001it's okay josh are you okay with force okay good evening welcome to the regular meeting of the bartholomew consolidated school corporation school board on this evening monday september 28 2020 we're here at the admin building for those of you who are joining us possibly online thank you for joining us as well we begin every session with reflections shared by one of our school board members tonight mr james persinger we'll be sharing james thank you mr caldwell it's been quite a year so far i think we can all agree to that uh it's been nothing short of an emotional and mental rollercoaster for the vast majority of us between coronavirus resulting economic and unemployment downturn the civil unrest response to you know the systemic racism that's rooted in the culture of policing at all levels throughout
002the country it's really been hard to find and focus on something positive really hard but if we shift our view from the macro to the more local micro level i can see several positives among our community and more specifically our bcsc community given all the challenges that have been thrown our way over the last several months i can honestly say that the determination and tenacity that our teachers and administration has shown gives me real hope for the future it's not any secret that i've had my own personal reservations and objections about the safety of opening school on time at the beginning of the school year i've expressed my concerns on multiple occasions and in multiple discussions with everybody it hasn't been perfect and there are still several ways and areas that we can improve but
003looking at where we are in comparison to where we started i have overwhelming positive feelings as we move forward into the future i hope we continue to keep a sharp focus on our corporation's mission and vision statements and most importantly keep at the forefront of all of our decisions the health and safety of our vote most valued stakeholders our students and teachers thank you thanks james an encouraging word is always appreciated and needed thank you and usually surprising for me [Laughter] you can be a protagonist that's right an antagonist that's good if you're able would you join me and stand as we uh have the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands like a nation under god indivisible with
004liberty and justice for all five of our board members are in attendance this evening so that does constitute a quorum so i'll call this meeting to order i would note that our mission bcsc mission vision and high expectation objectives are listed on the placards behind us and we'll continue to use those as we uh enter into the decision making processes we have tonight with that i will promptly gavel out and we will have a public hearing that mr phillips will take us through on both the 2021 budget and the 2020 additional appropriation [Music] good evening so we will go through the looks like the budget one first this will be a abbreviated version of a similar powerpoint that you all saw uh two weeks ago but this is the opportunity for the public to interact
005and ask questions or make public comment just note that this public notice was posted on september 9th at least 10 days prior to the hearing to inform the public of this of this hearing and you can see if you can see how small it is down there the total amount of the budget that we're advertising is 126 million 383 411 dollars which matches the same number on the slide there what you will notice is that there is a difference in this slide and the slide that a similar slide that you saw last week inadvertently this included the money that was transferred from operations to education in both budgets both the education budget and the operations budget that has since been removed and corrected and as you can see the amount that was that was publicized
006and advertised on the gateway public access website matches now what this what this states and so the overall budget is is up just under eight percent when you include the operating referendum budget of just under seven and a half million dollars these education fund revenue assumptions have just been updated based on the questions that you all had two weeks ago and hopefully it's more clear the funding sources the september estimate for adm actually the numbers that we have this morning this is actually a cabinet report that's later on but it's certainly relevant in this slide so i'll just share it at this time we actually expect to be up about 30 students as opposed to down students this year so based on the count that we had last week that process as you know takes
007about three weeks to resolve conflicts with other school corporations when we both claim the same student id number but at this point in time we don't expect it to move a great deal and so we're pleased that that number will be will be up our the number of students that we have that are uh cvp students or virtual students enrolled now on adm that were also virtual students last year is actually 40. these are the assumptions that were used the numbers on the screen were the assumptions that were used to build the revenue estimates for the budget but our actual number is 40. and we did expect that to go down with with graduates and and students coming and going um so in in february of this year we still think there'll be a significant
008number of students that are on our virtual pathway but we don't yet know how the state legislature is going to handle funding those students and then even next year going into the fall of next year that adm of course is 50 of next year's revenue from the state perspective um and so right now our estimates that there'll be about 500 students still virtual next fall and again unsure what the state is going to do from a funding perspective in this coming legislative session the expenditure assumptions that i showed you last time have not changed those remain the same i will note um i did you know the the net the net reduction in certified staff of 13 for this fall that action was taken certainly at the beginning and in the middle of the summer
009pandemic season for us and at that point in time we still had no idea whether or not the state was going to levy the same cuts to the budget to to schools that were made to other entities across the state other tax supported departments across the state and so it was certainly a prudent move at the time but we have we have built into this budget the ability to at least bring back half of those teachers next fall again that depends on adm but that is budgeted for next fall to bring back many of those staff cuts what's that absolute number currently 420. sorry 720. currently 720. absolutely when you bring back half how many people is that you're bringing back your in your assumption six 726 right the education fund budget is uh the
010same has not changed from the um from when it was uh shared with you earlier but i did do some some math for you last time i shared with you that a lot of those changes in the communications supplies and property and equipment lines just move things around but i just added those up for you in 2020 the total for those three categories there was 1.92 million in 21 it's 1.96 so while the amounts if you follow the lines across certainly changed a lot the total is just up uh you know less than half a percent just like the total overall education fund budget just under a just under half a percent and again we'd like to point out what you know what uh makes up the majority of that budget 97 of the education
011fund budget is made up by salaries and benefits so the education fund budget is just over 80 80 million dollars for the first time significant milestone there the operations fund assumptions uh also remain unchanged from the last presentation you saw two weeks ago we do expect the overall levy for that to be up 4.2 percent and the dlgf to approve that minus the pension bond offset of course and the assessed value up just a little bit less than that so the operations fund advertised tax rate will go up just a tad bit as the levy went up more than what the assessed value did that means the rate will tick up just a little bit on the capital project side the biggest change here is of course the addition of about 2.1 million dollars in
012building improvement budgets that we haven't been able to do for the last two years and so we're excited about that able to do that because we transferred the bus purchases to the bond the 2020 geo bond also had lower tax cap losses than what was expected and then of course the levy i showed you on the previous slide you know 4.2 percent increase in the levy was certainly helpful in that other than that the cpf budget remains largely unchanged chad what what salaries and benefits qualify to fall under the capital law projects budgets good question that is almost all technology and custodial skilled trades are our plumber electrician hvac but the majority of i think the majority of it is probably actually technology on the transportation side really the only change to this budget is
013the the fact that those buses moved from the bus purchases moved from the transportation budget uh into that bond uh other than that just increases on the salary and benefit side the transfers from the education fund again these are expenditures that have been established in the old general fund and supported by state revenues that now the state says you have to expend those on the operations side you have to spend those from the operation side and the state allows you to transfer a certain amount of state revenue from the education fund to the operations fund to support that and these are those expenditures that come from the education fund again include most things like utilities some administrative costs and lots of custodial costs and so the operations fund down there up a total of 2.7
014over the previous year's budget and here's the breakdown of those expenditures that move from operations to education interestingly and i don't think the legislature knew this when they were thinking about it they didn't really think about this and it made it makes the whole process complicated which is why that appeared in two places on the previous on the previous presentation two weeks ago but um we actually many districts have found that much of their technology fund this is entirely technology right here much of their technology fund that was always funded through the operations side the old cpf side those are actually educational expenditures those people work in the building supporting teachers and students and so a good portion of money each year will also transfer from operations to education and so the net of those
015two amounts is about six and a half million dollars which is just over 8.1 percent of the education fund budget well under the 15 threshold that the state sets for that the bus replacement plan a little bit different this year we're of course going to replace more buses than we have for for a long time or at least since i've been around um but we'll be replacing eight of those 11 buses from the education sorry the the geo bonds the 2020 geo bonds that you just passed and then the other three from the operating referendum fund using the uh the safety and security portion of the operating referendum fund that i'll get to here so chad does the does the um sustainability of that concern you at all the fact that we're we're using bond
016bonded money to to go buy those assets um not as long as av continues to support it so as long as assessed value continues to support it without raising that tax rate um it's actually a more stable way to do that because we have the tax cap losses attacking that operations fund each year and if we ever need to move those things back we can just reduce those cpf projects that we built into it this year like we had the the prior two years right okay um but but everyone that i know of all of my colleagues around the state are really trying to figure out how to address tax cap losses yeah and this is one of the ways that's helpful to know that's where your thinking is okay and it's also uh we'll
017get to the pension bond offset here um that payment comes off this year or next year in 2021 we make the final payment there so it's about 320 000 it moves back into the operations fund and here's that debt service presentation i did add in there for you just that that one year tech bond last year's capital purchase bond that you uh that you approved that was paid off this year and replaced by the next one that you just approved two months ago and so the debt service payment up against 7.41 percent and again just a reminder our goal and and the way we can do this is because we're taking those cash operating balances in the debt funds and lowering down them down to that new 15 threshold that the state passed on all
018new debt so you used to be able to keep 50 percent of the next year's payments in an operating fund all new debt you can only keep 15 so we have to draw down those amounts as time goes on so it's a way we can improve we can increase our spending there without affecting the tax rate without raising people's taxes and there's that pension debt uh payment for next year the very last one that we make and so that uh in in next year's budget presentation uh for 2022 we will not have to reduce the operations fund by that 300 thousand dollars like we have for the last 20 years or so this is the high school building 2010 referendum debt fund making payments on that and that is largely unchanged and will be so
019for the for the remainder of the payments through 2029 and so the overall debt funds portion of the budget up just under five percent and then here's that referee operating referendum fund that the taxpayers approved back in june and and hopefully these numbers down at the bottom look very familiar to you because these are the exact numbers to the dollar that we've been talking about for a good year and a half now and so the uh 5.3 million dollars going to teacher salaries and salary related benefits and about one and a half million to two dollar increase two dollar an hour increases for bus drivers and one dollar for all other permanent support staff and then our safety and security expenditures there this line right here being those three buses the uh the property and
020equipment line 400 000 being those three additional buses and so there's the operating referendum fund there in the overall budget this again i did not change this slide from last time i'll have after the end of september we close out this month next month when i do your uh your third quarter update i should have some better predictions on cash balances to end the year but at this point i still project them to be flat over the beginning of the year and here is the the big difference in this presentation over last week's or two weeks ago's presentation the advertised tax rate that we have right now is uh just over a dollar two and a half cents um and that is just about where we we predicted now the dlgf will reduce that i
021told you that they'll take that 300 000 pension bond payment and reduce that and then uh one of the ref or uh resolutions that you all will approve next month gives me the authorization to reduce the um any of the budgets in order to achieve a tax rate that we're aiming for and of course during the referendum we spoke spoke often about our desire to keep that around the dollar to dollar one mark and we fully expect to be able to do that on the final tax rate that does include the 15.6 operating referendum rate in that and so next steps is all that you have next uh next month is uh approval and adoption of the budget can you go back a step inside i'm sorry yeah so so with the 15.6 increase due
022to the referendum then you're actually projecting the rest of the tax rate to be lower than 2020 as the advertised rate we don't know the final yet but i mean if i just take the 15 6 off of that dollar 259 you're under the 90 cents that you projected last year well last year's actual rate is here in the second year i see i see that but every year the the final rates lower than the advertised right good question what i expect and and has i expect this trend to continue um if you notice you know we used to project the the tax rate and advertise a tax rate that was 30 higher than the actual adopted yeah like the top of the you're talking about the top of the chart yeah this year i
023don't expect it to be more than than one or two cents it's just everything has gotten much more predictable in the budget process than it was just five years ago you don't have to artificially inflate some of your budgets to make sure you don't miss out on on getting the maximum levy and so each year we've been able to get more precise with that and so i do expect it to be around the 16 cents more than last year's right between a dollar and a dollar one at the end yeah i think in that 2006 to 17 air that was why we asked fawn silva to wear a wizard hat and he did it well right right have a wand and everything yeah okay and so that's the that's the end of the presentation on
024mr caldwell let's see if there are questions anyone has questions on that section right now because uh before we go to the other anyone uh have questions since there's a public hearing it can also be questions can ask be asked from those attending i i would note that that um sounds like what you're projecting for next school year i think you said next school year was to recover six of the twelve that we had and the other six that we would still hold in reserve just generously is something under four hundred thousand dollars probably in salary and benefits i mean we i i don't want to make 400 000 seem like not a lot of money it is a lot of money but um i i think um you know that's a place we ought
025to press ourselves to as quickly as possible get back to full staffing rather than if there's a place where i think we should stick our necks out a little bit if we had to find it somewhere else in our budgets you do have room to move between your two funds you still have additional flexibility there and that additional 400 000 but you know it's it's surprising to me how impactful just six more teachers can be you know in terms of balancing and i know teresa always fights hard just to keep us fully staffed anyway so planning for that if i would just encourage dr roberts's administration if you've got anywhere where you would push that front push push on getting to pulls back to full staffing asap given given the good news from the legislature
026that that at least and from our adm that we're gonna have an additional set of funding looks like so and then on on this when you assume the the uh in your budget assumptions for 2122 500 students on on cvp that are funded at 85 so uh i can't do that math in my head really well is that uh four hundred thousand dollars or is that four million did i drop a zero that's four hundred thousand dollars four hundred thousand that you lose there right um somewhere in that ballpark yeah in that ballpark is um what's for cvp versus in person what's the student teacher ratio i mean when we had 80 or 50 to 80 per year we probably had one person two people doing monitoring that oh so so like last year when
027we yeah we did cbp that was pretty much angie winneke i think monitoring yeah it was right up to the 80 and the ratio right now is closer to 50 to 1 something like that so we've got about 10 10 teachers we got about 10 teachers doing just cvp not including bridge five five teachers doing cvp for elementary and then including you at the elementary level but you but you're not all 500 students right are you half okay okay so it's not dramatically different in terms of that ratio if you figure no no that's interesting i'm i'm surprised that our student teach ratio is is that close to our in-person student-teacher ratio is that let me back away from that in in terms of in person being probably an average of 23 24 25 at
028least with cvp much higher than that 50 or more bills indicating it's higher at least for the secondary level so probably double or or more of what's in the and then of our bridge students or just secondary it varies greatly the elementary has gotten it down to about 35 to one for bridge okay so 50 yeah okay all right other questions anyone want to talk about the 2020 um bond sure i i think you technically have to gavel out of this hearing and then start start a new publication if there are no other questions then we'll gather the out of the budget hearing and gavel into your appropriation hearing for the 2020 additional appropriation thank you so this also required a public notice was published on september 16th and this is just anytime we're going
029to spend more dollars than what the board appropriated last fall we require your approval last fall we did not have the full debt payment schedule for that 2019 geo bond and that came in later at 37 000 higher than what um than what we had passed for a budget and so this is just a public hearing to advertise that just more than thirty seven thousand dollar increase in the debt service budget for uh 2020. thank you board members or anyone in attendance here this evening are there any comments or questions on that additional appropriation hearing none i think we've met that requirement thank you chad thank you thanks chad so we'll gavel back into our regularly scheduled meeting dr roberts we have you on the agenda tonight for another um uh just how things are
030going with our reopening yeah i think last time i said i would be brief and i wasn't so brief so i'll try to be prefer uh this particular time before i jump into the reopening plan update uh just a a to summarize uh the public hearings from chad's perspective uh the one in regards to the budget as he indicated there the budget adoption hopefully will occur on october the 19th our next school board meeting the second item on the appropriation is on your agendas tonight for uh approval under uh recommendations so with the reopening plan update uh we talked about adm a little bit the last time a reminder that friday september the 18th was our account date official count date for the state of indiana and chad did provide mr phillips provided some information
031in regards to that so some pleasant news is that it does appear as we reconcile our students with potentially somebody else may be claiming the same student id that we will have an increase in student numbers this year and it seems that that at least partially responsible for that increase would be students coming from other districts and taking advantage of some of our remote options given that we had a a couple of choices for people to make mass compliance just an updated uh set of numbers for that in asking our buildings to check on mass compliance again our elementary percentage averaged 96.3 percent secondary 95.1 both of those slight increases uh secondary was at 95 even the last time elementary i believe was at 95.4 that puts our overall rate at 96.1 percent we have
032one special note a bullet point that's on the screen since our last school board meeting we talked about some of the challenges we saw with compliance in some cases was simply the mask being a little too big for some of our students and so it might be falling below their nose on a regular basis and so we had some entities within our community reach out to us and say hey if that's a problem we can get some mass for you so we are having some help and making sure we have proper size mass for even our smallest kids uh additionally um just in regards to the metrics that are there the numbers that you see that data is gathered from a combination of things from unannounced visits into classrooms other observations and other places spaces
033within the buildings input from teachers surveys that were sent out asking for uh input and what what staff members were seeing and then even discipline referrals and counting referrals to the office if a student was sent down because they were being non-compliant and maybe non-compliant a little too often so those were different ways that we ended up getting that information and balancing that out you see the percent mass compliance that we have there from a physical distancing standpoint just want to always throw this in front of you because it is continues to be our our challenge most challenging mitigation strategy we've had continued dialogue with the columbus educators association i think since our last meeting we probably between three subgroups have had a combination of seven eight nine meetings based upon that that subgroup total
034uh three different subgroups and probably the smallest number of meetings of one of them was maybe two and the largest number of meetings is approaching four or five so quite a few opportunities at least talk about how we can address this this problem or challenge i do make the note here the challenges will persist as we add students back to in-person instruction so as we come back from fall break we did send surveys out to parents students who are participating in our remote options regarding their plans following fall break and a part of our efforts to make sure and address the challenges of in-person and remote teaching that many of our teachers are involved in as well as take a look at our physics physical distancing challenges was to limit the flexibility or remove actually
035the flexibility of students and parents to go back and forth too easily among the options we have it is certainly something we talked about on july 20th in our reopening plan roll out and continue to talk about as we got through the month of august but that is is definitely a challenge as we have students coming and going uh sometimes it seems like on a daily basis so we are removing that flexibility uh asking for a commitment and when that with that commitment uh getting a lot of students actually back into the classroom 20 25 percent based upon the building levels that you have and so that will change our classroom numbers as we head to things after uh fall break the note i have there are over 600 elementary students are returning to in-person
036learning just elementary just elementary so that number at one time was around 1600 students in bridge for example is down to about a thousand twenty-nine that's off the top of my head but uh that's that's what we're looking at so a thousand twenty nine still in bridge that means 600 back in our buildings and then that's a secondary level bill and his team working on where people are so they have phone calls and other follow-ups happening this week to narrow that down but in the numbers that i saw this morning uh anywhere from from 17 18 to 23 percent of students coming back uh from bridge in those cases so um but we'll have again more people in our buildings as we return and and efforts uh to be made to to try to address
037that we'll have to eat up that square footage that's in each of our building as buildings as creatively as as possible the in-person versus remote instruction piece i i reference that um so as we've been working on just that challenge and recognizing the the amount of additional amounts of time that teachers are having to spend you do have as an approval item tonight a resolution for stipends that is under my recommendations for approval additionally as i've just said we have a reduction of flexibility for students to transfer back and forth we know that following fall break with reducing that flexibility and getting commitment and knowing at least where people are going to be that we are going to be able to move to only in person or remote again this is only elementary that i'm
038talking about as we continue to wrestle with some of the complexities of secondary uh teaching uh and and just scheduling uh but that will be the case for elementary and then we're continuing to investigate ways to assist teachers with this challenge as we continue to work with our teachers association and our administrators so making some headway uh in regards to that but still work to be done as we get into fall break and come back out of it i always try to update you on the metrics since they were a key part of our plan uh so we have continued to go back and forth with the greens and yellows for now over a month uh coming out of intel going into labor day weekend and coming out of it we were getting into the
039the green and so shortly after that 12th of september the per capita rate get back up to yellow for a little bit and then drop back into the green by the 19th so just a week later and here we are basically a week after that um and then we're back to yellow with a 5.1 and a 5.6 uh this weekend so just as a reminder the most up-to-date data we always have as a day behind so today's the 28th you'll see the september the 27th being listed there so right now the percent positive rate and we're always about four days uh lagging with that is under four percent uh test turnaround time continues to be at 2.9 we'd like to see that improve a little bit it does it does challenge us when it comes
040close contact time when you're waiting to find out if somebody is is positive and then covet hospitalizations are remaining very low over the weekend two and a one posted so that's our local data and that data this data is what is on the community's cover 19 task force as of 5 o'clock p.m today the the task force website the isdh releases information on wednesdays so that information came out on the uh last week i guess that's the result as as of the 20th and we are 0.5 if you're not sure exactly where we are we are immediately to the left of the one kind of in southeastern indiana there so there is a one decatur county uh had creeped up to that number so they were in the yellow but most counties in the state
041of indiana at least right now in the blue uh we are in that kind of interesting time frame that we're watching closely and as we saw yellow is that you know labor day weekend was um about three weeks ago and uh as we came out of that i think september the seventh was the monday of labor day weekend so we are three weeks removed from that and we'll see if at what impact maybe labor day weekend had on on numbers as we move forward so interesting that a yellow started to occur this weekend as i mentioned that we're three weeks out from labor day weekend right now so we'll we'll keep keep an eye on that information just a reminder in terms of our flow chart that red yellow green is our spread and we
042work with the local community medical professionals and otherwise to look at substantial spread um and then we we base our instructional model upon that and then uh in terms of internally so we went with the local metrics the state metrics and and then here at bcsc and we have been providing this information to you as a board and also to the media each friday and we had at the end of the day on monday the 10th we had 25 positive test cases 16 of those were students nine staff members that's a combination of teachers and support staff only six of the 16 positive student cases have actually been in a school building and then 395 total close contacts now due to both internal and the majority being external positive cases so that is information as
043we have it right now with uh reopening thank you dr roberts board members any questions is there any particular reason why the test turnaround time is trending up over the last three four years great question uh james we've not been able to get a substantial or significant answer uh from from local professionals kelly anything that's been brought up recently in your dialogue so we you know it it was a 2.7 went to 2.3 went back up 2.7 now it's inch back up to 2.9 so still in the green at least the way we have this here but the trend is not good to keep picking up that way and as i indicated the challenge with that is if we have a student who went home sick and they get a test a couple days maybe
044after going home sick and then we're still waiting another three or four days before we get a positive we haven't done any close contact tracing to get those students or staff members out of the building until that test gets back so it is a is a key piece for us i was very concerned considering flu season is coming up quickly i mean it's going to compound that issue it is indeed uh i do want to comment i want to thank mr persinger on his comments this morning er this morning before the meeting this evening uh in regards to school certainly challenges uh many things going on but um certainly a credit to our staff members our teachers our support staff and our administrators for getting us to where we are now as we continue to
045work and tweak things and address and realize those challenges we've had there are a lot of positives are happening in our school corporation as we continue to move move forward kelly we we don't have data do we on on like in in years past normal um absenteeism from flu season colds things like that do we i've heard anecdotally from a couple of teachers that they're not they're not having kids already you know the normal spike when everybody comes back and shares germs and they're not seeing that are you hearing that across the schools that's i was that's going to be an interesting side effect is that we may have one of our best attendance rates for those that are coming in person in a long time because everybody's got one of these on right yeah
046the one thing just might hurt our attendance right a little bit is when we do send a kid home they're staying home for a number of days yeah yeah yeah we have quarantines of 10 school days 14 days when you have the weekends or a good point where a kid goes home with a sore throat might have to stay home for 10 days as we went through the process so that's going to exaggerate some things a little bit just because of those those circumstances okay i have a question sure julie first of all i'd like to agree with jeff's mr caldwell's comment about bringing our teachers and staff back as much as we can so thanks for bringing that up secondly when we do get the commitment you're talking about remote in person does that
047maybe i miss this does that mean cvp or in person and bridge will no longer be an option or how is that a good question julie because that is that is combined with our efforts with this so first thing we try to do in the middle of the semester was just reduce that flux or remove that flexibility of going back and forth and maintain still both options so bridge and cvp still in place in terms of a commitment yes so coming out of fall break we know where if a student's going to be in person in bridge or cvp and there for the remainder of the semester that's the commitment we're looking for in all three options as we go forward we would like to reduce those two options to one and and and get
048students to get into one of those two now i think i mentioned this in the last meeting but we do realize that that answer of of which option is best based upon grade level may be different so it may be likely that the remote option for elementary students would be bridge and the remote option for secondary students would be cvp so as we're working on that to see what that might be and hurrying toward a solution there i don't know that that can occur by second semester or not as we balance everything out but that is a piece of the the puzzle okay and and as we uh bring those students back who want to come back for the remainder of the semester right then uh we're looking at we were talking about teacher and
049student ratio so what is what is an ideal teacher-student ratio in elementary versus secondary that's probably based on who you ask as small as possible would be the the typical answer um i i don't know i mean a lot of people will if if there's a policy number we're not going to set policy on this because you have to stick to it to throw out you know 25 it's kind of that that number that you try to keep classes below that if you can um and that isn't always the case so there will be classes of more than 25 in our school corporation but uh as we i'll use the elementary example specifically here because we do have all the the the numbers back right now as we head into fall break so as we
050balance uh the remote options and get teachers assigned just a remote and we get then some teachers back from remote because as we reduce that that number of students that were in remote to in person we can take teachers that were doing remote only now put them back in the classroom so even with that movement and using the spaces we have we're at about 23 to 1 in terms of an average i think we have some class some buildings averaging 24 to 1 but the average over the 11 elementary schools is still going to be at 23. now the physical distancing and some of our classrooms that's that's still not the easiest to do but we have a lot of classrooms before having kids come back that were at 23 as well so it because
051of the teachers we're getting back from the remote learning and putting back into the classroom they're helping keep those ratios at least still manageable with physical distancing and moving forward okay and i have one more question um you talked about the stipends for the teachers who are doing this double work um and you're still in conversations with the cea about that about the amounts and how much will go out is that what you it is so so the resolution that's on the table for tonight is an intent it's for you to give us the the ability to move ahead with that looking at a january payout of a stipend and that's after the criteria for earning the stipend is set and then the actual dollar amount in terms of per person so we've established a
052pool of money that we can take from our budget and use for this purpose and now we'll find out how many teachers would actually fit into that and the reason is that you know again we're entering week 8 right now and and there may be a teacher who now can step away from doing both and just back to one or the other um whereas other teachers will be doing it maybe for the entire semester we're trying to to also address that but if that's the case then what is that final pool of people that we would say all right that that was a semester's worth of in-person versus in-person and remote learning here's a certain stipend that we would go okay thank you so the first nine weeks we were about i i kept hearing
0538200 and in person and 3200 in in virtual or one one form or other the virtual what are you projecting that's going to be then in second second nine weeks so we're inching toward nine thousand back in the building since still twenty two hundred all right um and they're rough numbers mr caldwell but yeah around around that i know we don't have the finals yet yeah okay that's a big change yes all right thank you dr roberts if there are no other questions board members we'll move on no one signed in for the public comment section tonight so we'll move on to board commendations um i think you had one dr shed i do i wanted to offer commendations to the corporation but to particularly oops sorry highlight the work of benny coomer she's our
054coordinator of instructional technology and wrote a grant that we've received for almost a hundred thousand dollars from the indiana department of education it is our digital learning capacity building grant and it will allow us to create a program called growing educators through micro conden credentialing referred to as gem so yay thank you for sharing that doctor should thanks to bernie and nick in the i.t group for putting that together and providing additional ways for our staff to develop in their use of technology instructional technology board members do you have other commendations i would share one with you must be nick and his team's night but brian trivit from our it department along with marie gregory took advantage of homeland security flag some additional dollars available for our free and reduced lunch population and this was
055kind of above and beyond i don't think they this was work that was in their job description but they saw the opportunity they were the right folks probably in our team to do it and it ended up resulting in about two hundred thousand dollars more available funds for our free and reduced lunch population here this year so that's terrific work uh um that really will help both the corporation cover the cost of the services and the meals that we're providing and the families that need those so thanks thanks especially to brian and marie nick if i missed anybody else in that group that helped out with that but thank you thanks for mentioning that mr colwell that was one of those very quick things turn around time wise i think we got the notice on
056a monday night and said that by the way this is going to be due on wednesday yeah and so to make sure we count every student uh we rely on brian and his team to and marie to get that done and they pulled together so appreciate their their hard work on that that's super school board member so do you have any reports this evening from your uh other committees or groups julie i have two thank you the first one is from diversity council which met on september 16th and just as a reminder the diversity council mission is to ensure that no bcse student success or failure is ever determined by any part of his or her identity and we had a during our meeting uh charles edwards we haven't met since february 19th basically we
057hadn't gotten together so our very first opportunity to get together we had what charles called a temperature check so we were able to go around the room see how everybody was doing and we really shared some great feelings some people you know we just opened up and said here's how i'm feeling about covid here's how i'm feeling about just everything that's going on in the in the world today and um so props to mr edwards and his leading of this um of this diversity council and then kim easton gave some updates on some of the other committees that are meeting or that are getting ready to meet and then we went over some upcoming community events that were going on um council for youth development some other some other workshops and things like that so
058that was the diversity council hold on i have to find this other and the other one was the bcsf let me find it um let's see hold on sorry there we go okay so the bartholomew consolidated school foundation has announced a new partnership with donors choose was founded in 2000 by a high school teacher in the bronx donors choose empowers public school teachers from across the country to request materials for their classrooms this partnership is designed to provide teachers and bcsc with broad-based support for supplies and classroom projects bcsf has contributed an initial twenty five thousand dollars toward a dollar for dollar match for projects with a total cost of one thousand dollars or less in the first two days of this matching partnership three grants were fully funded in bcsc one each at clifty
059creek elementary busy bees and south side elementary donations have come from local donors as well as donors from pennsylvania texas and arizona we are looking forward to seeing bcscf's impact grow exponentially with this partnership and information can be found on bcsf's facebook page but the website for donors choose is www.donorschoose.org and it's a very easy website i i visited it it's really nice so that i wanted to announce that for the foundation i'll add to that dr biltz that if you go to that website and just type in your zip code or even type in our name of our school corporation any grant that falls within that zip code will pop up so you'll be able to easily see the grant requests that are there and choose to donate and as dr bill said if
060you donate a dollar the foundation's donating a dollar so it uh reduces the ask uh by half of what was needed thank you for representing us on both of those committees uh dr bills james yeah just real quick i had the honor this morning to participate in the isba delegate assembly and uh although i can't go into details because it's not you know officially released yet just in reference to the budget that we were talking about earlier one of the top priorities for the legislative session that we voted on consists of 100 percent adm funding for virtual education participation even if it's more than 50 uh utilized so but that is only for the upcoming school year because obviously you'd have to renew it every year but that is their top priority that they've listed
061that we voted on so that was good to hear good thank you thank you for representing us on that i appreciate you stepping up and doing that for us this year it was interesting no not me okay there are no other reports we have at least one cabinet report this evening on preliminary adm mr phillips thanks mr caldwell just to bring you bring you up to date on where we stand today with adm the count today would be 11 309 students 40 of whom are virtual students from uh from a funding perspective which is which is what i pay attention to of course the uh interesting thing i know a few of you got an email but the the class that we saw the greatest decline in is the one we fully expected to be
062which was kindergarten large number of families just deciding to wait a year or even skip kindergarten and roll their students in in first grade next year as i dug into it i just looked back at prior kindergarten years and only three times in the last 20 years have we seen a decline of two percent or more in our kindergarten classes the first time is the class of 2020 which is the children that were born after 9 11 the second time are our current fourth graders who were the the children that would have been born following the great recession and now this one with the uh what we're calling the coveted recession eventually but it was just interesting to see that that's where our greatest loss was in that in kindergarten had we had a normal
063enrollment in kindergarten this year we would be would be somewhere up in the neighborhood of plus 75 students this year which was certainly bucking the trend of what many of my colleagues are experiencing across the state so good news on an adm standpoint so the 11 305 309 309 is it compares with what was our number last year it's up uh 25 25 or 30 from last year still down from the prior fall right because we did lose uh 60 60 plus last year but okay certainly certainly good news and you said had we had a what we would have considered a normal kindergarten class it would have been up almost 100 well over 70 up yeah oh wow okay great okay thank you mr phillips any questions for chad let's move to item 4
064on our agenda dr roberts you've got items 4a through in that you're requesting approval on you want to take us through those sure what my record for number of requests for approval is but this may be approaching this approaches those first five always the same but my request for approval include minutes of the public hearing meeting that was held on september 10th which was the kickstart to the ability or opportunity to collectively bargain also the minutes of the regular school board meeting on september the 14th we also have a list of supplemental contracts for you we always have field trips professional leaves and school fundraisers on here no requests specifically for those this particular time we did have a set of uh claims from dated september 28th that's a little over half a million dollars
065and then a set of payroll claims from september 11th that was about 2.4 million dollars additionally this is the second reading for policy 2266 a new policy which is non-discrimination on the basis of sex and education programs or activities which is title ix that was a federally directed situation as changes were made we needed to change our policy to align with that additionally we have a request for the budgets for title 1 part a title ii part a title 3 and title 4. we also have a new service agreement with a new benefits broker slash consultant that is being recommended by our health trust we have a 2020 additional appropriation resolution that's the resolution that comes out of tonight's second public hearing we have a resolution to change the number of teacher days for 20
06620 21 that is in regard to the number of uh teacher session days the number of days that we dedicate specifically for teachers not instruction so this year when we added a time to the beginning of the school year took the start date from august 6th august 10th made sure that our teachers had three paid days to prepare for that on the calendar is two and a half and so we just had them stay for the extra half day on a friday paid for that extra half day because we changed two and a half to three we need to have you approve a resolution to change that number of days from two and a half to three and then there's a resolution of the intent to pay the teacher stipends that i uh reviewed earlier
067so those are the many ones that i have um let's see let's see it looks like i have an extra piece there yep okay good so board members is there a motion to um approve items four a through in on the table so thank you mr persinger for a second thank you mr bryant questions if any do you have for dr roberts or any of his staff on these items dr roberts on the second reading of the non-discrimination can you explain to me the how that works so we have a second reading and then next time well there'll be a i'm not quite sure yeah so so our policy indicates that a a revised or new policy would go through two readings so first reading was on september the 14th and tonight is the second
068reading so actually your approval to tonight if you so choose i would make this policy policy julie if we agree on it tonight okay so what i see in front of me that you sent that there's some green and there's some so the green are the changes those are the changes right okay yeah just like last time you had some green but there's changes since then right yes yeah okay so so yeah okay thank you so they're they're the the we had a few words added based on mr monroe's um recommendation on just making sure the definitions for sexual offenses align with both federal and indiana code so slight changes there and then dr shed cut a a blank where we had not put a number of days that we allowed people to respond back
069to when we'd given them the the information about the decision and it's five i think that's the top of page 18 if i'm recalling the pages but so those those tweaks were in the policy and it's still the 90 days that you have to have still that timeline within within 90 days dr said just did make a nice helpful observation i think at the beginning of the meeting tonight that that that policy looks this long it's still going to be long but it's going to be shorter if we take out all the editing notes and and the options that were in there that we cross out and so forth right uh yes it will be reduced thanks for raising that doctor bills that that that's my question is along those lines uh chris you've you've
070had a chance to look at that you're you're good with what the changes that were made okay we used chris as direct language right right and did we include the definition of consent yes in there as well yeah and does anybody want to grill dr pleek on the her four title requests tonight i already sent her notes and got answers yeah i got copied on some of those those were very helpful thank you gina yeah i think that was something we talked about and did appreciate gina's kind of one pager i think title one went to two pages or more but pretty much was able to scale that down to be readable and understandable i would share with the other board members i swapped a couple of notes with mr phillips and i think a
071copy james on those as our health trust representative just this this service broker the expectations these fees i think will be higher than we've been paying but um chad and the and and james and the rest of the health trust feel fairly confident that we'll more than make those up in savings on some of our expenses that we've been incurring with that so because of those questions mr caldwell mr phillips he did put a slide into tonight's presentation just to address some of those questions that have been asked okay thank you thank you chad any other questions hearing none all in favor of items approving items for a through n as presented by dr roberts please indicate by raising your hand all opposed same sign that motion carries unanimously thank you dr roberts miss heine
072you have some human resources recommendations i do thank you i'm requesting approval of the human resource recommendations as presented this evening thank you is there a motion to accept the recommendations made by ms heine thank you mr brian is there a second a second thank you dr shedd any any questions from his hiding hearing none all in favor please indicate by raising your hand all posed same sign that motion also carries unanimously thank you miss heidi board members other items for this evening dr bill's anything from you mr persinger okay mr bryant dr shedd i i'll just add i do appreciate because we've been getting lots of emails i appreciate the work that everyone is doing to respond i appreciate the flexibility that we've had and it is very cool that james said positive stuff
073tonight but i appreciate that that we are learning from it and um i aspire that second nine weeks is going to be much well more calm perhaps we'll say as long as everybody's really healthy and smart during fall break so i just appreciate the work that we're all doing and that we're all listening and we're listening openly versus meaningfully so i i do enjoy that work and i hope everybody has a great fall break people have worked really hard there's a significant number of our administrative team that i don't think took the summer off and i'm sure we have a good number of teachers that didn't as well so they do everyone deserves fall break so do enjoy it and be safe thank you dr shed dr roberts nothing more that thank you mr culver
074thank you dr roberts i would echo um dr shedd's points i i i wish we could go faster with being better at our alternate modalities of providing education especially the bridge i think we've been learning on the fly i keep reminding myself we're seven weeks in uh we've been doing it that we the program we thought was going to be a temporary stop gap because do you guys remember april we really thought by this time in the year this would be way behind us i think and we were just starting to get a hint that maybe not and uh and so i think i think the the teaching staff all the folks involved with with delivering uh the bridge education plan there are to become commended for for hard work i i feel bad continuing
075to ask people to be patient but it's really seven weeks it really is just seven weeks we've done and and i i like uh dr shedd said i i'm convinced that the second nine weeks will be incredibly better and more successful at the work that we do then the first nine weeks was and yes yes yes please if you can take a down week control break and relax and uh even if you just sit quietly and sleep a little dr caldwell i or mr caldwell i should add because i get to hear about all the school corporations in the state of indiana and where my student teachers are are not we have done a fabulous job serving kids there are way too many school corporations that have not and didn't prioritize kids over all kinds
076of other stuff so i'm very proud that that was important to us in all of our decision making and our chaos and requests for flexibility it was always about the kids so i do appreciate that and i see it compared to certainly corporations our size thanks dr shed thank you um our next a reminder our next school board meeting um is on october 19th so we have uh about three weeks uh from tonight and we will have a fall break in between now and then so please everyone in that time away if you're traveling travel safely if you're just staying here please relax and and get some downtime there's no other business for this board this meeting is adjourned