ACSD Regular Board Work Session 4-23-2025

001It's all yours. All right. Uh, at this point, I'm going to call to order the meeting. We're going to have a special meeting and then a board work session tonight, uh, April 23rd, 2025 for the Atlantic Community School District School Board. So, uh, this we're going to start out with the public hearing for our budget and some, uh, special meeting agenda action items. So, if we can have the call for order. Okay. Jenny Jordan, yes. Josh McLaren, yes. Laura Mlan, yes. Christy Bell, yes. Okay. At this point, I'll take a motion to approve the uh, public hearing special meeting agenda. So, move. Second. Okay. Jenny, yes. Josh, yes. Laura, yes. Chrissy, yes. And at this point, we're going to open our public hearing into the fiscal year 2026 budget. Um, I don't see anyone here

002to comment. Did anybody receive any comments on the budget? No written comments. Okay. Um, do I need a motion to close the hearing? Um no we can go right into the action items. Okay then we will move into the action items and the first one is to approve the fiscal year 2026 budget provided you with a couple of hard copies. One is the public hearing that uh summary that was in the paper allowed us to do a public hearing. The second is a worksheet. You'll notice from the columns on the far right on the worksheet, they match up with the same numbers that are on the summary of the public hearing. You'll notice the top half is the revenues that we intend to receive. The bottom half are the expenses. So, the worksheet kind of

003breaks it down for fun. And then the public summary that goes out into the paper, groups all of those together and puts it just all in one column. So, this is based on state aid and property taxes. And so, what you're approving is the overall budget. Can I ask um did you with some of the anticipated changes that that are going on at the state level with property taxes, were you able to take any of that into account when you were making this budget? So when we set the budget, we have to set it at the highest rate um because you can't go up, you can go down. At that time when we set the budget, we didn't know what state aid was going to be. So I set it at the highest rate that

004we can. Um now that state aid is done, we're not able to go back in and make any changes at this time, but the Department of Management will go in and make those changes for us, and they'll make those adjustments. There will be a slight uh decrease in property tax revenue. um because it would go from 2.25 to 2% for state aid. It's going to be which causes then the property tax rate to drop a little bit. Right now the talk the it's 1253 per thousand. I would guess it's going to drop to maybe 1252 maybe 1251.8. It's not going to drop much and that's out of our control because that's directly driven by state state. Okay. So when we set this usually if it's nice if we have stated it known because then we

005can set it. We feel like it's good. We just went in blindly. So numbers are based on what we anticipated. Um we will have to make a few adjustments but I don't feel like enough that warrants concern and last year's rate was I can throw out my sheet. We said let me look what last year's rate was. This is a slight increase from last year. The 12 the levy rate is 1253. It'll probably be exactly the same once they man they go in department management goes in and makes that adjustment because they did set the rate at only 2%. spell the same 12.514 and we're at 12.532. Now that it will drop slightly from that but mostly uh management funds needed to be increased because uh the cost of property insurance and auto insurance and

006cyber security went up over 20%. And we usually only ask for management fund to be almost to what we need and this year we spent every bit of it and we already know it's going up 20%. So, we had to increase management to offset that cost which caused the property tax to go slightly up. Any other questions? Take a motion. I move we approve the 26 budget. Second. Okay. Josh, yes. Yes. Chrissy. Yes. Okay. The next item we have is uh onetoone device recommendations. Are you going to speak about that or is Lisa? I would like to. Yeah. Well, one of the things I started the process of looking for new devices as in our plan that we've had the way it was set out. So, I started here about three months ago, uh, fishing

007for a good device, something that, uh, has held up. And basically, when I took it to Rick's, if you, in the computer world, if you give it to one vendor, he's actually going to get the best price because he's going to approach these people. Well, um, when they first gave me the first quote, it was like $335 per device and then $39 for the uh, uh, the Chromebook license. That being said, they come back with a quote here three weeks ago uh with what you what you have there at $279 for the device, which it's a very similar device that we have now, but instead of 4 gig of RAM, it has 8 gig of RAM, which these devices will take us for another four years without a problem. And they've been a good device.

008Uh and then also the Chrome licenses went from 39 to 31. I said, "Okay, it's time to jump on it." I wasn't quite sure. I u appreciate Beth and Lisa working with me because here's what it the whether you agree or whatever. The tariffs, we're going to throw a monkey wrench into things if we didn't move on it. So, just to let you know, that's why I'm trying to get this approved now. It's going to come out of this year's funding that what she talked about. That way I can get them ordered and uh basically in a nutshell if I can get them to PO tomorrow they can guarantee that price and get them get them to us. Otherwise we don't know what's going to happen. I got a quote I got a quote today

009for the cases new cases that go with them and u they've got a $5 per case tariff search charge put on there already. So, I guess I'm just trying to be proactive and and get ahead of the game. So, your your vendors, were they telling you sort of like we're only going to guarantee this price for, you know, two days or Absolutely. Well, I'll put it this way. Uh I sent these two a note that Acer and he'd give me the quote. He called me and we had this all set up. He called me and goes, "ASer is not going to honor this. you're basically dead in the water. Uh and I go he said I'm still talking to you because you know the idea was if I can get it to them before the

010end of the month they'll still honor the price. So yeah they they're not going to guarantee anything after that. So, I'm, you know, like I said, I felt I got a great device going to fit right into the the the scheme of things. And, you know, who knows? You know, I'm thinking that we're if I had to go find a different device or couldn't get those, I would be looking at 350, maybe 375 a device. And so, who will be getting these new computers? uh 612 all the way through six grades six through 12. They'll all be taken in. Um I'm going to keep as many back as I can right now because of the attrition. I mean they're starting to show their age. And how old are they? Four years. Four years old. You

011can imagine by the end of this year we've had them four years. I mean time flies to be real honest with you. and uh they're starting to show their age, but I've got to take the really good ones and put them back into the first grade cards because I had to pull those out. So, I had enough because we are increasing enrollment. If you remember when we bought these the first time, I bought 1492 and that was for that was quote unquote 10% extra in two years. had that many students and I'm scrambling to get make sure I got enough. That's why I had to pull them out of the first grade carts. I had some devices I could put in there so I could get through this year. So that's just our our enrollment

012has made that that's why I put 900 on there. 900 by the next four years calculations is about 10% more than what we're going to have in the next four years. That's just what was on JMC as of that date. We had another 100, you know, 50 to 100 students. We'll revisit that and probably get some more. So, so what is your recommendation? I recommend uh taking a bid from Rick's Computers for 279,000. I move to approve Sid for 259,000 to raise computers for 900 devices. Second. Okay. Laurel, yes. Christine, yes. Jenny, yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. All right. These are some big big ticket items here. So, the next one is talking about our health insurance vendor. We've been talking for the last couple of weeks. We've had a couple of sessions where we've

013talked about looking at some different options for our employees health insurance benefits. We use uh the broker agency at Homes Murphy who helps manage our long-term disability uh dental vision health insurance. We currently are with United Healthcare and we've been with them for some time and we took out to bid. We had about four bids. the other ones didn't have really comparative products and we wanted to try to stick with the same deductible and the same benefits if we could. So, um I know we've talked about this so I won't go into a lot of detail, but I kind of shared with you a paper copy as well as an electronic version of just a breakdown of the costs. There is going to be an increase because insurance rates are determined by your last three

014years of claims. This district in about a 10-year span never had anything over a 4 percent increase. And most of the time, this district has always taken on that cost and not passed it on to the employees. So the employees have not seen an increase since I could see since like 2016. And so this is going to be a significant increase for both the district as well as employees. Um because our claims were so high this past year, it's causing a 30 um 8% 34% increase um in rates. The United Healthcare did provide us with a quote for next year, which is actually higher than Walmart Blue Cross Blue Shield. We talked to the teachers union and they emphatically said they want us to go with Walmart Blue Cross. That was what their recommendation was

015even before they saw rates. Um, looking at this, Wellmark is a cheaper option by $100,000 annually. Um, reviewing the details with Sarah and I believe she spoke at the last board meeting. You probably remember Sarah Bradshaw who was here from Holmes Murphy and kind of went over the details of that. Um, she also recommends this plan. Now, it is a Cadillac plan. It is the best of the best with a $1,500 deductible. And when you buy the best, you do pay for the best. And so we recommend that we go with this Walmart Blue Cross Blue Shield. We will do an analysis at the end of the year to see if this is the best fit for the district. We do know it's going to increase costs. I shared with you how much of currently

016the employer covers. So we cover 100% of the cost for an employee only plan. Uh for employee plus spouse we cover 49% of that cost. Employee plus children we cover 53%. Employee plus family we cover 45% of that monthly premium. Um because of the increased rates I'm recommending um that we go slightly higher on that on the district side that we um support the employees by paying a little bit more because it's going to cost us more. But it's still, even with us providing more coverage, it's going to cost employees more. Um, we're still working out the numbers, I think it's a really good plan and I think it's worth doing. Um, United Healthcare will still cover all expenses through June 30th. And if anyone um has like goes to the doctor even on June

01730th, but they don't get the bill till July or August, those things will still be covered by United Healthcare. But July one, we would go with this new plan. And we talked to them and they sounded like most other schools were going to this as an option because health insurance rates are just skyrocketing. But it's based on your own claims. So um what happens if our claims don't improve next year and then when they re-evaluate and quote us if we have a significant jump? Sure. What are opportunities at that point in time then to is that just within our percentages of what we how we would adjust or we um so the the year that they look at is from they looked at November 3 to October 24. So they'll look at this year November

01824 to October five. So by October of 2025, which actually isn't that far off, they'll give us an indication of what those next year looks like, um, we could be another high-risk year. And so what we would have to, again, these are one-year contracts. So if at that time, you're fine. If at that time we say, gosh, we think this is is too big, we can look at a couple things. We can go with a bigger deductible. We have a $1,500 deductible for employees. We could go to a 2,000 or 2500. We could do a 5,000. We do offer a um high deductible plan on this 3,300 that we're seeing a lot of employees go to because it has that health savings account benefits. So, you can put money in that and use that for

019your dental and vision and um some pharmacy. The Wellmark, one of our biggest expenses on our current insuranceances, we had 1.8 8 million in claims and 640,000 of that was in pharmacy costs. Um, one of the nice benefits that Walmart does is they have a pretty um very very top-of-the-line pharmacy program that allows a lot of those tier 2 uh prescriptions and things such as that a little bit discounted compared to what United Healthcare. So, our brokers feel like that's where we're going to see the biggest savings is in our pharmacy costs. and when our pharmacy costs were half of our claims were in pharmacy. So, we think employees will start to see that if in year two we think gosh this wasn't the best idea, we could stay with Walmart but look at a

020different deductible. We could change the benefits um because like I said this is a Cadillac plan. So, we could determine that we don't want to go this level. We could definitely change and go like I said a different deductible. we could reduce some of the benefits. Um, Walmart is a very reputable and very good company. I mean, there's going to be a few things we have to work out to I was wondering if you know why our staff were so adamant about wanting to switch to this even it sounds like even aside from costs they don't know since I've been here um my very first year that was one of the first things they approached me with is hey we don't we don't want to be on United Healthcare. I don't know if there was

021just I don't know probably individual um situations. How do we My only concern with when we start switching stuff like this is even if they want it. How do we make sure that our staff and I mean when you're talking this very important stuff how do we get them educated to make sure they're in the right thing getting the right thing not getting what they don't want. You know is that something that Wellmark comes and does? Is that something that Holmes does? He does. I mean just Yeah. because you hate to not know of a benefit because it's a new program or There's always a few months. There's a lot of growing pace. But yeah. So what we'll do is the month of May is open enrollment. So what will happen is Emily and I

022once we have whether we stay with United Healthcare or whether we go with Walmart, we'll start that process of open enrollment paperwork. Um Homeless Murphy is planning on providing a lot of that documentation. We did side by side the last presentation where compared both the old and the new. um we'll go through everything with them. They'll have to do an application process and it'll be you know there's going to be a tremendous amount of work and and it's going to fall on our office and we know that and so this we do not take this lightly because it's going to be a lot of work for us and a lot of time commitment and we know the first few months because we're going to still be dealing with United Healthcare for a few months as

023we transition over. So, it's going to be um challenging, but if if this is what people want, then I'm willing to put the time in and the effort in to make it happen. We'll definitely get information out to them. But it's just like when we probably went to United Healthcare, there was a learning curve trying to figure out who needs what, meeting with people individually. We try to talk in big terms with big groups of people, but there may be well, we have to have individual appointments with people. Everyone's so unique on their health needs. Great. Other questions or comments? I'll take a motion. I move we change our health insurance vendor to new Walmart cross shield for 526 second Christie yes Jenny yes Josh yes I'll take a motion to adjourn so Move second

024J. Do we have second? Genial second. All in favor? I. Okay. At this point, we are adjourned from our special meeting and uh I think we will just go ahead and open our work session. Yeah. You ready? Okay. I will call to order uh the work session. Um our agenda for tonight involves uh two significant presentations. One from SVPA and IAT regarding our master plan process and the other one from Excel. Is that how they say it? Um a a virtual school vendor that uh wants to make a presentation to us. So uh we'll have the roll call now. Jenny Jordan. Yes. Josh McLaren. Yes. Laura Mlan, yes. Christy Pell, yes. I'll take a motion to approve the agenda. I move to approve the agenda. Second. Okay. Josh, yes. Laura, yes. Christine, yes. Jenny, yes.

025Rich. All right. Let us up. Good evening. Uh, Vitus Bearing with SVPA Architects. Um, I will keep my comments a little shorter than last time. I think we've gone a couple hours through the master plan process at your last work session. So I want to give you an update. We've fine-tuned some of the concepts a little bit. So I'll walk through those pretty quickly and then we've been working with the Estus and IAT team on developing some budgets for each of these various scope items. So that's really the the primary focus of tonight is to just give a first pass of of those. Um, we've set up a potential scoring matrix of what might be a number one, number two, or number three priority for some of your big picture project goals. Um, and we're

026here to go over that and welcome your input on on those as we go through them. So, I've provided an 11 by17 handout of each of the floor plan site plan concepts. We'll go over those first um just to refresh you on some of the priorities that we're looking at. Then we'll go over the uh associated budgets. And then the last item we'll go through um and I'll let maybe Mark kind of lead this discussion is if we sort of on a parallel path been looking at some um maintenance costs that might be something you start to plan for over the next 10 years that would be just things out of your routine or save funds. So without further ado, uh we'll start on Washington Elementary. We've got seven different scope items identified for Washington.

027This is I think one of the one of the priorities for moving forward we would be to really look at some opportunities for improvement at Washington Elementary. The first item and these are these are kind of keyed by by school and then by item number. So WB means Washington Elementary and then items 1 through 70. Item one is a classroom addition of approximately 20,700 square ft. That would be for kindergarten and first grade. That would be um the theory would be to construct that addition first and then go back in and do some additional renovation to the other older parts of the building. So that's uh item two would be the demolition and replacement again of those 1950s sections of the building and then replacing those with some of the support spaces, cafeteria, secure entry,

028admin office. Um, item three, uh, we looked at the opportunity to include a prek addition. That could be part of the that could be done initially with the project or it could be something you plan for in the future. That would provide for five preK classrooms. That's about a 6,500 foot addition. Pricing also includes an age appropriate playground for that that age group of kids. Um item number four would be a new parking lot. Uh that's about 99 stalls. Uh at this point we're showing that on the um east side of the facility. Um I know there was some discussion at our last uh last meeting with the board about you know the playground is fairly new and the parking lot's fairly new. Is you know is that is that ultimately the best long-term solution

029to to do there. Um so we'll have a little bit of discussion about that. Item number five would be relocating the the playground. Um I think one of the nice options about where it's shown in this diagram is it's protected from the northwest winds and it's you know it's a little bit more um protected. Um item six would be to provide some allowance for some minor interior renovations to the 1986 two-story portion of the building. And then item seven would be some um minor updates to the bus lane and drop off curve. Um we did look at the option of of trying to provide some additional apparent drop off by creating another curb cut uh right off of the street. Um so that I know it's there's probably not a magic uh solution for this

030site to make it perfect at pickup and drop off. Most schools have some congestion, but we're optimistic this would at least make some improvement to what's there today. So that's kind of the the seven items and then the idea was there would be a budget number for each one of these so we can look at it as a whole as a whole project. You'll have a total number for Washington or you could say well we really want to do items one through three but not four through seven. Okay. Could I ask you a couple just clarification about that? Yeah. So, when you talked about um item three, you said a future prek edition and we could choose to do that immediately or would it be like there'd be some sort of pre-prep for we would

031say maybe four, five, six years down the road we would do it or would that item just be like removed entirely like um I think the the thought at this master planning level would be to make sure from a site planning perspective we've planned for it so we're not putting new utilities or things in the way of it. Um, I don't know. I mean, there might be a little bit of prep just to make sure the the grading is that's there's not very many flat parts on this site. That's one of them. So, there's probably not a whole lot of work to prep it for for grade, but it's more of a a placeholder not to develop, you know, so that you could do accomplish that in the future. A placeholder. Yeah, thank you. That's

032helpful language. Um, and I just want to say your idea about moving that playground there. That's actually really good. Um, that is I mean I like our new playground, but I've had the concern that it's it's very open. I mean, those kids are very easy for them to run off. I'll give the credit to Beth. Like it's uh Yeah, I I actually do appreciate the thinking about reciting that. And then on item number six, you put allowance for minor interior renovations. Were you sort of thinking those are unnecessary or sort of like lower level of urgency and like what are you talking about with minor interior features? So that area of the building is um from 1986 so it's not brand new. It there's probably some opportunity for refreshing carpet or paint. Okay. Um, we

033did look at in some of the earlier versions, we looked at some minor reconfiguration of certain spaces to make sure that the support programs, you may take a room that's being used for a certain function today and form it into two smaller group use rooms. So, we allowed for some money to to do some minor reconfiguration of rooms and then give you some budget to do some interior refresh. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone else have questions on this part of it? Maybe it's good. Um, so couple things. First of all, in terms of from a and part of this is just design concepts that when we were at schoolboard association, they talked about looking at from a school safety perspective. Do you have um insight specialists that kind of look at that and

034look at that plan design part of it? We are talking about relocating the playgrounds where kids are that shift and for me it feels like you're putting them right close to a road where people have access. Is that what kind of thought goes into that? Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple of different things on the security side of things. We've we've partnered with IMEG on our mechanical electrical technology. they have a security specialist that might be geared a little bit more towards the technical side of secure entry and and making sure that you've got position switches on exterior doors, those sorts of things. From a from a site perspective, um some of the strategies involve landscaping and sight lines or playgrounds in particular, there's um more of an emphasis on making sure that

035they there's a fencing barrier so it's not just wide open to kids coming off of the playground or strangers coming onto the playground. Um, and then, you know, good sight lines both from the school into that space. So, yeah. I mean, and that's just from a an aesthetic view and then just, you know, how that feels. I'm not sure how I feel about that because we don't have to have that. We've got sort of building borders and spatial borders right now versus that. My other question is sort of related. I was always told the way the original design it was kind of designed to be a we a be and allow for an additional expansion um off to the the northeast there. Um and I'm curious if if that was considered or if that is

036included by the topography because that would also provide sort of a windbreaker or barrier for that playground. Yeah, I think going to the norththeast. I mean, right now that's where the playground lives. There's a sort of a a line on the edge of that playground where the hill just drops right off. So, there's certainly opportunity to consider the same scenario building to the east rather than to the west. I realize that doesn't allow you to stage kids, you know, having access probably as easily as the other plans do, but never heard that. So, the expansion going off to the northeast. Well, the building was originally designed to have a wing. I always thought what the only thing I heard was going off like this way. No, to have a wink this way. See how it

037balances it? But I don't know if they ever You mean like right here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's um that would contemplate building the addition as a twotory having it sit right and I'm sure they probably didn't worry about that because that's kind of how they did the other but I guess we had talked about that early you know discussion and you had said because it would be you know the primary kindergarten first grade somebody doesn't recommend to do two stories for yeah usually the younger particularly the kindergarters we like to have on the first on the on the first floors. I think the other the other piece in the equation is just when we went and toured the building, the 1950s part of that building are the ones that feel like they need the

038most attention. So, we were focused on taking what's what I would consider the worst part of that building, replacing it with new construction, and taking the newer part and salvaging it or, you know, continuing to make good use of it. So I one other strategy that that led to this thought rather than just adding to the twotory would be um the office entrance and secure entry component to the the cafeteria. There's a whole there's a whole handful of things that really you know one of the goals was to try to get cafeteria and PE so they're not all sharing the same space and it frees up some flexibility there. So some of the spaces that result came out of this plan were really geared towards making improvements to the worst part of the building and

039trying to make functional improvements to those critical spaces for security and cafeteria. Yeah, I I did not realize how much we were asking for this one building. What about your alternative concept that you just put a little quick um space? Yeah. So, I we heard and we totally understand. You know, if you've just spent some money on a playground and recently spent some money on a parking lot, I mean, I think if you're looking at a 20 30year solution, you don't want to make a decision on a $500,000 piece of paving, but at the same time, you also don't want to um you know, discount that that those investments have been made and if they can be preserved, let's look at that. So, this was a very quick just square footage idea. If we took

040that addition to the west and then took it to towards the north as opposed to the south or at elbows, the idea was could you fit the same amount of square footage without having to take out the current parking on the west and then would that free up space to also preserve the location of the current playground. So, this diagrammatically shows you approximately the same amount of square footage could fit on the tennis courts and to that flat area to the north of the tennis courts. And then, you know, potentially not touching the existing playground. And again, if you, you know, have a have that prek area, you may have some additional staff. You may want to have some additional parking. There's some, you know, potentially some drop off or there may be some supplemental

041parking and drop off needs for that. So, it's a smaller area of paving. We haven't laid it all out, but just diagrammatically it shows you, you know, I suspected we would come tonight and you guys would say, "Well, we kind of don't want to move the playground and we don't want to move the parking lot. So, tell us what else we can do." So, I'll be the guy. I like this one. I like this one better than the first one. I mean, really, because it's So, the difference is we lose the tennis courts, right? Well, I think you lose those on either option. just right. Right. So, um I just and I'm still concerned a little bit with the u the hey the movement in the parking lot, but not necessarily that just the access

042points because if we move our staff parking in in the option one now all of our staff and everybody's coming through here at least now we have two spots as we currently do, right? um you know that so then we got all the students and then we're also going to have whatever 80 staff members or however many go to Washington every day. Um and then I think we're also going to have the problem with I think parents are going to come in there to drop their kids off. Uh you know what I'm saying? I just that that's is um is there did you run numbers kind of on both? Does it keep it similar because the construction cost is is similar or does I we just looked at square footage. I think it I mean

043when we go through the budget we've highlighted maybe the parking lot and the playground is something that either as a fate a step priority level two or something that if we didn't have to do maybe we look tried to save those monies. Um it will logistically I think there's a lot of things you know once once you decide on a plan and the community supports that plan and explain it there'll be a lot of logistics in terms of what does the phasing and the sequencing look like that parking lot will probably be out of commission during that construction of that first wing because it'll be needed for construction delivery and staging of materials but those are really sometimes that ends up tearing it through nice part one they have to replace that anyway I I

044mean I did think about that I do like the concept just because I know when we have been without play spaces that's hard you know and so staging that too you know with this you you still preserve that play space and really it's away from most of the construction and things so you have well some of it's just community perception it might not you know if you're looking at $30 million of $100,000 playgrounds not the biggest thing in the world but perception is that's it was a lot $100,000 like to move it because it's 100,000 because I I thought the same thing. I'm like maybe we're being silly, you know, if it's a $30 million project to be saying that about the playground, but also but if that some of those things and some of

045those things really hit community members wrong, then they don't support it. Yeah. And they go I mean, if they use it all summer long, that play, you know, not that they still would, but Okay. It's all right if we go to the next one. Yeah, thank you for thanks for doing that. Yeah, you bet. So, the the next uh sheet that you have is uh for Scheler Elementary. And at Schuler, we've identified four sort of highest higher level priorities. Number one, I think without question, at least from our meetings with team members, is to do a major renovation to the gang restrooms on all three floors. Um item number two uh is to update the west locker room. Um that west locker room is current hasn't been modified yet. It's um so we would look

046at adjusting that to provide a training room, some uh supplemental work room space, some storage, mother's room. Um and then the third item is the east locker room. that's already there's been a lot of work in that east locker room to convert it into a wrestling practice area. The thought there would be to go ahead and take the what's currently the the toilet restroom block that's that's shown in that de dash line and and get that out of there and then look at taking what's currently a PE office and renovating that to an officials area that would allow for single showers, restrooms, and a place for officials to use. And then the fourth item identified there is uh the secure entry improvements which would really look at updating that entire entrance vest if you will

047giving that a refresh putting a door in to take you in to check into the office before you have access to the school. Well, I'm sorry to that I don't know this already, but we're using all of this space for wrestling and sports stuff at Schuler. Um yeah, and it's kind of I apologize. There's the some of the existing walls under the hatching don't show up, but there's a there's a wall um in between, you know, that what what's labeled as the wrestling room and the storage or work room. There's a wall in between there. So, right now, most of that space. They went in and knocked out the showers. They leveled the floor. They put pads on the on the walls. So, the the one piece that's a little awkward is this, and it's

048not really used, is that where that dashed line says demo restrooms, that's currently a block wall with a couple of toilet fixtures in it. So, the idea would be to just basically finish what they've started and and get a more functional practice space. So, this is who's practicing there? Does anybody middle school middle school middle school wrestlers? Okay. What they had done in previous years is they had to use the uh middle or the shoe gym after basketball practice was over lower the mats practice on the gym floor and then put the mats back up the next day. So that I thought we were still and it's and not that I mean obviously this isn't the scale. I don't think it's really as big as it looks on that. I mean it's really it's just

049the old locker room. Okay. I mean, it looks like it's a lot bigger than really it is. I mean, you know, they just they took the the locker rooms that were never used, you know, created it that. So, I mean, the storage area. Yeah. And the other side that hasn't been touched, it's it's storage area. It's still the locker room benches and Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It should be cleaned out. Should be used. It's prime real estate and should be using it for something, right? I think so. All right, the next sheet. Uh, and and really going back to it, it is right across the the hall from the main office. I mean, it's been uh gutted out or shelled out for a wrestling practice room. Doesn't mean that it couldn't be used for something else.

050I mean, we could find another space to put wrestling practice at and use it for something more all day long. Yeah. Yeah, I I mean I think the the west side I mean there's some nice opportunity. One of the things we heard is needing to have some more training and meeting room space for teachers at each of the facilities. This is a we're showing a 640 foot training meeting room and it's right across the hall from the the main entry. We're able to get the mother's room in there and some additional work some storage and support space. So, I I think it's going to be a better utilization of the square footage. And to Beth's point, the one that's been converted to a wrestling room, that's there's been a lot of I don't think there's

051been a huge amount of money put into that, but I think there's been a lot of effort put into it to to make it a nice functional space. And so, good good for whoever did that. All right, the next sheet, we start to get into the middle school. Um the first item on our middle school and this is kind of a middle school shoeler thing would be to replace the skybridge uh with a new structure that's wider about a 4,000 square foot common space and that um could be used for a variety of functions by either school some overflow seating for the lunch period or study halls or just student social social space. Uh so that's I think that's a kind of a neat a neat thing to think about. Um, jump to the to

052the next page goes to the lower level. So, a middle school item number two is focusing on that special ed room down in the lower level to put in a single-use restroom. Uh, and then to address some door security issues down there. There's an exterior door coming out of that special ed room. And then there's also another exterior door that we want to do some electronic access control improvements for. Um, next page shows uh item number three for the middle school, which is doing a renovation to the locker rooms. Uh, the thought there would be to to make some adjustments to how you enter those locker rooms. Right now, they're not accessible in terms of how narrow the corridor is to get in. The door pole and bush on the door is not accessible. So,

053we're looking at improving accessibility to those locker rooms, putting new finishes in them, taking what are currently u older style gang showers in a drying area and repurposing those for new restroom fixtures and in single use shower stalls. Um, so that's the that's the goal there. There's been some discussion about, you know, also use utilizing these for like varsity football events and having both, you know, visiting teams use use those lockers as well. And then item number four for the middle school is uh doing a secure entry improvement. So this would look at converting the space that's adjacent to that current entrance um such that you have to come in come through check in at a reception counter and then have access to the school. So I think that's a it's just repurposing some space.

054It's not a major don't think it's going to be a major challenge, but I think it's going to help the security to make sure that you you can't get through the second vest field doors until you go into the reception area and check in. Can I can I ask and this may not be really um for you by this, but in regards to just looking at because the middle school space down there, we talk about the home school not having enough space there. Jason, are we and I guess I asked administration, are we sure that this is the right configuration if we're going to do some work to add a restroom and for special ed? Is that the best space that they in the best room for their use or something happens and homeschool moves

055someplace else? Are we going to look to re-evaluate or move programs and and change spaces? because we've changed faces a couple different times down there possibly. Um right now we we think because the room's larger, it's one of the larger rooms in that middle school that it's a good space for our um specialized room because of just they'll have like different areas of instruction and spread kids out a little bit. Yeah, I mean it looks like it functions well there now. I'm just wondering long term is that going to stay? and they like the uh access to pick up and drop off kids that are on special needs buses and transportation. They really like that. So that probably will stay as a special ed room with the need of a restroom change regardless of whatever

056happens. Okay. or uh should one of the other options there was if is if the um homeschool program moves out that that would be available for another meeting conference staff type training room. We had kind of identified that and had some cost to it, but it was fairly minor. You know, you can repurpose that room for whatever you feel best when they do. All righty. High school um items there. We've got total of six different items that have been priced out. The first item is a new fieldhouse. Um last time we met with you, we looked at three different options for the fieldhouse. I think based on your feedback, what we're proposing is um a 60,000 square foot field house to the west. It would have three hard surface courts. Maybe two of those could

057be wood or two could be multi-purpose. There's some um turf space available, great room. Um so that's high school item number one. Uh item number two would be a classroom addition, four classrooms that would be part of the connecting corridor to get to the fieldhouse um and give you some flexible space for some of the other renovations that we're proposing. Item number three is uh some secure entry improvements. Again, there at the high school main entrance to to force a track to come in through the office before going into the second vest doors. Um, item four is looking at trying to repurpose some existing space, this being one of them, to try to to look at some options for improving this utilization of of this space as well as at the intersections of some of

058your classroom corridors. Uh, trying to take one of those interior classrooms and open it up to be uh some more small group spaces and some student social spaces. So, you'll see that on this the next page blowing up. Um item five is improvements at the tech wing, trying to get the um welding area out of the wood shop and making improvements to that that tech wing. And then item number six would be doing a remodel of your science lab. So, the last last item on the on the handout there just shows a little bit larger of a blow up of the uh fieldhouse, the classroom addition. Uh and then, you know, options for reconfiguring the media center. And then you can kind of see those corner at the intersections of the corridors. Trying to open

059that up, give some open, flexible seating, couple of small group rooms, another room, meeting conference room. Uh just trying to make those a little bit more pleasing and and and social spaces for students and some more flexible smaller group use. So those those two classrooms would be um replaced in the in the addition there's two standardsiz classrooms in that connector edition. One larger classroom that could be for um kind of a flexible large group space and then one smaller special ed or smaller group type space for those four classrooms. So that's that's kind of a a walkthrough of the the items and again each of the items that are in your site plan handout will relate to the next handout which is the budget items. We so and I guess maybe when I looked at

060the previous plan I wasn't really focused on where the location was for the fieldhouse. Um one is there any concern about losing that practice field space and two large arefield? I think the wellfields are further to the south. So I I feel like we've we have looked at that. We'll have to double check that the south edge of the fieldhouse isn't getting close to the the welf. But we have looked at that. Um, as far as giving up the practice field that I can't comment on, but I know the first iterations of this with the athletic director, they were there's always envisioned that that's where they wanted it. And we studied maybe we want to try to put it over by the current gym where the music and and music wing is and replace that

061by the auditorium. So, that's what we know there. So, um, Mark's team with Estus, uh, they put together some costs for these things. We've kind of walked through them. We've had two sort of previews and questions, Q&A from both us and some of the leadership team with the district and and the ESIS team. Um and so what we we met earlier uh with some of the leadership team to just and we took a pass at it first because we I'll skip to the very end to get kind of get to the punch line. The all of the things that we identified as things that would be nice in a bond they added up to 47 million. It's like well that's probably not realistic. We're going to have to think about prioritizing some of these. So

062that led to the thought of let's let's go through an exercise of of as a group thinking about items that are number one priorities, things that we'd love to have, but if we can't afford 45 or 40 million, those are number tws that would would be great if budget allows. And then number threes would be more of a medium priority or things we might put on a a 10-year plan for something we try to accomplish five five years down the road or 10 years down the road. So, this is just a a what if scenario and what we'd like to do is get your feedback tonight and then we can go back and recolor code these and see what the budget number adds up to. But, um, again, based on what we what we're going

063to show you that are items highlighted in green, um, that adds up to about 38.5 million with the balance of those being priority level two and three. So, at Washington, uh, the items that we thought would be, you know, really key items for a potential bond referendum would be to do the classroom edition to demo the 1950s part of the building and replace that with new construction. Um, we listed the pre kindergarten uh edition and playground as a as a priority level two. That's something that would be nice to do all at once, but could be done in the future. Uh we listed number four and number five the parking lot and the playground as a level two. Um the minor renovation to the 19 86 building as we included that as a level one

064along with the updates to the the bus lane and the drop off curb sidewalks. So that totals about 13.8 million and priority level one and about 4.2 4.3 million in priority level number two. I guess any initial reaction on the Washington prioritization. My personal opinion is number one and two are like non-negotiable. Three through seven. You may say we totally want the prek edition and we don't need to do the work to the bus lane whatever but that's to me the one and two are the fieldhouse and the in addition to the Washington feel like they've what we've heard in all of our meetings the two things that have risen to the top of the priority list and maybe that that cool uh cafeteria connector on the middle school shoel So, I don't know if

065this is the right time to ask, but um like how how firm are you guys on your your numbers on your estimates like given the uncertainty about how much it's going to cost to source materials and and stuff like that or I might defer that to Mark. Yeah, I mean we're we're still in We're still in the design phase, right? So, we haven't there's still a lot of questions as far as square footages that we're talking about depending on the priorities of projects that we're that we're going to do. So, uh I I I would say that we're getting close, but these are not final numbers today. These are these are still ballpark numbers. um they're close, but uh but we're still again we're we we just need to determine especially for the maintenance projects

066kind of what we're what we're talking about for for short finish. So are you are your numbers more firm for new construction because you kind of can just say, "Yeah, we know what those components are if we just slap a per square foot price on it." whereas the the other things it kind of depends how if we're going low quality, medium high and stuff like that. I I think that's a pretty fair assessment and and so you know, yes, these these numbers that we're using are based on like projects that we have done currently. So they're the most upto-date that we have available. Obviously, as square footages or design things change, we would adjust those. I think one other thing to note is the numbers do include some contingency and some owner soft cost. So,

067it's not just what would you see from a subcontractor, a bid contractor on on day one. There's, you know, geotechnical reports and engineering costs and fixtures and furniture. And so, these these are intended to be a total project cost and not just a what's the what what's going to be bid for. Yeah. What's the bid day number? You need to have some ownership cost built into that. And there is some contingency. I will say from my perspective, I I don't know where things are going to go with inflation and I mean there's there's some contingency in here and I think you guys are building in 4% per year. Hopefully that's safe and hopefully we don't see crazy um cost changes but that's an unknown and I was just going to ask you to comment on

068that. So anything that's projected to be on 2026 for every year uh output it shows like 2029 you've done 4% on right there's inflationary costs that are already correct right you want to explain that part yeah so uh we we usually so if it's 20 if it's going beyond 2026 so 2027 89 31 we add uh a percentage of inflationary cost construction uh and pro total project costs actually uh into each of those years going forward. So if you're so um as we're looking at some of these numbers on the uh the big ideas the bond or the maintenance uh there is a a year date listed on that. So so there is an assumption built into that. So, for example, 2031 or 2031 on on Washington Elementary School, that last gym floor project, uh

069there is incremental inflationary cost built into that 2031 number. Those are numbers you'll see on the backup. I'm just kind of have a worksheet to try to get priorities. Mark's team has a has the towards the the last two pages of your sheet show the more detailed items that they that we use to build this spreadsheet. I'll try to walk through these and again I know I want to be cognizant. I know you've got other things tonight so I'll try to get through this. I am happy to say and you guys can ask questions as long as you want. Um, Schuler Elementary. The items that we highlighted as a green or number one would be the restroom remodel on all three floors and the secure entry improvement. The renovations to the two locker rooms. Um,

070we had that as a priority level, too. You know, between the 600 and 400,000 a million dollars. You could you could easily spend that. I mean, you could also do some of that on your own. Uh, maybe at a lower cost. I know volunteers doing the wrestling room didn't spend three or $400,000 getting it done. That was a lot of sort of blood, sweat, and you know, people just helping donate time. So, that's kind of why we listed those as a priority level two. Um, at the middle school, the items that we listed as a priority level one were the new Skybridge Commons area and the secure entrance improvements. Um, we listed the secure the security improvements in the restroom at the special ed room as a level two and then the locker room renovations

071as a potentially a level three priority. Um, so based on that at the middle school you've can see you've got about 1.7 million in priority level one about 28,000 for that level two and 1.3 million for level three. Jump into the high school. The items that we had listed as a priority level one were the fieldhouse, the classroom connector, the four classrooms that connect to the fieldhouse, and the secure entry and safety improvements. Uh the fieldhouse, you know, that's a $20 million number. Um it's a it's a nice the design, it's a 60,000 foot fieldhouse. So I I would tell you there uh if that's what the community wants, then great. If you said we can only afford a $17 million fieldhouse, you need to cut 5,000 10,000 square feet out of that. I mean,

072I we're seeing field houses anywhere from, you know, 40,000 to 100,000. So, there there's certainly room there depending on if you need three courts or two courts or you want you need turf space. So, I of all the numbers you're going to see tonight, I think that one we we tried to hit a middle spot between the really big version that the AD wanted and then what we showed you last time. We're kind of right in the middle of those two uh at 60 60,000 square feet. But and to clarify, the construction materials of that are a building similar to our school building or that's like a metal building that would that's a pre-engineered metal building with some brick veneer facade improvements on on the public spacing side, but it would be pre-engineered metal building

073structure. There's a little bit of extra cost in there. I mean there's a there's some locker room spaces, some restroom spaces, you know, those would be more typical block block type durable construction, but the overall shell and the practice space would be in a big clear span pre-engineered metal building. What's it what's the dimensions of that fieldhouse? Is it like 80 by 100? Yes. What is it? I'm just for me sizing it up. 100 to 200 by 300ish or maybe I should know that because I I laid it out. Yeah, just maybe sizing it up with other buildings that are by 300. Probably 180 by three. It's a little more rectangular than I can get that. It's fine. It's fine. Maybe it is 200 by three. I can tell you it's close rough roughly that

074size. So, uh then we had the the media center and those common area updates is a level two. The career tech boag is a level two and then the science lab is a level two. Um and that gets you to uh 22 million for the priority level one and just over two million for level two. So again, getting down to the the grand total based on the way this is currently set up, that would put you at about 38.5 million for priority level one, 7.3 million for priority level two, and 1.3 million for priority level three. So, we've we've tried to narrow I mean the lists that we were looking at at the last time. A lot of that's moving between whether it's on this list or it's in a maintenance item, but we tried

075to kind of narrow in on what we what we felt like. Security was a really important thing. Washington was really important. We got great feedback on that middle school shoeler connector. And at least what we've been the vibe we've been getting is there's really some strong support for a fieldhouse. So that's that's kind of the big picture summary on where we are budget-wise. Um I think the the follow-up sheets that are in this in the handout. Um the first one is really the spreadsheet we used to build this this one uh that that they put together. And then the the last item is the maintenance costs which um those we tried to categorize between you know more urgent and what year they might be in. Um I may let Mark kind of walk through those

076depending on this I would say this is still a work in progress. I mean I think we've been had some discussions with Russell what's on his list. I'd like to get Lisa involved in that in terms of you know what are you planning ahead for Pebble and SAVE. So, I don't I don't want to get bogged down too much in the details on this one yet. Um, but it is here just it's it's been updated since we last met. Um, again, I think you know, if you want to go through if you want Mark to go through all of these, we can do that or if there's other questions you have or be happy to answer those. Um I was I just wanted to ask the board if you guys have been hearing anything from

077people as you've talked about it or people who've uh you know seen that we're talking about a brown project like what kind of feedback you've been getting. I haven't gotten anything. One person asked me if we were going to redo the tennis courts for pickle ball. That was the only thing you because of those conversations you know that were out there. Did we decide to do that? But no, they might not be there in the future. I guess I would ask just and I know you just are seeing this for the first time, but is there anything that you're seeing on this list that's missing? I know you were concerned about interior refresh high school, which that's on the maintenance list as a budget item. Um, is there any things you feel like are not

078on the list or are on the list that really we've taken a few things off and put them towards future maintenance? Um, or there things on here that you say, well, it'd be nice if we could do all that, but 38 million is not a realistic number. Um, you know, I think from our conversations with with Piper Sandler, you know, that 30 to$40 million is a doable number. It's just sort of what's the what's the right number, the right balance between making sure you save plenty of your save money each year for things that are going to be ongoing. I think bonding save capacity question you have the the ability to do it. It's just what's the what's the community going to support? What's the right amount to make sure that you're preserving every year

079for ongoing? Well, I say I think that that's a concern I would have. You're increasing the square footage of your buildings and doing that through a bond issue. And then if we in that bond issue, if we're not addressing any of any of the maintenance type stuff that's coming up, you know, I just are we getting too big? Are we going to be able to sustain the ability to maintain everything? would be my concern. Yeah. And I think to that point the the strategy would be not to touch any of the ple money and to preserve significant percentage. You know, maybe it's 50% of the saved money is borrowed for the this project and 50% is, you know, saved on a year-over-year basis. But I think you I mean you probably have a command on

080those numbers. But I think from our initial discussion with Travis there was when we were getting into that 30 mid30s discussion we were that was part of the discussions making sure that money is there for those couple is not very much. It would be the same. We get one about 1.7 to 1.8 million each year from the local option sales tax which is what we use 33 fund for. um 520,000 of that is for revenue bonds we've already committed to. So that leaves you about 1.2 to do your classroom refreshes, your updates, your maintenance. And so I don't really designate that for anything else other than grounds maintenance operations. Um for your Apple fund, we get around 700,000. That is usually split between technology and transportation. that gets you a bus every other year that

081gets you uh uh these onetoone computers that we just approved, servers, technology, those kind of things. So, Pebble I would probably steer clear of as far as for these building projects because it does take care of those two areas and they are expensive. Uh transportation and what does that one bond go all 29? Uh I think it's 29. So, I mean, we're got, you know, $14 million worth of costs that are only gonna probably continue to, you know, have things back behind that. Yeah. So, if we needed to commit a million dollars every year, it's going to take us 14 years to get through this list. 14 years. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, the list may not just like the bond things. This is everything. You may not you may only do twothirds of that

082list. And there's, as an example, I think there's an item on there that's over 2.3 million is the refresh of the interiors um in the high school or Yeah. item number nine on the high school. Yeah. So again, these some of these you will probably definitely rise to like you need to do that you're free. Some of it would be well it would be nice to but we got the money to but I I mean I appreciate having it. I would you know I I like having a comprehensive list for us to look at and be aware of. Yeah. No, that's exactly what we asked for. It's just, you know, I'm just going on a, you know, do we just keep I mean just just from my side it our side uh just to reiterate

083what B is just talking about. So on the fourth page for the maintenance you go down to Schuler. So, as we were talking with Russell the other day and kind of going through this uh item number six, the refresh uh interior finishes we have 684,000. Um but as we were talking with Russell, he's like, "Hey, we only have like six or eight rooms, I think it was left to do." So, that number will obviously narrow the scope of that uh and obviously the cost. So, as we continue to go through this without going through every single line item, I think you can look at this as kind of just a a general document of numbers like we said, hey, they're in the ballpark, but really as the scope continues to get defined, then those numbers

084could come down. So, still a starting point. I think we're in a good spot. So, um if whoever can help me with this, um so if our PPE and our lost funds are already sounded pretty committed in your mind, Lisa. So, like where does the money come from to do these maintenance things that like if it's not from this bond? Like where where's that money going to come from? Well, that local option sales tax, you know, you're getting 1.7 to 1.9 every year. The only commitment we have is the $520,000 payment we make every year for revenue bond. The rest of that is for the for maintenance and and those are the things that we are have on our ongoing capital projects need that we've been addressing you know like the HBAC right those things

085roofs those but some of them like when you look at roofs if you got 1.5 million that's a couple years saving up to I think exact yeah that's kind of my point is kind of we we right now have about two million in the account like if if we take this maintenance list seriously and even if we say well you But we probably 50% of it is going to be the cost. You know where like where will that money come from if we don't for it? Like you you could bond with the le the local option sales tax and instead of making a $520,000 payment, you make a $800,000 payment and you bond with that and then you have that money up front to do those projects and you set it aside as needed. you'd

086have a you'd still have a commitment of some payment that you would have to make every year, but it would give you that access to money quicker than doing 1 million over a 14-year period. So, you always have that option because we did, as we talked with Travis with Piper Sailor, that was an option is to look at what we could use as a for local option sales tax as a bond option. I'm very conscious of this building because it gets a lot of public view, a lot of use, and you know, we know it's no longer new, even though many still refer to it as the new high school. And if if in fact, you know, we are so lucky that something would pass and we would have, you know, a new fieldhouse and

087new classrooms and things, I feel like you would really notice the disconnect in this building if it's not refreshed. I mean, that that to me to spend $2 million over time doing this would be difficult to do, I think, if you didn't fold that into something. Well, I think there's an opportunity to have another pass through with Travis. He's got these spreadsheets that like there so there's there's like seven layers of them and he builds in like well we know you're going to have a bus we'll plug it into the spreadsheet and you say well we we got to do this roof this is 1.5 we'll do it over two years. So he can kind of take a lot of this and then come back and say, "Well, if you're going for 30 million versus

08838 million, this is what it's going to do to that save list of things over a longer period of time." So I I would encourage an update with him, you know, now that there's a little more clarity on some of these numbers to do another test pass with him to answer the details that you're you're kind of alluding to in your comments. Can I ask because it's like half of what we're talking about with this fieldhouse are these and you know I realize there's kind of just a layout here and I don't know if that's kind of permanent or based on what other schools have done and how that space is utilized but if it's intended to have some competition in there is there u bleacher space allowed for that? Is it kind of, you

089know, turf? Typically, you go into places and you bring your lawn chair and you, you know, we have an indoor softball game. You're just pulling up to that. What types of other amenities come with a $20 million 60,000 square foot building? A couple of general comments. Um, right now what we've planned for is two maple courts side by side and then the third court would be a a flexible sport court type thing that you could do other activities and not worry about doing things you shouldn't do on wood. Um, it's not designed as a competition venue. So your your varsity gym would still be your main competition area. When you get into fixed bleachers, that really affects your assembly and your your restroom counts. Um, we did provide some space that on the north end

090there's some space that you could set up couple of rows of movable bleachers on you know the south end with the flexible courts you could have people set up launch chairs and not worry about those things. So it's I would say it's geared towards community competitive a volleyball tournament or a youth tournament that's not where you're going to have a thousand spectators. It's more of you, you know, I'm and I guess that's what I'm going for. I I think that's definitely a huge need. We haven't Jody was here for this conversation, but I'm also kind of curious about, you know, typically how we run things where we've got um maybe JB or freshman that's happening over at the middle school. could that is this is the type of situation where a freshman game could be

091happening you know in the fieldhouse and then you know the vars JV and varsity are here and so we're not having we have players that can be somewhat close on the same campus and yeah I think you could definitely have competitive events JV middle school I would just caution against thinking that you're going to have a regional tournament you're going to have 500 parents somehow packed in here to watch the competition. You might have I mean it's a big space so you know there's there's overflow all the way around these but it's not a bank of a thousand bleachers. Right. Right. We haven't really asked. So then does that in terms of heating and cooling does that get its own set of well fields and things I don't think it'll be I don't think it'll

092be geothermal um there'll probably need to be a discussion when it gets further along to on the degree to which you want to cool the space it's a large volume and air conditioning and something that large um that's probably one of the biggest questions on the heating cooling for sure there'll be proper ventilation and heating there may be some cooling that gets it so that you can get it down to let's say 80 degrees instead of 95 on one of those summer days, but it's typically for a fieldhouse, we don't see those conditions. Strictly a wintertime use type thing. No, not not strictly, but it may be it's not 72 and perfectly comfortable with a thousand people in it like your gym would be in the summer because you you can really, you know, you've

093got the capacity to get there if you need to. Yeah. I've never I've never been in a fieldhouse or had the need to be in a fieldhouse in the summer. So, I don't know by how bad. I mean, the ones that we've been working on that the strategy so far has been to provide some cooling, but to take the edge off to where it's it's usable and not, you know, to get it to 80 degrees instead of 70 degrees. I appreciate you taking the time to answer. I'm just trying to understand. So, like for a weight room, if this is going to be one of our main weight that gets used in summer, you have that cooled. Yeah. Independently in that the weight room piece of that would definitely be fully air conditioned. Yeah, that

094would be my But the volume of a 60,000 square foot the air condition that No, I understand. I'm just Yeah, I'm just trying to understand like is it going to be a space that nobody wants to be in, you know, in August? I guess probably if it's raining. I have an interest to know what the cost projection would be for a smaller space like 40,000 instead of 60,000. I'm just throwing out conversation. That's I mean at this point that's probably a fairly easy analysis to say for every 10,000 square feet you take off it's $3 million or whatever the number is. That's what I was guessing something. Um I think but we're probably going to move on. Um but I I want to affirm that I think you guys are moving in the right direction.

095I feel like it it feels to me like you're picking up on a lot of what we've been saying we wanted. I guess I mean I would encourage the board to, you know, really spend some time looking at it, maybe talking to some people and thinking about if there's anything missing. That would be the most important thing at this point is if there's anything we're going to add, you kind of want to know it now. Um, and uh if there's specific things that these guys can help us with in terms of numbers or in terms of ideas to bring our costs down or shift things around, that probably would the right time to be asking you guys stuff like that. So, one thing I would close on before we wrap up would just be kind

096of a overview of where we are in the timeline and sort of what things look like moving ahead. Um, our thought process was that there's enough information here and if you want us to make some tweaks here and there, but we thought it would be good to try to to do some sort of community engagement, whether that's um putting something on your website or, you know, coming up with some sort of survey or just giving an opportunity for people to start to be aware of what's going on. We want the community to know there's, you know, the board's having discussions about something. um here's what here's the big ideas that we're looking at. You have feedback. We don't want to get to the end of the master planning process and folks say well I never

097they did this without everbody thought we're on the right track for what you know what our goals were. So um there are there are specialty groups that help with public commun you know communication campaigns. That's sometimes that'll happen once you if and when you decide you want to do a bond. We can help with that. But there are there are groups that help that are more professional in terms of well this is how we do in a community engagement. This is how we would do a survey. This is how we would structure mailers and those sorts of things to get feedback. Um but short of that I would say you know over the next few weeks it might be good to think about how you might start to reach out to parents or teachers or

098or how you might want to share some of the very high level of what we're doing to just get some awareness going. Um, our thought was that about a month from now in your your May work session, we would try to get towards a some level of consensus with the board that this is what we think we want to do. This is what we think we can afford. Uh, so that we can wrap up the master planning process um and give you the opportunity to make those decisions. What we've scheduled is to have their final report ready by the first week in June. And I think by the by the time you get to June, you're going to want as important, you're going to want to have decided. Yes, we do want to pursue a

099bond referendum. This is what we think our goals are because there's a process for for starting to do more um I guess more in-depth community engagement work. Um there'll need to be a petition process if you do decide to do a referendum. You'll need to dis you'll need to set your budget. You'll need to describe what you're going to do. Um get that petition language help. You know, there your bond council will help draft that petition language. Usually for a November referendum, those activities should be going on in July and August. You need to have your if you do want to proceed, you need to have your your petition in and approved, I would say, in the board in August. so that you're notifying the county auditor. The deadline's usually like the first week or

100two in September when you need to actually say county auditor, here's the language, put us on the list for for November. So, you're right on track in terms of schedule, but over May and June is sort of those decisions you'll need to sort of get together and think about whether this is a priority for you or not. invite us to you help us do that survey or do we hire a company to kind of put it together or we grade it over what other districts what do they what yeah I mean we don't necessarily have things in our current master planning scope to I mean a lot of times when we get to the end of a master plan we can put together scope of services to help with pre-bond referendum campaigning you may want

101to get renderings you know you may say I want more than a site plan I want a pretty picture of this we may want SVP to help with surveys or or online things or I mean we're seeing success with some other districts that have hired an outside group that that's this is their sole focus is you know how to do a community um communicate they're more communication specialists um and I I can give you some references on that if you'd like but um I think having an extra layer of professional community I mean you guys may have, you know, well-connected community members that will be on a on a bond referendum committee and pick up the ball and just run with it. Some community members communities have that sort of court regal folks that can

102really go out to the service group meetings and, you know, they're the ones that are going to sell it, not you guys or me. But again that sort of that communication specialist can help with technical things like they can do the software programming to get the survey you know to where that's not your tech your IT department doing that or build a website for you or those sorts of things. That's who that's who I'm thinking of. That's who I'm sorry Lisa. Uh the Donovan Yeah, we're we're kind of on a parallel path with Mount Pleasant and they just they know what they want to do and they just the Donovan group crafted their did all the technology behind their online community survey. Great. Um, Lisa, would you be able to get us like links to

103what Mount Pleasant is doing and stuff and just send it out so we can start? They're based out of Wisconsin, but they do a lot in Iowa. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Um let's just take like a three minute break and um then we'll get started with I mean I can look it up myself but if you can get the mouth and stuff so we can see how it looks. camera would talk about it. That's who you want because they stuff with community bonding. They good stuff. You know what they say about it's great when it works. I thought the thing was gonna flip over. Yeah, it was it was the worst turbulence I've ever seen. Oh, wow. Oh yeah, it was I wonder I wondered when I saw these a few

104prayers going in front of my my big window and I was like I'm wait till it lights up. Then it didn't lighten up. So I'm like a Shakespeare's birthday everybody. Sorry. Okay. celebrate that celebrate. Thank you for coming. Thanks guys. Thanks for along. I wonder if you had some if you had some second thoughts. Thank you. Thank you. I wasn't sad to leave the choir concert early. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, but our kids did very good. like 32. [Laughter] Yeah. So, Jody, the main thing was the the alternate location for Washington edition and then kind of talking about how like determine we're have to decide some priorities as far as like what what's most important as the bond now. shipped off because the maintenance schedule itself is full. It's not like we can just take

105the things we don't want to build and put them on maintenance, right? And that's kind of our next job. When I was I know I was like I'm like I see the price and I'm like, "Oh my gosh." But then I look at the things I'm like, well, I want to do all these things. I mean, Beth has been working. This is like the third iteration. She's been trying to get them done. Get more stuff like that. Yeah. Well, that's Yeah, it's a lot of pressure when you ask. So, you know what's interesting? When I was a superintendent in Massachusetts, I went out, you know, and it was in a room like this and I talked with the broadcast. I got to tell you, this is being broadcast live right now throughout our community. I've

106never been on an interview that was broadcast live before. Right. That was incredible. Wow. Interesting. Yeah, that No pressure. No pressure whatsoever. Yeah. We're gonna lift the Scott is from a virtual school and it is called cell schools. Y and he's got a powerpoint that is to do you have handouts for us too? I I emailed to you today but I did not bring copies so I I'd be happy to get copies to everybody. So I can do you want to email? Um I think just the PowerPoint's enough. I think because I've got a copy of that PowerPoint and I think Okay. We'll get fine. Okay. Great. Okay. Um so hi everybody. My name is Scotty Anderson. I'm glad to be with you here today and I was actually scrolling through your website today looking

107at the names of some of your staff and I feel like I am home because I'm an Anderson with an EN. She's a John Sen with an IN. I can't tell you how many INS I saw on the list. I was like raising my hands in the air. I was so excited like wow they know how to spell their names right. No offense was just 15 miles north of me. [Music] So for that that's one reason I'm th thrilled to be here. The second one is I thought I was going to die on the flight to Omaha today. So I'm glad to be alive and then I got to get in a rental car and drive through the storm that we just flew through. So that was all just really thrilling. But nonetheless I'm really

108happy to be with you. We had a really great meeting last week with your superintendent and I'm going to give you just a really broad overview of what we do from an online learning and then I'm going to really address some of the questions that we discussed last week about if we decide to move in this direction, how do we make sure we're not doing damage to a district and how do we make sure we're maintaining the academic integrity of the district, etc., etc. So, I'm just going to go and get started. Uh, and by the way, this is interactive, so stop me at any point if you have questions. I'm happy to answer the things I'm going to talk about are in this order and actually I have a fourth thing which is kind

109of like a next steps but these are the key things and you know every company in the world comes in and says we want to talk about ourselves first right I'm going to do that really quickly that's not I'm not really here to talk about us but I am going to tell you a little bit about us because you need to know that actually we know what we're doing we we are these numbers are always moving because we're growing and and stuff but basically we have about 55,000 students around the world actually the majority of them like 95% center here in the United States. We have about 5,000 teachers and staff. We operate 90 plus schools and we uh are in 20 states here in the country. And you'll see I'll show you the map

110of that in just a moment. Um by the way, we do online schools. We also do brick and mortar schools. We also do uh early learning childhood centers, you know, so we're we're in all realms of of education. Um, one of the things that we really pride oursel on, and you're going to see it because I'm going to have several slides where I talk about it, is the fact that we don't come in and tell you what to do. We don't come in and say, "Here's this product that we have on the shelf, take it or leave it, right? We come in and we're we consider this partnership. Every single partnership that I have been involved with with this company is absolutely unique. Every single one. There's no two that are I mean there's similarities

111obviously between things but our job is not to come in and tell you what to do and you'll see I have a slide later it's actually your job to tell us what to do right so um I'm really excited about that but we also have some flexibility in the types of programs that we offer which most of these are not relevant to what you're trying to do but the point is to show that we're about meeting the needs of the local community not coming in and meeting our needs just so that we can you know gain garner business map here all the areas in blue are states where we currently have schools operating. It could be an online school or a brick and mortar school. Uh the states in yellow are ones that we're in

112process of. In the states in orange, it says future. We're really not doing anything there. So, who knows? That future could be, you know, maybe a millennia from now, but um we just don't like to say nothing. So, anyhow, all right. So, that's about us. I told you I wasn't going to go too deep into about us. I'll be happy to answer any more questions about us that you want, but I want to talk a little bit in big pictures around the products and services that we offer at Excel Schools. The bottom line is this. We and I'm I'm going to show you the complete array, but we can do anything from that complete array down to small. Basically, we can provide every single service that is needed if we wanted to operate a totally

113independent school. So we do HR, we do back office finance, we do facilities management, which isn't really relevant when we're talking about an online school necessarily. Uh the most important one in there in my opinion is the academic and student support services. I think we excel in that. I think we excel in all of these. Um but the other area I really want to point out is obviously in an online learning environment, technology management is paramount. And one of the things that I think is a really strong point of what we do is we have actually designed and I'm going to show you this on the next slide, our own learning ecosystem. And so like many of you probably in your jobs, you log into some portal and you do something and then maybe you

114have to log into something else to get something else done and you end up you have a list of passwords like a mile long just to get your work done. One of the things that we're really proud of is our technology team actually developed the strategies to integrate all the products and I'm going to show you a slide about all this into a single sign on platform. You log in once whether you're a parent, student, teacher, administrator and you have access to everything within the platform one time one password right that I mean that seems so trivial but it's a big deal. So uh we basically offer all the services necessary to ensure that the school could be successful or in this case the program would be successful. So I talked about the learning ecosystem.

115This again is a a very big um uh uh big picture look of what it is. But this is the technology where we've got all these are just some of the big major systems. All these major systems to communicate and integrate with each other play nicely together allow data to be transferred back and forth so that we are uh facilitating what student and teacher students and teachers are doing in the classroom. When I was a superintendent of schools for 10 years, people got tired of me saying this phrase teaching and learning. In fact, my email address is teaching and [email protected]. So, teaching and learning. That's everything we do in our educational environment is around should be around I say should because it's not always, but we should be focusing on what's happening with students and

116teachers. And the technology that we've devised is around supporting that most crucial component of our responsibilities. And you can see some of the names of the platforms. We use the Power School SIS. We use Salesforce to help us enroll students and pass them into the SIS. We have a very customized version of Canvas. Some of you may be familiar with what Canvas is. Ours is a unique installation that we custom designed. We use Big Blue Button to communicate with uh students and families u and and various other products. Um okay, I don't want to go too deep. I could honestly spend an hour talking about this slide. So this is the lit learning ecosystem and underneath all of this are some of these products and the educators in the room are going to some of

117these going to look very familiar to you. Oh yeah I know I ready and I know con academy and etc etc. This is not a comprehensive list of all the products that are within our learning ecosystem, but it is some of the key ones that are um highly utilized and and these ones here should make sure I didn't with the exception maybe of of Salesforce and Power School, these are all designed around the teaching and learning process whether it's communication or the actual instructional components. Okay. Oops. change. So, I mentioned earlier we don't just come in and tell you what to do, right? And I I love this is maybe it just tickles me, but if it doesn't tickle you, I apologize. But our approach, whether it's in the way that we relate to you

118as a school board and a school district, or whether it's the way our teachers relate and interact with students, we don't utilize one-sizefits-all. We utilize this phrase, which I'm sure you've heard this too. We utilize a one-sizefits one. So we customization and meeting the needs of the individual district, board, classroom, students is just all throughout our philosophy of how we deliver uh the program. And so okay, so it's true for teaching learning process and as I've already said, it's true with how we relate to the district. So what can you expect from us in a partnership? So here we go. I told you that we don't come in and tell you what to do as a school board in a school district. You get to determine what do you want to have happen in the

119school, the mission, the type of school accountability, which we talked about a little bit last week in our meeting. Policies around enrollment, retention, absenteeism, and then you tell us what to do and then it's our job clicker going there to determine how we do what you want us to do because we're the operations entity, right? You don't want to have to have daily management dig put your fingers into it. You're entrusting us to handle all these functions as defined by what you put on the left hand side of the screen. The vision, the mission, the accountability, etc., etc. Uh we take this this role and relationship very seriously. Um and and um and we actually enjoy playing this role very much. And then um in a very big picture sense hopefully as a board you're

120sitting there thinking why the heck would we want to do this right? So a couple things these are just some things that came off top of mind and some of it based upon the conversation we had last week is retain existing district students. You may be have experiencing some students who are leaving elsewhere going to other programs. Let's keep them in house. Let's pro if there's something you're not providing now that they want let's provide it to them. Right? uh jointly develop strategies to recapture students who have left the district and then even I don't know the numbers or you may not have very many but some district experience a large number of homesooled families right and as you know homeschool instruction can range from actually what they're doing is pretty good to all the

121way down to oh my gosh right so I know when I was a superintendent when I saw students coming back enrolling who had been in homeschool programs the results generally were not particularly favorable uh because frankly they at least leak states I was doing it, there was no requirements on what had to happen. So, we would get a student back in who left a year ago and they were a couple years behind. So, that third bullet is really important because it it it really is the true commitment to providing a great education to every child in your district, right? That's what we want to do. And so, uh, it's not in any way to offend any parent who chooses homeschooling, but it is to provide an option for some parents because some parents want to

122do it and then they get into it and realize, oh my gosh, it's it's a lot more than I can handle, right? And then they can realize, wow, in an online environment, I can still get some of what I wanted from a home school situation, but not have to do all the work. And so, that's a benefit. Um, and then, uh, as I'll talk about here very shortly, execute strategies to project the to protect the district from performance drag and absenteeism and graduation, uh, uh, uh, rate. And I'll talk a little bit about that coming up because that was a good portion of our conversation from last week. And of course, we provide state high quality instruction by state certified teachers, all Iowa teachers certified in the state of Iowa. And then the final benefit

123is you will receive a little bit of funding from the program that can cover any administrative costs that you have and likely be higher than the administrative costs that you might be expending. So you may be able to reinvest back into other programs to serve students in your district. I'm just going to take a breath because I know I've been going really fast. I feel like I'm like had a big cup of coffee and I haven't because I'm tired. I wish I had a big cup of coffee. We good? Can I keep going? Okay. So, one of the things when I spoke with Superintendent Johnson last week is we spent a lot of time talking about how do we do open enrollment um for students and uh how do we handle the absentee issue absenteeism

124issue and truency and setup. So, we've done some digging. We have an amazing uh attorney who works in compliance issues and so these slides here are basically me transferring what he told me and sharing it back to you. one um something that we discovered and we didn't know this at You might have known this at the time, but I didn't know this at the time. Iowa statutes actually allow this board to define what um it means to have insufficient classroom space. And that's a really key determinant because there is you have wide latitude on what that means. And I'll get into that just a little bit in just a moment. That's important because you want to uh protect the academic integrity of a program. And a lot of times in an online environment, families want

125to choose the online environment because they've they've run their course everywhere else. And now the student might be three credit years behind and they're technically a senior and they're coming into your program and they're hurting your graduation rate, etc., etc. We're not saying we don't want to serve those students. We want to say we want to define how we serve those students and this law clearly provides your board the ability to determine how that is done without it just consuming the school. Um which is really important. Um and now I'm going to go on a little bit more about this. It's slow. So, as part of this and I I have it in the in the u uh in the handbook is that this board is technically when you accept open enrollment polic uh students,

126you should have a policy written by the board that defines what it means to have sufficient classroom space and um so that's an important thing. That's something you do relatively easy. Um there is the ability to um uh uh uh based upon special education there are some ways in which you can deny enrollment if you if you're not able to serve a student. Of course the really key thing uh and I'm sure educators in the room clearly know this the responsibility for a special education student legally rests with the resident district even if they're open enrolled in another school district. So that's that's an important component to keep in mind. So um it doesn't mean when you say open enrollment that you have to accept every student who comes to enroll in your school district.

127So that's a board determination. So my bottom bullet I think is something that should give us great solace and basically uh based upon our conversation last week. Let's say for instance the school board sets up a policy that's that sets up we're going to accept English and this is just a totally weird example. English or math classroom for remedial students who are behind in credit and they're they are underredited but we're gonna assign a staffing level. So we might say we're going to assign 0.25 FTE to handle our credit deficient students and based upon whatever ratios you have in your district that defines a number of students. So let's just pretend it's just for easy numbers let's say it's 20 students is your ratio. So 0.25 would be five students. Once you enroll five students

128in that credit underredited class, you do not have to accept anymore. You can say we are now in an insufficient classroom space. So that's your way of making sure you're just not being inundated with students who are just trying to escape. Okay, you said it. Fine. I'll go with that. So that is very very encouraging and it allows us I believe to be able to maintain academic integrity. So, um I like that. Um and then um so if you enroll credit deficient students, as long as the ratios are maintained for the staff designated, so whatever the designation is, you can you can once those ratios are met, say we cannot take any more students that. So this is what that would look like. The majority of the students who are going to come to your

129online school are going to be perfectly normal credit on-time credit students. And you're probably going to want to accept the majority of those that come in, maybe even all of those that come in. But you're also going to get those students who are credit deficient. And so you can say, "We're going to have a credit deficient program. We're going to serve those students. We're just going to cap it at this number. And then once once that has been met, we're still going to continue to roll all the other students who are not credit deficient. we're just not going to take any more credit deficient students to that and you get to determine what that is. You get to tell us how to operate that, right? So, um I I found that to be extraordinarily encouraging.

130Yes. You said something new. You guys just kind of uncovered in this last couple days. Yes, it is actually our compliance. That's why we have this amazing compliance attorney. We did not engage him before we met with you last week. We weren't totally sure the direction and what your concerns were, but once we heard your concerns, we then engaged back with him. His name is Chris Mormon and he he'd be happy to meet with you, your attorney or whatever to talk about those things. But yes, this is new information to that wasn't new information to him. It was information to me. Yeah. Um and then let's keep going. And then um I don't know if anybody has seen this document before, the Iowa Department of Education open enrollment handbook. Um, I went in and actually

131when I say I I mean the attorney uh and looked at open enrollment and truency and and I this c section I have circled here is on page eight of that handbook and I've already actually done the work for you because I now have that on this slide right here. So the Iowa Department of Education handbook gives the receiving district the authority to remand students to the resident district if the truency standard is hit. So, we were talking, one of the questions that came up in our conversation was, "Well, what happens if a student is in your online program and they just stop doing any work, right? Because in a brick and mortar setting, you're the student hasn't showed up to school physically, so they're absent, absent, absent." Well, the same capabilities are available in

132an online student where you can demonstrate that they are not because we have all the technology. We know exactly how much time they're spending in the computer. We know where they are in the coursework, right? We even have what we call engagement factors within our ecosystem. Let us know is this a student who's act actively engaged in progressing their learning or are they just being enrolled somewhere just to so they can say that they're being enrolled. So the that truency law that applies for traditional brickandmortar in-person attendance still applies in an online setting. So we can make a determination that a student is in essence truent and if they're not uh participating they can be remanded back to their regular district. So in other words we don't have to carry the the weight of students

133who are not performing not performing is not the right word engaging because obviously students can not perform and still be actively engaged right but students who are not engaging can be remanded back to the district much like you already can do now with traditional brick order. We Yeah, I'll just leave it there. Any thoughts or questions on that? Okay. And now, um, a couple other things. These are proposed next steps. And, uh, I want to be very clear to you. These are just things that I thought of in my mind. Um, is develop a launch plan. We can we can do a launch for this fall if that is what your desire is. We can also launch fall 26 if that's what your desire is. Either way, we develop a launch plan around whatever the

134start date is. Uh we've provided the district with a term sheet which are just the general terms of how we operate. Uh we can assist in helping you draft policies for board consideration like around what's your uh sufficient classroom policy etc etc. Um and then obviously there will be a final contract at some point and then we can open this fall or next fall. Um, I wanted to just show you a a sample on the lefth hand side of what we talk about when we talk about a launch plan. And I don't I didn't put any dates on here because I don't know when the start date is. This is a multi-page document that our internal operations teams put together to handle business development, legal, compliance, facilities, and then there's instruction on page two. It's

135a whole bunch of stuff all the way down. I didn't want to show all pages, but I could send you a draft of this if you're interested in seeing it. But this is a a process that we have fine-tuned over the course of years to ensure that once we say go that we start putting together a plan to ensure that we have a very successful launch that we have students enrolled in the program and that we're abiding by the policies guidance and mission that we get from the school board. What I have not done given to you today here is like looking under the hood of well what's that learning ecosystem looks looks like and I'd be happy to do that. we can provide a live demo with some of our operations team. I actually

136even have a recorded um demo which we did with another group before. Um if you're interested in looking at that level of detail, I'd be happy to set that up for you. Um and uh so I'm going to stop there. What questions? You've got to have some questions. I think you send that line live demo because there's a mix of like just independent online work for students but there's also live interaction. Oh. Oh, thank you. Great great point. Yes. I didn't mean to cut you off. Did you finish? I'm sorry. You got me excited. Yeah. Cool. I should have mentioned this. Another key differentiator with us and like K12 and and the other big one is connections, right? We have live instruction every day, right? Some of the programs you might see your teacher once

137every two weeks. We have live instruction every day. And when I talk about customization, remember I said one size does not fit all. Our general philosophy is we generally don't do whole group instruction. Why do we not do that? Because whole group instruction shoots down the middle and misses people on other sides of the spectrum. So generally what we use our live instruction for is small group instruction because we have such rich data on every single student. We know where they fall on the Iowa standards where they're strong where they're weak and then that teacher can group and regroup students constantly to ensure that they're focusing in on the Iowa standards that the students need to attain. And so we do that through small group live section s sections. I'm not saying they never do

138whole group but I'm saying the large majority is in smaller group sections. So, and that's live instruction and the kids would be required to uh get online and be part of that uh small group or large group. That would be part of their attendance. Yes. In fact, if a student is in any type of academic distress, that's one of the factors that triggers us in thinking is this going to be an engaged student? Right. Because if they're not engaged and and they're let's I'm just going to make this up. math standard 2.1A, they are three grade levels behind and the teacher keeps setting up a live session for that student to participate and they continue to not come. we consider that be non-engagement and so that and we have a whole level of interventions and

139when you get to level four that's when we're talking about do we need to initiate that truency policy because they're just not engaging with the learning right um so uh yeah we we are and oh let me just since you got me going now um the other thing that we have is we don't our teachers obviously their main purpose should be interacting with students and engaging in instruction teaching and learning right we also have what we call success uccess coaches and their job is to support the student not in an instructional sense but to support the student and identify any issues around engagement because if the student is not engaged the teacher is not going to be able to interact with the student. So that student then works with the family, works with social services,

140works with whoever they need to work with to ensure that the student is getting the the type of engagement they need with the teacher and progressing in their learning. That's another thing that's unique to us. Most of the other providers frankly also used to offer something like that and I'm not up to them on anymore but I know some of them cut those those positions. It's a real vital position for us because we know that in online learning engagement is paramount and without the engagement not topend students are going to perform no matter what. I mean honestly they are some mid and some lower performing students need that engagement support and that success coach to help them along the way and we consider that to be absolutely essential. So you you mentioned that the the

141teachers are Iowa certified teachers. Yes ma'am. So, where um for all your support staff and your teachers, where are they located? Where do they teach from? Their homes. Their homes. Okay. Yeah. So, we don't need a classroom or any type of space here to sort of have a common area to come at any given time. Okay. So, I wasn't going to bring this up. So, yes, the answer is yes, we don't need that space. It would be nice if our school leadership and and uh and a support person had a space, but we can find a place in the community to do that if you don't have a place in the district for us to do that from. So, we would we would certainly want to have a local leader uh in the community in

142the community that is here. Yes. As a full-time employee or right, but that you know is that face of Excel. Yes, that's correct. Yeah. and and then I'll just take a step forward. This probably should not be a year one situation, but assuming that we have um the enrollment success, one of the things that we have tossed around, I can't remember if we talked about it with you all may have been on our drive away from you all, but the idea of creating some type of what you were talking about like a drop-in center. Now, there's limitations to that because we're not going to bus students to the drop-in center. So, the drop in center is really going to be for students in your community and anybody close enough who would want to come in

143and have some face-to-face time intervention or whatever. But honestly, with our success coaches and our great classroom teachers, we generally don't need that. But I'll tell you, there are times it would be great to have that. So, that is something that we would would certainly explore in subsequent years as the program grows. For sure. When you're starting the year one, your enrollment is typically smaller and it doesn't from a practical point of view, it doesn't make sense to have something like that going, but as your numbers grow and increase, it may make sense to do something like that. Yeah. What other questions? What I'll I'll keep talking. One of the things I really love about this is I have seven children and every single one of my children at some point during their K12 career

144used online learning. So I have I had a couple students who were accelerators. So I had a daughter who graduated with like eight more credits than she needed because she went online and took classes because she wanted to enrich herself. I have a I have a son who took a couple of years to get done and uh but he got done and how did he do it? because he was able to work because he wanted to work. He was obviously at age and he was able to use online courses. And then in my students in the middle just mixed inter intermittent courses but every single one of them had their unique needs met because online learning helped them along the way. Now for some of them it was full-time some of them it was just

145individual courses. The same is true with students in your community and and around the state. There are needs that are very unique that online learning serves very well. I will also say to you there are students who should never be in online learning. It's not going to be the right environment for them. So we don't pretend this is the beall endall for everybody. And we hope as part of our enrollment process and our orientation process that we identify those students early and and I'll tell you one of the ways we do it is when they're enrolling there's some things that they have to do online. And if mom and or dad and or student are not able to execute some of those things, it's an indicator to us that online learning is not a right

146fit for them because we have orientations and you know things like that and sometimes we get a good sense of it might not be a good fit. We have that conversation with parents and sometimes sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we think, okay, maybe they can do it, they can't. Sometimes we think they can't and they can't. But um it's not like we're just saying come and and and flood the the gates. We are very thoughtful about that. We want the most importantly the child to be in the best setting for their learning. And sometimes that is the online learning and sometimes that's not dual credit in in Iowa for high school kids. Yes. Is dual credit part of this? Yes. Absolutely. Yep. In fact, our team will help uh

147we'll obviously work with you to figure out what arrangements you have and see how we can get on to those and if we need to develop new arrangements, we'll work on that as well. Yeah, we also have some CTE pathways too um that are we have a brand new agriculture program by the way and that is amazing. You come out with a certification, but we have other pathways too. So, there's lots of different options. Um, so it sounds like this has the flexibility that students could take a couple classes with it or do students need to be all in like they're So the I think initially we're saying it's all in, right? It's full-time. We do have the ability once this the program is running and we have numbers. We can then say, okay, let's

148open up a single course to students in your district. The problem with doing that at day one is you might be saying, "Okay, this student wants to take Mandarin Chinese and they're the only one wanting to take it, right?" And so that doesn't make that's just not practical, right? So once we have the school rolling and students enrolled and the numbers are getting up, then we'll have classrooms that have those capabilities to accept the oneoff students, right? So I think that's maybe a year two, year three situation, but I don't think we should. I mean, if you tell us you want it year one, we'll find a way to make it happen, but practically it's it's it's better down the line. And did you start out talking about students who um I think you know

149are behind and you know need to make up courses and all that stuff because online learning or your program in particular tends to attract um those kind of students more often. Well, I'm not sure that online learning attracts them. I think what they're not able to get in their traditional environment forces them to look elsewhere. Does that make sense? That's Yeah. Yeah. Is that the same thing? You might be saying the same thing. Okay. Yeah. So, um, so your teachers are used to dealing with students who maybe have already had problems with engagement, whether it's just through circumstances in their lives and, you know, some disrupted learning and stuff like that or it's, you know, because they have learning challenges and and stuff like that. Yeah. We we have part of our we have an

150amazing uh teacher training guide book and a lot of that training and and particularly with those u success coaches I was talking about those folks are really trained on the engagement components night learning and that's a vital part of our success. We also know of students and families that have a flexible lifestyle. Yep. you know, where they just can't or don't want to attend school every day. They want to be able to travel or maybe it's a health issue. Maybe it's something that just prevents them from coming to the schoolhouse. Yep. Every day all day. Yeah. And that's the other flexibility that's to to that is um one size doesn't fit all. Well, families, you know, every family has unique situations. Like I look at my seven kids. My gosh, everything and I have twins

151and even the twins have different needs, you know. So, everybody brings something different to the table and online learning does afford great levels of flexibility to families. Yeah. So, does that and I'm I'm just I'm not familiar with or does that allow them the opportunity to participate in extracurriculars or, you know, are they considered an enrolled student in Atlantic Community Schools or are they completely a student of Excel? No, they Yeah, they're they they will just be participating in the school. They will not have access to the extracurricular anything else that we do here. I almost think state law is changing that. Oh, really? Do you think it's changed or in the process of changing? It either just changed or it has changed. So I heard something about that too. So kids that are taking

152um like we have some we have students that are going to camp which is the CAM Academy, right? Um we know that they can participate in sports here like two activities. Oh and then they can also go to CAM. They can be unlimited in their in their open district. So, you kind of wonder how's that going to work? Okay. Right. Wow, that's interesting. Where did they get more guidance on that? In the open enrollment handbook that you looked at, if you'll there's a section on there that talks about that. It's it's unique. We're kind of waiting to see how how this first year next year is going to roll out. Okay. Right. Yeah. So, and then can you just maybe briefly outline or just kind of express because I see you have a whole term

153sheet. How do the terms work or why is it advantageous for us to house an online academy here versus just letting our kids go over to connections academy? Uh well, your superintendent might be able to answer part of that for you. But from my point of view, I would say is I know when I was a superintendent, I felt would feel much more comfortable knowing that I was delivering a great high quality program to the students within my community. That's one piece. And if some of them are going elsewhere, then whether it's CAM or Shannondoa or the other places, you don't know what's going on in those programs. And I can tell you, I've had superintendent say to me, when my students go elsewhere and then come back to us when they're not succeeding, we

154struggle trying to get them back on track, right? So that's the very basic ant reason why you might want to do that. Um and and then so from that point of view, but also then to afford students the the flexibility that is best meeting their individual needs and if they can't get it here, they're going to go somewhere to get it, right? So that's I think some key drivers. I don't know if Super I would agree too. I mean anytime kids are living in our district and they're choosing to go somewhere else, the quality of education we just don't like. Um but if we have more knowledge in influence and control on if it is a online virtual school the likelihood uh in our mind that it is going to be a better program. So

155and you kind of touched on this. So how much authority do we have to you you went through some of the parameters of how we sort of filter that right but then if you have a student that is not successful then they would consider them let's say truent right and so then do you make a recommendation to our board then we no longer serve that student or that student it would be whatever the process that you currently follow would just like so we would we would adjust our um attendance policy I mean, I'm in contact with our school attorney and even a week ago and and they're still working on looking into developing policy for us um to kind of make sure and ensure that that kids are academically going to do well and then

156also um attend virtual school regularly instead of just you know not attend and and therefore not learn and progress. that there is uh safety guards in place so that kids are going to you know progress and do well and learn. We want them to learn and be successful citizens in our community. Yeah. The and and we'll we'll take the guidance from you when we identify that we're hitting these uh thresholds of concern, right, and start escalating. We we have tiered interventions already built into our program and we're happy to adjust those based upon what uh the the district's needs are. Um the there are several kind of key checkpoints. Key checkpoint one is at the time of enrollment trying to make sure that we're having that really good counseling and orientation uh with the family

157and the student checkpoints with our engagement. Are they actively staying engaged students? Right? And then if they if they are academically failing, you sometimes don't even have to go through a truency process, our success coaches could be meeting with families and saying, "It doesn't seem like this is the best fit for Johnny. Do you want to consider going back?" And sometimes families will self- select out of the program, which is, I think, actually a great way of addressing it, but sometimes they don't, and then you do have to go to more drastic measures. Yeah. In my mind, the most important part about even considering going the direction of a virtual school is having very um defined policy in place to start, you know, the process if the board chooses to go there. Otherwise, if we

158don't have policy that supports um quality education and safety nets, kids for academic growth and then attendance, um I I just don't see us moving forward or even recommending that to the board. I mean, would kids from Atlantic who were involved in this, would they feel like they were still part of our district or would they feel like they were I go to Excel school? you know, like how no, we don't we don't want to make it seem like it's Excel school. We want to make it seem like it's that's this is our preference. You can tell us however you want, but we would much rather have it feel like this is an Atlantic school for them, like a program that the district has decided this is a good fit for you. We know where

159you are. We want to provide this for you. That's the way that I think it for the local students that it makes that sets best. But that's not my they wanted to do extracurriculars. Yes. Yeah. That's why that's why I was trying to get to that like what is the advantage of you know sort of if you live in our district being part of this as opposed to just take choosing an online school anywhere. Yeah. I I think it first it just recently caught my attention and I need to go do an accurate count but I know at least 20 students in this academic year have open enrolled out to virtual schools. So it's 20 this year. What if it's 20 next year? That's 20 kids in two years that we're losing two online program

160somewhere. And there's something about how you've been certified by the state of Iowa. Yes. Yes, we our curriculum was just approved. We got the letter probably what, two weeks ago. Yeah. Can you curriculum? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, what does that mean? That means that they have deemed that our curriculum is appropriate to meet the Iowa state standards. Right. Just like every school district can do. Yeah. So when they get a diploma, that diploma comes from where? Here. We're just like we're we're we're the vendor. We're not the school, right? So Atlantic is the school district. We're just serving at your will basically. I mean, I'm sure you're used to I mean, this is new to us, not school in this kind of an environment. So we're kind of grappling with how to do this. Well,

161for our students, I mean, Dr. Johnson has a concern that, you know, she wants to keep those kids in our district for the sake of um academic accountability and also so that you know, our district is keeping those dollars in Atlantic. Um, but I I appreciate you started out with sort of you're not looking to, you know, sabotage what we're what we're offering in the buildings by pulling students away. And so I I would it's true these like online options are popping up all over the place. Um you know when you talk about students open enrolling out they're going multiple different places. So I would guess parents who are shopping for this kind of an option. um it would matter that our district has one that we're kind of saying we have vetted these programs

162and think this is the best one and here's the reasons why and you know we want your child to still feel as part of Atlantic Community School District as possible. So, do these students take Iowa skills tests? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. So, that falls into our scores the same with a their ACT scores back to our graduation rate. That's correct. That's one of the reasons we spent a lot of time last week talking about all the measures on how can we ensure that we're just not getting tanked by the credit deficient students who are just trying to Yeah. And so then I'm assuming it's like a is it a flat rate per student that or how does that uh what we proposed in the in the term sheet was a percentage of the funding goes

163to Excel and the district retains a percentage of the funding. Yeah. So then do we if we get this going then then would we open it up to other We could I I kind of like what Scott said. Let's let's see how the first year goes. I mean, I know you said we could cap the numbers on the classes or whatever, but I mean, do we we could definitely I mean, didn't Cam say on the radio the other day they went from Yeah, that was supposed to Yeah, but you that also I mean that part of that discussion clear back I don't know you does that affect your classifications for activities and things, you know, if you have enrollment, you know, how does that you got to kind of I I don't know this camera

164How long have you been how long you guys been an educational provider? Uh, our founder started online learning in 1999. Uh, yeah. So, uh, but Excel has been operating since 2014. Okay. Okay. And and all the lessons are are pretty much tied to like an Iowa standard. Absolutely. Subject area. I kind of like that the the online materials is additional resources like you show the different vendors and whatever. Those are just additional ways for kids to practice. That's correct. On their own for additional at home practice. Yeah. Let me share something that that is is very unique to us. We have what we call a teacher differentiation guide. And um if I'm looking at Johnny and I'm going into math and again I'm looking at math standard 2.1A and I see that he's based upon

165all the data and test scores and progress he's two grade levels behind. I can open up that differentiation guide and go to standard 2.1A and I see all the resources available to me as a teacher. I click on it. I put it in his lesson. When Johnny logs in tomorrow, he's now getting very specific instruction geared to his level in math customized just for him. And maybe when I'm doing my small group instruction with him, I'm going over that coursework with him as well. So, it's an amazingly powerful tool. When I was a superintendent, one of the things I tried to protect so much is the teacher time so that they could spend as much time working with students. And and one of the challenges in a brick-and-mortar environment is you don't I don't can't

166say you don't have the time, but we have made that a matter of seconds to be able to customize instruction for a student because we already have all the standards linked to all the products that you saw and the teacher opens up that guide. Click, click, click. And it's, by the way, it's not just for a student who's behind. I might have Susie who's two grade levels above. I have the same capabilities of going and going click click click and now I'm giving Susie meaningful instruction where she is. Right? So that's one of the reasons that we don't do a whole lot whole class instruction is because everybody's that you know different levels. One size does not fit one. Excuse me. One size does not fit all. One size fits one. So I love that

167component to be honest with you as an educator. It just makes And so you guys aren't in any school districts in Iowa yet. That's correct. Yeah. And you've primarily worked in Ohio. Ohio, California. Well, you saw the states that I'm just going over it. Yeah. So, okay. So, those areas, do you guys have statistics on like what your graduation rates are like? Sure. You know. Yeah. I I would love to see Okay. That kind of stuff. Absolutely. It's a brand new concept, Scott. We got to put a lot of time. Absolutely should. It's an important decision. It should not just make it snap decision. That's for sure. And Excel would be totally in charge of, you know, the the administrator, the person that would make sure that all the different kids and families were moving

168along. Uh, and our administrator would be happy to work with your administrative team, too, and be part of that network of of leaders, etc., and ensuring that we're staying in tune with what's going on within the district as well. So we wouldn't have to hire anybody here in the district. We would just be talking to who the person in char school leader probably is almost always be the point of contact. He connect you with maybe another superintendent that you know has program before. I'll be happy to do that. That's a good idea. Yeah, that's a good idea. Thank you. Awesome. Appreciate you coming all the way out here. I didn't realize you were going to do that. Oh, I'd much rather I'm a former student. I love sitting in board meetings. Like I I was

169sitting over there watching the the bond talk and my last school district. I had to get a $258 million bond passed. Two took two years. first year we missed it by like four points but we got it through the second time and I was just sitting there thinking oh my gosh I remember these days like your life will change as soon as you all start doing the campaign because all I did for three months was go out to every single meeting in the it was a little bit bigger than Atlantic but every single meeting in the talking about endlessly about do you want portable trailers here or do you want a real classroom you know it was just it was like my whole life was consumed with the bond for a few months so good

170luck with that by the way uh it it it's worth it it's worth the fight because the kids are worth it. So, anyhow, but I really enjoyed seeing that part of it. I wish I was here from the beginning. So, thank you all and I'm available if you have any follow-up questions or anything. Um, you have my email. I'll get you the information that you requested. I'll get you a reference as well and I'll send them to you. Thank you so much for coming out. It's my pleasure. Really, you have to catch a flight tonight. Oh, no. I'm going back to Hong Kong. I'm going to sleep. Okay, thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Our last item is just upcoming dates. We will be having our regular board meeting in three weeks

171on May 14th, 2025. Dr. Johnson informs you it's a very full agenda. It is. It looks really busy to Lisa Jones. May often. So, yeah, let's all try to try to be here for that. uh right before and then actually graduation is the AP that's not on here but ready there uh and I'll take a motion to address second you all in favor evening