001i 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 all right i can welcome everybody to the meeting tonight and if you're tuning in on facebook you probably didn't set your clock right because we're done future board meetings march 22nd at 6 00 pm here april 26 6. at 6 00 pm here and may 10 at 6 pm here under recognition we have a recommendation to approve a 500 donation from marion family optometry for sharp creek robotics program a recommendation to approve a 500 donation from stan and kathy leland for sharp creek robotic robotics program a recommendation to approve the 500 donation from andrew dixon for sharp creek's robotics program a recommendation to approve
002now get this 381 dollar grant from bright futures indiana build learn grow stabilization grant from metro north elementary little knights preschool and also equally impressive sorry little norse preschool i'm sorry also as equally impressive for the little knights preschool we have a recommendation to approve a 171 226 dollar grant from bright future indiana build or grow stabilization grant and get optional north recommendation to approve the donation of a weber grand piano model wg-60 for the northfield choir from valerie boyd and a recommendation to approve a 100 110 donation from jonathan flops for northfield track i'm good to appreciate that donations appreciate it i second that motion on a second to approve the donations all right for sale school recognition i'll go ahead and start and do a few and i will let mr mcdivot as
003he's um he's going to take the screen and we'll show some things at the end but before he does so don't uh yeah yeah like that play what i'm reading but uh because they'll be just watching that because that says wonderball 2022. there's gonna be a lot of excitement right there so i'll start with northfield from mr steiner congratulations to the northfield 8th grade robotics team for winning the wallace robotics tournament and of course qualifying for the state meet and i'll talk about that a little bit more later on my report there were several team members of course you have logan mesa lyons cody yester and local graf congratulations to our seventh grade team we will also qualify for state with skills points norfolk junior high teams are coached by jason lyons so good luck
004to state this saturday also northfield congratulations to carson pratt for being named indiana high school wrestling coaches association junior academic all-state honorable mention also congratulations to the following boys basketball players for making the old wallbush county team eli crow and dylan thomason uh jackson peas and jake holderman honorable mention and mr snyder continues to say that he would like to say thank you and awesome amanda jones amanda rhodes and her staff in the northcote kitchen throughout all the pandemic and staff shortages they have done an awesome job serving the students and staff and then mr mcdaniel at southwood would like to recognize dakota wilson for representing southwood high school at the isma state's instrumental solo and ensemble contest at north central high school in indianapolis she earned a silver rating for her flute solo also
005from southwood congratulations to cole weiner and jason mulcik for being honored at the region five football junior class all-state team and continuing on with southwood congratulations to ourselves with varsity boys knights they took the sectional basketball title saturday with a win over lakeland christian each game tuesday friday and saturday were hard fought competitive and could have gone to either team congrats to coach burris and the crew and our athletes for their success this is the third straight sectional title taken by the knights the knights next play at regionals at frankfurt high school on this saturday i believe that is at 10 a.m and then i will let mrs moore mention the ones that she has we have artists with the artwork on display um in the state house in the rotunda for the celebration of
006youth art month and the students are grant abel kelly morgan addison chamberlain avery davis gage cook kenzie dietrich alyssa johnson reagan woods caitlyn lafferme and braelyn freedom and five of those all the artists were invited for a reception there at the state house a couple weekends ago and five artists were there along with mrs gray and one of our artists grant abel received the award of honorable mention for the elementary division so it's pretty exciting very awesome all right thank you and now i think we'll turn it over to mr mcdivitt share some of those things at white studios in high school thank you so mrs falbein who is our official title is in school suspension supervisor but she wears a lot of different hats so one of the things she does in coordination with
007mrs our girl's math teacher is they organize a winter ball every year for our students typically it's been in december we did not have it last year for obvious reasons but we have this past thursday and there's a lot of work that goes into it from mrs feldman's standpoint over the years she and those who assist her have accumulated a variety of formal dress attire both for boys and girls and so for the weeks leading up to it she takes them down takes the girls down and they go through the dresses try to pick out something that they like that fits for them the whole nine yards and so um not that this surprises any of us but i think sometimes we feel like you know the kids that go to whites are different than
008all the other kids and in some ways they are because of their past but in many ways they're just teenagers and they love dressing up so when they come in it's in the hot sunset in the cafeteria where we set it up i mean just like most teenagers when they're dressed up they stand taller they act more adult-like it is so it's really cool and i'm not this is like a two-minute video i'm not going to show the whole thing but i'll show a little bit but the best thing that happened as a result of this at the end of the evening white says what they call campus supervisors which lack of a better word it's like it's who the house parents would call if they need help uh and so the campus supervisors that
009were on duty that night as afterwards were tearing things down putting things away one of them came over to me and said i don't know this is a good thing or not but i've heard a couple kids say that this was the best night of their life and so obviously the thing can be discouraging it's like wow this is the best night of your life but on the other hand it's just really cool that we can you know make something like this happen so i say we uh almost all the staff pitched in in some form or another but really mrs feltheim is does the heavy lifting here to make sure this happens so let me just again this is a couple of minutes long i'm just gonna play a little bit but if any
010dancing brings out mr key paper you can you cannot because you have a knee injury i'm ready to [Music] i will go compared to two years ago there was very little dancing [Music] so i cannot say the name of the dj but the dj we use is a former student of lights from like 15 plus years ago so anyhow it's a great night and uh just like most high school principals you kind of take a deep breath and say it's another dance okay but at the end of the night it is it is worth every everything that we put into it so thank you very much can i show you one more thing let's see if i can do this right that's not what i wanted to show you so my daughter uh that's my
011daughter there she works she's uh she works at indiana wesleyan but as you can see all that stuff is hers and i asked her like a month or so ago hey sir would you want to come over to school the day of our dance and just you know start doing nails for girls and so she did she took the afternoon off she came over and this is in my office but it was just fun just to listen to sarah talk to the girl i mean my daughter has a lot of great people skills but just to hear her talk to the girls and get them you know get excited about getting hamilton from the dance so that was kind of a cool thing for me as a dad just to watch my adult daughter do
012that but uh but the girls it's a different one but yeah it was it was really cool so i mean that's it if i can steal that back then you can yep oh hold on sorry sorry [Music] for agenda items only i'm guessing there are a whole lot of people that call it they have 11 viewers 11 viewers because all we ever really did was say it in these meetings wasted enough time for them to catch up to what they want to say if anything yes okay and since i haven't heard anything we'll move on to consent agenda items approval of the minutes from our last meeting on february 22nd last meeting claims [Laughter] approve the claims on february all right pre-roll nothing different with payroll it's a little bit higher but like i said
013before we're starting to get some of those winter sport coaches stipends and so second to approve payroll on february financial summary just the uh normal end of the month for uh february kind of shows where our balances were at the beginning of the month beginning of the year beginning the month and at the end of the month and so still things are trending in the right direction from that standpoint i don't know if that is possible just because it's a gun that we have used okay so i just don't like it whatever go all right so we'll move on to personnel then under resignation we have kim miller custodian at southwood elementary school employment james ullinger junior high wrestling coach at wabash high school how about james oligar junior high wrestling coach at northville high
014school amy long cook northville high school it's because of the time change that's right april howard paraprofessional at metronome elementary uh for retirement teresa brubaker bus driver from the north and that was effective at beginning school here and again we just want to thank especially our teresa brubaker for all the time that she has spent uh with us as as a bus driver um and that means that we can have more people sign up to become a bus driver so i've seen this melissa ball if you're interested in doing that any board member too that wants to sign up they look something out to us just came a little bit harder to get the license motion in a second to approve hr all in favor say hi heartland career center report matt's not here i
015don't think he gave us anything so we'll move on to superintendent's report mr key favorite yeah i just want to mention um this is just kind of fantastic how things have have gone over the last uh several years but with robotics um i call it the 2021 2022 state bound we actually have nine um nine teams going um this saturday to lucas oil stadium of course last year it was virtual um but this year we have nine teams so just to let you know southwood elementary has two teams they have a fourth grade and a sixth grade team uh southwest junior senior high as one team the eighth grade team and let me just mention some of the the coaches here too for southward elementary it's erica tyson kelly baird and amy schmidt and southwood
016junior senior high school it's jody carr and dan wright and then sharp grade we have four teams going the blue the gray the white and the black and that's amber kevin brettsman and joel nessler and then at northfield we have a seventh and eighth grade team going and they're both coached by jason lyons i think you heard that earlier from the recognition from mr snyder and also just want to uh recognize again uh regional bound the southwest boys basketball team we did say it was 3p but i also believe it's the fifth time they've won a sectional in six years so three p but five out of six years so that's excellent and then um the courses we have coming up uh norfolk and south of bannon choir honors band performance is this friday night
017a lot of excellent musicians there too and also just want to mention we have and i had this on my forefoot i'm going with but also we have the northfield seniors are going to be going to boston i think they leave on sunday you guys have already approved that but that's coming up and then the southwood seniors are going to vision for tennessee in april so it's great that they're all able to do that and those are are great memories for those kids so i appreciate you always uh approving those field trips and those extended field trips that's really happening this time all right curriculum report mr great yeah yeah i've got a couple things this year thanks yeah um in the board packet there should have been i'm going to kind of go out
018and order here's a little bit of press release yeah i just wanted to make the board aware this was in the newspaper mr key favor maybe saturday's paper saturdays the uh i'll give you the the condensed version of it um several libraries have started to pool their resources for digital sources because you know obviously you don't have to be at the physical library it's the libraries for fort wayne the wabash across the state and so um the vendor for that is uh is one we use for our our personal school libraries and so our kids can work with that but they couldn't access the digital library because that's a you have to have a library card to do that well the vendor really encouraged libraries to try to work out reach out with schools and
019so [Music] we found this we found a library to do that we found a library to sponsor our schools so that all msc students can access uh this they call it connect but it's just this digital library that they can get to on the cloud and so um we've got juvenile and young adult things that kids can check out there they can check it out at any time on their ipad and it automatically when it finishes it just returns it back to them and so we're just really excited to find somebody to do that to offer they say thousands i haven't looked at all of them but it's a lot it's a lot and anytime you can get especially in a rural county where you get access to all that stuff we just think it's
020amazing to promote that and so we want to give a special thanks to i want to be careful to say it correctly pulaski county i've got a got a ringer in the room to make sure i say it correctly uh because they were willing to step out and do that so the vendor connected us it was funny the vendor connect asked me on a tuesday hey what would you think about us reaching out to the libraries and i said you know well they're not going to find in my mind i thought well they're not going to find one and then sure enough by friday they had found one and connect those so it was just that fast and so just really excited about that so if you see the newspaper somebody asked there you have
021kind of a background so we weren't able to do this locally yeah that's that's a great question um we actually learned about this from a partnership that wabash carnegie library has with another local school system um and it came at no cost there's no cost for student membership there's no cost for any of that stuff the libraries buy the books like wabash carnegie would own simple books but so would other public libraries and so actually that's where we got the idea because they partnered with local school and give their students free access however we we tried to work with them after a couple meetings we went to their school board and sorry library board yeah sorry uh and and made a presentation there but they denied our request um they denied access and so we
022thought that's kind of what encouraged the vendor to go do that um the vendor was kind of surprised because they had not had that happen yet um and so that's why they were prompting us like they kept honest about that and so when they came up with this idea i thought well i mean if you can find a library to do that and sure enough the people of pulaski county stepped up and um and we have it a it's a win-win for students i mean there's no cost there's no work you just literally our students would literally just push a button that they would use to access books in our library at the school they don't realize that it's not at our school it just connects them to those things and we get to monitor
023them all uh jennifer neal our head librarian already kind of looked through to make sure age appropriateness and stuff so that we make sure they match the values of our community and so and plus i think pulaski county has some excellent people there and still trying to trust their values as well based on the people i know from that area so so you should see that pressure if somebody has any questions please have them contact me i'm kind of the one that's kind of been organizing that and might know the most and the high schoolers are they'll they'll become more of this out that's right and so at the high school level they can already check them out um and so they've already been able to check them out on their ipads and so we've
024let librarians know it all schools and we're trying to let english teachers know to try to get the word out um we don't expect a huge following for this um it's probably in this group that'll do that at the older grades but even those handful of kids that might do it you know to give them access to this it's it's really cool so let's i mean just all different titles and all different books yeah primarily at the high school level it's more the classics and so not quite the excitement but once you get to the like the elementary the juvenile like they're a lot more kid-friendly kind of books that they're going to enjoy but there are some and they come with audio books and they're not audio books like siri red like robotic like
025they're actual actors reading them and so it's quite a quite a right range and to be honest we found out about this how long were we doing this it was about three years ago that we tried to get the system to work with carnegie library and every year they added more books like not just wabash but like the other group has so i don't see this slowing down i feel like this is going to be the way the future and so um they say thousands i would i would assume soon will be tens of thousands as we get other libraries yeah the vendor put it together they wanted us to promote this because they want more people to access the books so there's one part to that and then if you look on my report
026um [Music] we are uh as an administrative team we've been really toxic about trying to narrow down our focus as far as what we're going to do academically and the and the term literacy kept coming up and so that is that's going to be our biggest point is promoting literacy and one way we wanted to do that was to try to make sure we had access to materials um not just digital ones but also print and so we're kind of us old-timers remember that there used to be a cycle like a six-year cycle of you know adopting science this year and social studies out here and so we're currently in the math cycle and so we sent math teachers to go look at the textbooks to get some of the get some of that and
027so we'll actually be bringing the math here shortly but today i want to bring the findings from the social studies committee and um you can see kind of the notes there we have we've been at this for about a year with the social studies people and so they've explored them and they've looked hard and so we're going to make this recommendation to you guys here in a month or so we want to leave it out for four weeks to look at but because of the way spring break falls they're actually going to have a couple more weeks so at the end of april we'll come back with a formal recommendation but this is just to let people know that we are looking at some some materials and we have print copies of those here at
028central office that members of the public can come look at and check out if they want to we have parent representatives that are currently have some of those materials too that are looking at those i just know in today's age everybody kind of gets real attentive when you talk about curriculum and things and so purely transparent we've been looking at it for a while and so if anybody wants to board member or club member the public wants to see those we have those we'll have those here from now until um we'd like for them to check them out now in a week prior to that board meeting so that way we have a chance to respond to them and make our final recommendation to you guys this has to do with printed text correct so
029there'll be a set of 30 in class correct somebody taken home if somebody wants to get one yeah yeah um and you'll notice that some places some classes didn't want to buy books and so they're still using the prior books and some of the materials they've kind of a huge accrued along the way but yeah printed textbooks uh several you kind of have a wide range some of our teachers really want to have textbooks on hand and some of our teachers really enjoy having a visual too they feel like that connects with the students and so i feel like that's healthy as i look at the big picture because students that prefer to print are going to get a chance to access it that way in some classes and students like the digital like we're
030giving options to those kids because they're going to have to be able to read something on the screen and they're going to have to be able to pay for it so i appreciate the next one i'm curious that has been done people learn better as with most studies it depends on what they want to find when they go looking most of the digital research was set up prior to the ipad becoming such a useful thing and so reading books on doctors is not very convenient and so a lot of the earlier studies 10 15 years ago will say yeah kids don't learn as well reading visually but now that we're reading on kindles and ipads and it's much more mimicking what paper looks like there's a lot of research that's that shows that it produces
031positive impacts as well i think my personal opinion just off top of my head uh regardless of what kids are going to do that right that's i bet i bet our kids will probably getting most of their news media from facebook and tick tock and twitter and whatever else and so we have to engage them where they're going to be um but that doesn't mean we should sacrifice the academic readings as well i think probably even some adults might live in that area so i'll bring a formal recommendation for the social studies materials at the at our board meeting at the end of april um and this is a chance for public so the numbers that you order is that based on uh what recommendation or so you'll notice that are you talking about why
032there's 30 yeah so buying textbooks is is costs i mean it's costly and so if we buy 25 now and we end up losing to you and somebody moves and so so 30 is a general round number most of our classes are in low 20s 2021 and so it just gives teachers extras in case they have to send one here and the members that come back but i have a feeling you're gonna talk together recommendation to approve the 2022 summer school courses i'll let mrs moore so we're looking at offering similar experiences for our elementary students like we did last year we had roughly about 200 kids participate in some sort of activity last year um whether it be through what i would say more of a traditional summer school where it's an academic business
033for our minds in action which is an enrichment focus but we're looking at that from the end of may through june um just mondays for thursday and then offer also for that academic person parents the option of either half day or all day in partnership with ymca i'm not sure what's the first year we had done that as well well off of the half day we've always had a full day yeah i'd say the other highlights are the expansion of the minds in action program which we'll do some uh exploring uh different parts in across indiana right yes so our younger group will stay close to home just afternoon experiences and um then our older students will have two campouts one in southern indiana where we're looking at some caving and then at the indiana
034then if you go ahead and go to the secondary page um boone has kind of been in charge of the secondary summer school has taken that over and it'll be continue the same offerings that we've had in the past we'll have driver's education we'll have the opportunity for a credit recovery we'll also have the opportunity for um advanced uh advanced credit as far as maybe trying to work ahead or maybe fit in their schedule uh and some other opportunities that we may not offer through indiana online academy and then we'll have the summer ag program as well and again these are all offerings and a lot of that depends on the actual number of enrollment that we have for those students because we have to have a certain ratio to be able to get reimbursement
035from the state so we won't do them chris if we aren't getting a reimbursement yeah first like summer ag mostly the secondary level stuff we don't india online it doesn't india online doesn't really matter because that's handled a little bit differently through the state um but like the edmonton and the ag and driver's ed does not impact us as well um but our goal is to have enough students to make sure that these programs can operate but in the past there's been times where we haven't had enough and i had to not offer it does it hurt them to have kids try and graduate early by doing some of this they don't necessarily graduate early that's not really the encouragement or the focus there more of it is to fill in gaps that maybe we
036don't offer or they get a schedule that's really tight and they may need to take a class online to be able to get the classes that we offer especially if they may go to an internship or do something like that just to fill those gaps would like that and then that way we can start opening up and looking for stacking for these positions you have not gotten any ideas you can fill all that we did it last year that was way bigger i mean last year we went all the way up to sixth grade and so we're only going up to third grade so i would hope that staffing would not be an issue i've already had teachers ask no grant money for that day is that a lot of that so what we'll do
037is we'll get reimbursed from the state and then we'll supplement anything through some work should be cost neutral for the district yeah and teachers don't like to get up there somewhere but elementary teachers just love their kids so much and they can tell you they can tell you like high school teen let me tell you the high school elementary teachers like they all understand just the power of that extra month with some of those kids and they are more than happy to try to work with them um and so i we won't have yeah i don't think we'll have much trouble filling those positions and in the past financially typically it used to be that the state would actually reimburse us 100 or more but because the budgets are smaller and because more people are
038doing it it's not as much so technically it reinverse about 60 but three or four years ago it was over a hundred percent yeah it was probably over that but when i first started doing it it was over a hundred percent so but yeah but you got more people they never changed the budget as far as the appropriations so you got more people doing summer school it's just taking that away so we get about 60 percent back but it's still important to do it it is it'll be cost neutral this year and for hopefully another year to end we'll make the motion for the summer school that's presented so again we will shoot in a second to approve the summer school course descriptions all right exciting my new business recommendation to approve the southwood senior
039trip to pigeon forge tennessee april 24th to 27th of to approve the southwood senior trip depiction forward all three percent we have no unfinished business or work policy public comment we're going to five years now obviously all right any items from board members on those larger grant dollars early on we have employees now that are just aside from that instead all right so i guess that means we're adjourned