001Good evening. I'll call the meeting to order. If you'll please stand and join me for the pledge. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Now if I can get down over here. First thing we will be uh looking for is approval of the consent agenda. The consent agenda included contracts for the demolition of Eastwood and abatement of Eastwood, a short-term storage contract, a hay contract uh for the north campus, um our AMI schedule, and there was one other item as well, and it was just a um an order from our NAB Holtz on uh on construction. construction. So moved. Second. It's been moved and second. There any questions or
002discussion about the consent agenda? We uh previously reviewed the pricing and approved that. These are just the full contracts for the abatement um and such that were included. So, and demolition. Call the question. All those in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Staining or accusing? Next, uh, down to the approval of the financials. This is the smallest amount I think we've had in a while. Um, 1,221,76749 and the financial reports which uh back those figures up. Second. Second. Okay, it's been moved and seconded. I will recognize Miss Staley on that. Call question. All those in favor, please say I. I any opposed mean to abstain are recused. Uh next we will approve our minutes from the prior meeting which are in the front of your packet from May 13, 2025 and we're also in
003your electronic packet. So move second. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor please say I. I. I. Any opposed? Um, next we will adopt the agenda for the remainder of the meeting as so printed and published without any changing. It has been moved by Mr. Linds. Second and seconded by Mrs. Staley. All those in favor of the agenda as printed and published say I. I. I. Any opposed? All right. Uh, public comments. We have Mr. Wilcox in here this evening um that is not looking to give a public comment I'm sure and the gentleman from the news I'm sure will catch us for a comment afterwards that he can use we have a really crowded room tonight so all right so summer meetings are always so uh so special for us so we'll
004be uh moving on to the superintendent report um and I'll allow Mr. Mr. Pettit to get ready to give his report. Thank you very much. Before I start talking and anybody that might be listening at home falls asleep, I want to say that August I'm sorry, July 2nd will be our next board meeting and it will be in the boardroom, not in this location because of the floor cleaning. July 2nd. July 2nd. That's a Wednesday, I believe. Normal time, 6 p.m., but instead of being here, it will be over in the boardroom on the north side of the building. So, when you say north side of the building, it will still be at the uh Butterfield Early Childhood Campus. It's just on the central office side. Yes, sir. On the center door, north side. All
005right. That said, I have a pretty fast report tonight. I do have a few pieces of information I'm going to go over quickly, and if you need me to repeat anything or have any questions, please just slow me down and stop me. Uh, first update, make the main office is where the next one will be. Uh, over here in the main office. Yes, sir. It'll be where we usually do the retreats in the room right up the hallway. So, you'll need to park the next set of doors up. Sorry to interrupt, but that's okay. Anticipating a a large crowd in July. We'll we'll be able to fit everybody there, I think. Uh, quick update on Eastwood, Benton, and Northwest. Um, as you all had in your board packet, more for the public's understanding, but Benton
006is closed and no longer belongs to Marshall Public Schools as of today. Uh, we closed successfully on that property. Northwest Elementary closes should close this Friday and both those buildings are empty and that included surplus auctions, etc., which all went pretty well. Um, I'm most excited about knowing that Miss Smith called and shut off the utilities and we don't have to pay those bills anymore. Eastwood slightly different with the only thing we've shut off there is the gas because there's no need for it at this point. Just would be a liability. HVAC has all been sold and removed as part of the surplus and the playground is nearly gone. The trailer, if you've driven by or haven't driven by, they've got that all broken apart on wheels and ready to move. And uh there's really
007just one more small round of auction items there. Um and that'll all be wrapped up. One thing I want to mention about Eastwood is there's been some inquiries about the doors. They had those glass pane doors. We didn't love those for security, but they were really a neat architectural feature. And uh we do have a limited number of those up for discussion with the community is what we've been thinking we would do rather than sell them. We've heard some interest and neat ideas of people that want to do things with them like uh in the business district around the square and stuff. So, if anyone has interest in that, they can email or call central office and leave a message for me. I'd be happy to entertain doing things that kind of give back to
008the community with those doors. Um the uh Sling County Historical Society also contacted me and I directed them to contact you too for any memorabilia that they may be able to uh display. Yes, I know I know they're interested in the the uh is it the stone over the front? I call them the keystone or I think it's keystone is called and then the plaque for the board and some various other things will be going to the historical society for sure. They have reached out to me. We've spoken budget. We spoke at length about budget last month. There isn't a lot of changes. Still a whole lot of movement in Jefferson City, which I'll discuss briefly in a moment. But I would just say as you all prepare to approve that budget. I am very
009confident that we would be looking at conservatively a million dollar deficit spend in our budget next year with a an innumerable amount of variables. Who's to say? But um that's that's what I'm looking at. and we'll be, you know, hoping that there's a lot of efficiencies. I've underlined efficiencies tonight in the rest of my report. Anything that's underlined is efficiencies and uh those are all things that we have not calculated in our cost because it's hard to do, but I'm hoping that with some good decision-m um looking looking well into the future as we make decisions this year fiscally. I really think that we may have an opportunity to balance this budget by the end of the year, but I'm just not going to put in the bill. Awesome. That would be awesome. Even come
010close to balancing it with the when we closed Southeast, which was our, you know, big experiment before closing these three. We didn't calculate a lot of the variable cost savings and it was double what we anticipated. I don't remember exactly now, but I believe we anticipated 250,000 a year and we got closer to 750. Um, so something like that. That was close to what we actually realized. That would be so legislation legislative session should be over. We shouldn't be talking about that anymore. Um, but here we are. There's a lot of things going on, I think, both in Jefferson City, uh, locally, uh, at the federal level. It's just been a really, really interesting year. By far the most interesting I've ever seen. Uh, assess valuation AB in Marshall, Selen County specifically, is going up
01115% on residential on homes next year. On commercial, there's been a lot of discussion about the fact that commercial is going to be all over the place. I've talked to people personally that have seen between 200 and 400% projections on what their commercial property increases will be. And uh I just want to be clear in saying that, you know, the school passed a levy obviously and we've done some great things because of the community support in that. But when this assessed valuation goes up enough, the Hancock amendment based under three different categories, one or the other, one of the three reasons, will roll back our levy. So it is not that we're going to lose money, but just for the taxpayers to know, we won't continue taxing at the same rate because of the assessments
012that they're going to see changes in. Um, I anticipate that we will be rolling back our levy uh as part of the Hancock amendment in August. Why is it a commercial to run it so high? I I've been um seeking to understand that better myself and in short and I think to keep it matter of fact, the state is mandating it and saying that we're way behind and where we need to be, but why we have to do it so much all at once, I don't know. There's a lot of discussion going on in the county uh about whether or not the board of equalization could possibly intervene to make that a little more bearable, but the state's saying that's how far off we are. But I think this is going to have negative implications
013for businesses that have been doing well. If we look at how many have been I've been kind of tracking since we passed the levy how many new businesses we've had and we're up to getting close to 10 or 12. And I just I hate to see that happen to our our businesses. And this is a county assessment issue. This has nothing to do with the levy. This is us as a county have been behind uh on the correct rates of our assessment valuation. Keep your mic closer. I can't hear what you're saying at all. Please. So, what I was saying is that this is a county assessor evaluation. And so, this um I've heard some rumors that this is due to the levy and other things. I just want to make it clear. Uh what
014Mr. Pettit was saying is that this is due to us um having lower residential and commercial um annual valuations on our property and that is being added to us and told to us by the state that that needs to change and those numbers need to come up and be assessed at a different value. Um what he was saying is hopefully that we will get some equalization and maybe that will be a slower climb. Um but at the moment that is not what probably some letters that people have received including myself and a number of the other people uh around the district, the board and the community. So um I urge you to take your questions to the assessor's office because it doesn't have anything to do with um the levy that was passed. This has
015to do with just our tax rates as a county. So yeah. Yep. Exactly correct. I got my bills in the mail. Okay. Sorry, I'm hitting the wrong buttons. So, this is the last thing about legislation, but it's of interest and I sorry it's so wordy. I'll try to just summarize it to keep your interest. But uh the reason I'm talking a little bit about uh legislation is because Jeff in Jefferson City, the legislature has reconvened in what they're calling an extraordinary session and they've gone longer past the time that they would normally be closed and things would be finished. Uh I don't I believe it was last week at around 2:30 a.m. Um and I could be incorrect. It could have been this week, but around 2:30 a.m. the Senate passed out of its committee
016Senate Bill Number Three. This extraordinary session was uh it was really conceived in the idea that they were trying to save Arrowhead and Kaufman deal to keep it in Missouri and not going to Kansas. Um for a play on words, it was pretty ordinary in an extra way in the sense that it ended up becoming about taxes and funding for schools. And so when it passed out of Senate, it ended up including some things that are going to be similar to us like the senior tax cut bill um in the sense that it freezes taxes um but not for seniors in this case and not exactly the same way. Selen County as it's passed out of the Senate would have a 5% cap on assessed valuation. Won't be voted on until April. But if it's
017passed, which is an extremely likely that the House will pass it and then in April voters will pass it because it saves them money. uh if and when it passes then in fact they will roll back to current right now tax rates on residential. So the 15% that Marshall Public Schools is getting would immediately roll back 10%. What will change with the language in Senate Bill 3 is we have the ability to roll back and are required to roll back under Hancock amendment. We will lose the ability to roll back up to where we were if we're losing funding after Senate Bill 3 passes. Uh however, none of that does anything to do uh to help commercial. So I think you're going to see a year ahead where we've got to think about how much
018are we really asking our businesses to support the school in terms of donations. What will that do for booster and all these other groups that rely on that? And then uh probably the school's funding will be okay in the long run. But it's just, you know, it's just one of those things. It's it's an unprecedented time. I we'll just see how it translates. I'm not saying it's going to hurt us in the long term financially, but things are going to be different as we think about the year ahead and how we fund raise and different different stuff. So, we could come up short way short because of the Hancock. Yeah, we could. The unfortunate is and we didn't have a crystal ball because we passed a levy instead of uh a bond. It does roll
019back. It doesn't stay consistent. Um, so to start immediately losing that three years after we pass it, it's unfortunate. But had we had a crystal ball, we did that because you could pass a levy with a lower majority than you can a bond. We could have passed a a bond with the majority that we had, but our crystal ball was broken. We didn't know that. Ouch. Yeah. So, just interesting things that we keep visiting about. Okay. Uh, going to jump into end of year reports. Every June, you get a lot of reports. I'm not going into all uh the great depths that uh the reports were shared with you as a board, but a few of these uh interesting this year. I think I accidentally advanced it. Yeah, back up one. I bumped it. Well,
020back up one. No problem. There you go. Um so, transportation and maintenance first. Uh on the left, transportation on the right, maintenance. They gave uh the first time I've asked them to include their reports. It took a little while. So, you didn't get these until today late. You may not have seen this. Transportation, a lot of changes there the last couple years, including our radius where we pick up has been expanded, but we have 24 routes at NPS still and our fleet had 207,000 and some change miles put on it this year. We've added a full-time trainer to help keep up with our driver shortages and they received 100% on their inspections again, which is no small feat and they do it on a regular basis. um they're turning their attention in their reports. They
021said they're turning their attention to the design of this new bus barn and also the immediate efficiencies that they're going to have because of less campus this next year. And you see the underlying again our maintenance uh they just recapped a lot of what they worked on. We've done a lot of investing in our maintenance department with vehicles and equipment. They started some in-house remodeling in since this time last year to include sheetrocking, moving electrical boxes, doing our own flooring projects is actually starting right now and a lot more. Um, so they're now expanding this summer into more in-house concrete work and uh just a lot of things that we invested in that equipment and those vehicles because we believe we could save uh by doing things in house and they are stepping up and
022accomplishing that. So I'm really proud of both of these departments for sure. And now I'll hit custodial and distribution very quickly. Custodial with no schools where only one custodian will be assigned. So like an Eastwood, a Northwest, a Benton, there was only one custodian required in those schools. They uh believe that there's going to be some great team efforts in our cleanliness at the remaining buildings. You're going to have a team of custodians, you're going to be able to stagger their schedules. Even snow removal, there's just u instead of operating in these individual silos. A lot of lot of opportunity for us to work together and start attacking things with more of a plan in mind. And then subbing, there's a lot of moving around. Uh Mike Varnner just runs himself ragged covering places where
023he has to be. There's going to just be a lot more efficiencies and opportunities there. Same in distribution. Less sites to take deliveries to without the centralized printing. There's going to be more than half of distribution really is reduced and that's going to allow him to step up and help out from a custodial standpoint um or perhaps mowing standpoint. So again, just a lot of efficiencies. I forgot to underline on the lefth hand side, but we have a lot of efficiencies. going to jump from that to principles in one slide very briefly if you have any questions about all of that a lot of changes there and all those things that might save us money and help balance that budget I hope now when I say that I'm really just glazing the surface of this
024I truly am um our administrative reports they're fully staffed at all levels except for at my count today three teachers uh some paras otherwise we are pretty much having the best year in staffing at MPS that we've had since CO which is really a great relief to say now we still have some not fully certified things etc etc some 550s some critical shortage certainly there's a lot of that but by far since I've been here and beyond this has been a great hiring year for us the depth of the hiring pool all the administration has been pleased with what they've been able to hire from and how many people have applied not to say it's easy but it's gotten better we've seen a difference this year this next statistic is misleading. It's it is positive,
025but there's some more to it. 90% of the students in all of our school buildings have been at school this year 90% of the time. Um, some of them as high as 94, 95, 96%. The unfortunate thing that that doesn't reflect is the 10% who have not can really miss a lot of school. And uh that 10% single-handedly will be the reason that if we see an APR uh that reflects poor attendance, it's not because most of our kids aren't doing what they're supposed to do. It's because 10% are so far from being where we'd like them to be. Um so that's something we'll continue to work on. Discipline. I say over the last two years because if you look close at the reports, there is an eb and flow to this. But over the
026last two years with certainty, we have seen a reduction in discipline. And that was not a goal we had. In fact, we actually asked for a higher level of expectation and we saw that go up a bit and we're really starting to see a two-year trend where where it's starting to go down. When there are exceptions, I don't hold anybody I'm not upset with anybody for that. Sometimes when you're changing culture, you've got to amp up your discipline a little bit and so you'll see that eb and flow. But I was really pleased to to look at and see that from our principal reports. And that was truly just a snippet of their end of year reports. If you haven't read that, it really is a lot of lot more interesting stuff than that. But
027that was just some quick takeaways for the public. Uh yeah, I' I've got a question on one of them. I'm going to bring it up in in close session. Sounds good. Any other questions, thoughts? That's my whole report for this evening. Thank you. Thank you. So, moving on to old business. Uh we need to approve the fiscal year budget uh for FY 26 that was presented to us uh last meeting. Um this of course is a projection of where we feel we will be and of course uh the figures of balancing our budget for next year. I see I move to approve. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Does anybody have any questions about the uh budget for next year? All those in favor of the budget as presented, please say I. I. I. Any
028opposed, abstaining or excusing? Under new business, there is quite a bit. And of course, this is the time that we uh balance our funds for the year. So, uh the first order is to set the fiscal year 2024 budget at the same amount per accounting codes as the actuals for the 24 and 25 fiscal year. This just means instead of uh uh the round numbers that we're using, we're just going to have the actualized numbers in there and being able to finalize the budget for the end of the year. So move second. Yeah, it's been moved and seconded. I know that we've had a lot of accounting work go on between uh Grace and the team um of looking over our numbers, but um they have turned out pretty well for us actually uh this
029year. So all those in favor of the budget as uh presented and annualized please say I. I. I. Any opposed are stating. Next we need to transfer funds from fund one to uh to the teacher fund which is fund two I believe at no less than zero. So, that just means that we need to move money from fund one to fund two to pay off our uh debts to our teachers and to be able to uh make sure everyone gets a check. I move. So, second. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Next, under C, we need to transfer the amount allowable for the limit from fund one to fund four. There is not a amount listed here. I do forget what the total amount is that
030we can transfer, but I'm sure we'll stay within the legal limits of doing that after we make the move to the teachers fund and what is left um in fund one that we can still move to fund for. Yeah. Is is this a fund that we play catchup with the last couple of years? Uh fund for is your capital. Um so there's various uh allowable transfers here. One of them is your annual water transfer. Then we have uh transportation as well on here this year exceptions. And these are once a year transfers that you're able to make from fund one to fund four. Yeah. Is it moved by Mr. Linds and seconded by Mr. Carol? All those in favor of the move, please say I. I. Any opposed? Staining or recusing. Um, next we need
031to authorize payment of the remaining fiscal year 2025 obligations to close out the fiscal year ending in June 25. So that just means that we're going to approve any bills that are going to come in from now until we meet again till the end of the fiscal year uh to be paid. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions? All those in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? recusing. Um, next we need to approve as uh Mr. Pettit spoke to earlier the transportation fund transfer from one to fund four as well. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor please say I. I. Any opposed or abstaining? Um, we also need to set the date for our July meeting. And I believe that date was going to be
032July 2nd and we will be at 6:00 and we will be at the boardroom. Um, as Mr. Pettit said, you will come through the double doors in the middle of the side of the building that faces uh uh the route outside. So move second. Sorry. Either one. Amy, you're in there. It's been moved and seconded by M Green. All those in favor, please say I. Any opposed or abstain? Um next we need to approve the bank depository proposal. Um this is where we are depositing our funds as a district and the tax rate that we will uh or not tax rate but interest rate that we will receive uh from those deposits. I know that Mr. Ranky called around to the area banks and asked for bids and proposals. We did end up with two
033bids being submitted um by Wooden Houston and our current bank exchange I believe is the other one. That's correct. Um the rate um was better with Exchange Bank where we currently are and so I would recommend that we stay there. I do forget what the percentage points were on that. I believe was it 6865 under versus2 over. Okay. And the T bill comparison had different language between the two but they were the same. I confirmed that today. So move so moved so that we get a better return on our dollar. Yeah. from Mrs. Green. Is there a second? Second. It's been seconded by Mr. Linds. All those in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Um, and then last thing is the creation of the RN or a nurse practitioner head nurse position to work
034within the district. Uh, we've had through attrition and staff leaving some openings within our nursing department. We're going to consolidate those and then have a true um I don't want to say a dawn position. director of nursing necessarily for the district, but uh someone that will be over the nurses and be able to help coordinate those services better throughout our district and our smaller uh building reaches that we'll be able to have. So move. I'll second. She will also function as a nurse in addition to earning. Yes, sir. Yes. All those in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? standing or recusing. Um, next there were a few policies in your uh, appendix B if you browse through those of MSBA policy updates. A lot of uh, wording changes um, in those as we go
035through quite often. This is just a first reading. So, we will talk about those at a later date. Yeah, I was looking through them. I like what they're doing. They're they're cutting cutting it down to bare bones, taking a lot of the jargon out. Mhm. And I really really like I like that. I could cut my summary down to bare bones if you want for next month if everybody likes it enough. We'll just [Laughter] you got to watch those big words. In the effort of keeping things uh moving for the summer. I will look for a motion to adjourn to close session. Uh we will talk about hiring, firing, disciplining or promoting particular employees. individually identifiable personnel records, performance ratings or records retain employees or applicants for employment. And that is all on the summer
036session. So move second. It's been moved and seconded in quite a hurry. I will start Mr. Carol. I I I I We're going to get here before.