001[music] >> Hello Lockport Township High School District 205 parents and guardians. My name is Bob McBride, the very proud superintendent of Lockport Township High School District 205. This is your board meeting brief and actually the last board meeting brief for this school year for the board meeting that we had right here in the port of room on Monday, May 18th. Before I share with you a few important things about the board meeting, you might notice or you might not notice that I am wearing red, white and blue. We're having a little bit of fun here at the end of the school year celebrating so many different things and today is a dress-up day that we dedicated to the red, white and blue USA. What's on our mind today? Memorial Day weekend. Veterans Day is for
002all of those women and men who served in our nation's armed forces. Memorial Day is for those who sacrificed. They gave everything so we could have everything. If you have a member of your family or someone you know who lost their life in service to this great nation, please take a minute to honor them however you do that. I know on Memorial Day weekend I'll be thinking about my great uncle Ed Gates who as a young man went off to the Pacific and in August 1943 as a paratrooper, he lost his life fighting our Japanese enemies at that time. Celebrate those who gave it all for our nation. Let's jump into the board meeting. As usual, we did not start in the port of room. We had to start in the East Campus cafeteria because
003we had so many students and adults to acknowledge. So many I am going to take our board agenda. I don't want to miss any of them as I read them to you. First and foremost, we celebrated our retirees. There are so many of our colleagues, bus drivers, teachers, uh you name it, who are walking out of this institution after 20-plus years of service. So, we spent some time honoring them and acknowledging that service to our school district. But in terms of students, let me just read off all of the students that we congratulated. We recognized students who excelled on the national German exam. In that language, they emerged as top in the nation. We celebrated both our boys and girls who completed competed, excuse me, in statewide powerlifting. Our boys earning a championship, our girls
004placing in the highest ranks. Amazing. We also celebrated SkillsUSA. This is a technical competition where so many of our students had first place, second place, or third place finishes. We celebrated one of our staff members, Corey Duzan, who works at our Central Campus. He was named the Outstanding Manufacturing Educator of the Year. We also celebrated one of our vocal groups, Off the Record, who finished fifth in the nation out of 262 vocal ensembles this past April. And then finally, we celebrated an incredible student, Cadence Sumarensky. She has just accomplished so much as an artist, not only a performing artist, but as a visual artist. She was in a competition where her art will hang in our nation's capital building in Washington. She also was named one of the nation's most artistic students. So, congratulations to
005all them accomplishing in athletics, accomplishing in art, accomplishing in academics and technical fields. Incredible. Now into the board meeting. A few things I just want to draw your attention to. If you go back to our live stream of the board, which is always available to you on our YouTube channel, or you look at the agenda. I think one of the really important things that our board discussed was in our president's report. Our president, Dr. Veronica Shaw, led the board in a conversation of superintendent search firms. Selecting a consultant to lead the board through a search for my replacement is one of the most consequential decisions that the board will make. Boards of education only hire one employee, and that's the superintendent. On June 30th, 2027, I'll be retiring from almost 40 years of service in
006public education. Our board is already preparing for that search so that they can find the right leader that will serve you, serve them, serve our community, serve our staff, and serve [music] our students. We then moved on to my report, and in my report, I actually had two reports from some of our staff members. First and foremost, we delivered our annual public relations department report. It was given by our public relations director, Janette Castillo, and her staff members, Eric Slaeger and Grace Gonzales. They highlighted the incredible work they do. I would invite you, if you want to see that work, go to our social media sites. This video, go to our YouTube channel. You will see incredibly professional storytelling that elevates the accomplishments of our staff, your children, of our entire district and really tells
007the story of the value of what we're doing here at Lockport Township High School District 205. We also had a first reading by Matt Dusterhoff and some of his colleagues in our technology department on artificial intelligence guidelines. Yes, AI is coming to schools. We're required by the state on July 1, 2026 to have AI guidelines both for our students and for our staff. We shared those AI guidelines with our board. We will vote on those on June 15th. They're online for you to review and you're going to be hearing much more about artificial intelligence. Then we had two action items I wanted to draw your attention to. The first was our board approved a new collective bargaining agreement with our educational support professionals. Our educational support professionals are our secretaries, our library aides, our paraprofessionals,
008all the people, almost 80 strong, who are doing so much behind-the-scenes work at our transport center, at Central, and at East. Our board voted on uh negotiations that we've had since January. And we believe that relationships with our union, with our staff, are important. We also believe that fair compensation, both monetarily and in a collective bargaining agreement, are important as well. That collective bargaining agreement is online as well and you can review it. Also, the board approved something called a parameters resolution for a $16 million bond issue. That is part of our 10-year facilities master planning guide that is leading us into facilities improvements over the next decade. We will use that $16 million in revenue generated through debt, low debt, life safety debt, to make our final improvements this summer on Central campus. It's
009kind of a key component to keeping our district in a great financial position. We learned this week that Moody's, the credit rating agency that did our credit rating for this bond issue, gave us the second highest rating, double A1, and we achieved that through having a plan, being such a good financial steward, and in essence that double A1 rating says to banks, "We are a good investment. Your [music] Township Public High School is a financially sound institution with a great business plan moving forward. We think that's as important as anything we do. The future of our facilities, the financial solvency of our district, because you our taxpayers fund us and we should be good stewards of the time and the treasure you put into our district. Thank you so much for listening to this board
010brief for May 18th. Have a wonderful summer. Our communications will go down during the summer as you enjoy it and we'll certainly be back in August of 2026. Go Porters.