001[music] Good evening. Want to call to order the board of education meeting for Monday, January 26, 2026. Kristen, would you a roll call, please? >> Tracy >> here. >> Brian >> here. >> Eric >> Ann here. Bridget >> here. Um Mark is going to be joining us virtually. Um not quite here yet but we'll be shortly and sorry and >> I am also here I'll verify that we have a quorum present please rise for the pledge of >> allegiance to the United States of America and to the stands one indivisibley and justice for all. Brian, would you please read the school board mission statement? >> Absolutely. Working together to ensure high levels of learning for all. >> Thank you. Kristen, was public notice given? >> Public notice was given to the requesting news media. The
002agenda was posted in school district buildings and on the district website. >> Are there any revisions to agenda? >> Thank you, Mr. President. I uh propose that we move item 14, the audit, to after number 10. request to move item 14 to follow item 10. >> I would make the motion to uh make amend the current published agenda to move agenda item 14 to after agenda item 10 otherwise as published. >> Second >> motion by an seconded by Bridget to approve the published agenda with the following amendment moving item 14 to follow item 10. Are there any questions? All those in favor >> I >> opposed. Tonight's agenda is approved with those adjustments. We don't have any requests for public input on tonight's published agenda and therefore we'll move into the first recognition item which
003is item number nine. >> Board, it is with great pride that I am wanting to uh turn it over to our students here in the audience. It's great to see you. We have some of our students uh from an Alaska High School and we will just turn it over to you and why don't you share with us who you are and and what you're here to do. >> Yeah, of course. So, thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak. Um so, we are the SET organization. We are a nonprofit youthled organization and we stand for securing equitable health access together. So, our team consists of me, Ali Abdi, and Grant Hughes and Eva McClung, Joey Duckworth, and Zach Hammond, as well as Caroline Stanton, who couldn't be here today. Um, so today we're presenting
004a donation to the Onlo School District in um hopes of furthering work towards uh social services. So, as an organization, we aim to reduce health inequity for everyone regardless of circumstances and give them the health care they need and direct them to the healthcare they need. And so, we have a four-point strategy. So, our first um way that we do this is that we build community bridges. So we partner with organizations like Mayo Clinic Lacrosse, Gunderson by Amplify, um Sinclair Health Mission and now the Allesa School District to further social work and learn and align our interests to reduce health inequity together. Um and secondly we also organize education and awareness events what one of which has already happened this uh past November in which we educate members of the community about what SEAT does
005about potential healthcare resources they could use and opportunities they might not know. Uh our third point is that we also use technology. So last year um some of you may remember I developed Apollo Health which was an application um for uninsured and underinsured patients to find free and lowcost healthcare clinics. Um and we are currently working to translate that into Spanish and Mong for the lacrosse community. And finally we also fundraised. So we launched our first fundraiser back in November of 2025. And since then we've raised about $2,500. And today we'd like to present 800 of those to the Alaska School District to um further work in social uh services. And we actually met with the social worker for the school district, Miss Workheiser, and she told us a lot of important information about that.
006So that was just a little bit about the organization. Um again, thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak. if any of the team members would like to speak at all. No. So, I like I just like to thank the team members for being here and being part of the team and being so supportive as well as their family members for being here today. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. >> That's really amazing. Um Ali, I remember when you were here uh and and and talking about that application, right? And I think sometimes uh big ideas can just be that like I I did a science experiment and I turned it into an app and great but now you're with your colleagues with your friends uh turning that into something that that really seeks
007out to uh the mission that that you uh you know created that application for. So kudos to you, kudos to to the other students here. Uh I think it's just fantastic to see this in action. It's uh really remarkable. Um so >> thank you. >> Yeah, please. >> Um so is this SEAT incorporated? Is that something just locally that you started? When did it come about? >> Yeah, so I started the organization in June of last um uh of last year and uh that was when I also um joined with the team members here. Um, so this is something that's currently community- based, so for Lacrosse County and the surrounding areas. Um, but hopefully we can expand it to other places as well as we move on in our lives. But for now, it's um
008for Lacrosse County. Yes, >> that's awesome. I just think it's so inspirational that not only have you had goals, you're like making them happen. So, you know, it's one thing to come up with ideas and it's another to like follow through and actually do it. So, I'm super proud of you. I'm sure everybody's super proud of you, but it's just very impressive. So, thank you. >> Thank you. And I'm I [clears throat] guess I'd like to leave with just an invitation. You can take it or leave it, but if you'd like to broker a meeting uh work to to sit down with myself and and have some discussions about some other community members that I may have relationships that I can put you in touch with that uh your work may be aligned with their
009values and their work. Uh for example, um I'm a Rotarian. Several of us up here are Rotarians. Um that might be something that they'd like to hear about, right? That's just one example. So, I'll uh put that invitation out there and uh hopefully maybe we can talk again. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Uh I can follow up with you on that. Thank you. >> So, while [clears throat] the your your donation doesn't reach the the level that the board would need to uh like officially approve, I can think I can speak for all of us to say we're very grateful and thankful for the work that you're doing. So, well done. >> Thank you so much. >> [applause] >> ALL RIGHT, UH BOARD, WE HAVE ONE OTHER donation that we want to acknowledge. There's
010$40 from Mark and Ciney Casilius for the district for any district need in memory of Harley Hayes. >> And that's also very much appreciated and great way to to honor that memory. So, thanks to Mark and Cindy. Now we have staff recognition and we have a number of teachers who are being recognized for receiving their master's degrees. >> Yeah. Well, this is equally as exciting. What a great night. We get to have our students and we get some of our great team members to come join us. Um we're hoping that maybe you can just take some turns and maybe move over in this direction and and maybe have an opportunity. Whoever is able to sit at the mic first, maybe introduce yourself and uh you know share with us your uh program and uh maybe
011a couple things about it if you'd like and the board members can ask questions if they'd like and and we just want to uh present you uh before you leave. I believe we have a certificate, right, uh Kristen? Uh that uh we would share with you, but we just want to share with you how proud we are of you. Thank you. We understand that it is not easy what you went through um to improve your skills. Uh and as we've talked a lot, we want to be a model school district, right? And to be a model school district, we need to have the greatest team members that we possibly uh can have. So, thank you. And now, uh I know that this is a point of pride for our school district. Uh so it's always
012good to share a reminder that now we have 73% of our uh professional team members, licensed team members uh with at least a master's degree. So that's pretty extraordinary. So I'll turn the mic mic over to you. >> Hey, uh my name is Ally Leer. I work at uh Irving Perch. Um in October, I graduated with my mers in reading with a elementary emphasis um from Grand Canyon University. Uh throughout that program, I just use uh learned a lot of instructional strategies and ideas that I plan to um implement in my classroom specifically for early literacy. So as a first grade teacher, I understand the important importance of building that foundation so that they have success as they um move throughout their academic careers. Um and then maybe potentially as I use my degree um
013as a reading interventionist or specialist in the future. So yeah. >> Do you do your master's program project here like classrooms or >> I did not have to do the action research. Yes. >> I was just I just want to know what the outcomes were. [laughter] >> No, I did not have to do the action research. So, >> but congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you for the recognition. >> Were those high schoolers? >> Yes. >> So, I was listening to them and was like, okay, how do I be more professional than [laughter] those high schoolers? Really very impressive. Wow. Okay. Well, um my name is Emily McCall. I teach fourth grade at Irving Perch. I also graduated in December with my MERS in reading. Um and today is my first day of six more credits
014to get my reading specialist um license at the end of this um semester. So I did do an action research project um around the effects of CKLA implementation on students self-perception of reading and their reading comprehension. Um it was a short research project but I did see growth in student reading comprehension throughout my research and did not see much growth in student self-perception of reading. Um I I'm not exactly sure why. I recall one question that I asked was um uh I like being the only person who knows an answer to the to a question and that number dropped which I actually took as a point of pride that like maybe they were glad to see other people in the class know answer to questions. Um but I I'm not exactly sure what I'll do
015with this other than like expand my knowledge as a teacher. um I I could become a reading interventionist or academic interventionist or a reading specialist at the end of um the semester, but it really just was an area of knowledge I wanted to I wanted to learn more about this area. So >> thank you. >> Hello, I'm Mary Kate Jones. I'm a second grade teacher also at Irving Perch. Um I presented to you all um in November for my action action research project through Western Governor's University for my degree in educational technology and instructional design um with the second grade students I was working with within specifically math fluency. And so it was a short research action research but overall the results were very positive. student accuracy increased. Um, and my observation data showed strong
016engagement and non-task behavior, especially during those game-based, really interactive pieces of learning. Um, and so I plan to use kind of my my results and and the learning that I have to just continue to to teach using engaging research-based learning experiences that support learning and and help kids grow um within that technology and teaching within our classrooms. So yeah, results were very positive. Thank you. Um Miranda Flock, fourth grade teacher also at Irving Perch. Um I graduated from W Lacrosse in December um with a master's also in reading. Um so I'll have my reading education certificate. Um, I would say just the biggest takeaway from that would be that in fourth grade students usually are kind of transitioning or taking that leap from um, learning to read to actually taking that reading to um, learn
017different things with it. So, we still always every year have a handful of students that still need some remedial skills with comprehension and fluency and decoding. And so just with what I was taking away from my program, I'll be able to use that knowledge to work with students that still need assistance or remediation with um learning, working on learning to read and practicing those skills to better serve my students. So, thank you for recognizing us tonight. >> Congratulations. >> Hi, I'm Abby Boss. I teach first grade at Northern Hills and Kaylee and I are gonna take T-Met because we did our program together. >> So, I'll let her introduce. >> Okay. I'm Kaylee Olsson, a third grade teacher at Eagle Bluff. And Abby and I actually competed for the same jobs coming in. So, if
018Lish and Todd remember, here we are. We did know each other, but like she came in with a thank you. I was like, "Who's that girl? She better not take my job." But here we are. We're friends. Here we are. Yeah, exactly. >> We both got the job we wanted, so it all worked out. >> Um, yeah, so our master's program was through UWL and it was we got our masters of science and education with an emphasis on professional learning communities. Um, so through our program, we were able to go to a lot of different rural urb urban and suburban um communities and learn about different cultures and then just have some leadership opportunities throughout. and we were working with educators from all over Wisconsin in our program. Um, so it was really cool to
019be able to interact with them and just take ideas from them and share ideas with them and bring that into our own classrooms. Yeah. Yeah. So, our learning experiences and collaboration with a bunch of amazing educators just gave us even more skills and knowledge in um just being able to support all students and having some of those cultural experiences and knowledge even. Um, both of our confidence really grew as leaders in and out of the classroom, I would say. And we even brought like the leadership opportunities in into our classrooms for our students to kind of own their own learning and really improve that engagement as well. About a year ago now, I think we were here presenting our action research. So, I um researched mindfulness, daily mindfulness practices in the classroom and the effects
020it can have on students emotional regulation and overall there was really positive outcomes from that. Um, one thing I found that was super cool was that the students who maybe needed the most help in regulating their emotions showed the most improvement. So, it's something that I do at least three days a week um this year and will continue to hopefully throughout my whole career. Yeah. And then I just did my um research on the effects of student engagement through their leadership um and the implementation of morning meetings. So, with first graders, I wanted to be able to get them more involved in leadership in the classroom. Um so, I was able to have each of my students like one a day would lead morning meetings. So they were planning the greeting, the share, and then
021some sort of like um community building game. Um so it was just really cool to see six and sevenyear-olds taking the opportunity to be leaders. And this year I'm able to use that and have my students continue to pick those things and have the opportunity to have a say in the class more um and just show that they're very capable even as six and seven year olds. So yeah. So, thank you for being a supportive district and furthering our education. Like, as teachers, we want to model that for our students. The learning is never done. And I think we all recognize that here. Um, and just having, like we both say, we have the most amazing like co-workers and admins to support us in furthering our education and giving us that um, encouragement. >> Thank
022you. >> I think it's really neat to hear that you learned something from your action project. You're like, I'm out of here. I'm a talker. >> I love it. >> But I think it's really cool that not only did you learn something, but you're all already like the gears are turning like how can I use this to continue to like enhance my teaching experience and help these kids. So, I just think that's super cool. It's not just, you know, going in to get the degree. You're actually like actively ready to use it and make things happen. So, that's awesome. Thanks. >> Hey guys, just [clears throat] a comment like I think many of us around the know what it's like to have a full-time job and then be going back to school for for more,
023right? So, commended on that level of effort and commitment. And I think right now, like at this moment, this is this is when the the the payback comes like for for all of you, but for your students, for your colleagues, opportunity to share and grow and continue to, you know, work down that path together. So, thank you so much for the commitment, the investment of your time and uh look forward to uh what we can do together here as we forward. Thank you. [applause] Okay, now we will transition to item number 14 and welcome Joe Hoffs from Hawkins Ash. >> And I'm assum you're probably gonna introduce >> Well, you you did a great job. Um I just want um to thank Joe for being here tonight. And I also wanted to recognize Emily Baldwin
024who's here tonight. She's our um accounting manager and she's the one that really has the heavy lift as we go through the audit and she does um an outstanding job um as well as the entire team and quite frankly there's just like anything there's many many hands that that make the work happen. But just um to all of our staff we really appreciate the work that they do to help us have a clean audit. Um for this agenda item there are two attachments and you'll be happy to know he's not going to go through the 70page um financial statements he that we've got in the an attachment and Kristen can put uh flip the script so that I can I can put that on the screen and then he can use that as kind of
025the talking points for a presentation with you. So with that I'll turn it over to you Joe. >> All right. Thank you. Thanks for [clears throat] having me tonight. Yeah, my name is Joe Hos. I'm a partner with Hawkins Ash CPAs. Um, so I'm here to talk to you about your June 30th, 2025 audit. So I want to do three things tonight. One, tell you what an audit is and why you need one. [clears throat] Two, talk about the results of your audit. And then three, I'm going to just hit some highlevel financial statement highlights just to kind of give you an idea what the financial statements say. Uh, this is our first year, our firm's first year doing the district's audit. So a little bit about our firm. We're a local firm. Well, I
026would say regional firm now. We started in Lacrosse. This is actually our firm's 70th anniversary year. So, we have 10 offices now in Wisconsin and Minnesota. We do about 40 public school audits a year. So, we've got a good team with some good good experience here. Um, so we're happy to to be with the district and working with you. So, yeah, as Janet said, there is a financial statement which is about 70 or 80 pages long. It's it's hard to cover something like that in a setting like this. we've distilled it down into like a six- page document that we can go over, but if you ever are referring to anything in the public or with with anybody asking you questions, that big financial statement is really the financial statement of record. So, please refer
027to that one. Um, and if you have any questions as I go through this, let me know. Otherwise, Janet knows how to get a hold of me if you have questions beyond that. So, first [clears throat] thing, why does the district have an audit? Well, the answer to that for any local government is usually the same. is that the state requires you to have one. So there's a state statute that said every public school district in Wisconsin needs to have an audit every year. But beyond that, why would you want to have an audit or need one? Um the purpose of an audit is to really give your financial statement users assurance that they can rely on the data. So you have a very competent staff here. They could provide financial information to anyone that
028asks for it, but those people asking for it want some assurance that the numbers are correct. So you hire an independent third party, the auditor. to come in and do procedures on your numbers and issue an opinion so that people that reading your information can say, "Yes, I can rely on this. I can make decisions based on this." So, your audit really has two parts. One is a financial statement audit, which is probably something you would think about when you think about an audit. We're looking at numbers, making sure the balance sheet and income statements are correct. For public school districts, you almost always have a second component, which is a compliance audit. So, you spend federal and state money every year. If you go above a certain threshold, you're required to have a compliance
029audit. So, we'll talk about the results of that, too. So, what is the district's responsibility in all this? It's really to um prepare the financial statements. The financial statements are really the responsibility of the district. We prepare those as just like a service, but um it really is the staff's responsibility to know what's in those and be confident to talk about those and produce that information. Then our responsibility is to look over those and issue an opinion which we'll talk about. So at the end of this all there's a few things that the district gets. We do an an aid certification. So in the middle of September the state of Wisconsin collects all the information from the school the financial information. They use that to determine the next year's aid. So we have to do
030procedures to certify those numbers for the district. You get a financial statement which is that 80page document we talked about that has all the financial information and footnotes in it. We also issue something called a communication with those charged with governance which would have findings problems we had during the audit. There aren't any, so that's good. And then [clears throat] we do a data collection form which sends all the federal grant information to the federal government and they track that. So that's kind of the the result of the audit. Okay. So number two, what kind of my agenda there is the financial audit results. So we issued an unmodified or clean opinion on the financial statements. That's the best you can get. That's the one you wanted. It means that anyone reading that document can
031rely on that uh those numbers to make decisions. Um in addition to looking at the numbers, we look at internal control. So we pick transactions and walk them through the process. So who opened the mail, who approved the invoice, who paid the check, who reconciled the bank statement. If we find any issues in that, we issue findings and we didn't have any findings for internal controls this year. We did record one what we call material audit adjustment. material just means it would matter. Um, it had to do with some security systems recording those. It was kind of a unique transaction, so it's not something I would be concerned about. One audit adjustment is really good. We we do districts where we have many, many more. So, I would say that that's a good thing. Um,
032and then I do just want to say that Janet, Emily, and the team did a great job getting us the information we need. Um, being responsive to our questions. It can be a big process to prepare and and go through an audit. So they do a great job getting us the information we need. Okay, the number three I want to talk about the the compliance audit results. So it's called a single audit. Um that's just the terminology that it's used. Um you have a federal and a state compliance audit. So um in 2025 the district spent $2.6 million of federal awards. That's across, you know, a few dozen programs. Some are very small, some are much larger. So, we do a risk assessment to figure out which ones we're going to test. In 2025, we
033tested the child nutrition cluster, which is your free and reduced lunch. That's about $875,000. We tested special ed, which is about $830,000. We tested Medicaid, which is related to special ed 2, which was about $370,000. So, those were our major programs. We go through a compliant supplement that the federal government puts out that says this is what the district should be doing. and we make sure you're doing it. For the federal awards, we didn't have any findings either. So, all clean there. Uh for state grants and awards in 2025, the district spent about $21.2 million. The largest portion of that is the general aids, the equalization aid, um which is about almost $17 million in 2025. So, that's the program we tested. It's the biggest one. We look at it every year. And then on
034a rotating rotating basis, we test some of the smaller state aids too. And we had no findings with those either. So the district is what's considered a lowrisk audit when it comes to compliance auditing. If you have no findings for two consecutive years, we test less. If you're high risk and you have findings, we test more. So if the district is low risk, so uh the results were were positive for the district this year. Any questions on the results before I hit into some financial statement highlights? All right. If you just want to go to the next page there. So, um there's a lot of numbers on these pages. I'm not going to talk about all of them. The top section there under number four says statement of net position. So, all governments including the
035district use something called fund accounting. So, you account for things based on the purpose of those transactions. The big groups are like a capital project. Once you have a big you account for one of them debt service you collect and pay um for debt other special revenue funds. So if you look at the fin there's all these columns that are self balancing that top section there number four is all of them mashed together um and it's actually a different form of accounting so I'm not going to spend too much time on it I just wanted to point out that it was there. So going on to number five this is the general fund so your main operating fund of the district. This is the results for the last three years. Um, so [clears throat] you
036can see there's revenues, expenses, and then there's a net change. So for 2025, the general fund had a net change of a positive $915,000. So you're adding to fund balance. And actually over the last three years, you've added to fund balance every year. And then the very bottom of that page talks [clears throat] about the fund balance, which is the equity of the general fund. Um, so at the end of the year, it was $13,338,000. You can see that's broken up to a few different categories. So yes, you have equity, but some of it is restricted or reserved or designated for certain purposes. What's left over is 11.9 million of unassigned fund balance, which is basically you decide, you haven't decided to do anything with that yet. One of the ratios we look at is
037the last line there. We compare that unassigned fund balance to a year's worth of expenditures. So your percentage there is 25% which is a pretty standard good metric to have in your fund balance. Um so it's a strong fund balance and it's been increasing over time which is good. Um I do just want to point out that fund balance doesn't necessarily mean cash available. You might say hey we have $11 million of unassigned fund balance. We can spend that. Not necessarily. You need to keep some of that for financial stability. If you spent all of that down you would have no reserves. You would have nothing to, you know, prepare for a rainy day. Okay, so that's general fund fund balance. The next page, page three, does a similar thing thing with all your other
038funds. Again, a lot to go through here, so I'll just hit some of the high notes. The first one there is your debt service fund. So that um collects tax revenue and then pays your debt. The second section there is the capital project fund. The majority of that is your large capital project that you just borrowed for. Um you can see the fund balance for that kind of right in the middle of the page is $26.7 million. The idea is you borrow a bunch of money and then you spend it and eventually that fund balance will go to zero. Uh and then the other one I wanted to talk about was the food service which is the bottom uh section there. So that's your child nutrition program that's supported with user fees. So, families pay
039for lunch, but also free and reduced lunch for those that are low income. Um, and your fund balance for that was $864,000 at the end of the year. That has decreased a little um since the last year. And then on page four, similarly, some more uh smaller funds to talk about. The top section there was the community service fund. So, this is a fund that was new in 2025. Um there are certain thing expenditures the district has that benefit the entire community and you can put those aside in a separate fund and you can levy special taxes for those. Currently the district has crossing guard and the school resource officer in there. So those get pulled out of the general fund so you don't have to spend tax dollars on those. You can levy for
040them especially. Uh and then the cooperative service program is your co-op athletics typically. Um and then the bottom two, the private purpose trust and the employee benefit trust are um funds that are collected and maintained by the district but don't belong to them. The biggest one there is your post-employment benefit trust. So um the district doesn't care that money but it's not technically theirs to spend. So a lot of numbers there. We'll get some graphs here on the last few pages that are easier to understand. Um so that top graph there, this is just general funds. So again, the main operating fund of the district over the last 10 years, you can see the revenues and expenses have gone from, you know, about 35 million up to almost 50 million in 2025. So a pretty
041steady increase there. Which is what we would expect honestly. Expenses tend to increase. Uh the bottom graph there is the net change in fund balance. So that that's your net income of the general fund over the last 10 years. You can see in 2020 or 2018 there was a dip basically in that loss. Um from that time on it's been steadily going up. You've had pretty strong fund balance additions over the years. Then the next graph would at the top is your fund general fund balance over the last 10 years. Going up is good like we talked about. You can see there was kind of a dip there in in 1718, but over the last five years, there's been a pretty steady increase in the general funds fund balance. I'll skip number seven. That's a
042budget to actual. I think we've talked enough about general fund, but the last uh graph there I do want to point out is your general obligation debt. So that is the general obligation debt is repaid with tax revenue. That's the ending balance over the last 10 years. As you can see, it stayed pretty steady there from 16 to 22 and then starting in 23, 24, and 25, we borrowed a large amount of those capital improvements. I do want to point out that the state of Wisconsin imposes a debt limit on all school districts based on the value of the property inside the district. It's 10% of that value. So, your debt limit is 314 uh million dollars. So you're not close to that with a currently outstanding $81 million debt balance, but um just know
043that that is a limitation of borrowing state. So that's all I wanted to cover. I think the big takeaways are it was a a a clean opinion. We didn't have any findings and then the general fund fund balance has been growing steadily over the last few years. And I'm happy to answer any questions. I know that's a lot to get thrown at you at one time. Um but again you can always get a hold of me later if you have any questions. >> Do you have any questions? >> Just quick one. Um Joe you had mentioned that if you have two that are like clean or positive then you get audit you do this less. Can you just >> Yeah, I should explain that more. So um like I said there was let's see what
044was it $2.6 million of federal awards during the year. If you're a lowrisisk audit we have to test at least 20% of that. If you're a high risk, we have to test at least 40% of that. So, um, you don't ever get out of the audit unless your federal awards fall below a million dollars. That's the threshold. I doubt that you will. Um, so you always will have that single audit, that compliance audit. Um, just how much of those dollars you have to test changes depending on if you have or not. >> Thank you. That's well well done. >> Takes 20 minutes in a board meeting, but it is just months and months and months of work. It's one of those typically iceberg things. So many come to things come to us and underneath it
045are are days, weeks, months of of effort and this is one of those. Just thank you guys for all the hard work that that you do to get us to this point. >> Appreciate that. And Joe, I know this is first year with really appreciate the uh thorough uh review and presentation this evening and >> yes >> see you again. >> Sure. >> Thank you. >> Then we do need approval on this. >> Um I would make a motion to approve the um audit and financial statements as um presented in the report and closure 14 as well as verbal presentation. >> I'll second motion by second by to approve the 202425 audit [clears throat] as detailed in the closure 14 presented this evening by Joe. Uh any further questions? Let's do a roll call approval.
046>> Uh Eric, >> yes. >> Brian, >> yes. >> Tracy, yes. An >> yes. Bridget, >> yes. Mark Mark's having some audio issues, so he's following us on YouTube also, so he's about 10 seconds behind. Um, but I see him on screen, so I'll make sure I get a yes from him. And then Erin, >> yes, thanks team, Joe, Emily. Thank you very much. >> Okay, uh, we'll move now into ourformational and discussion items and start with the administrator and then [clears throat] we'll also have uh opportunities for board members who attended the state convention to offer any any recap or reflections. Start with you. >> Uh Karina was not able to be this evening due to a family commitment, but I wanted to share with you that one of the new classes you approved
047last year just started last week, the uh soundtrack of America, a senior social studies class. the song they used last week to kind of learn how they're going to do the course, one that even I'm familiar with. We didn't start the fire, but um they've now jumped back to the 20s, the Harlem Renaissance, and moving forward with it. So, um I think it's going to be a very engaging class for the uh the seniors that chose that elective. Um at the end of the first semester, um 93% of our students passed all their core classes. And uh when we looked at some resource analytics, about 47% of our students are being drafted on a daily basis, um as part of that. So, middle school. >> Yes. [clears throat] At the middle school, um last week,
048excuse me, the week before, our eighth graders had an opportunity to go down to Western um have kind of a career day down there with junior achievement as part of their academic and academic and career planning. Um they reported having a great time and trip went really well. So, that was great. Um the area of belonging, we have um a new student club that just started this week. uh the fitness club and so our PE teachers are going to be taking turns having the weight room open a couple days a week and so there are a number of students 40 50 students that expressed interest in doing something with that. Um so that's great and great to be using such fantastic facilities and um also our our middle school showers are off to a great
049start to their season. They're doing really really well. um the competitions that they've had um just doing great. Always impressed by what Mr. Eric is able to do with those kids there. So that's fantastic. And then uh finally just from a classroom perspective, just want to spotlight eighth grade science this week. They've been doing a lot of work. Our all of our science teachers are vertically um doing a lot of work on claim, evidence, reasoning and working on supporting that. in and sixth grade they're focusing, you know, most heavily on the claim and then they layer in the evidence, then layer in the reasoning just with that scientific process and inquiry and whatnot. Specifically, this semester in eighth grade, they will be letting go less and less of the um experiments. And so they may
050give the students just simply the question that they need to answer, then they have to figure out how. And that's that's what I've been seeing in the classrooms lately is they have to do they carry more and more of that cognitive load as the year goes on. So a lot of great work happening in the classroom too. >> Good preparation for high school. >> Elementary [clears throat] done. >> All right. End of the semester means our semester progress reports are completed and sent out to families. Um, we had P professional development on CKLA. That is our ELA resource, curriculum resource. We had that on last Monday. And then we followed that up with some on-site sessions at each of our schools um last week as well. So, we got um some very um personalized training
051um last week on CKLA. Um we are beginning to prepare for forward testing which is uh March 16th through April 24th. So um we're looking at our schedules. We are training the proctors and of course we'll be notifying our families and of course finally preparing our students as we approach those dates. So always um um an anticipated time of year. Uh we also have some on-site math training coming up with Shannon Keebler. So, we're planning for that February 3rd through the 5th. We each have a day um as well in our schools with Shannon. An Alaska dance team members are coming to visit our schools on Friday to do some reading and work with our students. Always great to have older kids um be a part of our our younger students day. And uh 100th
052day of school is coming up. Maybe Friday, maybe Monday. You know, it's always a bit of a it's always a bit fuzzy in there, but always some exciting activities on the 100th day of school. Uh last for EABLuff, last week we had our annual science fair. Last Thursday we had about 40 entries. So, uh um it was great from projects from emulsification to um cat food choices by the cats, not the students, the cats, the cats chose um and just, you know, static electricity, all the things. So really, really awesome. Elizabeth Witzik, our PTO president, did a great job organizing that and getting us judges. Um, and then this Thursday we have a a Mc School night, McDonald's fundraiser, uh, between five and seven and and our staff will be working. Um, I've I've never
053worked at McDonald's, so um, so this will be this will be fun. Maybe the drive-thru. I'm not sure what I'll get assigned, but um, but we'll see. You have to use your app or the kiosk inside. So if you go We'd love to see you there. So, and we have some other uh individual schools. >> Yep. So, just at Perch, we're looking forward to our PTO sponsored family movie night on Friday. And as Todd mentioned, we have our 100th day celebration on Friday and we're hosting a fancy lunch and worked with our nutritional services team to select a strawberry shortcake as something special for the kids on that day. And then um also we have upcoming grade level events for um each for first, fourth, and fifth. We have some escape rooms planned um in
054the LMC on upcoming evenings. So, lot to look forward to. At Northern Hills, we also have on Friday our PTO sponsored winter family fun night. So, we have bingo and movie night happening. Our first through fourth grade concert is tomorrow night. So, we've been doing a lot of rehearsals today. Our schedule changes and just getting everyone prepared and ready. And then in kindergarten, we had farm day today. So, just a culminating activity at the end of their CKLA unit to try to bring bring what they're learning in literacy to life for the kids. And so, um, my husband brought by a few of our chickens from our house. And so, the kindergarteners and first and second graders got to got to hang with my chickens today for a couple hours. So, it was very fun.
055Very fun day. >> Thank you. We'll uh turn to board reports and just start at the uh Yeah. So, last week was the Wisconsin Association of School Boards conference and a number of us were able to attend. Um, I'm sure lots of people have lots to share. So, I'll be really brief. Um, some highlights for me, especially as a first-time attendee and a first year on the board. Um, I did get to participate in the delegate assembly, which was I found actually quite fascinating. It was like being in C-SPAN but in real time. Um, unfortunately, I did have to leave a little early so Brian Brian held down the fort. Um, a couple other things I did get to do, um, a new board member roundt with some WASBY representatives, which is very valuable. Networked
056with some of our neighboring school school board members, especially Homeman and West Salem, and had some good conversations there. As far as sessions, um, one of the highlight ones I attended, um, as members of the co-curricular committee, um, Ann and I are on that. I went to one on WIAA and the NIL um, and what's going on with that. And then um just some tax transparency things and how school finances are levied and more to come. >> Um I as always want to thank the district and the community for allowing us to go. I think it's a valuable few days. Um highlights are always just spending time with our fellow board members outside of the formality of this meeting. Um I went to um a couple breakouts. one um was on the um direction of
057AI and um talking more procedural policy, legal things. Um it's always heartening to see that we're on on top of those type of things, but um interesting to hear where other districts are at in that process. Um, another highlight definitely was um a leadership breakout um where Erin and I had the opportunity to sit at a table of leadership from neighboring districts discussing the possibility of sort of creating uh our own community of um leaders in the area to talk about what's going on um specifically from the board level. It was a good week. >> I'll just piggyback right off of that. that was on my list as well and uh and the process around that which uh is is already underway to try to try to understand like how we could put something together
058potentially on a quarterly basis just from a a leadership standpoint to collaborate with one another. So it's exciting to uh to contemplate that >> the whole board is just the president >> at at this point it's it's certainly the invitation going out to local board presidents with the consideration of potentially including the vice presidents as well. So yeah, uh I would also just echo just appreciation to uh to the members who were who were able to uh commit the time and and learn together, right? And and uh it's just really valuable opportunity I think on an annual basis. Um the other thing I would mention is just a a session that I attended that talked about like transparency on local uh tax bills. Uh we learned a bit from the school district in Green Bay
059about uh disseminating uh with clarity the [clears throat] portion of of tax funding that goes to voucher schools versus to the public school, which is a kind of an important, you know, number to keep in mind. And uh in the way our funding is is translated into different educational opportunities. So, if that's something that we would choose to, there's a template that we could we could leverage at some point in time if needed. >> My first day was spent pretty much with delegate assembly. Um, it was rather interesting because I went to the session in the morning talking what was going to happen the afternoon. And one of the things that was going to happen was there was a proposed amendment to change the bylaws to WSP which hadn't been done for like 30 years.
060So, um it's kind of wacky though because they wanted to do a two-tier and it failed. A two-tier delegate just didn't make sense. I don't know what they were thinking. Um everything that we wanted ended up going the way we wanted it to. except for the the decoupling. Um the decoupling, the first one was decouple public and private school funding. Um it did not pass. We were against that. And then um the second one did pass. We supported it that um opposes decoupling. So the way you wanted to. Uh some of the things I went to um the next day I went to a session that talked about uh board development and it was interesting because they have through WSB they have a evaluation the board can self self-evaluate something we might want to consider
061um it's put out in the fall which is a pretty busy time but uh they said that you can have we can have a reset anytime we want to which would be nice Um, and then Wednesday I was trying to find kind of just a quiet spot for Thursday because it was just really busy. So I went and sat at a table and this is this is kind of interesting. I want to share with you. I I was talking to a woman Kathy Klein from Edertton. Okay. She worked in the school district for 40 years and now she was on the school board. So I asked her, "What's the difference? What do you see?" and she said, "Well, when I was part of the district, I was part of the force, but now I'm like
062a drone up." Which is interesting. She shared with me that her daughter has worked there for 25 years, is now a principal at the middle school, moved out. But the thing that was the most interesting was that she told me that they have problems with staff retention. And she said it was amazing. I went to the first session And it was it was just illuminated because they do this thing called bounding and they start they start having better engagement. So it's interesting. I think the work we do matters and we don't know what matters sometimes until we hear from other people. >> Good question. Brian, um Lis, you're you're in attendance. Anything you want to share? >> Sure. Uh I would just echo a lot of what you guys said. Sometimes it's really nice to
063go and see what others are doing and feel validated that we're on the right track with some things or that we're headed the right direction. And it's always great to connect with others in the field. I was able to connect with a couple other directors of instruction from our area. Um, one of the sessions that I went to that I felt like I really took something away from was they were talking about their journey of uh career and technical education and making those connections with businesses and other community partners. and that's what we're talking about working on as well. So, it was great to see that we're on the right track with some of those things, but then also hear some of the things that they did that were successful or things that they might
064have done to make their journey easier or quicker in reflection. So, that was really nice to hear. And I also really liked the keynote speaker on Wednesday. I just thought that uh you know, sometimes we go to conferences to feel refreshed a little bit and I think that really helped with that just refueling of the Sonia, you had the opportunity to present and attend. >> I did. I did. I again, I want to appreciate the board and the community for allowing us to go. There's a lot of different topics that um relate to the board, but also for us at the district level to um an HR related topic. So, I did present with three other school districts. We did kind of a combined panel on our compensation plan and how we've been rolling it
065out for the last three years and saw a lot of improvements. um rightly so was having seven uh teachers with their masters that was obviously because a part of it is they get a big bump in compensation when they get their masters too. So um one of the sessions that I was able to attend was actually on pharmacy benefits is it would seem like an odd one to be at a schoolboard convention but when you look at our total compensation it's not just the salaries it's also our benefits and so they have some great ideas on how we can look at a different pharmacy benefits manager to help um oversee our health insurance and our costs and you know we monitor that although we're not self-insured we monitor that quite a bit and you know
066I I shared with our admin team I think it was last month that um 90% of our pharmacy costs are on brand names and it's really only a small percentage that actually have that a significant cost. So finding ways to reduce that and keep our cost health care cost down. >> Ben, it was your first >> but yes. Yes, it was great. Hey, I tell you what, our vision is to be a model school district and to be a model of anything, you need to utilize best practices and you need to continually strive to improve. And I think it's hugely important that the board sets the tone for that, right? You lead by example. And I think the fact that uh every year as many board members that can attend attend and that does set
067the tone and I thank you and appreciate that. The other things that I thing that I think that I feel is the most important is we get to know each other better, right? And uh as human beings and I think that as we get to know each other better as human humans, it helps us operate better as a team at the board table. So I really do appreciate that. And uh one uh session that uh hasn't been shared is one that I went with Ann to I think our last morning that had to do with the uh superintendent evaluation and uh you know that's something that's essential for uh best practices in any school district is to have an annual evaluation. and we were able to learn a little bit about uh the state association's
068model that they've been uh sharing and promoting out uh that was created just recently and uh we'll be discussing around that u at different sessions as we move forward. So I'll end my remarks. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great set of uh reflections. Appreciate that. Uh we'll move into item number 12 now which is uh information on the quarterly financial report. Janet, >> so um we're giving the quarter 2 financial report halfway through the year. It's our first report though because as you remember we're a quarter of the the quarter of the way through the year before we even adopt our budget. So we don't we don't do an update in that first quarter because we haven't gotten that budget adopted. Remember this is looking at the operating fun. So that operating funds are
069the day-to-day operations of the school district when we um talking about our budget amendment. We'll go through all of the different funds. But just a reminder to make sure that on the usually it's the second meeting of each month, you're getting our financials. So you're seeing all of the funds. Well, each meeting you get all of the um all of the expenditures that we made, but then also looking at those financials so that you can see how those are tracking. So again, this is through December 31st. One of the first things that that we want to talk about is where where's our cash flow? We heard tonight about fund balance and fund balance is important and it's in a very important metric. Even more important is what's happening with cash because cash is the money
070in the bank that's there to to meet our expenditures. And when you look at this graph, this tells a story. When we look at the more purple lines are this year, the top lines are expenditures. You can see that our expenditures are higher um year-over-year than they were in the in the prior year. But you can see that our revenues are about the same. So what does that tell you about cash? We need more cash, right? Because the lowest point in our year is almost always in November. And when you look at this slide, you'll see that the available resources that we had to meet all of those expenditures for operating was $2 million. Now, when you think of $2 million in in relation to a $54 million budget, that's not a lot of wiggle
071room. We're we're at a comfortable place. I don't want us to be startled or alarmed, but you know, there's not a lot of wiggle room. we're right where we need to be with these other um dollar amounts in there. So like you'll see fund 50, that's school nutrition. That's that's students that parents paying for the students lunch. We can't use that for operational purposes. Fund 21 is scholarships. Those are donations that people have given to us so that our seniors can have scholarships when they graduate from us. the employee TSA account. That's money that's being set aside for funding postemployment benefits. Again, we can't use that for operations. Debt service when we have collecting our first cash for the year when our first tax um settlements come in. By law, we're required to set that
072aside to pay for our debt. That's the first thing that we've got to do is put money aside for that. Can't use that for other purposes. capital funds. You can see with capital projects trust. The board put that into place a few years ago to be saving money for the future so that when we have some projects we don't have to go to referendum. We can pull that money out of fund balance. And then you can see what's remaining from the um from the operating or not not the operating referendum the capital referendum. So those funds that we have yet to pay for the um middle school and high school. And then lastly, the last thing is the community service fund. Um that is actually in the whole um when we'll do a transfer to
073to account for that, but that's for our fund 80 for um paying. We we get the money from the um we pay the we pay the um gosh I'm going boys and girls club for those different things as well as for school resource officer and our crossing guards. So point uh point that's important to take away here is while fund balance is increasing our cash position this year is actually worse than it was last year. Our lowest point last year was $2.1 million. This year it's $2 million. So then looking at the operating funds, kind of taking these things in um in total and where does our money go, you can see that 86% of that revenue is coming from um state and local. And what we're seeing is over time, if you kind of
074remember how these charts are changing, that local revenue and state revenue are starting to be more like equal. It used to be we had more funding coming from the state and less reliance on local taxes. That's shifting. And then you can also see that big chunk that comes from Wisconsin interd district. That's open enrollment. That's an important piece for us. But the thing to remember there is we educate the students all year long and then we get that money in June. So when we're a positive open enrollment district, that thankfully we are. That's great. And it requires more cash available to make sure that we can meet our expenditures there. So, this is looking at our um our operating revenue by budget and then what we've seen to date. And as you can see, there's
075there's not a lot of similarity between these two graphs. And there's and it's little not a lot of money has come come in at this point in time. So, as of December, remember in November that was our lowest point, but December, we got our first equalization aid payment. That's two $6.2 million. So that's that little light purple amount in there. But the rest of it, that's for the most part, that's the only money that's come in at this point in time. Then looking at our operating um revenue funds 10 and 27. You can see when you look at the budget this this is showing our operating transfers in and we show it on this and most of the other things we have that eliminated. But we show it here because it's a good thing for
076you to remember like how much are we transferring from fund 10 to cover what's not covered through the state or through grants in fund 27. And you can see that amount is projected to go down this year because we are supposed to be getting 42% of um of categorical aid. We know that we're not going to get that, but it we will be getting more than we got last year. It was at 31% um in the prior year. So we want to see that number going down because obviously if we didn't have any transfer needed there that could all be going for our regular education. Then you'll see local revenue that from a budget perspective what we brought in at this point is very low compared to to budget. And you can see that local
077revenue we have a heavier reliance on that. We're relying more on our local taxes. Remember there was no equalization aid put into the formula this year. So that had an impact on our local taxes. Just that revenue limit minus state aid equals local taxes. Then you can also see the state revenue. You can see that that's down. But remember I just said that our um categorical aid for or our special education aid is up. But our state equalization aid is down enough that it's really still down overall when you look at it from a budget perspective. So now looking at our expenses, we look at them two ways. Um by object, that's the what, and then we'll look at it later. By function, that's the what for. And you can see that 74% of um
078our expenditures are for wages and benefits. We're a people business. So that's what you would expect to see. And then the next big chunk is our purchased services and educational payments. We have our 4K partners. So those are purchase service. We'll see that shift that graph shift next year as we bring more 4K insight inhouse and offer more of it. Then we'll have less of that. So that educational payments are our um offsite 4K also. Voucher payments are in that category as well as any contracted education for students who we aren't able to meet their needs on site and they're going offsite. That's included in there as well. The other big things in that area are like transportation, utilities, um those are the big items. And so between those three things, salaries, employee benefits, and
079purchase services, advice bar takes up the largest chunk of um expenditures. And you can On this you can see similarities between the budget and the activity that that activity is kind of a lower smaller version of what is the budget. So they are more proportional. Um then when we look at our expenditures by object you can see here uh again salaries and wages are um are up. We expect that because of our increase in CPI. And then in addition to that, like with the Anna Pal program, that was contracted education that now we're bringing in house. So all of the staffing on that is kind of like switched categories. It's gone from purchase services now into the salaries. You'll also see in the business administration a higher amount there. That's for the Anna Pal's remodeling
080that we did prior to getting ready for the start of school. So then looking at um this by by function. Um we can see that um 67% when we take instruction, the co-curricular activities, the student activities, that's real close to like these are direct student contact kinds of things and that takes up the largest section of the budget. Um business administration is the next biggest chunk and that again is the utilities, the transportation and uh then we have the purchased instructional services those are our vouchers and our contracted education offsite. So looking at these um you'll see that these again this map kind or this chart they kind of mirror one another. there's there's some it's really the revenue that looks the most off on that, but the rest of it we are pretty cyclical
081in how those expenditures come through. So, um looking at this by by function um you will see that in the instructional area we've got uh a higher amount there that's for our curriculum adoptions that we have put into place um as well as staffing that we have, but mostly our curriculum adoptions that we have going on. And um with that, our next monitoring will be in April for the third quarter. But can I answer any questions as I went through that? >> J, just a real quick one for me. Um my recollection is we talked about cash position. >> First tax payments usually arrive >> um in January. >> January. That's why I thought we were right on the cusp of that turning the other way. >> Yep. For people who pay their taxes in
082December, we get that um tax settlement in mid January. Then we get another one, a big one in February for all of them that pay their first installment in January. >> Thank you. >> And then our final one comes in August after the year has finished. >> And that all goes into the local the local portion. Any other questions for Jenna? >> Thank you. Let's move then into the 2026 27 budget projections. So, um, because this is a non-state budget year, we're able to be a little bit earlier with our budget projections because we we pretty much know where we're going to be with the exception of enrollment. We won't know that until the third Friday in September. So, we're just laying out the the preliminary budget estimates. What we're going to be talking about
083tonight is the revenue limit. Just revenue limit minus state aid equals local property taxes. Not worrying about those other pieces at this point in time because they don't fund programs. It's the revenue limit that funds the program. And so that's what we'll be talking about. And with our state budget, there is no increase in our low revenue limit ceiling. Remember, we're a lower spending district. Sometimes we've gotten a bump on on that. There's nothing that was put in the state budget this year. no increase in per pupil aid statewide. A $325 per pupil increase in the revenue limit. And then uh for this next coming year, remember I said that our our specialled reimbursement should be 42% this year. It won't be. Next year it's supposed to be 45% but it it'll be a little
084bit less than that. But again, we're at 31 the year before. So these are it's progress. if we can get there. And there's been a lot of a lot of legislative push to use some of the state surplus funding to make good on that that commitment to make it from a sum certain which means a certain amount of money is put aside to pay for those expenditures to a sum sufficient which means we will meet the needs whatever they are. So, we're hoping that we can see that down the road. And then we'll see a $928 per student increase for open enrollment both in and out. Being a positive on our open enrollment in is really a help for us to help us balance our budget. Um, open enrollment has been extremely important for our
085school district. Then we talked before when we were talking about um the just where we're at financially. there's no increase in state equalization aid that um payment reduces property taxes but it doesn't impact spendable funds in any way at all. This just shows kind of the um when you look at that top row showing that the state budget just they didn't put any money into it. It's just it's the same both years um over all four state support. And then this estimated state support, you can see how that keeps going down, down, down. Kind of like special ed funding, it keeps going down, down, down. And then the special ed reimbursement, it's supposed to be going up. But again, we won't we won't see that in its entirety. Um, this just is just a history
086lesson of that per pupil increase as well as that per pupil aid. And then, um, just a reminder too of why does it why does it seem so hard? You know, we just haven't been keeping up with inflation. And had we kept up with inflation, we would have $8.9 million um more this this year than than we have. So, I mean, that's way more than our operating referendum. Our operating referendum is 5.2, But 8.9 just to keep up with inflation. This I like to keep out in front of you as a reminder of like when we will need to be going out to renew that operating referendum that will expire in June of 2028. The federal budget is unpredictable as always and we rely on that mostly for the school nutrition program. It's really important
087there. and then also um our title grants. It's another important place of funding that comes from the federal. Then with all of that as a backdrop, what we do our very best to do is use that and align that to our strategic plan and our u our pillars. So use that and then that's the backdrop. So then now drilling down a little bit further that major revenue limit components what we're expecting we do this big calculation called a revenue limit worksheet. It's lines and lots of lots of calculations on numbers, but when you boil it all up, um our three-year membership, and remember, membership's different than enrollment. Membership is discounted for our 4K students who are counted at 6 and early childhood counted at 0.5. We're expected to have a loss of 59 FTE, full-time
088equivalency. Um, this next year we will be getting a per student increase of $325 per member. And then our current year base is $35.6 million. So, taking all of that into consideration, we are projecting from the revenue limit uh close to $363,000 increase. That's it. And that includes $200,000 more for an operating referendum. It's not it's not a pretty picture. So remember when I said earlier that um we have gotten in the past a bump in that low revenue limit ceiling. You can see we had one in 2324 where it's that nice even 11,000 uh dollars number over on the right. It's just kind of interesting how to see like how revenue limits which have been in place since 1993. It just keeps going on and on, but how it has been such a disequalizing
089thing for school districts across the state of Wisconsin. So from that revenue limit formula, you can see that the lowest is 11,037. There's I don't know which school district it is, but somebody gets 26,363 for every student. And you can see the average and the median there. And you can see in how how that compares to us. So with enrollment, one of the things, this is not new, but I always like to keep that in front of the board how important it is to be watching what's happening with our class sizes with the gray being our smallest class sizes and the purple being our largest. And you can see they're aging out. So that's why I uh all of us are so grateful that the board took the action that you did with That's really
090a good strategy to help us try to turn this this these numbers around for our district. And it gets kind of depressing sometimes when we talk about declining enrollment, but I like to put this in here just to kind of like we're not alone. It's it's a it's across the state. 71% of the districts have declining enrollment. 55% were declining in 20067 and 75% of the students are located in in 30% of the district. And I'm hoping in time just given the statistics that there will be some action on looking at that revenue limit formula and how can we how can we look at some equity. Uh it's said earlier that open enrollment is so important for our district and you can see over time what our in and out and net are and then
091you can see how that helped close the budget hole for our district. Very important piece. This I put in there just um not going to spend any time with it, but what I want you to pay attention to here is just some of the percentage differences. You can see where the state priorities are where investing the money for um when you look at year-over-year changes like for open enrollment and something that will be good for us with that $932 per pupil increase this year that's an 8.4% increase was 12.7 the year before. So our work to be a destination district is really really important to help us just balance our budget. This is looking at our personnel by category. You can see each of the different employee groups and over time how how they are
092um stacking up. And you can see that we do our best to try to make sure that as we're losing students, we're also proportionately downsizing our staff as well. We have class size targets. You can see that class size targets um for both the target and then our target maximum. Um, obviously there's going to be some classes that are over it, but this is just what we look at for our targets. And then looking at those staff to student ratios by these different employee groups, what are um those those ratios and then monitoring that over time. So again, we're making slow incremental adjustments over time so that we don't have to do large adjustments down the road. >> Jamie, just to clarify, this teachers ratio is including like the special like correct >> gym. First
093time I saw this I'm like well if there's 11 students to each teacher like why are the class that's why >> it's everybody that's considered in your contract. Yeah, thank you for for bringing for pointing that out. So it's all of those specialists or anybody that's under that kind of a contract. Then um got a couple slides here of just staffing by teaching area. Again, important metric to be watching so that we we can make sure that we're adjusting and if we're out of whack in a particular area, we're out of whack on purpose. It's a strategic kind of initiative that we are investing in a certain area or or not. And then this is continued here. And so like you can see um by teaching what Tracy was saying before like some of those
094different areas that we're seeing that you know those aren't all classroom teachers. So when you take all of that we're at the point at this point in time where we're in we're doing the projections and what we're doing is and when you look at that bottom line you might panic. Please don't panic. It's like we're early in the process. We're early in the process that is rolling things forward as the as they are right now. We won't be doing that. We'll be adjusting. We'll be getting through a balanced budget. One of the things that we're doing right now is meeting with like each budget manager to help Ben learn about the different budgets that we have in the district and what efficiencies might we have because what's super important is that we're not just cut
095you don't nobody cuts their way to excellence. We got to be strategic about the things that we're investing in and we still are investing but then we're looking other areas where we can be more efficient. And then um what we do in this process is we create what we call a budget strategy map where we with the administrative team we're looking at the different things where I'm saying that just because the financial picture doesn't look that great. That doesn't mean that we're not continuing to look at innovation and different things that will make our district better. So, we mark these all out on a on a spreadsheet that we keep tracking. And then what we'll do down the road, too, is that we will now look at and we'll add to those areas where we
096can find efficiencies so that we can make decisions on the different kinds of initiatives that we want to make sure that we're we're implementing for the next budget year. So, we'll be continuing this process. This is just kind of our our first blush at it. And will be coming back in the spring and giving you more detail um on on how we will be proceeding forward and what the recommendations are and we'll be starting that out with the finance committee and then bringing it to the full board. You have anything you want to add to that? >> Yeah, I think that the board should be prepared that this is kind of the start of an ongoing conversation that we will probably touch on this uh almost every meeting from this point on. will certainly be
097uh kind of olling back and forth between finance committee uh getting some direction from that group and then bringing it to this group. It may entail uh a board work session um or a board development uh in the near f future as well. But our starting point uh when we project our revenues and then we move forward and we project our expenditures the the approximate dollar amount that we're starting with is a negative $750ome,000. But then our work begins and that's uh where we're meeting with every director uh and every principal and we're analyzing uh literally every single line item of the budget and we're looking for efficiencies that we can find. And then we are uh discussing uh uh staff that uh touch the lives of of students, teachers. And then we also take
098a look at all of our uh team members that aren't uh at the teaching level. Uh with the teachers, one of the things that we lean on heavily is those staff guidelines that Janet had shared with you. It's really important for us to be able to have staffing that is proportionate with the number of students that we have and the fact that we have uh we are projecting less students than we need to be proportionate in our staffing levels. and we're doing some of that. So, um we have some retirements that you've already approved. Uh we'll be leveraging some of the savings associated with that and we'll be strategizing around that. We are um [clears throat] confident that we will be able to bridge that uh projected gap of 750,000 and uh hopefully actually get
099under that because uh the board has already approved uh the additional expenses of all day everyday preschool which we know that there's an an additional expense to that that hasn't been in our budget. And there are some very important items in this budget strategy map that we will be uh further analyzing and advocating uh to add or repurpose in our school district to really take us to the next level uh of innovation and uh continuous improvement. So that's all I got. >> Thanks for the question and you may not know the answer. It was came up just so I follow. So when we're talking about enrollment, you know, some of that enrollment is because people are having less children. So I was just curious and I don't know how much information is available, but are
100we looking at like hospital birth rates in our area or like I know that a lot can change though between birth and you know 4K, but I don't know that's just for my brain. >> Yes. And I know that Janet will speak to this further, but there is a process and that does include analyzing, I think, birth rates and population density and doing kind of demographic studies in our community. But Janet, do you want to speak to that further? >> Applied I I don't know, it's been I think in 23 we had applied population lab come in and do a a presentation. What I can do is resend that [clears throat] out back out to you that report. But they do they at it four different ways and that's the information that I use to
101do the projections because it looks at birth rates and it looks at all of those different things and um but it's something that just with a declining enrollment it's probably something that we should update probably like every three years or so and it was 2023 when we when we did it um first time I think it was the fall of 23 that we had her come in. Thank you. >> Sorry for the sorry for the random question. >> Other questions? >> Janet, you know, this is there's a science, right, that goes into this, you know, the the the accounting, the projections, and then there's an art of presenting it. You do an excellent job at those walking us through this. So, I appreciate the the recap today. Um, team, we'll move into our action items
102and we'll start with item number 15 which is the 202526 budget amendment and for that we stay with Janet. >> So for this item um I'm going to there's two two attachments. One one is the the detail changes and I think that's going to be the most helpful because that talks about the changes and as you remember what we do is each time we do a budget amendment we'll add another column. So we've got December Then we'll have March changes, then we'll have June changes that we'll we'll be looking at. So for um for this budget amendment, uh not a lot happening. So we've got a literacy grant of 43,000. Um that's the increase that you're seeing on the revenues. You can then with a grant our our revenues and our expenditures will offset. So
103bottom line is staying exactly the same. And then we have we always have some movement in different line items each quarter where we're taking we underestimated this or overestimated that and we have some movement going along there. So that's in fund 10. In fund 21 we have both revenue and expenditure. Remember that's the scoreboard for the high school. So that was a gift and donation. That's why it's in fund 21. Then our last one is in fund 49. capital projects fund and we are doing well on interest there. So we're making an adjustment for interest and then just as we have different expenditures categorizing we put when we start out the year we start most of it in the 200 but as we are buying equipment and furniture we're just reclassifying it. So it's just
104moving that along in the in the line items there. So that's the detail. Then how that ends up and this is showing this is what we're actually asking you to take action on is the amended budget. This is showing everything. So it shows what was there before as well as the updates and the updates that are showing on this were the ones that I just talked about. So we would ask the board to take action on approving this budget amendment. I'll make a motion to approve the revisions to the 2025 26 budget as outlined in enclosure 15 budget detail and budget amendment and outlined by Janet. Second >> motion by Bridget, second by Tracy to approve the 202526 budget amendment in it closures 15 budget detail and budget amendment as presented by any questions for
105J. >> Tracy, yes. Brian, >> yes. Bridget, yes. give me texting and looking at each other and Aaron. >> Yes, the amendment is approved. Thank you, Janet. [clears throat] >> Okay, we'll turn to phase 1A of the November 2022 high school referendum projects. and I'll start. >> Okay. What an exciting item. Thank you uh to our de guest for uh coming up to the table. There is not too many times in our organization can say for a large construction project that they're on time and under budget. Now, I can't say that we were on time. Okay? We know that we weren't on time, but the uh the focus of tonight is that we were under budget. We were significantly under budget. we were under budget uh by approximately $10 million. Now, it's still I'm still
106pinching myself because of that. And I think uh before we go further, I think it's just really important for us to acknowledge throughout this whole discussion and even afterward. So, that wasn't by accident. There's people in this room that are responsible for that. And I think it's really important for us to continue to give our thanks and uh acknowledgement and gratitude to them. Um certainly Ben and Jared taking on the responsibilities of uh really managing the project and and us asking them to do some things that uh generally speaking principles uh don't don't do right. That was huge. Janet and her leadership from the office and and I think um the underspent piece is a little deceiving because it's not only under spending, it's investing the dollars that we had and Janet was a master.
107All right. And Emily and in that office to to utilize those dollars to make money on that. So that's another reason why we have that Dan in the back and his leadership um was just incredible through this and our architects and our engineers and our partners in the construction world. We thank them um and I I think it's just important to keep that in mind as we go on throughout this this process. Now, uh, we had to wait a little bit before we could share this information because of course you have to wait for all the bills to come in and as the business office was kind of waiting for that process to happen, they had a good idea and I think the board even had a good idea as you knew that some of
108the bids were coming in under the under uh what we had projected. So, that was a good thing. But before we could share uh we didn't want to uh uh overpromise and underdel. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to underpromise and overd deliver. And I think that's what's happening today. Um so tonight's discussion uh is a fun discussion to have. Um because of the nature and the laws associated with this, you're going to hear that we don't have much time uh to mess around here. we're going to have to make some decisions because uh we need to spend the dollars by a certain time frame for us to stay in compliance. Okay. So, our intent here and and and Jared and Janet and our architects are going to uh spend a lot of
109time speaking to these items, but the agenda really is focused on a little bit of the history, how we got to this point, what our current status is. Uh we we did share this information uh with the finance committee and the finance committee provided direction to administration to bring forward this information to all of you plus a recommendation on how we uh feel those additional dollars should be spent and what priorities uh we feel are most important and and Jared will speak to that and I'll certainly provide my two cents as we go and someone move the screen. Um, we're going to talk a little bit about pre-qualified contractors. And uh, is that Janet? >> Yeah, that's me. >> That's right. >> I thought you were ready to move on. >> And you could see
110the rest. >> Uh, I think we're going to turn her over to Jared. He's going to share a little bit of the history. >> Just to underscore something Ben said. Um, you don't get to see Dan here very often, but I think it's remarkable that Dan was able to lead two very, very large projects at the same time because it wasn't working with one general contractor. It was working with one general contractor at the middle school, one at the high school, all of the different contractors in both buildings. So, um, I really think Dan deserves a round of applause for what he's done. I don't know how he kept his desk organized with piles everywhere. lots of good conversations. All right. Um, moving in. Um, when when we had the original task force come in,
111the task force kind of looked at all of the needs at the middle school, all of the needs at the high school and and then started to go through and identify what were the biggest priorities. The the task force really focused on that whole idea of safety, access, ADA, compliance kind of across um it's why some of the things were as high as they were. Um, we kind of looked at everything there was at the high school. There were some things at the high school that were high priority or excuse me that were low priority that had to be addressed. For example, I remember we talked about the bleachers in the gym. That was a very low priority. However, as you know, we flat out had to replace those because after 40 years, they just
112decided they were done. They quit working and it it became a necessity that that leaprogged over other things on the list. And so another piece of this was looking at what makes sense as we go along doing it. Um you know instead of doing a one space here, one space here, one space here. It was kind of looking at if the science labs are a high priority, let's do the whole basement, which you've heard Jerry talk about because um instead of jumping around between floors, let's get that portion of the project done. And so that was kind of the thought process that went into everything up to this point. Um, if we jump to the next slide, Janet, the a major concern during the whole middle school bid process was, is there going to be
113any money left for the high school? I remember Todd saying to me several times, Jared, if we're just left with one thing, what's that one thing going to be? As you're going to see from these pictures, and as you all know from all the updates, we were able to do a lot of things thankfully at the high school. Um, we added the 140 spots in the front parking lot. We added another 45 47 counting two handicap stalls in that lower parking lot. We lost 20. So we gained uh close to 150 parking spots on campus which is a huge piece from a safety standpoint not just during the school day but also in the evening as people are walking dark streets to get to events. Next um that the tech head space was one of
114our most dated spaces in the building that was very high on the list. And so with what we're seeing on this screen as well as on the next screen, we're able to really bring this space into um the current needs for students to meet the current needs for industry. And not only the current needs, but positioning us to meet the needs um for the next 20, 30, 40 years in terms of of how the space was able to be developed and and designed ultimately for student use. Um as we mentioned, those science labs were a major concern. um those classrooms went back in some cases to the uh the 67 edition and then others to the 88 edition but but bringing those spaces u most importantly increasing the space within every science classroom save one
115which was our largest classroom to begin with. So that was a huge piece to making that a much better lab experience for students. And then continuing in the basement, um we were able to go around the corner with the math rooms and the business rooms and and you could ask the question, man, you know, with what we did in the basement, does that change anything? Um changing how the bathrooms are set up and changing the furniture has absolutely changed the structure of math classes in terms of math engagement. So, yes, it absolutely changes it with the renovations. And a huge piece of the priority here was that whole soundproofing piece. Um, prior to this, you could hear three math lessons at one time. Um, not not the most conducive thing, and now you can focus
116on your single math teacher at a time. Uh, we were also able to really change what the music spaces looked like. A lot of this project really looked at the things that were done in 88 were awesome, but they were no longer sufficient in size, scale, or scope for the current program. So, being able to make the the band space and the choir space much larger. And the neat thing is as we go into these spaces, um, at first when they were building them, they felt really big. But now when you go into the band room with 70 students on one side with their equipment, you're thinking to yourself, we could have gone a little bit bigger possibly. Um, because again, they were scaled correctly for the needs of our students. And, um, there's no
117quote extra space within. Um, but they're really serving the needs of our students very well, including updating the dance studio to be um, both handicap accessible as well as um, flatout taking it from a dungeon, a hole in the ground to something that is worthy of our fire classes as well as our co-curricular programs. Um the fieldhouse um we were able to add the LED lighting which was a major improvement um painting in there and then of course the the bleachers again which which has made all the difference in the presentation of the space and flat out the functionality of the space and safety. Uh the locker rooms were renovated the the fire locker rooms upstairs from a ADA accessibility standpoint. Um, and not only that, but also from a mechanical standpoint, these these were
118really in need of repair from a mechanical in terms of of what the water pipes looked like and and needed to be replaced after 40ome years. Same thing with the bathrooms, uh, both in the downstairs level as well as in the fieldhouse area. Um, new flooring within the hallways, um, as well as new lockers in the basement. I think I actually talked about all of these things already on the very first slide, but uh yeah, uh $10 million and we were able to maximize earnings from borrowed funds. Uh so let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Uh we have uh met administratively uh and Jared has met with his team and certainly uh Jared being the leader of the high school I really respect one of what his recommendations are and what we
119are uh recommending is to renovate the first floor classroom similar to what we did in the basement classrooms. Um, so we have some and Jerry can speak to that a little bit later, but basically that hallway that leads down to the media center uh on on both of those hallways we would renovate to bring to the same standard of the classrooms that are in the lower level. That is uh one of the recommendations that we have. We also have a couple of mechanical areas that uh really are essential. I we believe that there's really no discussion around that. There's a elevator that needs to be replaced and there's an air cooled chiller on the rooftop that needs to be replaced as well. Those are two mechanical items that are just essential to the functionality of
120the building. And uh lastly uh and we really look at uh the weight room and uh that area as a classroom just like all of the others because our uh PE classes and our health classrooms uh are tied to uh health and wellness and fitness and it also certainly is aligned with our desire to have a career academy. And we know that there's lots of professions associated with that uh line of work. Uh we also know that uh the wait room will be very beneficial to our many activities that we have uh in the school district as well. I would tell you as a new superintendent that's probably the thing that people have gotten in my ear the most is uh that our wait room is just way too small. And I've had the opportunity
121uh a few times to be up in that area. And the first thing that I noticed is my excitement with how many students want to be in that wait room. That's exciting. But the second thing is it's just not too it's not big enough. Students are crawling all over each other and you really it it's really not functional uh with the space that we have and it really limits uh where we want to go and it certainly is not comparable to any of our our other local schools in the area. Yeah. >> So those those are the things right now that that we're recommending and and we'll have additional information related to that. Um this is uh phase one recommendation. So you can actually see on the map here, the green is really those the
122green and the blue, those are the classrooms that were uh we're recommending that will be renovated. Um you'll notice that the media center uh at the end and the guidance office u is not uh involved with this renovation. That does not mean that we don't feel that they're important. uh we would be trying to strategize to uh find ways to use uh possible capital dollars on an annual basis to uh give those a base lift to make them comparable with the rest of that wing of the building. You can also uh see the area that is proposed for the new construction and the new square footage. that is where uh we would uh have the weight room uh as well as some other important areas that we'll refer to here in a little bit. Um
123this uh slide just gives you an idea of the um elevator that needs to be >> for just a second. >> Yeah. Um when you look at that green area and then the blue area too, that's going to be dependent on how we structure a bit too because we'll go as far as we can knowing we may not be able to do all of them and and if there becomes a priority area the priority are the interior classrooms because just like Tracy when you were here there's no windows those are the darkest rooms and and thinking about the priority of those areas as we go through it finding out where fall as part of that. >> Okay. So, here's just an illustration of the elevator and the chiller. Um, go ahead, go to the next
124one. Uh these are pictures of the uh upstairs classrooms that are more outdated and and I think Jared hadn't uh referred to it, but he's shared with me many times that the noise pollution up in that area is uh a huge distraction where you can pretty much hear what's happening in every single classroom. Um and like I said, it's a distraction. Here's a picture of the wait room. Um lot of students in there. that's not even nearly as busy as I've seen it. Um I you know this this is something that that the kids will just be jumping for joy about. I mean, I I tell you what, um, this stuff is important to the students, and I think that it's it's would just be a huge morale booster for them to have a new
125state-of-the-art facility uh for a weight room. >> For sure that high school, they'll do it today. >> I imagine for Dustin folks, too, capabilities, the capability, and the capacity. So for them to branch out to this >> well when you mentioned Dustin too another piece of that would be the current training room pictured here is in the basement. Um which which when we think about that we're having injured students go downstairs to get treatment. Um part of that would be bringing this up into that new addition on the east side of the gym so that it's it's both near the fieldhouse and it's near the external athletic area by the high school. >> What do you think you'll do with the um where the weight room is now. >> Uh it may be used for
126for girls wrestlings, but girls and boys wrestling can both practice at the same time as well as for space >> um as well as for adaptive PE. >> Awesome. Thank you. >> It's about 1,800 square feet is the current one. Um >> does that include the training space? No, the training space would be additional. >> Um, on slide 18 where you have the graphic and it shows the addition um where the weight room would go. Does that go into the parking that we just added or is that not cut cutting parking spots? >> It it does take some parking away from what would be right off the east side of the fieldhouse. Um, didn't count stalls, but I think about 20 stalls when we were eyeballing it. And the logic of that location is we
127would want to extend the addition the entire length of the gymnasium. Um we'd make it 60 ft wide and we'd make it one story with the option to put a second story on later. So you may want to build more multi-purpose space, that type of thing. Right now we would just do one story for the weight room, for the training room, but build it so that we could always put a second story onto it. The other thing in that location, there was always thought maybe someday there'd be an auditorium out in that parking lot. Well, we're saving enough space if that ever becomes a reality. We can do that, too. So, what we don't want to do here is do something now that hampers us for decision making in the future, but takes advantage of
128the space as well, you know, as most we can. All right. So, now [clears throat] you're probably wondering how much uh is all of this. Did you have something else? One other one other piece too is that we know that we have to stick money um invest money into PAC lighting because you've all been in our PAC um and and the focus would be on what lighting could eventually a serve the needs now but also be something that could be used down the road in a different facility if there was ever a different facility. But um the lighting flat out needs to be addressed in the PAC also as part of this. So the budget here what we did was we looked at I guess in two different areas. The classroom area and then the
129wait room area. The classroom as we had mentioned basically it's it's the soundproofing. We picked out the green and the blue areas are the ones that were the most problem. The walls they're called demountable walls. They only go up to the ceiling. They don't go over the top so you can hear from one to the next. Those are what we're focusing on so we can fix that. There's a transom in the doors so the sound goes out to the corridors. So there's a lot of noise issues. [clears throat] But in addition to that, when we do these rooms, we're doing them 100%. It's not only the finishes, it's the lighting, it's the HBAC. Right now, there's multiple rooms on one system. We'll separate out the systems. Uh to make that better, we're adding fire suppression
130to any room that we work on. We're adding fire suppression. So eventually we'll get the whole building fire with a fire suppression system in it. And so there's logic to those areas that we looked at. The green area is all on one system. So it makes sense if we pick out an area, let's pick out an area that we can do completely. So that's the logic in the classrooms. And then the wait room area, as we discussed, we want to take advantage of the space. Let's go all the way to the end of the building and let's save room for the future. Let's make it, you know, an option to add a second floor someday. So then in addition to that, I mean, we've got contingencies built in here and as you see bid as
131an alternate, what we want to do is be flexible. There's things that that we want to do is take out more asbestous. We're going to need equipment for the weight room, those types of things. As Jared mentioned, possibly lighting for the auditorium. We want a flexible budget at this point. As we go on, as we work through this, then we'll finalize what we want to do, but we can bid alternates as well. and we want to spend right up to that limit. We've got to spend the referendum money, so we'll want to spend it up to that point. So, >> um, February of 2027. >> Jerry, did you have any other commentary about kind of your approximate numbers that you had listed there? >> Uh, well, no. I guess I I basically covered them and
132what I say is we want to be flexible here. So as we go through this, we can pick and choose what we want to do and and as we do our bids, we'll bid alternate. So then you as the board can select this is what we want to actually do. >> How soon do you anticipate this starting if approved? And then how long do you anticipate it taking? >> There is a a slide. We do we do have a slide I think two more. Uh this one just is an estimated uh timeline. Uh we were hoping that the board is going to vote to give us authorization to move forward this evening. Uh then we move into a design and development and prepare documents in February, March and April. Then there's a bid process and
133uh we need to have a I believe a do they call a review and comment here or the state review from uh DPS and then uh we we work to find a general contractor and mobilize in May uh with the idea of starting uh the renovations in the classrooms by May 20th. Uh you can see this is a very aggressive timeline and that's why um and it's aggressive because you know that there's a there's a de there's a due date that we need to have the money spent by. Um then the new new construction uh would start sometime potentially in June. Um the the new construction and the renovations are two somewhat different pieces because uh the new construction we really will not impact the student day at the high school. Uh however those renovations
134would be that priority that we would want to ensure uh got done so that we could have as little disruption as possible to start next school year. >> Um but with that you had mentioned that February of was like the end time like what is let's say you don't get it done by December 2026 like what's the plan? >> Well, yeah. So that's when we advise and work with our very talented and gifted financial people like Janet and we work with our we work with our what we'll do is we'll work with our vendors to uh come up with a plan on how we could be invoiced uh prior to the dates that we need to have the money spent by. I guess that isn't that's something that we're not terribly worried about because we
135feel like >> allows us wiggle room with contingency. So we just have to have the the lion's share of it done by that amount in time. The law allows us to have some pull back for wrapping things up, which we'll need. You know, we don't want to be paying um before the work is finished. So, we just need to have the lion share done, which we should be fine with. >> I appreciate you clarifying that. >> Okay. >> Um >> do you want to speak to this? >> Sure. So, um, and Jerry, help me out on this as, as you see fit, but, um, given the size of, so normally we're going further on the high school. What that process would be is a change order, but given the size of the amount, we don't
136want to do a change order for that dollar amount. It's too much. So, because of that, what we would like to do is um, competitively bid it. We recommend reaching back out to the pre-qualified vendors that we all pre-qualified when we started this whole process out. Then reaching out to them and saying who would be your two key people that you would have the boy I always forget what their names are. Dan might have to help me out. The construction superintendent and >> Project manager. Those two people are critical in the success of the project. So who who would they be putting on the project for that and then what are the resources that they are able to put into the um to the process. So we will basically do like a re upping or
137refining of that pre-qualified list um and basically um just kind of upping that and making sure that that's what we have and then that's who the bids would go out to. So making sure that they can commit the resources and that they've got the leadership that we need to have a good effective process >> for transparency. Do we have that list that we can we can we can review the major contractors? >> Yes, all that >> and I believe there was six. Is that correct correct? Yeah. I think another important item just to reference is that we are in discussions internally about um the benefits of of having our own owner's rights. Uh is that what it's called? Owner's rep. Owner's rep. Um just to assist us in kind of like our own u daytoday
138oversight of getting the work done. competitively everything. And I think that's partially why your your numbers look so good these days is because you've been taking competitive bids. We're comfortable with whoever wins the bid because of our process that we use and so it doesn't matter. But yet everything's competitive. So >> great. So, as a result of what we shared tonight, we certainly entertain questions as many if you have more. Um, and we're certainly available after the meeting, you know, for followup questions if you have them. Uh but for us to get moving uh we are hoping that the board will give approval this evening to proceed with uh architectural and engineering drawings for the project of the first floor classrooms elevator wait room addition uh for referendum phase 1A is what we're calling it
139and uh approval to update contractor firms that were pre-qualified from the referendum phase one. Can we do that all in one or separate? >> I'll make a motion. >> Can we do that all in one motion or does it have to be two separate? >> I I think that's up to you guys. >> I think we can do. >> It's up to me. >> I'll make a motion to approve um to proceed with architectural and engineering drawings for projects of first floor classrooms, elevator wait room addition for referendum phase 1A, and the approval to update the contract terms that were pre-qualified from referendum phase one as outlined in closer 16 phase 1 and motion by Tracy, seconded by Eric to approve uh permission for the administration to proceed with architectural and engineering drawings for projects
140of first floor class. Elevator wait room edition for referendum phase 1A and to approve to update contractor firms that were pre-qualified from referendum phase one. >> Roll call has been requested. Are there any further questions? >> Bridget, yes. An Eric, >> yes. >> Brian, >> yes. >> Tracy, yes. Mark just um told me yes. And Aaron, >> I'm a yes. That is approved. Very exciting. Looking forward to the next opportunities uh to to review uh results of bids and and get this rolling. So >> the eighth graders will be thrilled to know that they're going into another project called the construction cohort. I don't think it used as a as an editorial comment like without the forethought of of you know just bitting our bonds out and and all the thought process that went into
141that leadership from Janet I don't know that we'd be sitting here right now. So thank you. Um [clears throat] we have uh one request to uh we're going to remove B1 from the agenda for separate consideration. Are there any other requests to remove items from the consent agenda? >> Seeing none, I would move that we approve the consent agenda with the exception of the personal report agenda item B1. >> Second. >> Motion by seconded by Tracy to approve the consent agenda accepting item B1. Are there any questions? All those in favor >> and that is approved. And now we'll move to item. >> Well, I think that uh we have some very um important sad but happy kinds of uh resignation retirements that we want to share out tonight. And I know that different uh
142admin will be speaking to some of them. And I'll start and I'd like to uh start by congratulating Todd Sainer who has recently announced his retirement uh to his team and the community. And uh you know I when I when I kind of announced it in my uh my topper talk it just came out. I said he's a living legend. And you know, I say that because, you know, he was there at the very beginning of Eagle Bluff. And I I feel like we should start the plans of like a statue of Todd outside of Eagle Bluff. I mean, somewhere, I don't know. Uh, but Todd, thank you so much. I'm sad that I don't have the opportunity to work with you for lots more years, but I'm so happy for you and your family
143uh and your bride moving forward. But I know that you just are such a talented professional, but such a talented human being. And you have so much to offer this world. And we all know there's more to life than just one thing. And now you have that opportunity to go do all the other things and have the time that you want to do uh with your life. Um I've said it to others and I'll certainly say it to you. You'll always be part of the Hill Topper Nation. There's always a spot at the table for you. and uh you know you'll always be part of us. So thank you and uh others can pile on and start sharing the love as well. So I'll stop. >> I'll start the love test. Uh when I came
144in the district in 2018, Todd was my mentor and I told him I was going to say this and he's like, "No, you don't need to." But you know what I really appreciate about Todd was that he noticed right away that I could use humor infused into my day. And so that was one of the things that he has done for me in the past several years I've been in the district. But something that I think needs to be mentioned about Todd is just how many teachers he mentored into becoming leaders um not only in our district but throughout and you know some of them at the table here today as well. So his mark has been left on the leaders that he helped grow into those positions and that will continue on. Thank you
145Todd. I'll take it from there. As part of the elementary admin team, I've had the privilege of working with Todd for the last six years. Gotten to know him as a person, but also as a leader and a professional. Um, and also got to hear him play music from time to time, too, which I really appreciated. So, just to kind of dubtail on what you shared, Ben, and and also this just has a great balance of work and life and what what priorities are are established for him. So, I just appreciated that about you. One of your top priorities, I think, is humor and infusing that in our team and our day. So, I've appreciated that. Every time I've given Todd a call, he answers in the same or in the same way. He says,
146"Abby Davis, what's happening?" You know, and it doesn't matter what time of day, could be early in the morning, we're talking about subs or something more, you know, challenging or significant, but I appreciated working alongside Todd and you'll be missed. >> I have missed Todd answering what's happening in the hills of the north sometimes in a Sound of Music. Well, I'll try not to age Todd too much here, but um Todd was my principal in my fifth grade year at Eco Bluff, and I was lucky enough to get hired back there as a teacher by Todd. Um my daughter Elanora is considering not wanting to go to school at Eco Bluff anymore now that you heard that Todd's leaving. So, um but he's been just you've been a wonderful person in my life. So, thank
147you. Yeah, a wonderful person in a lot of families. You've had a huge impact in the community. Oh, and I'm also supposed to share for Jana, so I'll do that, too. Jana just wanted to say that the highlight of her day every day when she worked at Eagle Bluff was Todd Sain's live announcements in a hard hat, a plastic hard hat, nonetheless, but a hard hat. >> I'll speak up. 12 years I [clears throat] had students roam in the halls of your building. Uh and I always knew that they were well taken care of by by the staff by uh by yourself. So much appreciation. Going to miss seeing you at this table. >> I'll just add really quick as well. When we first moved here, we just got really lucky and landed at Eco
148Bluff and got to meet Todd and um when it came time to move, I was very particular. Um my husband was very particular we stay in Alaska. I was very particular that we stay at Eagle Bluff. So it made our house search very very very difficult. Um but worthwhile and so I guess you know my last ones leaving Eagle Bluff at the same time you are. I guess I know graduating together. >> Thank you. >> One quick partying shot. Todd gave me my stock and we had many great times, but I remember two two two three months into it. He said, "Yeah, by the way, you're in charge of the birds water, but by golly, the birds and I became really close friends after he told me what I was in charge of." So, thank
149you for that. Well, one last thing. I mean, everyone's so shocked though to hear that Todd is retiring because they all say he's so young. He look he he can't be retirement age. He looks so young. >> So, you age well, my friend. Well, thank you. I I will just say a few things. Um just a couple words. I know it's getting late, so uh but you know, a couple words come to mind for me and that um is is pride. um pride in the district, pride in in what what's been accomplished in Eagle Block over this quarter century. Um and most most importantly, I think the the culture of collaboration and um and how that has grown, developed, and evolved over the years and and I'm really really proud of that. Um and all
150the people that have been a part of that. Um, the other word is gratitude. And I am grateful for for all those that I've been able to to to work with, um, to work for, to serve. Um, certainly students and families that will, you know, forever be imprinted on my on my heart and in my brain and and all those memories that I that I carry. Um, and and the staff. Um, I think there's one person left that I haven't that I didn't hire. So um [clears throat] so just a lot of wonderful um staff that have given their all um to make to make Eagle Bluff great. Um of course the the district leadership that provided me um affirmations when I needed it and some encouragement uh to improve when I needed it as
151well. And um that's all been much appreciated and has has changed you know who I am. Um and of course the school board members who have served throughout this time uh dedicated and um just committed to to doing what's right for our kids and our community. Um so yeah, it's it it's pretty amazing. Um, I remember early on walking up to the building and going, "People are trusting me with this, you know, um, because they they, you know, they don't they don't really teach you much in principal school." I mean, let's be honest. Um, so so I just kept having that feeling and I and I still have that feeling as I walk up every day. There's a there's a there's a humility in in in that responsibility. Um, and I and I'm so grateful
152for the opportunity and and uh and certainly look for the best for the for the district and the school. So, thank you. With some reservations, I'll move to approve item B1 from the consent agenda. >> Motion by [clears throat] Aaron, second by Bridget to approve item B1 from the first. >> All those in favor? >> I congratulations. Okay, great. Let's pause for that. I didn't know. >> Please. >> I'll start with speaking about Lorie Peterson. It's not very often that someone spends their entire career in one district anymore in education. Uh but long term sub stint at Perch. She loved it and stayed for 30 more years. Um, so yeah, very grateful to her having spent her entire career with us. She has mentored and supported several student teachers who have gone on to become
153either team members here in an Alaska or across the state. Um, even some that are also now leaders and in leadership positions um in the area and that uh she kind of parlayed that to the instructional coach role about eight years ago. And I really don't know another person who has a deeper knowledge of math standards and progressions than Lori Peterson. She supported our new teachers, learning the best practices through our induction program, coaching veterans as they try new things, and everyone in between. Um, and talking with Lori this year, she felt that it was really fitting that the last class of fourth graders that she had before moving into the instructional coaching role are graduating this year. So, she felt like it was the right time to graduate with them from this career and
154retire, but really wish her well and so grateful for everything she's given to our students and our staff here in the last 13 years. >> Thanks. >> And another individual who spent her entire professional career in the school district of an Alaska, Jenny Sain. Jenny has shared with me she only interviewed once for a job. Um, and that was to become the long-term sub at Alaska Middle School in the middle of the year when she graduated. Um she never left. She stayed at the middle school teaching choir there as well as being a show choir director. Um getting some of our current staff members their first experiences in showquire. Um she went to Eagle Bluff where she had some ridiculously amazing uh concerts in the spring. They were just amazing what what she would put
155together. Um it kind of made me think of the choreography of showcar she brought into the elementary. Um, and then I've been very fortunate to work with her at the end of her career, um, as she's been in a position split between the high school and middle school. I think the absolute world of Jenny Ser. Um, when teachers want to learn about classroom management, like a a math teacher, social teacher, English teacher, I have them come with me to watch the beginning of Jenny's choir because, and you might think, well, Jared, there's no correlation. There's a 100% correlation and she is so so good at what she does um, and getting choirs to perform at a high level. Um, and she is a perfect match with uh Richard Moses at the high school level. And
156we think the world of Jenny. We blame Todd for this. If Todd had retired, Jenny maybe would have not retired either, but >> yeah, without a doubt. Um, you know, both just exceptional professionals that have touched the lives of just so many hill toppers over the years. A lot of appreciation. So, thank you for those comments. Um, Seeing the the board of education will now entertain a motion to convene in close session pursuant to section 19.85 Parents one, C, D, E, and or F. Please >> um to discuss and when appropriate to take action on individual administrator employment contracts and to consider and take action as appropriate on minutes from the January 12, 2026 close session. The board may take other related appropriate action in close session. The board will adjourn from close session. >>
157Motion by Ann, seconded by Bridget to convene in close session as detailed by myself. Are there any questions? >> Tracy. Yes. Eric, >> Ryan, >> Yes. Bridget, >> yes. >> Mark had to leave the meeting. And Aaron, >> yes. >> We will convene in close session three to four minutes. Give everybody a chance.