001because everybody's watching. >> Call this Monday, November 10th, Board of Education meeting to order. Please rise. Please say the pledge of allegiance with us. >> I 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. First order of business is to approve the agenda. If I can get a motion. >> I make a motion to approve it. >> with the addendum. Sorry. With the agenda. >> I'll second it. >> All those in favor? >> I. >> All those opposed. Same sign. Uh scheduled unscheduled audience. None. Right. Moving on to school reports and fanfare. The first one is the curriculum report from Lana Maine. All right, >> can I have you use the mic? testing. >>
002Testing. There we go. >> All right. Now I'm ready. All right. I'm here to talk a little bit today about um the overview of our district report card. Um a little bit on curriculum and also a little bit on professional development. I'm going to start with our district report card. This is the three areas that are tested. ELA, math, and science. These are our district overall numbers for proficiency. Sparefish is in maroon and the overall state averages are in the darker gray color. Going to talk a little bit more on those in subsequent slides, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it. Right here, this is ACT data for our district. You can see that Spearfish High School last year the overall um score was 22.5 compared to the overall nation score
003was three points higher. Um so that's something we continue to be quite proud of. Our students do very well on the ACT. We also have a fairly large number of students who are taking the ACT. Um typically that is somewhere around high 50s to 60% of our students taking the ACT at some point. Um, two other metrics that show up on the report card are on-time graduation and high school completion. On-time graduation is the students who graduate within four years. High school completion is whether or not students ever finish high school. You can see that we're way above the state average on those two numbers as I would certainly hope we would be. Keep in mind with on-time graduation that also includes students who are on IEPs who we serve till age 21. um it
004makes good sense to do that, but that is something that is subtracted from that percentage. If we have a large number of students who are on IEP and are served through age 21, they eventually complete high school, but it may be in their best interest to be there after age 18. This is district proficiency by year, and I wanted to point out that our percentages have been going up. um we would like them to go up even faster than they're going up. But in pink, you will see that recently we have experienced our highest proficiency percentages in the time in which the South Dakota assessment has been in place. Um math, we experienced our highest proficiency rate last year and for both science and for ELA, it was this year. We were really happy to
005see that we had a four-point jump in ELA. Again, we're not where we want to be yet, but we think we're moving in the right direction. This is the same data as you saw on the last slide. However, it's just charted out. I think it's kind of nice to be able to see the trend lines. You can notice that during the same time that ELA proficiency has decreased in our state, it has gone up within our district. Here is math and this is science. Um at the beginning of 2020 2021 we had a new science assessment. Um so the the scores are not directly comparable prior to that but that we do have data from the previous science assessment. Science is only tested at grades 5 8 and 11. Also on the report card is
006data related to attendance and chronic absenteeism. The attendance calculation uh from the department of education is a little bit different um than the attendance calculation that we typically use within a building. This looks at the percentage of students who are at school at least 90% of the time. Missing 10% or more of school is considered to be chronically absent. So that is the metric that they use. That's the percentage again in the top row of our students who are at school 90% or more of the time. Below that is chronic absenteeism where we can see the percentage of students who were below that threshold. This is an area of focus for us. It's something that's part of our strategic plan. We're working on improving this. We have fewer students who are chronically absent, but we
007know that when students aren't in school, it's a huge barrier to learning. So, it is something that we're focusing on pretty um intensively right now. Um, that's really what I had for the report card. Does anybody have any questions on that portion before I move on? >> Can you can you define the chronic absenteeism again? What was the definition? >> Um, the definition is students who are absent 10% or more of the time in a year. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> So, we do track that pretty regularly. At the beginning of the year, missing just a few days makes you chronically absent, but as the year goes on, it's a more meaningful snapshot. Um, while we're on the topic of assessments, I just wanted to remind you that the ACT will go into
008effect as the high school assessment this coming year. There have been some changes to the ACT, and those are shown up here. The ACT is a little bit shorter than it used to be. There are fewer questions, and therefore, there is less time allotted for every test. The writing portion of the ACT is optional, although in South Dakota, it is something that we are going to be taking to assess students writing. So, it is something all South Dakota juniors will end up taking. I linked the South Dakota specific ACT website there, too. I'm not going to take us to it right now, but it does contain all the information for the ACT. Moving um onto professional development. Our goals this year are professional learning communities. that gives staff an opportunity to collaborate um on student
009learning. It is really the vehicle for collective teacher efficacy. That's something we've been training staff on and giving them time to work on this year. We also implemented a paraprofessional PD calendar. That was something that was part of our strategic plan. I'm going to show you some of the topics on that in the next slide. Um February 13th is our annual breakout session day. that'll combine in uh some sessions that are really about our strategic plan and supporting that but also some things that staff are asking for that they think are really important for them to be learning more about. So back to paraprofessional training this is some of the topics that our paraprofessionals are learning about this year. We started out with an int introduction to special education looking at communication during the November
010early release. They learned about behavior management and there'll be a variety of topics like in April they're learning about math instruction. So some really I think relevant topics for our pair of professionals. I wanted to mention that the department of education is funding a literacy initiative right now that we are part of. It is a three-year plan with the department of education. The thing I really like about it though is that we're able to partner with Black Hill State University and customize the plan to meet our particular needs. So, we're really excited to be rolling that out this spring and then we'll be doing that the next couple years. They'll be able to support us through some professional development, uh maybe some time in classrooms and some other ways. So, and the last topic I
011had is the curriculum study. This year is math. We did a 5-year buy with math due to COVID. We typically would do a six-year purchase. This year, we are starting a needs assessment. We're really looking at what's working well for us, uh, strengths and weaknesses, a really in-depth look at our math data. Next year, we will be going through the rest of the process, probably doing some piloting. Um, we will be making a decision early 2027 and then engaging in some professional development. 2728 will be the year that we'll be implementing that curriculum. And that's it. Any questions? >> Thank you for the great information. >> Thank you. >> Next item, uh, consider conflict of interest waiverss, which there are none. Uh, moving on toformational items. Uh, superintendent update. >> Yep. here. I don't know
012a week, week and a half ago, Nathan called me and asked me about uh students on free and reduced meals and with the government shutdown as to whether how that would affect them. We got news through the can's office that our free and reduced meals would not be affected. So, um this I guess the good news is maybe the government will open up here in the next few days, but uh in the meantime uh students that qualify for free and reduced meals will continue to still get those and won't be any financial negative impact on us. Uh enrollment as of today is at 2317. So a month and a half roughly after our uh fall enrollment count on the last Friday in September, we're up 13 students. So hopefully we continue with a a bit
013of an upward trend. Uh school resource officer. Uh they just finished interviewing for a new school resource officer. Officer Sam Funk was promoted to detective and so he is just serving uh part-time right now. and uh Mr. Jacobs and Mrs. Anderson were on the interview committee for a new uh SRO that will start after Christmas break and that is officer Caleb uh Ferrer. Is that pronounced that right? Ferrer. And so uh excited to have him start after Christmas break. Uh I just a really quick update on the CT house at Skyidge. I I don't envy anybody that's a uh uh a general contractor trying to line up subs. U but uh the crawl space is all completely done. It's insulated. It's ready to go and so on. The garage is framed in. Uh it still
014needs to be sided, needs to have a garage door, and then we need steps built. Uh once that is done, the house will be ready to sell. So, part of your bills, your add-on bills was appliances from Carl's. So, we got those ordered. They'll be in put in. I would really love to have this listed sometime close to the end of November, maybe early December. So, that's the time frame on the CT house. Um, last thing I'm going to say is Veterans Day program at the middle school tomorrow. Great program they put on each and every year tomorrow at 8:30. That's all I have. >> Okay. Thank you. uh action items. First one is to approve a special meeting for board administration retreat on November 17th at 5:30. Get a motion. >> Move to approve.
015>> I'll second it. >> All in favor say I. >> I. >> Those opposed? Same sign. Uh next action item is to appoint a new school district legal council. Uh if we can get a motion. I move that we appoint Eric M the Spearfish School District Legal Council. >> Seconded. >> Any discussion? I would just say anything you want to say, Eric? >> Well, hi everybody. Glad to be back. >> And I will say on a personal note that it is nice to have a school attorney in the community again. I I think Mr. Kerr did a a a good job as well as he could being a bit of a distance away from Rapid City, but it is very nice to have somebody of Eric's caliber back uh in the community that we can
016lean on. Correct me if I'm wrong though in conversation that special education law is not necessarily your forte. >> I've I've done it a lot, but I'll defer if you've got MX. So, I work for me and uh me's got a out of Minneapolis who they use. I I work really close with them, but I've done a lot lot of special ed. >> So, >> okay. So, what we will likely do, not to to completely remove the special education from uh from Mr. Nice, but uh we'll probably provide or enter into a letter of engagement with uh Nicole Moaning out of Cutler Law Office in in Sou Falls. She specializes in special education law and so if there isn't something that he can answer with us, we will engage with her. >> Absolutely. >> So
017all those in favor of the motion. >> Those opposed, same sign. Motion carries. Uh moving on to the consent agenda. We can approve everything at once or you can pull something off of there. If I can >> to include the addendum. >> Yep. If I can get a motion to approve the consent agenda, including the addendum. >> We'll move to approve of addendum. >> Second. >> All those in favor say I. >> Those oppos. Uh, moving on to discussion items. Uh, middle school track and field. So, just to bring everybody up to speed, the middle school track committee, which consisted of myself and Craig, Nathan, and Ryan, um, Mr. Lime, Mr. Jacobs, Mr. Williams, Mr. Wademan, and Mr. Ghalt. Uh, we've met and we've met with the Mammoth folks virtually and talked through it. We
018of course have the design and engineering agreement with Mammoth uh for uh to provide the engineering and and and specifications for a new a new middle school track and field. It does not mean that we have entered into an agreement for them to do the construction services but provide those engineering fees and uh specifications. So anyway, with that, uh, the reason we did that is we had to have a better idea what it was going to look like if as far as cost estimates and projections. And I sent that interactive spreadsheet to you. You can kind of plug in, pick and choose what you want. It would total things up. Uh, for the track, you know, uh, without any add-ons like the fence or the sidewalk, we looking just under 1.7. Uh and then you
019add the uh the turf part of that in there, we're probably a little bit less than 1.3. So you do all that, we're we're somewhere right around three $3 million if we were to do it with Mammoth per those items. Um I'm not asking the board whatsoever to do uh to make an a decision or an action tonight. I think if if you were to ask me my opinion, uh I would say that if we were going to move forward with a track, we look at uh doing the track again with a perimeter fence, a sidewalk, and a pad for the bleachers. Uh right now, Mammoth has that projected at 1.85. Um I would say if we could do it for 1.7 that that might be a price point where we would say proceed. Uh,
020as far as the artificial turf, again, all the things that I mentioned as far as the track, but then adding the turf, I would say if we could hit the mark of two two and a half million, that would be a a price point where I would say let's proceed. However, Mammoth puts that almost at 3.1 million. Um, so whether that's getting them or another company to reduce the prices somehow, sharpen their pencil, or whether it be us going out and pounding the the pavement to find donations of some kind or inind things like hauling soil away or whatever that could reduce the overall expenditure. If you're looking at this time to say, you know what, this isn't the time to do it. Isn't time to invest a million or so dollars. I think the
021next best thing, because I think we have to do something to the track. I think the next best thing would be to do a simple 2-in overlay. Uh we have the reflective cracking material, if you will. Uh there would have to be some spots that they'd come in, grind out and repair, and then they would put down this fabric. Uh do a 2-in overlay, and you're looking at 340,000 to do that. Again, no fence, no sidewalk. It's essentially to do exactly what we have there. no rubberized coating, not including any striping or anything like that. It's just doing the simple overlay. Um, we also have a estimate from Bros Engineering uh from back in March when they put this all together that if at the same time we want look to do something like that
022and we wanted to bring in some infill and crown our field and sod it, not seed it but sod it, uh, we're looking at roughly 600,000. So, there's some options on the table. Um, we just at some point I guess we need to decide if our budget includes a track, a track and and artificial turf or if it's just the simple overlay. Again, my recommendation, if I had to make a recommendation right now, would be for the to do it all for the two and a half if we could hit that price point. Uh, I talked to a gentleman from uh Castleton, North Dakota, just west of Fargo. It's Cass Central. uh they used doesn't matter who they used but somebody other than Mammoth they and they're happy with their product and they said while
023the track is nice the community at large uses the artificial turf more than anything. So just whether it be I think in our community whether it be uh the Ram football or the flag football or youth soccer or even if we stripe it for youth baseball, softball, whatever that the use of the field could be so much more than just uh the school. Of course, we have our school activities that we're g, you know, people would have to work around, but having the turf, he was just saying, by and large, our community uses our turf more than anything. And just because it can be used for a multitude of things, you don't have to necessarily worry about whether it's wet or muddy or whatever. It's always usable. So >> my two cents >> are the
024artificial turf fields is that like 10 to 15 years or are they a little bit more longevity wise now for like replacement >> typically? >> Well, it used to be like 10 to 15 years and you needed to replace them. So the gentleman that uh I talked to in North Dakota from a prior school, they put in a track and field uh a track and yeah field artificial turf. And he said they did it 2010. And he goes other than coming back to sew some seams here and there, which this company that they utilize did it for free. Uh he goes it was put put in in 2010. He goes both the track and the field are in pretty darn good shape. But that was a question. the turf uh that that Ryan you wanted
025to know from our committee meetings. Uh the turf is an 8-year warranty. The track, the rubberized surface, that's a 5year surface warranty. Again, this is mammoth. The track itself underneath is only one year. Now, they said it should last you 20 to 25. And they said, of course, in year three, if there's some kind of cracking underneath, we'll come back and take care of it. But it really is it's a one-year warranty. >> What was the top three? Uh the the rubberized surface was a fiveyear. >> Okay. >> Again, I'm quoting mammoth. >> Multitask. >> I'm quoting mammoth. >> Uh another question that Ryan had asked is is the engineering work documents ours. Yes, they're ours. We are paying for that. Um is level of quality of the turf that again mammoth he said is
026the mid level. It's not the very bottom and it's not the very top. Somewhere in the middle. anything I guess as the full board if you're not sitting on that track committee is there information that that you just need to know that we need to discuss >> for comparison to your number quoted from bros the natural surface in our quote from Mammoth is that going to be seated >> mammoth is hydro seated >> okay >> I wanted to make sure I okay >> yeah now again the one from bros I should have uh should have clarified does not include the irrigation system. So the uh 600 and some thousand >> solid u we would I don't know what what the irrigation system does it say in here and it doesn't break it out but the
027irrigation system whether it's you know 50,000 or whatever. So probably again closer to 650,000 uh for an irrigation system in there. If we were to just fix it and do like what you talked about the one that's 300,000, what how long would that last for? >> Uh the engineers uh will say that we'll have get that reflective cracking in probably within three years. >> So just fine. It's kicking the can down a little bit. >> So the hard part about this is the over excavation because our soils are really terrible under there. a lot of lot of uh clay. So, they're going to have to excavate. They're guessing somewhere around three to four feet of clay and to bring it in engineered fill. Now, talking to the folks from Tarquette Field Turf, the other quote
028we got, they're they're saying you're going to want to do that with the field as well. Part of our conversation in the um in the track committee is could we just do the track now and then just smooth everything back around the edges and wherever the the soil was uh tore up. We just hydro seed that and we wait three or four years to come back in and put in the artificial turf. Certainly could do that and and these these firms like Mammoth or Field Turf or whoever do that all the time. They say part of the problem with that is you compromise the compaction underneath your track. So as you're digging out around along your track, it's just like digging alongside your sidewalk, that fill kind of spills out underneath it. He goes, you're
029taking the same chance of that happening, that compaction. Said best case scenario, you do it all at the same time. And again, the people from field turf says whatever you're excavating from the track, you should be excavating from your field as well. So, it's three to four uh feet of excavation track side to side and end. It's all excavated if you're going to do the field turf at the same time. Yeah, it is a lot of dirt. >> So, now with Mammoth, there is a dedduct. If we could find somebody that would take the dirt, they would load it, but if there was a farmer or a contractor or somebody that just wanted the dirt and they would be willing to haul it off, there was a deduct of roughly a little over 100,000. >>
030You might try getting the city of Spearfish for that, too. The rubble site needs dirt. >> Yeah. So, yeah, there might be something there as well. Have we has the committee looked at and maybe not to this point yet, but looked at potential grant opportunities that we could potentially apply for for something like this or andor sponsorship? I mean, you know, if we look at key sponsors, larger entities within the community that like to give back to youth athletics, if you will, or even just a community based project if that's what we see it as, or is that something we've talked about, just haven't got to that point yet. >> Again, I don't know if we've talked about grants. We have to some degree talked about sponsorship and what that looks like. Is it something
031around the scoreboard? Is it something on the field depending on the size of uh of gift? Um that's where I'm at with like the the field and the or the track and the field together. Two and a half a half. If it comes in at 3 million and there's no way we can get it any less. And again, that's doing it right. I don't want to take shortcuts and not do it right. But if there's a half million dollars and you say we need to find half million somewhere and again whether it's inind where somebody's taking the dirt hauling it off or it's a monetary donation uh that's something we would look at and whether you said it in justest or or was completely honest. We had a community member said I'll give you right
032to you a check for 50 grand tomorrow. So there are people that are willing to I think give Well, I kind of sit in the, you know, we could, like Alicia said, kick the can down the road with some aspects of it, but I'd rather do it right. And I think to do it right, we need to do it right now. If, you know, because of track, we need to do something. It becomes a liability issue. If somebody gets hurt, we could take on a higher higher risk then, you know, at that point. But um we kick it down the road and then our cost doubles or you know goes up 25% compared to what it is today. Um so it's not like kind of similar to CT conversations. It's not going to get cheaper
033the longer we delay. Um, so I don't know if we look at price price comparisons with other companies potentially, um, sponsorship or grant opportunities and see if we can't get in that two and a half and do an entire project, something that's going to last 20 to 30 years and not three to five. So once we get all the engineering drawings and uh specs and so on that will be sent to other uh other companies to get a a good cost proposal. The other thing you know there's another option here. Another option would be to we hire somebody there's a guy or a company by the name of Krauss Anderson. They're just construction managers. And so if we wanted to do a design bid build per se where we get this, we have the specs
034and then we bid it out and then we hire somebody like Krauss Anderson uh one of their people to come in and be the construction manager to oversee all the work. So that's another option. >> I think getting the pads in are great, but some of the extras like the additional things maybe we don't have to do right away and there things that we can do, you know, as a summer project after whether it's a press box if we decide that's something we actually need if we're going to utilize it for competition where a press box is needed. >> Sure. >> I don't know if some of those things are really necessary out of the gate. >> It would just be nice to have that pad for the what bleachers we have now to sit
035on and we would use our current press box or whatever crow's nest, whatever you want to call it. Uh something that I'm not necessarily maybe including in my price is that uh drainage ditch. They have an estimate of what 265,000. I think we could find a local contractor to uh do that site work or do that work less expensive than what they are pricing out here. So I'm not including that in the numbers that I thrown out there. So next steps, do you see that we would um get some additional bids, compare those and then from there we could we could start to formulate I mean if we need sponsors and formulate a plan um and then bring that back to the board or what do you what do you foresee as next steps? Yeah,
036I think the next steps are we get the finalized drawings from Mammoth and we send them to Fiser Track out of Iowa, send them to Tarquette, not sure what they're Tarquette Fields or Tarquette Group or whatever who is Bay & Tracks and Field Turf parent company. uh send the all the information to them whether it be well I've sent them the geotech but uh the geotech the site survey and this all the specifications or engineered drawings and say all right I need a pretty much uh a do not this is a do not exceed amount and if it is say you know one of them comes in pretty close at 2.8 8. Um then I guess again the decision is the board said we're going to willing to go to 2.5 Kirk, you got to
037go find 300,000 to cover the the additional cost. Something I guess I just want to throw out there, you guys are well aware of it and I guess anybody in the room, anybody that might be online is that while we're looking at this, it's uh quite a bit of money and it's coming out of it would come out of capital outlay. Now, we've also talked about how uh in our general fund, which is a completely different fund, we're looking to cut 700,000 to a million dollars over the next uh for the next budget cycle. And if you've been listening to me at all, uh they approved their new field over there for 1.2 1.3 million and they've paid for half of it already. And their patrons just sometimes don't understand the difference between general fund
038and capital outlay. and what they can be used for. So again, the capital outlay can be used for buildings and grounds and and projects such as this where our general fund is typically almost 80% is salary and benefits, supplies, transportation, um property liability, uh property and liability insurance, things like that. So there's a difference between the two and it may just seem really odd that we're looking to spend this amount over here where we're looking to cut over here. So just want people to be well aware of that. >> And just to clarify, Kirk, we are not allowed to transfer large sums from capital outlay into general funer. The state gives us specific guidelines on what things might fall under the general fund that we are allowed to spend capital outlay money on and this
039is not one of them. So the state is uh very clear in statute that we can there's 45% of your revenue you have that transfer transferability to your general fund but that is a very very slippery slope when it is for ongoing expenditures. Um really your capital outlay shouldn't be for ongoing expenditures. It should be more for maintenance buildings vehicles computers those one-time things and not costs that will escalate year after year after year. So I think you got to be really careful. Uh there's also a proposal from the property tax task force to eliminate that flexibility. So again, got to be careful saying that we're going to utilize this flexibility when it might go away. >> Thank you. Any other questions, comments? If you think of any, I would encourage you to reach out
040to to Kirk and ask those and we'll wait some further information. >> Thank you. Yeah. Uh, move on to the next item, which is to approve the minutes from the October 14th meeting and the October 27th meeting. If I can get a motion. >> Move to approve. >> I'll second. >> All those in favor say I. >> I. >> Those oppose, same sign. Uh, moving on to financial reports and bills. If I can get a motion to approve. >> Move to approve. >> Second. >> All those Anything you want to say on those or anything? >> No, we're We've already started cutting. I can see trying to make uh the cuts that we possibly can. Okay. >> Uh all those in favor? >> I. >> All those opposed, same sign. Uh if I can get
041a motion to adjurnn. >> So move. >> Second. >> All those in favor say I. >> I. We are journey little bit