001i will not be with you all in july as that is when i will be attending the iea leadership conference so my messages will just be submitted in writing for july and as always and closing thank you all for everything that you do and have a great rest of your evening thanks ted uh committee updates i'm not sure who all's had uh committee means uh we'll start with aaron nothing from me nothing okay nothing anybody ah chris i got something we had a special cac meeting um in order to address our subject area leadership teams that was predominantly part of our discussion because we wanted to get those up and rolling for next year we did we determined that we would have three teams this upcoming year math and ela which are anticipated to be
002permanent teams and then the last one will be social studies because uh we are in the process of uh integrating the new illinois social studies standards into our program so that is going to be one of the assault teams next year and um we outlined how they will meet in our how often they will meet and how each team will be comprised and we're working out the details on how they will actually function so awesome thanks but they are in the process and hopefully will be up and running come this fall all right the next item on our agenda is our consent agenda which is our opportunity to approve a number of routine business items all in one vote all the details of each item in the consent agenda is included in the board book
003so mr pierce if you would take us through that consent agenda absolutely 5.1 and 5.2 is the approval of the may 24th 2022 regular and closed session uh media minutes 5.3 is our monthly personnel report 5.4 is the authorization of our monthly payroll and bills 5.5 destruction of our closed session recordings from december 7th of 2020 5.6 designation of authorized depositories 5.7 is the certification of hazardous bus routes 5.8 is the approval of our insurance benefit contract renewals 5.9 is the approval of our contract for cisco smartnet flex 5.10 approval of our microsoft volume license renewal 5.11 approval of the contract for email security services and 5.12 is the authorization of our intergovernmental intergovernmental agreement for our cooperative uh boys and girls swimming and diving teams and then finally 5.13 is the approval of the
004debt are there any items for clarification or removal from the consent agenda all right then i would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented move by myself second by lock all in favor aye any opposed all right the consent agenda is approved as presented the next item on our list are reports and i'm going to hand that over to dr hitchens right and i will hand it over to tony unless you have questions about the foyer request for this month or the treasures reports budget all right i say but we get to talk budget one of my favorite topics the upcoming budget for the 2023 fiscal year this is the preliminary budget so it is our first pass at the budget's our first look at what our revenues and expenditures might look
005like in the upcoming school year in terms of the approval process you'll see the preliminary budget here this month next month we will post what is called a tentative budget on display for the community to see and the board will adopt it in august we will hold public hearings on the budget for also for the interfund transfers that are included as part of the budget and in this year what's different about our budget is that we'll hold what's called a truth and taxation hearing it's atypical for us we don't typically do it because we do not usually anticipate a levy that is five percent more than our prior year but unfortunately this year with inflation being as it is our levy will in fact be more than five percent and so we have to comply
006with the law we will have to hold a truth and taxation hearing along with our budget hearing they don't necessarily have to coincide with one another but i figured since we're adopting the budget it basically makes certain assumptions about what the levy is going to be or what the board expects the levy is going to be we may as well do them at the same time just to get them out of the way we do anticipate though that we'd adopt that levy in november or december as we're required to statutorily by law after those hearings are conducted in august we would adopt the final budget in september at the regular meeting in september so that's the process overall this budget given our first look we anticipate a surplus of 1.5 million although of a 600
007000 of that surplus are in non-operating funds and it is for either debt service or capital projects which just based on the timing of when we've been receiving federal relief money or esther money uh we're able to book a surplus in the capital projects fund so that surplus looks better than it really is in actuality overall our revenues are increasing by 0.6 which is good given what we're facing but our expenditures are increasing three percent so the growth of our expenditures is significantly outpacing our revenues that does cause concern so we have been enjoying surpluses for the last several years our financial condition has significantly improved but our expenditures are growing at a faster rate than our revenues and we will need to be cautious in future years on a side note which is also
008included in this preliminary report uh staffing is uh increasing in terms of its uh relative to its our enrollment we're going from about a 8.1 ratio of students to staff to a 7.7 ratio which is which is excellent and on average that will have positive influences on class sizes across the district not that there won't be class size issues of course but on average um those class sizes are improving and significantly that's a pretty big difference from year to year and perhaps i would say venture to say the best ratio we've ever had in the history of our school district but we will have to be careful that that moving forward as i mentioned those expenditures increasing and enrollments continuing to decrease in future years so we will have to be cautious again i add
009that this is the first pass at the preliminary budget it will change in the coming months as it certainly already has and so those numbers are certainly subject to change too so i'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have all right we'll be talking about this for the next however many months three months four months um so the next item on our agenda is building our future together yeah so building our future together and so here we are um after many many years of discussions on this particular topic and we're reaching a point where the board of education has a decision to make and so we've offered here an outline for a conversation for the board this evening and this is a conversation for the board of the board by the board and
010so this is just an outline of that conversation and you are certainly able to take it any direction that you may want to but we just thought that this was logical in terms of of that at least the concepts that should be addressed in this conversation so first and foremost uh the review of the process in history i know you've been hearing this for a long time and uh but on many cases this process started before several of you were on the board so just to give a brief recap the first time we really started talking about this was in 2016. we kind of mentioned it as an aside the board of education but we work didn't start in earnest until about 2017 when we formed our first facilities committee to really take an in-depth
011look at the way our facilities function and what our current and future needs would be so that was five years ago that committee worked together for the better part of a year more more than a year and established some recommendations in terms of what were clear and urgent priorities for facilities in the school district but in so doing realized that there were a lot of projects that were puzzle pieces of a larger picture that we couldn't quite fit together and we were afraid that if we moved forward the plan as it was without more professional assistance namely architects that we could throw good money after bad where we could get projects out of sequence or work on certain aspects of our buildings knowing that other work would have to happen and we might actually have
012to tear down some of the improvements that we made to actually correct the larger hole so of course after that recommendation the board of education agreed to hire uh professional architects to do a real whole a pro holistic approach to a master facilities plan that started in 2018. it really started in earnest in 2019 we formed another committee of citizens that took a deeper look at this um at our needs it took looks at programmatic needs in terms of how we use spaces today what enrollment trends would be how we might use spaces tomorrow how much space we would actually need to do these sorts of things and what the what was working what wasn't working and really related it to the educational needs of the district not just here is the current condition of
013our actual facilities so what we did come out of that plan we basically realized that the master facilities plans we did one in fact operate eight continue to operate eight schools despite declining enrollments it makes sense as a community continue to operate six elementary schools one middle school one high school but also looking at those facilities the condition of four of them where we're not as good as we would have otherwise have liked they certainly were in poor to fair condition need extensive work and to make them meet our current and future needs we would have to and many more likely than not actually tear them down and rebuild them so um and looking at that we started looking at funding sources and options and looking at what money was available to us to actually
014carry out that plan and we realized that you know there was different approaches there's option a which is we would let the property taxes um go down because the bond levy that we have for not that we're currently paying for our facilities would expire and the board has no choice about that without passing another referendum which means that we'd probably have something in the order of about 40 million dollars to put toward our facilities over the course of five years which is not nearly enough compared to what we identified in terms of of needs we looked at option b which would theoretically generate about 180 million dollars of money toward those improvements but would continue the tax so taxes would continue forward for another 20 years at the current bonded interest rates and that would
015um get the vast majority and i wouldn't say vast but the majority of the work done that we wanted to in the next five years and we looked at option c which would generate something about 250 million dollars that would do the vast majority of that work that we had identified but would increase taxes by 50 percent over our current bond and interest levy so it wouldn't increase the total tax rate 50 percent but the bond and interest portion of that tax rate so that brings us to our results and recommendations from community engagement so having considered those that plan and the funding options for it we went back to the community and said hey you know what are the expectations in terms of what we want as batavians for our schools and what are
016we willing to pay for and i'll let lisa give you a description of the results of it right i know that this is such a big decision for the board and you've been elected by the people and you have no intention of putting something on a ballot that the community does not want so there it you have to be think big when you think about getting that feedback and so we did have a consultant help us with this who has this expertise and put together a citizen committee and there was a bea member on that committee that was the one staff member and then tony and i and mark's served as advisors as well to do whatever work needed to be done behind the scenes just to get the tasks done but really it was
017a committee of citizens and their job was to get as many people talking about this as possible and they presented this to you so i'm not going to repeat everything that they said they just were here last month but what they you know what went out were emails uh several revisions to the website social media not only ours but holly got all other different the batavia women's club the rotary club batavia main street the chamber of commerce the city of batavia all these people are retweeting our information we went and spoke at the city council we got um the the committee members went and emailed everybody that they knew and so they made phone calls we we had principals make phone calls we had direct mail we had the batavia magazine that goes in your
018mailbox the batavian batv signs of banners we did literally everything we could think of in order for you to hear from the most number of people does that mean everybody engaged no does that mean everybody heard these things no they didn't we heard from a couple that said i never knew any of this was going on we had a lot of these things and so i would any we heard it from a couple people and i said well what could we do differently to make sure that we reach you so um one recommendation from the committee was to make sure whatever we do moving forward it's that big of an effort keep going and keep engaging so they said there will need to be a lot of communication about whatever it is that you decide
019and the committee of citizens took all the information from the open houses from the community engagement sessions that were interactive and from the survey and they met and they discussed and they deliberated and they said that you should their recommendation is that you would put option b on a ballot and there's a lot of information in that report that they gave you as far as what the what is the community thinking about the districts and about what the role is of school in a community not just which option it wasn't that easy of a survey it was pretty complex and the survey was adjusted statistically to make sure it represented the whole um community the whole school district so even though well women took the survey more than men so 71 percent of the respondents
020were female but what the statisticians do is they correct for that and make sure that those scores are not weighted as much as scores of the people in different bands when they took the survey so what you're seeing is their best guess of how batavia if everybody in batavia respond in the batavia school district responded um how they would have answered and the so yeah they recommend that you um are very clear with the community about the state of the economy and that um we can't give you a project list because we don't know when things go up for bid or the bond market at the time we um sell those bonds so they are what they're saying is make sure you're very clear about that with the community don't over promise but they did
021recommend option b i don't think we're there yet okay i said so the timeline is that tony that is my i think there are a couple logistics that tony can go over i'm i'm accidentally moving the agenda as we're talking sorry um there were a couple things i don't know if you noticed that but sorry that was me um tony you have the rest sure yeah uh the one thing i want to caution is that option b as it existed and what we've contemplated up till now needs to change as a result of what's going on in the economy is that the bond market has increased dramatically quickly compared to work it's talked about this and so that limits just like when you go when you buy a house and interest rates go up you
022can't necessarily buy as much of a house as you or the other otherwise would have the same thing that happens with bonds and uh the other factor is is that you know with the lumber prices increasing and other construction inflation costs increasing you're not going to get you're not going to be able to build build as big of a house either and so those two factors uh are significantly changing the scope of what we can accomplish with the money that we have available frankly the money just doesn't go as far under these economic conditions and that's the way the economy is today now who knows what the economy will be like when we actually issue these bonds and that will change the plan to some degree it could be better it could be worse maybe
023we'll be in a recession and interest rates will come down and maybe even construction costs will come down it's very difficult to say um but either in either case it's time to move forward we our bonds are expiring in 2025. the opportunities you have to pass a question or ask a question of the community and have that timing such that the taxes wouldn't go down is either in november of 2022 or april of 23. our all indications are your best opportunity to pass this question are in november of 22. and to do that to put that question on the ballot you'll have to actually pass a resolution to do so in july so in a month from now you'll have to make that decision um to put the question on the ballot basically i just
024asked a quick question how confident are we that we can do the necessary work that is you know the emergency stuff like roofs things like that with the money that we will have with option b even if costs are increased i mean obviously we won't be able to do anything that we would like to do but i assume that it will at least give us the ability to do the things that we really need to do that we've been putting off our first objective obviously is to keep our students and staff warm and safe and dry and yes that we'll absolutely do that we just won't be able to do as much of it with the other things that we want to do is improve spaces for educational needs in particular our special education spaces
025they are more often than not in less than desirable areas of the building or areas of the building that are not designed for their programmatic needs and then other programmatic needs for electives you know building trades at the high school as examples our libraries uh collaborative spaces those sorts of things those will have to be scaled down with the with the money and the inflationary costs that we face i would also assume that with this inflationary pressure that if we do nothing the amount that we're able to do with the little money that we would have left is going to be even worse so the longer you wait the worse it gets i mean absolutely yeah so the option of doing nothing actually looks worse in the scenario so people might say hey you might
026want to put it off but i think that might actually put us in an even worse situation because the thought that we thought we would be able to do with option one um also scales back significantly well that's what i'd say yeah chris brings up a good point that uh when the economy tanked in 2006 that's exactly what we did part of the reason why we're in the situation right now yeah your buying power for both drops exactly so all the things that people thought we might be able to do we can do about half of let's say right but at least we can accomplish more the other thing is the and this is my opinion from what i've seen in the past because i do these things occasionally is if the bonds fall off
027and you decide to wait your opportunity or ability to bring it back to the table becomes exponentially more difficult so you know from a board perspective we're kind of between a rock and a hard place right you know and so you try to do the best you can at a certain point that's the position i'm taking and i'm looking at it yeah so so at our next meeting the resolution will be on the agenda i'm assuming we will have a discussion and we will choose either to pass that resolution or not yes so all indications are from i'm gathering from the conversation that you're having is that something indeed you want to move forward with it and that that's the case we'll continue to work with our financial consultants to craft a question and a
028more definitive financial plan and up then and be ready for you in july and simultaneously begin to um figure out how we can continue to get the word out when it comes to information about this potential referendum as you know when you pass this question in july people will see it on the ballot of course in november and that's not does it does that's not a lot of time at the next meeting can you put on the topic and this is for everybody to kind of agree or not what is the role of the district and the board from that point forward so that it's clear educational you know what can we do to help put that information out and what are we allowed to do as board members as opposed to private citizens certainly
029we can include that yeah i think that's a really good discussion just because there can uh it can be confusion on that confusion and you can trip up a process that can make it very difficult for everyone i've got three questions for 20 you've already said i just want you to one more time i'll be brief sue um but it's okay option b allows us to move forward with our operational goals which include safety security and comfortable all buildings correct the assumption is however under option b as we've discussed extensively that we would demolish and rebuild louise white and hc storm schools i bring it up because for me everything's been going on world security has been i think on all of our minds and so that's something that's very important to me in that
030i know the b encompasses making our buildings more robust in that manner simultaneously though i would add and i should have probably added earlier under that budget as i the board may want to consider increasing spending on the capital projects budget in fiscal 23 so that they can address more of the safety and security needs in particular at alice gustafson and jb nelson schools even before we separate as we identified in that master plan as those schools ought to be decommissioned unfortunately financially that's not going to happen at least not in the foreseeable future and because that's the case we have some renovations to i would say moderate to major renovations to those schools to bring them up to security standards that we expect everywhere so um is that something that would come from iraq
031or capital projects yes um a little yes yeah the answer to that is yes so will you bring us a recommendation from them as to what shifting we should do and what projects that should encompass in the yes and if you are um considering that along with and you do pass this resolution for this referendum question we would move quickly on that because we would want to get those projects out to bid this fall late fall early winter so that they could start next summer as soon as school is out so when would you bring that one that part to us the budget capital projects increase we i certainly could bring that to you in july well why don't you it would just make sense yep yes and then the other components of that would
032follow quickly thereafter okay uh and the other two parts i had were oh wait you did not say that it was a two-part question he said three questions he said i keep interrupting him i'm sorry that's right uh this is uh i'll be interested in how you answer this question but you know we just talked about the budget in general in general relative to past years the district is in a relatively strong financial position right now healthy position i should say yes and part of that is because we made certain sacrifices on capital projects that was a component of it that was yes is that fair statement okay and that b if that's one that we're considering i'm just going to read from the conditions would allow us to live within our means as a
033district now we know that things are changing and you know we might not get as much of our money as we were hoping you would get but that's accurate statement yeah okay those are all accurate statements yes i would say well then this last one lisa but i mean based off canvassing all holly's hard work the feedback we've gotten there is support in the community for b at this time he's confirming and i just have one last quick thing the writing of the actual verbiage that's pretty much automatically happens by the lawyers we really can't change any of that i mean we're going to want to get involved well right i mean for the people who are watching it may seem weird that we see and approve fair enough the question one time but that's
034because we really aren't the experts and we can't understand and it isn't just written by the lawyers because they feel like it in a certain way it is prescribed by law okay so how the question looks there's certain components that they can change but um there's a lot of it that's prescribed by law and sometimes it just feels awkward to the average voter and so often times that question has to be explained to the voters and that's one of the key components of helping people understand like what does this question mean and what does it mean in my pocketbook what does it mean for my child's school and what does it mean for us as a community but they are very awkward questions i've also seen situations where people write it for the constructive of
035a new school building and they thought they could add furnishings as a part of that and it wasn't written that way so then they couldn't use the bond money for furnishings which which is why it's a big scary problem that you might be running into and i wanted to explain to the audience that they understand that we're although we're seeing it for the first time we understand the concept and it's all legalese and right we won't pick apart the verb exactly good point chris all right so tony you're going to bring us those recommendations from the capital projects group and you're going to include the question the resolution on the next agenda and i will also include kind of the do's and don'ts of what we can say and what we can't say thank you
036in terms of publicizing that question all right any other questions on that all right final item on our agenda tonight is talking about an executive search firm yes this is my um 10th year of superintendent tendency starting this school year and i am retiring at the end of that school year please hold your applause [Laughter] um right right so i um it's time for you to um invoke board member 101 which is you get to hire one person in the entire organization everybody who's here you get to pick one person and that is what you will be doing during this school year i it is not something that you can most schools do most school districts do without the help of some expertise because um if you just interviewed 10 different candidates everybody has a
037different idea of what they would want and you're supposed to be representing what this community wants and what the staff wants so a search firm could do things like hold focus groups and get some information from all your different stakeholder groups give that to you so that's the way that people have voice in the process among other options what i did for you is pulled some proposals from different search firms one of them is your iasb so the illinois association of school boards they do a lot of work not as much local as the other three organizations the other three um one of them you used uh 10 years ago when you hired me that would be school exact connect one of them is um and the other two are being used currently by local
038districts we do have a high turnover of superintendents in king county between the last two years in the upcoming year or two you'll see about two-thirds of the superintendent's turnover and so those other two firms hya and rain associates are being used locally right now with two neighboring districts and they are all willing to come out in interview this needs to be a public discussion and public interview um i would say four might be a lot to bring in and we do want to negotiate and look really closely at their proposals and say well i like this but i don't like this we don't need these services and you can add and remove and so it would be hard to do those with four all at the same time so i'm going to stop talking
039because this is really your decision but that would be my recommendation that you give me some parameters to go and talk with one or two of them and invite them back for a face-to-face interview with you guys can we do the face-to-face interview in a open session so i would like to put out there that i would like to hear from at least two an interview too i'm a person that's in occasionally a position it does no service to say i can't even break it down to to this group so i would like to see two um you guys look at that wait yes now we're down to two yeah i agree with that i would agree with that um i know lisa shared all this with us i will be completely frank that while
040i was out of the country i did not read all the um but i don't know if other people had a chance to and if you have some leanings as to where you are thinking we could sort of tally it down so sue just said her top two okay did you write this one all right i'm i'm very passionate about my oh i actually just have one who um the school exec connects okay so sue said hya in school is technical i wonder why they didn't i didn't see batavia as a reference who it was it was um 10 years ago 10 years ago with our current champion i mean that is bad marketing isn't it like step one hey do you remember we hired lisa that should have been the proposal victory might not
041it might not it's dangerous [Laughter] again that was actually really nice dinner you said that uh did you have any preferred is hya printed out yeah yeah right here oh thank you that was the one that um referred saint charles yes they just did the saint charles search yes okay i have heard a good amount of negative feedback about that individual i don't know how much it impacts this about that search firm or the superintendent oh yay thank you just so with which hype he was talking about the super attendant not the suspect i heard good feedback about the search room from the community well from people that hired them don't they have a warranty so that if yeah craig did you have thoughts um my generalized thoughts are one that um i i really
042appreciate kind of how school exec broke down the information and presented it in a very clear visual way as opposed because that helps people like us who may not be in the process to understand and parse the data as opposed to at least one of the others that my head was hurting the same time i was always trying to read through it so that that kind of bothered me about that um my opinion of my two would be hya and school exec connect if i had to pick a second i would pick or send you two i would pick the h-y-a yeah i think part of where i have the consensus part of my hya is i actually i have the same two also um so then my question is timing and paring it down
043to figure out what we actually want from them as lisa mentioned um so they they give you like here's everything we could offer right so maybe the next step would be the interview everybody look really closely at those two highlight the things they like and maybe want to subtract but once after the interview then we just really focus in on one of them and and do that negotiating of we don't want this we do want that just figure out i guess i wrote they said in their thing they'll match any offer right yeah but i thought it was you got everything for this x yeah and they they said they would match any comparable offer so right so what am why would i take stuff away if it's still gonna cost me got you i
044would you know what i mean but i'm assuming if we took stuff away from someone else that would lower their bed the other one's about the same right but if we took services away couldn't we negotiate and say well we don't need this so right no i mean i i get that tough negotiators too oh i can they all look like they're in the right area where we just swipe oh yeah they were all they were all pretty equitable everything's fast okay no that's what i'm just saying so are we talking inviting them back to the next meeting because we would like to get this ball rolling it is uh superintendent hiring season it is superintendent season yeah i would um do you want to do a five o'clock workshop or just uh during the
045recording i would actually prefer to if we could do a workshop or shop workshop workshop rj sorry not just because you feed us well i didn't hear did i hear from chris and aaron we all had we all had okay okay okay thank you all right so workshop next meeting we got all those 60 characters yeah 19. let's just make a day of july [Laughter] i will see if they are available at that time all right perfect do we want to consider possibly adding a second meeting at i mean either for july or august i would i'm here i am open to that i mean just i i just know we have a lot of stuff on our plate and the summer it's a little less pressure so perhaps if we you know if there's
046some stuff that we want to get to consider it i mean i'm not saying that we have to decide right at that now but are we happy with the idea i think there's a logic at the july meeting of doing a work session for the interview and then having a follow-up work session in august to discuss our final selections because i also know that we had the meeting before this where we were talking about other stuff that we wanted to discuss too so that's why i'm saying we may want to throw a different one in there and we normally do a training during the summer anyway so perhaps that's the training but yeah but i would argue too uh august does work better because then i'm back at work and july is going to be
047a little muddy yeah i'm fine with august yeah i think august is right august for the decision no so we'll make the decision oh a different workshop seriously yeah so we're going to try to do this in july we're going to do our workshop decide on and do our interviews for july is interviews and got it yeah got it i think to do our due diligence we have to make this decision asap oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you can approve the contract in august but we can start doing some of the groundwork with whoever you sit you know whoever would collect whoever you thought all right any other questions on that topic all right then we're gonna move to uh superintendent comments i um wow yeah uh kathy scafidi doesn't like spotlight but
048thank you for putting all this together and every couple weeks and everything you do in between for them i know that they we all very much appreciate what you do for the board meetings and cindy we love you but you got big shoes to go yeah that's it for me all right start down with aaron um i just would like to add to our state champion some unsung heroes and it's the parents oh god yeah i mean chris greg several all the rest of us up here those parents are out there driving their kids to all of these practices at all hours of the day all kinds of temperatures and weather and i just would like to express a little appreciation for their efforts because we couldn't do it without them so as as maybe
049silly as that seem i really do appreciate all of their efforts and making our students successful and that's all i have tonight thank you aaron rj i like to appreciate aaron's appreciation of you all very nice view so thank you um i think this is really neat i was so excited about this so thank you to the state track team for stay track team the state champs for thinking of us for this because i know i had little to nothing to do with that but that's that's really neat and i don't know graduation was amazing so i hope all the graduates are enjoying their summer so far it sounds like they're all a lot of them already doing things and working or going to school i can't believe they're going to summer or camps and
050things already so that's amazing and i'm really looking forward to the next couple of meetings that we're having because we're really starting to dig in and get some stuff done so it's exciting yeah it is that's all thanks correct um obviously congrats to you know everybody that was involved in the state championship parents and everybody else i mean one takeaway i had is just like you know i'm not involved in track or running unless something's chasing me and that doesn't happen nearly enough so it is you know you always think about it from my perspective it's like an individualized effort right you know i'm running for this medal or whatever else it really was refreshing and interesting for me to hear about how really everybody put themselves aside over the team yeah you know and
051and kudos to the coaches and everybody involved that worked whatever math and metric they had to understand that certain sacrifices might move them ahead than others you know to and to educate the uh team which they probably already knew that this is their goal and this is how you achieve that goal you know you win the war not the battle kind of thing that's why you have a math teacher being the director yeah i got gotcha um and then you know just as as was said earlier you know it summer might seem like time off there's a lot of teachers doing work to help students do things and and you know literally they're trying something new on the marching band this year and starting it again because just about half the band are incoming freshmen
052oh wow this year for the marching band that's cool so it's great it's fantastic so to everybody and all the teachers that are working with kids on things over the summer thank you you know for all the parents that are driving them back and forth to those things thank you so um and i just want to say i appreciate the discussion for the work session we had earlier fantastic it was very discussion oriented and it was refreshing to see so thank you all right thanks ken thank you kathy thank you ted i'll be brief but echo what everybody said uh the meeting we had before this meeting was exceptional i'm excited about the progress we're gonna make having the track team here was again i did get goosebumps and just i think we can learn
053a lot from those kids uh as a community so we're proud of that and i agree this is unexpected but very cool and i'm also very excited about the work we're doing i feel like we're really moving forward here it's uh for a while there i felt we're moving slow now we're really making giant steps forward so that's very exciting so i'm looking forward to the decisions ahead and then again kathy i know it's been brief i've worked with you but i really appreciate it so thank you for all you did and cindy we're looking forward to getting to know you and working with you so thank you i will keep it short and sweet thank you everybody i am just very happy to be a batavian and that we're all working together even though
054we have struggles i feel like we're a team so thank you can i have one more thing after you've done todd i want to tell you how excited i am about your new opportunity to coach here because to me it takes two things that are so very important to not only me personally but the rest of the board as well as our community and brings them together in such an important impactful way and i want to thank you for putting batavia on the map and your leadership in in those efforts so um i didn't want to forget and please don't take my looping back as anything like that but i'm i'm thrilled for you thank you for representing us in that way and going last there's never anything good i can add so i'm just
055going to say uh that is everything that we had on our agenda for tonight so i would entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second we find meta second my mind sir long day okay you