001Hello, I'm Nick Reichoff, assistant superintendent of operations for the Sun Prairie Area School District. I'm here today presenting on operational expectation 4, personnel administration, which is one of the final monitoring reports of the 2425 school year. This is coming forward for review and consideration by the school board on February 9th, 2026. As we think about personnel administration and this 2425 school year, I think we would all agree that it was a year of hardship in the district related to personnel. It was difficult in a lot of ways. We had separate incidents occur at various uh locations across the district that resulted in uh really negative things in relation to staff members. We had a staff member arrested for serious crimes. We had a leadership change at East High School. Uh incidents in 2425 led to
002a leadership change at West High School and the separation with the district level leader. In addition, these incidents uh caused concern among our community and brought negative attention to the administration of personnel in the district. It's important to recognize this as we take a look at the measures that go into uh monitoring personnel. And while it was promising that the third party investigation did not find fault with the systems that we set up to be compliant with personnel administration such as policy development, implementation of implementation of procedures and training of staff. It's important to note that that investigation did find that these systems weren't utilized uh in the way that we intended. And while this layered approach is intended to mitigate harm, we have to understand that it did cause harm. It caused harm to
003students and staff and the community in our school district. As a learning organization, the learning of our adults also has to be a priority in addition to the learning of our students. And while OE4 is focused on our staff, we need to recognize in the spirit of continuous improvement that we need to review uh how our staff is trained and how they implement that training in order to provide a positive and healthy workplace for our staff and of course a positive and healthy uh learning environment for our students. As so as a reminder as we look at OEE4, the purpose is to asssure the recruitment, employment, development, evaluation and compensation of our district employees uh is aligned to our results policies. That is to uh ensure that our staffing is set up to make sure
004student learning can occur. As a reminder, this is the second year of monitoring a revised OEE4. Uh in uh March of 2024, uh the original OE4 was divided and uh metrics that are being reported on in a separate screencast that are more progressbased were put into an operational results policies policy while uh results and measures that are more compliance-based either it was or was not completed uh remained here in the operational expectation. In addition, we also added a couple of additional uh policy statements in the OEE policy. So, as we think about the entirety of the report, the report has 35 measures. 31 of the measures are uh we deem compliant. Uh when we look at which measures were not compliant, one of them would be related to staff complaints and investigations. Um and the
005measure is that a 100% of formal complaints and grievances are resolved and handled according to district policy. And we know that the report completed by attorney Sam Hall from Crellllo Nichols and Hall looking into uh the incident that occurred during the 2425 school year at West High School. Uh we know that his findings indicate that uh concerns were not adequately investigated and so um we are marking this as non-compliant. It's important to know that efforts are already underway to ensure that uh we address this issue. We've uh already communicated and the board has already communicated out about some of those efforts which include uh retraining staff on mandatory reporting uh bringing in the elephant alliance to help staff recognize signs of grooming and how to take action uh and to expand uh training to other
006groups um to recognize the blurring of boundaries. More action steps will be taken over the coming months as we continue to enact uh recommendations that have been uh an outgrowth of that report linked here on this slide and in the monitoring report. Out of the 35 measures, uh again four were non-compliant. Uh three of the non-compliant measures relate to evaluations. And so measure one focuses on uh professional educators and certified staff. Uh measure three focuses on uh administrative support staff and measure four focuses on um support staff and we had some evaluations not completed in each of those three groups. And while it is a small overall number um it's important to note that we didn't reach the 100% goal that everyone who was up for a full evaluation uh had an evaluation in that
007year. And so some of the actions that we're taking uh to correct that and make sure that we that seven out of 585 goes down to zero is uh we are working with uh all staff who uh supervise others to ensure that um processes are in place uh that training is had and that everyone understands their responsibility um to engage in the evaluation process. Uh we will continue to monitor frontline which is where most of our evaluations are tracked to ensure that those evaluations occur and we'll target our newest evaluators and supervisors to ensure that they understand the process and that uh the HR team is accessible to help if there is are concerns about how to complete evaluations. One note that we do want to make sure we share is uh when an evaluation
008is missed, it doesn't mean that that uh employee starts over on their three-year cycle. Uh their evaluation uh full evaluation summary year is moved to this coming school year to address the the fact that their uh evaluation did not uh occur on the timeline originally intended. Uh we also want to recognize that there are a large number of uh measures that we found compliant and we're uh we are uh meeting the board's expectations and the community's expectations related to personnel administration. Uh we have a continued focus on uh building relationships through job fairs and job postings with different groups to ensure that we are recruiting staff who match our student demographics. Uh we have aligned professional development. We're engaging in salary studies to ensure that our uh staff are compensated competitively in the region. Uh
009we're growing feedback structures to ensure all employees are receiving feedback. We're in integrating our core values and the behaviors that uh lead to the u actualization of those core values into evaluation systems. Uh we're working with employee workg groupoups on handbook language, calendars and other ways of providing feedback and we're strengthening our onboarding process. Uh some other highlights uh for 2425 is that uh the HR department worked to improve the technology infrastructure that supports um the administration of personnel. That includes uh implementation of the HR management system out of frontline which is a software package that we already subscribe to for a large number of uh services and uh functions within the school district. Uh we're continuing to improve our grow your own program to ensure that uh people who enroll in the grow your
010own program uh have a a path towards uh getting teacher certification uh which is another high lever strategy to increase the diversity of our staff. Um, our employee wellness communications have improved and and grown and been become more integrated with other aspects of human resources. and we launched the Kickstart program uh to ensure that all support staff have a way to get connected to the district in the first few days of their new position and that they have the information they need to be successful given the uh non-compliant measures in this uh OE the administration does not feel that certification of the report is appropriate um we're uh leaving it to the board to make a determination as to the gravity of the uh non-compliant measures and uh whether or not those land in um
011compliance with exceptions noted or that if the report is non-compliant. We look forward to uh continued conversation about this topic on Monday the 9th and continued work to ensure that we are living up to our mission and our vision and our values uh as we go into the uh 2526 U monitoring. Thank you. Uh and we will talk more on Monday night.