001The first. Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Lord, we just pause before you here tonight. We're thankful for all the blessings you bestowed upon us. Lord, thankful for this school that you blessed us with in this community. And I just pray that our spirit to be at work tonight. Lord, give granting us wisdom, Lord, to make decisions on behalf of both. Pray this in your name. Amen. So, we'll call the meeting to order. First on the agenda is the consent agenda. If we all had a chance to look at that. Any questions regarding that? No questions regarding the consent agenda. Entertain a motion to accept that. So
002moved. Second. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Next on the agenda, comments from patrons concerning items on the agenda. Terry, thanks for coming. It's been a long time Yeah, I I will have some questions after you go through some of the things, Senator, if that's okay. Okay. Thank you. We'll move on to new business. Board policy review and update. We need to go through each one of those individually. Okay. Yes. So, the first first item would be the second reading of the updated um So, update to March batch. Yes. When we redo policies, we have a lot a lot of batches to go through. >> we had to go through individually. I mean, we had to. So, you guys have already seen the March batch. Um and so, this This be your second reading. If
003you guys are ready, you can take a vote tonight on whether or not to accept those. The only couple of changes that we have in the update two from our current policies. Again, these are just transitioning our current policies from Neola over to CCHA. They do talk a little bit more in the policy about some parking procedures as far as having the kids come and register their vehicles with the office and just let us know which vehicle they will most likely be driving. to school. All the rules are still in place. It just helps us a little bit with the identification. And so, it would actually be a better way for us to communicate kind of some of their responsibilities of what it means to drive a vehicle onto our school property. So, that was
004the only difference in the the policies really from what our current policies are. Any questions regarding update two? I'll make a motion to accept update two. You guys are ready to go. I'll entertain a second. I'll second. All in favor, say "Aye." Aye. Uh second is our next item on the agenda is first reading of update three, April batch. Yes, and so the April batch, again, these are all policies that we currently have and we're just converting them over. I provided you with some of my notes and questions that I had given to the attorney just for some clarifying questions to make sure that I understood them correctly. Some parts of the policies do apply to us, some parts don't. Um and so, some of the language I asked if it was legally required to
005have it or if we could have that taken out. Again, she responded that we could, so you have all of those notes in there. So, I'm happy to entertain any questions, but again, you guys have another month to look at these, so we can always get those questions answered, too. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. You got that, Alex? Yeah. Uh item three, approval of Antioch Bible Church soccer and transportation facility use agreements, which I think they're At this time, we're going to go ahead and table that. We are still working on working out some of the details on those agreements. I went ahead and put it on just in case we did have it done, that way we have transparency on our agenda of what we would be talking about tonight, but we're not quite
006ready for that one. So, we're going to go ahead and table that one tonight. And then, approval of the HEA 1003 flexibility or waiver resolution. Yes, so this has been in place for many years. We have not applied for it because we are a performance accredited school, and so what that allows us to do is instead of reporting our number of school days that we attend, we get to report in minutes. And because we run one transportation route, um we do often exceed our minutes. Sometimes schools that they might have just elementary routes, just middle school high school routes, they run a little closer on the minimum minute requirement, but we always have banked minutes, so then we can use those to have our teacher work days, or sometimes we'll have a snow day and
007we choose not to make it up. We choose to use some of our banked minutes that we have. There's been some talk questioning whether the state is going to do that again this year, and so one way that schools who aren't performance accredited, they apply for permission from the state under HB 1003, and they ask that they can use minutes instead of days. And so, the board has to make a resolution giving us permission to request that. So, that's what I'm doing is basically kind of a backup plan for us in case the performance accreditation would go away that we would still be able to apply for the waiver day so that we could have our teacher work days, and our calendar would stay intact as it is um, already approved for next school year.
008No changes. No, but you said it's really just a backup plan that would allow us, um, to be able to continue with our same setup for our calendar. Just a different route. Question regarding that? So, I'll make a motion to accept the HE 1003 flexibility waiver resolution. Entertain a second. I'll second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Next, uh, will be the approval of the 2026-2027 enrollment caps. So, we are an open transfer district, meaning that we do take students who do not live in our current district and we do allow them to attend here at Bar Reeve. With that, um, we're happy that we can do that and that we can provide a great educational opportunity to students who want to choose to be here, but at the same time we have
009to make sure that we are allocating our resources appropriately and that we can still be Bar Reeve. We can still have the class sizes, we can still offer small class sizes and the opportunities to our students that we want to. And so, we sit and look every year at kind of where our grade levels are at and then we set caps based on resources for that. And so, my recommendation to the board tonight is a little varied just because of some of the different grade levels that we do have. I would recommend that grades kindergarten through third grade and then 10th grade through 12th grade would be capped at 88. And we have about four sections per grade level, so that would put us a max approximately 22 students in a grade level. Those are
010some of our smaller grade levels across the district. Some of our larger grade levels are back-to-back with each other and so again, kind of stretching those resources and making sure we have the staffing to cover those, I would make the recommendation that grades four, five, and six be capped at 80 students. Grades 7 and 8 be capped at 88. They're already well over the 88 number. Um, so they won't I don't foresee them coming down um, to that number. So, those would basically be closed grades for us. And then grade 9 capping it at 70. That does sound smaller than the rest. It is a smaller grade for us. However, once they go through high school, we are going to have larger grades coming behind them. And in order to be able to offer our
011same sections and once you start getting in the high school, you have more specialties with your licenses, dual credit opportunities, some of those things that we can't stretch as far with some of those. So, that would be my recommendation um, for the board. You've seen this ahead of time. And then we also put in some grade band caps for us again because cafeteria times and and those types of things for us, we want to make sure that we do have the capacity. And so, a maximum of 500 students in the elementary, 240 students in the middle school, and 320 uh, students in the high school. And those have not changed from the previous year. What do you >> That's that. Right? Clear as mud. Any questions regarding the caps you just spoke of? No. Other
012than just to say thank you for had a lot of discussion around this. It's thing I mean it's tough because um, there are two sides of the coin really. Um, you know, what is the best direction moving forward? There are a lot of things to consider. And so, we even have differences of opinion a little bit on what to do. And so, um, we all feel pretty good about we feel like what we're proposing is a good balance of all of the feelings that we have about it. So. And if If wanting a student to come in to a capped grade, just move to borrow re-township. There you go. That's even better. Yes. Yes. And we And if we need to, we can revisit this at a later date to look at We can We
013can revisit if we need to. Um again, want to be mindful of the fact that depending on which way we would go with revisiting, we would potentially have already told students that they couldn't be here and stuff. So, we need to go back and revisit that. So, that's that way could be a little more complicated. Um Okay. Any questions regarding the caps that Andrea spoke of? No. I'll make a motion to accept the capped the cap numbers that we I'll I'll get with Amy and make sure we can Make sure we have the Is that We've got part of the road down there. Uh entertain a second. I'll I'll second. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Next on the agenda would be the approval of the Constellation of pricing agreement. This is one of the
014ones that is not in a textbook anywhere and you get to learn on the job. So, we have a third-party company called Constellation and they do our gas purchasing for us for our heating and they can usually get us a better deal. What they do is they watch the market, they buy and sell on a continuous basis. However, this past winter we did have a winter storm come through that put a shortage across the entire nation. When that happens, the third-party company is forced to purchase gas during that time. It's some agreement that they have in place and they have to. So, we did see a significantly larger um cost for our gas for a period of time in the winter and so reached out to Constellation, what can we do? What are our options
015for this? And so, they gave us a couple of fixed renewal options that they have in place. The one that I'm recommending to the board tonight is that we do the fully fixed renewal price, and that means that we would negotiate a rate right now based on the market trends. We would accept that rate, and then whatever gas we use, that's the rate that we pay for it, regardless of what the market value of gas is at the time. The other option that they have is that we can agree upon a rate that they do on a quantity basis. And so, they estimate how much we're going to use. They purchase it ahead of time for us. If we use that amount, we pay the rate we agreed on. If we use more, we have
016to pay whatever the market rate is. Chances are, if we're using more, it's cold. It's the the rate could be up. If we don't use that amount, they will sell it back at market rate, and we could potentially get a credit. I had them run the past 14 months for us both ways, kind of a comparison for us. Both ways would be a savings for us. The fixed rate was a little bit more of a savings. So, I would like to see us enter into a 12-month agreement with them to try that rate for a year. Re-evaluate at the end of the year, see what we think once we've kind of lived in that world for a minute, and then we could always go with the other option at that time if we wanted to.
017So, that's my recommendation to the board is that we enter into a fixed renewal pricing with Constellation. Sure. We did have some really big bills in months, and um it was frightening how much of a change there was. Um just I commend Andrea for trying to track this down because um with some questions on the claims, and we just weren't satisfied with the complete answer. And so, um I think this gives the potential for savings and good forethought and so forth. Um, cuz we don't want to pay the Yeah, the kind of bills that we paid a couple times. Okay, this is where I have a question through Mark, through CTA members. So, it's like I'm hoping I get this right. Um, when Mark sends out the agenda to all the CTA members, they read
018it and if they have questions, they send it back to and he had a couple of people ask what Constellation is. So, now I know what that is. Have we been with this company a while or Travis moved us to the company. I can't tell you how long ago, but it was a few years even before I took over. Um, so I would venture to say, I'm going to guess at least six years. Okay. And you said they're They're a third-party gas company and so, um, they purchase the gas, they do the market bidding, they get us better pricing on the gas. And you think that they've been the best one so far that that we've had? They're the only company that I know that we've had, but like I said, they're working with us
019on our rates and they're they're doing a nice job. Um, Brandon was his name, he was phenomenal. He made it very easy for me to understand it. Oh, I know what our house bills were during the wintertime when it was cold, so I can imagine what our school was. Well, it was to the point where we were questioning whether a door was left open or a window or something like that or we had a leak or, you know, what the problem was because there was it was just a dramatic change. But it was because that we were using, yes, we were using more, but also the market rate went up. So, I I guess some people call that price gouging or whatever, but it's completely legal unless you have, you know, some type of agreement
020ahead of time. So, that's where just I mean, we've been working on this probably at least a year. And so, just having the forethought to try to We're still working on the electric side. Yes. This is the gas side. So, the gas side was kind of what started it. And so, um you know, we want to be mindful of utility bills and things like that. So, Oh, everybody does. I know Art would whine and complain that I kept her house too cold. I said, "Put on a sweatshirt." That's what my roommate college always said, "Too bad." Put on a sweatshirt. Yeah, I mean, "It's cold." I said, "Too bad." I said, "I don't want to pay those huge bills." Yeah, and utility costs are just I mean, you're you're kind of stuck in some ways
021because you have to have utility. You have to use it. But, um yeah, just controlling costs. Okay, thanks very much. So, it's important to remember like if the price is going down, we don't get the benefit from that. But, it just helps us budget. Mhm. Cuz we're going to be fixed We're going to be fixed price-wise and amount-wise, right? Or is it price-wise? >> Not amount-wise, just price-wise. We're going to be fixed and stuff. But, again, that's why we could go into a longer agreement, but I'd kind of like to just do 12 years to compare Firstly, yeah, sorry, 12 months. I just to compare and see how it worked out for us because again, we did 14 months, but the next winter could look totally different. Right. It's similar to what what River Co-op
022does for our personal homes. Any questions regarding the Yeah, thank you for for saying that. You're welcome. So, entertain a motion to approve the constellation pricing agreement where we have the fixed price for the next 12 months. Correct. Going forward and then reevaluate. So moved. Second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Uh next on the agenda is person personnel is end of employment. Mhm. Um high school English teacher resignation. So, we have been very blessed to have Anita Hart with us for the past 3 years. She's stayed in our ELA department, but she's moved back and forth with different grades as we have needed her to. Again, she's been a blessing to our students and to our staff. She's a a joy of a person. Her personality is phenomenal. The kids have enjoyed having
023her. The teachers have enjoyed having her. Again, she has just been a positive impact on our school and our culture, and we thank her for her time. She was retired and then decided to come out of retirement to come back, and she was with us for 3 years. And so, again, we're thankful for the time that we had with her. I would like to share that I think the feeling is very mutual. She had some very kind words to say as well about our staff and our administration and our students and our school. And so, I think she as well has enjoyed her time here. So, we'd like to thank her and recognize what she has done for us. It just leaves one one more dungeon girl to Yol Gene is the last last of
024the dungeon girls. So, any questions regarding Anita Hart's resignation? Just thank her for coming back out of retirement and helping helping our students. >> She's been a big help. So, I'll make a motion to accept the resignation for Anita Hart. I'll second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Uh next on the agenda is employment recommendation for a band director. Yes, so we are recommending tonight that Anthony Richardson be hired for our band director for the upcoming school year. So, he is from Spencer Indiana, and he has uh he went to Ellettsville, and so we've got good recommendations on him, and he is graduating this spring from Manchester University. He's been very involved in the band program there. He's has marching band experience. He has show choir experience. He's directed multiple events. We're very excited
025for him to be able to start his teaching career here with us. So, when so Noah's he's going to South Bend, right? Correct. All right. Any questions regarding band booster recommendations? So, what's the process for like the transition there? I mean, well, I know Noah has several people to help the transition, but what just kind of describe the process for us. >> So, Noah has been very gracious. And so, Noah, knowing that he's leaving at this time, he's been able to start making sure he has everything in order, and he has his activities and everything lined up. The band position is unique in the fact that they do have a very active band boosters program. And so, the band boosters, a lot of the events that we put on, the band boosters are very involved
026in those. So, again, a lot of the um working with the Festival of Bands and the concerts and things. Misty Mosby's been very good as well to be working with Noah during this time so that she can learn some of the transition pieces as well. And so, he's said he's very willing to sit down and meet with Anthony at any time and to come back and, you know, have conversations with him and discuss that moving forward. So, it's similar as far as um when another teacher would leave from a general classroom or like a content area classroom, they would leave their curriculum map, and they would leave their resources behind, and they would have other grade level um teachers to help with that transition as well. So, in this case, it's going to be the
027band boosters, it's going to be Mrs. Mosby, and then also Noah coming back as well. Thank you. All right. Any questions? So, I'll entertain a motion to accept the new band director. Somebody second that. All in favor? I. Uh next on the agenda is summer school staff. In your board packet, you had two names, but I'm only going to be presenting one tonight. Um one of them was not able to do summer school with us, so tonight I am recommending that Laren Nett be um approved to teach summer school at her hourly rate based on her master teacher contract. We are still looking for another teacher to fill the other summer school position that we have. We started summer school again last school year. We are required by law now for any student who is
028at risk coming out of second grade to not pass I Read in third grade that they be offered the opportunity to attend. We also have to offer summer school for any student who did not pass I Read in third grade. And if any of those students who opt not to attend where they wouldn't have a satisfactory attendance rate as set by the state, then we have to put an individualized reading plan in place for each of those students as well. And so, again, last year was our first year of bringing back summer school. Um they want small group setting. One to six, one to seven is a good ratio um from research standards for that. And so, that's why we employed two positions last year. We have similar numbers this year. So, again, we're looking
029to fill that second position, but tonight I would like to go ahead and get Laren Nett approved to be able to teach summer school. And then we will have another board meeting prior to summer school for me to be able to bring another name for the second position. Any questions regarding Laren? I don't. I'll make a motion to accept Laren Nett as the new summer school teacher going forward. I'll second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. And let's see. Next on the agenda is approval of medical leave. Mhm. So, I would ask that tonight the board um retroactively approve Jen Stall for a medical leave of absence. Again, I've been in communication with you guys. Um she does have provisions that have allowed her to have her leave and so her leave began
030on December 4th and it will go through the end of the school year. And so while she is protected under FMLA and ADA, you're not necessarily proving that side of her leave tonight, but just a medical leave um as recognized by the board that would help her with some of her paperwork. Any questions regarding the leave? No. Entertain a motion to accept the medical leave for Jen Stall. All right. Yes. Mhm. So moved. Second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. And next on the agenda is superintendent report. Okay, so at your actually listening agenda. Don't let me forget to do that. We do have another tonight. I gave you a packet of pictures. I was looking back at some of the events and recently I knew that our students had attended the Uplands made
031student run business and so I went to grab some of the pictures to share that with you and then I saw some others that I wanted to share as well. We've talked in depth for a few years now about our ready schools grant and the work that we're doing and wanting to have the student run business, wanting to have hands-on learning be one of our components, wanting to give our kids real world opportunities. And this spring we've had some great opportunities for our students. So the first page that you have, you see our students, they went to the Uplands student-run business convention that's held every year, and we've actually attended as a school who has watched. And so, we've sat and watched other schools present. And when we were doing our Ready Schools work, we
032toured several schools who had the student-run businesses. And honestly, we sat there thinking, is that ever going to be a like, are we really going to be there one day? And this is just goes to show that we are. Our students were there. Our students presented. They actually had to move our students from their current venue to a larger room because they had so many people sign up to come and listen to our kids present. And so, that was a really neat opportunity for our kids. And they did phenomenal. On the second page, you're going to see Mr. Harrington's Principles of Business Management class. They traveled to the University of Evansville to compete in the JA Social Innovation Challenge. And so, we had two teams who went. The JBM team, the Optics team, they took
033two different hunting pieces of equipment. I'm not going to try to name what they are, but something along a scope and something. And they said, we use both of these, but what if you could bring them into one? And so, they designed a product where they combined the two pieces of equipment into one, and they were able to go and then do their pitch, very much like a Shark Tank experience for them. The Eco Sense group, they took recycled materials and found a way that if we could turn them into fertilizer, and then use that and convert that into a resource that could be used. And so again, you can see them there, they are presenting. They represented us very well, and what a great opportunity for those kids. On the next page, the third
034one, you are going to see seventh-grade students in Mrs. Deville's class explore natural resources by using solar energy to make s'mores. And again, hands-on learning has been one of the core pieces that we've said we've wanted to get. The more we see it, the more excited our teachers get about it. I don't think it gets much better than this. You have a beautiful sunny day, you've got science going on, you've got a s'more. I mean, it's perfect. There was no samples, true? No, no samples. I should have brought a sample. Um and then on the fourth one, you have students This was a cross grade K through 12. They all came together for a school-wide STEM activity. We did it over 2 days. We ran a delayed schedule um for the the middle school high
035school kids and the middle school high school kids all went down and they all got partnered with elementary students and both sides loved it. The elementary kids ate it up because these big middle school high school kids were down working with them. Middle school high schooler kids, they thought these kids were great. I'll share a quick personal story. They had an egg challenge and they had to build a catapult and my daughter came home and she was telling me on the way to school on the day when they were going to actually launch it. She said, "Mom, it was great because actually it was the day after because she said, 'So-and-so in my group, we had worked on this project, but he went home, he thought we could make it better, so he made some
036tweaks, he made a sample, he brought it to school, he let us look at it, we compared the two and then we decided to go with his and so we modified ours to make the new one.' So I mean, think about all that learning that's taking place and the conversations. So again, it was amazing. And then uh the last one that we have is Mrs. Manley's sixth grade social studies class. They were busy working on their gummy bear governments in their civics unit. So they had to create pictures of gummy bears acting out different types of government to help them remember who has the power in each one. So again, what a creative way to take, you know, something that sometimes kids maybe don't always see the relevance in, but still making it a a
037interactive learning process for the kids. So, so proud of our our teachers that they're stepping out and they're doing those activities and coming up with them for our kids so that they can come to school and find enjoyment in their learning as well. Thank you. You are very nice presentation. It tugged at my heartstrings when I when I went through. It made me excited. Um and then I do have an other tonight, Joey. I do have an other other. You guys are bad. So Whoops, sorry. She's here. She is. So, the you want to go over the other first? I can if you guys are okay with that. It's real quick. It's just a couple of field trips that normally go under the consent agenda. You have them in your red folder. We just didn't
038have them in, but one is an overnight trip because it is our seniors class trip. So, I did want you guys to have the opportunity to approve that prior to them going on that one. And then the other one um last time I talked to you guys about our curriculum work that we were doing partnering with EES and having them come in and help with our ELA in the curriculum. And so, it does take our teachers out of the classroom for a little bit, but we're trying to get them covered having maybe we planned them to where we had them in one day so that we could get one sub who would cover the whole day and we weren't having to have it spread out so much. So again, just trying to use our resources
039well, but they do need some approval for that too. So, you can do those together if you would like. Could we vote on them together? Yeah. I don't know. Don't forget to approve the trip to DC. There'd be a lot of disappointment. It would be. Parents and kids probably. It's a neat trip. Any questions regarding the class trip for the No. The other one? Okay. I don't see questions. So, we entertain a motion for for the field trips. So moved. I'll second that. All favor say aye. Aye. Who's the chaperones this year? Tim and Nancy Harrison, Carrie Boyd, Chase Wagner. Guess we should have checked that out first. Yeah. And Aaron Ashley will be on the trip as well. Guess we should have checked out who the chaperones were first before we heard Sounds like
040a good trip. Yep. It will be. Mark and I were talking about that today. I said, "Who do you think I could get to walk with Thank you for going to see the creek." No. Now we go. I could not walk that far. They and they start them out like at 6:00 in the morning, too. It's great. Keep them moving. I make them good and tired. It's a very tiring trip, but it's a very rewarding trip. Well, we're going. That is all I have. Any comments We're good. It's good seeing you guys. >> Nice to see you again. We miss you, too. I'm loving retirement very much. I'm stepping in every now and then. But I told them not too many times in a week. That's great. Okay. No other Nothing else to talk about
041or address, we'll I'll turn it back to the meeting. The next meeting is May the 19th at 1:00 p.m. Mhm. That's a Tuesday. I guess I will add we do have two current openings. We have a CTE position still looking to replace behind Mr. Bullock. And then today we announced a math position, which again it's kind of a shuffle and stuff is actually to fill in behind Anita's position. We have a staff member who's moving over, so. Those are our live. If you know of anybody, and them our way. Keep your ears open. All right. So, I'm going to entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. I second that. All in favor, say aye. Aye. And then we'll wait for the next meeting.