March 2022 Regular Board of Education Meeting

001sorry so it is now 7 pm on monday march 20th 20 22 i hereby call this meeting of the board of education of the nordonia hills city school district for order this is a typical meeting of the nordonian hill city school board of education it is a meeting in public but is not a public meeting the pride the public is invited to watch the proceedings of the board there will be an opportunity for public participation in the open forum section of the meeting a little bit later please be sure to sign in and include your phone number in the event that we need to contact you if you are going to be presenting if you are uncomfortable with open form always know that your comments and questions may always be submitted to the board and

002administration through emails and phone calls so mr brown would you please take the role mr kearney here mr larmour here mr mckinley here mr tidmor here the spottage here all board members present if we could stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all great can i get a motion please for the approval of tonight's agenda a second mr kearney yes mr larimer yes this is mckinley yes mr tidmor yes respondent yes who cares well tonight's an exciting night for us it was just over a year ago that the previous board sat in this room on a very very snowy day and decided that they would hire soul harris day as the architects who

003did the pre-bond work i see mrs strong was here she was a big proponent of the sulfera's day move and i know that she would be incredibly proud of the work that they've done if you are still you're on the board tammy and so what they did is they started um what was the beginning of a steering committee process and scott leopold's going to tell you all about it but what it what's going to entail is hours and hours of 30 plus community members coming together time and time again and putting together a master plan to recommend i see a lot of our steering committee members here in the room so i think before i turn over to scott i'd just like to recognize because if you are on the steering committee could you please

004stand and be thanks for all of the hard work thank you so much the steering committee was a great cross-section of our community um and at this time i'm going to turn it over to scott leopold of cooperative strategies and don ferrante from seoul harris data is here and scott's going to take you through what the process was and what the steering committee is giving the board as its recommendation for what we do with our facilities going forward thanks scott great thank you again i'm scott with about four strategies here's our agenda for the evening we'll just talk briefly about the the process and the timeline talk about some background data we'll kind of at a high level go through our community meetings what those results were uh we had our futures conference at the

005very beginning then we had an educational framework session in the middle and then we had options at the end and we'll talk about final recommendations and we'll wrap it up with a q a so this is the overall process that we followed it's you know kind of intended as a six six-month process we started at the beginning of the school year and so this is this is where we are with the engagement piece uh it kind of built gained steam as we went through we had the educational futures conference at the beginning we used that to kind of help recruit for the steering committee we had a great steering committee throughout the process we then dug into that background data that assessment information about the schools then we came back in the middle and talked

006about the educational framework and so we talked about things like what rate configuration we want how large do our school how large we want our schools to be how many schools we want and then we get into the nitty-gritty and we kind of use that as an envelope to develop the options that we then would share with the community uh a couple months ago and so now we've had a chance to kind of comb through all that output from the community and the committee has come to some recommendations that we'll be sharing tonight uh here's our overall timeline uh that futures conference is this september we talk about that educational framework november 10 and then the community meeting where we talked about options was on february 2nd we had a lot of online feedback throughout

007this process that was great and so you know some people thought that maybe our turnout of those community meetings wasn't so great i was pleased with it we had we had a disproportional amount of online responses to the number of people who kind of came into this meeting so it was great uh here's all our entire steering committee being scheduled i'm not going to go through them but you can just see the amount of time that the steering committee members kind of put forth into this again a great group to work with so just uh going through the background data portrait overnight we have seen this graphic in every single room we've been in we've had a meeting this is kind of our our north star for the process if we got stuck or admired

008in something we came back to that original portrait of a night because that was the reason that we're doing all this and this is something that the board kind of put together and approved so just as a refresher so facilities master plan what is it we want to make sure that our facilities align to the portrait overnight and support it uh that we're aligning with our educational framework we're considering our facility condition and our educational advocacy and we're looking at our enrollment and our capacity and then we're also looking at those costs and those are something that we've been happy to take a real hard look at throughout this process because of all the recent volatility so here's our historical enrollment and so uh this just shows what our what our overall enrollment was in

0092010 so we've declined slightly uh over the last 11 or 12 years to around 3 500. uh this is our projected enrollment that we've been using for this process this was done you know this was done by future think which is produced by the state and uh this is a pre-coded projection and so the data that we've been using for this process was based on a projection that was done before the pandemic and so we've gotten pretty close to kind of bouncing back where we were and it's it shows a pretty flat trend uh moving forward and so we've been working with that as we've developed our square footages and stuff for options and recommendations maybe there we go uh so this is a this is a map we've been using throughout the process this

010shows the location oh there we go this shows the location of all of our facilities so i'll leave from the north uh rush rushwood uh over to the east and then of course northfield here we've got ledgeview all right sorry goes to the west my other east and then uh ledgeview and then of course the high school you know the middle school's in the middle too what we also have on this map this shows our student density and so you can see where the concentrations of students are in the district relative to our facilities so that's something that we've kind of used to make some of the decisions that we've had in the recommendation as well we've also looked at our sites and so this is always a fun slide for me to put together

011this shows all of our existing sites to the same scale and so you can kind of get an idea of how large each of the sites are relative to each other and so northfield and you know northern middle school two of the smaller sites russ wood larger site got a lot of terrain and uh woods there at rushwood leedon ledgeview and of course the high school site and transportation and we'll be talking a lot about that tonight because this doesn't include some additional parcels that we have so now i'll go over some of our community meetings and those findings so again our educational futures conference this is the first one that we have this is back in september we had about 75 attendees we had an online questionnaire following that meeting we had about 20

012responses to that we asked people you know four questions to ponder in this process and this meeting was really intended to just get people excited about education and think about what it means to the future and the opportunities that it presents so what qualities should the students of 2050 have what are the careers of 2050 what does the school of 2015 look like and how do our facilities support or hinder the portrait of the night so again our feedback from these meetings people people really came to the you know what i would call the right answer flexibility the one thing that we can guarantee is that there's going to be change and so having facilities are going to be flexible going into the future is key and uh you know there was also a lot

013of feedback around the idea of you know career tech uh medical uh trades those kinds of things uh our educational framework again this is the meeting that we held on november 10th at le eaton uh we had about 17 non-committee members attend this is lower uh lower than you know we want for people to come in person we had six different groups that would fill up that filled out that survey but we had 815 online surveys tonight we had 20 at the first week and so we we've started the games themed by this meeting kind of the big takeaways from that doing nothing was not an option uh there is support for reducing the number of facilities and there's support for for having three total facilities today we have six every time i load a

014big image it takes a bit uh this was a this is a graphic that we used in the educational framework meeting and what we wanted to do was kind of just put together what are the other districts around us doing what are their configurations and so this shows nordomia in the middle and we show kind of all our neighboring districts how many facilities they have what their grade configurations are what their enrollment is and you know what their total number of students per grade they have and this this was helpful for a lot of people to kind of see quantify what was going on in erdogania versus some of the other surrounding districts so again one of the questions that we had on this was uh how many sites should we have uh by grade

015level and this was kind of the output to that there was again there was support for one elementary site there was support for three but it was really all over the place but there you know there was a lot of support for one and two elementary facilities uh when we look at secondary sites there was some support for two some support for one total sites and now when i say secondary i mean middle and high school and so there was support for having you know a middle school and a high school in here and if you look at our total number of sites here you can see pretty good spread but we did have a significant amount of support for three and four buildings so when we came to options this was our second community

016meeting you know again we started off we talked about the renovations and so throughout this process we've been talking a lot about the physical condition of our facilities and what those costs would be and this is based on an updated assessment from 2018 and if you look at the total cost to renovate all of our facilities we're in the neighborhood of 118 million and this is one thing i do want to point out is that this is not a apples to apples comparison with the cost sets that we used for the options so we were using for new construction we were using stemware in the neighborhood of 325 a foot these are not escalated for that and so my guess is is that if those are escalated to the same conditions that that 325 is

017that 118 million is probably closer to 135. and so just considering this renovation you know these renovation costs we're at a point as a district where we kind of have a clean slate we can just apply starting new everywhere we don't have any one of these buildings that is below that two-thirds rule and that's the 66 fci which is if the cost to renovate a school is greater than 66 of the cost to replace it often you're better off replacing the facility because at the end of the at the end of it you have a new facility versus an old facility that's been renovated i kind of use the the car analogy you know if you've got a if you've got an older vehicle you can put your tires on it you can you know

018put new body panels on it but you still got that original frame it's the original vehicle there the same vin number and and so again we're at that point where it does make sense to kind of start over one thing i just want to i want to start start with this is our kind of updated high school site map and so this includes those additional parcels that we have and this is something that we shared with the committee that last meeting we did talk a little bit about debt capacity uh the district currently has a debt capacity of 150 to 165 million match chime in if anything's changed we talked a little bit about millage the military for a bond of 150 million would be 6.43 for 165 would be 7.07 uh we've got to

019just keep an eye on that construction market due to supply chain and other factors we're seeing costs coming in 15 higher than they would have last year when our typical escalation year to year is somewhere between three and five percent the construction costs that we use for new construction are 325 a foot plus an additional ten dollars per square foot for debit and so you know as you see these at these recommendations there's going to be excess facilities at the end what did what the fate of that of those facilities are is another dedicated process but we do have dollars allocated here for demolition and basically finding grass and book sites and so just because we're allocating the dollars for it doesn't mean that anything's been decided we just want to make sure that we

020have the cost covered so here's our original four options and i'm just i'm just going to kind of go through these briefly option one was a four facility option it was having a k3 a 4 6 a 7 8 and nine twelve went the other way and then option two was another four facility option but this was having two k4s one five eight and a nine twelve option three was one k four one five eight one nine twelve and option four was a k three a four six and a seven twelve and so those are the original options that we presented to the community back in february uh as we went so i'm going to kind of take you through the same exercise we took the committee through to look at these results uh again

021status quo is not an option uh we talked about this lovely little smiley face scale um where we kind of judge the sentiment from people's comments and what they felt about each each site so ledgeview people were somewhat indifferent northfield people didn't think it was a good site for the future rush what they did lean they did the middle school again kind of that middle of the road and i think a lot of the sentiment around the high school is it's the site that we have um some other prevalent comments that we had uh you know the high school is where it is uh this believe it or not we saw this quite a bit the district should have enough money uh but they should be able to lower taxes especially with the mgm money

022that's coming in and so that was something that was a problem in those comments i thought that was going to be the cure to any facility issues so individual results versus group results um we did have at the meeting that we had on february 2nd we asked people to kind of work in small groups to try to come to consensus and you know we had them we gave them the presentation they talked about it and in that meeting uh kind of the consensus of the group was they liked the idea of option four which was the 712. uh when we got the vast amount of feedback we had i think we had over a thousand responses online um option four was not favored people really liked option three they didn't like the concept of having

023the seventh graders in the same building on the 12th grader and even though we kind of took them through the exercise if we can make the building feel like two buildings from a structural standpoint and function like one building programmatically if we have kids in lower grades with one access to that advanced programming uh there were still you know there it's still not very much positive sentiment for that seventh level option uh we have a thousand views of the survey but about 486 hits on the on the youtube video so we have a 30-minute presentation embedded in the survey and we got about a 50 watch rate on that uh the other thing that i put on here is you know we did have uh the steering committee was a majority of the people who

024came to that meeting but when we looked at those responses individually the steering committee didn't pull people towards option four so here's here's all of our individual responses and so i don't expect you to be able to read all of these on this chart but obviously option one is first option two option three and option four and so this is uh when we look at just the steering committee only that attended the meeting this was all responses at the meeting and then this is um all all in person responses so this is this is the meeting this is all online and so you can kind of see looking at this the the the blue the gray and the red ask people you know level of support and then the green bars are what is your

025preferred option and so you can see we look at the overall all responses option three which was the 5 k4 9 12 was kind of the favor and so again here's the group results for those that came to the meeting and that's what i was talking about how we had that those those those groups liked option four and those are just the people that came to the meeting once they started talking about it but again the overall sentiment from where we filled it out online was option three so here you can see this is out of the chart zoomed in as option three again we also did have some questions about uh prioritization of projects uh you know because we know some of these processes are expensive uh so given the realities of escalating costs

026and affordability how would you prioritize buildings by grade level so the lighter the green color that is going to be for high school first and then number two is middle school second and then elementary is third and so kind of as i read that that's that's how i look at that and here's the individual responses pretty much in line with that we also have some questions if it becomes necessary uh to reduce costs should renovations and potential additions be considered at any of the facilities so should we try to preserve any of our existing footprints if we can so this is how it looks at by building at my building these are those group responses and so blue is yes red is no so ledgeview no lee eaton 4060 northfield pretty much know rushwood 60

027yes middle school 20 yes high school 40 yes same data for for everybody all thousand responses um i think what's what's interesting about this is these are the people that came to the meetings they're more connected to the district and this is those thousand responses that may have less of a connection with the district but they have more tolerance for renovating versus uh replacement other question we asked would you ability to support a bond issue between 150 to 165 million to approve facilities and so this is again those group responses so the darker the blue the more positive the gray is neutral the red is negative so here's the 150 here's 165. again these are the people that attended the meeting we look at the overall response uh we're starting to get some more negatives

028in here than we did for those people that came to the meeting and so again just remember that this is kind of this is the the more representative group to fill this out but overall we're at majority support for both of them but whenever i show this kind of data to boards i i ask people to take it with the grain of salt because these are the people that are connected to the district enough that they're have access to take this survey that they know what's happening and we've got oh shoot what is it joe we say 75 percent of the households in the district don't have any kids in the system closer to 80. yeah and so we've got some work to do on a communication standpoint from the communication standpoint just moving forward

029uh so one of the questions that we had on here was really interesting and everybody's like well how are you going to get people to articulate how they would configure the district and so we did it um so what we were able to do is we analyzed everybody's responses we asked them you know again what's your level of of support for each of the scenarios what's your preferred scenarios your scenario and how would you configure the district this was just an open-ended text question and you know the answer was you know we want them to answer something like oh i like the option i would like to option three uh kate you know k4 at lee eaton the middle school at the middle school site and high school and so we were able to kind

030of go through this and see what the favorites were for each site so this was option one which was the again the uh k three four six seven eight nine twelve they liked rush wood is the k3 site lee eaton is the 4-6 site uh the middle school is the middle school site and of course the high school where it is so this is how we're able to kind of drill down and see what those look like so option two this was two k fours the five eight the nine twelve so the favorites were k fort ledgeview kfor rushwood 580 at the middle school and 912 at the high school so you can see how that all picks out option three so this was k four five eight nine twelve so k fort rushwood five

031eight the middle school and nine twelve at the high school uh but you can see looking at this how it kind of spreads out so rushwood was the favorite for the k4 lee not far behind and here's option four so this was the uh k three four six seven twelve so rush lee eaton and the high school k3 brushwood 4-6 at the middle school i'm sorry typed up here and then high school okay so other thing that you know we talked about is opportunities to educate opportunities to educate the community how much things cost i think people have stiffer shot with how expensive a lot of this is the difference between capital operating funds that's something that every every district struggles to communicate with their community where the mgm money is is going what are

032what are basically ceiling is what can we do without increasing the tax rate and the condition of our schools i don't think people understand what the condition of our schools are compared to some of the districts about this as well so recommendations and we've updated these a little bit we have looked taken a a deeper look at the middle school or the 5 8 square footage and so that's reduced a little bit and that's got our cost down i think we're in 165 163 million range now we're 158 million so new k-4 at rush wood new 5-8 at lee eaton and a new 512 at the high school and we took the boe offices out of there based on feedback from the community so this is something that's new uh one thing that i wanna

033i wanna make be very clear on when it went to the community we didn't know the status of additional land adjacent to the high school site and so all that feedback we got from the community was based on the idea that you know we could we could basically rebuild the high school and pieces on its current footprint and that was going to be about it so here's an alternative recommendation based on that recent property acquisition uh new high school uh somewhere on the newly appointed you know on the existing site with the acquired property uh and the idea of the 58 on the existing high school footprint i think that this is something that we're going to have to work on because you know this land is kind of new we're going to have to

034turn dominic and his team loose on trying to see what fits where on the site and what works best for the next 50 years but this is kind of where the where the committee kind of landed we had here's here's the recommendation you know given the current high school configuration here's something that we talked about based on that new land acquisition at the high school and so here's the again k4 at rushwood 5 8 at lee eaton and then 9 12 at the high school or this concept of having the 5 8 and the 912 at the high school and i want to be very clear these are two separate buildings it's not one building that's connected we have it as two separate buildings and then we've got the k4 lee eaton just because it's

035kind of more central and it's available in this scenario so here's what the the overall costs end up looking like so that the k4 we're at 42 million the five eight we're at 46.7 million and the replacement 912 uh we're at 67.3 million so our total is 158.5 we've got that that 10-year operational savings at 21 million because we're operating three less buildings than we are today and so that's you know that's the numbers we've been using throughout this process and uh you know that's again based on operating those fewer schools that adds up quickly if you think about it uh one other thing that we did talk about uh just because i wanted to i wanted to just have it out there and at least have the conversation with the committee was so far

036our our construction costs are 325 a foot and they're holding what do we do if costs escalate beyond the debt ceiling and so this was this wasn't anything we had a lot of conversation with i just wanted to have this discussion with the committee so that we didn't have a gotcha moment the future but the idea of you know construct the high school on the newly acquired property if possible minor renovations of the existing high school to make it suitable for grades five through eight we do the new the newly eaten project uh to get that operational savings and then we come back and do the 5 8 later when finances a lot and so this is a way to get the program moving in that neighborhood of 100 million versus 150 160. again we

037didn't have any consensus around it but just something that we talked about with the committee so one of our our final exercises that we kind of took the committee through is a consensus building exercise and so i i like to use this example of pizza so i'm gonna get everybody hungry so um it's a consensus scale of one to four uh if you you're a one you want to have pizza you don't care what kind of pizza it is if you're at a two you want pizza but you don't want pe you don't want my you don't think that belongs on pizza but you definitely want pizza if you're at a three uh you don't want pizza but you're okay with other people having pizza and if you're at a four uh you don't want

038pizza and you don't want anybody else out of pizza and so when we took the committee through this that last meeting i think we had um we had 14 people that wanted everybody to have pizza didn't care what kind and then we had seven that didn't like pineapple and then we had one on the committee that uh did not want pizza it was a forward that that didn't it didn't support the wreckage but that's the the overall consensus of the committee that came to last so at this point i'm happy to toss it back to you and answer any questions you have so as i talked about the board clearly is not expected or should vote on anything today you should take what scott took and you should have discussions and if the board decides

039that it wants to move forward with any kind of facility um then you know that will happen after a lot of discussion but i would like for the board to have the opportunity to ask scott any questions now if you haven't so just out of curiosity you mentioned the 21 million that the automotive cost savings so if we're looking at that simultaneously simultaneously how does that hit the overall price so if we were at 100 million connectivity or is it more long-term container kind of specular what does that look like per year i i would defer to that on that one that's something that we'd have to kind of flesh out and see what percentage of that savings could be used on debt service yeah yeah so we just want to make sure that we

040have the two different pots of money so the one would be the bond issuance that has to be used strictly for the bond and then we could realize the operational savings like scott's mentioning which would impact the general fund for the operation inside of this workflow okay so it will help i can't tell you with regard to the proposals uh roughly 158 million is that factoring in the 15 uh differential for inflation for next year or is it 15 in addition so it's it's based on 325 a foot for construction costs dominic do you have any do you want to talk about any recent bids we've had so yeah um we kind of targeted the 325 i recently had um two elementaries go out to bid for north canton city schools um those bids were

041coming in roughly just under 300 a square foot so we're trying to build in some of that inflation or future inflation as these schools could potentially if it moves forward typically the process is one year roughly to design and then it's two years of construction so if you look at it if you put something on the ballot here in the future you're probably looking at roughly two years of total inflation in that 325 that we're trying to build into it so that was kind of like our analysis when we looked at what that cost per square foot should be and does that consider also the flip side of that if next year there were collapse in material markets how how would you go about impressing that and obviously we would have much larger pot left

042over which i'm assuming we can't return back to residents how i mean how do you how do you wrestle with that we wait to see i wish i had a crystal ball i mean as we've gone through this process we've aimed high we wanted the cost to be higher so that we we have the opportunity to well we don't need that much money now and it just gives us flexibility later we don't want to be low because no one likes no one likes certain costs come in over budget so it's something that kind of as we look at how this gets phased out we'll have a better idea of what it looks like we've tried to aim high for at this point in the process so last well next question okay so when you look

043at the cost for renovation and the cost for new was trying to follow bui lawsuit maybe a difference of maybe about 15 20 million ish yes as opposed to going to one of them and that's going to be liked for like it's not going to give you any reprogramming dollars to move walls or anything like that it'll be a fully modern and up to code facility but it's not going to be doesn't give us a flexibility correct now that's not saying that it can't be done it would just add cost and by the time you start looking at reprogramming dollars and additional spaces that aren't there you're probably getting close to 150 thank you thank you you talked about earlier that a lot of the participants so far have been families that have students in

044the district and that you mentioned having we have a little work to do in terms of trying to um reach out to people who don't so that we can raise awareness and get other opinions do you have a plan or a recommendation on how we can do that and start you know talking to the community a little bit more i think once down the road we get you know buying from the board we'll start to kind of prepare documents that we've had in this process in a way that are very easy for us to communicate and that'll allow you know whatever bond committee or foundation to kind of take that information and go forth with it so we want to make i want to boil this what we like to do is boil this whole

045presentation down to a placemat that's the process on one side the recommendation on the other so it's super simple to communicate how we got there why we're doing it and what exactly it is yeah i think one other important thing to communicate and actually probably matt can do this before you scott is this is the whole idea that we do have some current bonds that are going to be expiring soon so whatever it is if the word put this on the ballot and it were to pass that higher rate would be for a couple years can you i'm sorry to put john's spot mr brown so to your point dr clark um we currently have two two major bonds that are out there that are assessing levy tax levies to pay those back and uh

046the larger one it's about 2.49 mills currently that's going to be expiring in december of 2025 so that'll those millage dollars will fall off of the tax bill in 2025 after 2025 and uh then the smaller levy is about 0.37 mils and that's not going to expire until december 2030 so we do have some flexibility in the near term here to drop some millage off of the ballot thanks scott thanks don but the board's gonna have a lot to consider um because you know if ultimately if the board decides that um you know you're gonna take the steering committee's recommendation and give the community a chance to vote on whether we do facilities or not i think like august i think matt gave the timeline to you it's going to be within a few months

047you'll have to make a decision but it should not be rushed you need to have some religious discussions about this thank you scott thank you all right we have another presentation tonight and so casey wright is here and casey has been talking with me for years about this idea of class rank and this will also be not something that you vote on uh tonight but if the board is in agreement it would be a slight policy change that we would ask you to vote on within the next couple of months to be active for the incoming freshmen so casey take it over well i thought clark mr brown president i'm here to talk to you something that may be not as interesting is building all the facilities will probably uh make more impact on kids

048lives right away at least in this class rick clash rate is something we're very familiar with class brings what we had when we were kids grow up in school it's class rate that i'm passionate talking about uh you're laughing he knows i've talked to her about this for probably 10 years she's running board um and so this i bring this board to talk about comes from this policy 6.14 that's where class rank is codified within your policy it tells us how do we rank kids we rank kids based on their gpas while they're at the high school why is that a big deal now over the years we've increased the number of ap courses and ccp courses in early high school what that does is and we rank an ap course and cc of course

049on a five point scale where your rendered course is under four point scale and your honors courses get an extra point five of jump and gpa what we try to do is encourage our kids to take harder classes that's exactly what and then what do we that's doing class right you provide that on your transcript so in any transcript it tells you what that is in class right we're talking about how world and high school changed over the time i've done here um and why change is needed first of all what do we use classroom for internally we use it for top 25 for graduation graduation we start with our top 25 and uh clark's superintendent's award is a top ten percent in the class and so that's why we currently use that once you

050leave us uh if your school does press rank you put it on your college admission and uh your application and they will uh use that as part of their admission statement for you um if you're applying to an office college they will also look at your class rank and then when you get a private scholarships if your school does pledge frankly we'll use that in making the scholarship all right when i started talking about this 10 years ago all these ones right here they are class ranked over 10 years these were all my friends they went this way none of those guys use class rank again they eliminate class rank there's only probably five of us still holding out that still use class rank and we're going to talk a little bit why that possibly

051is all right let me talk about two students so you get a kind of idea of why this is important student is an outstanding student straight a student he's taking all of our hard classes on plenty of our ap classes and what i highlighted is this student also is very interested in banned choir and finance i ended up on a average let's turn this student on a 4.19 gpa pretty impressive right that student rates 41 out of 327 students 41. students plus ray perks ranking kids first student here um so what does that happen um what does that person that soon have to do they have to ask themselves how important is class right to them and so how much are they going to challenge themselves and will they take classes that maybe does not

052get the advantage of the class right yeah that's what their parents are ripping their arguments at what would that do well potentially it could affect what college they go to or scholarships they may get and when they get the honors program this student also is usually very concerned about being the top 10 percent of the class so they spent a lot of time thinking about that and all that they're afraid of not getting into the school of their choice student b so solid students taking a lot of our honors courses but also taking a variety of variety of ap courses took a college prep to the college press in uh spanish and plenty of fine arts courses solid b average good student right here 3.25 gpa where's the student fall out of 327 or at

053357 where the student race that students channels ourselves this is a college student taking rigorous quotes as we talked about all honest courses ap courses rigorous courses and got beats so they challenged himself they also decided to take world language spanish college prep and fine arts and got these there too and um for that they're not in the top half of our class again what are we concerned about what is this person concerned about at home not being they're worried about not giving the college of choice worrying about having an honors program if they applied to those honors programs in college um because of the because we did we chose them other examples we've seen the negative impacts of kids um our students and some people have kids in this room right now who had

054these conversations at their table i remember these conversations chose not to participate in unrelated courses they will not take a course that's not considered a way okay so they won't they always take an ap they won't take a band they won't take the choir they won't take any fine arts even though they love art and they love band player um second one is the point i just made this is the one i worry about the most they these are the students are in our counselor's office the most for anxiety um either they're anxiety about not being the top 10 or top 25 and uh even there are lots of situations where we have to refer these students for outside agencies and this is the question i asked you guys and these are the questions i've

055asked previous awards and these are questions that i've asked my staff is who are we and what are we about are we about ranking kids sort of consent to them or what are we better are we about our gpa or about growing as a kid are we about rigorous coursework in benefiting her sports work or is it the game of gpa we had this year alone we added 14 new electives in portugal tonight not every one of those electives are going to be weighted gpa electives some of our kids may choose to take them or not take them based on their link we have a real argument with my department chair is now over math the state of ohio is going to delay with algebra 2 equivalencies so there's going to be change in brick

056and so if you are a stem major and we have some new pathways for your file will you choose not to follow those because you want to get into uh honors pre-health i mean calculus because you want the gpa versus maybe taking some of the stem pathways that are open to you this year's uh graduating class so let's just see look their gpa ranges from a 1.2 to a 4.564 pretty impressive mean 3.38 now that's really impressive there's 57 of our students have over 4.0 gpa that's an incredible number and 3.0 above there's 175 students that have over three point uh 3.0 or above over the years this gives you the spread of our gpa that's what you've seen just in the last four years sometimes you last if you look at the spread of

057time when i first took over 2009 2007 took over principal 2009 the average gpa review this graduating class is a 3.37 and how is that it's not the spread of grades it's the rigor of the classes kids have taken when i first started with seven ap courses on 97 tests taken uh this year we have 27 ap courses we have close to 800 tests taken and that doesn't count the number of ccp courses over half of our seniors will take their english and someone will take their science uh college course walmart high school and about third of our kids go to kent state i can take eight courses so what's my recommendations for here's my recommendations i want to move away from classroom and i'm going to move to a who block system a similar

058system you see in college and here's the medal that we will present kids that's hudson's medal what's in uh when i proposed to brian's 10 years ago he actually did it and that was the medal he created so we would do a lot of magnet coupons system based on a gpa breakdown we don't necessarily have the breakdown of where those would fall we would award that medal at graduation and you would wear it down that we will provide class rank we still we were not eliminating class rank we are eliminating opinion on your transcript and eliminating that it's there we still think one class rank which means if you need a class rate for a certain reason because you applied to our scholarship that requires class rank you can ask us for that i will

059write you a letter with your classmates in there um and a couple changes i make i'm gonna i would like to implement a cumulative with next year's graduating class but i promise our students i will not eliminate a rule that they came into northern high school with so the class of 2026 but the first time we stopped public publishing classrooms so if you're at our normal high school currently underground high school we still will rank you uh we'll still provide that rank for you for the freshman eighth graders incoming we will no longer rank at that point that's my recommendation to you what will that remind you if we make this decision how you accept the race in college one night three percent of our kids are accepted into college about 84 percent of them

060go i call them i forgot to fill out fast reforms uh higher acceptance rates and honors and uh star program technologies we do have a great number of kids already that's like parents over here with their kids in those programs so congratulations uh more scholarships last year's graduate class was a record 8.5 million dollars in scholarships you can see a scholarship that should increase because we would i'll share idea how we check the box and don't believe anymore we would honor more students at graduation just from not the top 25 we would probably honor almost a third of our class maybe with something the focus on come on it means commodities with honors with high honors and then uh what i find the most important is we will value what learning actually is about taking

061classes you're interested in and learning as much as possible and stop a great growth departing classroom difficulty in your curriculum competitiveness of your high school your t s a t scores they don't look at flash where you can tell them halfway down then they'll get your essays your recommendation monitors your interviews um you have to do a portfolio for art or audition for music or any obstacle activities or even your plugins we talked to some colleges uh i picked some challenges that were unique and i picked ones that we typically hear from uh boston college is interesting they said that um although it's helpful um there are better ways to choose a kid or than class rank and they find themselves moving away from using classrooms at all um because it's not worthwhile washington university

062in st louis we have a couple of couple kids in my time going to washington university it's actually an awesome school so if you're interested in great school that's a great one they said the stress is a worth class rate and they said most of their schools they work with do with classroom can happen and then you'll recognize this one ohio university a lot of our kids choose to go island university and they said you're really close right now all right so this is on our common app which is most of our calisthenic common app you see the box here about halfway down it says does your school rank we simply would say no and that would eliminate class range being looked at for our kids that's all we would do that's how easy it

063is for us to do that it also gives you some idea how common it is and put a check box in there that is questions you guys have for me on my recommendation do not talk to any colleges that require clustering and others will not be submitted without senior questions you mentioned military capitalism currently how does class rank impact our students with disabilities uh they're right just like everybody else uh i'm not breaking down interesting questions i've not broken down the skills ability where they call them classrooms so i can't give you a real great answer in that question my suspicion is just like you as a principal it probably doesn't benefit them but it doesn't benefit anybody yeah that's my prediction but i've never broken it down by a disability would the elimination of

064class frank change students accessibility into honors programs not just getting into college but then being able to get into an honors program or scholarship money none that we found um although it did hurt some more kids getting into my program because once you check the box then they look at that i also tell you that we're not eliminating our building clustering we still haven't got training but honestly guys here's the truth classroom only helps you talk to your class that helps number one there's very few rules i've ever made as a building principle that helped the other 326 kids does that make sense meaning it's the one decision we can make as an organizat so what casey will do is he will take the board policy he'll craft what he would like it to be

065i will bring it to the board for you to discuss and at some point i would i'll make a recommendation unless i get the sense that you're completely opposed to it but i don't have that sense but we'll work through it okay thank you so we have come to that point in the meeting where we have our open forum um although the public has the right to attend board meetings it has no inherent right to participate in the deliberations of the board without its consent speakers may offer such objective criticism of the school operations and programs as concern them but in public session the board has the right to request that complaints about school personnel or about any person connected to the school system be directed to the appropriate administrator the board asks anyone wishing

066to participate in open forum to please sign in the law so that we may have the ability to contact you later do i have anyone who would like to speak for open forum tonight we really wanted to try out the new shot clock but oh you know what i jumped i'm sorry that's right you're right it was communications my screen was scrolled up you know what let's do communications and i already gave this field no we did the communications that was in case you're right on where you're supposed to be i was going to say you were going to announce that we have a new shot clock there's a reason i was on it you want to talk about it yes i did all right so now that we know what the expectations are um

067we did get a timer so that everyone can see the five minute time limit so that no one has to verbally interrupt you and you'll be able to see about where you are in that timing process so hopefully it makes it a little um easier for everyone and hoping that that creates a more comfortable system but having nobody for open forum we'll try it again next month yeah yes committee reports mr burroughs would you like to go first i'd like to be on the shot clock are you sure that after like 25 minutes i'll take all five mr brown dr clark madam president school board members for those in attendance i'm jim garros i'm the nordonia's representative to the cuyahoga valley career center i'm on the board of education for the cuyahoga career center and

068this is my arch report something a little mundane compared to the previous reports but something a little different on monday march 14th the career center's fire and ems academy students participated in a training simulation which was a culmination of all aspects of the fire service curriculum that the cadets have been learning since the beginning of the second grading period they learned how to quickly put on all of their gear hook up to a fire hydrant homes and nozzle applications and proper emergency seat communications search and rescue and firefighter down rescue this was the final phase of their fire training during the junior year the fourth quarter will be an introduction to medical training in preparation for the emt certification next year their senior year captain paul tepley is a member of the south euclid fire

069department and is a primary instructor at the tri-c fire training academy for the high school program he graciously volunteered his time to come in to observe and offer tips of the trade to our students overall the fire and ems students did an excellent job and continue to learn how important this training is to make them ready for a career in the fire and emergency medical service curriculum our next topic is during the week of february 7th the career center joined other career centers and technical schools across the nation to celebrate skills usa week this annual celebration includes over skills usa members nationwide and promotes career and technical education abbreviated cte the week highlights the benefits of the skills usa program developing personal workplace and technical skills grounded in academics it also provides schools with an

070opportunity to demonstrate how cte helps prepare local students for college and high wage high demand career fields on friday february 11 an assembly was held at the career center highlighting all the students who participated in the skill usa leadership conference this past fall as well as the local competition awards we wanted to thank all the students who participated in this celebratory week and finally our next regular board of education meeting for the career center is this thursday march 24th 6 30 p.m at the career center and thank you thank you thank you go down the road you have something tonight so i do um in the attempt for us to partner with all of our groups here um school district uh one particular group i have had the privilege of working with is the nddic

071the ndesc is our regalia diversity equity and inclusion council and in their attempt to ensure that all of our students are able to thrive academically and socially without the barriers presented by prejudice and or discrimination they have been hard at work for the last several years are really trying to be intentional about doing things that are inclusive of all students and so i start with uh praise to the schools and to the councils who have been responsible for our unity week i think we can all agree that that has been an awesome undertaking and i'd like to just take a moment and just give them an applause for a job district in a way uh to be intentional about just identifying where our gaps are but more importantly trying to work hard to bring this

072together and so i wanted to commend them for that work i also wanted to give kudos to both the high school and the middle school for their immediate and intentional response of getting some boots to the ground and working collaboratively to design our nordonia high school and middle school deic so i'm going to give them a round of applause and the last thing that i want to mention and it's kind of a pretty to something that you're going to be hearing much more about as the planning is just about underway but i am extremely excited to announce that in partnership with our schools and the ndeic district initiatives uh committee they're going to have we're going to have first uh disabilities week in acknowledgement of our scholars and awareness for our scholars who have disabilities

073and having that sense of making sure that we are inclusive of all students and so i'm really excited about what that is going to formulate into and just want to openly say again kudos to all the schools the administrators the teachers and staff that works on those groups and the hard work done by the ndeic council so thank you very much um i just wanted to report we did have another um schools foundation meeting on march 8th um this meeting we had a um our mordonia schools family support specialist amy gay was there to talk about the different um resources that are available and different things that we do to help students and families every day they also another highlight of the meeting was that they uh gave a nice donation to our schools for

074something called dna day that you know all about it probably but this is the first time i heard about it um it was it is on april 22nd and it's put together by my understanding is the biology teachers of nordonia high school let's write that together um and so i'm pretty excited i'm hoping to be able to be able to attend that and hear the guest speakers and learn more about that but they did give us a donation towards that which was pretty cool um again there is an upcoming golf outing for the nordonia schools foundation on june 11th they're still planning that and finally our next meeting is going to be on april 13th and that's all i have first thing i'd like to do is this is tonsing i your fifth grade student

075council a huge um round of thanks um there's their little support notes and thank yous um that they were here we've all had a chance to read them and it's wonderful to to see kids um stepping out and trying to make an impact and so really grateful thank you so much for the legislative piece there's a few things going on so in the house finance committee um it's held a second hearing on house bill 597 and the senate finance committee has had a first hearing on house bill 597 usually you kind of see these running running separately but they're about the same thing um it's what this particular household would do it would provide capital reappropriations including approximately 442.8 million for local school construction through the ohio facilities construction commission that received prior conditional approval

076so there had already been some prior approval there that's what they're working on um the senate local government and elections committee um has they've heard sponsor testimony for house bill which would eliminate the august special election except so you know like you have you can have like a may election august election in november it gets rid of the august special election except in instances when the august special election is to nominate or elect candidates for the u.s house of representatives or if a school district is under fiscal emergency so they have to fall in that category a fiscal emergency to be able to use that date the bill would also allow a school district whose entire territory is located within the congressional district that is on the august ballot to put certain levies on the

077august ballot so um that one is it's like in its beginnings so just sponsor testimony nothing else yet um federal um the federal omnibus approach creations bill that was signed by president biden for fiscal year 22. there are multiple layers to this but it provides 1.5 trillion in funding and the bill contains educational funding in the following amounts so um for instance it's adding and mind you at the federal level this is going to go across the country so i mean it's you're talking billions in each of these categories but discretionary appropriations um before the department of education um for essa title 1 grants essay title 2a grants idea b um sometimes you hear us mention those um and which is also an increase so it's going to be for 13.3 billion which is an

078increase of 406 million above last year's level so there are significant pieces of money that are going into education and also money going into the cte state grants which are increasing by 45 million above the amounts from last year so it's good i mean on a national level we're seeing more money being pushed into education and that's what i have tonight well let's move into the superintendent's recommendations i recommend you approve the consent items listed can you get a motion second uh several things here first of all um you will be approving revised work policies and the new board policies and public participation policy which the board had a really great discussion about um at the board's retreat that will be in place and to dispel you know myth a rumor it does not restrict

079any kind of participation at the school board meetings other than it prevents people from getting able uh being able to get up and speak more than one time the time frame still the same and whatnot achievement testing policies telehealth appointments which allow our kids to with permission visit their doctors via online at school to keep them in school you'll see a donation of eight hundred dollars as ms said about the from the gordon schools foundation to high school dna day dna days nordonia is well known across the nation for this if you go to the youtube and put in nordonia dna day you'll see some teachers doing some fabulous singing of songs that they uh kind of weird al yankovic it's all related to dna fun stuff it is a great day you should get

080there if you can uh you'll be approving some overnight field trips most of these already happen because our bowling team and wrestling team went down to state but one of them is to come and that's our softball team going to myrtle beach over spring break and finally you'll be approving the transportation impractical for two students any questions mr brown mr kearney yes mr larimer yes this is mckinley yes mr tidmor yes responded yes she carries item two is a recommendation to approve the revised job descriptions a motion second uh last month he approved the job description for our new central office position the director of educational services and we thought it'd be a good time to revise the other central office job descriptions they hadn't been revised since 2012 they didn't change very much to

081be honest with you but a few were tweets so that's what these are any questions mr brown mr kearney yes mr larimer yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes yes item three is the recommendation to approve the resolution to adopt the new um revised board policy 8.07 this one's unique in being here instead of the consent agenda because it does have to have this resolution what this policy does currently board policy has us go out for bid for purchases over ten thousand dollars uh that is a well under the law requirement of fifty thousand dollars um we still for purchases under fifty thousand dollars get multiple um quotes but we don't have to go through the formal bidding process and with mr brown coming in realizing that we are one of the only places he'd

082ever heard of that still does that we thought we would update it to be currently law i'll answer questions mr brown mr kearney yes mr larimer yes mrs mckinley yes mr tidmor yes respondents yes item 4 is a recommendation to approve the resolution for our great three assessments for next school year this allows our third graders to use paper and pencil for the tests instead of doing them online and what we found is our students perform better when they're on paper and pencil and the state allows us to do it for this grade only any questions or comments um i just as as an elementary teacher it is there's been research put into um when it was mandated the discrepancies between um online computer testing and then the actual like paper pencil tests the younger

083kids still do much better if they have the opportunity to use paper and pencil so this will play to their strengths um and then but they do have to go on the computer from fourth grade mr brown mr cooney yes mr larimer yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes ms bondage yes item five is a recommendation to approve the contracts for the pupil services department can i get a and these are for one student who diagnosed with autism pretty significant and this is a a better way for us to go as far as providing the student the services he needs mr kearney yes mr leonard yes this is mckinley yes mr tidmor yes ms bondage yes item six is a resolution a resolution to approve the mou with the summit esc arp homeless consortium a

084motion second we get a small grant every year to spend uh for the homeless population and under current law if we do not spend all of the grant money we lose it and sometimes you find yourself buying things you don't need fortunately this new law allows us to join a consortium with the esc whereby unspent money carries over so it's a it's a much smarter way of doing things we'll be able to make the purchases without giving money back and if we don't need to spend the money we can bank until next year any questions mr brown mr kearney yes mr larimer yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes respondents yes ocean cares item seven is a recommendation to approve the medicaid addendum for the summit educational service center a second and hopefully you saw

085my write-up about this in the board update it all deals with the audit from the esc that they would like us to do this to help their future audience questions mr kearney mr larimer yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes your spanish yes ocean cares anime recommendation to approve the resolution with the office of cooperative purchasing motion uh this is a cost saving measure the district takes we belong to uh group purchasing um groups so we can get better discounts on things that we need so we have not been part of this one for a while because we're with the ohio schools council but this one has now given us some offers that we want to join them again any questions mr kearney yes mr lerner yes this is mckinley yes mr ted moore yes

086mrs bondage yes or she cares and my final item i recommend you approve the personnel items listed one motion just a few things of note here first of all the new position that you uh the job description you approved sean smith who's been our associate principal at the middle school for about 10 years now has been tapped to be our new director of educational services she will be relieving several of our central office administrators with some of their duties and also as we talked about with denise ward retiring and with deb wallace retiring she'll be doing our diversity work she'll be doing our work with bullying with health and wellness all of those sorts of things so we're excited about that and sean will be great in this position john is here sean congratulations sean

087we're very excited [Applause] she's staying in the district she's staying in the be the associate principal for the rest of the school year and you'll see brian's listening another all-star abby schupp is one of our nordonia grads middle school language arts teacher husband got a job in michigan and she decided to go with him i tried to talk her out of it and then you'll see a lot of the traditional kinds of things i do want to point out one thing with curriculum and that's the immersive virtual reality and math classroom training i'm so excited about this pilot program that we're doing whereby sean phillips and 60 of his algebra kids will be doing virtual reality algebra where they'll be using the oculus devices to manipulate um objects in 3d to learn um algebra skills

088and uh we are one of ten districts across the street across the state highlighting this really excited about it it is super cool and then the rest of the stuff is the typical kinds of things you can see this time of year any questions curry yes mr larimer yes mrs mckinley yes mr ted moore yes the spot edge yes and that concludes my report thank you madam president members of the board um item number one on my report is to approve the consent items and i recommend for approval good promotions um so what we have in the consent items are the special board meeting minutes from february 14 2022 along with the regular board meeting minutes from february 14th 2022 as long as the february 2022 financial statements do you have any questions uh mr

089kearney yes mr lerner yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes the spanish yes richard carries uh item number two is a resolution to approve uh the school district use with the huntington national bank commercial credit cards and i recommend for approval i get a motion motion i'll say it and what's going on with these is when uh huntington purchased first merit the district had credit cards through first merit and so as a result of that acquisition we have maintained the first merit platform which has over time become a little bit more archaic because they haven't really invested any resources into that so um looking at their new platform through huntington the commercial credit card that they're offering to upgrade us into a more user-friendly 21st century type of platform we'll take care of that for

090this resolution any questions mr kearney yes mr lerner yes mr mckinley yes mr tidmor yes espanace yes then finally item number three is a resolution to approve adjustments to the appropriations for the 21-22 fiscal year i recommend for approval motion please no motion we have two appropriation adjustments here that i'm proposing um the first one is we got some additional funding through the esser funds esther ii and sr3 arp and it's just underneath twenty thousand dollars split between the two of those programs and it was just an additional federal application that the state awarded across the state and that was the amount allocated to us so just appropriating that additional company and then the second item deals with our permanent improvement fund and you've seen in the past i've come to you for some appropriation

091adjustments with our permanent improvement fund uh this fund was created as a result of the mgm settlement money that we received um dudes at the time of when we created that fun we didn't quite know but all the projects that we'd be taking on for this current school year so working with mr strickland and his department on ironing out summer summer work with roofing at the middle school and other areas throughout the district increasing his appropriation measure will give us the spending authority to move forward with those projects obviously it's important to note that we are using the permanent improvement fund paid for this roofing project whereas in the past the general fund would have been responsible for paying for that cost so what he's looking at is mr strickland's looking at is around 300

092000 for the middle school roofing project above the gym that needs to be that's the camaro mr kearney yes mr larmer yes mrs mckinley yes mr tidmor yes espanage yes ocean cares and that concludes my report so that brings us to uh adjournment um our next the next regular schedule meeting for the board of education will be on monday april 25th 2022 at 7 pm at northfield elementary school um right here you can see you then um can i get a motion oh yes right thursday um we have our community open forum at seven o'clock 6 30. 6 30. right here so we'll see hopefully i'll be back here on thursday yes