January 12, 2021 // MSD of Wabash County Board Meeting

001wait until we do that we're actually going to start the calling to order the business uh the board of finance meeting the first thing i need to do is that i'm going to be declaring that the board of education as a whole will constitute the board of finance first item up then would be to elect a president of the board of finance nominations are open we don't have taught here anymore oh you mean me [Laughter] i was hoping to get out of it any other nominations motion and second to elect me i guess is the president of the board of finance all in favor say aye aye opposed so we have that was next we need to elect a board of fine secretary to the board of finance sir motion and second to nominate to

002elect matt as the secretary of the board of finance all in favor say aye aye opposed all right now the report on investments and review the investment policy by dr q so as part of the legal requirements that we have to meet for the board of finance meeting one of them is to look at the yearly investments and our investment policy last year i spoke on this we do not have an investment policy that is something that originally kind of gave to todd a little bit to work on uh we just never got anywhere with it so that'll probably be something that we'll need to look at doing as far as the policy is concerned uh as far as investments the only thing that we receive back in return is just interest from our money

003that sits in our bank accounts and so this shows you what that looks historically the rate of interest this year varied from 1.39 to 0.2 i actually got put i think it was back in july kind of when things were happening and interest was starting to really decrease i to talk to the bank and we came to an agreement to put a floor level on there and that floor level was to the point two percent so it's not going to go any lower than that for right now that they said we'll they'll reevaluate every year but you can see this year for 2020 the total amount of interest earned was about 58 000 and then you can compare that 2019 was a pretty good year 2018 was a decent year but we've had years that

004we've hardly earned any interest and that's all dependent on how much money is in the bank and what the rate is at that time and so it varies from month to month and so our total amount of interest that we earned for 2020 was any questions with that money in the bank is all money that's in a transactional state let's move on to the 2020 financial report though okay so these another requirement then is to this is something just within the past two years is to give kind of a financial report on uh the past year so we're kind of looking at 2020 maybe looking a little ahead in the 21 but we'll go over some things here that are required as part of the report and so uh we can kind of skip through

005some of those uh beginning slides one of the things that we'll start off with here is what is our budget for 2021. we gave or i gave you a budget estimate of 2021 that was something that we had to approve and then submit to the department of local government and finance they review that based off of anticipated revenue and expenses and they determine whether or not that we have those funds or appropriations i should say to spend so when we're talking about dollars here with the budget we're talking in terms of appropriations so those aren't actual dollars those are just dollars that we're allowed to spend for this year okay so with the education fund we estimated we we published an estimated the 14.3 million it came back to be that uh which is good

006so we didn't have to lose any appropriations uh when it came to the education fund i gave you a comparison of what we spent in 2020 just to kind of give you an idea of how that appropriation lines up with what we actually spent in operations we estimated sent in published 8.8 million dollars uh the lgf reduced that appropriation to 7.4 and then there's the actual expenditures in 2020 debt service health and rainy day health which then shows the total differences between what was submitted back in september i believe that's when we did our budget hearing to what the actuals would be for 2021. so as a comparison i'm a visual person there's a graph that shows what our budget estimated breakdown was for those funds how much of that was for education how much

007of that was for operation debt and rainy day and then based off of the appropriation reduction uh very similar in in that so not much changes as far as uh that comparison is concerned when we look at expenses of the education fund there was no reduction of appropriations so it really is very same as what we initiated um back in september this gives you a good breakdown if you go to the next slide mike gives you a good breakdown of those categories so you can see that our budget about 90 of our budget is spent on salary and benefits when it comes to the education fund and then the other categories um other big ticket categories then would be things that we pay as part of our heartland agreement and then supplies and materials and

008then part of our white's agreement as well now we get into the operation fund a little bit i'm not going to go on this this is a hyperlink that you can click on and it gives you a historical breakdown of tax rates and levees and those type of things but it's numerical so it takes some time to dive through and look at but you always have access to that if you want to look at it from a historical perspective you can click on that hyperlink so when we're dealing with operation fund we like to understand and know what our assessed valuation is going to be we had a slight increase of our assessed valuation for 2021 about half of a percent it's better to go up than down because your assessed valuation drives your tax

009rate right and so um having a higher assessed valuation can offset uh our tax rate a little bit and and keep it at a lower level go ahead mike please that's just a historical picture um this is what this is what i found interesting um i think it was back in october and november we had policy analysts come in and kind of do a forecast a little bit of what our assessed valuation tax rates could potentially look out look like out into the future and so um you know for 2021 they showed a assessed valuation of 722 million dollars and when you compare that to what we actually were we were 70 721 million 814 000. so it's pretty close uh to that so this blue line kind of just represents a future trend uh

010possibly with our assessed valuation the orange line is something that i asked them to do just in case there was a lot of unknowns there still is a lot of unknowns uh to how cobit 19 might impact impact uh property values and those type of things down the road but that blue line is kind of what the baseline is for our assessed valuation i mentioned before our assessed valuation drives our tax rates a little bit this is a historical perspective of those tax rates for msd wabash county with the breakdown to what those tax rates serviced so you can see uh back in 2019 legislation combined those bus replacement levies those capital fund levies those transportation levies into an operational fund or an operation levy which represents the entire green uh column there and then

011the peach column would represent your desk service so you can see we've kind of hovered around the 86 88 cent range and if you really got interested you can compare that to those assessed valuations and you can see where there were dips in the assessed valuation where your tax rates increased a little bit when there was an increase in tax or increase in assessed valuations your tax rates dipped a little bit so that's where some of that dipping and going comes and then i i get this graph off of software that i use 2021 they've just published 2021 into uh gateway so that wasn't ready for this time so that's what that bar line represents up there at the top is the 2021 um current tax rate i like to show this just to see

012how we compare to other corporations and statewide the average statewide is about a dollar one uh when you're looking at tax rates uh that's from 2019 haven't really found any more recent information than that at this point larry duvor i don't know many of you guys know him uh he actually retired this year and but he's still going to be giving presentations to local governments and iasbo and some of those groups so it'll be nice to have his wisdom and knowledge around uh for that uh this also came from policy annex it relates to that 2019 uh median average so at 80 cents you can see that we're right there towards the top as being one of the lowest in the state for tax rates net asset valuations like i mentioned before drive your your

013tax rate dollars a little bit again this was a projection that policy analytics presented to us back in october and you can see us their estimate for 2021 was almost right on to what our actuals were i think our actual was 87.77 so very close there with that and then you can see for 2022 a slight increase probably because there's a little bit of dip and assess valuation from their projection and then you can see it fall way off and the reason that it falls way off is because we would have retired all of our bonds at that point in time from our debt service which would be our last payment would come in 2022 this year we'll have one bond that will pay off at the end of the year which would leave us

014with two remaining bonds that get paid off at the end of this is recent information uh presented back in december uh from larry devore uh just showing that bond interest rates are at the lowest that they've been in a long long long time less than two and a half percent who knows with the new president coming in and anything that happens with legislation and so forth obviously some of those things could change uh in the future but right now uh it's pretty low lastly i like to do a comparison around our border schools just to kind of see what our our tax rates were again this is from 2020 so this isn't the most updated version because that was just released to gateway today but comparatively to last year you can see where msd of

015wabash county stands uh from a tax rate perspective this year that would obviously represent 80 87 88 cents we do know that just comparatively from the county because we did receive the county budget order as well that wabash city schools for 2021 will be a dollar sixty five and uh mcconaug manchester's would be a dollar six the the bar graph on the right is just a side-by-side comparison to give you how much money is uh collected based off of that tax rate so it's the levy and so for example like if you would compare msd to peru we get about the same amount of money for levy but they have a tax rate of 1.61 and we had a tax rate of 80 or 85 cents so assessed valuation really drives that again they have

016a lower assessed valuation we have a much higher assessed valuation and that's where that factor comes in which then leads to the money that we appropriated for the operation fund budget this is what we submitted to the dlgf back in september it gives you a breakdown of what those different categories are you can see general administration that would be like central office dealings marketing and communication technology maintenance and custodial security services would be like our sros insurance costs property insurance workman's comp auto insurance transportation costs building land those are improvements and then you have sports facilities and equipment purchases in there as well which building land and equipment purchases can also have repairs and some of that stuff in there as well as maintenance um and so with the new budget order for our operation

017or appropriations for operations this is the breakdown in that and as you if you compare those the biggest difference is typically when appropriations are reduced then we don't typically spend as much money on projects that's where the bonds have come in handy the past few years is that we've had bond money to be able to do those types of things any questions with the budget then break down from this from that and i put in your board packet the 1782 notice which gives you a little bit more information that's what we get from the dlgf with that did you expect a dlg to cut back operations yeah they do that every year and a lot of that is because part of the process is that we over appropriate so that we make sure that we

018don't put ourselves in a bind because we don't ever know what our assessed valuation is going to be and we don't want to put ourselves in a position to not receive enough money to fund our budget though 105 000 tax the last part that we have to go through is the school corporation fiscal indicators so back in 2019 part of legislation required a new entity to be created called the do ab which is the distress units appeal board and they were to come up with some fiscal indicators and share those out publicly of every school corporation to determine some categories that might end up leading a district into financial distress a lot of that has to do because of the issues and the takeover of muncie schools and gary community schools and so this is

019a fairly new process it's only been out for a couple years one thing to remember about this though these indicators is that they are always a year behind so these do not represent uh end of 2020 school year they represent end of 2019 school year and then next year's will represent the end of 2020 so it's always a year behind with that so one of the things they look at is your adm because that's the money that we get from the state per student and so obviously if there's a decrease in enrollment that could lead to financial distress because of the schools not getting as much revenue from the state so adm is one thing that they look at the other thing they look at are fund balances and so what i shared with this

020is and you can go on there on this website and you can play around with it if you choose but this represents i i just broke it down into a few categories capital funds which is the orange that represents the bond money that we've received and so obviously you can see where it's gone up and we've been spending it down because it's kind of a one-time thing that you get and you receive that money and you spend it uh so the capital funds represent those bond dollars education fund and general fund those are kind of the same thing they're not really the same thing but you can kind of equate that because we don't have a general fund anymore it's now the education fund so you can see where we were in the past with

021those in the negatives and obviously we've improved our balances when it comes to the education fund operation fund is the great and you can also see that our operation fund is him is getting stronger rainy day which is the yellow and you can see that we're starting to build up a little bit of rainy day reserves and then the brown is the self-insurance fund and the reason i wanted to put that on there was because today will be a day that we will celebrate for a little bit and uh we ran into some issues back in the past with our self insurance fund and we will have that paid off um after this board meeting so that will be a good thing the other thing they look at is your revenues and expenses for each

022year so this is an example of the education fund revenue and expenses uh from year to year green representing the revenue uh blue representing the expenditures obviously if your blue is higher than your green you're losing money right because you're spending more than you're receiving which is not always a bad thing but if it if you do it a lot then you're gonna dual down your reserves next slide they look at a fund balances as percentages of expenditures you can look through different funds this is the education i just selected the education fund so we didn't have to go through all these different slides but education shows that we have a 50 fund balance as a percent of our expenditures and i think at one point we used to have a goal of that and

023i think it was like 12 or 15 so we're doing well there and then the annual deficit surplus this just shows you revenues and expenses for all funds all funds that hit our banks not just the education fund the last two is revenue by type so that just gives you a breakdown of the where the revenue streams are coming from from year to year and what those look like and then the last slide is an operating referendum which mike you can go back which we don't have enough we've never had an operating referendum so there's nothing to see that i created this graph i like to see it i don't know if you guys really care to it it the blue lines represent our basic grant comparative to our adm so basic grant are the

024dollars that we receive per student so you can see from the line graph as our adm you can see how that has impacted or adjusted our basic grant dollars that we received from the state and then i tie that into the total revenue for the education fund and the total expenses for the education fund and then lastly this just shows you again a historical perspective or fund balances you kind of already saw that on the other graph i i mentioned food service because that's one thing that we kind of take keep an eye on because that's changes from year to year all the time and so forth and then lastly last year we we created a two-year goal so this that goal goes through this year so i'm just carrying that goal over and so

025we had established a goal that we wanted our education fund balance to be equivalent or better than three months of expenses and our average expenses per month for 2019 was 1.1 million and our average for 2020 was about 1.2 million so three months of that we'd be looking at about 3.6 million dollar um balance that we would like to maintain in our education fund and i believe our currently our education fund sits at about 6 million so uh that's we're good in a good direction with that our other goal was to increase our rainy day fund to up to a million dollars um i believe after we made that uh transfer back in october from operations to rainy day when we take out the five hundred thousand dollars to pay off our self-insurance uh today

026that will leave us just over a million dollars in our rainy day fund and then the last was to pay off that self-insurance fund uh by this year and so we'll have that done as well uh today so that being said i don't think i have to come to any more board meetings [Laughter] so that's just a financial recap then uh of 2021 leading us into 20 or 20 20 minutes in 2021 any questions with that i just want to say i appreciate your guys's leadership on being able to have us hit those every one of those financial goals when i first started on the board that seemed impossible so good job thank you absolutely so i guess that would be cool so we are adjourning the financial of the board of finance meeting so

027we'll move right on to the reorganization meeting and i will call that to order uh recognize the visitors in the in the room or mostly just employees no revisions to the agenda for the reorganization meeting and so we'll move on to the oath of office for the new board members and re-elected board members thank you very much we'll start with mr routine if you would stand and raise your right hand yes okay hi christian roseanne hi chris do you solemnly swear it's only for her that i will support the constitution of the united states of america support constitution of the united states of america and the constitution of the state of indiana constitution of india and the laws of the united states and the state of indiana also the united states and of indiana i

028will faithfully execute the duties of my office can you repeat that i will faithfully execute faithfully execute the duties of my office these are my offices as a member of the school board board of school trustees member of the school board of trustees so oh my god oh my god congratulations thank you very good mr bowman and the constitution of the state and the constitution of the state of indiana and the laws of the united states and the laws of the united states and the state of india and the state of indiana i will faithfully execute the duties of my office i will faithfully execute the duties of my office as a member of the school board as a member of the school board so help me god so help me god congratulations mr paul

029hi scott halpert i saw harper do solemnly swear please and i will support the constitution of the united states and i will support the constitution of the united states of america of america and the constitution of the state of indiana and the constitution of the state of india and the laws of the united states and the laws of the united states and the state of india and the state of india i will faithfully execute the duties of my office i will fully execute the duties of my office as a member of this school board because they were a member as a member of the school board so oh my god so help me out congratulations you're official all right thank you all thank you thank you later now and i will file these with the

030clerk moving on to the reorganization of the board of education first item is election of president finally todd any other nominations we have a motion second to elect me as the president of the of the board of education all in favor say all right election of vice president kevin i have a motion a second to elect kevin as the vice president for the board all in favor say aye aye opposed election of secretary [Music] so there's a motion and a second to elect matt as the secretary for the board of education all in favor say aye aye legislative liaison delegate to the indiana school board association annual convention is that a person this year or is that well it will be until this fall so we'll find out okay a second motion in a second

031to nominate me as the legislative liaison delegate to the isba convention all in favor say aye all right okay i guess i'll do it uh representative to the heartland career center board of managers emotionally second for matt being the representative to the heartland uh board of managers all in favor say aye aye next is the appointment of the corporation attorney and establisher retainer of 175 an hour and mr president i will recommend we approve the law office of downs tandy and but there we go as attorneys at the rate of 175 per [Music] superintendent's hour okay we have a function in a second to approve uh those guys to be the office of uh to be the corporation attorney and to establish that uh retainer all in favor say aye aye opposed appointment of corporation

032treasurer and deputy treasurer with current bonds set at 200 000 elementary bookkeeper's current bond set at ten thousand dollars and high school bookkeepers for twenty thousand dollars mr president i recommend the appointment of dr chris kin as a corporation treasurer and i also recommend laura baer as deputy treasurer and the bonds that you actually read okay we don't okay the bookkeeper bonds are yeah it's tied to a name right position right i guess i should have been sorry i have a motion in a second to appoint dr kuhn as the corporation treasurer and laura bears this deputy treasurer and to approve all of the bond amounts that previously read all in favor say aye aye opposed next is to establish the salary of board members the current salary of the board members is two thousand

033dollars with the heartland career center represented receiving an additional twenty five dollars per meeting not to exceed twelve meetings so the maximum salary cannot exceed two thousand dollars that's my recommendation and that's my indiana code i need to approve it more than a second to establish the salary of the board members all in favor say aye aye opposed establish a mileage reimbursement rate and i recommend the mileage rate for all school employees be the same as the amount in the current teacher master contract which is 44 cents per mile so we have a motion and second to establish a mileage reimbursement rate for the school district employees all in favor say aye aye opposed board scholarship yes since 1994 um the board has been very generous and giving a contribution for two scholarships and so

034each board member contributed 120 annually toward two 300 scholarships one each at northwood and southwood and so the board selects the recipients from the applications submitted each spring so that would be up to you if you would want to continue that but we appreciate what you've done in the past what did we raise that to last year it was a 200 scholarship we went to 250 i believe which i think that's what it was represented no it went from 200 to 300. that's what he just said i didn't say 300 this is the one that we did this is correct yeah correct we went from 200 to 300 so instead of a hundred dollars from each board member it's 120 donation from each board member so you want to keep it at 300 that's fine

035with me i have no problem i was a little disappointed that we only had one applicant in the south carolina district didn't we but it could have been a tiny thing yeah and they're only about five or six from the north i think i just realized as a project next year we'll have the senior class right one forever to send a second to approve a 300 per school board scholarship presented each group all in favor say aye aye closed appointment of the local education agency officer the lea officer and mr president i recommend that the board appoint the superintendent of the embassy of wabash county as the local education officer for the ensuring year ensuing year with authority to file applications for federal funds on behalf of the school corporation so i have a motion

036in a second to appoint mr kefaber as the lea officer all in favor say aye opposed select newspapers for legal advertisements so by law we are required to place legal advertisements in our county newspaper i recommend that we or you officially approve the wabash plain dealer and again just to let you know it has to be a paid subscription and that's the only paper that we have did you have traction with john you were going to do it electronically yeah there's been there's still some traction on that there's some of the requirements have been taken away but actually it's made it almost more difficult chris could talk about that you have to do a different form to advertise it in the paper and a different you stop to advertise in the paper but you have

037to do two different forms now instead of just doing one advertising in both places so it doesn't really help a lot a lot of lobbyists that make a lot of money to continue to do it in print so i moved and we approved the walbesh plain dealer as the newspaper for our legal advertisements all in favor say aye all right and then we need to approve the continued participation in the wmap and heartland career center and i do recommend that continued collaboration with those two entities so sure motion in a second to approve continued participation in the wabash memory area program in the army career center all in favor say aye aye anything else it says other here but i didn't know there was something we were missing okay so the reorganization meeting isn't there

038i guess the other thing was though you already hit the gavel but if we want to do anything else different as far as our timing with board meetings or anything like that so keep that in mind as we get to items from board members we'll bring that back up again okay so now we actually get to the regular meeting and so at that point we're going to stand and say the pledge for those of you who've been here the flag is now behind you pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay so future board meetings january 26th february 9th and february 23rd are all regular meetings those will be held here and

039on february 18th we have the public work session january january 18th we had the public work session here at one we have no re revision to the agenda and so we'll move on to public recognition we have a recommendation to approve a three thousand dollar donation for southwood high school 1500 100 of it for southwood and 1500 of it from northville high school from first farmers bank and trust a recommendation to approve a 100 donation from earnest and barbara ball for the art program at southwood elementary the recommendation to approve 1225 donation 250 from robert and claudia may 100 from jennifer and stan cox 200 from amy kuhn 50 from randolph and barbara swanson one hundred dollars from morris and carol smedley twenty-five dollars from john john and paula mcdonald 25 from billy and linda

040site 50 from catherine baker 25 from marley a man 250 from john and diane cauldron 100 from troy and stacey bear 50 from joel and connie roberts all in the memory of kathy seif from northfield athletic department i also have a recommendation to approve a 40 donation from wabash county farm bureau for southwood ffa a recommendation to approve you got a couple set of zeros in there is that 130 or she giving us 130 000. i'm going to guess 130 dollars uh thirty dollars from aaron and amy rosine uh a hundred dollars from ron ron and rhonda bear all in the memory of kathy seif for northville athletic department to approve a 75 donation from tim quinn for northfield girls basketball and a recommendation to approve the 40 donation from wabash county farm bureau for

041northfield ffa my is that a lot of money i'm going to accept donations yeah a motion and a second to accept all those very generous donations your health has been greatly appreciated all in favor say aye bye-bye school recognition all right well thank you we'll start with uh mr martin who's on the list that'll be first appreciate the opportunity to tell you a little bit about some good things kids are doing on shark creek elementary first we'd like to recognize the shark creek elementary spelling bee winners uh which mrs nguyen provided fifth grade winners for the kiwanis contest uh the winner was colin beal and runner up nate hudson hodgson i'm sorry hudson sixth grade kiwano winner was nicole fisher and the runner-up was emma wilson and the journal connect because that winner rihanna poe

042and runner up keon stevens so congratulations to all those kids we'd also like to recognize the hard work and the effort and skill and ability of our sharp creek elementary paw print newspaper staff they produce a newspaper once a month under the guidance of mrs pam campbell and these students are allison edmonds ashland macy sage martin dawson tashera and hayden copeland and we just appreciate what they're doing they electronically produce that goes to all of our students and staff through electronic mail i also want to mention one staff member mrs becky mast just want to thank her for her extra time and help in providing homework help opportunities for our students two days a week after school and it is taken advantage of and parents and students and teachers appreciate her time with our students

043helping them have success okay thank you mr martin mr mcdivitt thank you mr keith faber i'd like to recognize gary the grand champ who will be retired at the end of this month gary has served as our basically we call the transitions room where kids are getting close to exiting campus we put in the gary's room and gary's there to help him earn any final credits they might be able to piece together so one of the things all their kids tend to struggle with is math gary is a math list bank and there's a lot of kids that would not have graduated that had not been for years health and math so one to wish very well for his retirement he's done a great service for our students and uh we hope he enjoys his

044january uh we've tried to help we've tried to make that honestly we've tried to help make that possible for him so thanks to gary and then a student i want to recognize his name's quincy uh as you may know for really about four weeks end of november start of december our students were on quarantine in their colleges and so we were able to deliver all their all their computers to their colleges so the house parents could have school during the day i'm sure it won't shock you some students don't thrive in that setting quincy did quincy was one of the kids and he kept his nose down he kept his uh he kept you know shooting off questions the teachers which they can do with an edmonton and he did a fantastic job so uh

045quincy has been now moved to mr d's room uh because he getting he's getting close to graduation so we want to recognize quincy for for doing work when it's it's it's not easy to do work when you're just you know quarantined for college you would think it would be but it's not so so questions done a great job a lot of distractions it can be in homes and cottages wherever so it's great that he did that um mrs boone had a conflict tonight so she um is not here so she will not be mentioning anything right now except i think i will say something later um mrs moore is here she's more to talk a little more about our new business with our preschool uh but she also put some things down so mrs moore

046won't you go ahead and share i wonder um we just like to thank the bachelor creek church of christ they contacted me right after thanksgiving break but there are members in their congregation wanting to adopt some families for students that may not have the resources that they need and they adopted four of our families that were not getting any other type of community help so they hadn't signed up for christmas spirit and maybe missed that deadline or i think that deadline comes out right after school starts so parents whose situations may have changed they adopted four families and 1911 kids and we're just very thankful they were there for our kids and their families and the responses that i had from parents whose children received was just overwhelming um just super appreciative that they're able

047to help provide for their kids that's great yeah thank you um andrew mcdaniel had a few or a couple here says the southwest community would like to recognize alex farr grade 12 for selection as a rising star for white's residential family services by the nba all-star legacy committee this award comes with a 2 100 scholarship to college of alex's choice only 21 students in the state of indiana were awarded this honor recipients were judged based upon their leadership through community service academic achievement and extracurricular achievement where they go alex we are proud of you mr mcdaniel also mentioned the southwest community like to recognize tom finickle and carrie aidcraft for the work on the county tournament this year there was a great deal of planning and revising plans but students had the opportunity to play

048basketball over the christmas holiday thank you mr finical and mrs haycraft a lot of people involved to make that all work and make it happen and we're glad it happened mrs boone with the car program we wish to recognize and express our gratitude to kylie broman transition coordinator for the car program for the exceptional work she does conducting the onboarding enrollment process for all students and parents as a program that offers open enrollment we are continually enrolling new students from across the state of indiana the task of onboarding new students and orientating parents to online learning is a heavy lift miss roman does an excellent job of connecting with and engaging new families additionally she carries a large caseload of students with whom she facilitates their learning ms roman works harshly to encourage support motivate

049and connect with students who might otherwise fall through the cracks educationally we sincerely appreciate miss roman's passion work ethic and commitment to the mission of the carr program mr snyder at northfield northfield is very proud of senior emma brainerd who was recently announced as the 2021 lilly endowment community scholarship recipient this four-year full-tuition college scholarship is given to one walter county senior each year who ranks high on 11 criteria including academic achievement measures financial need volunteerism and work ethic school participation leadership essays and an interview congratulations emma nhs is very proud of you for this awesome accomplishment that was an excellent choice there are other excellent choices but they could only choose one so congratulations to emma see what else we have mr snyder also uh would like to thank jason lyons and sharon gray

050for all their time and dedication to helping get the robotics team up and going this year they took our team to their first competition on saturday just last saturday january 9th these guys do an excellent job of not only teaching students for competition but also thinking through building and programming in regards to careers having two professionals like these um that two that work in the engineering field is an awesome resource and wealth of knowledge for our kids and mr snyder also threw another one out there north would like to congratulate the lady norrish basketball team for winning the 2020 wabash county basketball tournament a special shout out to the seniors on our team on winning the tournament each year of their four-year high school career i don't know how many that could say they won

051the county attorney each year their high school careers congratulations on the fourth county tournament went to seniors in the hoover kirsten stout kenzie bear addie baker ira kennedy and jenna crum addie baker emma hoover kyrah kennedy made the all-county team kyrah kennedy was named walrus county attorney mvp good luck the remainder of the season if you were there and watch those games they made it very exciting that was i think i don't want to miss anybody um yeah mr boone didn't uh put something down uh he um was also going to be here for the preschool but he was unable to come his wife is actually delivering a baby she's not delivering but she's helping deliver got to be careful what i say there but we'd like to take this opportunity to thank our elementary

052coach sports coaches for the 2020-2021 school year for girls volleyball gina deaton and drew gentry did a great job working with our young ladies to help them come together as a team and improve individual skills for our current basketball season sean hunger injured and jesse high are coaching our boys teams adam weiner and randy pershing our leading our girls teams we appreciate all of them for juggling work and family obligations making it possible for one more voice who is encouraging and challenging our students to reach their fullest potential and so mr daisy i believe that's all i have for you well we're to the point for the public comment we're still doing facebook live so we'll do the countdown until they catch up here scott you're in charge of finding some sort of theme song

053to play at this point and that's fine okay so we'll move on to the consent agenda items um approval of the minutes from our last meeting on december 8th motion in a second to approve the minutes from our last board meeting on december 8th all in favor say aye aye opposed claims um okay end of year and month balances uh table oh yeah i got the yeah there's two other things there payroll we have two payrolls it looks like yeah we have two payrolls uh the last two of the the calendar year um and so you can see a difference between the uh december 15 december 30th payroll and that's due to the fact that we issued those teacher appreciation grand dollars that we received from the state out and then also the eca's for

054the first semester for both high schools okay we'll stay on that line and go with financial summary right now okay um i gave you a lot of information so i'm not going to go through all of it uh just an opportunity i'm going to try out some new things just to see what you thought about some of that not necessarily that i need to do it every month but i thought since we were at the end of the year it'd be good to just kind of show some of those things so the first is the cash balance report we usually typically for you new board members we showed this report on the first for me of the month so it just shows you the imbalances from the previous month so for example this would be

055not only the imbalances for december month december but also the end of 2020. and you can see like i mentioned earlier education fund had a 6.1 million dollar balance and then that little negative 500 000 uh will eventually have a zero on it after today so that just kind of shows you all of our different funds and what those balances are in those funds as you get down towards the bottom a lot of those funds are federal grants so typically you will see negatives in there because those are always paid in the rears we pay those out and then once we pay those out then we have to seek reimbursement from the government to get those monies back so that's why those are in the negatives education fund we usually do a cash flow sheet

056usually give you a cash flow spreadsheet on the second board meeting of the month to reflect the previous month as well so this obviously since it was the end of december would reflect all of this all of the 2020 school year so you can kind of see how funds change month-to-month in what categories and what areas and then we use those trends and so forth to make projections for 2021 so currently i am working on projections of the education fund for 2021. the next is just the previous years cash flow if you wanted to compare you have that option this is something new uh i thought i would throw it out there because a lot of it's more visual just kind of gives you an idea of what those trends have been in the past

057compared to what actuals are for revenues and expenditure and expenses and then it kind of gives you a picture of what those fund balances were uh each month which kind of see that from the cash flow but this is more of a visual perspective that compares it to the previous year from month to month for the education fund this is a dashboard that this one represents the revenue and so the thing i like about it is it kind of shows your comparisons uh of appropriations to expenditure to forecasts and actuals it gives you a top of what your top 10 revenue sources were for that year or that month if we did if this was something that was done on a monthly basis uh and then it kind of gives you that comparison of what

058the budget was to what the actuals uh are and what the uh current was if you compare that from a month-to-month basis so that's looking at it from a revenue standpoint this shows this also this is also being shown as a revenue standpoint it kind of gives you an idea of where your trends if they're favorable or not gives you a comparison from previous years if you wanted to look at month-to-month from a previous year or a year to date from a previous year kind of gives you that breakdown the next one is the same dashboard except this is for expenses so it gives you the top 10 expenses out of the education fund for that year with those similar comparisons to appropriations and actuals for that time period in this case that would be

059the whole year with a similar graph here that shows expenses you can look at you know december expenses and how they compared from month to month from previous years and so uh that gives you a little different perspective again maybe not something that you care to see from a a month-to-month uh relation but something that i look at also helps me make my adjustments and then this was something that kind of just explains that report all broken down gives a little bit of analysis of what some of the variances were in the education fund related to revenues and expenses from what we budgeted out to what the actuals were and what uh some of those areas of increases or decrease decreases occurred in so just something to add to that the next one is operations

060fun uh so similar thing here give you a representation of a cash flow from month to month and where those expenses and revenues flow in and out of uh each month and that will lead to trends for projections the next one shows 2019. if you wanted to compare how 2020 look to 2019 you can always go back and forth and do that and then again similar graph here you can really see a spike in certain times of balances and that's because when you're dealing with your taxed funds the main source of revenue in our operation is our tax dollars and so we only get our tax dollars twice a year so we get them in june and we get them in december and so that's where you see the spike and increase so essentially those

061tax dollars last us for the six months because you start to see it decrease because we don't have as much revenue coming in but we had still have all of our expenses and then you get a spike increase because we get our tax draw so that's where you see those that's why you see those jumps in there and then we don't again we don't have to go through all this dashboards for revenue and expenses compared questions with the cash flow slides i know it's a lot of information something that you can look at on your free time or call if you have questions about any of it i don't think i'll give that large amount of information from a month-to-month perspective but it is available and it is something that i look at each time

062and make adjustments accordingly uh when we're going through our projections shout out to you and chris and you guys should pick up on that you're in projection in line with the finals our contract agreement with whites that we rent a part of we don't own that facility that they educate the students in so we rent that facility and so that's the the cost there and so that 210 000 is now we may have some other things but they're not even closely associated with that that's the big chunk of it that make might go all the way back through carpal tunnel okay uh one of the things that we'll we'll approve tonight is a resolution that determines the amount of money that we transfer from our education fund to our operations fund and this all occurred

063uh for you new guys this all occurred in 2019 when they changed our fund structures and they they got rid of the general fund and they created the education fund and they got rid of the capital projects and bus replacement transportation and they created the operations fund well some of the same expenses that were in the general fund they moved out of the general fund and put into operations without any revenue and so because of that they allow school corporations to transfer money out of their education fund to cover those expenses that used to be out of that fund and so um they allow schools to do that but they cap it at 15 so you're not allowed to transfer more than 50 15 of your revenue into operations and so this document then just

064shows that breakdown of the different categories that used to be paid out of education funds so like the support services used to be paid out of education fund the central service used to be paid at an education fund the operation and maintenance services used to be paid out of education fund now they're paid out of operation so we transfer money out of the education fund to cover those expenses because that's how it was working beforehand and so that maps that all out and the bottom line is is this year we transferred 12.48 of our education revenue over into operations to cover those costs does that all kind of make sense as a comparison that is that's a very good figure there are schools when dr says that it's not allowed to go over 15 some

065schools will go over 15 but then they will be basically documented in saying that they were they have to document if these documents of why they're going over how they're going to fix it those type of things so they can maintain 15 so it's not like that's a punishment but you have it's kind of like a audit you have to get your problems fixed to some degree and so where they came up with 15 nobody really knows but that was the magic number and so and originally when they did this it was supposed to be flexibility for schools and it was flexibility but then they actually then put this and they kept it regulation so yeah uh the other slides that go with that are just a similar breakdown this would be if we transferred

066the exact amount of dollars from month to month so if we were to transfer the exact amount to cover those costs it would have been 11.4 but what we do is we just do a monthly amount uh and we set that monthly amount through that resolution and then we just make our adjustments as needed so that so that we can just manage it a little bit easier and then that's just the entire number breakdown by each category you don't really need to worry about that okay that's all i had as far as my financial end of the year summary moving on to personnel under employment we have danielle renberger a paraprofessional at metro north uh effective december 15th shelly grump paraprofessional at sharp creek elementary the beginning of this semester randy pershing southwood elementary fifth

067grade girls basketball coach for the winter season under leave we have number 115 believe to continue through the end of the school year and retirement danielle snyder teacher at south of high school uh that would be effective at the end of this school year and if i can just mention something about mr snyder mr snyder put his uh retirement in um i think it was just monday it was after this already came out that's why we put the revision i asked him if he wanted me to go ahead and put it on now or later he said it was up to us so i thought i'd go ahead and put it in there but just a great teacher but even more importantly a great person a great person that works in a community builds relationships

068and going to be a really tough person to you know for somebody to take his position because he's done a great job and we appreciate him and all the years that he served um at southwood also south of alum and we'll miss him and wishing well in retirement football program's done this weekend motion and second to approve personnel fred all in favor say hi i did one thing i did i did ask him he um does some stock car racing so i asked him if i was gonna see him at the the brickyard but he's probably not the brickyard i think his racing kept him employed for one or two more years it seems like there's always a transmission that needed appearing moving on reports heartland career center do you have anything man uh no

069before we'll have uh meeting next week okay guys mike's got something about now we'll they'll give us some more information about the funding but but there is a lot i guess i would say though there's a lot of excitement with that moving it's going to take some time but but there is a lot of excitement a lot of excitement with the donations that have come through over 800 000 of the million dollars that we needed to raise so there's just a lot of excitement um for the community and for all of our students and for adult learners too to be able to participate in that so with a federal grant there's a lot of things that you have to follow and it's going to take some time but it'll happen is the funds that are

070raised matt does that decrease our commitment as a district then yes yes because we're kind of guaranteeing that yeah yeah and we still may have to do some of it not to extend yeah i think we were on the hook for 27 percent of whatever was left that wasn't raised and some of the donors are like four or five years out too so we'll have to figure some of that out also um as far as yeah but the largest donation i think is just the one time so that that's good but there's other smaller ones that said that they would do a certain amount like i said four or five years so they're working on that too so mr keith i think everybody here knows this i've served as a high school principal in three

071different districts with all three different vocational schools and i can tell you the leadership of carlton career center is is by far the best leadership of any person i've ever worked with they do a fantastic job and they are to be commended and they're working with weiss to you have to do a welding class yes they are starting this semester i don't know what his name is he's coming out to campus after school hours at heartland to work with the cohort of kids at weiss to work on some welding skills that's right really excited about that and they like to add a lot of different programs it just takes time but it's nice they also have not through which they're not through heartland career center but they have another program that they're doing since you

072brought that up um is the cna program that they're doing too so yeah magazine health yes i think there's a connection that ron evans has with somebody in indianapolis but we just had our first cohort of kids last month that did some cna training with magnolia health and then they'll also do their contact hours as well with the idea that once those kids leave whites because magnolia health has nursing homes all across northern indiana i'm told and so they would offer all those kids that get their certification a job they might return to so it's really a it's a great deal with some of our kids superintendents report what's your key favor yes um so last year started with the review of 2019 and this year i just want to do a review of 20

07320 have some slides here i haven't shown these to you yet because it is a presentation i'll go pretty quickly on it though um one thing i was going to do is just say cover 19 and just make it one slider but just just to go back and recap there's a lot of things that we could say as far as the schools this is not necessarily school related uh but it's more or less um so maybe the corporation this first one is in january one thing i put a highlight josh moore was approved as athletic director at norfolk junior senior high school uh february the tim tebow's night of shine if you remember that that was really a neat thing that used to be at honeywell and it was at northfield it was going to

074be maybe at norfolk or south with this next year but because of cover that change well i mean yes it has changed because they haven't done anything with it and then the strategic plan update of course we had those informational presentations in february right before copenhagen southwood and then we had swimmer grant dale placed 29th in the state meet in his events in march um i guess i don't even read all these to you but i will the six robotic teams that competed at lucas oil stadium and that was right there really on the verge of of the pandemic right before we close everything down of course the kindergarten roundup was the last community of really community events for the school year prior to the shutdown coba 19 friday the 13th wow unbelievable day started

075the meal program donated needs needed supplies to health care facilities i know mrs moore went through some other places i took some different places because we weren't in school we had a supplies um that was the big situation they needed the ppe and they didn't have it so we were able to donate you saw the donations that we get all the time but it was really nice to be able to reciprocate and and be able to do that also for other health care facilities the 160 school day rule i put that down just because that was really just unbelievable as far as what happened because it's a 180-day the last year was 160. um of course in in april just the first of april that was very early on how many meals that we served

07630 521 a lot of people doing a lot of things with the meals everybody got involved and then when we went to the different nine location or eight delivery dates or that that those were eight delivery dates up to that point but there were nine different locations of course then because of the pandemic we had the uh required the continuous learning plan that we had to complete and it was approved and then if we i don't know if dr coons gonna spend a lot of time on it oh no don't tell me this isn't gonna work what just happened he took over that too oh well what just happened i'm supposed to push that and it's supposed to play because it did but basically i'll just say that we're so we're all in this together

077this was just um a teacher at shark creek elementary actually put this together and it was just kind of a a really combination of a lot of different things that were happening as far as saying that we miss you and there are a lot of people involved in that and it's a video i'll probably throw it out to you on an update so you can see it because it's not very long but it's pretty neat uh the homeschool policies um were actually approved by you as a board for heartland career and athletics and that was the first time ever that we had that situation uh in may of 2020 the new event new events passed out caps and gowns we had drive-by delivery kind of something new staff and senior signed secret distribution that was

078fun student device drop off and pick up of personal items we had to do that because of coven and then of course we had the 27 member covet 19 pandemic re-entry task force team that's hard to say met for the first time getting ready for school and then of course um the board started approving all kinds of re-entry plans you started out with the athletic reentry plan we had the senior parades that was really neat in july you had the msd county re-entry plan then it was revised jay snyder was approved as norfolk principal joel martin was approved as a sharp creek principal norfolk and southwood finally had their graduations in july and then of course they had proms msd we went to the fair again but it was a lot lot smaller um probably

079didn't know we were there because we were tucked in that it was a nice place but that's all happened we went to the virtual option face coverings was a big topic we had the vigil for dakota who was killed and one of our students just a tragic thing 85 staff members participated in ip ipad training in august you could see msd re-entry plan revised again then right away right when we did it the isdh released new data and we had to do something different you also did the event management plan we did start school in march or in march in august the second refresh of student devices ipads ninth year to be one one-to-one school district that's kind of hard to believe but this is the second refresh refresh but the ninth year we received

0804 200 masks that was the first time we had the distribution we actually had it again so we we've received 8 400 masks uh six percent of our traditional student population started virtual education msd uh started being on this week in wabash and we've been there every week we're the only um school district in walmart county that does that on a weekly basis 31 teachers provided instruction for virtual virtual only students from august to december this is kind of interesting all seventh grade students for a first time participating at wall base river defenders wild river wild field trip usda offered free breakfast and lunch to all students so pretty big there october the teacher contract we appreciate everybody working on that that was approved brain suite ran across country state meet placing 30th south football

081team broke a trc record of 27 consecutive wins for the in the trc uh november implemented the health care assistance program with the united fund community foundation walrus county challenges continue with coven 19 as you know live event streaming started so um not just here we do this we've done this for a lot of years now but in the in our gyms and in december we invited uh senator anderson representative snow we're invited to attend a meeting with the administrators our advocates and also teacher representatives we had the reception of the outgoing school board members uh also challenges improved by the end of the semester uh virtual for second semester i say 26 students it's really a little closer to maybe 30 students but some of them are students that are in our rice classrooms

082and anyway that's kind of a highlight unfortunately a lot of that is about covid i went back to 2019 if you guys remember we did this in there are a lot of things that we began in 2019 we didn't have to react to something like we did with kobe but we hope to see more things coming in some additional highlights we talked about the funding i actually went back last year was like 75 000. it was 28 000 but most of it was just the first three months because of the year before the pandemic there were several work sessions to discuss strategic planning of course all those grants that this year i say 2021 but it's um really in 2020 i don't know why i put 21 there but all the ones that you've already

083seen a lot of competitive grants that were earned also probably people get a little tired of all the messages but about 140 messages to parents through school messenger um in 2020 and typically we don't do that many unless it's about fog ice or snow but there's a lot about covid fund balances are improving and stabilizing self-insurance uh to ourselves is falling off by early 2021 and debt uh and dr cuny talked about all that msd is moving forward and continues to appreciate learning um and there's our plan there i'm just going to skip those two for time and 20 21 here we come so a lot of things happen just to recap pretty quickly all right that's all i have thank you mr drake hurricane instruction report i think mike pretty much covered all the

084stuff i would talk about so okay i'll forfeit my time okay we have a lot of items under new business and i think each of them deserve their own time so we're just going to vote on each one of them independently recommendation to approve the 2021 budget reduction resolution from our 1782 notice so we kind of went over that in our financial reports um we just kind of have to approve that 1782 notice to some degree so we have to approve what those new budget appropriations do we go back to getting what we asked for yeah [Music] budget reduction resolution okay motion second to approve the budget reduction resolution for our 1782 notice all in favor say aye recommendation to approve the local income tax distribution resolution so the state we receive local income tax

085dollars from the county uh the state requires a state board of accounts requires us to determine where that revenue goes and how it's distributed and so basically what we do is because it's a tax related revenue we do have the operation equipment for the option of putting into our education fund but we usually keep it in line with our other tax revenue funds which means we split that income tax distribution between our operations and our debt service and we split it based off of the percent difference between the tax rate for operations and debt service and so that local income tax distribution then gets put into those two funds the resolution for the local income tax distribution here's the one i like recommendation to approve the rainy day transfer to the self-insurance fund i almost

086put 500 000 and one dollar great pleasure i approve the resolution of the transfer rainy day fund second no motion on second to approve the rainy day transfer to the self-insurance fund hang that thing off i mean it will be at some point we can inactivate it but it's just a fun that we have and it'll always be in our history so recommendation to improve to approve the disbursements from education fund to operations fund so um this year i anticipated a 2.1 million dollar transfer which would equate to be about 175 000 a month and that's just the cap of it so it's not to exceed 175 000. we're currently doing 165 000. i actually probably will even reduce that a little bit more so i'm looking at starting at maybe 155 uh for monthly

087and then just adjust as needed not to exceed 175 000. if it ever got to that point then we would have to do another resolution of resolution motion and second to approve the disbursements resolution to disperse from education to operation fund all in favor say aye recommendation to approve the resolution authorizing the treasure to play to pay claims so we our board memes are the second and fourth tuesdays of the month we usually approve claims uh on those board meetings but in the rare occasion that we cancel board meetings or don't have a board meeting this would just allow us to continue our our operations and then you would approve those claims at the following to approve the resolution authorizing the treasurer to pay plans all in favor say aye okay recommendation to approve the

088covet additional lead resolution yeah so the family first act um expired on december 31st 2020 and so we wanted to make sure that because of uh quarantine and things that happen with our staff members that they would not have a pay loss so this basically um outlines that and so if we go down to their fours it talks about it but i'll just read it so everybody knows and make sure we understand all this so it's not renewed in the second semester of the 20 20 21 school year the msd wall bridge county shall be entitled to additional um sick leave days for absences which are attributable to exposure arising during the employees performance of his or her his duties on msd of walrus county schools campus and to meet the following guidelines so it's

089determined that the employee contact contacted kobe 19 virus or was exposed to the coba 19 virus at the school the school district places employee on quarantine isolation due to the school contact tracing and the staff members has exhausted all of his or her cumulative lead days if the staff member has no leave days then the staff member will receive 10 days in the second semester for absences outlined in this policy and then that would be expire on june 30th of 2021 and so basically if they're quarantined by us because it's a close contact and it happened at school then they would use their lead days if they don't have leave days then we would give them up to 10 days and you have to recall now that we have the 10-day quarantine instead of the

09014-day quarantine it would really never be 10 days because the weekends and things like that so but that doesn't mean they could not be quarantined for the second or third time like some people understand have had those experiences unfortunately but it has to be determined that the employee was exposed at a school or school function yes yeah if that's the intent you probably need to clean it up a little bit because it does just as that they were exposed at the actual school yeah so that's the intent of cleaning some of that up and i think mike the show that you read is not actually in there so should we shall be entitled okay i should have blown it up a little bit the font was pretty small i saw my screen when i was

091reading it so so do we want to have um a motion to accept it pending slight revisions to um make sure it's it's it applies to employees performance of their duties not limited straight to the campus i think that's probably the intention of yeah resolution upon revision from josh i'm just going to say it easy so i just have a question then josh so is it all right for us to implement this then until we get the until we get a sign like we'll need to get a new paper back and sign but is it okay to go ahead and implement it yeah i think with you um resolving to just pending these changes that should be fine okay so tonight we will not be signing this one because it doesn't have to change but

092we will sign it when yeah when you bring us the new one all right recommendation to approve an overnight extended trip for southwood seniors to pigeon forge gatlinburg on april 20 are april 18th the 21st and just to talk about that a little bit we don't know for sure what's going to happen in april and so when we start talking about these field trips we i did talk to mr mcdaniel and the sponsor and just say that you know number one whatever if you approve this tonight um it is approved but that doesn't mean that we can't cancel it prior to the event and we'd also have to follow all covered 19 protocol that that's been given to us so those would be the stipulations with that they just have to know that it can

093be cancelled and probably we always know it can be anything can be canceled after last year a lot of things were cancelled so but they're looking a lot of it would be outside um of course they would be on a bus so they're not gonna have social distancing but we don't have social distancing on our on our buses now so that's why i went ahead and approved it uh but of course um you as a board have to officially approve it also if they go so i moved to approve the field trip for celebrities motion second to approve the field trip for southwood to pigeon forge all in favor say aye all right recommendation to approve the little norse of little knights three-year-old school preschool program yeah so put the proposal on the goal there's

094a lot of information here i gave you and also gave you a little bit about the 2018 the dashboard for the walrus county profile i basically could go over all this or you could ask questions i have mrs moore um said that she would come to be able to answer any questions too that you might have tried to outline a little bit more in general we gave you some ideas of what we were thinking um and we started some of this conversation but we started several months ago but more officially in october and then putting out some of those surveys to find out if there's any interest because if there's no interest obviously we would not pursue anything but there was interest in that and so try to outline all of the different things that

095would occur because of this um and just if you have any questions open up for questions right now what's our goal for number you guys have a number that you'd yeah so we we did say like the minimum um right now uh the ratio is one to ten for the three year olds so we were we're still hoping for 16 to 18 would be a goal for a classroom but what we said was do we start and that's a question that we have too kevin though um would we go with with 10 um and that's something that we'd have to determine but that's we were talking about if we had that minimum of 10 then we would go with it so i was thinking how does that space work out yeah so at metro north

096elementary some of the discussion would be if we needed extra room then there would be a possibility of shuffling some students from metro north elementary in other words uh even doing possibly a third grade going to sharp creek to shark creek so moving to third grade as a possibility yes we can move around kindergarteners i mean what kind of room you're looking for for you got you got these um we would definitely look at both buildings what are the needs of our students and then make adjustments we have three different free feed structures the full pay and then if they're on reduced lunches on textbook assistance or if they're free you guys know where i come from all the time it seems like it's kids that can't go to some other place you know yet

097they can't prioritize that you know you have to be open across the board right right and that's why when we talk about the financial part we don't know necessarily are we going to get all of them at the the different is it going to be a combination of all the different fee structures or all the lowest ones the middle ones are high ones so uh chris did put some of those things together as far as what what it could look like but we wouldn't know until we actually had those students that would enroll or apply i guess and we do pursue all kinds of alternative funding um both buildings are a part of the on highway pre-k grant which just applies to our four-year-olds families and they've opened up their eligibility a little bit more

098this year if i meet eligibility requirements and i have a job outside of the home then my child goes to metro more if i've done all the paperwork and it pays us in full and then some and when you say when you say in full and then some know what's higher than the rate that we've corrected so higher than our a little bit more than our highest rate and the other opportunity that we have in addition to the on my way pre-k and our three-year-olds would also qualify for this is that we would qualify for ccdf funding which is a voucher program and that again is based on income has those same sort of requirements that parents have to be either working and staying for on my way pre-k working or enrolled in some sort

099of continuing education so those are also available and we help connect parents with that in fact i send that to a parent this afternoon that they've had a change in their income structure at home and so she was applying tonight to help which would offset our costs for this current school year because her child was enrolled at mature month in preschool um the community foundation has offered a couple scholarships to students in the past that has helped offset a bit um as well they have opened up that eligibility in the past for on my way pre-k it has not included grandparents raising grandchildren and they um now make that available which i think is huge and we have several i have two of my on my way pre-k kiddos whose grandparents are raising them who

100would not have been able to attend preschool because of what financial strange financial stream so we're all aware that gap you could say between those kids that had the opportunity to go into preschool in our kindergarten that's like just disadvantaged and we pursue those um you know those that we know typically are with younger siblings we you know call them to get them connected and then you know through the great fun find other kids that may not have that opportunity we know in the community our early childhood opportunities are dwindling and it's because of the costs it it there's an immense cost with running a daycare and just early childhood programming the expense is huge and they are typically the most underpaid employees that you will find that's pretty well the way my son who's

101involved in this sums it up he feels like you're over charging and underpinning at the same time tension and conflict all the time and we don't have enough spots in our community we i think on average in the county bring in 350 kindergarten students there are 250 early education spots and so we know it's even more for our three-year-olds i tell you that you're excited for the task of adding more to your management i think at one point my office has a restroom so i think we need to 10 of them so how does transportation is that is that all parents on this one three-year-old three-year-olds it would be yes okay four-year-old no four years we transported we transport we give them that option i guess because obviously that becomes you know usually some of

102the disadvantaged you're probably not gonna you know especially if someone's at work and going to work you know they don't have two vehicles that's probably not going to happen yes that's why i was wondering about them and our four year olds are also i think it's important you know buckled in they're enough i've seen that again a special seat so i thought that was have you seen the growth from those kids going into kindergarten being more ready yes and i wish our kindergarten teachers were here to speak of them because i mean just from the first day in the cafeteria alone is huge because they know how to carry a tray but you think that's not a big deal it's a huge deal if you've never had to balance something before but our preparers by

103the end of the second week have got that mastered and then you throw into this here they are sitting every other seat in the same spot every day um they've had that master within the first couple weeks as well so just navigating the cafeteria is huge and it's time that our kindergarten teachers don't have to spend where they can focus on academics in the first few weeks of school and getting to know more importantly getting to know students but yes greatly impacts their academics good you would think so yes yes our first group right now is in second grade and so it's exciting to watch how they've grown yeah this is a recommendation that we would want you to go ahead and make a motion if you so determined to do that the final decision

104based upon final interest yeah yeah and we're doing this kindergarten roundup right yeah well it'll be separate but it'll be similar to what we've done last year with the fourth grade um four year olds so yes and the timeline would be if if you would approve it tonight we would go ahead and start advertising and then in march we would get those numbers just like we do with the four-year-olds just like we do with kindergarten roundup uh kindergarten roundup we're looking at you know we used to have a community kindergarten roundup because of codewood and other reasons we're going to be in the schools this year but then that will give some more flexibility with with our preschool programs too so i'm not sure if this is an information something but i think it's something

105to also note that our staff with students of that age group are also involved and i think that's an amazing benefit to offer our teachers and our support staff and it's just a great benefit to have well that wasn't in there that is good thank you i'm able to approve the little norse lights through your program motion and second to approve the little knights and little norse programs to the three-year-olds this year all in favor say aye all right no one finished business board policy and we'll go to public comment and here's where scott's going to provide us to do this there are actually two questions and since he had and while we wait though i do want to say i have sticky note and i put it on the wrong device here but on

106the um on the update or on the 2020 we did have the car graduations um uh where the first time in the in that year and so we had one in february and august and not just the graduations at norfolk southwest credit alternative recovery program um and those are very special too and we made those happen in august two during the pandemics but it was done outside and a lot of fun so maybe i stole a little bit there i was gonna sing if scott didn't have the music i was actually going to ask you to dance so my first question tim has a couple questions on facebook the first question was where can you find the documentation of districts that went over the 15 transfer rate uh right now they're still uh i believe

107they're gonna start collecting that information when we submit our form nines they haven't really decided on where that information is going to be located there has been talk that it would be added to the do ab fiscal indicators there has been talk that it might get added to the interview which is that breakdown of all the school districts uh they have talked about putting on the indiana department of education website so there's not been really any uh distinct determination at this point uh i think they just really right now they're just into that phase of starting to track it and so that's we're reporting it on form nine and that type of stuff now so ask us again in a few months the second question is what percent of students are virtual now percent well

108i think you said well six students yeah well we'll say the 30 because of the rise program both those questions came from the ridgeways and they wanted to also list though they were celebrating when they say they're said they said they're celebrating this i think they need the insurance so i and self-insurance share that too that's it one point four two one seven five four i know so it's easy for them to celebrate oh yeah all right uh items from board members we'll jump back into what uh mike had suggested could be under other in our reorganization meeting on whether or not you know what we think about leading times and six o'clock still works okay for me but my thoughts on uh has always been a hybrid some kind of heading into the start

109of the school year we needed to make more approvals maybe stretch out the june july time period not very frequently you guys know the business as well it would as anybody required the it would just require at some points or sometimes we may have to have special meetings for certain things there isn't a law that you have to have based on a frequency that's consistent no it just has to be able to wall for that you just have to advertise it whenever you have you can have as many as you want or well we've discussed this in the past we always felt like more often we met we thought we were more engaged and we stayed current with stuff we've got a good information low transfer but i don't know where he at all through

110two he's coming up quick that's not about us i mean it's whatever's gonna get the information that you guys well i mean obviously i always like to be efficient with our timeline too so if we're not if we're not accomplishing anything in our meetings that could be done on a monthly basis then you know i'm for less meaning you know too so that's if we if you guys see a time of the year obviously you guys have been in longer than we have there's time that you know that you need to have two then let's schedule that but if we can go down to like planning yeah so may april may september october november i could see that but i also think especially because of the two new guys that they're i remember i been

111six years ago now and i'm just not really starting to feel like i got a good handle on what we're doing so there's a a a decent learning curve so i i'm going to suggest i've got a ton of dumb questions yeah well i at least especially had to relearn it once we in 2019 when we did this the new uh operation and education fund but i can at least understand the terms now when we're starting to have these discussions i personally don't have a problem with every two weeks but i know it increases preparation yeah i guess what my my position would be is that i agree that uh um you know there are some times that it probably could be once a month but if we need to you know if the schedule

112permits that we feel like we've got a pretty good handle for that one then we can go ahead and take the second one off but i think it's important as many times as we can at least for this year to go with the two can i throw out a proposal with a little bit about what kevin said about what you said and everybody has said as far as maybe looking at one in june or july and december we typically only have one two and in october we used to have one if um just depending on where fall break landed if paul brake landed even though we're still sometimes here sometimes we're not here but we would have one and not have one so you know how far out do you have to schedule the whole

113year we schedule out the whole year but then you can just cancel i mean that's as easy as canceling one it would be nice to cancel though a little bit ahead of time too though for those planning purposes too so but i'll put something together and put in an update just and then we can put it on the board agenda too if we want to if you if you don't want to talk about it we don't have to either i don't care i'll throw some things out that's okay i'm not opposed to going to one one a month but i think more often than not we probably should still do two yeah i would hate to do one a month for the whole year yeah yeah yeah an occasional month here and there i have

114a problem with one month i hope there's something there's six months okay i mean whatever works best o'clock still work okay or we want to go to 6 30 we want to go to 4 30. [Music] [Laughter] all right anything else welcome to the new guys welcome look forward to working with you yeah a little longer than that this is more