001Good evening. I'll call to order the board of education meeting for Monday, February 23rd, 2026. >> Bridget Tracy >> here is Mark, would you please read the school? >> Public was given to media school district buildings on the district. There are no revisions. question. All those in favor >> I do not have any public directly into recognition items and we have >> Yep. So, uh we have three of our students here from an Alaska High School um that competed at the state ski and snow competition at Mount Lacrosse. So, we did that last week and so I'll have them introduce who they are and their their grades and and some information about what they did, but I know that they represented our school district very well as always and we're certainly proud of their accomplishments.
002I am a junior and I guys tell us about the competition takeways from the experience. New York was very fun. That is definitely the best part. Like the races, they're very quick. Like it goes it goes by fast. It's a quick day and The most fun part about just messing around is probably my favorite part because don't get We're on our home. Think there's familiar faces. You're all congratulations. >> All right. Thank you, Mr. President. Uh with a great deal of thankfulness and gratitude, we'd like to share the following donations. $500 from Robert George for the ML program at Irving Perch Elementary. $1,000 from David Rutder in memory of Bonnie Olen for the engage program at an Alaska High School. reached a level approval app. >> Um, I have a lot of things to talk
003about today, but they're all kind of short, so this should be interesting. So, last meeting I talked about the scholar opportunities in the process at OS. So last Thursday the seniors who were interested in applying for these scholarships, we all sent in our applications. There was one general one and then there's a few more scholarships like if you qualify like if you're like specific clubs or maybe certain sports fair, you'd apply to those as well. So we sent all those in on Thursday and we'll hear back about these opportunities in May at the scholarship award night. And then early this upcoming Wednesday morning 27 students and three teachers will all be traveling to Panama for the 2026 Spanish trip. And these students will be living with host families while experiencing the Spanish language and culture.
004And a highlight of the trip that one of the teachers shared with me is that everyone will be visiting orphanage for two days and they'll be visiting with the kids there. Um the students will be purchasing gifts at a local market for them. And they said the teacher said that some of the more like athletic students will be playing like soccer and basketball with them and then who the students we like face paint on the kids at the orphanage. So, it sounded like a lot of fun. And when I went to Costa Rica two years ago, we didn't have like an outreach or anything. So, this sounded like a really cool um addition to the trip. And then, additionally, the National Honor Society hosted their yearly blood drive a couple Fridays ago on February 13th
005and over 30 OS and community members donated. So, it was really great success and I got to be there to help out. And then also the finance poll was this past Wednesday at WL and there's two days of competition for this and different attend each day and an Alaska attended the first day and the Alaska team of three students they each won a 5 $500 scholarship and they advanced to the state competition in Madison. So that was really excited exciting and when they explained the competition to me it was so confusing and I took a couple notes. So how it worked was in the first round there was true or false questions and each team just got three. There was no like fighting for them or like trying to be quick. And then the second
006round there, they each had 10 questions and there was no fighting for them again. They each just got 10. And they got 10 points if they got it right, five points if they got it wrong. And if they just didn't want to answer it, they could pass to the other team for free. And then the last round they had 14 questions all together. And each each team member, they all had a buzzer and it was just the fastest. So if you knew the answer, you go really fast. And they said that some of the questions are really really hard. like no dance for them and they would just agree to like move on. So, it's probably a really fun competition. It was also really exciting that on >> the Panama group is also very excited
007about 90 degree weather. I've heard that from several of the students that are attending. Um, a couple of quick things. um tomorrow, um I think I mentioned earlier that we have our ACT prep, but the key message to our students is um this doesn't replace what you haven't learned over the last 11 years, but the key thing is if you can get another two to three questions right in each area because of the strategies, because of the review, because of all those pieces, um it has a significant impact on your score. Um if a student at scoring currently at a 20, get three more questions right in three areas, um they're going to jump to a 23 on most versions of the ACT, which is a significant difference. So again, it doesn't replace anything. It
008allows hopefully as students to jump up those extra two to three points um based on it. And we know specifically um students that benefit the most from it um our students that that have fewer resources and and that's been proven time over time with us. So we're excited about that tomorrow. Um another piece just to share with you is that early last week a student reached out to me. He was a member of the class of 2022, but he didn't graduate. Um so if you do the math, he's about 22 years old now. Is there any way I can come back and earn my high school diploma? Um, he came and met with me. Long story short, we can use our GED option two program to to help him earn his honest high school diploma.
009That before I allow him to take a second test, he is going to do a short video where I just ask him questions. You know, for other students maybe in the same boat that are current students just to think about that life is really hard if you don't get this high school. Couple updates from the activities. Uh our snowfire winter garden drum line continue their tours of the Midwest. Um they're doing very well. Uh band, they've had their solo and ensemble gone with competition and have a concert tonight. On sport, we have spring sports meetings a week from tonight. So, believe it or not, uh track starts like couple weeks. So, um get rid of the snow will be going there. So, in the winter though, we've had a really good winter season. Sports wise,
010we have conference championships and boys hockey and boys basketball so far. And we've been at the state level as you've seen with our dance team, winning a state title, our ski and snowboarders, and while we're represented at the boys wrestling state tournament this week. So, uh, this past week, I want to thank our student council and their adviser, Katie John's. They had a great festival week for our students and wrapped it up with a dance last week. And then finally, this Thursday night, I think it's important uh to share with the community that we're going to have a boys basketball game against Toma. Uh but we're going to wear red for Kev. So for Kevin Height, so Toma's involved in this really well as well and they're excited as well. And we'll have a miracle
011minute for Kevin and things like that. So if anybody's available to come out Thursday night for the basketball game, uh we'll do some uh fun things including recognizing um some folk that helped out on on that day with Kevin everyone else was projecting closer, but um crossing guard appreciation week was last week, February 16th through the 20th. And today um here at the district office, we had a breakfast to celebrate our crossing guards. MS is a bit unique that we staff um the crossing guard on Pan Lake and Quincy in addition to crossing Quincy. In addition to um crossing 8th Avenue. Those are all very busy uh intersections that we need to have crossing guards there for student safety. We have our employees um cover the one on Quincy Street and the one on 8th
012Avenue. And then there's community employees through the district who cover the one on Stan Lake and Quincy. We're just very thankful for um the individuals that do that, especially when it's um second winter like we're currently experiencing right now. Um and like when it was ridiculously cold out there, we allow the students to come in, but the crossing guards are still out there making sure that our students are safe. Um, we had family conferences last week on Wednesday and Thursday. The middle school, we had a lot of engagement, um, a lot almost all engagement in sixth grade, gets a little bit dwindles a little bit in seventh and eighth grade, but we had a steady stream of uh, parents and families coming through. Uh, the highlight, there's two highlights for middle schoolers. One is winter
013wellness and one is upcoming which is our middle level ed week. Um I'll talk a little bit about winter wellness. Uh it was on February 13th. We utilize a number of locations around our community. Jump start lanes and the center for ice skating and students pick a place to go and they enjoy two hours off campus on a field trip and then they come back and have activities at school. We modeled it a little bit after the global play day at the elementary schools, wanting students to just be able to have something to look forward to during the winter months. Um, our ski club is up and running. We went on February 11th and hopefully there's still snow and we go on March 4th. Um, and then our drama club started today. We're in the
014middle of our winter two and our spring sports and it's about a six week period. So this is when our clubs start to ramp up a little bit to give kids something to do after school. Then lastly, we um are meeting as a math group to continue to do work on our tier 2 and our tier three interventions. Um just helping students who have gaps in their math skills. Uh we're getting some of those interventions up and running at the middle school. I will I'll just second the uh the crossing guard breakfast. That was really nice that the district does and we also have it with all of our teams. What we're doing is we're going to have our CKLA like our literacy leads for each grade level. Um so I guess the best way
015to describe it is for example my fifth grade literacy lead is going to be teaching a lesson in front of the other two buildings literacy lead at that grade level. teacher teacher will come watch and so we'll console our district literacy specialist and the rep and then they're going to debrief that so a little bit more of a um like in the moment coaching type of situation so we can kind of learn because I think our biggest thing is you know it's a it's a long block of time and we're trying to figure out how to best keep kids engaged and so what's better than watching an entire lesson and debriefing and thinking about what are things we could be doing differently we have going on this weekend next week. CK sorry our CK literacy
016leads are also working with console to develop our um progress reports and match our essential standards to the unit work of so they're doing that work as well this weekend we have read for the record on Thursday this week and that book is Marcus Grow by Marcus Bridgewwater and then read across American next week we'll have different dress up days going on with that we have our battle tomorrow and each of our buildings has teams at the battle of the book. And then buildings, we had our fancy lunch. Bridget came and served at fancy lunch at Northern Hills back on February 13th. It was uh it was wonderful. And I would say the highlight was uh Terry Johnson, our district nutrition um director. She this year put out strawberry shortcake for every single student, not
017just the school lunch. And my kids and talked about it for days after. So, we're just happy to like have nutrition jump in and join us too. I know that's something we're trying to do more of all three and she's adding a special cookie to the menu for Americs. performances for our also collaboration between our music and our art teacher. background so that they have displayed out to groups and engage with our kindergarten students board members. sit on this committee and uh they can take it from here. But we basically split our batch of policies into two and this was the first uh grouping and u these were um ones that weren't a whole lot of changes that uh that we're recommending but there are some and the board and or the board members on
018this committee and the health analyzed each of the recommendations made by Leola um and had some good discussions and this is what we're recommending to you for our first read. There is one um of the policies I think Mark might be sharing that is one word that we need to still get changed in there from the sharers. Here it says that shall bear the I would just share with the whole board that we do this two meetings to allow you the opportunity if you have any questions over the next two weeks or concerns that you could bring those forward to us. We can answer those questions before you would be voting on those at the next meeting. >> Well, at uh we we've gone through a quite a extensive process. Uh we started this actually
019think before the new year and uh started putting some projections together related to revenue and uh some expenditures. We met with every principal, every department uh leader. We've had discussions administratively uh to come up with some recommendations and shared good deal of this with the board at our development session last meeting and Janet is going to share some high level pieces and to that with you now. And then we'll be coming to next uh school board meeting um with some items on the agenda that would ask for us to act on some of the recommendations that are coming from the budget as it relates to positions that will need to be eliminated and positions that we will need to be adding. And uh most of the eliminations of positions are purely due to um enrollment
020projections and just being proportionate to our staffing with enrollment and as you're aware we are projecting 60 less students in next year's budget. So we need to be proportionate in the number of FE that we so I'll turn it over to J. >> And just one more piece of information as a backdrop that we did in January that went through those initial budget planning assence and then also referencing that. So where we start out every year in the process what's happening with that revenue and there are three main factors for our revenue. is our membership number of students that we will have for the upcoming year. Another big component is what is allowance increase $325. And then the third major component. So taking those into consideration with those factors and the enrollment of 59 student
021that's not considering the um the students that we would capture who are resident students that would be participating in the virtual school as well as any students that we would additionally capture because they'll be attending all day kindergarten. However, because of the fact that we're in a declining enrollment situation, when you do the calculations for the revenue, because of that declining enment doesn't change. So, from those original, they still vouchers because again, voucher money, we will be taxing for that. turned over to the private schools. We do not get to spend that in our in our budget. So, it's just we don't even at this point we're looking at those that are really targeted toward the amount of money that we can offer and services. So, that additional revenue limit,000 does also include the $200,000
022increase that our Then looking at the next section of this next year budget open enrollment remember I said $325 but for open enrollment students we'll be getting an additional $928. So if we can just maintain our current third Friday 550 students that's another 510,000. So it really just emphasizes how important open enrollment is to a district like Alaska we have then open enrollment also thinking. So again from open enrollment not res We'll have 15 open, next year, but we count those at even though they'll be all day. So that's looking at another$100,000. Then special ed a if you remember right with the budget that was passed at the state level was supposed to be up to 43% reimbursement this year and 45% next year we're not seeing the 43% for this year. However funds that
023are at the state level in dialogue. So, we're hoping that we will be seeing some of that, but at this point in time for next year, that increase should be estimated at 1.75. So that would be about another $120,000 then upward estimated open enrollment estimating 50 students will be open enrollment students that we will be hoping to bring in that full 1130 because remember we're concentrating we feel we'll have more of our regular ed enment rather than special ed just because of space available special that we set at January. So 551,000 total amount for revenue is million as I like the important thing to remember the wrong it's going to change. It's going to keep changing even from the time that the development development session today the numbers have they haven't changed dramatically but they
024will just continue to be tweaked throughout this whole process and it won't be final until the second meeting in October that's when we know where the numbers will be at so then looking at the expense side and again with this we're looking at our operating funds those are the funds that we talk about when we do our quarterly update because 10 and 27 those are kind of what we can looking at salaries with our CPI this year at 2.7% estimating an increase there about $87 and this is without the money that we would put in for um for people are under the old plan for retirement kind of taking that out and keeping that neutral. That increase would be um that increase would be about 111,000. That number's up a little bit more from when
025we had our development session because we're doing some insurance work that looking at the nonpersonel cost. What we do is take and look at what taking these costs year over year looking at them. an actual expenditures are digging through that and saying which of those expenses were onetime expenses that we don't need to pull those out because we don't expect those to continue and what are the things that we do to continue the big ticket items here are transportation for our students getting them to and from school transportation contract with Rightway and Those are by far the biggest biggest things in this area. But looking at well there's a whole bunch of other things there as well but those are some of the larger items there. Uh looking at that we expect that to be
026close to when I talk about open enrollment in that additional $928 per student. We also have open enrollment going up and so for what we had in September that maybe less but we would have about $200,000 more going out the door for open enrollment. Then we're planning on a phone upgrade. Our phone system is reaching its end of life. That'll be about $30,000. We're super excited about what this new technology can do for our phones. Um, so that's something that we're planning on upgrading students out so that we can be ready to go for the fall class equipment and supplies. We'll need to put more class on that in the budget for this next $75,000 to get those. We're hoping that number will be less because we can repurpose a lot of stuff because we've
027been in the district. So hopefully it'll be less than that. But that's what we're expecting. Then looking at one expenditures that we had this year, budget year 256 that we won't have next year. So examples of that were next year. The huge curriculum ads up front. So going through this year's budget and what are all 736,000 then talked about meeting with each department. So we met with each department in each building identify different things that we can um identify for savings there instructional services $8,000 and then human human resources student services operations that look like a big number but remember talking about taking our contracted service for technology and bringing that It's a decrease here, but it's an increase on the personnel side. Then we look at our big looking and this is going to
028based on where the positions that we think that we can delete are close to $69,000. We have some positions that we need to add back like positions there. And then when we have our staff retiring, even if the position is replaced, a lot of times we have a savings from the person going out to the person. Although sometimes with recruitment today, there's not a lot of savings. There used to be a lot, but sometimes that's pretty neutral. Even with what we've identified so far, we think they'll be about 110. been looking at the expenses for the online coordinator and teachers about $170,000 and then we have 4750. So total projected expense close to$1.5 million very preliminary bottom line right now we're showing so showing a balanced budget that's how we want to be going in
029and we'll just keep refining it and it dialed in um every month as we move forward until we adopt that budget meeting in July October last meeting in June we'll adopin budget to get ready. Anything I can answer? >> Just have a couple of quick additions. Um, one is we will be meeting with the high school yet. They're finishing up the registration process so that Jared will give some recommendations related to FTE needs at the high school. yet to be determined. Um, and the other uh noteworthy item I want to share with you is that we do plan to have our next topper talk um is which is our message to our team members which will be a video message for myself that will be fairly scripted but it will kind of outline the specifics
030of the budget. So we're transparent with our team members prior to the board making any kind of votes on position additions or deletions of next So that will be coming. Thank you. question. So it gets confusing that Ben is talking about those are membership students that are talking about the online we're talking about all enrollment. So those are all students boundaries. So, it's a different group. Did that answer your question? I think I understand it now. >> I'll add to that. I mean, I think that the reductions that we're um recommending, we would be making those recommendations whether we were reducing or we were flush with money. I mean, it purely trying to be proportionate like when when if we didn't make certain like a reduction in one grade level at a school, you could
031have, you know, 10 students in a class or, you know, something that would be really like you would never see. and uh you know we're we're still able to stay within our guidelines and parameters of class size and make some of these uh reductions and then some of the other reductions um that you're seeing up there um you're if you look at the additions we're just basic we're re repurposing a lot of the positions too to be aligned with the direction that we uh hope to go in our vision as a school district. Um there's only a handful of what I would call true uh deletion on that recommendation sheet and those are primarily all because of just decline enrollment and it would be in my opinion foolish to not make those reductions because we
032would just be in class sizes that would not be conducive to operating school. Maybe I have some of the reductions are like retirement repurposing. So there is no there is no process from the standpoint of none of these things from the standpoint of anything that's going to be a change for us. question. I know that you said the numbers estimate, right? And that they will change. Um, for someone who's looking at like the 4K classroom supplies, I know you said you're looking for come on that. Are there any major ticket items that we're looking at? >> If you don't know the answer, that's not really major things. We still have a lot of furniture at Northern a bunch of things for us to store. I wanted to take the opportunity to just say I appcour
033to Yeah. And I just remind the board that we don't actually offici the board doesn't officially approve a budget for next school year until what? June. >> Yeah. We'll do a preliminary budget in June, but we really aren't getting more right now. numbers a little more dialed in. Hi everybody. Jen, so glad to see you. My two favorite things, fouryear-olds and summer school. So, this is my favorite meeting tonight. I could talk all day about both, but um I've had the privilege of meeting some of you if I haven't met all of you in person. to see before you today an approval for our summer school offerings. I believe that it's been sent to school to show part of it, but I know that you had access to look at a few of the things
034that we are proposing for this summer. Um, your approval tonight will just help us move forward with final planning and some enrollment getting ready for April already. Of course, our courses are always contingent on how many And uh if we cannot maintain required numbers, we have to adjust those courses accordingly. And so this year there are some primary updates we wanted to make to that we summarized on the top half of that sheet kind of at a glance. Some of the new things um big deals for us is the location for July. Grades one through four will be at Northern Hills and grades through will be at the middle school. completed. We're very excited about that. Also, kindergarten camp will continue to be held at the three elementary programming will be in July only. My
035understanding is some background information on some of those decisions with our summer school committee and the grades seven through eight projected learning. academic team will be an international trip and that was after a lot of discussion and input from Jana and others so we can access the great things in our lacrosse area but put the focus on what that might look like for international resources. this summer and then our multilingual learner program will run one week in June. The adventure for Os Monday through Thursday June 1st through the 24th and the ability will be added to practice works and that will be June 1st through August 14th days a week about three hours. And then also addition classes for students in the grades 10 through 12. So on paper, I think this is like a
036great summer to talk about all the warm things. We appreciate your support and um happy to answer any questions or we have several members from our summer school here in us. Thank you. All those in favor. We'll remove item number. approve the consent agenda. Any questions? All those in favor. >> I tonight. There's a lot to say about when we director director did a great job there for a few years. her to fourth grade where she spent most of her time. And then request as well. constantly researching material critical. So he would say very we have three retirees this year and ironically all three of spent their entire career within the school district and and two of them including chef entirely at the high school. Um he soon taught at an Alaska high school. Um
037and then that summer after as he was on his way moving out west got the call there was a position came back to OS and hasn't left in that time for over 33 years at OHS. Um obviously longtime uh coach in both cross country and track but also you know the area that has been his home the last 10 years has been world history. Um very passionate about that and was a leader in starting AP world history um which requires tremendous amount of knowledge across decades across centuries and centuries and centuries of history around the that uh that alumni race group has actually started a scholarship in his honor about five years ago that they've awarded the last four years. agenda item. I