001okay we're live you know trying to do tomorrow oh we don't have this you are alive okay all right we'll go ahead and begin so this is strategic plan number four update and we will actually go through a few slides and obviously stop me if you have any questions um and then we'll get to all information we want to share and i may go back and forth on the slide since uh some of the notes are not they're on the screen but not on the screen so we'll go ahead and do that so just a reminder that our strategic priorities the one is student achievement of course uh seeing different data that we give you all the time there's a lot of great things happening but we always have room for improvement and we'll continue
002to work on that number two recruitment and retention we'll talk about that a little bit more later some of the things that we did to get to the point where we're at and we are close to our adm um final count and i will tell you that we're going to be really really close to what we were last year and obviously knowing a lot of different things there have been a across the county and so it's good to know that we're we're back on track with that it'll be signed to what our thought was our followers yes mostly we're trying to compare apples to apples of course typically we have an increase from fall spring but it looks like we're going to be about the same a lot of different scenarios with that and then
003of course financial uh chris does a great job with all those and you will approve the budget tonight uh we're recommending the budget there tonight so things are looking really well there and of course priority number four facilities and technology is really what we're talking about the most here and so provide safe and efficient learning environments and i do want to read the measurable goal that was presented when we started this in 2019 and that is to optimize utilization and determine feasibility of current facilities or other possibilities and so really when that was written we didn't really know what the other possibilities might be but those are the things that we're looking at whether it's a current facilities or other possibilities and that's what we'll be talking about tonight also so i want to give
004a little brief history i think this is really neat too if um the people if anybody's online watching this we do have the pictures of all of the board members on the on the wall and it's interesting to note that on july 1st of 1959 is when msd became a corporation and you can see in 1962 is when southward northville oakland and you can see where all of those township schools came together and then of course from 1965 to 1980 the four elementaries were built and so one thing i think we're at the point now where we look at okay are there other things that we can do to be more efficient and provide more opportunities for students and looking at the picture there i know everybody can't see that if they're online i don't
005know if anybody is online right now but um the pictures there you can actually see um they're around some tables now we don't have those chairs anymore but we do have uh new tables and chairs but we we uh up to about a year ago we had all those chairs 60 from 62 years ago yeah we still have a few they're just not in this room right now and i have one in my office too so it's really neat to have that so but anyway they were contemplating what to do when you have chippewa fountain la grill lincolnville lynn lawn noble township rowan somerset and urbana they were contemplating of course then like we said 1962-63 was the first school year for southwood junior senior high school in north virginia high school like yesterday but
006nobody was necessarily school at that time here but they watched it but you watched it yeah so one thing we want to look at too is and part of the reason for all this discussion and discussion across the state of indiana with other schools too is just a student enrollment history and i have to explain a little bit this so um going back to 1962-63 being 60 years ago it's almost 60 years ago it's sometimes difficult to find all the data but we do have little booklets that shows some of those enrollments uh that we had back in 1976 1977 and you can see the other day there's a date there that skipped also you from 1980 to 1981 could not find that booklet but there are other dates there so there's a big gap
007from 1982 to 2015 2015 is when i came to central office and then have a little bit more idea through our skyward system or through other electronic means to find out what all those numbers were so you can see the difference from 1979 1980 there were one thousand four students uh at northfield and southwood combined with 493 and 511 always been pretty consistent with the same amount of numbers and then presently and when i said presently this is uh like a week ago so it could be up or down a little bit probably up about 509 students so again when you look at that it looks pretty uh like a huge drop from 81 to 2015 but you also notice that that's there's a lot of years involved with that and then you can kind
008of compare them you go back and forth here you can kind of compare that this is a graph that was provided actually i was in a kiwanis meeting that grill wash county actually presented a population loss in the county and you can see it really parallels you can see 1900 all the way to 2050 is what some projections are but kind of parallels the two different graphs but that's not necessarily our concern as much as a concern of what our own enrollment is how we can make things more efficient provide more opportunities also notice though from to 2020 the last census um it actually we lost 1912 people in long beach county according to the census so going along with what has been projected and this is just another uh graph that was provided by
009walrus county really breaks it down to kind of the same thing you saw before but also breaks it down by age groups and a number that's projected be lost in 2020 to 2050. and look if you look at the 45 to 65 year age that's the largest loss of course when we're talking about large loss unfortunately those people probably aren't moving maybe some of them are going to be snowbirds of florida but other ones might just be passing away save that way that's probably good that's part of that scenario i'm sure maybe they'll move quite sick who knows but that age group two for the most part 45 to 64. probably will not be bringing children to our schools at that age would be yourself so really you know 62 years after the creation of
010mscwc that's where we're at right now we want to propel msd of waters county for the next 60 years and beyond obviously um so strategic plan for is is another way of looking at so providing again additional opportunities for students also facility improvements uh maintenance and upgrades and also building use efficiency and you know through a lot of things that dr kuhn gives to us when we talk about budgets and when we talk about different things we we look at those numbers as far as the efficiencies of our building the capacities that are involved and we do know that right now the capacities of southwood and northfield typically they say for about 80 percent that means we're pretty full but we are actually in the 50s at one of the schools in the 60s to
011the other school and that hasn't changed for the last few years so that's something that we have to look at so really it comes down to some other things that we've looked at so part of this history and strategic plan is just a reminder of all the things that we've done so far so september 2018 we had steve yeager the yeager educational service corporation that came in if you recall he went to all the different communities um he went to all the different schools did a lot of work on just talking to people about some different ideas the same thing is what we're looking at as far as what what can we do to propel uh propel our school district for the next 60 years plus a lot of great things happening but we we
012can't just be looking at today we have to look in the future and so 2018 to 2000 or august of 2019 we had nick lloyd from bright minds marketing of course with open enrollment we have to look at making sure that we are telling our story because if we don't tell our story somebody else is going to tell the story for us so that's when we made some changes and have a lot of great things going along with that too i think you would agree that you know with our hire and with all the things that are going on it's been a good improvement so we appreciate that deb black fighter dr deblar blick fighter from butler university she has her own um also business doctor like lighter associates basically came and helped us with
013those four strategic points those priorities and so all of them really are going to be continual priorities that we've had but those are some but tonight we're going to concentrate more on strategic plan number four so just community communication one thing we went back and looked at okay what are all the things that we've done so far with the public just like this is a public um this is an open meet it's a work session since we only have one guest today it's not a place where it's a question and answer but it is a place that we can discuss and talk and do a few different things like that of course there'll be no vote tonight during this meeting so april 17 2019 we had a school board work session strategic planning two of
014you were not a part of that but the rest of us were and we actually um were off-site we did go to heartland uh i mean yeah heartland remc to their conference room and had a very good meeting with dr december 3rd through the 19th then we presented that to our building level staff so we went to all the different schools and did a presentation and then if you recall on the 17th and the 27th of february we went and took that strategic plan presentation to norfolk south and that was open to the public basically going over all those priorities and other various uh situations and in september 20th or 22nd 2020 we had a school board work session like we are tonight the strategic plan reviewed and updated and part of that was looking
015at you know where we were as far as finding out about building facilities and different things like that and if you recall that was kind of during the cobalt area too and we're still in the covent but it all started march 13th of 2020 and so we we waited a little bit longer and then we had that strategy or that uh school board work section and october 13th is when dr kuhn brought in and we had policy analytics come in to look at some tax rates of a b and then november 10th is when we actually had another school board work session reviewed the strategic plan with barco vilma and then on january 28th of 2021 another school board work session and that's with all of you then two new board members um one thing
016i don't know that we put in here and i thought we did but i don't see it we actually had a work session where we actually took a tour of all the buildings too that's that one it says yes sorry yeah there's two buildings i thought it was theirs okay thank you um so anyway that gives us a little idea of all the things we we've been talking about this a long time um and a lot of things that have been going on the last two or three years and so really tonight and this is where maybe more the discussion so there are studies for facility efficiencies and really there are different studies that we've already looked at we've looked at the retaining of all schools and how what that looks like how much it
017would cost to get them to the point where they would be like new the shuffling of grade levels over time to also reduce or phase into a four or three building um corporation and then giving a specific photo focus on the nine through twelve uh grade levels because as we know right now and we've always talked about a lot of times it's it's the 9 through 12 is where our schools are not to capacity and so looking at that and then of course the one that we need we haven't looked at a lot but we need to do and that's what we've discussed is to build a new high school uh build a 9-12 high school to include phasing into a three-building district over time while maintaining and improving certain buildings so you know i
018want to look back if we look at those board members and i think maybe the superintendents were in some of those pictures too and maybe even some of the school attorneys but i'm sure when they were thinking about amnesty of wall bush county they had all those schools and they were looking at what can we do to become more efficient and i think we're at that time too is what we can do to be more efficient we have a great school district we have a lot of great things going on in all the buildings but we always have to look to the future to see how we can keep that going and make it more efficient and so really that is our work session for tonight so we can ask questions we can talk i
019want to just give you a little bit of an update because these are some of the things that we've been talking about um and thinking about but we just haven't uh made any decisions obviously we're not gonna make any decisions tonight but we need to continue to study and so i think that's a key word here is the studies for facility efficiencies so as much as we can we want to look at studying certain aspects of propelling our school district for the next 60 years there really are no other slides so i conclude with that part of it and obviously then we will uh we'll go into our school board meeting at six o'clock um and then there will be some recommendations we have a this is a a very good uh agenda because of
020of course we're looking at uh different things but i think some great things with with the teacher contract the tentative agreement with the budget uh dr has put together um and then of course uh a resolution that we're gonna look at and the resolution uh we'll go along with this but here again it's just first study because um you have to follow different aspects of any other code to follow looking at studying different facility efficiencies it's almost on topic for a second so see if there's anything anybody wants to say before we conclude this part of our meeting i know there's not enough time for you guys to go back home and get in the fields and then come back to six o'clock i'm not that far away i want to reiterate this isn't because
021we have financial problems correct correct now this has nothing to do with that yeah because some people will say that but this has something to do with that because you guys have done a terrific job of getting us where we need to be yeah well you're talking about fact we're as strong as we've ever been ever efficiencies actually efficiencies provide even more opportunities i think you know there are a lot of opportunities but if the more efficiencies that you have provide more opportunities that's a good question let's just talk about that so um you know financially we are able to add programs which we actually had another program in high schools this year with computer science we could add financially we could add more programs for other students but yet it still comes down to
022that critical mass of if you add this what we'll take away from and will we have any students so we talked about that quite a bit we could add a lot of different things but we would not have students to be able to be in in those activities or in those classes or any of those types of things so that's a very very good question because that is sometimes a question people ask well is this because you want to save money it's not about saving money it's about being efficient with the money now obviously everything it's also i would also say that it also gives us an idea of how better way of how we spend our money so with a direction with a plan yeah we could spend our better we could spend our
023money say better but we can spend it wisely down the road and mike alluded to it you know 62 years ago there was a vision put out for msd we just want to reevaluate that vision and see what we can do to propel us the next 50 16 years as msd and to do that we're going to need to study some things and get a better idea of some of these impacts in the future and i know tim talks about programming too it's like they're programming for our students but because and i'll probably just turn that over to you as far as how students are able or not able to do that because we have programming but yet can you take advantage of that programming in certain situations that we have so yeah our current
024programming is as robust as any area but we offer courses that don't get put into the master schedule because there's just not enough kids to sign up for them so when that happens then that reduces the number of sections we can offer the class which then kind of locks up other parts of the schedule and again it's not for lack of funding or lack of staffing it's just a lot of students and so finding a way to get more students in into those programs unlocks all kinds of opportunities so yeah and people often ask well this to increase our programming well kind of to increase the program i guess more just to create that increase the opportunity for students to take advantage of our programming that we currently are offering so we will see growth
025but it'll be more so allowing students to get the classes that we offer now but because of tight schedules they just can't get to a couple years ago i guess it's been close to a couple years we had as many as i believe you said sections of different classes that met between the two schools that had less than 10 kids but i know this year it's still early and we have kind of an idea on are we still pretty close to that you know i haven't ran that report so i would hate to guess but we still have quite a few like that and we work very hard and it's in some ways you might consider it financially unwise right wasteful we work hard to offer classes if there's only one or two students um
026we still do that so i don't know the exact number but we still have that same time well with the enrollments with the enrollment that we have now compared to what you're talking about i thought i'm sure it has to be close to that too so and and i will say too other school districts that larger school districts or i'm going to say a larger school district but students that have larger districts that have one high school for example you know a lot of times they say that if they don't have 12 students in the class and i just i talked to a chief academic officer curriculum director just a couple years ago they said 12 was the number so they didn't have 12 in that class so you think about that situation you know
027two years ago or three years ago when we said 50 classes that means in some schools they'd say you just lost 50 classes well then what are you going to do so you know we had to offer those classes so you know more efficiently more wisely as far as you know providing those opportunities right and i applaud our efforts and even if we have one or two people in that class to make that available to them i think is important but i also think it's important to look at that efficiency of you know is there a way we could be more not necessarily for financial reasons but for reasons if we can make as you said earlier if we could make more sections go then that frees up a schedule for somebody who said well
028i'd like to take that class but i've got this requirement for my graduation requirement class that has to be this class so i can't take that elective that i would kind of like take so you know we're talking about if we have two or three kids in a class so okay if you've got two or three in northfield two or three at southwest you're still that's six right is that is that a reality oh absolutely there are even in bigger schools you're gonna have classes like ten and eight and some other classes and so we do we try to make those go even with that yeah but it was like advanced classes or those ap classes they are generally ap classes but they're also your special art classes um we have some students with needs
029that are at different buildings and if they work together in one building the programming and the opportunities we give them to meet groups so it's at all levels um i would say even at your chamber or you still have that achievement yeah and no matter how many people you have colleges the more specialized you get the smaller that number will get it will be i mean i took a music theory class at ball state that had seven people in it so it's just a matter of how many people are interested in that class at that time so just i mean is there are there classes that as a department that's there classes that you think that we would offer that we don't now sure i think um but the ones that come to mind are
030your top-end classes like we currently offer a calculus a b which is like calculus one um and we have probably ten students north and south of those um it would be nice to offer calculus two and that you're talking five or six kids right that want to do that but that there would be one example um our fine arts music and band we kind of got very tight with that because of the schedule right like um the band teacher has to cut a list and do this and that well if we had enough grandkids we could hire a separate person to do better than require or open up a schedule for them to offer more banned electives um drama we share a drama program north to south um computer science we were able to create
031an entire new position for that but we have her drive north to south for those things some things gary dale and industrial arts and so all of those things as you create flexibility it opens up all kinds of opportunities and some of those are ones we couldn't even predict right now just depends on teacher and student interest we can really i feel like most the public can feel it with athletics right like we can't feel the c team where we can't feel whatever and all of a sudden then it's like oh what what kind of implications that has on the varsity level same things happens in classes when you can't fill this class then that kind of locks up all of these other things because you have to get this one class in which then
032impacts all levels right not just ap but that teacher also teaches general classes and they have to cover this prep period or they cover this launch and so um we just are we're lean we're leaning tight which is great financially and so it's exciting to have ideas to maybe explore ways to give us just a little bit more breathing room for our teachers and our students so that's scheduled the speed of efficiencies even though the two teachers that we have that travel not the best use of efficiency when they travel because then they lose a period that we could have do something else i'm teaching another class and so that's one of the geographical challenges that we have too because it's great to share and to be able to do that but yet you are
033losing some teaching time because of travel so i guess i would add too as a curriculum guy everybody always wants to promote the academics out of it i think there's a lot of value from our athletic program from our band program from industrial like all of those programs help build kids and that's what we're in the business of it so i hope i hope we don't it's not solely for the academics it's for raising good kids good well-rounded kids that can participate in sports and participate in their interests and the more opportunities we give them the more chances we are to connect with a kid and help them succeed and that's really i feel like that's where our heart is so what would the class size be your estimate well right now just to give
034you an example we had 134 students i guess that maybe give you a little example like last year 134 students graduated from northwest south yeah and i know that i've it's been a long time since i'm in school but i had 130 that graduated in my class and so we're really very close to what the class is part of it and that was kind of a larger class i mean you could we went back to the one slide you can see like back the year they had a thousand students i mean that was a large um obviously large classes there they weren't always like that but still that's it's not very large um and even comparing to schools around us of course there's a lot of schools that have a lot more students than that
035even the eight that we if i think about those you guys could probably help me a little bit too be very comparable to you know manchester wabash mechanical peru um oak hill um not huntington obviously right um okay those classes are getting bigger probably more wabash manchester yeah definitely yeah oh actually higher than that so they were capping up at 30 a class and since i was there they're using the same schedule well they just changed it but for about 14 years they use that same schedule but they were having 50 i mean 30 students in each section of each core class so that's 150 students so they were having 150 um in each class for the most part so they probably averaged 130 to 150 right now and then of course uh um miami
036you know smaller um north miami is comparable to one of our schools to norfolk southwood separately right now um eastbrook maybe a little smaller than that but about the same also so really our neighboring schools that we touch are are about the same as our norfolk and southwood high schools combined right now so give or take 125 to 150 and really our largest class right now is that seventh grade at northfield with 90 students and so but then we also have um i'm doing this on memory but we do have a couple of classes still in the 50s one and i think our senior class right now at southwood is only 50 students so you double that that's only 100. now that's a small small class within the throughout the corporation but there's another one
037that's 50 and but yeah 125 150 but typically probably right around 130 is going to be where that will be over the next several years i'd love to know what some of those guys were thinking what their discussions were i wonder if we could go back on facebook [Music] well there's nothing else we can close this meeting and get prepared for the next one but we can still talk chris our long-term debt goes completely off in and we've done that by choice though too we couldn't we could have had it off before now but we've made strategic spending decisions on northfield and south to keep up with some of our maintenance and upgrades on our facilities we extended that bit by small chunks just to be able to we've always well lately we've short-termed this
038length of debt so that we were in a position we got free but we could have been decorated here to the government hall but we chose to keep improving northwood and southward as the lead schools right right there are bigger facilities and especially southward being kind of an anchor in the southern southern part of the county and district right obviously we're continuing to do that and we just finished up the roof at southwood and then moved over to northfield so contained work on that which is mostly what this last bond was for was for those repairs any other questions or comments kevin definitely touches on an important part of it like it's not just the academic side of it but it's also the financial investment in the future the best way to spend money for
039the next 50 years as well as far as buildings and groups and sewage treatments and the projected assessed valuation was projected to go up even though that you can look at that in two different ways favorably but also ultimately it's net tax bill private tax building it's always encouraging to be in a growth assessed valuation increase happens we don't set proper events i think we'll continue to gather information and continue to report back through some of these sessions and sometimes we think it's we spent maybe too much time doing all the study but it's a very very important decision so we're going to take our time do it right study and the different information it's great to know though too that you know we always want to encourage people that when we do have these
040different meetings and public presentations that they they come and share obviously we have open doors here at central office and the buildings too um to ask questions when it comes down to it so this sidebar and all this is through here in the news about code and so forth there's been a just a decline in public student numbers due to some of the feelings about all of that i just wonder if that'll come back or if public education is still going to be competitive against more private education or home education and so it's it's a tough call for the future you have to do something that puts yourself in a position that attracts everything that you can possibly do we've been fortunate here though i feel like we've not been as impacted as maybe other
041areas in the state with all of that but it's still a market that we need to do better at and become more efficient so that if that trend does continue then we can do more with your students well it it's become such a consumer somewhat a consumer environment is as though you and i decide where we're going to go get our groceries so you know what over here versus here many choices now certainly from other school districts that are finding ways to market what they offer and what they can provide and so it's the competition beyond the covenant and our staff has done a great job knowing that you know we didn't um train necessarily as educators to look at marketing and doing all those things but we've really i think turned a lot of
042corners to make sure that that's what we're doing and making sure and even stepping up games things like that i think we've always have done that i think we kind of look internally a little bit more to say what can we do to do better jobs with that so there's a lot of things that you can do but you have to have that in your mind too to know what can we do to help and making sure that we provide the best opportunities for our students and the best education that we can all right well we will close this meeting ps6 [Music] same bad time