Rolla Board of Education Meeting - July 17th, 2025

001Session and Dr. Dyrsk can speak for a few minutes. Yeah, I just wanted to thank everybody for their flexibility and let everyone know if things look a little different for the broadcast and recording. We had some moisture issues downstairs in the boardroom and we're working on those repairs, but they're not completed yet. And so. rather than try to make that work and makeshift something and figure that out, we've just shifted locations. So appreciate everyone's flexibility and willingness to make this work. So if we seem a little off or a little out of place, that's why. But I think we're going to be fine. We will. Thank you so much. All right, well, we're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. So to open our meeting, we're going to begin here with inviting all of

002you to participate. So please stand. face the flag and join us and if you have your hats please bring those for us. Here we go. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Are there any questions on the camera? Seeing none, we'll move on to presentations on agenda items. Any other questions? Seeing none. Dave, did you have a question for the board? No. all right we will move on to our consent agenda our consent agenda is utilized by the royal board of education as a means of dealing with routine matters which must be considered by the board of education but require a minimum of discussion all board of education members

003receive and review written information supporting the items listed on the consent agenda well in advance the meeting while any member of the board of education is welcome to remove any item from the consent agenda For separate consideration or discussion for any reason, normally all items on the consent agenda are approved in one motion with a minimum of discussion. Tonight we have items A through D. if you don't have anything you want to pull out yeah just a couple items to point out under uh item d for bids uh the elementary rooftop units and chiller bid you see that breakdown that will all be part of the 2023 bond issue funds so there are there are funds left in that in that to do the hvac projects that's what one of the things we said we

004were going to do This, with your approval, that will actually bring everything up to date and in good shape other than, with the exception of the chiller in this building, and there's a small handful of rooftop units on the front sections of RTI, but everything else will be up to date and current. It's a great step forward. Appreciate the community support in doing that. You'll also see tire and oil bids. Those are normal things we do every year just to get the best pricing. Milk and bread bids are required by federal law. I think since the dawn of time, most school districts get one milk bid because we typically have one service provider for that. Bread bids fluctuate a little bit, but I do want to point out we're required by federal law to do

005the bid. If you look over that bid for the milk, it's for the school year, but they only hold the pricing for 30 days. So it's really a moot point. They are the provider, and they can charge whatever they see fit. So we're kind of at their mercy, but they're great to work with. Highland is obviously a good company, and they're great to work with us. But all that bid information is in there. Can I get a motion to approve the consent agenda items A through D? I'll make a motion that we approve the consent agenda items A through D. I'll second that. Thank you, Sue. Is there any discussion by any board members? I was just, let me just comment that the total of the HVAC units is $1.4 million. So it's a big

006expense, but again, covered by the bond that the community supported. Very appreciative of that for sure. All right, if there's no further discussion, can I get a vote to approve items A through D? All in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed say no. Ayes have it. The motion has been adopted and the consent agenda items A through D have been approved. All right, moving on to old business, our long range facility update. So no presentation for this just a quick update we are still working with honor associates We've had multiple online meetings and in-person meetings So working on finishing up the the design plans for the football field drainage issues and turf replacement lighting project there We have the softball field piece that we're working on from the tornado side the Mark Twain cafeteria

007piece that we're working on and then of course the early childhood center, so we hope to have some some additional information and Probably will look to schedule a work session with the board to look over those Kind of not final plans but close to final plans before we do finalize so that you all know what we're putting out to bid and how we're doing those packages to see if you have questions suggestions or things that you want us to do differently there but we are going to try to bid all four of those around the same time frame not in one package but around the same time so that we get good information we know what the costs are going to be and hopefully it attract a good set of contractor interest. Do we have

008any idea when that might be? We're pushing for August. Yeah, we're pushing for August. I would tell you reasonably probably September to go out to do. But we're still kind of on the track to early childhood center August of 26. Yes, softball field August of 26, July of 26 is what we're shooting for. And then the others are a little more flexible. Football is obviously. confined we're trying to do that between seasons so November to summer and then but Mark Twain cafeteria will be a little longer so just a couple of quick things on the storm recovery So again working with Hunter associates to create a plan so looking at Mark Twain We do have the window replacements, so if you're driving down Salem Avenue, of course, you still see we have the three classrooms

009boarded up. So part of that project will be replacing those windows, but we also then, they won't match the rest of the windows. So looking at what that could look like and how we can fit that so we can get a feel for that. We are pretty close to having some some floor plans for the storm shelter cafeteria area For the kitchen and all those things we met with a kitchen consultant who does commercial kitchens who's designed the junior high kitchen The RTI kitchen for the district so we've worked with them before So we were quite a ways down that path But just need to finish some things up the old cafeteria area is a question that comes up a lot. What's going to happen there? So what we're kind of looking at for this

010bid package would be two options. One would be to just, I'm going to say close that area up so that it's external walls instead of internal. The second option would be to go back with a couple of classrooms and infill that space. We could use the space, but cost may be a factor there. But we'll have to do one or the other because we can't stay like it is. We are still thinking timeline on that is probably 18 to 24 months. That's just a big project. On the cafeteria? On the cafeteria side, yeah. The window replacement, will that happen before school starts? No, no. There's some block work and some things that have to happen in that. There's an economy of scale that if we do that when we have masons and stuff on site

011versus having them come in to do a little fraction of some stuff. And then once the design is completed and we order the windows, it'll be several weeks before we get them anyway. So we just think it'll be part of the package. Is there a plan to have a class in that classroom for the fall? Do you know? The classroom that has no windows, it's boarded up? Yes. There's three classrooms. Okay. Yes, there will be classes in all three of those. The Mark Twain PTO painted murals on the inside of those. So they're very adorable little scenery things. But yes, there will be classes in those. Okay. Wyman, I'm not going to go through all these details, but I'm very happy to report that the roof is dried in. We're not complete, but we are

012dried in. So that's allowing the interior work to move forward at a little faster pace. But there's a lot to do in there. So we have the flooring to do. We have the ceiling grid with all the tile work. Our tech department, Bill and his crew, will go in and do all the wireless access points, the paging, the phone systems, all those things that were destroyed by the water. Our maintenance and our custodial staff will have to go back through over the new flooring tile, the wax. There's a lot of layers that have to occur. The insurance company first on site. Not the insurance company, the company hired by the insurance company, first on site, is also doing a lot of sterilization and cleanup as they go. So they're cleaning the walls, sterilizing them, and

013then painting those that were heaviest damage and had storm debris in them so that they're clean and sanitized and fully prepped. So there's a lot of work to be done in there. This is a fairly aggressive timeline, but I will say they bring an army of people. So it'll move pretty quick. Even when it comes to waxing the floors, normally that's a fairly tedious process. It takes time. But just remember there's nothing in the building in those sections. So they have wide open floors. They won't have to move furniture. They won't have to strip floors. They'll just be able to go in and start putting their coats of wax on it. So it should go pretty quickly. The end, the gist of that is, oh, I'm sorry, let me back up. You'll notice on the

014fence replacement, it says fence replacement to begin sometime. Weather doesn't work for fence people either. So it delayed our roofers, but it also delays the fencing folks. So they have other projects to do, of course, as well. But that has all been approved and is in place. We just don't know when that work is going to occur. The playground equipment has been ordered. It will not be here until, they're telling us, September at this point. There will be some sections of the playground that will have to be fenced off and closed because part of the installation of the new equipment is the removal of the old equipment. So we will dispense those off, shut those down. The playground will still be accessible. They'll still have access to some basketball goals and some volleyball things. The

015custodians painted some foursquare and some hopscotch and that kind of stuff. So there's still activities for them to do. They just won't have the full equipment until we get the new stuff in. Casework is ordered. They're saying it'll be here and installed in August. I don't know that that will happen before school starts. But that's when we're saying casework, we're talking about sink cabinets and some of the built-in cabinetry. There's not a ton of that at Wyman. There will be a few spots there. So furniture has been starting to come in. We've had several truckloads coming. We have another one I got a notice today coming tomorrow. So that's all coming in and those replacement pieces are happening. The teacher stuff has been replaced or they at least know the process to do that. We'll

016talk about that here in a second. I think there's a notice light for that. So the insurance company recovered basically everything in the classrooms with a few exceptions and the exceptions were personal items the teachers had that were not related to their teaching. So for instance, if they had a coffee pot in their classroom, the insurance company didn't cover that. However, through again the generous donations of our community, CORE had the donated money specifically for those items. So everybody's everything is being covered. So the teachers won't be out anything to replace anything there. We also have a plan for those things that are damaged Because we know in all the moving and the packing and that that there's a chance that as the teachers unpack there will be some things that they find missing or

017damaged that need to be replaced there and we will be able to take care of those as well. So great shape there. The goal overall goal is to move everybody back and allow the teachers back in during that first week first full week of August starting August 4th. So that's our marker we're working toward. We did notify the teachers that that was the goal, but to please be patient and wait and make sure we'll communicate to them. I'll give them a couple of weeks there before school really gets going and we can get shape. So not ideal, but I think in the circumstances, it's a good spot to be in. Middle school. Roof repair, there's still a few little pieces to chase up there, some guttering pieces, some small things. We've asked them to focus

018on the big, you know, get the big chunks of linemen, get the big chunks of middle school, get the big chunks of linemen. We still have some other pieces, but they're not impacting anything at this point. HVAC units have been shifted just a little bit. They're now not scheduled to be here until August 26th. I'm sorry, not scheduled to ship until August 26th. Maybe it'll probably be another week or so before we get them after that. Hopefully they won't keep shifting that date, but we did we weren't able to have the temporary air reinstalled in the building so the rooms have air Everything is fine. We'll keep the temporary air in there until the new units are in working. So that shouldn't be an issue Gas line repair They have the kitchen temporarily working, but

019they won't be able to fully fix the gas line until the units are in but that's not an issue either Lighting is in, ceiling is in We'll have some, again, some small things to work, some cleanup stuff to do, but we'll be back in the full on. Before you go on? Yes. Dr. Derrick? Yes. So before when we had installed those units on the roof? Didn't have anybody in the building underneath right so I'm assuming we're gonna schedule this for weekends. Yes. That's a great point Yeah, they've already told us that they will they will coordinate with us to either come in after hours or weekend or something to set those units Softball mentioned earlier looking at the possibility of converting that into a combined baseball softball field a dual-purpose field There's been a lot

020of questions about turf for that field that can be an alternate for the bid what the cost is So we'll play on doing that again hoping to have that RFP in place by August September with the other projects Still some work to do over at maintenance. They had a lot of roofing damage and some things over there Most people don't know that because you can't see it but Those contracts have been released the insurance company has approved everything again. It's just we're just waiting our turn So they have everything to buried and targed Still some three buildings over there with roof repairs to happen. Tree cleanup, I don't know if we'll ever finish with that. I think by the time we get done, they'll all be growing back again, so we'll see. But the guys

021have done a great job trying to stay up with that. There's just a lot. And as they go through, they're finding other things that maybe... from a distance or from the road don't look damaged but we end up on them the root system is compromised or the tree is broken or twisted and so they're having to cut down some additional trees and some things like that so there's a lot happening here. Again a lot of fencing in that area so same company doing all the fencing that'll all happen. The box truck and trailers so the vans box truck and then we had a total of four trailers with damage. Those have all been approved. We've already actually been paid for those by the insurance companies. We're in the process of getting those ordered. The band

022is in the process of ordering their replacement trailer. We're trying to, we're getting the box replaced on the truck. None of that will happen for their season. So they're looking at some alternatives to get them through their season for this year, and it is what it is. All that's going well. RTC, so here the drip edge and parapet, there's about a third of that metal drip edge and parapet around this building, a green trim, if you will, that's damaged or missing. And so the insurance company is paying for that part. We could not match the color, so we're replacing all of it. But we also told them the only areas that were issues have been dried in and temporary. This was not the priority. Same company is doing the work here that didn't go on

023school appointments. So we've asked them to do those buildings first and this drip edge can come later. It'll be a nice gray of some flavor before it's done. Sorry, there was a slide on the classroom supply. So just again to reiterate, everything's been covered. Our downstairs lobby looked, you probably saw some boxes when you came in a while ago, but two days ago you could barely walk through there. Everything got delivered. So things are happening, and some of that stuff is fairly large because it's marker boards and cork boards for walls. It's classroom desks. It's some pretty big stuff, all the way down to replacement calculators. Markers and some things like that so it's the full gamut of everything that was damaged The insurance company has been great to work with to some that and

024reviewing those as quickly one last thing I would say is Contrary to Rumors that are still circulating we plan on starting school in August on the first day of school with everyone where they're supposed to be Wyman students will be back to Wyman middle school students will all be back to middle school mark 20 will continue at mark 20 so I'm happy to answer any questions on the way back Just real quick back to the band in the box trucks and such. Since it is going to be a little bit before those can come in, does the insurance company offer any opportunity to rent? We've talked to them. Yeah, we're still chasing some of those details, but I think they will help us with that, if need be. I'm not sure what the band means.

025They're still trying to figure that out, too. We're chasing those details. All ready for new business? So we have a technology plan update. Mr. Lewis. So if you want to come on up. Sorry, I know it's a little different than what we're used to. Bill, we think for sound purposes, and I'm probably somewhere in that general area. Yeah, but you're going to need this. That's the forward, that's the back. Good evening. Thank you for letting me do this month from last month. I was totally not prepared. Dr. Tell me I needed to do a presentation last month and I was like, my jaw hit the floor. And thank you for allowing me to come back. I truly appreciate it. I've learned the hard way sometimes. So I need to update what is going on. last

026or this past school year so we've got access control installed in all of the buildings we're going to distribute the access cards to staff i think next week i think well give to the principals so we've got that tornado damage yeah we're still going through all that so what happened for us i had to make some notes here So the fiber ring was damaged at Lyman, like the poles were on the floor, or the floor of the road there for a couple weeks, I think it was. Anyway, we got that up, Sparklight came in, and they got us back up. And I cannot give them credit. They called me. I had planned to call them, but they had already reached out to me before I could even call them. And then they hooked us up

027since we had to move from Wyman. They temporarily ran fiber over to the new early childhood building that was purchased. Allowed us to get on the network and it was a long two weeks, but we got it done. So the other damage was the phone system was damaged at Wyman too. So we've got two units. We've got a primary and a secondary. The secondary was damaged. So because of that, we're... Literally at Wyman right now putting new phones in for a new phone system. We had a lot of wireless access point damage, computers damaged in Wyman, McLean, middle school. We've all got them all replaced. We're just actually start hanging projectors at Wyman tomorrow. Get those back in. And then on a network hardware upgrades, district servers, we purchased new servers just, I think in

028June. We've got like three servers left to move over, but that's on hold right now for the phone system. Great system. We got it cheaper, about $15,000 cheaper than... We changed platforms, but we saved money in the long run because the licensing that we're using on the current system, it increased. And the system we bought is perpetual, so we buy it once and we own it. We've currently got 338 phones assigned to the new system. We're going to roll that and go live next Wednesday on the 23rd. Let me just throw in, I don't want to cut you off. Yeah, you're good. Just make sure you understand what Bill's saying. That unit damaged at Wyman was not Wyman's phone system. It was the secondary part of the entire district's phone system. So we've been talking

029about upgrading our system. The system we were using, the company is not supporting anymore. It's kind of aging. We're talking about that anyway. We had a bill was coming up with a nice plan to phase that in and do some nice planing and some things around that and that kind of got blown up. Yeah, like next time. We went all in. Yeah, we did. That's all happening very fast. So on the help desk, so we average response time for tickets submitted is 1.3 days and resolution is 3.7 days last school year. It's not bad. I don't think for the amount of tickets we get. We did 2,591 tickets resolved last school year. Does not include phone calls and emails. That's probably a quarter of more of that. So anyway. Cyber security. So we're continuing, or

030I say not I, but the department continues to make sure that we're meeting the insurance requirements set forth for cyber security. And on that last school year, I budgeted in to get a penetration test by a third party, a cybersecurity company. We did have that done, I think it was in February? Or March? No, it was during the tornado. It was right in March because we had to delay them. I'm happy to say we did good. I mean, there was a few things that we cleaned up. They were very minor, but I was very impressed. It's kind of funny, the company sent us a little unit to put on our network so they can do the internal testing. They couldn't reach it. They had to call us and we had to let them into our

031network to get to their thing to try to hack our computers. It was kind of funny. So the penetration test is just to verify whether a bad actor could get in using normal or known methods to attack. So here's the big one. So future plan. Technology refreshes. The high school is getting new computers this summer. Well, they're already in. Along with the RTI and RTC. This will totally complete our Windows 11 upgrade across the district. Add a five-year plan. This is a third year. Thank you for the funding. Seriously. It's done. Next year, we'll be doing other stuff. Next summer, we'll be pulling cable to save more money. Let's see. New projectors in the third grade classrooms along with Chromebooks in the sixth and seventh grade. And next summer we will obviously focus new technology

032on the early childhood. We'll get that in and get it wiped out. Class link migration. I literally have finished that up. I think there's three apps left in Clever. We're going to move over it. consolidate all our apps. Dr. Wilts has been very... Is she here? She loves my screen a lot better than Clever. That's our single sign-on piece. So when the students log into the computer, that's what gives them access to all the different apps and different programs that they need. I apologize for not explaining all that. We even did a little communication exercise using me as an example. I failed. Student data governance, we're still working through that. I think we're getting better along with that, aren't we? Yeah. So what that is, is like if we buy software, we get a contract

033with that vendor that they will not share our student data with any other third parties. It stays with us, and if we leave them, they delete it. So that's a good thing for students and us. Technology planning, I still got to get a committee together on that. I left last year and came back, I don't even know, November. I wasn't gone long, so again, thank you. But I will get on that to meet our new CSIP. Emergency power, that tornado made us realize we need some emergency power to keep the network up. I know the tornado hit Friday, Monday we were in here all day getting power to the server so we could all get paid. So we worked that into the budget. I know there will be a long term plan but that's what

034we need to do. Okay so eduroam, Hornet called me last week and I just threw this on there after I sent it to Amy and I'm sorry for changing it. So S&T, let me explain what that is. So eduroam wireless is like a nationwide, worldwide type of wireless access for students. S&T is currently used in. like morning called me and said hey would you guys like to pilot it I'm like yeah sure it's free so what that is is if a student has their device here logged on our network they walk in the S&T they just hit edgy run wireless network and it logs in man with our credentials here so it's just I think I think he says gonna call the public library here in Rolla try to get them on that too and

035with our hotspots. So it'll just make things a lot easier for students around town. And the more schools and libraries that get into it, it'll become more widely available. And that actually goes live in January of 26 for all of More Net schools. We've already discussed this slide just so you know. Thank you for providing that earlier. Yeah, that's cool. That's nice. I'm kind of scared now. Well, let me explain. This will go down, I promise you. We just haven't surplused a lot of stuff yet. Now the iPad count is going up because we're putting more in the elementary classroom so they don't have to share it. The Chromebook count, I think it was down a little bit from last year. I'd have to compare, but we've got hundreds that we've got to surplus still,

036which I've got to get you guys a list so we can surplus it. But let's see. Yeah. I'm just reading my notes. I'm sorry. I'm not very prepared here. Yeah. That's pretty much what I have. A lot of devices. That's a lot of devices. That's not a lie. That's for sure. I know the Windows computer went down. So, yeah. And that's just us. Oh, we did get a new... So Tom retired. We kind of took that position and made it a lead technician. Didn't hire another take and we got a system administrator Hello, Nelges. She was at the district previously She's been very good We're all staffs are good. I'm working hard. Two of them still on the clock. Put the thumbs in. Now we've got Nikki and Kayla with the instructional technology. If you

037guys have any questions, I'll be glad to answer. Do you feel like you have enough people? We say very busy, I'll let it out. Ask me in private. Right now, yes. We're busy. I think when more people, we'd be less busy, but then I'd have to be finding things to do. No, I think we've got a handle on it right now. Any more to say about the one-to-one? Yes, that's a good, good, yes. So last year I think it went okay. I wasn't here for all of it and sadly there was some stuff I would have liked to have implemented last year or changed but I plan on doing that this year. So what we did get, having a technician over there eight hours a day it was really hurting us. So I've got some

038lockers where the students can go up in a little kiosk, log in, get a loaner if they need it. It's self-service, same with repairs. If their device isn't working properly, they can go in there, log in, put their broken device in, close the door, another door will open up, and they can get a loaner. So we're going to run that. It's a lot cheaper than having somebody sitting there all day. It's a subscription thing. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than hiring somebody to sit there all day. But then the reason I went that way is because with the new early childhood building, so we don't have to hire more techs. That would be a building to take care of, but it won't be very, I'm trying to think how to say this, it won't

039be as busy as the high school. So we can just have somebody slide over a couple hours a day if needed. So and I talked to Dr. Ray about that. He was, he seemed to want to try the lockers. Last time I talked to him, hopefully he still feels that way. There was some discussion, maybe we just talked about it, I can't remember, of maybe one of the computer classes having some students who would learn how to do repairs on Chromebooks. Was there any of that this year or is that a future thing? Well go ahead bill, but I think that's a future thing. There's a little talk, but that's not how we were talking about the RTI programs But that's not what our current program is structured at so it would take a shift

040Programming and approval from the department And I and I know we discussed that with dr. Ray I don't think it happened last year. It was just Trying to get students to who wanted to do it. I don't know the details I just have a quick question about your help desk and those tickets that you talked about. You talked about phone calls and emails as well. So if those are not put in as tickets, how do you track those? We don't. And I'm working on that. I've told them going forward if you get a phone call just put it in. If you get an email just copy and paste it into a ticket. I mean I tell them to understand teachers are busy, they just ask for an email, I get it, or make a call.

041But yeah, we do need to start tracking them better. That is on my list. That'd be nice just so we can get it. Right, yeah. Yeah. If I went through the emails, there'd be a lot of emails. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next update. Do you have Mr. Snicker with you as well? Everybody was pointed at you. Now you can print it wherever you want. It doesn't actually matter. Here we go. All right. Well, thank you for having us up again this year. Come up this way a little bit. Thank you. Thank you for having us tonight. You guys know Shannon Snicker, our assistant AD, and has done a tremendous job. Before I go too much further though, Bill, you guys have done one heck of a job. You probably don't

042hear it enough, but your department, your group, we couldn't be here without you guys. And so I just wanted to say that because you guys, ever since that darn tornado... It has been a scurrying. I mean, you guys are like everywhere and I just appreciate you guys so much because we couldn't be even close to what we're doing now with the kids and preparing for this year if we didn't have you guys. Thank you. You bet. You bet. Well, let's go ahead and dive on in. All right. Are we going to play it? Stop touching the clicker. Okay. I'm going to plug this speaker back in real quick. it'll play. Pictures are something that we like to show off and for the kids success and that's one of the neatest things about my job is

043Getting to see both sides of it because later you'll see how good we do academically But it's always nice to see the kids enjoying their activities that they love to do and perform it So that you know that's a big thing for us. I think as we move forward with the kids and promoting the kids through our websites and making sure that As we now move forward into this next year Our big challenge is going to be to get as much. attention with the kids without going over the top too much. Sometimes you can almost put too much out there. This slide here I wanted to transition to a little bit. The numbers you guys can see historically from 2015 to 24-25, what's happening with our numbers. If you look at that 2020 to 2022

044area right around that COVID time, that's when everything went down, but it's moving back up. Our numbers are going to be really interesting this fall to see just because of what we've seen in camps. And I think you guys would be probably really surprised to know that usually in the months of May, June, we process well over $40,000 in camp money. Well over that and we have when we came right out of COVID it was like record highs kids parents wanted their kids out of their house. They didn't want them there no more, but the numbers getting kids involved in keeping our activities program from the junior high level which coach will talk about and all the way up to the high school from club activities to All the things that we can do to

045help our kids belong at school and make sure they do better part of it. That's a big piece of it. So let me keep on going on here. Okay. Um, this This slide right here has a breakdown of numbers of what's happening within the teens. You can see everything from all our academic teams, fine arts teams, all that. You can see exactly what we have going on. Now, this fall, it'll be really interesting to see what we can because we still have good numbers coming in from the junior high. And that 9th grade, 10th grade year is a big year for kids trying things. So that's really good. Does anybody have any questions about this slide or the previous slide? Because, I mean, I know it's numbers, but that's where we're getting ready to roll

046everything over from last year to this year with Misha. That's going to happen this next week or two as we get closer and closer to August. Then we take those rosters and we start moving everything over. So then we process everything for this upcoming year. So we're always about a year out on everything we do. with the mission organization. Okay, clubs and activities right here in what we have. Oh, this is Coach, this is you. A couple things. One, the junior high weights program. And the weight room over there is awesome. So thank you for that. Getting on board, the principal over there is kind of pushy, I know. But that was a big sticking point for her, trying to get kids motivated, up to par with a lot of the other schools we compete

047with. Most of them have those. So it's very nice, very, very nice, actually, for a junior high. Probably the best. really close to being as good as anyone I've seen any other schools we used to go to in the conference in Springfield or St. Louis, places like that we've been this last year. So anyway, thank you for that. That's a big deal. I think we had around 35 to 40 kids showing up between 6.15 to 7.15 every morning. So that would be just two classes worth that maybe couldn't get weights in their schedule because we don't have enough teachers yet to implement that for... every hour of the day. Hopefully that's something we can consider in the future. But Coach Terranova, I think Coach Shukart, Coach Swofford, Coach Yager, when they're not coaching a sport,

048a lot of times they open that up in the morning and we have great participation there. And I think the kids really enjoy it. So thank you for that, again, like I said. Last year when I talked to you guys, it was a struggle getting... things contracted as far as football and things like that. I'm a little bit at ease right now because football, all fall sports are contracted and full and most time A and B games I think for four of the six football games, which last year I think we only had two. So things are kind of looking up there. Just being involved a little bit longer, getting to know some more ADs, things like that have helped me greatly. Coach Cavalier obviously, but just you know, just throwing emails out all over

049the place and finally starting to get some responses because they don't know who this weirdo is. Emailing them, they can put a face with a name, stuff like that, right? So I think that's helped a ton. Our activities on the slide here is up from 626 last year to 677 this year. We added 10 new clubs. The goal at the junior high is to get 100% of the kids involved in something. We had 75% of the kids involved in a club this last year. We've got a couple ideas coming forward for this next year as far as being able to even allow the kids that have to leave immediately after school or something like that to get them involved. Again, the principal has decided to implement once a month during our Bulldog Blitz Pride time

050to, we're adding one club. this coming year. But so one of the days, I think the first Wednesday of every month is kind of what we've decided on at this point. All the kids will go to their club during Pride. So all the teachers will be responsible for working. around whatever club it is that they have to have things for them to do during that time once a month on Wednesdays so that every kid can feel like they're a part of something. And then, you know, again, right, try to get kids involved in activities that may not be able to, especially the ones that, you know, have to leave school or can't get rides to and from, those types of things. So those are some things we're looking forward to this next year. Let's see.

051And so, again, that's really, as far as just to keep continuing to get more and more kids involved, that's a big deal. I think we've seen some pretty big strides over there in the last couple of years as far as that kind of stuff goes. One, just having somebody there. to help promote those types of things, kind of get some rapport with the kids. Cuz I get to see some of those in class and I can talk to them more one on one than they have to come to an office or not even have a person over there. So I love doing it. I appreciate the opportunity. And I think it's been very beneficial as far as getting kids involved in multiple ways, not just sport, but all kinds of activities as well. So it's

052been fun. Hopefully we're a little ahead of where we were last year. I know we are as far as scheduling goes. So that's made me pretty happy, honestly. All right. Shannon's done a great job. I think one of the great things when you guys decided to and approved it, having the junior high activities director, that is so huge. Having somebody in the building, building that culture for their activities and the clubs, that's really important. just like it is anywhere else. So him and his staff, they've done a great job. And I know, I'm sure that's going to really keep on growing for our kids. That'll be a good thing. The high school, we have more clubs. One of the things we've been talking about here at the high school is trying to make sure we

053understand that we're just not throwing up a bunch of clubs at any one time because we want to see them stick and stay. We just don't want it to be a little fry up in a pan. We want it to be able to be something that... you know, is going to last us because our teachers are their sponsors and our teachers are busy, but also too, our kids do a really good job of maintaining once they get something going. So that's good. The other piece of this, you know, of the clubs and stuff before I go to this is understanding that our needs are going to change. In years to come, I bet you within the next five to ten years you'll see a surge of different activities, which is good. Change is good. All

054right? But it's going to be a reflection of our group of our students in our community, what they desire. And, for example, we have not brought it in, and I don't see us bringing in really quick or anything, be like boys volleyball. That, you know, that's not there yet. Trying to bring in Other things that are just emerging through the Michigan department there is, you know, some of that stuff you're going to hear from flag football for girls. Well, it's nice to have it all, but where and when, that's going to be the piece. But like I said, it's a good thing to have changes. It's a good thing to offer more things as long as you can handle it and manage it, right, and lead it good. Okay. You guys have seen this in

055the years past because you hear the word Misha and that organization will go up, coach and I will go up the first week of August and do trainings up there. We're waiting for more verbiage on what we have now with the homeschool. I am thankful that the open enrollment didn't pass. That was going to be really interesting, especially for us and how we would handle that. Everything's working well. We have a few kids. We actually had one mother and daughter come in this week wanting to do a ninth grade and homeschool and do it. So they were surprised that they didn't have to take the classes, but also too they want to now. So that's nice. And a lot of times that's the way it is in some of the fine arts. So that's a

056good thing. That's why I bring that up. But with the mission guidelines, we have to follow that every year. It goes all the way up to Dr. Dare and then back down because we have to have everything from enrollment declarations to everything that we process in to get ready for every year. So it's kind of boring stuff, I guess. activity is sanctioned yes and we do it in an equitable manner as a matter of fact I usually always go more with the girls and I do with the boys as far as When any time like when we purchase things or we try to get things out there is trying to get things out there a lot of for the women's sports Because it is so important that we push It that because I raised two

057daughters or since they Jane did I was I was there but trying to help she told me what to do, but It's important for the girls to feel as significant or as important as any boy would with their activities And I think sometimes we lose that because of what we see on social media or in magazines or on TV It can get lost in that translation, but we do a good job of that I really do feel good about that and another thing too is like for example our holiday tournament that you guys We had 38 years of it so far, right? This one, I think 39th this coming year. That is a huge thing for the girls and the boys in our community. It is a really big thing here. And now that we

058have the big, beautiful field house, that really is cool, right? I mean, what a place to showcase our kids, but also our community, right? So that's a really big thing. I'll just keep on pushing on. I think last year I talked about this a little bit because this is good information for you all to know, just in case. Any parents come up to you or somebody who may be a concerned citizen, what do our coaches have to do to get eligible to be able to do this? Well, you can see it's a litany of things. And so from just understanding the coursework. Also understanding the fundamentals of coaching, pro trainings you guys see up there. That is our first day CPR stuff. I'll take a little blurb of that. You know, we do that every

059year online. But then our trainer last year also has done this for the last couple of years, is taking the guys through situations, right? And thank God for that because it saved a young man, right? And so that coach did a great job. Tori did a great job. The football staff did a great job. That's just, that's always scary when that happens. But you're also thankful that it turned out as well as it did, but the coaches were ready for it, and so were the kids, because they knew what to do. So that's a good thing for us. But all these things that we do, it's interesting. Finding coaches is about as hard as finding teachers right now. It is really hard. And so we're looking at... how much is too much, you know, from

060this level because it gets to be where if you're going to hire people that work and they're not teachers, which we call uncertified people, then you show them, hey, I've got to have you do 15 things before you can do that. they'll leave you before they even come through the gate on that. But we're getting better at it. I think our coaches do a good job. I know they do. Our directors do a great job with it through the band and fight arts. So that's really good stuff. Here's some GPAs I was telling you about earlier. Our kids do exceptionally well. And our kids, from generations, and I know you guys have had kids from the board in here, but our kids are used to travel. That's the thing about our community here. It's our

061geography where we're at. So our kids do well, but the one thing that we have purposely tried to do. is make sure we're not leaving as much out of school unless we have to. So they're in the classroom as long as they can be. But then also to getting the kids to understand their focus of grades first and those activities second and third, because that's a big thing. But we have so many good students. I really want to pump that up because it's... It's easy to lead with just all the successes and the stuff that you see and you hear about an event But this is going to get them down the line for their life a lot further Some of the activities here there. I know you guys have this so I'm just going

062to briefly go through it art You are marching band had another great year. No, it's a it's a year interesting year glass John Swinsky this when I first came here Rolla marching band was I remember like the first day of practice I went out there because it was so loud. Well, the football field was just covered with kids everywhere. And I know the COVID kind of took it down, but now we're on the back, on the way back. That is probably one of the biggest things, the pageantry of the band on Friday Night Football. for us. It really is. It's such a really big thing. And those guys, Slow, all those guys, Gee, they do a great job with those kids. And I'm really excited about them because they do a wonderful job. You know,

063it is part of that interest. We can see it down at the junior high level how many kids are in the band down there. And that should be growing and growing and growing, especially those beautiful facilities. What's that old saying? If you build it, they'll come, right? So that's another good thing. Our speech and debate team with Mr. Brooks has done tremendous. I think you guys have seen that. His heart and soul is in that. Those kids love him. He's very passionate about it. He is going to really build this up to where it'll surpass where Rolla was at. And I believe it was in the mid to late 50s and 60s. Rolla had an unbelievable run there of speech and debate. And so it was really, really neat to see that. And the reason

064why I know that is because when I first got here, we were doing a project in the lower commons and all those trophies were in there. I mean, those were state trophies. So, I mean, you just can't go buy them anywhere. And so they did a great job. I want to talk about drama. Kelly McNevin did a tremendous job. When I first got here eight years ago, she was hired, and she has really brought an insurgence into that program. I know many of you have gone to the plays, but here's the neat thing about it is we're getting a lot of kids now that would consider that. at an earlier age versus when you don't have that really strong in your community. They don't know what that is till they maybe get in high school.

065Well, now they're seeing it in the elementary ages all the way up through high school. So the junior high is paying dividends for that too. Scholar Bowl, Keith Peterson's done another great year with this. Those kids are so smart, it's intimidating. I don't know if it's just two or three of them, but it is really, they do really a great job. By one point, by one point they were from going into that finals in the top two. So they were really good. Soccer, Matt Calvert's doing a good job. He's learning to be a head coach. He also has become a father of twins. So he's learning to be a dad too. So that's a good thing. Zach Nixon had another successful year with the boys golf. That's another historic thing in Raleigh history is the

066golf has gone back into the 50s and 60s with state titles. So that's exciting news. And you've seen some of the clips with softball and cross country. Coach Cook has done a great job. I think what's really exciting is what's happening at the junior high with Coach Hewlett. He has brought kids, he's recruited kids, and they were like 30, 40 strong, I believe, this past year. Yeah, like 58 strong. Yeah, and if you can get that many kids wanting to run, that's a big thing. Right? Right. So... Yeah, so this is just some more stuff. Yeah, I know you guys see it, but it's just high points of what we have for the track kids baseball You know Getting all that up in front of you guys is great But it's just living it with

067the kids in planning it and doing their things throughout the whole season You know, that's one of the big things with the kids too is as they go on from here They always have these memories that we're showing you Some of the future stuff and some of the stuff has been done too. So I wanted to just briefly talk about it. Like Lions Club, some of that stuff at the bathrooms, renovations, boys and girls bathrooms have been renovated. Concession renovations, we've done a little bit in the concessions there. On Friday nights though, because of the mass, it's so big, we still go outside with it. So maybe in the future, that'll be something we come back to. And then some of the fencing and stuff we're still working on because when we had those heavy

068snows this past winter, we had some of that get broke on that, what I would call the west side of the stadium as you approach the ticket booth in that area. That's not bad. We've got more security cameras up. The turf lighting project, you know what's going to be happening after this fall season. The Bray Center has new storage sheds now. It's exciting so we can make the brace and more of a locker room to help our kids and our teams that visit us too. So we have quite a bit. Dr. Deer has already shared with you guys about the softball or baseball, whatever that is. Everything we've been telling our community is it takes time, it takes money, and we've got a lot of other things prioritizing that are higher than this because we've

069got to get our kids back in the classrooms first. Then some of the other things we've done, got from little simple repairs all the way through another softball seating. Yeah, we're going to work on that, but if we can make it work, we'll get it ready for all for the 26th year. Okay, and it's doable. I think that's just, it takes time to get all that stuff done. And you know the other side of it too is when that thing did get leveled, it's kind of like a blank slate you can kind of recreate a little bit, make it better. Okay, and then the track Dr. Fulton and I have been working on that piece. That is an expansive piece. It really is a big piece. So there's a lot of little things that go

070with that from sub-base issues to drainage. And so we're working on that. We've had multiple, three or four companies come in and give us some estimates and thoughts of what they would do to make it more of a competitive track. Okay, and that's it. Does anybody have any questions? So how are we as far as you mentioned conference? So we're out this year. Yes. So how's it looking? Okay, so it's a challenge, okay? Geographic challenge more than anything. It's hard for us to go into St. Louis to the east because everybody's there, right? So they don't have to go 112 miles or 15 miles here to get it. So they don't want to come all the way out here. probably are there's two areas that we're going to have to look at one is is

071there a potential I know Dr. Reyes has been talking to some of his friends that in the four rivers conference right we're just trying to figure out is well they want a big school like Rolla coming in you know that'll be a or can we expand it into a big and small division and do that possibly That we tried a little bit a year or two ago and it was kind of tough. It was just one of those things they just never had thought that we'd ever try to really say we're gonna come in. Cuz we are so much larger than them. And I get it, but the other side of it too is with some of the smaller schools, they don't offer everything that we offer. So that's the other thing and that goes

072from everything from our fine arts all our academic programs All of that they won't just have as much as we would Okay, so some of it. Yes, it would be great to have a conference But then when you're playing somebody that doesn't have everything because some of the schools in the Florida River is throwing them into football soccer, okay? So that has been a big issue. And not everybody has a big thriving band like we do. We like to compete. Our band loves to compete. So we do a lot of things, but we're used to... When we were with you as our conference it was just we were dealing with larger schools all the time and it was more like we were dealing with all the time with platforms of putting programs together for programming

073scheduling and all that The other part would be if we were to look to the north Meaning the C Mac out of Jeff City and Columbia Cansions in that Sedalia than that too That would be something maybe in a year to two years because they want to go, especially in the sport of football, they want to go from eight to ten. we would be considered to be nine or 10 into that conference. And then could we play everybody pretty much everywhere in that conference? So it does kind of make sense. Now the challenge for some of them that is that drive. They want to Columbia to come down 63 highway all the time. I get that. It's a tough one. Now the other one we were looking at too was the Ozark Mountain Conference and

074with Branson, I don't know, Dr. Dare, we've been conversating on that a little bit. they're still trying to figure out what they want to do because some of the leadership, I guess, that started that conference has transitioned. And I'm thinking within this next year or so, we'll hear some more about that too. That was a good question. I like that. So some of them were still independent. Yeah, basically. Yeah, we're independent. And I will say, CABHI, they've done a great job, Shannon. They've done a great job filling in the holes. It's not been easy because a lot of the conferences are built so there are no holes. And so finding a team to play is sometimes tough. Yeah, it is. It's a challenge. But the nice thing about it is with the majority, if you

075took football and just moved it over here, everybody else has, you know, playing 20, 25, 46 times, like baseball, softball, basketball. So they're used to playing all those many games. So for us, the host, like the shootout in the basketball tournament, well, for us, that's really good because we don't have to travel, but everybody comes in here. Now we're starting to look more to the east to St. Louis a little bit to get those kind of tournaments going but also too we go there with our other programs. Speech and debate goes in there, band goes in there, competes very well. So we're looking still into this next year. Hopefully we can get some traction and see what we can do. Okay. Thank you. Yes sir. I was surprised to see how many programs we had

076that competed. in class 6A this past year. Well, and here's what's really odd, and I don't understand it, I guess I do, but girls went to class 6 in basketball and our boys stayed 5. I'm going, what? How does that happen? And then you look at it, both of them, we're on the cusp, and when they let those enrollments come out here in a few weeks, when we see where we fall, well, we go up. you know, in class six in football, preferably I hope he stays in class five. But, you know, when you kind of get pushed, it forces you to grow. So if that happens and the way I see the development in this community, if our enrollments keep on growing, we're going to be in the biggest classifications all the time in

077all our activities. It's just part of it. Anybody else? Thank you very much. Thank you. This is really awkward you guys. You need a lecture. Okay, so I'm going to discuss with you tonight the 25-26 plan year insurance renewal and at the end ask for your approval. So we're going to start with just some plan management information. So we do have a broker, Mrs. Tanya Greven from Barker Phillips Jackson right here in town. And she is really great to work with us and reviews with us at least quarterly our utilization, high cost claims, prescription data, and then we in turn share with her our fund balance information. And with all of that together, especially at this renewal time, we can make some really good decisions for the district. She also has helped us out with

078employee education, talks to our central office advisory committee, helps us get information on our staff web pages, and share information from the UMR or health insurance company. So we are required to go out to bid every year, so our next required year for bid is next year. However, she always, every year, requests informal bids, not just for health insurance, but also for vision, dental, board, paid life, and voluntary life, to ensure that we're getting the best rates possible for our district and for our staff. So a little bit of an overview, our plan year is from October 1st to September 30th. We have been self-insured since 1993. So a little background on self-insured health plans. That means the premiums that we collect go into a fund. From that fund, we pay out part of that

079for our administrative fees, which we'll talk more about in a minute, and the rest go to clients. For the certified staff, the district does pay 100% of the premium for employee-only insurance for the base plan and 95% for the support staff for the same plan. The base plan, all three of our plans, we have base, buy-up, and high deductible. All three are an 80-20 coinsurance setup. Base plan has a $2,500 deductible. The buy-up has a $1,500 deductible. And the high deductible health plan has a $3,500 deductible. The district also, if the employee chooses to enroll in a health savings account, the district will contribute $100 per month towards that account. Some additional staff resources that come along with UMR health insurance is 24-7 access to care via Teladoc. And then UMR has also been really

080great to offer a $15,000 per year wellness incentive. So we can use that, we've chosen to use it rather for $30 gift cards for each of our staff members who have a wellness visit and they administer that for us so there's no burden on us to administer that. We wouldn't have access to that data of course. And then in addition to that... Stephanie Wanaka has headed our wellness committee for the district and right now for the last few years she has spearheaded the annual weight loss competition and the award for that are Amazon gift cards and UMR then reimbursed us for that. So an overview of our program financials. So again monthly premiums are collected and those premiums are decided annually at tonight's board meeting. And part of that go towards our administrative fees, which

081we'll talk about in detail in a moment. So those amounts are paid to the provider. So they're paid directly to UMR for processing of our claims and our discounts and also our stop loss insurance coverage. The remaining amount is held in our reserves so that we can actually pay the claims directly. So this is a recap of our premium. So you see back in 2019, $678. This is for the base plan employee only rate. Went up to 721 and plan year 21 and stay that way for 22. It will decrease it a little bit and plan year 23 and then for this last plan year 24-25 that we're currently in, we decreased it yet again to 550 per month. I will propose here that we keep those rates flat. So we'll go into more details

082to that in a minute. So the administrative cost summary. Two years ago, $114.95 total. The bulk of that you can see is for our stop-loss coverage, $95.10. Went up slightly last year, or rather this year, to $115.95. For the next planned year, however, stop-loss fees are taking a pretty large hit. So, let me cut my notes here. So there's a national stop-loss coverage increase average of 40%. This increase is right about 27% for us. So one thing about stop-loss is You think of stop-loss while we're talking about health insurance tonight. The stop-loss insurance industry is Insurance wide it's nationwide and it everything that happens on a national level affects those rates so hurricanes floods tornadoes All of those things affect that rate, so that's what we're seeing that increase for, in addition to, of course,

083our own high-cost plans that we may have experienced in any given year. So I don't have a slide for it, but we are proposing to change our stop-loss carrier. That's all behind the scenes, so these were the best rates that Time was able to get for us for stop-loss. That being said, even with that giant jump, we were pretty shocked by that. We were hoping to keep it a little bit lower, but here we are. That's actually only a $17,000 annual hit, if you will, to our fund. So it seems large. We can absorb that, and that's why I'm recommending that we keep our rates flat for at least one more year. So year-to-date recap. all the way from October 1st, because again, that's the start of our plan here, through June 30th. We've collected

084$3.2 million in premiums. We've paid out for claims and fees $3.8 million. We're sitting with a fund balance right now of $5.5 million. A comfortable fund balance for us is probably around $3.5 million. It used to be about $3 million. We've kind of, in my mind, bumped it up a little bit, given the cost of things. So we are down about $629,000 from October 1st. Completely planned. We knew that by decreasing our rates yet again. So we're I think we're overall in a really good position So again, I'm going to recommend flat premium amounts for this next year. Are there any questions about health insurance before I move on? I did forget to mention we do have handouts for assuming you approve everything tonight The rates for all the insurance that we'll be offering to

085our staff So moving forward to ancillary insurance, ancillary insurance that we offer for what we're asking you to approve tonight is board paid life, vision, dental, and voluntary life insurance. Our current carrier is Reliance. They take care of all of that for us. Those rates when we, when Tanya went out to bid to price everything, they were offering some pretty steep increases in particular for our dental plan. A few other carriers bid, one of them being Principal. And so that's highly rated plan, highly recommended. She has a lot of experience with them. They're offering a two-year guaranteed rate for us. Along with that, they have the added benefits of an EAP, so an Employee Assistance Program, type of program rather. So that includes emotional health services, will and legal services, and a few other things

086thrown in there, free of charge to our staff. So if you approve this tonight, once we approve principal, then we'll eventually roll out all that information to our staff and through education. The coverage is similar to what we already had? Yes. So the coverage itself, there's no change to the providers. The provider network stays the same. In fact, I can't remember now, but this Vision or Dental, one of those actually had a few additional providers locally, so that was good. Board paid life insurance, it's $50,000 for basic life and AD&D. That's actually decreasing from $530 a month to $475. The voluntary insurance, again, no change to any provider network for any of this. So vision insurance, these rates are all employee only. $656 a month, which is a decrease from $832. The dental is a

087slight increase from $32 to $3304. However, this plan increased the overall benefit from $1,000 to $1,500. So we thought that that little bit increase actually was worth it. And then voluntary life, the rates remain the same, but the employee can choose to increase from $300,000 coverage to $500,000. Are there any questions about the ancillary insurance? And this evening, I would like to recommend that you approve continuing with UMR health insurance as our health insurance provider carrier. No change to health insurance rates and changing to principal insurance barrier for board paid life insurance and the other ancillary benefits. Can I get a motion then to approve the continuation with the UMR health insurance, no change to the health insurance rates and change to principal for board paid life insurance and ancillary benefits. I'll make that motion.

088Okay, thank you, Sue. I'll second. Thank you, Larry. Is there any discussion? If not, then all those that are in favor, can I get an aye? Aye. Those that oppose, say no. The ayes have it, and the motion is adopted. Thank you. We'll continue with the UMR health insurance. There'll be no change to our health insurance rates, and the change to principal for board paid life insurance. That's very good. For our legislative update. Okay, let me start by saying this will be a relatively long presentation, so I'm going to apologize up front. I'm going to do my best to move through it fairly quickly, but I also want to make sure that you ask whatever questions you want to ask as we go. So don't let that stop you. A couple of disclaimers. I love

089this little picture because there's always two perspectives to all of this. It is not my intent to tell you that any of this is good or bad. It is what it is. It's the law now. And so my intent with this presentation is more to just tell you what we believe the impact to our district will be. Because some of this quite honestly has almost no impact to us Some of it will have some very direct impacts some of it has a potential to indirectly impact us By pulling funding from other sources So that's my intent as we go through this What this will not be is a full summary of all the bills passed. We're not getting into all of them Not even all the education ones because some of them quite honestly are

090not They're not relevant to what our operations are in those countries. It will not even be a full summary of the bills that we are going to talk about because some of them have infinite layers that touch a myriad of things, again, that aren't really relevant for us. Nor should anything I say be construed to be policy language because we don't have that language yet. MSBA is working on policy updates. I think as we go through this you will see that there is a tremendous amount of change that they will have to develop in our policies for us. I think in talking with our rep, there's a strong chance that half of our policies will have some change or another because multiple policies touch multiple things. It's a lot. So they're planning to roll out

091multiple stages of this over the next few months. The next six months is their goal, but it's a lot. So just please know that what I'm saying is my interpretation of these laws and what we've seen in some of our training pieces. So this is kind of a list of the things we're going to go through. I'm not going to spend any time on that. We're going to keep rolling here. So some of these are pretty minor and we'll roll through them pretty quick, but it's interesting. So Senate Bill 160, the Missouri Crown Act, this is creating a respectful and open world for natural hair. I'm not aware that we've had any issues with this, but we can't discriminate against someone because of their hair. That's now state law. Senate Bill 49, school chaplains. The

092important word in this is a school district may employ a chaplain or... accept a chaplain as a volunteer. There's some provisions in this, some of the more important ones. They can't be employed as a teacher, so they have to be a stand-alone chaplain. But they have to be a member of the Department of Defense Armed Forces Chaplains Board. And I want to give you a little back story on that because the gist of this is by allowing chaplains in, you open the door for any religion, including Satanic things, those were literally some of the testifying people at the House and the Senate when this legislation was going through. So I think that piece is to somewhat limit the organizations that can be represented. But that list of armed forces chaplains, that's a very finite list.

093And so this isn't gonna be just anybody. It would have to be somebody who's a member of those. They obviously would be subject to all the criminal background checks and all those types of things. In our conversations, when the policy language comes through, we can adopt it as they may, but our recommendation for right now is to not do this until we kind of get a feel for what it looks like and get some more information. But questions about denomination, and if you let one denomination in but not another one, does that cause issues? Do we need parent permission for them to talk to a priest or a pastor or whatever? So there's a lot of layers of questions that we just don't know the answers to yet. Again, I'm going to keep rolling stop

094me if you have questions. Hospital 419 active duty student conditioning. My understanding is there was a situation that occurred where a young man was on active duty with the National Guard or perhaps had gone to do his first step of basic. which they can do in between their junior and senior year and in some way shape or form missed some of those opening practices for a fall sport i'm assuming football or something and then was delayed in getting to play because he didn't have his required practices and so now if you're on active duty with the military it counts as toward your practice time again i don't think that there's not an issue here but under those state guidelines that that would have been an issue so that's been great CAB, you mentioned this one,

095Citadel 63. This is the homeschool, FP, virtual student athletics activities participation. So what this law says is this is the opportunity to participate contingent upon a successful completion of a tryout if applicable. So if we have tryouts for a team, they would have to go through that same process. any event or activity offered by the school district in which the student resides. So there's a lot of information in that sentence. So this does require proof of residency. They do have to be a Rolla school district resident. They would have to have any physicals that are required, be cleared by a physician for all those types of pieces. They are still required to follow behavior, responsibility, performance, code of conduct standards, all those same things that all of our kids would have to do. They are

096still obligated for any financial requirements. So any activity fees, fundraising requirements, travel fees, any of those things, they would be required to do the same as any other kid. There can't be anything different, but the same as any other kid. They're, and Cavi mentioned this, they're not required to take courses except if the course is necessary for the activity. So the one that they use a lot is band. It would be really difficult to be an art marching band without being in band because that's when they do all their rehearsal and all their time. Same with CTE courses. It would be very difficult to be an FFA without being in an ACT class at some point, right? So those requirements can still exist. if they're necessary for the course. What we can't do is say

097you're going to be a better athlete if you're in weight training. It's not a required course to be in. Discipline and attendance policies still apply, so if they get in trouble, the coach can still discipline. They have to come to practice. They have to do all those types of things. The two big questions that came up that got fixed late in the process. One is if a parent or a student gets angry with a coach or they get mad at a teacher or something and they go to home school, are they eligible then to just keep playing? And the answer is if they are eligible at the time that they leave school, then yes, they can continue their eligibility. If for some reason their academics have fallen or there's a disciplinary issue or something that's

098caused them to be ineligible Then they're ineligible for a full calendar year, so they can't just go home school to be able to keep playing They're still held accountable under that regard The parent or guardian is responsible for academic oversight that is state law in Missouri for homeschooling. There are no requirements There's no check-ins. There's nothing a parent has to do for these purposes the parent would have to sign off that they're academically eligible That's it. There's no proof of grades. There's no tests that they have to take. There's nothing like that. So the parents are responsible for signing off on that. There's a lot to this. So one specific thing mentioned in the bill, these are events and activities as defined as athletics, fine arts activities, and integrated co-curricular activities. So what's not included

099are things like prom. student council dances or any of those types of things. That's not what the intent of this bill is for. So those are excluded. This does raise a lot of questions around, you know, you saw that list of activities and things from CAB. Some of those are very specific. National Honor Society requires certain courses and grade levels and things to occur here within the building. So there's some pieces of that that would not apply. We have historically had homeschool students participate in activities. They typically would take the class or classes needed to participate in it, at least be a part-time student. Those are the old mission rules. They had to take at least a class or two, depending on the circumstances. So this isn't a huge shift in that regard, other than

100just kind of opening the door a little further and not requiring those classes. So that's the biggest piece of that. One other piece of this I should mention is while we do have an arrangement with St. Pat's and we allow their students to participate on our junior high athletic teams, this bill does not include private schools. Just homeschool? Just homeschool and virtual. Is there any clarification on the enrollment status? and technically not enrolling them, but so we... So, Misha has put some things out, Dr. Welch and I have had some conversations, Cavi and I have had some conversations, so we will still need to collect that basic data. Right. They'll still have to come in and approve residency, so we will basically have them go through the enrollment process. They will be in our system

101so that we have emergency information, all those types of things. Right. They will just not be enrolled. And so they'll be exempt from state reporting. We can mark them in our system for that so that we have them in, the coaches can access, we can have access to them for communications because our parent square piece pulls from our campus. So we can make sure that they're included in all those pieces without having them actually be a student. So are they counted? You know, and doing your division 6A, 5A, you know, are they counted? They're not counted. They're not. Even though they're participated. Because those numbers are all based on enrollment. So they would not be enrolled. There's gonna be a lot of those types of situations and questions that come out of this. Same with

102some of the funding things too, because they're not enrolled. Dr. Dare, is this implemented immediately? Immediately, yes. The legislature didn't do an emergency provision on this, so technically it becomes law August 28th. Okay. Misha has recognized that that creates some issues if we wait till August 28th, because we're four weeks into fall sports. So they have encouraged everybody to just move on. And so MISA is a member-driven organization, so the bylaws and things have to be changed and have to be voted on by the membership. So that email was kind of interesting. The members will have to vote to change that. But you don't really have a choice because they don't get changed by the state law, right? So it's it's kind of a it's a very unique and different situation than what we've seen

103before We have a fairly robust homeschool In this area and we we partner with them. We have a meeting in the fall most some of you may know this so we may not we have a meeting in the fall where we bring in all the youth Organizations to talk about access to facilities and practice schedule all that the homeschool Association attends that So they use our facilities. They do organize some games and things on our own. I don't know, you know, some of them won't want to be a part of this, some homeschool because they don't want to be a part of our system at all or any system. But some will want to take advantage of some of those things. I think we'll see quite a bit for drama band, some of those types

104of programs and some athletes probably. That's a guess. I don't know. But a lot of those will be taking a class, so they will be. A lot of those will take a class and we will. We're still waiting on some clarification from that from MSBA. They'll be taking the class. The law says they don't have to accept in those cases. What we're not sure about is then can we force the parent to enroll in that class or do we just have to allow them to be there, right? So we're not sure how that works because there's some kind of funny language about funding and stuff in that bill. We're waiting on some clarifications on that. I think most parents would be fine with letting them take the class. That's a big piece. That one's going

105to be just different, and it's going to be something that evolves and grows as we go forward. That's a big change. Senate Bill 68 is a school safety bill. It started out two pages long when it was introduced. It was about reporting of credible threats and major... safety incidents. So thinking in terms of like guns, bombs, like significant issues, but it added, and that's always been there, but it added the credible threat thing. And so there were questions about what is a credible threat, all this kind of stuff. Somewhere in that process, it's now 142 pages long. So it grew a little bit. I found that picture. It grew a little bit. And so it contains all of these provisions. And while this may be a little painful, if you'll bear with me, we're actually

106going to go through all of these. Some really quickly, some in some detail. There's a lot in this bill. So this was, this became the omnibus bill that all the education stuff got tacked onto. As a reminder, state law in Missouri requires that bills be single subject. So they just title them education and then throw it all in one bill. That's what happens. Be creative. It's great. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good word for it. All right. So here we go Changes to the get the lead out of that. So this is bill. It was passed last year in regard to lead in school drinking water This has some minor changes and provisions to that act it addresses There were some districts apparently trying to use flushing as their mitigation So they were coming in every

107day claiming they were just turning their water on to let it flush the system. That's not allowed It added some filtering options that were recommended and a few minor changes. Nothing that will impact us. OSS attendance. There was a feeling from some of the legislators that school districts don't suspend kids because it affects our funding. I would tell you that when you take a 169-day calendar and you suspend a kid for a couple days, it has no effect on funding whatsoever. But fine so now any kid who is out of school suspended still counts as if they are in attendance at school for it for state aid purposes So they will be reported as in attendance for a DA calculations. I don't anticipate any change in our funding from that It's negligible Districts are now

108required to have a comprehensive emergency operations plan. We've always been required to have one of those or I say always for any perceivable past time. There are a few changes to this. One is an annual site inspection. The questions that we have asked is who is allowed to do that, who's supposed to do that, or the credentials that go with that. Does that look like we don't know that yet? DESE is supposed to be developing those procedures around this law. So that will not happen for some time. We do have an emergency operations plan. We've made some changes. Dr. Bolt is working to make some additional changes based on some of the training they've gone through. But we feel like we're in good shape there. We work well with RPD, the Sheriff's Office, the Fire

109Department, S&T, Police Department. We have great relationships with all of those folks, and they're all involved in our operations plan. Cardiac emergency response plan, as Cavi mentioned earlier, we have one of those. We've been implementing that for a while. Very happy to report to you there are some pieces in that that require some AED placements in certain places and certain things. We meet that criteria already. The state is potentially going to put some funding into purchasing AEDs. Not that we couldn't use a couple more, but the one caveat to that is AEDs require maintenance ongoing. So the pads that are in those expire, they have to be replaced, and they are not cheap. So while we want to make sure we have AEDs available, we don't want to just have them laying around if they're

110not in a good place. Derek, can I ask, how many do we have? I was afraid you were going to ask me that in that moment. I want to say we're up around 14 or 15. Okay. So every building has at least two or three. We also have three that travel. So if our teams are traveling, we send an AED with them just in case where they're going doesn't have one. We also have them at the track, softball field, soccer field, football field, baseball field. Thank you. Stop the bleed kits, very similar thing. If you're not familiar with these, they're basically kind of a blown up first aid kit. They're designed for those first response type of situations where you need to do emergency stopping of the bleed to buy time. So this is kind

111of relatively new concept over the past few years. We were very fortunate to be awarded some of those in our grant. Fire department helped us with some. And then Stephanie Wanaka, again, our director of nursing, has done a great job in taking some of those larger kits and saying we don't need that big of a kit for this space, but we could use some here and some here. and kind of breaking those kids apart again the kids are easy that there there's money available potentially if the legislature approves them to get some more but same thing the the coagulant packets in those have to be replaced periodically because they expire and they're not cheap so Again, it's one of those where we want to have them, we need to have them available. So every building

112has them near the front entrances, and in certain places the nurses have access to grab portable ones. So we're covered well in those. So not anticipating a major impact from any of that, too, for our industry. This one's kind of big, but I don't have a lot of detail for you. So as you're aware, on our MAP testing, we have below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced for levels. There is some discussion over these past couple years that a student on grade level, a student performing at grade level, could fall within that proficient or basic level. But the way our scoring system and everything is set up is proficient or advanced and above. So the legislature feels like we've been kind of self-harming ourselves by saying if you're basic, you don't count for anything. You're not

113where you need to be when, in fact, they could be at grade level. So what they've done is added a fifth category called grade level, very creative, and inserted it right in the middle. I don't really know what that means. What I do know, the frustration for us is, once again, our data will not be comparable. So for the umpteenth time in a row, they've moved the cheese, so as we're trying to compare data and look at growth and all these things, now we have different matrix again. The details of that have not been pushed out. I know SC is working on that. I don't anticipate that anytime soon. That will take some time. We'll have to run that through the full statistical analysis. All the formulas will have to be written and reviewed and

114all those things. So that will take some time to do. However, the law states that that will be in place in the spring. We'll see. I'm a little doubtful of that, but maybe soon. We'll see. Primary and secondary safety coordinators, we've been required to have a safety coordinator for some time. This requires us to have two. So Dr. Fulton is our primary, Lacey Colby at the high school is our secondary. They've been through some training. That's the other piece that's added. They have to go through training with FEMA or with DMSBA school safety. So both of them have already completed that training and we'll hear more about that at the next meeting. Anti-intruder locks, this one will have an impact to us. They're defined, so if the legislature provides funding, you'll hear that a lot,

115because they didn't in the bill, but if they do at some point, we're required to do both exterior and interior anti-intruder locks. I'm happy to tell you through our bond work, we are good on the exterior. No issues there at all. We have all of our exterior doors covered with door access control pieces to meet that fully. Interior doors, we're probably about 70 to 75%. Nearly all of our classroom doors and office doors and everything have locks, but some of them are keyed locks from the inside, and that doesn't meet the requirement of the bill. It'd have to be a push button or something that can be locked from the inside without a key. So that might require us to change some of those. That's the piece that we wouldn't have. School safety incident reporting,

116that's the same bill that started out as. That's the one surviving piece from the original two-page thing. Again, it's the credible threat. The piece that we don't know is what's defined as a credible and what threat. So DESE is supposed to be working on what that looks like and what that reporting requirement is and how that is going to be reported. So we'll have to wait and see what that is. Active duty mission participation, that is the identical language from the bill I mentioned earlier. it was stuck in here as well so adult high schools were moved from the age of 21 to 18. so there are six of those in the state of missouri st louis springfield poplar bluff columbia cape toronto and forderson they're run by mers goodwill they have the contract on

117those so what those are is a student who does not have a diploma not a student I guess they become a student. An adult that does not have a high school diploma can enroll in those programs at any age and go to school and earn a high school diploma. So you can be 75 years old and go back and get your high school diploma. We, as a school district, cannot have any students who are above the age of 21, and those are only under certain circumstances. So that was the original 21 piece where that came from. What the belief in this is, is that kids who drop out at 15, 16, 17, whenever they choose to do that, should be 17, but they find a way, they can get in a lot of trouble and

118get in a bad spot between the ages of 17 and 21. The hope is that moving that to 18 might give them another path to get on a better path sooner. It also allows us, if they leave us directly and go to them, it's a transfer instead of a dropout. They don't have that stigma to follow up on that. So don't anticipate that having a huge impact on us simply because there's not a high school close. Teacher up to the state board. There's been a teacher up on the state board for the past few years this Extended that program permanently and then they put some different provisions in as to how that person's chosen It's one teacher from the state of Missouri that sits on the board. It's a mental impact to There's some language

119about creating a stem career awareness piece We don't know what that looks like. We don't know what that is Virtual assessments for virtual students. So those students who are truly virtual on the state programs outside of districts can now take their map tests virtually. Before they were having to come into buildings to take those, we would have to make arrangements to test them, that kind of thing. There are some provisions. They have to be proctored. They have to be on video. They have to be on certain devices and those kind of things to help with the threat of cheating. But they can now do those virtually. Alright, student cell phone use. Give me one second here. Probably the biggest media piece that's come out of this bill. In fact, I would say if you ask

120most people, this is all they think is in the bill. The exact language from the bill, though, is on the screen here. Prohibits students from displaying or using an electronic personal communication device from the beginning of the school day until the end of the school day, including but not limited to instructional time, meal times, breaks, time between classes, and during study halls. So we were already doing something fairly similar to this at middle school and junior high. High school was trying to limit those during instructional time, but was allowing students to use them at lunchtime, in between classes, that kind of thing. It is now state law that students cannot have their device visible or in use between the start of school, the first bell, and the end of school, the last bell. Except, and

121we'll get to that in a minute, there are exceptions. This electronic personal communication device is defined, so it's cell phones, smart watches, even tablets, those kind of things. So Chromebooks, in theory, would meet that same definition, but those are school-issued, so it's not a personal device. It's a school-issued. It's a little bit of questions that will come out of that. These are the exceptions. So compliance with an IEP 504 plan or individual emergency health plan. We do have... several students who have for instance diabetic monitoring devices, heart monitoring devices attached to phones and watches. We will have to make exceptions and allowances for those of course. We do have a small number of kids with IDPs that have communication apps and things that they use on devices. And we try to be consistent at home

122and at school. So oftentimes those are on a personal device that travels with the kids, stays with the kid at all times. So there will be a few of those things. ADA compliance. So thinking about that, that would be someone who's truly defined as disabled who has a need for a device. There are some wheelchairs and some things like that that have app interactions. some things like that. So I don't know that we have any students that fall into that, but we'll have to chase that. ELL students, those are English language learning students. The obvious thing there is translators. Sometimes they need the translator. Again, we don't typically have a lot of kids who can't speak any English, so that's pretty limited number. In the case of emergency, so this is the one question that

123comes up a lot. Yes, if there is an emergency, we would expect the kid to pull the thing out of their backpack or their pocket or their sock or wherever they've hidden it and use it in an appropriate way. They're not going to get in trouble for that. And then the last is when directed for an educational purpose. So if the teacher, the chemistry teacher at the high school says, hey, bring your phones, we're going to take some pictures, do this live activity, whatever, then that's allowed for that class period at that time. So there are exceptions, but on the whole, it is a ban on cell phones. Period. The idea behind this bill is that cell phones are a distraction. That is a true statement. Even with adults, there are distractions. Hopefully this will

124limit that. We will start educating us. Gina has drafted parents. Letter that's somewhat vague at this point. It's kind of a first notification Letting them know that we will have changes to the handbooks and those things coming again. We're waiting on policy from MSBA They're telling me it's going to be another two to three weeks before we have that policy My exact response was what have you been doing? We knew this was coming but That pushes us close to the start of school, but he assured me we would have it before So at this point you're not talking about cell phone walkers or things of that nature? So we have had those questions brought up. We start next week, next, well the 24th, whatever that is, Wednesday, Thursday, with our lead admin. It is a

125topic of discussion. So it's still working out the procedure side? It's still working out the procedure side. And that's the part that has been a little bit mixed up in some of the media things that schools have choice in this. The part that schools have the choice in are the consequences and the procedures. We don't have a choice in the band. The ban is state law. It's how we implement the ban that we get to have some say. I've seen a few things voiced, but you know, just don't want to put more pressure on our teachers to have to police this all the time. Although I know they're doing that. And I think that was part of the thinking behind the ban is that maybe it's not on the teachers all the time. So there

126will be some hiccups and some bumps and some things that we'll probably put in place that we'll say we gotta tweak. It's new and different. But again, we had already taken some steps kind of toward this, so it's not a huge change for most of the kids in the school. This will actually help the RTI, RTC teachers a lot because some districts had already taken this step, some of the sitting schools. So we had basically 11 school districts coming together with 11 different versions of what was allowed and not allowed. And so in this regard, nobody's allowed to have them in an accessible system. Okay, kindergarten eligibility for YCDD. YCDD is Young Child Developmentally Delayed. This is a fairly common IEP designation, disability designation for preschool-aged children. It just means they're behind in their development.

127Under the former process, they could not carry that designation into kindergarten. So a lot of times kids were being dismissed from IEPs because they didn't have the ability to be tested or the parameters to show a need in some other way. So they would be dismissed, they go through kindergarten, first grade, then you find this reading disability or whatever, they go back on IEP. It's difficult for parents and it's a difficult process. It's just a lot. So what this does is allow that YCDD diagnosis to carry through into kindergarten to buy some time for classroom observations and some of those things to see if that has been truly remediated or if something else is going to pop up that qualifies differently. So we think that's a good thing. That will be helpful, I think, to

128kids and parents. Minimal impact for finances or anything like that. Out of state contracts for special education, there was some language buried in state law that basically said that any contract for educational services within the state of Missouri had to be within the state of Missouri. Quite honestly, there are not enough agencies in the state of Missouri to meet all the need. And the world is opening up for teletherapies and those kind of things. So this allows even the state as a whole to go outside of the state of Missouri for contracting with the need. I don't anticipate a lot of impact on us, but for a lot of the border schools in the state as a whole, this is a bigger thing. Removal of minimum salary master's component, this has no impact on us,

129but just to explain that, under the old law, to meet minimum salary requirements for the state with a master's degree, your master's had to be in the subject area you were currently teaching. So if you were a math teacher, your master's had to be in math. So they've removed that component, so now it doesn't matter what your master's degree is in. you still need the memo so we're well above especially at the masters of war well above that piece so that's that's not going to be impacting uh okay 169 day calendar sorry let kindred take over she just about passed out when you said that okay this one does impact us in a good way um so this was part of originally part of seven uh civil 727 last year And it was really meant

130to be a blast against the four-day school week folks, right? So they couldn't really punish the four-day school week people, so they said, okay, then we'll incentivize the five-day school week people. And we said, great. And then they wrote the language to say, because they didn't let anybody look at it, they wrote the language to say that you had to attend 169 school days. But we have a 169-day calendar. But when we take a snow day, we don't make that up. And so then we only attend 168 days. And so then it didn't count. And so they looked at the state as a whole, and there were only like two or three districts that attended 169 school days last year. It was not the intent of the bill. So they cleaned that up and changed

131that. So now it allows, as long as we have a planned 169-day calendar, the bill specifically states allowances for exceptional emergency circumstances. That's snow days. Okay, so this equates to one person tornadoes tornadoes weather weather. Yeah, that's a good point We'll say whether one percent of our state funding for this coming year in the next and so this is based on the prior year so for this FY 26 upcoming year if we have the 169 day calendar last year and Attended our days that we will qualify for a 1% bump in our state funding So it's 1% for these next two years and it goes to 2% after that in perpetuity So for us for this upcoming year we meet these requirements that should equate to just over $176,000 in additional stay day Assuming they

132have the money to pay. It's a good thing. And then obviously in a couple years that number would double Alright, behavior plans, safety plans as part of transfer records. We do that. I guess there are schools that don't. I don't know. But these are individual plans for students, typically with IEPs, but not always. Sometimes a safety plan has been in place for just two kids that can't get along or because of family situations or whatever. So now, as records are requested, those plans have to go with those records. That's a good thing. Juvenile court notifications. So under the old law, if a student was arrested outside of school, for the Safe Schools Act violations. So think felony level, just gonna be blunt, murder, rape, attempted murder, felony level, threat, theft, those high level felony things.

133The juvenile office prosecuting attorney's office actually had five days to notify us. That kid could still be coming to school because they could be arrested and released and come to school the next day. That felt weird. So they've reduced it to two days. So they have to notify us now within two days. Thankfully, Nakama, Ed, and Raul, we don't deal with that a lot. So we've not had any issues there. But that's probably a good thing. This keeps everybody informed. The next one's a little interesting. There's some allowance for certain crimes that are committed by a child under the age of 11 for us to report those to Children's Division rather than the Juvenile Office. Again, high level type of things. We started asking some questions. Nobody seemed to know anything about it. So we

134have asked everybody to come to the table. So next week we're meeting with RPD, the general office and children's division and the sheriff's office to talk about this because we all want to be on the same page. Who do we notify for what, when and how? So it'll be a good conversation no matter what. Not really sure what the premise behind this bill is. Hopefully they'll get some more information from their agencies to be able to share with us. Enrollment of contracted children. So I think you all are aware if we hire someone as a teacher under state law, if they have their own children but they live outside the district, their children can attend our school. This extends that to contracted personnel. For us, that's mostly going to be speech language people. We have

135a few. our behavior, people, we have a very small number of contracted people. Statewide though, there are a lot of districts that contract with food service, bus drive, bus, custodial services, those kind of things. That was the intent of this law, is to allow them to hopefully attract employees by being able to bring their kid to school with them. This next one is my favorite. It bans zero tolerance discipline policies. I'll remind you about the cell phone ban that's now state law. But anyway, we're not allowed to have zero tolerance discipline policies anymore. It's fascinating, right? The premise behind this one is a good thing, I think, because it shifts the language in state law. So if there is a fight, the principals have some ability to say, you are defending yourself. we're the instigator

136and the major part of that it does it will get a little more subjective but it does allow for some some grace in looking at those situations not everybody should get the same punishment every time so i think that could be a good thing but it will it will create some questions cpr training is now required for all of our employees the piece that we believe in the clarification that we received so far And again, I remind you, we do not have our policies yet. Is that this is CPR training, not necessarily certification. If they decide that somewhere along the way this is certification, it is a substantial cost. Because we're going to pay for the training plus the cards and all the things. If it's the training alone, we have staff members who can

137do the training. And we can keep them up to date without necessarily certifying them through Red Cross or AHA. So we'll see where that goes. But this one alone has an impact even outside of that because of the time. It will take, you know, we have 850 roughly employees. It will take some time to get them altering and keep them up to date. So that's the biggest piece we'll have to work through. Recovery high schools, this allows the establishment of recovery high schools in the state of Missouri. So these would be basically rehabilitation, so drug, alcohol type things, kids that need to go in for treatment that would still be in a high school setting kind of thing. I don't anticipate that impacting us directly, but could indirectly. The only part of that that would

138impact us is if a kid were to enroll in one of those, we would be responsible for their tuition if there are. Teachers of Tomorrow is an alternate teaching certification program. It's new to Missouri as of this bill. Similar to the ABCTE program and those kind of things, they take some online classes. They have to have a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and a subject area. They take online classes in teaching and pedagogy, pass a certain number of tests, and they can get certified now through that program. There are fees in that that the individual has to pay, so it's not a free thing. It just allows another avenue for teachers to . Removes a sunset on teacher externships. A few years ago they allowed teachers, this in particular was aimed at CTE teachers. So let's

139say you have a teacher in automotive. technology field that maybe hasn't been out in the field for a while. They can actually take time off of teaching and go out and work in an auto body shop or whatever. And this doesn't require us to pay them or anything for that time, but it does require us to hold a job for them to come back to. So it's an agreement that they're going to leave and come back. That was like a five-year trial thing. They just extended that and said if schools want to do that, great. And we've done some sabbaticals and things for people over a myriad of reasons. So we've not had anyone asked to do an externship, but it's an option if it's out there. The extension of the retiree sub waivers. So

140post COVID, they put a waiver in that allowed retired teachers to sub on a full time basis without it impacting their retirement. So they've extended that waiver now through June 30th, 2030. It's just a way to try to address the teacher shortage until they can get some people. Administrator Academy funding. There's always been this administrator training program. The interesting part about this one is they're now allowing them to pull funding from Career Ladder to pay for that. Don't know why that happened. Don't know what the purpose of that is. Some language about reading instruction. It really stresses the science of reading, which we are doing. It bans some teaching models and instructional models because they don't fit in that mold. That one doesn't impact us because we're already doing it. The next one is interesting.

141It requires active shooter scenarios in training. The training piece, the scenarios have always been required. This one requires student participation at all ages. So we will have to develop age-appropriate training for all children. So again, we'll wait on policy language and we'll work with our partners to do some of those things, but that is new and different. Teacher recruitment scholarship payments that one does not apply to us It just basically changes who has to pay back some scholarship monies for teacher recruitment scholarships that are out there We don't qualify for those so that has no effect on us International baccalaureate exams we have not really done a lot with IB exams here at Raleigh because we've always tended to stay more on the AP side This might change that because this does push all state

142post-secondary institutions to award credit for certain scores on IB exams. That's part of the reason we stayed with the AP program. Kids that were paying for those fees and taking those tests could get college credit for them. Under IB they could not. So now they can. That might be something we look at somewhere down the road. It's not a part of our accountability measure. We don't earn points for it. So unless that changes, I think if someone wanted to do it voluntarily, that would be the same. Not a huge thing. And then school bus driver training, the answer to teacher shortages was to make new certification paths and allow retirees to work. So the answer to school bus driver training is to make it where you can be older and drive a bus. So the

143old requirements were at the age of 70, you had to go get recertified and take your actual driving, the full driving test. every year or two depending on your circumstances. Now it's 75 and you have three years before you have to go and redo some of those things. So we'll see how that goes. All right, I'm going to pause there. Questions on those specific bills? There are a lot of questions still to come. Again, we will get more positive information and details, but that's the bulk of that. Okay, a couple other quick things here House bill 2 is the funding formula House bill 2 is always the education bill Education as a reminder is the largest chunk of the state budget is as far as an individual programs Constitutionally required to be a certain percentage

144of the state budget I don't want to go into a lot of details on this but originally in the governor's proposal on the house version of House bill 2 they withheld 300 million from the formula the Senate put that back in It made it through the process. It got reaffirmed in the special session. There were a lot of discussions and talks around this and highly controversial in just why the withholding versus not. The governor is concerned that the funding will not be there. State revenues are down a little bit. There's some talk about why the SAT went up. That's the adequacy target that's the driver of that formula. But that is all done by legislature. That is not anything arbitrary. That is by state law and how that is factored and how it is created

145and what is happening here. Part of the controversy around all this was this $50 million that was set aside to go to the voucher program. So that is in there also. That voucher program currently exists. If you want to make a donation to the voucher program, that donation is tax deductible at 100%. This takes direct state treasury money and puts it into that voucher program to use for private schools And so this is being challenged as we all know it would be what the outcome of that will be I don't know it will take probably two or three years to even find out It will go to the Supreme Court at some point so Not happen then? No, it'll happen. It's happening. Yeah, it moves. Unless a judge comes along and puts an injunction on

146it, but I don't know. Because I know MRTA retired teachers there. We petitioned together and I've had teachers texting me saying, yeah, this could affect our retirement. Teachers go into private schools and we've had less people paying into retirement programs. There's a lot of factors in that. And I don't know what will happen with it, but I know there will be more discussion on it. It's not over. But that was a big piece of that. The interesting thing was there was $50 million in the original. program and only 23.4 million were collected. It was capped at 50 million and only collected 23.4. So adding 50 million makes the cap 75 million. I'm not sure. I think their thoughts are that more kids knew about it. They might get more donations or something. I'm not sure

147where it goes. That's one to watch. Local funding impacts. So we have the senior property tax freeze that's been approved here in Phelps County. This is a baseline year and so there have been several I'm going to say around 2000 I'm looking at kinder ed to remind me. It's been a while since we met with them. There's been several hundred people There's been several people who have signed up under this program We don't know yet how many of them are actually lawless school district residents because it's again countywide We also don't know what their Home values are or what the impacts of this will be right? So this is primary home residences only for this year It's a baseline year. So they've signed up for the program that freezes their tax rate at this year

148So there's no impact for this upcoming fiscal year. Nothing changes. It just sets a baseline So in theory going forward their tax bill would not go up But the amount that it would go up if there was something to trigger it to go up We still have to claim this revenue So it prevents us from adjusting our levy to account for the loss. That's the impact to us. We will have dummy revenue that we aren't able to collect, but we still have to show on the books that we've collected. Or it's in the calculation. In the calculation. Yeah, thank you. That's a better way to say that. It's in the calculation. So I do want to just say again, because I think there's still a lot of confusion about this. It will not reduce or

149lower anyone's taxes. It just caps them. So they can still go up if there's new construction improvements on the residence and then if there's a voter approved increase that still applies to the difference. So it's not that they never can change or won't ever change or whatever, but they definitely don't go down. It's not a tax elimination. I think there are a lot of people who may be not clear on that. But I do think our county folks are trying to communicate that as best they can. They're trying to make sure they're informing people. Continuing through that, so also during the special session with Senate Bill 3, there was this property tax piece that was taken on. And I want to preface this by saying two things. One, nobody likes taxes. None of us like

150taxes. Nobody. Anybody that says they want taxes needs help, okay? But there's so many forms of taxes. So you have the income tax piece, you have the property tax piece, real property for real estate, commercial, agricultural, and residential. You have the personal stuff for vehicles, automobiles, livestock, all that stuff. And then you have the sales tax. So there's a myriad of pieces of that. All of those pieces impact us directly. So any reduction or change in any of those tax structures has a direct and immediate impact to any taxing entity. Schools, most of all, because we are the lion's share of the taxes. And that's true across the board in the state of Missouri. In the special session, there was a bill, part of the bill that was passed designated three different types of counties.

151So this is directly applied to individual owners, primary residents only, okay? So there are a group of counties designated as 0% counties, which means that those, sorry, let me back up. What this law says is that the counties have to put something on the ballot for their citizens to vote on if they're a 0% or a 5% county. So the 0% counties have to put something on the ballot that says their tax bill that each individual pays, the tax bill that an individual pays for their primary residence would never go up. from last year's rate. So their bill could go up this year because they can't put that on the ballot until next April. So it could cause some really weird things happening calculation-wise there. But that would be put out to the voters in

152a 0% count. In a 5% count, they would have to put out to the voters that their tax bill can only ever go up by 5% or the CPI for the year, whichever is greater. So again, individual's tax bill. And then there's the no change counties. So the no change counties stay under existing law, which is really governed by Hancock for limiting your oath. But the difference, this is the piece I want to make sure you take away from this. The Hancock Amendment limits the overall revenue for the taxing entity. So as a school district under Hancock, we're limited to 5% or CPI, whichever is less. That does not mean that an individual taxpayers bill would be 5% or the CPI. They could be as someone who pays a 10% increase in their tax bill.

153It's the overall revenue coming to the taxing entity that's capped. So part of what's driving all this is this reassessment piece that's happening across the state. There are a myriad of counties, and please don't quote me on this, I think there were 60 counties that were notified that they had to raise rates by more than 10% on homes because they're out of compliance with state taxing. Rates or values? Values, I'm sorry, values. Thank you, Jim. And Phelps County being one of those. So the assessor has put out information about an average increase to Phelps County property values in the 12% range. That does not mean that we would collect a 12% increase in taxes. We are limited to what we can collect off of that overall rate. It doesn't mean people's taxes won't go up,

154but we're limited on that. And what happens is those calculations would, in theory, drive our rate, our levy rate down. So we would collect less of the 12% to the CPI this year, which was about 2.3, I think. It's complicated. But it gets more complicated. So this is the map. So the pinks are the 5%, the purples are the 0%, and the grays are the no change counties. So we are a no change county, so nothing changes for us. We're not required to put anything on the ballot. I should clarify between the 0% and the 5% counties also, it's not that they're putting a 0 or a 5 on the ballot. They're putting whatever is designated on that map on the ballot. The piece of this that's interesting and that will be challenged, I guarantee

155you it's gonna be challenged. This map was created by choice of the senator. So they literally asked the senator what they wanted their county to be or counties, cuz some represent multiple counties. So there's a myriad of reasons why different ones were chosen. I have not spoken with Justin Brown about why he chose to leave us as a no change county. But my gut from talking to everybody and looking at the big picture, so I want to make sure you understand I don't have any first hand information here. But I think there are a large group of the senators that know that this will be challenged. There's a specific piece of state law that forbids arbitrary and capricious legislation. Asking the senator what they want is fairly arbitrary and capricious, let's just be honest. There's

156also the discussion of the 0% counties. It's unrealistic to think that a taxing entity, so this is libraries, ambulance districts, fire districts, county roads and bridges, would never need revenue above what they got last year. That's a bizarre thing to think. without a replacement strategy or a different strategy for how to address that. So a myriad of discussions, a myriad of things. There's some statewide meetings going on around taxing and what can be done. Those have been fairly heated, fairly divided. There's a push to eliminate personal property taxes. There's a push to reduce real estate taxes. Most of those involve going strictly to sales tax type things. But a lot of the rural communities that don't have businesses don't generate a lot of sales tax. And so there's a lot of pushback from different entities

157in what that looks like. So I say all that to say only, for us as the REL district right now, there's no impact to us from that part of that bill. This discussion isn't over. So I don't know where it goes. I wish I had a crystal ball, but this will continue to come up. And again, the key part of this is any change to the taxing piece will impact us in some way. Okay. Add to that state funding impacts. So those are, those are local because they're state decisions, but they affect our local taxes. So now state funding impacts. Governor has created a foundation formula task force. They're meeting. They've already started meeting. They've had two meetings, I believe, to see about rewriting the foundation formula. So that formula has been in existence for

158several years. Kind of the driving force behind looking at that formula is this concept of the whole harmless district. So there is a provision in the formula that says that you can't draw less state aid than you received when the formula was put in place. It was put in place to not punish districts. The original formula had a five-year sunset on that. So the idea was that any of those districts that were looking at declining enrollments or anything like that would have five years to adjust and account for that. Five years in, the state legislature took that provision out. So over the past 20 years, it's gone from zero hold harmless districts to hundreds of hold harmless districts. So in theory, what happens is those districts are getting paid for students that don't exist. Cuz

159they're being paid on their on their higher Student attendance from from a time period in the past so they've had a declining enrollment They're held harmless for that and so there's there's these ghost students in the system So that's the premise behind looking at that formula the hard part about that when you're talking about the legislature who have control of that is there will be winners and losers no matter what and no Senator or representative wants their district to be the loser So then it becomes a fight. So they've tried to fix this multiple times. I don't know. I'm not saying they can't, but it's a challenge. It's a challenge without additional funding to make sure there's no losers. So we are not a hold harmless district. I want to be clear about that. We

160are paid off of our student enrollment. We'll see where that goes. The governor withholding piece, he has expressed concern that state revenues will not be available to pay the... obligations that the legislature has put in place. The governor has the constitutional requirement to not spend more money than the state has. So we went through this in 2008 with Governor Holden. In June, schools across the state did not receive a June payment. That is a real reality, even with the funding that's been put in place and all the things that are there. If the money doesn't come in as revenue, it won't get paid out. And then future funding, additional reductions. are certainly on the table as we talked about taxes are going to continue to be a conversation piece so Don't know where that goes.

161Yeah, we wish we had a crystal ball. The hard part for us is we have to budget for next year But some of this we budget on best best information that we have at the time But we have to ride the train as it goes so and then federal budget impacts. This has been a hot topic People continue everywhere I go. I was at the hospital day for a meeting. So I said, what about this? What happens if the federal Department of Ed closes? I have no idea. When the current department was created in 1979, I was six years old. I wasn't too interested. So I don't really know what it looked like before that. So I can't really speak to that. However, I do want to point out, prior to 1979, there was a

162Health Education and Welfare Committee. that was put in place in 1953. So there has always been a Department of Education in some form or fashion in that process. So whether the department gets closed down and all those programs are dissolved or they're shifted to other departments and those kind of things, I don't know what the outcome of that is. There's been a lot in the news lately about this withholding of the $6.2 billion. That does directly impact us. So I want to talk about this just a little bit because I want you to be able to answer these questions if you get them. So specifically within that program are Title II-A, Title III, and Title IV-A. There are other programs within that withholding, but those are the three that impact us. So Title II-A is

163kind of classified on a big picture as teacher development and teacher support. We use that for a program called classroom reduction. So we use that as a way to keep our student members in our classes a little bit smaller. So that $169,983 is the average that we've received or been allocated over the past three years. So it's an average of the last three years. That's what all those parenthetical numbers are. Title III is ELL funding. We received on average $14,988 over the past three years. That money goes to our ELL teachers for professional development and a few other cool pieces, but mostly professional development. So for them to go to their conference, stay up on training, stay current on their testing pieces and the certifications that they have to have for those pieces. Title IV-A

164is student support and enrichment. We use a provision within the programming to transfer our Title IV-A monies to Title II-A. So the Title IV monies and Title II-A monies combined pay for four teachers for our district. That's what that money is used for. Those are four salary and events. So right now those funds are being withheld. DESE's, we get our guidance from the State Department of Ed. The Federal Department of Ed doesn't communicate directly with us, right? It's a trickle-down thing. So DESE has said that basically they're on hold. They hope to know more by no later than September 30. Well, that's an obvious thing because September 30 is the end of the federal fiscal year. So whether those get released or not, we don't know. But I will say that all of those programs

165for the FY26 federal budget are being proposed to be. So there is a chance, whether it's this year or next, that we will see that impact in some form or fashion. I don't know they're not saying transfer to another department. They're saying limited. So we'll see okay Grand scheme of things we are moving forward this year as we are we're already under contract with those teachers We may have to eat that with our reserves But we're in a great place thankfully because of our conservative processes to be able to do that we would not we would not Try to negate that at this point because we don't know so We will move forward as we were planning to do for this year and then we'll make our adjustments as we have more information Questions about

166that, questions about anything. I know that was a lot. A lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. So keep in mind, just final thing, just keep in mind, we're waiting on policies and we have to rewrite handbooks. We'll have to pull the policy committee together. We will have a lot of stuff happening over these next few months to solidify, formalize all of those things. Good job. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was a lot. We appreciate it. The next item is upcoming board meeting dates discussion. So we have a couple of dates that we need to talk about. On September the 18th, we have a board meeting. That is also the Rola High School. Football game, home football game, first one. No, it's not the first one. It's not the first one, but it's

167a Thursday night game. But it's a Thursday night game. And it's scheduled at 7 p.m. So there was a suggestion that maybe we would want to start our meeting early so that we would have time to go to that game. Are we okay with that? That meeting is not typically super heavy so yeah I think 4 o'clock would be fine. Closed session at 4? Closed. Basically move everything up one hour? Right. And then we also have October the 16th that coincides with the Rolla High School Homecoming Parade. So the recommendation was that we maybe just completely reschedule that meeting to a Tuesday. October 14th. We looked at the possibility of going to the next week but that starts to, I believe is the conference day. MSPA. MSPA. And going earlier is not really ideal. That's

168why we threw out the Tuesday but there's nothing magical about that date. And we always participate in the hokum parade. So, is everybody okay? Can you check the calendars? I'll be coming back into town with Amy. Okay, everybody's okay with that then can I get a motion to approve the changes to our board meeting on September 18th to start at 4 p.m. and on to change the meeting from October 16th to October 4th. I'll make that motion. I'll second that. All right. Any discussion before the vote being done? Then can I get a vote in favor of making this change? Aye. All right. Those opposed say no. If not, the ayes have it. The motion is adopted. So we will move our date then from September 18th. The time for 4, excuse me, from 5

169p.m. to 4 p.m. for close and 4.30 for. Open and then October 18th we changed 16th we changed to October 14th. And then next is comments. Do you have anything else to share with us? I don't want to say a whole lot. I would just say we are gearing up. School is coming quickly. So Gina has pushed out school supply lists. Open house dates are out there. We start next week with our back to school meetings. So we'll meet with our administrative staff over the next couple weeks. We have our new teachers coming before long, so it's coming very fast. And so we're entering that kind of hectic time period. We have onboarding this coming week. We have 21 of our 23 new teachers and I believe 14 or 15 sports staff coming for onboarding.

170So we're rolling. Awesome. That's it. Great. Okay, just real quick to cover some upcoming dates. No, I was just going to say thank you to everybody who participated in our lemonade stand last weekend, not just our board, but also our administrators who are out there in the heat selling lemonade. We'll go find out how that turns out in a couple of weeks. Also, Kids Safety Day is coming up on Saturday. It's at Lions Club Park. It's a free event. We'd love to have all of our kids to go out there, check out the emergency vehicles, the helicopter, the fire trucks, all the things. It's from 10 to 2 on Saturday, this Saturday the 19th. And the Cora Golf Tournament is coming up August 4th. If anybody is a golfer, I'm not, sign up and join

171in on the tournament. They're still looking for sponsors, right, Gina? Are we still looking? Just teams. Just teams, okay. You know some golfers have signed up. It's August 4th, the heading contest at 10 and tee-off at 11. It's for a good cause. We're looking at you. You're the golfer. You're the resident golfer. We are signed up. We're ready. We're ready. We need a fourth player. We've got to have a fourth player. Yes. We're working on that. Up and coming dates, our next board meeting is August 14th. Hopefully back down in our boardroom. We do have an admin retreat lunch on Wednesday, July 30th. Of course, the core golf tournament on August 4th. Chambers' new teacher lunch will be Friday, August 8th. Our all-staff breakfast will be Friday, August 15th. First day of school will be

172August 19th, which is a Tuesday. And Dog Pride Night will be Friday, August 29th. Next, pay attention to some written reports. We have attendance, which includes our summer school attendance report. So, nothing else. Can I give a motion to adjourn? I move we adjourn. I'll second. All right. All in favor say aye. Aye.