001Good evening everyone. Tonight is um the citizens advisory committee meeting. It's June 3rd, 2025. In attendance are Dr. Layman, Mr. Moraldo, um Kate Ratner, Miss Ratner, Miss Alvarez, Miss Fabian, and our wonderful members of the committee. Um, tonight we're going to do community connections and future opportunities, plus a program and facilities tour. We're going to take a little walk around and show everybody what great things we have here at the high school. And then we're going to review the summer schedule and preview um SY 2526. Mr. Morala, if you would like to. Sure. So, um, one of the, uh, original goals of this committee was to, uh, bring in members, uh, with diverse backgrounds and experiences as a means to help thrive some of our existing and and some of our more innovative programs. Uh,
002one of the things that we had identified as strength of the district was, God bless you, was one of the uh, was basically the unique construct of our community. people that I guess from different not just cultures and and and demographics but professional uh backgrounds. And this has also lined up with uh the revitalization of our high school work-based learning program and some of the other community-based programs which is actively seeking ways to connect our school district with individuals and organizations in the community. So, uh, when trying to figure out a nice way to to take that a step further, we figured it'd be a nice opportunity, especially as we're winding down, uh, the school year, to familiarize committee and, uh, with some of the things that we do here with hopes that we can
003use this new knowledge and additional context to our courses and programs here. um to maybe go out and find some additional partners or maybe go back to the people you associate with in the community that may be retired or working or looking for ways to connect the school district or maybe even um offer some professional opportunities for current students seeking internships or even if we just want to have an opportunity for someone to come in and speak next Monday. Uh to give you an example, we have a uh principal ser principal engineer surveying division coming down to speak with our uh computerated uh design and civil engineering course. Um and and one of the reasons we can do these types of things, it's one thing when you have a guest speaker come in, they say,
004"Hey, you know, I do this that and that's great, right?" But when they can come in and get on the technology and leverage some of the tools and equipment within a practical learning environment that just enhances that type of um learning experience even more so. So um Dr. layman and I would like to share that with you guys tonight and um we'll start with talk about a little bit of the infrastructure the building and how it supports that and then we'll show you some of the facilities and as we're doing that um I'll describe a little bit about the programs that take place and uh what we're hoping to do with them and and how we think that a partnership with community might allow us to improve. Um, so just while we're talking about this,
005one thing that I've been asked by people both in our community and by board members from other school districts is because they've heard of the partnerships that we've had. Um, and I know you sort of make it tailored to the person who's reaching out, but I know a lot of times people are resistant to make that initial contact and would love to, I guess, see information, whether it's on the website or something that they can look at as ways that they can partner with the school district. Is that something that we have available on the website? Yeah. So, we don't I thought it was Yeah. So we do have like a very generic way for community to reach out and and and kind of kickstart a relationship email but like yeah but I think I
006know for yeah there's no there's really no like alocart menu of of partnerships um uh as far as like uh entering into structured agreements with your organizations um that is that you know I think that that's good though to offer something like that because I I do use form letters and things like that. Uh but for tonight's purpose, um what I was what I'm hoping to do, what we're hoping to do is really talk about really, uh bolstering our existing programs through community support. Um and also maybe give us an opportunity to brainstorm some new ideas about how we can expand some of the opportunities within this committee by leveraging community. um uh the individual that's coming in next week, you know, that's not part of any structured agreement. That's just uh we were able
007to successfully for forge a relationship with someone that was willing to donate their time to come speak to our students that are future engineers. So, it doesn't always have to be as formal, right? As as hey, you are official partner of the district. Now, you can come in and speak to the kids. If if you have an interesting message and it lines up with what our curricular is asking us to do, our curriculum is asking us to do our lesson plans that we will we will enterpain that we have guest speakers coming. But isn't there a spot where people can make donations on our website correct? I thought you had said that one. The focus is really funneling anyone that's interested in collaborating with us. Okay. of the community outreach. Then based on a conversation
008with whoever's looking to outreach, we would support whether it's a one-time donation of a piece of technology to a specific school who for a specific reason or if it's a professional that says, "Hey, I have this career experience, can I be of benefit to the district or anything like that?" um we all funnel it through the to the community email which is really the funnels to Zach's office and then uh we make that connection from there. Um you know to go back to an alleart menu like a platinum donor versus a you know silver donor or something like that. I think maybe what would better represent our vision for a partnership or our vision for collaboration is we could probably put examples or uh samples of our current partnerships so if somebody went to a
009landing page they could see some of the things we have going on. Um but again it's very specific to uh who's interested in in partnering versus you know time money specific. You know, sometimes people say, "I have office furniture that's never been used." Do you have a, you know, Yeah. Or like a piano or something? Yeah. Piano or, you know, athletic equipment all the way through finances and technology. So, um, like maybe like a form with like the examples and then a form to fill out. Yeah. Create their land email. Um, and Mr. I think you might the mono ed foundation, which I think worked with you guys for that workbased learning um, night. They have I was just gonna say if anyone in the community is ever in doubt of how to help, you
010could always go like especially if you just hey listen I I want to make it you know I woke up feeling generous. I want I want to help out the school district. You can't go wrong with supporting the Monter Foundation. Um because again they they work directly with the Dr. Lane's office and and directing uh you know the the beneficiaries to places where we can best use them. But uh but yeah, no, I I I think that that feedback even if it's something more for someone that wants a donation because normally what happens is they reach out to the business office and say, "Hey, I'd like to donate something and then they throw it to us and then we will check in with the supervisor, see if it's viable, stuff like that." But there's like
011I like the idea of just even putting something out there just if you want to make, you know, you came into some money and you want to give a $500 donation or $100 donation because that all adds up eventually. or they can even say that they'd like to veer it towards something like music or the arts or sciences. So, you know, you know, and that's that's where the edge foundation is nice. I know it is, but I mean in in addition to Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. I think we, you know, do as much as we can. I like to when we when we take on particularly entering financial agreements, um I find that directing the fund and directly associating it with a program that gives the partner peace of mind because sometimes a $500
012donation, you know, I want to donate $500 to music. They said, what does that mean? Right. Right. Whereas like I want to donate $500 to support our on boarding with new board creators. then we can have a little bit more of a feels a little so sometimes that that um is more appealing uh than just saying hey everybody can cut a $500 shirt right but you know I I could talk to Dr. Layman and the business office about some sort of like standard process that would probably make streamline things because we do get a lot of people offering donate things usually it's material things uh and we don't get as many people offering us cashes as as you think I mean there are I know we don't we don't use it here, but like donor's
013choose is another type of platform where like in in East Brunswick, we have a process that we that we do. We fill out the form, we submit it to our principal who submits it to the superintendent's office and then it gets approved and then we post it. It has a cap of like, you know, $500 or whatever. Um I don't know, maybe I don't know if that's something that we would be able why don't we here? It has to do with the there's no process in place right now for us to vet Yeah. and or support what would potentially be uh acquired through that. Y and I don't mean that like in a negative way. It really, you know, for a while it was right when it came out it was being utilized and we'd
014end up with, you know, Amazon Kindles in classrooms and our technology department is now getting asked to put non-district devices, right? Because they came from Yeah. We're not yet a donation. I think I mean if it was something that we would that that we wanted to look into definitely like the process would have to be put in place because same thing was happening in East Brunswick where we had stopped using it for a while because we were getting an influx of technology and you know all of those kinds of things that were harder to support. So now we can't put in for furniture, we can't put in for technology, but we can put in for books or games or like materials and things like that that you know just enhance the classroom experience. vetted it
015towards vetted curricular you know right if every classroom has a different versus this versus that study tool or whatever um we have vetted we have chosen the tools that we use with a purpose y um and they're all under this the district umbrella. So um you know looking into something like that would involve a filtering process um that these are not designed to but they kind of circumvent the district purchasing pro process um because it's a direct donation that ultimately you know whether it's an Amazon wish list or uh you know the donor's shoes and things like that. So, it's something we can, you know, look into in, you know, not today, but to be looked into because my daughter in New Brunswick, they do it in New Brunswick. She's been doing it for years.
016She did it, I think it was5 or $600 years ago for the um furniture for the children, like the balls, and then some of them sit on the flooring. Thank you. Flex seating. And she had all that. And then when CO hit, the district made her take everything out because they couldn't clean everything, was put away. She moved to a different school. Now her friend is using it, but she really could use it in this other school. So she has put in at least two or three times in New Brunswick. So our other pieces, we support the classroom environment, the instructional environment. there's something a teacher needs, they can approach us and very few times um would we if it's justified and needed would we say no. So um because that wants food that must
017have correct and that's the difference between districts. I mean you got you have all kind of districts I was Dr. Layman just said but much more articulately what I was going to say. Uh I I feel very confident that the district delivers on for what question teachers need. Now of course they could always be more. What I think though what we might be something worth exploring is that if let's say as a as a as a team or as committee or as a district leadership team whatever we've identified a point of need let's say let's just throw full out there right just pull it out of there. You know if we if we However, I get the uh if we were to say or maybe that's something like the if we could construct we need
018this much money to do this like a week of elementary school. Yeah. But maybe not even so much specific. I could probably figure that out in a couple months if I could just you know what I mean how ahead of you the what if like if we could somehow drive support the type of support that you might get in New Brunswick where donor's choose but just redirect that into a more eminent need um what we've been trying to do is the traditional approach of state funding um if we could construct some way to circumvent that local and you know because clearly there are very generous people in this town. Yes. That would prefer like we learned in referend referendum. I've said it a couple times. They don't have a problem donating. They just like raising
019their taxes and and I think if maybe you find a way to work around that, work off that and then you can find other ways to financially support the business. I think it would be nice if we can do something like that because I know for me like you know when you donate to different organizations they say for $10 you can get this for $20 this will impact this. If you have that very visible Yes. very specific. Um, you know, this will get the school district back. Founding families of full day kindergarten. Exactly. Get a brick on the wall. There you go. I love it. We love that idea. And you can't even excuse me if using catchy cookie. Um, two two things. First, there is actually legislation about donations possibly to school districts that
020then people would be able to write like right now like there are certain things already you can write off but I don't think monetarily it's a write off whereas I don't remember the bill number but that has been in the works. Um and then the other thing um you mentioned the policy for East Brunswick. I just tried to look. It's not a policy because I was just I'm I'm looking through the policies. It's not 230. But we we do I'm gonna try and find like guide the guidelines that we I'll ask my daughter from We have parameters in place as far as like what we're allowed to request, spend through like a whole process. I'd be curious too administratively what type of protocols they follow for the reach out to them. I'll answer. Yeah, we
021we definitely do the online donor's choice portion and then we submit it to our principal and then after the principal signs off it's almost kind of like when you when we would submit a grant to our education like we fill out the grant, we submit it to the principal for approval, then the principal will send it off to the next supervisor for approval and then once it gets that final approval, then we can post it to donor's choose and and also it partners with our education foundation because they'll partner like once the project is funded so much by like maybe I don't not even say I'm not sure right um they'll contribute like the last remaining magic yeah they'll contribute the last remaining amount so just something yes speaking of um you know donations and
022trying to reach uh people um I know this is public school so I'm not sure if this will fly in like how it works but um where I work there's like a reunions like every year to gather all alumni and they have um to generate funds out of that. They also reach out to alumni like um like different from the reunions um that they're happening where they like okay online this is what you'll be um getting some funding from donations and then in in this case if alumni would know where that funds will go to let's say a new facility or a new whatever technology that we need that would encourage them more because I'm sure a lot of people who graduated from this school are now successful in their field, they would probably like
023be generous enough to get more fundings to share what they have to this. So, you're 100% on something and in fact that's that was something that the high school we've been talking about a lot. We, you know, we've talked about it, I think, here a couple times, too. We don't have a alumni association. Yeah. So, so we we we've started, you know, through athletics, we've put some stuff together, but that was that's one of the really the ideas of this work-based learning career connection event that we hosted a couple years ago, which was sponsored by the MEA. Um, and uh to really start and and actually when we go down the hallway, I'll show you the postra. You can see that it's a blend of local uh local business owners or leaders, but also a
024decent amount of alumni. So the idea maybe if we could start doing something around that annually, start to build our rolodex, right? And and you know, again, our town is still fairly young when you think existentially compared to our our our I'm not talking about like like uh you said okay, right? Come on, Robin. That's right. That's right. We're very young here. the but but when you think about so like when um uh Mrs. Fabiano and I were in high school for Monroe, right? Wasn't that long ago and but but like so these classes that we have ascended right through our our system and through higher ed and now they're into their careers these kids are you know the core of our district the new Monroe whatever you want to call it they're just come
025they're just really settling into their careers. So we really think we haven't we haven't uh woke the sleeping giant of what our alumni could be and um we but we have to create a mechanism first and then build on that. And to your point, ultimately, you know, a a a foundation that is just really even Yeah. your point like they're still young, right? They're still starting like like my daughter just know started with school working after graduating here in college and so forth, but she's still giving like a dollar to her um school. That's so she's giving something. It doesn't matter if it's big or small. It's that um willingness to help out and knowing that there's what you're giving will go towards something that you really know that will help the kids will be
026the new f you know the new generation of what they are that probably would help out even and create ownership. Do we have an alumni listing that we keep in a database? So it's we we've been talking about this for 10 years. It's very so we have a really hard time bracking kids after they leave. Okay. And like so like even when you think about like all right so we have out in the hallway there we have our college acceptance list that that'll change significantly by the spring semester right transfer whatever kids I feel like they all still live in Monroe though we've talked about yeah but so there's no so like again when they we push them out of Genesis let's say you know we have our historical records but you know we we
027don't have any mechanisms of updating contact information that has to happen somehow voluntarily and other than social media and stuff like that like because you know there's alumni groups. We the district itself does not have a mechanism yet. They've tried they're trying really hard. I know the high school's got a couple ideas, guidance. We've tried really hard even just to track, you know, because this came up years ago. How do you attract ROI on a school district? Like I know I know former students that I keep in touch with that are crushing it. But that's just my narrow existence in the district. You know, we have kids that I had a student I found out she was, you know, an executive VP for Microsoft. She's on the West Coast now. We'll probably never see her
028again. But like this is that's part of our or though she can donate part of our ROI that quantifiably how do we access that and I don't have the answer right so we have that too it's from a different part from where I work but they're per like we there's like a certain group of people who track down alumni right like the joke around is like even if the alumni move to a different um state or city they're still being tracked just like they're like who's looking for us so it's maybe somebody would be willing to do that or like a part of their job to look around like social media and all heard Robin. Yes. Um, I have my 50-year reunion coming up at East Brunswick um in October and um they're using a
029site that's very inexpensive and our class president is um has always been responsible and it's called reunion db.com. I don't know what the DB is but database. Thank you. Um, so it basically asks for people to connect if you know somebody if you know and you can enter. So my friend is not on social media so I entered her name in the database. Um, so that's something that our president our class president took on and I had a graduating class of over 800. Um and we probably except and unfortunately we've lost a lot of people but we probably still have 600 um alumni lost on that database. I I would say there are over 400 right now in the database and we're using it for our reunion but as we're sitting here talking I can
030see where you know maybe that could have other implications that might benefit because the first thing you have to do is by class. So qu I I know from my experience with my children, you know, being well out of high school too is the class presidents were responsible. So maybe figure out the class presidents and they could go on something like that and you know start collecting and getting word of mouth and having people put friends names down that they can't locate and posting that on social media. A good idea. Yeah, that's what it is. They're trying. Yeah. You know, they and they have a link to go to the DB, you know, the class class union DB to sign up. So, it was very easy. Not to interrupt, when did you want to take
031the How long is it going to take? I didn't want to uh derail the discussion. No, I know. I don't either, but I just want to make sure that we're on time. So, I just 7 7:30. Yeah. So, let's take a walk. We can chat while we're walking, too. Yeah, I just have one more comment too. Something I lived in California for a couple of years when my kids were in school and California is notoriously known while they many areas have great districts. Um they're they're known for not um investing a lot of money per student. So what the elementary school there that my kids went to, we were there in 96 97 through 2000. So every year we received a very lovely letter at the beginning of the year the parents to donate that
032amount of money. So if it was year 2000 they asked for you know anything like 2020 200 or whatever dollars they specifically had to use it for um administration supplies in the office like copy paper and things like that. Um but you know you can designate when it was 90 1996 we donated $969 9798 you know it's really interesting so that's something too but I we would have to designate that money to something and I think the other thing is just keeping people engaged like I'm looking at our outgoing theater over here and I remember like one of the things like I grew up in Malber we have our 25th anniversary reunion coming up you guys are all dating yourself one thing you did was we had a Thanksgiving. We had a Thanksgiving football game.
033It was an annual still happens Malverse Manalapin and they would do like an alumni breakfast beforehand and then we actually had an alumni band concert. The last band concert of the year which like even last year I went I brought my daughter my band director from high school was retiring but all the music alumni came back and then we had a little thing afterwards. So just sort of finding ways to keep alumni engaged. I don't know. It's a that's an opportunity, right? An association has to be an outside organization or can be kind of a I think it could be collaboration. I think it can be both. And I I think it's it's it's a combination of the town. You know, when you think about towns like East Brunswick and even Longboro and they have
034such rich history and legacy, you know, decades and decades of, you know, Monroe, we don't have that yet. We're getting there. And I think our history is very recent. And I'm I don't want to say that the pe you know the other errors aren't as significant but it's a different town and our needs are much different and we haven't uh really been able to to sew the benefits of what the investment of the past quarter century has been. Um and maybe maybe the takeaway from this is that maybe the time is is ripe for us to make a concerted effort into establishing a former alumni network and figure out ways to leverage. Just other thing, Mr. P. I don't know if you were in town yet when they were doing this. So, they used to,
035this is when my grandparents lived here, um, have a senior prom where it was basically a prom for all of the senior citizens in town to and the high school sort of ran it. So, there were students there as well. Um and it kind of I mean it's different obviously than the alumni you know concept but it brought all which you know we have again 40% senior citizens into the school to see what's happening here to sort of talk with students and and people within the school district. So they're talking about like community partnerships. They do something I think they just did it the senior games the high school senior group. Yeah. Did you can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So, we went to the rec center essentially and we had um
036a bunch of us seniors in from the high school go over there and meet senior citizens from different senior citizen communities. Okay. Um and it honestly was even better than I imagined. We burst them in pickle ball, cornhole, um a bunch of different games. I know it was raining that day, so a lot of them got moved to inside. So I think some were like bingo and trivia, but I essentially played pickle ball with them and it would be like one senior student and then one senior citizen paired up together and we burst each other and man are they good at pickle ball courts in Thompson Park in the weekend. Um they in the community the communitymore has a pickle ball. Yeah. I just remember them putting their square dancing costume on for the prom
037and all. But to your point that those events do tend to work when we run information from one of them too saying like oh if you ever want to come over with you know the other senior students that I played with like we have a court in our senior community so it was really nice. No that that and the high school has done we I I don't know when they stopped doing the senior prom. I I vaguely remember it but I know for uh Dr. Higgins and his staff for the last few years have been doing that. I think a couple years ago they even toured they went to a couple different locations. I remember I did a Facebook post about it. But they uh but that kind of stuff seems to go over well.
038But maybe we're maybe uh maybe there's opportunity there for you know our group get in there maybe you know use as an opportunity to build networks and stuff in addition without distracting from what they're trying to do. Obviously they're all good. All the ideas are excellent. I mean, it's just having to work through them, see which and put them regarding, you know, priority and where we think we can all work together to to get it done. There were a post or something about requesting alumni support to to lead the committee and be on this committee like an alumni committee. I think we would get a lot of Would you belong to an alumni committee when you leave? Sorry. Would you belong to an alumni committee? I would I belong to like here I honestly we
039have kind of no information on that like I think mentioned before the class president is someone who would take care of that but I haven't heard of previous classes really having but no I think I think what you're asking like if it were created like an alumni then if it was created would you participate and if there a class president doesn't want to do it you know there's always class officers that usually take over and some people exist already organically like there's group like I know like they're unofficial like I know that the robotics team has like a group of all the kids in the college that like stay in touch with each other and it's more of like social but like they like the alumni like the the 2009 football team that won the
040state championship they get together every year so maybe it's just a matter of curating it all into one I think the outreach our graduating classes weren't even that big season time when I drive down the street anyway homecoming Homecoming is another one. Yeah. Where I the other district I was in where they all came back the alumni and they had alumni football games against the you know the present football players. They had alumni softball games with pre you know my daughter was played softball and she just played in an alumni softball game back in North Brunswick. So that's the kind of thing homecoming where you know let's make do this and let's and start these things already exist. Let's elaborate more on them and see where we can get involved. Yes. I'm just curious overall
041because it seems really foreign to me um to collect except for my experience in California in the late 90s to collect donations to fund school things you know um when did that start? So just to focus the we don't currently collect donations to fund existing opportunities and I think that's kind of what we were talking about donor shoes. We're providing uh an enriched high highly rigorous opportunities. What we've done with the summer enrichment programs, what we do in our partnerships is we leverage uh those partnerships to grow and expand our programs. So if if we have somebody partner with our cooking program, right? It's a typically a restaurant, a restaurant owner that reached out. We have this opportunity and it's an expansion of what's going on in the day that's in the afternoon. During that,
042we can kind of try some new things, expand on the curriculum and if they work, we can then spin those resources back into the the school day. Um, and we're going to biomedical piece. The culinary one's actually a great example because culinary doesn't exist prior to seventh grade in our district. In fact, and and because of the limitations of just being a public school, we often can't offer culinary recipes in from the uh culinary dishes that might be featured in many of the homes of our city, meaning more culturally diverse dishes with dietary restrictions. We can't wait to get to that in the school bag. Um, but through the enrichment model, we can design unique programs that might be able to meet these emerging types of needs without having to rob the pay fall. We
043maintain the existing curriculum. The industrial arts and the STEM program is another one. Many districts what they've done because uh you you often can't expand new programmings without interacting elsewhere in a zerobased budgeting philosophy, which is what most schools look at. Um and uh on top of that, you you don't want to abandon one area for another curricularly speaking. But on top of that, we have the inconvenient truth that things are getting more expensive. Um particularly if you want to evolve programs. So if I if I kept the industrial arts curriculum the same way from 1994, it probably wouldn't be that, you know, probably one more, but it wouldn't be the the cost that it is now. But in Monroe, we demand and we expect and we want to deliver emerging programs, but we don't
044do it at the expense of other ones. A lot of times if we want to try something out, they're usually tech driven, software driven, or require a lot of materials that there's no way I'd be able to fit that into our budget within 2% cap or even without contracting something else, which we obviously do not want to do. So, what I'll do is I'll go out to find someone that shares goals and values with what we're trying to do, that believes in what we have already, and that has a vested interest in the community, be really helpful, and we'll say, "Hey, we're looking to develop this new program. Would you like to be a part of it, and and they volunteer their time or or they'll they'll they'll make a financial contribution to the development
045of a pilot or an expansion of an existing program. Then what we will do as a district is we will evaluate excuse me evaluate the viability of this new program and if we can responsibly and successfully integrate it to the existing construct. Many times we can do that because some of the costs have already been offset through efficient and improved practices. We can absorb that into the existing school day without missing a beat. Um sometimes it's not that complicated. Sometimes we just call uh a restaurant and say, "Hey, we have a bunch of kids that we want to run a culinary course, but there's no way I can do it without charging kids $285, and that's very expensive. So maybe your financial contribution can just be scholarships because I can't afford it." Or we can
046use that to offset some of my overhead costs so I can charge at a lower price point for children. So sometimes it's just as simple as make a financial dist contribution, become the official partner of Cooking with Cantor and I can charge the kids less money so more kids can learn at a lesser price. The bill is S552 permits board of education to accept donations for purpose of providing property tax relief and the assembly bill is A3813 um this past bill cycle and then there also in the same bill cycle A4310 and I don't have oh and S13141 I learned about all these bills in my case um establishing public education innovative fund which provides corporate business tax and gross income tax credits to businesses that make qualified education donations. So, the want is there.
047It just hadn't really gotten to that final step. But I have to and we have to credit the the administration. I mean, we were ahead. We were years ahead of all these things that are now coming through for women. So, and we have a question. Yeah. I just had a quick question, I guess, about the extent of the donations I was curious about. So, let's say you have a club like Model UN and we go on a yearly conference to um Hershey Park with other schools in the area in the tri-state area. So, for busing, we have to pay. We basically split the cost between that. If someone were to donate and would they could they specifically say, "Oh, could we donate so that those buses are free? That transit donation to the conference and
048back is for the student." So, what I would do is you're I would I would find let's just say um Vicrim Enterprises that wants to sponsor your model UN stage with the one out Pennsylvania, right? Yes. So, the um I would approach Victor Enterprise be like, "Hey, listen. We've got this unbelievable model UN program. We send how many kid you guys take like 150 kids out there, right?" No, kids. You've been limiting it to good watch buzz. We had uh 50 kids going out there and and we go out there and generally do very well, right? Yeah. So, so it's one of our crown jewel programs at school. Vicram Enterprises happens to be an organization that uh is very proud of their civic duties and their humanities instruction. So, they want to be associated with
049that success. So, I go to Vicram Enterprise and say, "Hey, why don't you become the official partner of Model UN? Help us offset the cost of these buses so we don't have to hit these kids and their parents up and then we'll make official t-shirts. they'll give you a banner and then you're the official partner. Boom, the kids can even out gone and bust me off. So, those are kind of how those they have to let us know too. You have to let the organizations that um Monroe Ed Foundation is always willing to give I think they gave some um equipment to the robotics team in the middle school because they were missing some parts or something recently and they donated there. So I mean if you guys would let us know I mean it's
050something that we can you know we can work on with you know me or something here but that's a good example. So and that and that is a way that we've tried to use creativity um community outreach and also the success and the shine of the successes of the district to do great partnerships. It's no different than why uh people want to sponsor Oklahoma State. So to re to just to connect it to your initial question and then we can go on. We have to take the role. Yes. So to model you an example, we budget the staffing, we pay for the chaprons, we cover entry fees or whatever is appropriate. Um but the transportation to Robotics Worlds down in uh Texas or whatever, we again cover the chap room and things, but the students
051get there on their own. They they cover the travel cost for that. So the district covers the the program, but when it when it gets to that level of, you know, success or competition, it's it's the students that fund those competitions. That's an example of where the private partnership could support it. We're not supplanting a if we were funding bus there, we wouldn't raise funds to supplant our budgeted allowance for that transportation and then use it for something else. So, it's about expanding or supporting something um you know that we already have in place, but we may not cover the the full piece, right? We cover in district state championships and things like that, instate stuff. But when it goes to out of state, national for world stuff, that's we'll cover a chapron to get
052you there. We'll get the equipment there, the robotics and stuff there. But the busing, transportation, flights, that's the parents getting students there. So, and that's kind of the line between getting donations and supplanting something we already have in place versus covering things that we don't necessarily cover. And that's the line that donors choose would have to tow very very very closely. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna um end this meeting now because we're going to take a walk through um with the committee and Mr. Moral and Dr. layman and our students at some of the different parts of the facilities that are what would you call a lot more expensive than and then other so so I I'll you don't have a lot of time so what I'll do is I'll show you kind of where
053the most rapidly evolving areas are that are are require regular governance and evolutions and as a result we've had to rely on not just community expertise but for curricular support because these these common areas are very complicated.