001pledge 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 and all everybody we actually have an audience tonight um future board meetings april 27th 6 p.m may 11 and may 25th at 6 pm here you'll notice that we are not meeting two weeks or the second tuesday of april that is spring break we do have one thing under revision of the agenda on our new business so we'll move on to public recognition we have a recommendation to approve a 10 donation from joy adding for northfield high school from and also recommendation to approve a 350 donation from the fountain christian church for southwest high school fca have a motion in a second to accept the donations
002all in favor say hi all right that was school recognition i'll let you go with that mr d favorite all right thank you mr daisy so we'll go ahead and start in order uh with mr boone and then we'll go with mr snyder so mr moon you're on one of these times we're going to have to let beauty go before we are [Music] so thanks for having me i appreciate being able to represent southland elementary tonight our fellow books team uh competed just about like everything else they competed virtually last night uh typically uh the last several years that's been held at hartland career center but uh um we did it virtual this year and still thankful that uh you know kids can get their hands on books and just come together and so they've
003been working for the past several months on reading 10 books and i i kind of liken the battle of the books competition those of you that know mr tom vogelsby that taught english for a number of years south of high school that level of detail about you know what happened on page you know 119 in the fourth paragraph uh kind of stuff and your kids really do well um our kids answered uh in total about 80 percent of their questions accurately so that was maurice uh mrs unger miss natalie under and mr jennifer finney are our coaches and students on that team included avery henderson olivia rank ross andrews those are uh sixth graders fifth grade brock shane marker claire campbell ava goodfaster and grace rank and fourth grade sophia klein elan tyson and olivia
004frieden so congratulations to our fellow books team then uh this was two weeks ago uh tomorrow we had our first ever hosted southern elementary kindergarten roundup and typically that has been kind of a county-wide effort most of the county there at the honeywell center and because of the year that we're having uh we decided to do that in-house and so we welcomed approximately 50 soon-to-be members of the class of 2034 which is uh kind of hard to believe that's going to come quick so i think the older that you are the faster it comes so i've got ways to think about that so um but uh that we got some great feedback from parents and families like you even like as it was happening uh just uh less um chaos you know just less busy
005and um more like they had time to go to each kindergarten teacher and just you know see their room and just talk to them we we had 30-minute shifts and i believe that mrs moore did it the same way that we did the next night uh 30-minute shifts where we welcomed anywhere from eight to ten families and uh they they did the kindergarten screener uh did a little craft a little snack uh and just some time with the teacher and families just appreciated that more laid-back you know personally connecting with the school that kids are going to be in and so got some great feedback there and tonight would not have been possible without i didn't want to leave out any names so i listed them all hope that's okay that's your key favor uh
006mrs fadel and mrs steele kindergarten teachers mrs drake our little knights teacher was there too and she's sending up uh 19 of those new kindergartners so we're um we're happy to have her there that night then this is dupont mrs carell mrs banker mrs elliott miss robbins mrs dye and mrs mitchell and mrs heights all helped with the screener and then mrs wright mrs law mr weaver mrs ashley under and of course mrs weitzel who if you've been at kindergarten roundup at the honeywell center mrs weisel does a phenomenal job coordinating all of that effort and you know same with our in-house version and then our banner winners spring banners had several artists recognized by name the award ceremony ceremony recently and our two banner winners that will have something hanging in downtown for a
007good while this spring evelyn tyson in fourth grade and shelby hunt in sixth grade and so proud of our artists and appreciate mrs tyson and her efforts mr key paper if i may add them for a moment i did i didn't add this to the spreadsheet but um i was talking with a substitute teacher yesterday uh and he just wanted to make sure that i knew um how much he liked subbing at southwood elementary um he said you know no matter who the staff member is you know if he's in the hallway and you tell or just you know passing by that everybody's always very friendly and he said um you know i have seven other buildings and he said it's not always that way i was telling my teachers this morning and said there
008was a part of me that wanted to ask so where else do you set up i i didn't want to be i didn't want to be prideful but i told my teachers i'm proud of it because all it takes is a little bit of effort to put a smile on your face and a kind word and it makes a huge difference and so um just proud of our people that they're great and um it was just uh felt good to hear that yesterday so very good thank you all right mr schneider one thing i found [Music] um yeah first thing is a kind of a shared thing between uh southwood and northfield because both andrew and daniel and i were able to go i think mr key favorite went to the county honors being in
009choir performance friday march 12th and that was cool because that was the first thing that got cancelled um when all this coded stuff did a year ago so that that fact that they were able to do that we were able to go and those kids got to sing and play and they haven't had any concerts earlier this year we're going to start doing some in the spring things are opening up but that i didn't name all the kids here but we just want to say all the kids that were involved from southward and northville um we just wanted to say a great job by all and then i want to say again grant dale i didn't realize that kid had so much artistic ability he could not only swim and do a lot of things
010but he's been so he got this award more than 80 000 students vr teacher told me submitted over 200 230 000 works of art to the 2021 scholastic awards and grant was awarded two national medals for his artwork out of that 230 000 works of art that was submitted nationwide he was awarded a national gold medal for a ceramic piece called blob the impaled i don't have a picture of that to show you and the national silver medal with distinction for this portfolio that he turned in to show some of the work he'd done and that was one in 30 awarded nationally by this scholastic place that's this seems like an awesome thing that he accomplished there so we're very proud to grant and applaud his creativity preparation resolve through this unpredictable school year and
011so i think mr zwiebel or our teacher this year does a good job of sending the kids stuff in for these contests and things for them to get this recognition so good job by him too to take the time to do that and then today i found out we had four boys that did this entrepreneur through the i think it was through girlwall astronomy and it was you kind of told me about it earlier in the year to see if we have kids interested well i had a teacher that wanted to do it mr simcroft the english teacher and then he didn't have a ton of time but he wanted to get the kids started so then they needed more time to work on it because he couldn't devote just english time to business stuff
012so then we got with the business teacher mr bainey and they kind of worked together so mr suncroft could help mr vaney could give them time in business classes to work and to give advice they ended up coming up with this business called art like arc light historical tours that they picked all these places around wabash county included a lot of businesses and they said that this is what the kids wrote me today because i asked them to give me a little blurb that i could say and they said that that about mr sincroft but it was three of them that started it was keaton style clay herring and ben looked to start this program as an alternative project in english class they soon decided on a historical walking tour in wabash they later asked
013if ethan galbraith would join and he happily did and the idea of a walking tour stem from their mutual interest in history especially in wabash but it has grown to be so much more than that they immediately recognize the opportunity not only to educate and entertain inhabitants of wabash and hopefully its visitors but also to partner with other small businesses and be a real benefit to the local economy tourism brings people and people bring money these boys hope to not only provide an experience well worth the price of admission but also to make a difference in our community and help grow this town they've grown to love thanks to ethan keaton clay and ben for their work on creating arc-like historical tours and for mr sincroft and mr vane working together to support these students
014so i don't know if they're really going to do it it sounds like they're going to give it a shot but i think they've partnered with businesses to try to get their tours to go to them so i thought that was pretty good what started as just a pitch to start a business and i think they're really going to try me um we also had some artists at the art show the wabash county virtual they had a virtual spring art show and we had quite a few kids various grade levels that were finalists and winners those were emma bone emma warnock ryan brunette eden hoover jc crump avery napier jessica ray ainsley dale bayley byers grant dale jasmine fisher ethan galbraith lloyd chloe miller trinity shock me and clayton tomlinson a lot of what's cool
015about some of those names is they're getting connected you hear those names in athletics and art and academics it's kind of cool to see them well-rounded like that so i think that was my last one i believe it was and i have a couple things i want to add to that first of all i did learn that through the pitch contest that will actually be at the honeywell center those students that created those entrepreneurship uh programs uh nine hundred dollars were sent to all of our msd students who are part of that as like seed money for them to start get started so that's really cool 900 and i also want to say you you mentioned honor ban and honor uh concert uh honor choir um the director for the honors band uh mike lecrone
016actually commissioned um a song and it was actually for my uh a piece called roll of thunder for my dad and you're if you know i don't know my dad was a band director south of high school for 29 years before his early passing and so it was really cool to do that they were going to do it last year but of course like you said cove would hit um and then they brought it back again this year so it's really neat to hear that and for them to play that um in that honor so obviously they honored er connor who was also long-term uh long time uh band directors at walworth city schools so anyway it's really neat uh to hear them and to have that presentation was interesting last year on march 31st
017those kids were actually at the honeywell center all day long and then of course everything happened and everything just shut down because of course we had a southwood boys we're going to go to regional they've lost that too and all the other things that happen in the spring so i'm glad that things are are going a lot better and then i have a few other things that principals added here first of all uh southwood high school mr mcdaniel so we are very proud of our boys basketball team after a dominating win in the first round of regional play against seton catholic an absolute nail biter of a win in a second round against lafayette central catholic although our knights fell to celts in semi state play we want to congratulate them on an outstanding season
018coach burris has led a nice 2-3 semi-basketball opportunities in 11 years additionally the team brought a lot of excitement and school pride these last few weeks way to go nights and then also uh mr martin at shark creek said we'd like to recognize mrs amanda alliance this evening mr lyons is our librarian does a fantastic job of regularly providing our students with stem science technology engineering math based experiences she works hard to have student opportunities while playing and makes us use the many resources we have available thank you mrs lyons and then also congratulations to our sharp creek elementary students who won awards at the walrus county art show brendan swann kendall rife and bella myers each had their artwork selected to be made into street banners and callie mcclure was named shark creek's best
019of show winner so great job students there and i believe that is all for tonight mr daisy okay thank you i'll say one other word about mike lecron yes guest director i know i'm representing msd now but i'm a graduate of manchester high school where mike lacroix wrote our fight song rather than use a recycled coin song so he was he's the author of that but i'm fully committed to him all right moving on to uh public comment agenda items only do we have any comments on what we're going to be talking tonight we'll do our presentation oh yep i did scare that hi i'm so sorry yes that was right over at the top back up to the school recognition we'll do the wmap presentation all right i'd like to introduce mrs hann higgins
020uh who are our director of webwish miami area program and she's going to share with you and i have it right here mrs higgins your and it's it goes to a pdf so it looks a little bit different as far as a format but it's all good so because we have two newborn members and because things have changed it seems like there's always a flexibility in our positions in education and hers i asked her to come here and just share a little bit about the wabash miami area program and i know that the three veteran board members know a lot about it but it's always good to have a review but two board members too to to learn a little bit more and if you have questions throughout you can ask um she has uh
021the rest of the evening available so whatever questions you want to ask them my kids might disagree with you okay they might be happy all right go ahead um thank you for giving me the opportunity to come and speak again this evening this is not the first time i've addressed the board but um this is just kind of it's nice to be back and revisit this i wanted to give you some overall general information about special education um public law 94-142 was signed into law in 1975 so to put that a little bit into perspective i was three years old when when that wall was signed and i say that because my generation of teachers have grown up with special education and i think sometimes you forget that we we forget that so um in
0221975 that this was a new idea and so people um corporations came together to form cooperatives which is kind of how our wabash mami area program cooperative was formed and obviously it's been 45 years ago so you can figure out how old i am and since public law 94-142 that that federal legislation has changed four times and the fourth change is called idea individuals with disabilities education act and it was passed in 2004 and it is the current legislation federal legislation that we operate under so we have the federal laws and then each state has the opportunity to interpret those laws and it took indiana four years to interpret the 2004 legislation so we were kind of in limbo for a while um and so we are operating under the general practices that were um
023signed into state law in 2008 we've had minor changes to that law um including an update in may of 2019 um it is article 7 is approximately 150 pages long just to give you an idea of the amount of legislation that we um we operate under on a regular basis so so that's just a little bit of history about special education the initial law of public on 94 142 was about access to buildings and even when i was in school my my memories of special education are those kids got on a bus and they went to another location now our um our priority is access to curriculum and so we continue to fight for our students with disabilities to have access to their general education curriculum um and have similar opportunities to their peers as
024far as instructional time with teachers so and i think uh the article seven it's kind of yellow because i see that in your office you look up sometimes so i think you pretty much all marked up and then it's a lot to keep in your head um so some benefits to belonging to the cooperative are just what we said the compliance pieces understanding that knowing how to do and operate under under the compliance pieces um and and then monitoring we so because we have these federal laws we have federal indicators that the state has to report out every year and so that all funnels through my office and that's one thing that i assist corporations in doing is making sure that we've met the legal requirements set forth by the federal and state law and
025department of education financial um we do share some teacher cost uh for those of you who've been on the board we did a major restructure and decentralization in 2016. so um prior to 2016 we had probably between 100 and 110 employees and we moved that down and i think i have 23 and a half now and so we we share positions such as deaf and hard of hearing so for example msd may only have eight or nine kids for that have a hearing loss so it we pool our money with the other corporations and as a result we might have 30 kids that have a hearing loss and we can hire one teacher to service all 30 kids instead of each of you having to hire one teacher to serve a few number of students
026same thing with equipment by law we have to provide otpt speech services and especially our pt there's a lot of equipment that's associated with that so we share some of those costs and so for example i think we have at south well what started at southwood we had a student that needed what we call a standard which is a contraption if you will that once you the physical therapist puts you in it you you stand and we were able to purchase a piece of equipment that takes the student from a seated position to a standing position without leaving a share in essence and that run that was like six thousand dollars and so once that student outgrows that that particular piece of equipment will be able to pass that on to another student to use
027um so that's another benefit and then part b monies and all the reporting that goes with it each corporation gets an amount from the federal government for special education and that all right now comes to our office and goes through us and that's what we pay these services out of so there are all like a lot of federal grants a lot of strings maybe strings are not the right word but there are a lot of limitations and restrictions on how that money is used so we take care of that services again um otpt speech school psychologists we do programming for blind low vision and deaf and hard of hearing um who else that's the majority of that um and then resources and networking are big in my world we have lots of questions and the
028answers um are might be found by talking to other directors and that sort of thing because they're just unique they're unique questions unique situations and um the laws apply somewhat uniquely somewhat differently to each unique situation so um we find that helpful experiences we had this year an experience in another corporation where a due process hearing request was filed which in essence is a lawsuit against that particular school system um now that we've gone through that experience we know what to expect and i we have that opportunity that knowledge that we can share with our other corporations so that i think is very helpful and beneficial and then we do a lot of training for our special ed teachers and even our some of our gen ed teachers have participated in some of our training
029for example for autism so those are all helpful we are operating under what's called a joint service agreement joint service and supply agreement and that's the agreement that the five corporations have come together and the returning board members have seen that before and um signed different changes that we have made to that it is um kind of a general agreement it's not very specific and it's intended to be that way so we can apply it to lots of situations we serve the following corporations and you can see that list it totals to be 22 school buildings that we work in um and you know we travel we travel a lot we figure peru to manchester that's about a 45-minute drive we try not to do that on a regular basis we try to make sure
030we're a little corporation each day but sometimes it doesn't work out that we can do that and then we service mammals st ease whites whites has expanded it has some campus rose academy and so we provide services to that particular program apartment health and rehabilitation is a nursing home for medically fragile children that sits within wabash city's district and so we have a classroom there that we also provide supports in before we go on you notice that she likes to play with the different colors and nobody really cares about colors necessarily but uh you can see the significance i'm just joking here the significance of the different colors and things like that so um very good so it used to be what was the the logo was just like french and yellow orange and yellow
031was it and so they redid the logo to kind of go along with all the different school colors so try really hard to include everybody yeah so that's why it's like that and of course you saw that at the very beginning on the first slide maybe you'll be on the last one too so we are governed by the five super we yes we the cooperative five superintendents they make up for our governing board and then under underneath that they hire me to be the director of special education to oversee daily operations and staff and you can see we have two and a half office staff and 21 professional staff that we we work with and then um msc wabash county serves as our lea our local education agency and as a board we bring hires
032to you we bring recommendations you approve our budgets and signatures etc after it's been approved by the governing board we have to have an entity to do that and so and that is outlined in our jss agreement every year we do two special education counts december 1 and april 1 and then december so our december 1 of count for our entire entire cooperative was 1316 students with disabilities that is the umbrella that we have that is down by about 50 students from the last december and i think we can attribute a lot of that to covid and parents not pursuing preschool evaluations and white says that they've won the cart program now we have more competition if you will or msd has more competition with the virtual programming so msd's count was 350 students which
033makes up approximately 27 of the students and families that the cooperative serves so about a third of our msd students some services that we provide identifying students with disabilities we have school psychologists that are trained to do that right now as of right now you have to have an ed specialist degree in order to be a school psychologist so there's a lot of training involved in that we offer therapy occupational therapy physical therapy speech therapy um we actually have two speech therapists instead of one that's my error for msc um myself or my assistant director support can support state um case conferences so we've had some challenging conferences in the past where parents are upset with schools um and and so we go in and try to work through those situations with and come to
034a resolution for both the school and the parent we support programming for students it's not uncommon for mr snyder to say hey i need help with this how do you think we should go about this my level of health is so high so i do a lot of consulting with that and i really try to empower our principals to handle those situations when possible we do observations about 20 percent of our students that we serve have some type of behavior issue and so we spend a lot of time brainstorming we go and serve we try to come up with suggestions strategies etc um and then like i said make recommendations on how to um how to support kids we support special education teachers they send a lot of emails to keep teachers informed of updates
035and law updates and our iep system updates in changes in state expectations i know that shocks you but that happens um pretty regularly so um and then we offer training and this year the training has been virtual which the one nice thing about that is teachers can go back and watch that again if they forget so that's been helpful we support administrators you know again if you have a disciplined question i get those i get programming questions staffing questions we're gearing up um i think there are uh five or six openings in special education already for the 21 22 school year and so i've been talking about how to recruit for this particular area um and then support for our reporting um december one and april one the december one is a big deal because
036there's a lot of money tied to that particular count and then applying and utilizing our party knife so what kind of questions do you have for me tonight if he any of answered one that i had going in the end was the percentages on the whole versus the student population increasing and decreasing you said this year went down but for the most part we're able to diagnose more kids more problems or are there more problems out there like you mentioned 20 was of the students you work with behavioral issues yeah whatever direction things are going i think it's been pretty stable as far as the number of students that have been identified what's changed is the programming that's offered so when when carr came on board that was a huge jump in our special education
037numbers because typically those those students have challenges in the school setting and so they're looking for an alternate um type of learning environment so we saw a big jump with when that program was introduced but i would say in general it's been pretty consistent how do you work with the car students when you're not in direct contact as much as you could be in a school setting so it's more consultative in nature a lot of that is um checking in with them and helping them get started with with assignments checking in and making sure they can ask for clarification and they have the skills those resources so we might give them what i call a communication tool box and here are six questions if you get stuck one of these six questions likely will apply
038you know and how do you use those six questions um and then it's just checking in with that and staying on top of it a lot of those students struggle with attention deficit disorder adhd i did i started a file review before coded and the first five kids i reviewed all had some type of adhd mentioned in in their their records so by a thousand i mean i go back and i start from the beginning and review all of their records so trying to be better at recognizing those struggles and how to address them but it again is they may not know where to start or they may not know how to take break a task down and so it's working through through that with them maybe virtually um when we check in to assess
039those then completing their tests does that make sense yeah i guess it i'm just thinking mr would be a little bit more difficult though because you'd hate to see that kid the student become isolated that has the need for interaction you know they can fall through the crack easier i guess right and the other piece to that is there's usually a reason why they're not being able to function in a public school and um are we addressing those skill deficits in in the event they want to return to public school so many students don't even have the option at the time because they are actually expelled from school so this gives them another opportunity it's not you know it's not face-to-face and we would prefer face-to-face but it does give them an opportunity to continue
040on with their education how's it how early in like elementary do you start diagnosing this so i mean i know what this some disabilities are i guess i look like categorize a disability as differently i guess so that's why so under federal law we have some responsibilities to preschool students age three they are transitioning from a government a governor program called first steps and then those are the ones that have been identified maybe at work through age two and then we start providing services it depends on the eligibility area my bias is if there's any doubt that we err on the side of not making them eligible for us um as a student with a disability because um in general everybody lowers expectations for those students and so i hate lowering those expectations unless we
041have the data that clearly supports that if we're looking at a specific learning disability we're usually looking at the end of second grade beginning at third grade before we do an evaluation for that but if we have a physical issue or um you know we have believe it or not we have some personality conflicts between teachers and students and you know we try to sort all of that out and use data um to make those placement decisions but the majority of our students are probably identified by grade four or five i would think okay well i can just i can see you know some benefits of the you know our three-year-olds coming into these buildings because you know there might be you know chances of being able to you know to limit you know some
042of these that are going to you've got two more years at home that some of those things develop even worse um there might be a next chance to tear it back the other way as well closing that gap yes closing that cap and tim and i have actually had a lot of conversations recently about the percentage of our students that are on free and reduced lunch they're related high with our special education students and so are we addressing those those culture issues because they don't have the same level of supports as they come to us and and i'm excited about the opportunity for our typical for our students with disabilities at the preschool level to go into our typical preschools next year and for a three-year-old classroom in a four-year-old classroom because i think keeping
043our expectations high for that level of students helps us close that gap i appreciate you hearing that you don't want to label too quickly early on because there's a lot of factors playing into that child's life yes there's a lot of great kids out there that just get pushed down yeah we jay and i just worked on a case that um the students with a particular eligibility with mom and has moved to be with dad now and that has done very very well in that setting so is he is he really truly a student with a disability we're going to do a re-evaluation just to see i'd like to be able to celebrate more i don't want this to be this eligibility area this disability area to be something that they're tagged with for life
044some kids might end up having struggles for their for their entire life but if we can if we can celebrate and have a nice little party when they can accept that i think that's pretty cool all right for no other questions thank you mrs again for the overview and all that so i will add that from the financial standpoint another benefit is the fact that we started doing the medicaid claim which allows the school courts to receive some federal dollars and i just totaled that today and as a cooperative we've received 114 just over 000 through medicaid billing this year so obviously we have that since july first change in the law or we just haven't really done that we haven't really taken advantage of that in past years for whatever reason but we started
045doing that last year with the help of the area program and their staff and senator jose actually has a bill that he's authored to increase some of that looking at other states and how much money schools are getting for that so it'll be interesting to see how that that goes to it so all right thanks again we won't do the public comments and we'll again on to the consent agenda items the approval of the minutes from our last meeting we'll send in a second to approve the minutes from our last meeting all in favor say aye folks please motion approved it's payroll a little higher than normal again because eca is in the end of this four seasons not terribly much the higher section emotion in a second to approve payroll financial summary this just
046lays out the cash flow then for education fund operations fund for january and february actuals not much has changed as far as my statements down there at the bottom from what we went over again a lot of it's just based off of trends it explains you what the revenue actually reflects and so we should know by next for our april 15th basic grant what our reconciliation will be from our new adm count so that would show an increase then at that point for the months of april may and june and then by the end of this month i have to submit an estimate count for adm and what we think it would be this fall and that's what the money will be tied to starting in july through the next adm and so be working
047on some of those types of things as we prepare and update this as new information arises and so that lays out both the education fund and operation fund i know that property tax revenue flows in there on the operations towards the end of the year really bumps it up but on a year-to-year thing that it looks like a pretty good increase over 2020 then you're projected 21 then yeah on the operation side too for the and for the for the end amount yeah yeah and a lot of that is because we haven't had to transfer all that money out and put it into the self-insurance that's the big chunk of it so i'm sure we're doing it yeah i mean we're doing over a million dollars each year out of that fund just just for
048that and it's done so that's all i have okay um and we'd like to introduce tiffany okay hopefully those separately yeah all right um under hr uh the first one we're gonna do is under employment tiffany flora assistant director of special education for wmap effective july 21st mrs higgins speed today yes i we are am to have her um come on board with us she brings wealth of knowledge and um teaching experience she's taught from her school through high school she's worked with students with emotional disabilities i would say that's been the primary focus of your teaching career so working with kids that struggle with behavior issues which is usually by the time i get involved we're working on those big time um she has recently completed her the educational neuroscience um certification through butler
049university and so that is how you're bringing it it acts and reacts in situations and it really helps us understand um those those kids with challenging leaders not just special education students but any student that's been through a trauma that really works um for those so um i'm excited to bring her on board and have her um help us and see what her lens is of special education as we continue to move forward and improve the services that we offer our schools so all right thank you also under employment we have cody schumann the volunteer trap shooting coach at northville and southwood and under resignation sarah rank special head t-shirt southwood elementary effective at the end of the school year and that is human resources personnel i moved to the site thanks for coming tim
050her husband they uh i told her that they could sit together but they said his first school board meeting ever okay maybe they're arguing well you don't have to stay anymore that'll help with the argument okay under uh reports heartland career center you have one horse yes uh from the last meeting we approved some fundraisers for the kids going to the state competition national competition harlan will host the ymca day they do that every year it'll be in june for kids we gave them permission to have ivy tech have a adult cnc training our instructor right now is taking that class right now but that'll be from may 17th to september 22nd i think that's a 2700 cost for people to be into that and then they talked about the amount of kids wanting to
051come to hartford next year and at this point there's almost 800 kids wanting to go to work uh 773 and that's almost 100 more than last year it never stays that high but that's remarkable hopefully they find room for all of them yes yes that's right all right superintendent's department yeah i just have a couple things i put on the screen though um actually every day starting in that was november 30th mr drake actually would give me and also dr kuhn information as far as the quarantine list and so we continue to do that and you can see uh unfortunately we we were not doing this prior because in uh in november mr snyder can remember some of those those days yeah but anyway i just wanted to show that i haven't shown you this
052i don't think before but i enter the data that he gives me and it goes into this uh little graph but we're still about the same situation what we were all the way at the beginning of february we did have one positive case first time in quite a while that actually jumped it up a little bit there in the middle of march but again this includes students that are close contacts and quarantine because of a home situation or if they have code like symptoms or they're actually close contacts because of a school situation that typically all those other ones prior to the little increase there was more about things that were at home or at uh code-like symptoms so that's still trending well if you were here earlier at 5 30 you didn't have to
053be at 5 30 but we did have the governor on and we thought maybe there would be some changes but for school there are no changes as far as schools as far as the restrictions through the rest of the school year and also we are continuing to be a blue county so that means that we can't have 100 percent capacity in our activities 250 people at different events if it's off off-site but also they still have the restrictions of mass and social distances as much as possible and we are continuing with having like mr schneider said concerts programs uh field trips athletics um and those continue to happen so we appreciate uh everybody working hard to get the trend to go down so that's one thing i want to mention and also i'm gonna tag
054team here a little bit with mr drake but just to let you know i'll let mr drake start with this as far as sharing a little bit about our cares dollars cares actually stands for coronavirus aid relief and economic security act but along those lines it's also under the that umbrella is esser and we all know all these acronyms and all these letters but it's elementary and secondary school emergency relief act and so we have sr1 i don't know what happened there we had s or one um and then we will be getting s or two and sr2 will actually we've had the principles go through an activity to give us some different ideas as far as 20 of it needs to be used to make sure that we are having students what's the best
055word to use um actually just not necessarily remediated but being able to accelerate there we go accelerate their learning and then we have other ideas and we also talk to our discussions team today our teacher association before this meeting concerning letting the teachers give ideas to the principles and i will share that tomorrow the admin meeting principles that are here to get more ideas so i'll let mr drake then talk a little bit more about that as far as cares and what we did the first first section there so the first round that we received was a little over 180 thousand dollars it comes with strings just like all the other grants typically do and we allocated about 60 000 out of 180 to pay for ppe um cleaning devices cleaning hand sanitizer i mean
056all the stuff there all that cleaning even though we had a lot of it donated so the remaining 120 about 100 of that then we paid to our teachers to create virtual instruction we felt like by creating that incentive so teachers that wanted to do it could do it rather than forcing everybody to do it um it's funny how even the local schools have all chosen different strategies to do that um wabash did a little different than manchester and we did it different still but we worked really hard to not burden all of our teachers with virtual knowing they'd be so busy with quarantining and all that other stuff and so i'm very pleased with how that turned out um but about a hundred thousand dollars of that then went to the teachers to help
057pay for um for their stipends for their time above and beyond to teach those things and so like mr keyfavor said we have some ideas about this next round of funding um again accelerate learning [Music] and i don't know when you're going to bring up the summer school is this an appropriate time to talk about that there's that later we can talk about it later in the new business yeah and so one of the ideas you'll hear about in a little bit is uh we're going to really put our summer school program on steroids for our elementary kids most of our data internally is showing that they were probably the hardest hit as far as instruction and being challenged by last spring and even some of the ones that have been virtual this fall and
058so so we've got a strategy for that and i'm working with principals we really are trying to let principals make a lot of the suggestions because they know their teachers and their students so much better and some buildings have some needs that other buildings don't and rather than making one size fits all and so we'll be bringing more of those to you when we get some of those finalized but we'll have we'll be getting discussions probably in the next couple of weeks over strategies and where to best put those monies but again they come with strings uh they have to be spent by a certain amount of time you can't carry some things over and so this makes it more uh time-sensitive to make some of those decisions if we receive the information the application
059soon which they keep on telling us that but they said that two or three weeks now we'd like to bring a lot of that to you the april 27th meeting that we have that that may not happen if we don't if it's not released yet but that's kind of our goal to get things going so and then i'll go ahead and let you take over to your report too and what i have on the screen for you yeah thank you and so before i jump into this uh the um i want to just reiterate we've had several kids return from virtual school we are working to bring others back that are not doing quite as well as i think everybody their families hoped they would do on the virtual freedom that they had and so
060we're working very hard again to i think that makes us unique in the area um where mr key favor and that you guys approved where we're going to require medical license or medical notes to come to the virtual program and so um i know it might slip your mind but i can tell you it's a daily fight for our assistant principals and our principals and our teachers and myself and mr key favorite we work really hard to try to get those kids back in the building and almost all of them i think would agree that their kids will do better in the building they just have different reasons as to why that shouldn't happen for that particular story so so anyway i just want to make aware of that um i feel like this is
061the drama i meet pretty often um and there's a reason for that i feel like if you were just to catch some of the media put out by the department of education or by other schools around us um you can just hear how great dual credits are and so there's a report and the department of education sent it out to the entire state um and i wanted to highlight a couple of things so that you would be aware i've shared it with principals i'll probably try to share it with teachers we are certainly in the state of indiana leaps and bounds leading the country and handing out dual credits to high school kids and the state of indiana is incredibly proud of that um i think that i would argue that there's you need to
062take that with a grain of salt and i chose some of the data that's in their very report that they sent out to show that to you the left graph let me pull it up oh look at that look at that man again this is i didn't create these graphs these are copied straight out and in your reports i gave you a reference to find that information so that if you wanted to verify it or read more into it you could you'll see there that all the kids that dual credit in the state of indiana that are successful are there in the second bar graph 45 we're handing out hundreds of thousands of hours of college credit and the return on that is a 45 success rate is that bad yes well compared to neither
063that's twice as good oh that's true there you go that's oh how do you know we'll have to grab that's a good point mr driscoll you're right compared to not get any they're doing much better aren't they yes that is excellent but i see that as an over 50 failure rate over half the kids that get just dual credit are not meeting the success criteria and so then you can see the ap even the ap and dual is only at 74 i don't see that as being very successful either that is a lot of money those families are putting into college right i mean we all know that colleges are cheap and so they are sending their kids to college and even at the ap dual we're only at 74 percent sexual success rates um
064and so if you scroll down there i try to make the point that those dual credit people feel like they're saving money on the front end because they're getting to save all of those hours at college but on the back end i would question whether all of them are seeing the return on that investment for sure some of them are right uh 45 of them are but 55 are not and so that is why we work really hard to push kids into ap classes we need that rigor you need some of that challenge to do that because there is no accountability with dual credit um and the state is trying to make that better and so again maybe i should have stressed at the beginning this is that four-year college student the ones that we're
065sending off to iu and purdue and taylor and goshen andy wesley and iuk manchester all those places like the reason we send them there with college credits is so that they're successful and i feel like they are i feel like our students are but i just want to point out that the state is telling you how great your credits are and yet their own data is showing it's not quite as great but it's still good i don't know that i haven't seen that i would 45 i was looking at you know my kid graduated three and a half years why he carried 18 credits he absolutely did not take an ap class absolutely but he was in the same class as the ap kids and had he failed that ap test he would not have
066those credits so he did not he took it as a dual credit not ap and that is a great point i will tell you that not all dual credit classes are created the same well i'll agree with that but yeah i don't think we should diss too much on the dual credit well the fact that they're not created the same is where the accountability comes in and i would say that we work really hard to make sure our dual credits are rigorous um again there's no way for that accountability to show up because it's different for each school and that's the thing too it's not like it's for everybody and absolutely and obviously it does you know there's there's a lot of stories there's a lot of great stories like that but there are stories
067that you've seen that we've put grass to show um their gpas when they go to school um and and we've done ours that was very successful there's other schools around us have been successful all also but there's been other schools that maybe had way too many um and not everybody needs to you know i mean they're just pushing them down a little bit further than what they need to be so and that is kind of the second graph there they don't speculate as to what the challenge is for college and i think there's a lot of reasons behind it um i think some of that is we have a lot of people that don't have college experience behind them and so their first year kids going to college and that's just a whole new world
068so there's a lot of explanations behind it but this one again this is straight from their report according to their report the class of 2018 that just graduated two years ago 14 of those kids that got dual credits earned them as freshmen and so i would make the case that a freshman is a 14 year old 15 year old kid and we're giving them we're telling them that they are learning something at a collegiate level right the thinking and the reason that goes involved with that and we're saying hey this is going to get you out of whatever class but then when they go to college they don't necessarily have that skill we work really hard at msd not to do that but it is certainly licensed by the state um and actually it's encouraged
069and i if you scroll down just a little bit northfield high school enrolled a student as a freshman who came in with dual credits as an 8th grader that student happened to actually flunk a core science class but they earned dual credits and so i feel like that fits into this idea that not all dual credits have accountability right and so certainly some of them are worthwhile and i i hope i hope my message isn't to say that dual credits are bad um i think that it needs to be taken into account like a buffet along with other rigorous courses so i just want to put that out there because the department of education sent that out to the entire state the dual credits have their place but balancing them out with challenging classes that
070aren't just trying to get you the credit i feel like that's the message i'd like to send with that so a question now the teachers that teach the dual credit don't they have to be licensed by the university or whatever it gives them that credit yeah that's a great point the indiana commission on higher education works with colleges and they have tried to put that on the teachers in this area um but they have until it was until 2022 three now and they keep pushing it back and so currently you do not currently and prior to this time um you just had to sign up to teach it um and so they're trying to make it that case and so it was supposed to be by the end of next year and now they've bumped
071it to another year and so like i'm teaching dual credit through iu um i view it and all the colleges there's lots of money for this and so they're paying for my classes i don't get to take like a credit to earn master's but they're paying to credential me to teach dual credit because college is it's an income source for them as well right to get those kids to buy into their programs and so um so it's coming that idea of teacher the accountability the accountability being on the teacher to make sure they're trained to teach that but as it stands now that is not necessarily a requirement our cooperation with notre dame how's that working with this uh uh again with the ap tip stuff and mr schneider might he's been more involved in
072some of those conversations um the teachers that participated in it absolutely loved it we had some teachers that looked at the time frame of the commitment that it took and some of them were a little hesitant to get involved because it's an extra it's quite a bit of time but we saw great results in biology and in some of the english classes as well and so unfortunately this is the second year so our partnership ends but we are looking to continue as an affiliate school and that will give us some of the perks of the program but not quite all of the um cash incentives i think that comes with that i don't know miss cider diet coverage i have some teachers that want to continue and some it was a ton of extra work
073and they kind of want to break from it yeah yeah for sure teaching teaching things at a rigorous level requires us all that time right and so um but we i loved it and the teachers are just we are as a district we're going to fund that for another year okay yeah yeah we we are yeah we're encouraging it but we don't force it because if you do that the attitude well finding finding certified teachers that have their master's in math in math to teach math and then forcing them to do things that they and over their summers like yeah you guys get the pictures funding and finding those teachers is hard enough and so just so i have an accurate information base dual credit is not accepted everywhere yet right so that's one thing
074that's never really been taught when certain places market this early college thing to the hill absolutely you uh we always advise our students looking to take dual credits to check with the colleges they're looking to go for because those colleges will tell you exactly what they will and will not take and unfortunately and that's not part of my concern with the dual credit is depends on what the course is if it's a hard science man be careful might don't correct me if i'm wrong i'll just use my own as an example because i did a lot of research because my kids didn't want to go way off to college and of course we wanted to save money and all that maddy finished she's finishing her rn degree bachelor's degree in three years but none of
075the dual credits that she had from northfield could be core classes for instance they had to be they they allowed her to use them as electives which is good which is all right because that still saves you some money right the other thing is gpa this is the part that gets people that they don't understand so you you get these kids 15 to 20 credits in high school but if you didn't take them at that college they'll give you the credit save you the money but they won't give you the gpa which is important because these lower level classes some of your scholarships like your academic scholarships that most of our kids get are tied to maintaining a certain gpa in college to keep getting that scholarship every year but these lower level classes if
076you don't take them at the college that doesn't count your gpa so if you take a harder class and you don't do so well you not have nothing to balance that gpa i had my kids because of that we had tons of conversations i knew like maddie won the good huntington we lived fairly close to it she just went to huntington to take her classes because that's where she wanted to go now that's not very good i don't know where anybody wants to go to college but i have a building up for gpa like instead of going to heart one half a day or doing other things half a day i had to go to northfield in the morning and then drive huntington take them on campus so they're building that gpa for their next
077year if that makes sense you can jump in there if i'm saying anything no that's exactly that we really try to push kids to go to college that's what people don't understand you get a bunch of these credits and then your kids all of a sudden they're starting college at like a sophomore or junior level because they accept all the credits then if they bomb one that's what affects that success rate that's can depending on the student yeah and it's certainly again it does depend heavily on the students some kids can handle it earlier and some kids can handle different things so so that's it that's that's where we came from moving on to new business we have a recommendation to approve the extended field trip for sharp creek elementary fifth grade to the indianapolis
078children's museum on april 16th this year so the second motion and second to approve the field trip to sharp creek for our four shark creek the children's museum also high all right recommendation to approve the 2021 schools the summer school offerings sure because you used to uh we kind of handed that off now i've done the summer school stuff for about 10 11 years now so i am um handing that responsibility off uh to a couple of our admin that are so graciously willing to do that uh mrs moore will be heading our elementary programs and mrs boone will be heading our secondary programs and so we've been pretty uh consistent with how we've operated our summer school over the past 10 years and we will continue to do those things with a few extensions
079of programs due to the fact that we are receiving some federal dollars that will allow us to cover those costs for those of you that are new uh summer school the state allocates so much money for summer school that schools can apply for reimbursement for but there are certain strains that are attached to that you have to have so many kids uh uh so many courses and courses have to meet certain standards and so forth to seek that reimbursement and when we do receive that reimbursement because of so many schools that apply for it we don't ever get fully reimbursed for that either so we will still continue to seek reimbursement i will still continue to handle all of the financial and budgeting aspects of it the reporting aspects of it and so forth mrs
080boone and mrs moore will be handling more the day-to-day curriculum and staffing type of situations that we run into during the summer and so with that being said typically for an elementary summer school option we've focused on our partnership with the ymca for spark and we've also done our own remediation for those students that did not pass the irene test in third grade so we're still going to continue those things with an option to extend summer school not just to those typical students but for all students in grades k-6 that would benefit from this opportunity and we would extend that summer programming typically our summer program was maybe only a couple months long excuse me a couple weeks long we're going to extend this out for the entire month of june as far as that
081opportunity is concerned uh for two to three hours a day uh in our buildings and so if we have hopefully enough students uh to offer programming at both metro north and southwood elementary to cover grades k through six whether that's through extended learning opportunities through ireed remediation or through our partnership with the summer spark program with the ymca we will offer those opportunities then for our elementary students along with a more experiential opportunity some of you may be familiar with the old science and motion programming that we used to have we would like to start bringing some of those experiences back uh we changed the name of it a little bit to minds in action so not much of a big difference there but we just kind of wanted to start that type of opportunity
082again for our students and so this is kind of the first phase of that and so we are being selective as far as the grades that are involved in that and we'll allow that opportunity then for both metro north and southwood and sharp creek students to participate in on the secondary side reimbursement was always tied to credits we will continue to offer a couple different opportunities for students to earn credits one is through indiana online academy and then the other is through our own edmentum programming um that we offer now for our students and so uh india online academy is kind of a separate entity and those are for courses more for students that are trying to maybe get ahead or for courses that we don't typically offer and then the edmentum is more for
083those students that need to catch up a little bit and maybe even recover some of those credits that they got behind in or didn't earn during the school year we've also offered driver's ed but again that's not been ran through us that's through a third party that we've used and so we will continue to partner with the driving center to offer driver's ed courses as well and then the last summer opportunity is through the supervised agricultural experience program we've offered that for a number of years now some years we've been able to have it and some we haven't because again it's always been tied to the amount of students that have been involved but we've always tried to partner between southwood and northfield to make that program uh work and so we will offer that
084opportunity again for some of our students that are interested in taking advantage of that to earn uh high school credit so because of uh the additional federal monies that we can use towards summer programming we will still continue to seek reimbursement at the state level but whatever we don't get reimbursed for then we will use those esr dollars to cover the costs for those extended programs i hope your minds in action can take off yeah because that was such a great experience having the science of motion that was just yeah we're hoping it will too uh cami ross and patty seal kind of really taken the bowl by the horns uh with this program and so they're excited we we actually had this up and ready to go for last year but then with covet
085it got mixed so you know we've had this planned out for over a year now so they're pretty excited and pumped about uh trying to build that thing up so so tim i don't know if there's anything that you want to add or jay or fail to how we've operated summer school in the past and what we're looking to do this year with it for the new board members just the chances of us offering k-6 summer school is not usually something we do and so that is directly tied to those ones we are talking about and so probably next year or year out like i don't know how long they'll actually be able to stay there as a feasible option but for now we feel like it's a worthwhile investment so that being said what
086kind of cost is involved with that i mean i'm sure it's expensive i mean yeah salary teacher salary transportation transportation but teachers i was probably watching yeah typically in the in the past we've spent anywhere between forty to fifty thousand dollars and that's without doing some of this extended stuff without doing the mines in action so some of those additional things will be a little bit more of a cost so you have chart i see there's charges for each is there charge-free student if the parents pay or how does that work for for the like the minds in action no for so there is no cost for the k-6 elementary programs and that would include the extended school year the high remediation and the ymca summer programming so there's no cost there the mines in
087action there is a cost because of some of the field trips and traveling that is required as part of that to cover some of that i mean there's a couple nights that we're going to do some camping feeding the kids that type of stuff so that's what really those costs go towards those expenses we've tried to keep it as low as possible with that and then you know if we ever run into situations where families can't afford that then we look at alternative ways to make that happen for them uh when possible so we try to we try to not let the cost be a factor in their ability to participate approved the 2021 school uh summer school offerings on purpose ally all right and also then we have a recommendation to approve the school
088board appointment of a non-voting member to the county redevelopment commission for scott and christian we do have kevin normally serves as a the county redevelopment commission is that's that we send them off remember to kind of keep up with what's going on with that anything else you want to say about that no just recommend mr bowman to be that non-voting member again so still well still voices opinion obviously can you change a second to recommend the continued appointment of kevin to be our representative to the academy development commission all in favor say aye aye opposed we have no unfinished business any board policy i don't believe any public comment from for any item all right so any items from board members all right we're adjourned