001You guys look very happy to be here. All right. I'd like to call the May 5th, 2026 Cinco de Mayo, otherwise known as work session to order. It's now 5:04 and the members have an agenda before them. Is there a motion to adopt or amend? I'll make a motion to And I'll second. Motion by Mr. Grimes, second by Mr. McCall. All in favor? unanimous. All right. Welcome everyone. If you can, please join me for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All right. We will get right into it. Next on the agenda is presentation and discussion items. First up, Dr. Mitch Young. Revised timeline for FY27 budget. Thank you,
002Chairman Valdez. Here's what I would like to say. We at the couple of meetings ago, we showed our proposed budget timeline. Since that time, there have been a slew of bills that have that made it through the legislature and are now sitting on the governor's desk for for veto or signing or what have you. And so, we're sort of in a holding pattern. So, I I've got dates that I could give you tonight, but I'd rather wait because I think a week from now, we're going to have a better understanding of what the budget picture looks like coming from the state as well as potential property tax bills out there that could affect our our timeline this year. So, with your permission, I'd like to push that until next next Tuesday's board meeting. Any objections?
003Mr. McCall? Mr. Grimes? So, you guys agree with Dr. Young? Yeah. There you go. Look at that. Thank you, sir. Motion carries. All right. Next up, Mr. Derek Hershey. A regular here. Review of policy GAG, gag. Staff conflict of interest. >> [laughter] >> Good afternoon, Mr. Hershey. >> Good afternoon. How are you guys? Wonderful. Thank you for asking. You're welcome. GAG. Uh the staff conflict of interest policy has substantially been rewritten as in in two its entirety. Um this is not a policy that has to be legally there, but we did feel like uh it was important that we kept it to strengthen clarity, organizational alignment with current legal guidance and district practices. So, rather than a series of incremental edits, the proposed revisions represents a comprehensive restructuring of the policy. I'll pull that up.
004And that's the first time since 1998, correct? I believe so, yes. Yes, 1998. And so, um the revised policy that we've written uh clearly articulates its purpose, establishes precise and consistent definition, and intentionally distinguishes between policy level governance and regulatory implementation. >> [snorts] >> Legal counsel assisted in reviewing the policy by refining key definitions uh including conflict of interest, direct supervision, what does immediate family member, relative, and nepotism mean. Um as part of the rewrite, our operational standards and procedural guidelines that were previously embedded within the policy were moved into a regulation. And this shift allows the policy to remain focused on the intent while enabling administrative and operational details to be addressed with greater flexibility through the regulation. The revised regulatory language will also be incorporated into the staff handbook to make sure all
005of our staff know and understand what the policy, the regulations mean. Since they don't have access to the regulations, we will put those inside of the staff handbook to make sure they have it. Uh so, this proposed policy language is presented presented for first review with a requested 30-day review period to be considered for adoption. And and Derek, if you would be on the lookout, there's >> [clears throat] >> in one of the pieces of legislation that's out there uh on Governor Kemp's desk, um there's a piece specific to superintendent family members and and uh what let's see, section under your definitions of nepotism that might come into play. So, we will know that uh a week from now whether or not that that passes. So, that would be a piece of feedback to look
006for that would impact this. Sounds good. With the the definition of nepotism and with employees, does does employees include lay coaches or anything along those lines of that we hire that are not part of the actual No, um they are not considered the lay coaches are not considered part of the employees. Do we want to cons- is that something that we want to consider adding the language for? I would think so from our perspective. Um just so that you don't have a a situation where you have a coach hire their spouse to be their lay coach on the summertime. I I would agree and I would definitely loop our legal counsel into that. And we've got we've got some Yeah. We got some >> specific Yeah, specific examples where that's been a challenge. I'll I'll
007look into that. That's great point, Mr. Mr. McCall. Mr. Mr. McValdez. >> [laughter] >> Okay. Raise my chair up higher. Questions? Anything you'd like to contribute, Mr. Grimes? No, I'm good. Oh, excellent. Thank you very much, Mr. Hershey. We'll set this on the table for 30 days and we'll look forward to the revision to include lay coaches. >> Thank you. All right. Next up, review of policy IBB, charter schools with Dr. Josh Lowe. The one and only. Well, there's two Dr. Lowes. Thank you for that, sir. You're welcome. All right. Um thank you all. Policy IBB, um just a updated revision. As you can see, it was last reviewed and um and submitted to you all in November, but um due to ongoing um legislative discussion to ensure complete compliance, we're um proposing this uh
008as an additional um adjustment. And you can see the green, the new parts. And basically, this is to ensure that we're um in compliance with all the requirements of the Georgia Office of Charter School Compliance. And um this is based off of insight from legal is why we brought it to now. And and I do know that there's ongoing discussion of of new legislation regarding charter schools. So, it could be possible other adjustments could be needed down the road, but we just want to be sure we stay up to speed as changes are made. What is the reason for these changes? It comes down to um legal um insight based off of recent legislation. Questions? Comments? The The overall answer to your question is just that >> [clears throat] >> one of the concerns the
009legislature has had uh or the state government has had is that school systems are um not working closely with people that want to start charter systems and trying to make it more difficult for them. So, this is clarifying what our role is in that a little bit more clearly. All right. We will set it on the table for 30 days. Thank you, Dr. Lowe. Yes, sir. Thank you. All right. Next up, SPLOST summer work overview with Mr. Matt Work. >> [snorts] >> Take your time, Mr. Work. Well, I don't want to lose my voice cuz I mean, I'm getting the death stares already from back there. So, that's all right. My presentation will be much much more brief than my counterparts in Spartan or anybody else back here. All right, here we go. What? Um
010again, I was asked last month to come and uh uh talk through what our summer is going to look like from a SPLOST standpoint. So, uh I just want to kind of go through this. This will be very brief, uh but I'm open to any questions and kind of talk through some of these things. Um first of all, we're very excited that we're in phase three, which is the final phase of SPLOST six um work. Uh we're very excited about this because this has been an extremely challenging five years. Um a lot of people think building buildings or building additions, things of that nature are hard. They are very hard, but renovations of existing buildings are extremely uh much more invasive and harder to deal with. Also, a couple things that have happened during this
011time, um you ran into COVID really and coming out of COVID. So, our prices continued to be extremely high that we were not budgeting for, um but then the other piece a lot of people don't know that they're not in this industry, um last year, two years ago actually, the previous federal government decided to change all the refrigerant requirements in our HVAC units. Well, that was a major setback, um, because now manufacturers had to change over, factories had to change on how they manufacture things, which we all know who they passed that buck down to is us. Our costs went up 20%. So, we had to cut and move and do all these things. So, again, it's a extremely challenging 5 years, but we are at the final tail of it. Um, we feel excellent
012about going into this, uh, final group. Remember, we do the cluster method, uh, in this class, in this class. So, these are the final 15 schools that will be touched this summer. They've actually been touched all year long. We're happy to report that almost every one of these schools is over 50% complete already. Because we have absolutely dire straits pressed these contractors to work over Thanksgiving weekends, Christmas, spring break. Lot of people got to go on vacation for spring break. We 14 of these schools were under construction. We changed out nine cooling towers. We had 11 cranes for the entire week working 12 to 15 hours. That has my staff on site managing that. So, again, it's been a lot of work, but we all knew it was very important because it makes our summer
013a little bit less risky. We're also happy to report other than six units for Lambert, every piece of equipment is on our site ready to go. So, we're again, we're feeling very comfortable about moving in to this summer work. Um, again, something to remember because I get this question a lot. We are not changing out every single unit in these buildings. Okay? Um, we're doing a majority of things, but a lot of stuff we had already changed out or something broke, things of that nature. Or some of the items have not met their life cycle. We've done some other uh, maneuvers on those to try to get them better parts. So, sometimes people say when things break, well, you just redid that that school's HVAC. Well, that might be a unit that we did not
014touch, okay? So, just keep that in mind as things continue to break. Um, we're finding that a lot. It's magical the things you think are going to last longer, they're the ones that break when you don't change it. Um, again, this work is not very sexy. This is the, uh, I have pictures. I don't like graphs like Larry does. Uh, I, yeah, this is my time. I'm going to kill him. Um, but [snorts] these are the things that no one sees. These are the things that people don't understand what drives our infrastructure, what helps, what keeps our learning environments, um, clean, uh, talking about fresh air. These are things that we're doing. So, looking at these things, these are the cooling towers on the left. This is what if that unit goes down, that entire
015plant, we have no air conditioning throughout the whole building. It absolutely cuts them all off, okay? These are our mechanical rooms and these are our new boilers. Uh, talking about redundancy, each one of those boilers can work by themselves and manage the whole building. People say, well, why do you have two? Because when one goes out or extra power is needed, these are, um, made for that redundancy. They're so much more efficient than the mass gas that we used to use and things of that nature. So, again, these are just the behind the scenes and I wrote the thing, uh, items on the bottom. Energy recovery units, remember, those are our fresh air units and dehumidifiers. Those are absolutely critical for what we do every day and have for many years. Rooftop units, water source
016heat pumps, all these kind of things that we're dealing with. Just two more pictures about what this is. This picture on the left, that's one unit of an air, uh, ERU, which is our fresh air and dehumidifiers. These things work amazing to keep our dew points below 45%. That is unheard of in the industry. People come here from all over the country to see how these work because they say we have the lowest dew point set. So, [snorts] when you hear people say, I think I have mold in my rooms, they don't. Because our dew points are that low and we are able to measure that and keep up with these units. Water source heat pumps, that's just an example. One of those units does an entire classroom. There's two in every single closet. Other
017than that, that's mainly the HVAC scope, but we are also doing a ton of other summer work. And please remember, this is the one highlight I want on on this slide. Everything on this is being done and managed by myself or my maintenance people. We've taken on all this work because we cut out GCs, which saves us 10% markups. We saved on architectural fees, but we're managing these projects, okay? So, that's a, I cannot thank my staff enough. I have two construction managers, they're managing all the HVAC. This falls on myself and my maintenance staff to help the district. So, overall, we didn't put a list of schools, but we are hitting majority of the schools. We're doing painting, flooring, bleachers, door hardware, hand dryers. People don't understand that we have to change out hand
018dryers. They're malfunctioning, they're running their life cycles. Um, so, our maintenance guys, our electricians have to rewire because guess what? The ones we have don't meet the electrical codes that we had before. So, the new ones have to be upgraded. So, we're having to rewire every single one. We're doing that. LED lighting, happy to say over the summer every middle school's cafeteria will be changed out to new LED lighting and their serving lines in their kitchens will get new LED lighting. We've already done that at all of our high schools. Again, that's done with my electricians. We've got saved money and bought the materials and they're going to take that on. Um, water heaters, drinking fountains and striping doing pavement. Again, all through our maintenance. This is just some pictures of examples of what we've
019been doing. Um, again, it's a lot of behind the scenes. People don't understand parking lots, they have to get done. Um, but it is very important. Water heaters, things of that nature. Again, our students see this, but our parents sometimes look past these things that we're doing, um, from drinking fountains to wash fountains and then, uh, hand dryers. That is my last slide. Um, and again, like I said, nice and quick. Um, but mainly it's talking about, guys, this this has been very difficult for our staff and the pricing continues to challenge us. You might see in the next month or so we're having to do a lot of preventative measures. Um, tell you where the market is. We had one school that, uh, multiple schools when things break, they ask why it takes so
020long. I'm just asking you to be understanding that I don't live in the Amazon world. We pay for overnight shipping. When we, for an example, one HVAC unit broke at a school, they tell us it's a compressor that we need, two compressors, 4 to 6 weeks. 4 to 6 weeks just to get a compressor. Do you know how fast I can buy a new unit that's sitting on the yard? I can get a whole new unit in 5 to 7 days. Because people are buying the units, all the parts are gone. They have to manufacture the parts. So, this is very difficult for schools to kind of understand cuz we live in the prime Amazon Prime world where you push a button and it just shows up. Um, but we're doing the best we can
021to try to keep that stuff moving. You might see some things in the future that I'm going to start buying more more, uh, portable HVAC and dehumidifiers. So, that our schools don't have to sit and wait for me to get a part. It's an expense I wish we didn't have to do, but I think having those in house will help get our temperatures and our humidity back to our schools instead of me having just to buy a new unit that's five times as much. So, we're trying to find those ways to accommodate our schools, but we just ask that when you hear those grumblings, please help us with that. That's my presentation. Questions? Questions? Thank you. I think that really helps. I know I've had a couple questions about some of the work and parents
022have seen HVAC units sitting out in front of schools and so I think that's just good information to put out there. Yeah, I've received some feedback about the painting, too. Well, I appreciate it. Everything matters. We wish we could do more. Honestly, we wish we could do everything the schools want, but we we're doing the best we can. Something else? Your dew points are indeed very impressive, Mr. Work. >> I'm telling you. >> Thank you for sharing that with us. >> that. If people see something, it's usually mildew, not mold. >> Correct. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You taught me that a long time ago. [laughter] Exactly. It is not mold. >> you guys talk about. Welcome to facilities world. All right. Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. Work. Next item, future agenda items. Anybody? Got
023one. I think here's a good time to, I know he just stepped out, get with Mr. Hershey and just with the new school year starting right the summer, hiring teachers, just kind of see where our recruiting stands, where what have we been successful with, uh, this last year. Um, and I know both for our certified staff and classified staff. We will get with him. Chris is an overachiever. >> [laughter] >> All right. With that, executive session. Do I have a motion to enter executive session for personnel? I'll make a motion to enter executive session for personnel. Second. Motion by Mr. McColl, second by Mr. Grimes. All in favor? Unanimous. Look at that. Well-oiled machine here, people.