions pretty quick. Right. So the 70 questions gives us more of a picture. Yeah, I just as I read through the 30 question and 40 question examples there wasn't a whole lot left to be kind of figured out on those. So to speak to your point heather and like you guys have made the distinction down there if if we're seeking for um a specific acceptance or an idea of acceptance of a whatever it is we're proposing to the community um i think a 40 question survey satisfies that that need

093however the atmospherics might be what is of more value here in this situation since so much has changed since the last time we've done it so um just something to consider there's there's not There's not a whole lot of information to be or insights to be gained from the 40 question questionnaire just reading through those questions And I think there's a lot more for us to learn So I probably be on but then it almost seems like the surveys of two purposes right one to figure out if a levy would be Likely to pass and one to just generally see how people are feeling about the district in general, right? So then it's almost becomes two purposeful I mean, I would like to know how the community is feeling about the district, but do I

094want to pay $9,000 to figure out how the community is feeling about the district? I don't know, right? Like, is that a good use of our... But those feelings lead right into whether they're going to... whether the community will pass a levy or not. 40 questions would also lead to that, right? I think 40 questions that are pretty directed towards passing a levy or not would also give us that information about whether or not a levy will pass. If we knew exactly what levy we were... Posing I would say yes, we could do that, but we don't know exactly what we're proposing yet. If any yeah, if any that's what I also think I mean we could we could get results that tell us now is not the time for the levy and I think

095we might know why I mean those extra questions might tell us gosh We really need to work on this before the community is gonna support us. So it might give us kind of a roadmap of We really need to address this issue, and then hopefully in the future we can come back. Or we just need to wait because the current political environment is not allowing for this. It has nothing to do with us. It may have nothing to do with the district itself. It may just be the environment we're in. But if we don't know those reasons, we go out and do the 40 and it says no, and we're like, oh, we don't know why they're saying no. We're going to make assumptions and not be able to set up for the future. for

096oh well maybe we can do it next year or the year after um setting that up properly so yeah i would just say that i think we're all in agreement that we need to be good stewards of that nine thousand dollars in the difference right but we also need to be good stewards in the information that we can get access to and what we could potentially be learning and doing with that information moving forward so it's really just a determination is that nine thousand dollars a good investment to learn those atmospherics at this point in time An example, Heather, of like a question that I think would fall into that atmospheric section, but it's also tied to a referendum, would be if you ask community members their satisfaction with, say, teachers as a group and

097the school board as a group and the superintendent and administration as a group. And if teachers get a 95% satisfaction rate and the school board gets an 85% and the superintendent gets a 75% – sorry, Brian. Then we know we need to use teachers as our messengers when we're trying to sell the referendum to the community, right? So that's one example of how an atmospheric question could tie into the referendum. Another thing would be if you're asking, is safety and security more important to you or academic offerings or whatnot? Depending on how long of a runway we have from when we decide to put the question on the ballot to the referendum, that gives me time to inform people about where we think there's a gap in what's true and what they believe. So that's

098just another example, I guess, where I think the atmosphere questions could help us in the long run. And I think one last point, you know, we're kind of looking at that extra $9,000, which I get. But I think we also, it sounds like most of us are committed to doing something. So if we're saying, okay, we're already going to invest $16,000. I feel like to make the best use of that money, it just seems like to spend that total seems like overall it's a better use of even the initial $16,000. I don't want to spend $16,000 and then feel like I didn't get enough information. And then do what Prior Lake didn't have to add that additional piece on because we wish we would have had that information. So we've had a motion that's been

099seconded to approve the 70-question survey. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Motion carries. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. All right. Item 7B, we'll welcome up Pam again to discuss the award for the vendors for the parking lot projects. Think everything's in the packet, but I'll just put it up here quick So we went out for bids for the parking lot for the middle school and for Lake Town and we with Middle school, you'll see there's some information there in maps with some additional alternates the bids came in very favorable So we're recommending that we proceed with all of the alternates at the middle school and then that we award that to bituminous roadways And then with Lake Town Elementary, we're looking to award that to the Minnesota Roadways. So seeking

100the motion to approve item 7B, award vendors for parking lot projects. So moved. Second. Is there any discussion? Are there any questions? All right. Oh, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. Thank you. Thank you, Pam. Yep. And then lastly, again, Pam, we've got the Item 7C, E-Rate Switches. Yeah, so I just want to make sure everybody's familiar with the E-Rate Program. So the E-Rate Program is basically a program where we were awarded funds, and we have $454,875 left over, but it's a reimbursement program, which means that we will pay for 50% of the award, and then we get reimbursed for 50% of the award. All we're looking for right now is to get the application done and in place to get bids so that if we do decide, after we see the Pivotal

101Logic Technology Assessment, and if we do decide that this is a priority, we have everything in place with the appropriate deadlines so that we can purchase some or none, depending on what the board decides after we see the assessment. that it's in place and we can spend this money, just so everybody's clear, we have 15 months to spend this money because the federal is on a October to September cycle and this money would be spent for us from July 1 of 26 then, I'm sorry, July 1 of 25 through September 30th of 26. That's how long we would have to spend these funds. But if we don't do this, then we're done and we lose it. So I'm just asking for the approval to move forward with the application and start the bid process to

102put it in a position to utilize these funds if you decide that's what you want to do after we see the technology assessment. I'm seeking a motion to provide them 7C, E-rate switches. So moved. Second. Any questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you, Pam. Thank you. All right, moving on to discussion items. Item 8A, first read board policies. Anything to say? So most of these are small changes, just line item changes, nothing too impactful. In 512, Kelly asked the question. of if we have a school newspaper, which we don't at this point. There was, I think before COVID, was that right, Brian? We were talking about it. Yeah, there was a class, they think probably a dozen or maybe 10 years ago, and then a club, and there's a student group right now

103that does some journalism, but it's not a school paper and it hasn't been for a while. So, though the... policy would be in place, it really wouldn't apply to any, that part does not apply. So that was your question. All right. My question to Kim actually would be, do you remember the Tattler? I was looking to see if there was a newspaper, and they said that years ago there was the Waconia High School Tatler. Back in my day, it was called the Chronicle. I don't remember a paper. All right. All right. Thank you very much. Moving on to Item 9, Board Committee Reports. Do we have any reports from any of the committees? No, I think a lot of what we talked about in finance, Pam did a wonderful job covering to the whole board

104tonight. I will report that the Southwest Metro had an eight hour session on Saturday to talk about their new strategic plan. And you will be happy to know that they got a lot of feedback from the districts and other listening sessions. And the strategic plan this year is very student centric. It also calls into account the needs of the member districts, making sure that there's a balance with what the Southwest Metro does. and how it impacts the rest of the districts that participate. They are going through a rebuilding phase, similar to what the ISD 110 did a few years ago. They've got a new administration, and their HR department showed how they have had incredible turnover at the Metro. If you were to talk to anybody that works there, chances are if they've been there

105four years or more, they are veterans. So that was interesting to hear. They do have a challenge with their facilities and staffing. They've been buying buildings, and now it's a matter of how do they take these facilities that were not geared for education, especially for environments like what the Metro does, and turn them into safe spaces both for the staff and for the students. So that's where a lot of their attention is, and also with staffing. And then it was interesting. There was a document that they presented where it was listening sessions that they had had with the superintendents and with staff, with the school board, and going through all of the priorities that each of the different groups saw. It was nice to see that most of them, especially for the superintendents, and I

106get where you guys came from, could be accomplished without a cost. So it was mainly just, you know, again, transparency and, you know, just addressing needs of, you know, the soft needs of the people. It was like, you know, maybe 50% to 60% could be addressed just by modifying policies, modifying, you know, the way they were doing things. Anyway, so like I said, you know, it was a very long day, but... a lot of good results and i think i i almost wish that you all could have sat through it because i learned more about how a district functions i think through those sessions that i did through any of the msba training that we've done so i'll pass on a lot of what i what i got because i took a lot of notes

107so uh all right uh anything else from anybody all right seeking a motion to adjourn All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Anyone want to stay here all night? I may have. I'm not personally responsible, but I was responsible for.