WLCSC Board Meeting 03/01/2021

001on okay of the uh [Music] uh this is a school board work session so no decisions will be made and no votes will be taken during this part after each presentation questions will be taken from board members and time permitting will have either after the between work session and our regular board may be 7 15 or so depending on the second and also you can always give your board feedback as you know contact your photos on our website and also contact school administrators with respect to that topic tonight also both with the audio recording of the work session and both sets of power power sites will be posted on the corporation's website though the [Music] thank you mr carpet i'm going to take my mask off hopefully you can hear my voice if you all

002want to set these seats and look forward you're welcome to do that instead of your backspin to the presentation that's entirely up to you while you're doing that i do want to give some thanks i want to thank the lord for his healing grace and mercy i want to thank all of you for giving me time and patience the doctors said they could take up the year for my voice to get back and fortunately within two months uh it's operating again probably the chagrin of my wife and other people around me but i think that's a good thing at least for me it's kind of hard being a superintendent without a voice so thank you all for your patience i appreciate all that uh what i tried to do tonight is to put something together

003to try to bring amy austin yuin up to speed with regards to our school district how we make decisions how we uh look at various things in our school districts with proposals indiana codes of accounts department of local government finance a variety of things and so i'm hopeful that this information will be useful to you tonight as you learn the process of being a board member and understanding that school boards are a little bit of an anomaly in the state of indiana you're elected as representatives of our school district but indian code authorizes the daily operations of the schools through administration so you hire a superintendent you allow the superintendent to hire administration and then we make sure that we're following the goals of the requirements of indiana code state political accounts department of local

004government finance a variety of things that we have to follow so i want to get into some of that and then it's up to you to accept or reject those recommendations so tonight's agenda i won't read all of this to you but i'm going to try to do the best that i can in the time that we have to try to put everything together to give you a better understanding of how school districts school boards operate in the state of indiana specifically west lafayette schools our mission is to engage students in a world-class educational experience that prepares them the well-rounded ethical innovative creative productive and adaptive citizens who shape our global society the reason i'm sharing that with you is because part of our desire in our school district and part of the mission of

005our school district of course is to ensure that we're implementing our strategic plan which is one of the big processes if you will to help us drive improvement our improvement plans come from our strategic plans 2010 we had a group of stakeholders representing all areas of our school district put together an academic strategic planning committee with a certified cambridge strategic planner dr janet emerick she again came back in group of stakeholders about 50 people working together to create our mission to create our belief statements create our action plans etc in 2014 to 2016 we have 47 stakeholders come together to help us put together a facility strategic planning committee so these plans help us drive our decisions for the future and also school board policy and then also all the legislation that we have to

006follow which i'll get into so who are our patrons and stakeholders this is just an example but as a school board member you're going to hear from various groups in our schools students teachers staff members parents administration business owners patrons who don't have children in school city council mayor elected officials various community boards west lafayette library board purdue university staff administration police department city departments i'd also say neighborhood associations there's many others that i could list please remember that we have thirty thousand plus residents who live in our school district so you represent thirty thousand plus residents we have twelve thousand plus registered voters one thing that i think people forget about has to do with the number of patrons in our school district who don't have children in our schools uh we have 25

007percent rounded roughly rounded to 25 of children patrons with children in our school and 75 percent who don't have children in our school what i try to listen to quite a bit is what this group is saying because when we do referendums when we have to do other big projects we want to make sure that we're also taking into account these patrons as we consider big projects or big proposals so some people have asked so what are the improvements west lafayette schools have done you know you guys keep talking about this or talking about facilities talking about mission but what are the improvements so i want to go over some of those i don't have everything but i try to highlight the big ones we're continuing to improve academic achievement at all levels that's our

008number one priority we are expanding our special education services and inclusion classroom settings we brought on our own special education director we're decentralizing from glass which is our special education co-op between tippecanoe county schools and lafayette schools and west lafayette schools we're maintaining resources through two referendums to keep arts music co and extracurricular programs and retaining teachers to manage class sizes we're improving student safety and school security we're one of the few schools that have put back into our school calendar uh staff development days and one of the things that we just did friday as some parents know with their children being home we had staff development and i heard very positive things about dr renee aziz who came in to help us we scheduled her about 18 months ago with regards to diversity inclusion

009and received a lot of positive input from that staff development process we used on friday although it was virtual in nature but it still worked we're increasing building capacity at all schools well i'm very proud to say that we're one of the few school districts they have an intermediate school with the band choir and orchestra room you won't find too many schools in the nation at this level grades four through six with those three rooms and now we're including performing arts during the school day we are promoting our school district we're actively promoting our school district for a variety of reasons i'll get into that later we're improving our aging facilities we're adding opera well gap we have now operational kitchens at the elementary intermediate schools first time in the history west lafayette schools that

010all food is cooked on site for a hot lunch and a hot breakfast which uh i'm very proud that we're finally in the 21st century being able to do something like that in our school district keeping teacher and staff wages and benefits competitive with high achieving school districts i'll get into that in a little bit and we're maintaining a consistent school district tax rate since 2010. so i'll get into that in a little bit so those are some of the improvements there are others that i could highlight and i will highlight the things that we're working on for future improvements as we get to the end of the presentation one thing that i keep remembering from war and peace the two most powerful warriors or patients in time we're not like fast food where you

011can just have it your way every day quick and easy we have a lot of things that we have to uh vet we have a lot of things that we have to go through with regards to indiana code and i'm going to get into uh some of that here shortly before i do that i want to hit some vocabulary information because uh sometimes we use alphabet soup around here as educators and people don't understand some of that alphabet soup so avs are assessed evaluation uh that's the uh that's our real property and the value of our real property within our school district and as assessed valuation goes up the same tax rate generates more revenue and as that tax rate goes down the same tax rate generates less revenue a controlled project or construction projects

012where bonds are sold and payment remains within what's called the tax caps which means property taxes cannot go any higher than what is allowed by the tax cap and we'll get into that more into that a little bit later a referendum is where the community votes and if approved the revenue the bonds are outside the tax cap and home property taxes will go up because they are outside the tax caps a lot of people don't understand the difference between those two and we're going to get into that a little bit later so what's a tax cap in 2008 our voters in indiana uh created a constitutional amendment where property taxes on homes can't go any higher than one percent two percent for other residential property farmland and three percent for other property because of the

013tax caps west lafayette schools loses over a million dollars a year in local funding if we didn't have the tax caps we would be receiving over a million dollars more a year but because of the tax caps we cannot draw that money even though the assessed valuation might go a little bit higher or the uh the taxes go up we're only allowed to draw that percentage from the tax caps debt service is used to pay bonds for construction and other debt as approved by the department of local government finance we are under their auspices so we're not allowed to over exceed our debt we're not allowed to sell more bonds than we're able to pay back they're the ones that have final authority that say yes your but everything looks fine financially you may proceed

014or you're extending yourself and you can't proceed building holding corporation this is from indiana code 20 47 2 or 3. it's a holding corporation that allows indiana public schools to sell secure bonds for construction projects regardless if you're using a controlled project or referendum later on you're going to hear from jane hernan who is our bond council for construction we get her on the phone she's going to explain in more detail why west lafayette schools and other school districts use holding corporations by the way a neighboring school corporation very near to us has five holding corporations they use those for their ongoing construction because they're growing at a fast pace circuit breaker reduces the amount of taxes to be collected by schools and other taxing agencies based upon the tax caps again we lose over

015a million tax increment finance which is tiff is carved out of school districts av by redevelopment commissions and what's interesting about our school district we're only three square miles but over 30 percent of our uh base av has been carved out and put into a tif district which means we don't receive the tax base from that we do receive referendum uh from our general fund referendum uh of 37 cents based upon that a b but we do not receive uh other uh taxing capability because of the tip district and by the way there is um legislators are working on this and i hope this passes probably my redevelopment commission comrades don't like me saying this but they are looking at the possibility of sun setting the tip district a b so the a b comes

016back into the school district if we were to get back this 30 of a b in the tip district more likely than not we would not need a referendum more likely than not we would not need a referendum just say so it would be nice to be able to get that ice miller you'll hear from jane hernand ice miller we use experts in our school district to help us make decisions whether it's financial whether it's academic whether it's political whatever it might be we bring in experts to help drive these decisions these aren't decisions that a school board makes on their own we bring in the experts and they guide and direct us and you'll hear from jane hernan from ice miller who is our bond council for all of our construction projects uh baker

017tilly is our financial planning analysis and projection advisor brock is here from baker tilly he's going to give you a brief presentation on our debt service he's got some very good news for you uh with regards to projections and uh i think it would be very helpful for our two new board members to understand all of this by the way all of this was gone over back in 2014 2015 2016 but to bring you guys up to date that's why we put this together for you adm is average daily membership student enrollment wlea is the west lafayette education teachers association we are a union state we have to adhere to certain laws with regards to collective bargaining teacher discussion we are required to do that as administration and we have a very great relationship with

018the wlea we come together and we problem solve we come together and figure out how to get things done uh we work together and that's the way it should be we should be collaborative and i'm very proud of our school district that we have that collaboration with our wlea membership west lafayette schools education foundation helps support us with regards to fundraising teacher grants they do lots of things for our schools helping our teachers helping our school district to help if you will bridge the gap with some funding and i'm very thankful to our foundation leaders who have been working hard since its inception around 2006 2007 and they've done a great job in the fundraising and with teacher grants and so i want to thank them very much and several of our board officers are

019out there so thank you guys very very much for everything so why do we do what we do some people have asked me the questions oh why do you have your board meetings a certain way what training do board members receive so the indiana school boards association is the state representatives of all indiana school boards in the state of indiana they provide training to our board members they provide legal analysis of procedures policies and they also lobby the state of indiana legislators to ensure that we have the right legislation the right funding to fund public schools so let me give you a couple for instance so a lot of people don't know this but indiana code does not require a school board to use an agenda you are not required any school board in the

020state of indiana you do not have to have an agenda however if you do have an agenda you post it isba recommends that all school districts use an agenda so that you have an understanding and when you post it the community has an understanding of those topics you are not required to take patreon comments per indiana code you don't have to this is a meeting in public for you to do the business of the school board however isba recommends that you take patreon comments so those are some of the things that they provide to school districts to ensure continuity preservation training whatever you want to call it for school board members as you learn this role and for anyone who wants to know why we do what we do and you have any questions michael

021adamson from ispa has agreed for me to give you this phone number so feel free to call michael adamson or the isba attorneys and ask those questions because i expect everyone in this room who's hearing my voice don't take my word for it check it out for yourself call the people call the lgf called state board of accounts call isba call the superintendent's association feel free to check it out because that's what i expect good researchers to do don't believe everything you read on the internet because everything on the internet may not necessarily be true check it out for yourself do your research superintendents association does the same thing we adhere to the protocols as trained by the superintendent's association and if you have any questions dr jt coopen the director has given the phone

022number please feel free to call him and you can ask the same questions about why do school boards operate the way they operate etc we also have the indiana association of school business officials they provide certification to train school business officers about school finance and all the requirements of indiana codes a board of accounts the department of local government finance requirements we have to follow those guidelines if you don't you get in trouble and there is a school district a little north of us that just got in trouble because they follow these recommendations and these guidelines by the state board of accounts by the department of labor and government finance they are going to have to pay back close to eight hundred thousand dollars because they didn't follow the requirements and the training as stated

023in uh indiana code or state board of accounts or as required by the dlgf here's a real good one for you and if you're ever bored here is the indiana code requirements here are the indian code requirements for title 20 for legislation of public schools the next time a person tells you well that's not an indiana code you might make sure that they read it first before you believe it and if it's not an indiana code it might be in state board of accounts it might be with the dlt this is what changes every year i think our legislators so every year changes and every year we have updated our policies have donated our procedures because this is what tends to be larger and larger every year here so feel free to read that we

024have those laws and i think we do a pretty the indiana department of education is the regulatory office of the state and the indiana department of education creates all the procedures to show the indiana department of education for following the indiana and the longer you do this the more you understand the nuances of all of this neola is the national organization that provides not only indiana school districts but school districts throughout the nation revisions of school board policies based upon state and federal law when this book changes our policies change so that's what neola helps us do because believe me we probably would need several lawyers in-house all the time to stay up with this because of the ever-changing laws that occur state board of accounts audits school districts and other government agencies every two

025years these audits can be found at that website and typically our audits have to do with our audit citations have to do with federal grants have to do with having enough people for various checks and balances and as a small school district and other small school districts typically those are the comments that are in our our audits but you can go to that website and see all the audits of all of the different government agencies that get audited and then the department of local government finance provides financial oversight of all local government units we do what we do because a lot of that we are probably the most regulated institution in the state of indiana maybe outside of a bank i don't know the banking side of it but uh it's pretty heavy stuff and

026so you got to make sure that you have people in place you have the experts in place helping you maneuver through all of this because if you do this on your own you will get in trouble if you don't follow a certain law a certain requirement so we make sure as administration and legal reviews etc that we're doing what we're supposed to be doing based upon all of this and i want to congratulate our school board because they've been recognized since 1990 since 1994 as an outstanding school board by the ispa that's because of the training that we go through and making sure that we're adhering to all of these requirements so congratulations school board and our goal is to continue that process as we move forward so how are decisions made so per indiana

027code school boards hire superintendents higher administration and per indiana code we deal with the daily operations of the school that's what we do sometimes people are happy sometimes people aren't but that's what the requirement is and let me give you an example a couple of years ago our legislators changed indiana code and um there was a couple of school boards wanting to fire their superintendent and they found out in indiana code that the legislators changed that the only person persons who could recommend firing certified staff were building principles so the school board went to the isba attorneys went to legislators went to variety sources and said okay so if we're going to non-renew our superintendent's contract how do we do that they had to get a building principle to make that recommendation because no one

028was watching how the law was written so they've since got that fixed but my point is sometimes you get those crazy laws in there that you have to make sure that you're following otherwise you would lose that battle in court so the administration is charged with dealing with the daily operations we look at indiana code state board of accounts the dlgf the ido state federal law school or policy requirements etc we ask for a legal review when necessary and typically it's quite necessary making sure that we're following all the state statutes that could come from isba that could come from bob reilly i could come from the indiana department of education just depends on the topic then the administration gathers data we receive input from representatives of various stakeholders depending upon the topic and we

029tried to gather data that would support the recommendation so like what you're going to hear tonight with the high school presentation you're going to hear some data it's based upon our strategic plan it's based upon input received from various stakeholders some like it some don't like it but that's what happens when you make a decision per indiana code we also have to discuss specific topics with the west lafayette education teachers association the wlea so i can't bring something to the school board for consideration until i have met those requirements once we've done all that we put together a proposal we revised the proposal based upon the input received and like the proposal you're hearing tonight from the high school i think has changed at least ten times maybe more and then the administration through the

030superintendent's office will bring to the school board a recommendation you only in a public meeting can consider the proposal and you can either accept or reject or the proposal or you can table it to get more information i should add that you can table it but your authority is only in this public meeting your authority is not as individual board members your authority per indiana code is here so when you all get together and you hear a presentation and you hear a proposal that's your that's when you have the authority as a group to make a decision and typically what the administration is doing before we get to this meeting is accepting phone calls from each of you if you have questions about these proposals as we did with the high school proposal each of

031you were invited to meet with uh the administration without violating the indiana code uh fewer than three to hear the presentation and ask questions it's an education piece but your decision lies here uh when you meet in public so our goal is always to make the final decision based upon what's doing best for all students all students sometimes i use the phrase the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one or the few and sometimes needs to the one or the few outweigh the needs of the many and you have to use data you have to listen to the people doing the work and what i'm very proud of and i will state my reputation on this and i have plenty of teachers out here i listen to the staff those people doing

032the work that's where i lean towards if they tell me that this is probably not a good idea or we should do this in teacher discussion we do a lot of problem solving and we come up with ideas and suggestions and so i appreciate that communication because in the end like dr deming would tell you that you listen to the people doing the work because in the end they're the ones that are going to have to carry out whatever the decision is made in this setting so i try to listen as as best i can to the teachers to the staff to the administration and we go through that filter process with all of those different sets of rules now i want to give you some historical information believe it or not school districts continue

033to thrive and survive throughout history our school district started in 1892 thereabout and all of these dates have to do with the building and either when they were built or there were expansion projects and i'm sharing this with you is because 10 years from now we will not be here probably a new board will be here new administration will be here and they will be going through the same epic flow of student enrollment evan flow of trying to improve buildings or do you have closed buildings unfortunately for us we haven't expanded too much with buildings like the school district had back in the 70s but they needed it because of their student enrollment so i won't go through all this with you but there are two things i want you to be aware acts of

03415 of 1959 those acts created the school boundaries here in tippecanoe county and our school boundary is locked three square miles this would take either legislative action or our neighbors our neighboring school districts to say yeah you can come in and have more assessed valuation yeah you can have more students and i'll get into that shortly because we've had those conversations so we cannot grow bigger than our boundary which has been set since 1959. the second piece of this is i found this very interesting and wanted to share this with you 1970 our assessed valuation in school district was over 37 million student enrollment was over 3 000. look at this tax rate tax rate in 1970 was seven dollars and 42 cents per of assessed valuations were at a dollar 27 in some change

035and been that way consistently since about 2010 2011. so i sure hate to been here in 1970 when the tax rate was at seven dollars and 42 cents i have a feeling that that maybe well maybe they were all right with it seems a little high to me i wanted to give you the blue ribbon task force committee this was before i arrived in 2007 but 2004 to 2006 a group of stakeholders were asked to look at some topics with the school district because the school district was near having big financial issues for a variety of reasons including state funding loss of enrollment other things that occurred in history so uh there was declining school revenue there was the need to improve school facilities uh the student enrollment was going down and there was a

036discussion about if you're going to save dollars since not about 90 percent of the school budget is staff related you're going to have to reduce staff after two years of meeting and discussing with experts and looking at every variable they came up with these four recommendations and i will read all of those to you but three is the one that stands out consider expanding the boundaries the school district boundaries are three square miles which was and it says legislative mandated but it was the acts of 1959 actually i think you could take legislatively out it was more of every school district had to come up with where every county had to come up with their agreement with uh with their neighboring school districts on how to have their boundaries so in 59 tippecanoe county carved

037out west lafayette schools carved out lafayette schools and carved out tippecanoe county schools we cannot expand our boundaries unless neighboring school districts agree and we have discussed this i won't give you my my story about when i first got here to try to do this but i really tried hard to do this with city council and our school district uh working together to expand our boundaries they didn't go over real well uh that's because neighboring school districts would lose resources they would lose students they would lose the suspension and as was said to me and i agree west lafayette would not agree to giving up a v and resources to other school districts so you either have to have a legislative mechanism where you have to get other school districts to agree to expand the

038boundary and uh right now that is not a possibility so how do we make difficult decisions so i want to take you through a time when we had to make a difficult decision in the school district and for those that did not live through this these memories are very clear in my mind because i came here in 2007 we had a 250 000 cash balance among all funds as several financial experts told me we were one disaster away from turning the keys over to the state so we had to figure out what to do and that was part of that blue ribbon committee blue ribbon committee was already looking at it years prior so when i came here one of the things they said i should ask more questions and two how are we going

039to maneuver through this because i don't want to be the superintendent that hands the keys over to the state so then it got worse in 2008 the governor announces that the state will take over all schools general funds the general fund is the heartbeat fund that paid for all of our teachers our curriculum and instruction so the state says hey we're going to take that over we're going to relieve property tax leave property owners or property taxes we're going to raise the tax rate from six to seven percent we're going to make sure you guys get the money that you need then we had a financial analysis conducted by dr deboer dr humbles and they indicated in their analysis that high performing school districts like our school district we were going to lose significant state

040support over the next 10 plus years that was really scary when they made those projections and i'll share with you how they came to some of those decisions here in a little bit or the data that shows that so what we had to do in 2009 and i think some of my colleagues out there will remember this we had to lay off 10 percent of our staff in 2009 it's one of the worst years of my life i remember walking to each of the schools having my letters of reductions in force and telling teachers i'm sorry but you don't have a job next year that was tough but that was what we had to do in order to try to write that situation that was forthcoming fortunately we had our foundation operational thank you foundation

041we came together and did the sos save our schools and in the summer 2009 this little school district raised 217 000 in the summer to save teaching jobs and people magazine even called one to come to a store which i thought was great uh we were able to save seven teaching jobs through that 217 000 through some grants however that's one time money when that money is gone what are you going to do you're going to have to do it again so i recommended a referendum not to exceed 43 cents per sets valuation and that was the consensus actually of all of us internally working together to make that recommendation but i wanted to take the heat for it because i wasn't sure how it was going to play out in our community we held

042community forums to educate the community we brought in financial experts state education associations isba indiana state teachers association superintendents association asbo we have our administration we have state leaders we have a lot of people at these community forums i remember the high school auditorium being packed with people during these forums and there were a lot of people upset let me tell you this was not easy major opposition rose up against placing referendum question on the may 4th battle the opponent spent nearly a hundred and forty thousand dollars against this referendum in 2010. that means we had to raise the same amount of money to counteract what they were saying full page ads and i'm going to show you what the opposition said during the referendum campaign the reason i'm sharing this with you school board

043is because you're going to make difficult decisions in your career and you're going to have people that oppose things because they don't like it so you have to make the final decision as a representative of our students of our teachers of our staff of the school district sometimes not everyone gets everything that they want you have to make tough decisions so what did our opposition say during the referendum campaign i remember these because i with hundreds of people were knocking on doors talking to people during the referendum campaign here's what they said businesses would leave well i'm proud to tell you from the greater lafayette chamber business estate for the data given to me by the glc they said that our property values are going to go down because of higher property uh because of

044higher property taxes well watch this video i think this is actually 2017. it's a housing trend that's usually associated with san francisco or beachfront property but it's happening a lot closer to home and we're talking about smaller older properties being demolished and then replaced with much larger brand new houses they all have one thing in common they're all inside the west or truly a trend of the future so can you show me and her family moved from minnesota 18 months ago so that she and her husband could take jobs at purdue she moved into this home on sunset because she wanted her son in the west lafayette school district 2009 salisbury street valued at ninety thousand dollars tearing it down and building or this newly built five-bedroom home in 1809 salisbury which is 4 800

045square feet and lists for 530 000 dollars demand is high supply is low it's very much like beach properties and because the reason that these properties are valuable is because it's not very much beach so people go in and they take down these little houses what's the same deal here because although west lafayette recently annexed more land into the city it did not shift the boundaries of the school district but the developer says this blueprint can not work for many properties even in west lafayette it's actually tricky that's why we don't we're not doing more than what we're doing and i think that would be kind of difficult anyways because i don't although there's you call it a phenomenon i don't think that there's an overbearing need for it because the initial price point has

046to be right the lot size has to be large enough for a bigger home in a three-car garage and of course location location location the closer to the high school the better price is going to be too expensive you're just going to have to say no yes every day six iron gate homes are in various stages of completion several more are in the works have you had any trouble selling these types of homes even if it is at half dollars or more no i have no problems as long as the schools stay at the level that they are there's always going to be a demand for west lafayette properties she likes her home she likes her neighbors she likes living close to work do you feel fortunate and she's got no plans to move reporting

047in west lafayette dan klein news 18. the trend is also helpful for the city david hood estimates that tax revenues on his new homes are as much as five times the amount as the older property five times the amount property values have gone up and housing is at a premium in west lafayette schools so i think that that says something about our school district and the quality that we provide can we improve absolutely and i'll get to those improvements so they said that school district enrollment would decline because people would move out between that first referendum 2011 2017 we're up 257 students they said board members would be replaced no school board members were re-elected they said that we would lose our academic ranking and we have a new page on our website so niche

048ranks us number one in the state six years in a row and by the way if you don't like niche just go to u.s news world report if you don't like the u.s news world report go to the best music communities uh award if you don't like nam as they're called the national association of music merchants go to newsweek they have good rankings for so if you don't like newsweek go to the college board oh if you don't like them go to the indiana department of education we do not rest on this but this is one metric that we look at to see how we're doing academically statewide and nationally and i remember a big group of patrons saying don't do the referendum sell bertsfield guess where you're studying bert's field so we didn't do

049that because again that would have been one-time money once that's spent you can't replicate it so fortunately we kept first field and we kept the intermediate school so what was the result the school board kept the question on the ballot 66 in favor with a landslide victory and we continue to be successful because between 2008 2010 also in other times that i'll get into 15 to 17 20 21 the school board makes courageous decisions sometimes popular sometimes not and as a school board member you have to figure out how you make those decisions progress comes at a price you have to be willing to make tough calls and take the hits believe me i know been doing this a long time so here's a referendum message that i really like i i want to just

050share this with you this is one of my favorites it's not just about what happens in the classroom that makes west lafayette schools such a great school system it's the it's the arts it's the athletics it's a wonderful music program all these things really help prepare these kids for life and there are a lot of things that we can invest in but i can't think of anything more important for our children for our community that invest in their education great schools make our community a better place to live your yes vote is important [Music] i see a lot of our wonderful children that some of you may have noticed that we're part of that it was great let me give you some quick longitudinal data so how's our special education role have been over the

051last uh few years so this is where we were in 2008 look at the climb every time this climbs you have to be considered staffing so you're going to be asked for staffing in elementary you're going to be asked for staffing at intermediate school you're going to be asked for staffing at the high school believe me it happens every year with the building principles that are not shy about asking for staffing we have to try to balance the sapping because we have infinite needs and finite resources so this shows you our climb in special education enrollment and i think this is an anomaly but we'll find out because this is where the pandemic hits and we see a decline happening right here sharply in a variety of data sets i'm going to show you how

052about our number of students on free and reduced lunch this is uh telling in my opinion for our school district we're one of the highest achieving school districts in the state of indiana with the highest number of students on free and reduced lunch percentage-wise but one of the things i'm proud of is all students can now receive a hot breakfast or hot lunch prepared on site and we're no longer having to create a process where some students are separated if you will based upon a free and reduced lunch application all of them can be served equally and well i'm very proud of that longitudinal data for student enrollment you can see that our student enrollment starting in 2007-8 when i came here was here we've had a steady incline up until about here and then

053this pandemic hit and a lot of these students were finding or being homeschooled at this point and so i'm hoping that clicks back up by the time we get out of the pandemic we've added staffing every year despite dramatic budget cuts you can see where we were in 2010 2011 and every year we continue to increase and despite the state funding cuts i'll show you here shortly we've been able to retain teachers and we have kept ourselves from having to cut art musical and extracurricular activities which i'm very proud of certified staff information this is on our website you can see in 2020 21 that over 60 percent of our staff have 10 years plus of experience um this is uh interesting data i think because we started tracking in 1516 this information and our

054retention rate for staff is 93.4 percent in 19 and 20 and we ask our staff as they exit reasons for leaving and then i also personally called a large group of these people to get some more information to find out uh if there was any other thing they wanted to tell me and everyone that i called i asked the question did administration lack of support of administration drive you out of our school district and everyone said no it did not so i asked and that's what they told me so i'll be happy to entertain other people who want to send in those conversations if you want to hear so one of the things i'm proud of is that we're maintaining a consistent tax rate since 2010 which includes our referendum so our tax rate is

055remain consistent we're not at seven dollars and 42 cents or wherever it was in 1970 it came from 1.70 when the state took over the general fund all the way down to a dollar 23 and then we clicked up a little bit and we're now at a dollar 27 some change and we've stayed consistent uh since uh 2010. our debt service tax rate um has stayed consistent since uh 2016 when we made the recommendations for the construction projects and you'll get more information about our debt service tax rate shortly here's where we start getting into the meat of the matter with public schools and specifically schools like west lafayette there's what's called the basic support per student adm average daily membership in 2009 this is what we were getting per student on base adm predicted

056by dr deboer and dr humbles we saw a decline uh and it hit its peak or lack of peak in 2015 and it has inched its way back up you can see where we did the two referendums in 2010 2017 what's telling is we're not even back to where we were in 2009 in 2021 so that continues to be problematic for public schools and it's going to even get worse in my opinion and i'm going to share that with you here shortly our base a b history this is our base not with tif district but the base we had a tick up uh and then we had this little anomaly in 2018 and now it's been going up substantially since 2018 the reason for that dip is the base av was moved out of our

057school district and put in tiff due to a county assessor's error but they put it in the tif district so we did receive some revenue from that from the referendum because we had the fundraising from the foundation we were able to continue on because we made up the difference as a b goes up the tax rate generates more revenue so the av tiff history is here and you can see that it's exponentially going up and if we can get this bill passed that allows this av to kick back into our base more likely than not we would not need a referendum so i'm hoping that something happens with a pass-through of the assessed valuation from the tip back into the base i asked forecast five and steve specifically to give a forecast five to give

058us the top eight school districts out of 289 with regards to average teacher salaries west lafayette is eight out of 289 school districts for the highest average teacher salary we can still do better in my opinion these other school districts are larger than us other than speedway speedway has a 50 cent for one hundred dollars of assessed valuation and i think they're a tad smaller than us or right about the same size uh what i'm proud of is over the past 10 years our staffer received on average a wage increase of three plus three plus percent each year thanks in part to the referendum and student enrollment growth however if we want to do more we may need to consider asking for a higher referendum rate in 2024 however i would say to you this

059is a state problem and the state problem has become local school districts problems and so i'm going to show you some of that data as well our average class sizes kind of do an evident flow and again you have to make decisions about do we put it in special education do we put it into other areas and so you can see the ebb and flow of our average class sizes per grade level k through six and here it gives the overall correlation of all the uh numbers there so we're we're staying on average k through six steady i'd like to see this a little lower uh but we also need to do something with state funding we also need to do something with um maybe a higher referendum in order to accomplish some of that

060now i want to give you an excerpt from rise above the mark right above the mark was an educational piece that we did to educate our community about vouchers testing charter schools if you go to riseabovemark.com you can see some of that but this is a financial analysis done by dr deboer dr humbles back in 2014 talking about the state issues and we're now facing that in indiana legislators have taken the control of education funding away from local school boards general fund the general fund is the chunk of cash that pays for instruction maintenance and operating schools the general fund is the heartbeat fund it pays for the most important elements of teaching our kids historically indiana schools have been funded with local property taxes but recently the legislature removed the heartbeat fund from local

061property taxes and shifted local control to status control this gave legislators the power to shift and thus cut money from this critical fund that it pays for our teachers what that means is it's difficult to track what is happening with the money that's the backbone which enables our schools to exist david holmes and larry deboer economists at purdue university led an analysis of indiana school funding their findings show that despite the rhetoric of indiana politicians over the last 10 years education funding has been reduced dramatically with the biggest cuts coming to our highest achieving schools i want to go back to go back 15 years to 1998. in that year the average uh per people spending in the state was about 4700 i think it's a little easier to think of that in terms of

062how much money does a single classroom get let's take an average classroom 21 22 kids that's right around 100 000 for that classroom that probably seems like a lot of money uh but it pays for a teacher it pays for any instructional aides teachers needs in the classroom it pays for physical education and music and art and the cafeteria and the library and the school principal and the counselors and any maintenance basically almost everything the school does is going to come out of that 100 000 per classroom so 1998 100 000 and over the next five years up through 2000 to 2003 the money edged up very slowly and so by 2002 you were looking at about 107 000 per classroom just slightly keeping ahead of inflation at that point 2002 is really the high

063water mark for education funding in the state of indiana and everything since then has been downhill so probably the simplest way to think about it is if you just look at the dollar values put into the to uh to the schools it looks like the dollar values are slowly moving upwards 50 this year 100 next year that sort of thing per child but then you have to take into account that costs of running the schools are rising sharply over time inflation is eating away the value of those dollars so inflation is this kind of termite that slowly eats away at the value of the dollars being spent the energy needed to heat and light the buildings is getting more expensive textbook costs are going through the roof health insurance premiums more than doubled in that

064period and they went from 20 to 30 of personnel costs okay so energy textbooks health insurance costs those are all inflationary costs that are out of control of the schools there's nothing the school can do really to to avoid incurring those costs so what we have once you take into account those that those rising costs those termites eating away at the value of the dollars our classroom that had a hundred thousand dollars in 1998 and 107 000 in 2002 is down all the way to about 82 000 that's in 10 years that's a cut of almost a quarter of the money available to the average classroom to educate those kids in addition to that you have over the last several years a number of episodes in which there were sharp unpredicted and difficult to accommodate

065cuts so in the recession we had a 300 million cut to the schools and then again the year after that and again the year after that and so the the accumulated cuts there were nearly a billion dollars but a simple way to think about the impact of those cuts is to ask how much of the state's total income is being devoted to these educational expenses if we go back to 2002 the high water mark for funding it was only 2.7 percent of state's total income in indiana today it's more like 2.2 so this has been a conscious political decision to devote less and less of our state's resources to funding education so how does the school adjust to those kinds of steady every year cuts in the resources available to teach so what do you

066do you cut the supply budget you go from offering pe and music and art three days a week down to two days a week you decide i can't afford to send my teachers to a conference to learn new instructional technology for math and science classrooms maybe you used to have a teacher's aide in the classroom who could help with kids who are falling behind with reading and math well you let go of the teacher's age so now there's no one to help with that remediation you let class sizes grow just a little bit not you don't double them in size you add a few more kids to every classroom and so every day each kid gets just a little bit less time from their teacher and you encourage experienced teachers to retire so that you

067can replace them with low-cost novice instructors none of that's a disaster none of that is anything you could point to and say you know my school is terrible now it's just termites eating at the foundation of educational quality and as we know termites can stay down there in the basement for year after year after year and eventually the building collapses and i'm afraid that's exactly where we're headed i fear that over the next few years rural schools will be closing because of the current legislation that's being considered i'm going to hit that here real quick but again this is our state funding issue that has occurred over the course from 2009 to where we are our costs have gone up every year but yet our state funding has decreased uh every year and those are

068the termites eating away at education quality dr deboer put together a couple of charts for me this is a ranking of state support per public school ranked from highest to lowest in 2015 we ranked fourth to the lowest in the state for state total state support per student funding so i was kind of hoping that by 2020 we'd be better off so i asked him to do it again and this is what he sent me a while back uh we went down we're down the third lowest in the state for state support per pupil our public schools are getting starved to death financially and yet costs go up unfortunately we have a community that supports a referendum that's helped us bridge that gap but these are the conversations that i wish our patrons would have

069with our legislators because the real issue is this if we don't fix this we're going to continue to do what i call the referendum danes and this is going to get worse because of how our legislators are funding public schools this is a funding formula simulation so if you look at 2021 this is what they're predicting we're getting with regards to adm base adm and they're saying in 2022 we're going to see a 10 increase let me show you how those numbers work if we want to get the 14.7 million and we want to go up 10 our adm has to go up from 2 253 to 2 425 that's 172 students that we have to grow by next year in order to make that work and since i've been here we've never gone above

07080. we had one year where we had 80 and typically we're between i don't know 20 and 30 in that range so even though it's a projection those numbers don't play out unless we grow by 172 students and i hope we do that'd be great the indiana coalition for public education has this chart i love it i won't go through it but it's a bucket showing the leaking of state support from public schools into various uh legislative uh initiatives that are being considered looked at so this just came out by the associated press indiana voter plan could take one-third of schools funding boost that means 144 million dollars plus could go to the voucher program and there's only 10 percent of our students in the state that are associated with that and in time when

071the governor's commission said we need 600 million dollars in this state to increase teacher salaries and they said there's no money for that we have legislators trying to pass this bill this was an interesting article and i've had some people say how did dr hummels come up with the 2.2 this actually says when you adjust for inflation indiana's spending per student is down more than 7 since 2010. we dropped from 22 down to between 2004 to 2018 and it wasn't in the report but the indiana's gross domestic product dropped from 2.6 to 2.2 since 2010 in public school funding this has been a conscious political decision so if you take into account inflation indiana is spending 1.3 billion less per year on education than we should have had if they hadn't been doing some of

072this so those of you that are hearing my voice i ask you please contact indiana legislators oppose house bill 1005 senate bill 412 senate bill 413 i am hearing that this bill may be killed but this is the education savings accounts that is being proposed this is that funding expanding the voucher program and i think everyone received a handout with information please contact your legislators and tell them to quit diverting public school funding to uh this privatization and i'd like to thank our representatives senator altene representatives klinker and campbell for fighting against us because they are they are supporting indiana public schools thanks to our referendum we've been able to bridge that gap but one of every five dollars of our budget comes from the referendum and without the referendum our average class sizes will

073increase dramatically and larger class sizes make it more difficult for students to get the help that they need we use scientific polling to see how we're doing with our community in 2010 we asked our community how do you think we're doing as a school district 71 said that they gave some kind of approval while there was strong approval or somewhat approval so in 2017 we did scientific polling again using a stratified uh random stratified sample and i'm proud to say between 2010 2017 our total approval went up to 92 percent and this is one way we check with those 75 percent of the people without kids in school how are we doing now we'll probably do that again after we get through the pandemic because emotions are high and people are uh still emotional about

074the reopening of schools and that sort of thing but remember we did a referendum here and we did another referendum in building construction projects here and you can see the increase so that's one piece of data we consider let me quickly go through the strategic planning committee process and then we're going to get jane hernan on the phone if april you can tell her we'll be with her in about three to four minutes we use 47 members of ours of our community to come together as representatives to create a facilities plan we asked them to develop a plan that our community would support and on october 3rd 2016 i presented the committee's recommendations to the school board for consideration so our committee came up with three global parameters i won't read all of these to

075you but basically it was replacing our buildings or remodeling our buildings maintaining our academic excellence keeping our corporation debt service tax rate at or below the current level as of 2016. we held five community forums we held multiple community organizational meetings we met with community members we had nearly 1 000 people in attendance in all the meetings we also met with our staff we met with administration teachers to get their input did we accept everyone's input no because we couldn't do everything because we didn't have enough financing to do everything like for instance one of the patrons wanted this building to be on stilts so it would go up and down during a storm uh that was going to cost tens of millions of dollars and and we couldn't do it uh so how do

076we build can do building projects in indiana by large donations or selling secured bonds i'd like to thank the foundation for helping us so far up to date 2.5 million pledged after the pandemic we're hoping to get working again and get up to 5 million where we would like to be the process used we used our facilities committee we had dr ed eiler facilitate those meetings over two years we received input from representation of stakeholders to help us build the plan and then we held three additional community meetings with birdsville residents after the five community forums so we did have coverage this wasn't done without people's knowledge we seek input on school renovations that's from the journal courier this gives you the first four that we did right there we also had journal courier do

077a report on the happy hollow and what we were working on and then we had on our website this and then the fifth community forum was here we had the facility scorecard we had the study data we had the presentations that we did we had our architects working with us just made costs we had baker tilly and we had uh ice miller our expert advisors in bond council finance uh guide and lead and direct us in this in early 2016 the estimate came in at about 50 million in 2016 for the work we wanted to do and then at the october 3rd 2016 public meeting where patrons did speak i made the following recommendations and this is on our website i won't read all of these to you but uh the two i want to

078emphasize that the assessed valuation increases which it has use the additional resources to buy for additional expansion of projects and then the administration believes in the coming years that the same death service tax rate that now generates or supports just under 50 million dollars will also generate additional revenue without increasing the tax rate um and if this holds true then we'll be able to do more and that basically is what's been happening our av's gone up the costs went up this is our av history and straight line approach there was that dip here but we had fundraising going on and why did we invest improve our school safety and well-being of our students teachers and staff to improve the learning environment to add capacity to accept students we retired debt by the way when your

079retired debt school districts don't retire we continue on as that historical information shows and we wanted to stay nationally competitive with the best school districts in america well the control project versus the referendum project if we had a win with a referendum process and had people vote on it it would have been outside the tax caps and property taxes would have gone up up to 21 higher i didn't make up that figure that was from our tax experts who did the analysis so we kept it within a controlled project in both control project a referendum process use a building holding corporation when selling secure bonds we handled public hearings on all four bonds two hearings per bond as the a b increased we were able to bond for nearly 84 million to cover increase in

080construction costs why did the construction costs increase that was because that we saw 30 plus it's actually uh much higher as we got into 1920 but it started out at 30 we're probably close to over 40 percent in costs because of tariffs on steel shortage of construction workers and increased cost of materials and labor uh bonds we have approximately 78 million dollars in construction bonds we have additional costs and furniture supplies minor renovations we have about 3.5 million left over from the bond proceeds which can be used towards debt service payments and here's where uh you have to understand that and you're going to hear this more from brock from baker tilly here shortly we can maintain our debt service tax rate with a variety of things we can use the leftover bond proceeds to

081pay down debt and this waiver of 600 000 circuit breaker from debt service uh can come off we have a continued increase in av which is projected and brock will talk more about that here shortly we can continue leasing happy hollow or there's what's called refinancing or repurposing the 2017 bonds which would decrease our annual payment by almost 500 000 without increasing the amount of time that it will take to pay off those bonds you'll hear about that shortly so i would like to get jane hernan on the phone and have sir too quickly because she has a meeting at seven she's our bond counsel she's with ice miller and uh she's on the phone because she's working with another school district uh i've asked her to quickly talk about the difference between a control

082project a referendum uh holding corporations and the process used by west lafayette schools for construction jane can you hear me hi dan can you hear me i can can you hear me we can barely we're going to get you up a little bit uh you're here at our board work session i was wondering if you could just briefly talk to as a bond counsel attorney talk with our board about our process used difference between referendum and control project and holding corporation absolutely and i appreciate you allowing me to join through audio hopefully you can hear me okay there's quite a bit of feedback we're gonna try to fix it here right now [Music] jane are you there oh she got disconnected let's try it again let me call her on the phone oh she's coming

083back jane are you there okay yes sorry there was quite a bit of feedback all right go ahead okay um i appreciate you allowing me to call in and i wanted to go over just a handful of items first of all espond council in order for us to give our opinion to bondholders at the time of a closing we have a fairly high standard that we have to go through to be able to give that opinion and its opinion on the validity of the bonds and the validity of the lease which is used to repay those bonds and the standard is such that any court properly briefed could not conclude otherwise that the bonds were valid and as part of our diligence process in order to get that opinion we're required to gather proofs of

084notices in the newspaper minutes resolutions of the school board and the building corporation and all the signed documentation and i can tell you that west lafayette schools went through all the required processes in doing their projects and financing those projects that includes multiple public hearings multiple public meetings notices in the newspaper as required by the law and in fact unlike a lot of school corporations all of the planning meetings included multiple school board members which is really relatively unusual they went through all the needed processes to allow taxpayers and voters the opportunities to participate that includes under current law all projects that have a threshold of more than 16 million 727 000 have to be opened up to the possibility of voters or taxpayers requesting the referendum process and west lafayette went through that process

085and they did not have the required petition filed for state projects to go to a referendum in the last couple weeks i've had a reason to do a little digging into data across the state that you might find interesting and did some uh gathering of about 70 77 school corporations across the state of indiana and of those 18 school corporations requested projects to be put on the ballot themselves in other words they ran a referendum election 58 of those went through the 30-day process taxpayers did not request any kind of petition and therefore they were able to move forward without a referendum election and one of those had a situation where a petition was actually filed by opposition groups to put the question on the ballot what that statistics doesn't tell you is the number

086of schools who may have had community meetings who may have decided to cut back or reduce projects to get to the point where they were able to get through that 30-day period it also doesn't tell you whether the school corporation was increasing the tax rate or not and that does make a difference in my experience projects that uh get that application petition by taxpayer groups are usually in three categories one is community is mad about something else besides the project maybe it's because a basketball coach was fired or some other reason and this is a chance to be listened to sometimes we see people file petitions because it's going to increase an individual's tax bill and then the third reason is scope community members think that something about the project is unnecessary or more than

087what is needed but we see many many school corporations especially those that have debt coming off and that new debt can be done in a way that does not necessarily increase the payments above what is currently being paid they get through that 30-day process and i know a representative from baker chile's there i'm sure he can talk more about inside the debt caps and outside the tax caps but but that is some information you might find helpful i've also understand there's been some questions about building corporation so i want to just mention that basically every school corporation in the state of indiana some time or another have used this building corporation lease mechanism to issue their bonds and in fact this lease building corporation structure was first approved in the 1950s by our indiana supreme

088court the building corporation members are typically community members and they're not for profit so they are not getting any dollars in their own pockets in fact all of the bond proceeds are held with a trustee bank or in some cases in the school corporation's hands but they're not held by individual building corporation members or the corporation as a whole they're held in trust and looking back in our files we found an opinion that we gave in 1960 for a junior high school building corporation of west lafayette for a million four hundred thousand dollars uh and a building corporation was used at that time all the way back into 1960. now what's sort of interesting about that is the maturity of the bonds went to 1990 so they were 30-year bonds which we really don't do

089very often anymore but i wanted to give you a high-level look at that to my experience west lafayette went through absolutely all the legal requirements the state when they allow the debt service levy to be in place also asked for copies of those proofs of publication and those resolutions as well to make sure all things had been done correctly and in my experience having those board members being part of the planning process is unique and it allowed for in some ways a much more transparent process than in some other districts so that really is what i was going to cover be glad to try to answer questions it's a little bit difficult over the phone like i said i appreciate you allowing me to call in any questions for jane while she's on the phone

090board members jane thank you very much i'll make sure that they have your phone number in case they have individual questions to ask thank you thank you thank you all all right take care uh we're going to uh try to get to our student recognition here just shortly i'd like to go through the debt service analysis with brock and then if the board would entertain consideration to take a pause during the work session so that we can recognize our students uh alan can make that recommendation to you and then we can recognize our students and their families because i think that's very important uh since they're here on time and we're running late i want to make sure that we honor our students and what they're doing in our schools but i want to turn

091this over to brock because i want to give him an opportunity to hit the debt service tax rate um brock is with baker tilly favor tilly is our financial advisor remember the school board did not make the decisions about bonding and the financial projections we didn't make it up we had financial advisors do that brock the clickers right there i will give you this microphone since i like it clean for you and you can click and it will take me to your slides thank you everybody hear me okay uh thank you dr killian it's a pleasure to be here this evening again my name is brock bauscher with firm baker tilly formerly on ball we serve as financial advisors to the school corporation we are not bankers or underwriters so we only serve in advisory

092capacity i think what you'll hear this evening as part of my presentation is the exact content you heard in prior years going back to the original project planning and for the couple new board members just be aware that we throw a lot of terms at you so so please don't hesitate to ask questions and uh again it's going to be very much in line with what you've previously heard the four items that offer this evening are assessed value projection looking at our existing debt service then looking at some cash flow projections again consistent to probably prior project planning then we'll wrap it up with looking at some illustrations on back to a point dr killian made that there could be some opportunities in the coming years as very similar to your own home mortgage opportunities

093to refinance and save on interest dollars so we're working with a firm that we do a lot of work with that looks at parcel by partial analysis we see and expect the west lafayette school corporation net assets value to grow here in the coming years very similar to what we experienced you see two bar charts here the light blue represents the non-exempt we call net assessed value so this is the non-tiff av again represented by the light blue the gray is the tiff av that's expected to grow as well what we did highlight on this chart is the expected percentage growth year by year from 2022 and beyond so you heard the strong strong case made on the news network about residential growth we expect that level of residential growth to continue but overall we

094expect the net assessed value to grow by 3.6 approximately per year going forward so allows us to help manage that tax rate as you heard dr killian mentioned a moment ago so breaking down each characteristic of that net assessed value you can see this top line represents the residential growth that we're expecting for that continued overall growth of four percent per year so in west lafayette the residential property for net assessed value is about 17 of the total net assessed value the orange line is tiff av again that's not part of our discussion for this evening but you can see that tiffany is expected to grow as well excuse me the blue line is residential this green line is represented by the largest taxing piece of net assist value and that is nav2 or non-farm

095nav2 because it's subject to the two percent tax cap so that is your long-term care and rental property so again that represents about 36 of the total net assessed value for west lafayette ag land or farmland which is a very very very small percentage of almost zero that's why you cannot see it in the graph too well so with that on net asset value growth of about 3.6 per year you can see our existing debt for those in the crowd can't see it very well our 2021 total annual payments are about 5.9 million dollars so strategically this board made a decision to allow payments to grow within that 20-year required time period for repayment you heard jane herndon mentioned that very few bonds in the state of indiana are still paid over 30 years perhaps

096like your mortgage in the state of indiana bonds have to be paid back in 20 years so all bonds are for the past four years from 2017 to 2020 all are structured within that required repayment period so we see that our payments are growing through time however that was done again strategically to align with what we expect our net assessed value to do through that same time period this chart might be a little bit easier but we know that west lafayette has a total of six securities that we're paying back from through 2029 so as the payments increase you've already heard that we expect net assets value to grow by 3.6 per year that you'll see in the coming coming slides allows us to manage that tax rate what taxpayers are currently paying in 2021.

097so these bars again represent the outstanding debt as of today we added two lines on this chart as well this orange or red line represents the percentage of debt to net assessed value there is not a hard fast rule for the percentage that schools need to target however a lot of schools that we work with target a 12 to 15 percent debt to net e ratio and we can see in we're around 12 for west lafayette school corporation a more relevant percentage is represented by this black line and that is representative of our debt to gross assessed value or market value for the west lafayette school corporation in 2021 we're right around six percent and an independent agency that that rates bonds across the state of indiana and the united states target that a school

098corporation with approximately six percent debt to gross assessed value ratio is considered to only have a moderate amount of debt so again we're not in that high category or even that moderate moderately high category so s p that you'll see views in 2021 west lafayette to have just a moderate amount of debt in that same vein how west lafayette compares to indiana peers for the rating based upon a number of metrics debt to gross assessed value is just one of them by cash balances they analyze the the administration team in forward planning west lafayette school corporation has one of the best ratings in the state of indiana one of the 27 highest rated bonds in the state of indiana at a double a a minus rating that is considered very high grade credit according to

099standard and poor's so again one of the best in the state of indiana top 11 percent so now that we know what we expect from netices value we can begin to look at based upon a number of assumptions i won't read all of these individually however to hit highlights again we're expecting that approximately 3.6 net annual growth for av we're keeping our debt payments as is so we're not making any assumptions that refunds are going to occur in the future so being very conservative in our approach on how we we plan to manage the the debt service tax rate going forward we do want to keep in there west lafayette like many school corporations across the state of indiana does continue to budget for interest on temporary loans there hasn't been a need to use

100that in prior years however if the county or state were relate on collections there may be a need for short-term borrowing so we continue to budget for it essentially as an insurance policy to ensure that we can maintain cash flow i also want to highlight in certain scenarios in two and three there is an assumption that the school corporation will use at least 2.3 million dollars of unused bond proceeds or donations to continue to manage the cash in our debt service fund so with that being said in scenario one you heard dr killian mention the protected tax waiver in this scenario we are not assuming that we are transferring money from debt service to operations as allowable by the state of indiana in this scenario the gray bars represents the outstanding debt that the team

101just viewed a couple slides ago the black line is the annual debt service levy that we are projecting then the orange line is represented by the estimated debt service tax rate so we're keeping the 0.5375 debt service tax rate level through 2025 before we start seeing decreases as a result of that net assessed value growth this last line represents our estimated cash balance at the end of every calendar year or budget year based upon the net assessed value and tax rate projections so assuming that we are not making a transfer from the protect tax waiver we can maintain our 0.375 tax rate as this board's familiar with however we'll end up spending our cash balance down to a pretty low amount that we're assuming in 2023 looking at another scenario based upon our baseline projections

102no protected tax waiver and using at least 2.3 million dollars of bond proceeds and or donations this chart's built the same way in the gray the bars are represented by the existing debt the black line represents our estimated debt service levy the orange line is our estimated debt service tax rate and you can see in this scenario because we are using unused proceeds and donations we can maintain a much stronger cash balance there in the blue opposed to the prior slide we saw we would be spending it down to a pretty low amount or tight amount 2023 so in this scenario our tax rate will begin to drop around 2024 or 2025. so really good position financially comparing the levy in the tax rate because of that net assessed value growth in this last scenario

103we're assuming that we are going to transfer as allowable by the state of indiana through 2023 approximately 600 000 per year from the debt service to the operation fund that helps us maintain transportation services replace buses maintain buildings in our operation fund this chart's built the same way gray bars represent outstanding debt as of today the black line is our estimated debt service tax levy orange line is our estimated debt service tax rate and we're still staying within what the board in the community wanted with that 0.5375 before we start seeing a drop in tax year 2026 but using using our our cash balance to transfer to operations and relying upon some bond proceeds that have been unused in donation we can still maintain a strong operating balance year to year as a result so

104in all three scenarios we're maintaining the current debt service tax rate however the only variable that changes between the three is the blue line or how we plan to manage the operating balance or cash balance year to year so again very close to in line with what this board has previously seen before the projects were moved forward here's the actual cash balance i know that's probably a little bit difficult to see so this is the spreadsheet on on how we're working with mr sloat on projecting the tax levy year to year i'll just draw your attention to these highlighted or bolded line that represents how we're estimating 2.3 million dollars of unused bond proceeds and or donations to continue to support the debt service fund if needed if the board chooses this route for that

105third scenario that you saw now looking at some refunding estimates we issued bonds in 2017 2018 2019 and 2020. how municipal bonds differ a little bit from home mortgages is you can refund your home mortgage whenever there are savings in whatever the bank will allow you to do it for municipal bonds and typically have what's called a call date where you can refund those around 10 years typically once they're issued so in 2017 these will have a call date in 2027 so if we waited until 2027 and interest rates remain where they are west lafayette school corporation can save an estimated 550 000 per year based upon the remaining repayment structure now the further you get out or further before that call date you refund those bonds it's less efficient which means you don't generate

106as much savings however you could generate savings as early as refunding these in 2022 so if there was a need to generate savings we could look at refunding and if rates remain where they are for the 2017 bonds we can save an estimated 56 000 in interest per year for the life of the existing maturities similar with the 2018 bonds if we wanted to refund generate savings in 2022 we could do that as and save an estimated 14 400 however we waited till the call date we could generate savings of approximately 000 dollars for the 2019 bonds the soonest we see savings being able to be generated is in around 26 000 however if we were to wait till the call date we can we can uh save an estimated hundred twenty six thousand dollars

107and last here 2020 2020 bonds we could generate an estimated 47 000 the call date in 2030 you can see before that not much savings is generated just because of the size of the bonds and how low the interest rate was at the time of time of the sale so looking at these scenarios for those who like to see percentages rather than hard dollar figures you can see in 2017 if we wanted to refund now we could save an estimated 1.7 but if we can wait until 2027 when this when these refunding becomes more efficient we can save an estimated 16 percent the one percent 19 on the 2018 bonds on the percentage of net present value in 2019 we're not going to save much until 2027 at just over two percent in 2020 for

108the 2020 bonds don't generate your savings as you heard until 2029 or 2030. we have some additional supplemental information i don't plan to go through in detail but for those who like to read the common terms this information's in there and happy to answer any questions to highlight interest rates how low they are right now and i think we've seen that and heard that rates have picked up a little bit but it's still near historic lows so the timing of when the 2019 and 2020 bonds were sold they were near historic low so a really good time to sell it really save interest when we targeted those those sale dates with administrative teams fun after we meet our obligation what are we supposed to keep in there i'll go ahead and repeat the question yeah

109here question is is what is the recommendation on the amount of cash reserve a school corporation should maintain excuse me the government finance officers association gfoa is a group we subscribe to and and follow their their guidance and also s p standard reports your writing agency they both recommend a and target a 15 cash balance or at least 15 because you want to maintain at least two months of reserves on your books to help stabilize the school corporation as you heard dr killian to protect against any budget cuts or delay in collections or delay in revenue very good just to question if we uh did the refund you're not extending your payments out longer like you would do a mortgage that's right that's exactly right so in certain scenarios if you wanted to generate savings

110you may take if there are 25 years left in your mortgage you might extend it to 30 years where you're saving every month however totality you're saving you're spending more on interest in every one of these scenarios we're keeping the existing payment structure and length of payment the exact same so it's truly just a savings and interest rate which to me is [Music] to us um be able to uh easily accomplish all the things that we've been trying to do with the construction the expansion of the project plus the additional assessed evaluation and if the legislators do do the pass through the 10th av that'll be so that'll help us with that services yeah we just give us a basis of comparison out their apples to apples we assume that agents of interest rates there's

111some sensitivity analysis we can form as any other questions thank you very much [Music] all right [Music] um [Music] of the school district uh freelancers and administrators from each of the buildings [Music] thank you [Music] uh [Music] is [Music] his classes he appropriately encourages classmates to do the same thing chas is respectful to everyone and carries himself as the models of others he is one of the hardest working students in west lafayette he asked for help now there's a bigger right there they ask for help it's extremely polite not everybody he always does the right thing he is personal and always comes in and greets us when he enters the room chazz is truly so congratulated [Music] is [Music] becomes a class full of energy and is encouraging to those around them on a daily

112basis he sticks around after the class to make sure desks are lined up and chairs are back in place that's another rare we're just like asking for help honestly always first to volunteer and help out anytime i need a student to pass back papers or run to the office or even just help a student who was absent this is an all-around great redemption and it's such a joy to have in my class and also in the junior senior high school we're really pleased tonight lauren is a junior at our school and she is a virtual learner uh this time and some comments that we have from uh about you for this month struggles with others and sets [Music] lauren to accomplish this born raised over 24 000 over a period of time to make this

113happen she is a true example of the kind of citizenship we should all strive towards [Music] this is truly a lifetime [Music] work that you've done to reduce this incredible amount of money that you break thank you [Applause] congratulations thank good you see you [Applause] hello everyone my name is [Applause] liam is a fourth grader in mrs dawson's class this is not out here tonight liam is a kind of friend of all that he means he plays excuse me when would i play to work with the group of brothers liam will bring out our best and everyone in that neighborhood if anyone mentions really let them know liam will be the first to find something in that person to do he can be quiet which i think every teacher appreciates [Music] [Applause] arenas can you

114please come forward [Applause] david is a virtual student in assistance class david is kind to help out his classmates and his teacher he gives 110 percent effort in her class and asks questions and he doesn't understand his excitement for learning contingency learning which we all know is our task this year has been really nice so we're very proud of david thank you josephine seymour [Applause] joseph [Music] she doesn't let anything get her down we're very proud to have her be our sixth grade representative tonight [Applause] congratulations thank you hello [Applause] movie meeting she always talks about her family her parents and her classmates and offers it is so impressive to see how hard-working and resourceful she is while we must adapt to our activities virtually let's see [Music] is [Applause] is she is a good

115and very kind person very good thank you all for coming out and doing this i'm going to ask representative klinker to come up and say a few words so and then we also put the signature sheet out for the school board meeting so if there's anyone wishing to sign up for that hearing the great grant we do that we'll take a break and then we'll come back and finish the work session and then his schoolwork representative [Applause] [Music] and congratulations to the parents and the students i want their name so i can get you a certificate from the state council very proud of each and every one of you and proud of the parents who have certainly helped the children to achieve that wonderful award tonight let me just say briefly that we are worried

116about this particular session uh i just want you to know justin for indiana and indiana spending per student is down more than 70 since 2010 you heard dr killian say that but indiana dropped from 22nd nationally in school spending per student 2004 to 36 in the united states by 2018 and that does affect many of us personally i have three grandchildren two of whom graduated uh and one that's going to graduate next year for women in high school and i just wanted you to know that the share of indiana support has been proud as dr kevin said went from 2.6 to 2.2 and that being said that by last year we've spent roughly 1.3 billion less on education than they would than they would have had been just wrong with education spending the same rate

117as the overall economy and finally the commission figured that the actual costs who gave me to spending work out for about 580 million dollars per year and that's why i saw the next level compensation commission asked for 600 million and that was to cover teacher salaries and other areas that our school corporations need when you don't receive the number of students that you need to receive as they have been pointed to we're having that one growing but you have to grow a certain amount to get those dollars and that's almost identical that 589 million to the 600 million that they claimed would bring teachers back to 2010 levels in other words almost so and this is a study that's not done by legislators it's done by michael hicks from ball state dr certainly discussed many

118of those issues now let me tell you the good part that happened today my virtual construction public schools that happened today in ways and means today at 1 30 on the house floor we very rarely meet on the house floor we meet in the conference and the south government amendment but today we met there and that will certainly we hope take care of some of the dollars in addition to some of the federal dollars that are going to happen and that happens to be uh very important and i and a report regarding the 2122 school year that provides submitted information in the study by the department no longer no later than december first to find out what has uh and to happened out how the students have gained or have a learning loss regarding students

119in kindergarten through 10th grade that they have now the good news is that sometimes it's just a good thing to kill us there was a bill 1073 by representative west up north a person who administers a non-accredited non-public secondary school has the authority to execute any document required by law rule regulation of policy in the state to provide certain evidence regarding your child's education now that has not heard but you can imagine some of the things that are going on right now also 1005 has vouchers that are able to be received the family buyer if you make 170 000 family for 145 000 now folks many of our private schools are good schools i'm not here to tell you or not but the dollars and cents that started to be the issue for helping low-income

120children to get to schools is not happening it has turned to be a situation where uh very private folks who are fairly wealthy thank you certainly higher middle class can receive a voucher and that's not the way public education should be funded and vouchers should not be used so we're hoping that that bill changes over in the senate education now many of our western students as you know go into staff and we're very pleased about that but we have many students who at our career technical institutions going to culinary arts communication studies and also cosmetology as well as some other issues and they're cutting out those folks to go with stem and i can tell you just one example and then i'll be quiet a young man by the name of brian lamb started to

121be very active in wjef in jefferson high school he went on to wbaa the purdue university became active and henry roosevelt was k brad you remember henry i gave him a little job as his job at night on wsk he went to washington dc to work with chuck robb for president johnson as a legislative intern in the white house but he wanted to continue his career that he started with interviewing folks so he asked tim o'neill who was a friend of representative johnson and reagan remember speaker tip o'neill from the east coast brian asked if he could televise some of the folks that appeared on the houseboat the senate said no we don't want you in there but the house folks determined that they would allow him to come and that's where c-span [Music] and

122that's the rest of the story many of you know that and brian is recognized throughout the country and the world for having season so i want you to address if you don't mind the career technical education areas too uh in the future if you are concerned about that but let me say we're working hard to try to do something about that money and we will continue to work very diligently to get up to that 600 million it's now about 377 million and that's not going to take care [Music] again to the parents and children for your rewards we're very proud thank you everybody thank you representative clinton we're going to take a 10-minute break those that don't want to stay for the riveting second half uh feel free to make your exit if you want

123to sign up to the board meeting uh the comments pages in the back uh restrooms or through these doors uh to your left and we'll gather back in 10 minutes thank you here in just a couple of minutes the best of my ability and then we'll get to our board uh to the high school presentation to the board so ladies and gentlemen um you've heard from jane hernandez you've heard from brock browser uh you've heard from our financial advisor from our bond council we use experts to drive decisions and we use their expertise to help us make those decisions uh well we bring uh proposals to you and we look at big projects we get stakeholder input and we do our best to give you expert information and data and of course everything's projections and

124of course sometimes those projections work and sometimes those projections need to be altered or we have to alter plans if projections don't plan out for instance someone had told me in 2016 that we would be in the middle of a pandemic uh i probably would have retired by now or uh we might have done some other things however [Music] you have to do the best you can with the data that you have and then you have to make adjustments as you move forward that's how leadership works just imagine if we with our pandemic we had our kids still at happy hollow i just don't know how we would advantage because of the issues and i want to help you remember the past a little bit remember our overcrowded cafeteria where not all the kids could

125be seated remember our crowd of facilities those orchestra concerts were just packed um remember our classrooms we couldn't even handle technology in our classrooms uh for ice step and the the state's conversion over to everything electronic uh we didn't have enough plugs in our classroom uh electric electrical plugs our infrastructure we were always having our maintenance guys do this it's just crazy stuff our infrastructure was just had a terrible situation happy hollow the solution from the facilities team was to of course build a new school at burchfield site and that's what you're setting in and i couldn't be prouder of the school i could be prouder of the renovations we've done at the elementary school to junior senior high school because we're creating an environment where teachers can teach and students can learn and we

126can stay competitive so uh the intermediate school was built here and the performing arts is now part of our school day with the inquirer and orchestra rooms which i'm very proud of as a former band director choir director cumberland uh crowded facilities crowded classrooms needed more learning spaces crowded media center infrastructure issues a lot of people don't remember this uh our maintenance people really remember this private lunch room um the solution was to do the renovations i wish we could have had more funds just to tear down the school and to start over but from the facility scorecard and from the engineers that went through it they said that we could reasonably uh improve it by doing a remodel i would at some point like to get kindergarten out of there because i think kindergarten

127classrooms need more space more learning opportunities and would be nice to get to a point where we could repurpose happy hollow which we're going to be working on in a variety of ways so that's the reason we did west lafayette elementary school and first time in history of our schools that we have operational kitchen in all schools so students can receive a hot breakfast or hot lunch imagine that 2019 we we got to the 21st century finally and cumberland cafe is wonderful i've been there many times when the children are there and having our own kitchen staff and operational kitchens and their classrooms having the uh upgraded technology and upgraded hvac systems and can be better absolutely do we want it better absolutely but we took what we had and we tried to make it

128better to the best of our abilities and we still have some work that we can do and continue to do junior senior high school this is interesting this is our north east stair tower and i'll show you what it looks like now with the the new construction this is our old cafeteria uh this is what kids were having to do to eat lunch we didn't have enough seating or space crowded classrooms uh infrastructure someone asked why do you need a new pool well the facilities the construction engineers said that you were either going to have to tear it down and start over or create a new facility so it was more cost effective to do new facility and repurpose the old pool into more classrooms so that was one of the reasons the facility teams

129made that recommendation and our swim team it just loves it i've heard nothing but good things about it maybe someone's not happy about it but uh i've not heard that um infrastructure with uh or crowded performing arts uh and uh again we looked at improving things with the bob kelly performing arts center the richard wax aquatic center with the james r guy academic wing adding stem etc etc rdp cafe is now offering multiple food stations and on average our kids get through uh the lines and get their food and are seated in under 12 minutes that's on average if we have a technology issue or a couple weeks ago when we have fewer staff members and some of us administrators are serving food that made it a little longer because some of us didn't know

130how much to give students and you know where everything was but we did our best i actually had a good time serving food in the rdp cafe uh this this is that dorothy stare tower look at it now much safer if we ever have to have an exit of the school i can't imagine what our kids would have gone through if we had an exit through that whole stair tower and the northwest sarah tower is now starting to be renovated to widen it and make it a safer entry and exit we have more science labs more classrooms we have the williamson media center that students are going to be able to use we have stem technology and already our students and our classes our teachers are starting to use it and our new aquatic center

131uh again new classrooms and then uh in the coming months you'll start seeing the renovations for the bob kelly performing arts center so how do we provide a world-class education system well you can look at metrics we also employ a lot of people that have helped us um research that we've done in our school district what makes a world-class school and how to get there right jane strong it's an excellent read if you're interested jamie ballmer schools cannot do it alone who works with our school district martin huckaby leading high performing school systems worked [Music] administration finished lessons what we learned from the finnish education system mark huckabee and diane rabbid reign of terror these are all people that have assisted with our school district to help us to create the world entertaining system using

132the appropriate systems that the best education in the world are there no we have not until every student success i would say they never have a ride but we still look at metrics and these are on our website plus other things uh one of the big tough decisions that our school district had to make of course was the reopening plan and of course not a lot of people uh i shouldn't say this let me say this right not everyone understands the process that we had to go through for the reopening and i'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish through a very unknown situation and those of you that were behind the scenes seen all the emails and phone calls and some of the viterol that was coming through because we were trying

133to reopen schools that's just the nature of leadership we're going to make decisions and some people are going to be happy some people aren't the governor ordered the closure of schools in march 2020 what i'm very proud of is that we paid all employees during the closure we used our cash balance and paid all employees not one employee was laid off during that closure not all school districts will be able to say that to you governor ordered all schools reopened the fall of 2020 many parents asked us to have teachers teach online and on-site through our collaborative process with wlea we worked on a process which we extended 79 junior senior high school contracts we hired one additional kindergarten teacher we hired one retired teacher we added 10 permanent substitute teachers to work in our

134schools and we are spending this year approximately six hundred thousand dollars more than we're bringing in because this school board accepted the recommendation of doing these things to ensure that our teachers were employed teaching online and on-site in collaboration with the wlea and our teaching staff we've been able to accomplish that we do this in a collaborative way we use again experts we have our corporation physicians we have the tippecanoe county health department our registered nurses collaboration with our teachers association administration staff members also working with tsc and llc we also had a representation from a group of parents we spoke with and one of the things we do we pay and we'll continue to pay all employees who are quarantined even though the federal law now has changed and we're not required to do

135that we do that and i'm very proud that we do that over two-thirds of our students are attending school on site over 88 of our teachers are teaching on-site and i still believe this is true i've checked a couple of times i don't see copa 19 tracker regionally from other school districts but maybe there's some now that have popped up we try to keep our community informed with that and then food service is providing over 100 breakfasts and lunches per day to virtual students and so i think those are great things so what's our considerations for improving well one i think we need to continue to promote our school district to increase student enrollment if our student enrollment continues to go down we will receive even less funding from the state and if we have

136less funding from the state then we're going to have to make difficult decisions with regards to since our referendum we're using now about 99.9 percent of our referendum uh that we're bringing in to take care of the bridge the gap in the budget and making sure we have the money to fund the increases for staff maximizing the referendum to ensure we maintain our arts music pe sports extra co-curricular programs in my opinion we need to really improve our efforts to promote the west lafayette schools to try to increase student enrollment we need to allow the diversity equity inclusion committee to work diligently and intentionally to better serve our diverse inclusive and equitable school community we've got to give them time and space you need to begin building partnerships fundraising educating community of what it's going

137to take to convert happy hollow i will tell you there are three or four different conversations going on with partners throughout our community to possibly help us with that if we are to fund that on our own it's about 12 to 15 million but there are other options to consider and there might be other partnerships that would help us decrease that cost or maybe not even have those costs if some partnerships develop we need to consider additional staffing as school district grows i do believe we need to improve communication and look at staffing to improve communication to provide more timely information to our community and we need to advocate for public school funding and fight back against the legislation that continues to divert public school funds to other initiatives and there are other improvements that

138we're working on but those are the ones that i wanted to highlight and i want to leave you with this back in 2012 jamie ballmer who wrote the book schools cannot do it alone now pro public school proponent he was one of those charter schools bowser school type of people he was tasked by the governor of iowa to go out and basically straighten out public schools and once he got out into the public schools and he started working with teachers started working with staff members administration he figured out hey what being touted out there in the public is not what's going on in our public schools and so he came well tfc llc in west lafayette brought him in in 2012 to speak to our uh greater lafayette chamber dinner and this is an excerpt

139from his speech we're going to have to change this folks we're going to have to come together as communities and begin to change the fundamental building blocks of how we educate children the problem is the reason i say as a community is that if you allow just your educators to proceed down this path they're going to get cut off at the knees i've watched it dozens and dozens of times i've watched folks like rocky killian progressives interested in doing what's right for kids start to attack the core of the system changing the way we group kids we group kids right now in this country on the basis of their date of manufacture think about it and yet in here especially in this county with this fine university in harrison and ivy tech you've got parents

140you've got children showing up in his schools at pre-kindergarten and their parents have read to them every single night since they were born oh who am i kidding looking at this group some of you put speakers on the wife's belly and pumped baby einstein and mozart into the womb the problem is that that child comes in a pre-kindergarten and sits right next to a little a little girl who's never seen a book nobody's ever read to her and in my hypothetical both of these kids have exactly the same intelligence level we're going to have to rethink how we group kids we're going to have to rethink the curriculum people complain all these kids don't know what we used to know they're not being taught what we were taught how can we teach them everything that

141we were taught and everything that's happened since without adding a minute to the school calendar in eight decades how do you do that we're going to have to rethink it we're going to have to rethink the way we measure progress you don't know it but you're on a slippery slope with me right now i'm not going to go down we are locked in a national hysteria of standardized testing and it's killing us as a nation and the businessmen and women in this room it's killing you the very qualities that men and women in business need from their employees are not being even addressed anymore because the people working in your schools are under so much pressure for those kids to perform well in the istep we're killing ourselves with this and yet it's everywhere we're

142going to have to take one community at a time rise up and push back because it is not an appropriate way to educate the children of the 21st century we're going to have to rethink that but as i said i've seen people in his position go after assessment go after curriculum go after instruction the school calendar and after about 15 to 18 months of aggressive internal planning you know what happens in those school districts nothing no i misspoke something happens something happens that's apparent on school board election night when three or four people in the community run for the board on an anti-everything platform and they win and if they don't control the board they fracture it and the only thing that changes in those school districts it's not instruction it's not curriculum it's the

143superintendent so the question i leave with you working together or fracturing that's what you as the new school board members that's what you as veterans school board members have to figure out i can't tell you how to do that all i can do is do my best to bring to you the experts listen to the people doing the work in the schools have trust our administration to bring you information that's been vetted by stakeholders and then you have to make decisions but if we're not working together then we're dividing in a house divided by the dividends that doesn't mean we can't disagree but we have to work together for the common good versus our teachers common good of our schools common good for our community and there are many voices that you're going to have

144to determine who you're going to listen to so i have an attitude of gratitude i want to thank everyone that has worked during this difficult time in pandemic and some quotes for you a leader who a leader takes people where they want to go a great leader takes people where they don't want to go but ought to be that's what i hope all of you as the school board would aspire to be great minds discuss ideas average minds discuss events in small minds discuss people and my favorite one is steve jobs if you want to make everyone happy don't be a leader sell ice cream it sounds like a good retirement gig i don't know what kind of ice cream might sell but west sideways scarlet and gray that's what we agreed to do in

145october 16 2000 i'm sorry october 3rd 2016 and we're making progress are we there absolutely not but every day we try to improve and i've not met one person in our school district for 14 years who comes into the school saying you know i think i'm just going to do make people miserable i think i'm going to not do what's best for kids i think i'm going to uh make bad decisions i i don't find that in our public schools everyone comes in and works very hard to do the best that they can and tries to improve every day that's what i appreciate about our staff or teachers or administrators so with that i will open it up for questions from our school board and see if you have any questions before we get to

146the high school presentations uh [Music] um [Music] i wanna [Music] is foreign it's not taking any away in any situation we're proud of them we've been it's been an extremely challenging time this past year uh not the least of which it's been with our students and and be able to totally see what what really did transpire but i think i will know that this is going to hurt [Music] here [Music] [Applause] here [Music] high school presentations well thank you i appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight um we're going to kind of do this in three parts i want to just briefly run down the proposed schedule we'll hit some of the highlights of it uh and then mr walma is going to kind of take through the process of how we have gone you know

147from from the first first phase through ten different iterations of the schedule and then i'll come back up at the end and try to share with you what we feel are the benefits um now mind you uh none of this is in existence if covet is still ruling the world in august right so um if we still have to operate with significant social distancing and things like that school would obviously look very much the same as it does uh this year but if not and hopefully not we're excited about this opportunity for our students and staff and the highlights are simply this uh we're gonna have a seven period school day with 48 minute classes and five minute passing periods with a later start time which we we have found has been very important to

148to our students we heard that it's it's you know the research is better for the adolescent mind and then it provides for an earlier release in the evening which will allow for more family time and really one of the things that we're most proud of is that that time period from 7 50 to 8 15 in the morning where our students are going to get to meet with each other for club time that has been missing during this last school year for for covid it's going to allow for a more equitable opportunity for young people to come in and meet with teachers to provide and get extra academic support and it's going to allow for more students to be able to utilize a lot of the new technology and facilities that this board has been

149so gracious in allowing our school to build and so for those reasons we think this seven period school day is going to be very uh impressive and important and effective for our students obviously um the the big the big question uh has been over the lunch period which is in period four you will see that students will receive a 30 students and staff will receive a 32 minute lunch period and we will add to that lunch period a little homeroom time and i'll discuss that more at the end um and quite frankly in a year where covet has reached such havoc um the home room is actually a positive that has come out from from covid and something that we've learned over the course of the 20 20 21 school year so with that that's

150that's the general outline of the schedule as proposed i'm going to let mr wahlbaum kind of talk to you about the process of how we got to this schedule and then i'll come back up here at the end and try to tell you why we think this schedule benefits our students instead uh this process really began of course as we've had kind of a look back on many years throughout the school corporation this process with regard to the schedule and studying the school day really began as an outgrowth of the reimagining west lafayette schools committee that refined re-examined our existing strategic plan and from that process from the fall of 2019 it was finalized in january of 2020 we were asked as the school administration to review several different parts of that strategic plan uh

151first of all we were asked and again i won't read all of these to you but we were asked to provide as much equity as possible what can we do to take away some of those barriers for for student success what can we do to provide an equitable opportunity for all of our students we were asked to look at different academic supports what can we do for for all of our students to again provide equity throughout our curricular extracurricular co-curricular offerings we were asked from the strategic plan again to look at safe and efficient scheduling what can we do to maintain our diverse elective offerings especially in the arts and music which again we've gone through at several points this evening and uh we were asked to examine ways that that we could ensure uh

152a more formalized time for clubs to meet in our school schedule and then uh finally again some of the i think dr killian called it alphabet soup tonight we were asked to look at what in our building we call mtss multi-tiered system of support other buildings do too for academic support what can we do to provide some common time there for students who might be in need of academic intervention and that's a nice combination there i think when we look at that club time in the morning we shouldn't overlook the importance of a common instructional time for either teachers for professional development or obviously students for our problem solving process and that's been something where we've had a hard time getting teachers together at a common time throughout the day so those objectives those action

153steps grew out of that strategic plan revision in the fall of 2019 and early winter of 2020. so last year throughout our winter professional development sessions with the departments we worked with our department chairs and individual departments to identify some teacher volunteers who might be interested in serving on a committee that would examine the school day what can we do to and and we went into it this was not a closed lunch committee this was a committee to offer a safe and equitable and efficient school schedule we went into that and had our first meeting one of the last meetings we had before the base shutdown in march we had our first meeting with 17 people students faculty members food service transportation administration counselors we had our first meeting on march 6th of and had

154a really interesting and thoughtful discussion where we talked about the qualities of the ideal school day we took away all the constraints in our schedule what can we do to to build something here so you'll see that later obviously later on in march we we had to shut down we didn't come back to in-person learning for the remainder of the year and we spent some time this summer crafting a schedule that would a pro provide a safe environment for lunch and so we went from our traditional two period lunches uh in the junior senior high school to four period lunches again to make sure that we didn't go over our capacity there in the lgi and the cafeteria the food court and so uh we learned some things from that experience this year we learned

155first of all that the the multiple lunch hours work uh we we learned that our students you know go back to class they can settle back in and have a meaningful experience there we learned that our teachers did their usual excellent work and uh improvising and planning we learned that we actually liked our homeroom session our homeroom time there's a little down time uh in the school day for our students i'll be honest this year's homeroom is simply so the other half of the well quarter of the students can go to lunch and so we keep a homeroom time in that schedule but we maintained a little bit of that down time in the proposed schedule here the school safety committee has met well it meets yearly multiple times but it also has continued to

156review and revise we have a number of administrators and teachers who are indiana school safety specialists but obviously we have discussed uh things from entry and exit from our building we discussed lunch we discussed obviously we're fortunate one of the often overlooked facility upgrades the new office complex and safe and secure entrance in the junior senior high school as well the school data team conducted surveys teacher needs assessment and student needs assessments in september and october of this year and we we use a lot of that information where again they i mean it is just that they identified some areas where they might be struggling in this odd school year and we tried to come up with some ways that we can address that certainly this year but obviously moving forward so we've had several

157opportunities in our departments as they have met and with our department chairs we've discussed the proposed schedule and actually refined a lot of things as a result of those meetings the schedule that we took to our department chairs in december as much different well in subtle ways uh in three or four areas from the schedule that we are proposing now so again i i went through the considerations for the ideal schedule and this is where people tend to hone in on one or two key issues and how it will affect them how will it affect their children how will it affect their uh just even their neighborhood uh issues or their lunch issues so obviously uh it was very important that we maintain our vast diverse course offerings especially in the arts and music some

158areas where schools sometimes might make some cuts we mentioned the common meeting time for clubs and activities we certainly wanted to have a safe and efficient way to deliver breakfast and lunch we shouldn't overlook breakfast in our building we serve over 100 breakfast hot breakfast meals a day and that's with approximately one third of our students who are learning virtually so the breakfast has been a real success story uh for our food service and with the improvement in the facility there we wanted to maximize the social interaction opportunities at lunch uh those of us who a lot of us remember the two periods for lunch we had plenty of social interaction opportunities at lunch this year when we went to four we limited those and some of that is because of well it's all because

159of covet and masks and the spacing but we thought in this proposal to go to three periods it allows us to do to run through lunch safely we know that we're going to have a dedicated junior high lunch so 7th and 8th graders will have the same lunch and then we propose that the high school then would have the other two lunches so again we're going to increase those opportunities for some social interaction we have in a few of our lunch periods right now we have kind of an odd section of uh seventh grade for example where they have d lunch while the rest of the seventh grade has sea lunch and so that's a challenge for our students i mentioned earlier the academic intervention supports that would be a part of that common time

160in the morning and obviously so the professional collaboration opportunities uh in the morning as well so we went through the course of this school year i mentioned our department chairs already and the needs assessments we have solicited feedback from our teachers the wlea teachers have been outstanding with their uh comments and questions and review and helping us go through this process uh we did also have a productive meeting well several meetings with the wlea and board teacher discussion two weeks ago now we did meet with the parent council at their february parent council meeting and we're on the agenda for their march meeting coming up wednesday morning as well uh as a part of that and preparing for that in some of these discussions we are preparing kind of an faq document to share because

161because we are getting now some common questions as we get the word out we've had some parent emails asking some questions generally mr ulrich and i will pick up the phone and call those parents because as you can tell tonight it's more than an email i can't just you know send this to you and uh try and try and win you over at least get you to see it where we are here but we look forward to those discussions on wednesday mr ulrich met with both student councils separately the junior high and senior high student councils and again had some thoughtful feedback there we did have some student representation i mentioned on that school day study committee uh a year ago so uh so we've gone through several different steps i think at last count

162we read about 10 drafts of this schedule from 45 47 48 minute classes sixth period day seven period day the old eight period day you name it uh it is important to note even though it looks like a seven period day uh and and you think last year you know we had an eight period day it was still seven because your eighth was lunch and now uh with this your seventh part of your seventh is lunch so it's important to note obviously again the improvement that we've made in the facilities no schedule is going to be perfect we understand that but the facility improvements we've made allow us to at least explore these opportunities and bring a schedule to you for consideration to uh to look at again i mentioned all of those qualities of

163the ideal schedule i think it's a nice blend uh we look at uh in subtle ways a later start time and earlier dismissal which will help our students we'll get to that later as well but obviously the the safe and efficient lunch uh we're still able to have the club time which we really hope will increase the club participation obviously this year has not been a good year in that regard uh because of coving so we're really thankful for this opportunity and i think this schedule will be a nice improvement uh and and we've tried to be responsive all throughout this process with with anyone who has questions and again it's a very often it's a phone call it's a discussion uh it's a face-to-face meeting uh more so than than an email or a

164powerpoint or anything along those lines so mr oler is going to come back up and discuss the answer any questions okay so so really it boils down to three things as we looked at the schedule one we needed to make sure that we we improved equity across the board um for our students number two we really needed to attack a significant school safety issue as we have all dan mentioned many of us are indiana school safety specialists as we get trained every year one of the things that we would discuss in those meetings was the unique opportunity that west lafayette students had with open campus and then the third thing that we were looking to do was to ensure that our kids were getting that club time back every day i can't tell you the

165number of times i heard those student council meetings how much kids wanted to meet with their clubs you'll notice we've gone from a 50-minute class period to a 48-minute class period well that could insinuate the students might have to do a little bit more on their own they were 100 okay with that if the time was going towards that club interaction so it meant a lot to students uh and it definitely meant a lot to our faculty as well a chance to share their expertise and to watch kids in a situation outside of the classroom so why is the schedule that is proposed good for our school well number one it continues the the tradition at west side of exceeding the indiana department of education's required instructional minutes so we continue to spend more time

166in class in school every day than the state requires and obviously that that translates into you know higher academic performance secondly it utilizes a later start time to the school day one of the things that came out of the strategic planning committee was looking at a way to get students to school later so if you remember back to that slide with the schedule on it the buses are going to be arriving at school about five minutes later than they arrived now but what that means is students who ride the bus or students who are dropped off all students now have the opportunity to meet with teachers before school current currently and last year and year before that and year before that if a kid rode the bus to school when they got to school they

167might have time to grab a quick breakfast then it was time to first period they didn't have the opportunity to go meet with the teacher because they were a bus rider or their parents maybe dropped them off right on the way to work they didn't have the opportunity to get there earlier so we think this is another opportunity to improve equity for our students all students 7-12 whether they're a bus rider or driver will have the opportunity to get academic support on a daily basis if needed under the proposed schedule it also ensures that all kids will have enough time to eat breakfast if they want to they don't have to worry about running off the bus to grab a sandwich before it gets cleaned up so again breakfast full bellies helps the mind get

168going in the morning so we we are uh appreciative that we have the opportunity to serve breakfast and i can tell you that many many students are using it it creates time during the contractual day of our staff to help them work with students so now we're not going to have to require staff even though they will do it because they're amazing they've done it because they're amazing we won't require staff to have to stay after school 45 minutes an hour to help students with work they can do it there in the morning before the school day starts it also allows our students to meet with multiple teachers or with multiple national honor society tutors that are available in the morning they have the opportunity to to kind of move around the building and see

169all the people they need to see as opposed to you know just just waiting for a study hall when a teacher would ride on a path and then that club time in the morning is is very unique right so uh prior to covid we had the two lunch periods students would eat for approximately 30 minutes the last 20 minutes of the lunch period was designed for clubs well we have clubs in our building that work with students in grades seven to twelve under the old lunch system they weren't allowed to meet together because junior high kids had one lunch high school kids had a different lunch now with the club time being in the morning any student in that club no matter no matter the grade they can all meet together and so we think

170that's going to help enhance club time on top of the fact that the club time is actually longer now at 25 minutes versus the 20 minutes that it used to be we think that students will have more time to utilize the brand new media center that was just opened on monday as a matter of fact because they don't have to rush in during a passing period they have all that time in the morning that they could get it done and really it's a great place for kids to sit you know there's the commons area in the building but it's kind of it's kind of cold with the concrete you know benches this new media center is amazingly warm and welcoming has all kinds of new and modern furniture mr shriner has spent many many many

171hours in magazines trying to find the most hip furniture for our kids and uh they're going to be in there a lot to take advantage of that it moves lunch a little bit earlier in the day so under the the two launch system that we used to have the second group of students um didn't get served lunch until much later in the day and again as kids get hungrier it makes it more difficult more challenging to pay attention in in class the safety aspect really would be the only thing that would be needed to propose the change in lunch we have to have three or more lunch periods we cannot safely fit our entire student body in the new designed area in just two lunch periods we just can't do it it's not big enough

172and it's not appropriate it's not nice it's not sanitary to have kids eating by their locker on the floor which is what we used to do now that we've spent the money we have this great brand new facility we have a great place that all students can have a chance to sit and eat and enjoy their friends but we gotta have three lunch periods at least to do that and now with the three periods we get a good have our junior high lunch our seventh and eighth graders get to spend their time together and then our high school kids have the opportunity to eat just two lunch periods and enjoy their friends the other the other critical piece to that safety issue is that there's not a school safety expert in america that says it's

173great to lock your building from eight to three and then unlock it during the lunch period to let kids leave and come back that doesn't make much sense and it's work at west side i can't stand up here and tell you that it hasn't but it doesn't mean that there weren't students that would go off campus and come back under the influence of something it did mean that car accidents didn't happen it doesn't mean the students weren't coming back late by and large it worked for a lot of kids but it's not safe why would we keep the building locked all day long just to turn around and unlock and unleash the students out into the community for an hour it just doesn't make a lot of sense equity reasons why the equitable part of

174closing the canvas is this about 13 of the student body at the junior senior high school is on free and reduced lunch there's another percentage i can't tell you what it is of students whose parents don't have extra money to give them to spend to go out to jimmy john's so we have a number of students in our building that would sit and eat lunch with the school provided food and they would see their friends leave campus and come back with jimmy john's or pizza hut or whatever restaurant they stopped at well that's not good for the social and emotional well-being of those students they stand up and it makes them feel you know poorly about themselves quite frankly and so by doing this by eliminating the ability for students to to go off-site to

175grab lunch and bring it back we've taken away one of those things that make kids stand out in a negative way and so we're really we're really excited about that potential opportunity okay then i want to go back to the see if i can remember how to do this go back to the slideshow to talk about that lunch period so you can see there in period four and let's just look at lunch a the the lunch is from 10 54 in the morning to 11 26 so you have 32 minutes after the 32 minutes kids have an additional five minutes to get back to class so we're really talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 to 35 minutes where kids are going to be able to hang out in the the food court okay during

176the next 48 minutes of class they have class but as we realized after talking to students and staff over the course of this year they needed more of a brain break they needed some more down time outside of just lunch and so we've been able to provide a minimal [Music] homeroom time period where kids can kind of just take that break they get to unplug so for 11 minutes of that class period the teachers aren't instructed students will be allowed to communicate with their friends in the classroom they could get a head start on homework they could just listen to some music they could put their head down on their desk to rest this year we've had staff members that have taken their entire class outside on nice days to walk around the campus to

177get some fresh air that certainly would be allowed but it's just a chance for kids to kind of de-stress unplug just just rest their head before they finish up the latter part of their day and so we're excited about being able to continue to do that along with some of the old traditions we used to have at lunch which is opening up the gym to let kids quickly have a chance to go run around we still allow kids to eat outside on nice days in a nice green space on the west side of the building certainly kids can walk around outside during lunch they would have a chance to go visit the media center at lunch they have all these things that they've always had that will continue to have they just can't do it

178off campus and so we think it's a safer environment a more equitable environment for our students then the earlier dismissal i'm a former coach and i had two kids that went through athletics and participated in musical groups and and every day after school kids many of our kids have have events they have practices and so being able to dismiss kids earlier means practice starts quicker if practice starts quicker i get home quicker if i get home quicker i get my homework started sooner i get to spend more time with my family all of those things are positives students that don't have after school events but might have a job don't have to speed out of the parking lot to get to a 4 pm start time for a job we have more and more students

179who are working and we we think and have seen that percentage of kid is going to continue to grow so for all of those reasons we think this proposed schedule you know the safety the equity the importance we're placing on club time we think this this proposed schedule is one that will benefit our students will benefit our staff and we are we are certainly excited to present it to you for review please continue to know that not every schedule is going to be 100 perfect certainly we can't make every family situation met to the satisfaction of everybody right because everybody's different across the board they have different priorities but anytime any parent or any kid or any community member wants to know more about the schedule there's our contact information please encourage them to speak

180to us the proposed schedule will be on the website uh the faq um questionnaire and sheet will be on the website by this time next week so that the common questions we've gotten um it might help pass out some more information for those who are interested any questions for either dan and myself any questions we've all been part of a part of initial zoo meeting as well uh here in the last week or so but any additional questions at this time from anybody at this point okay all right well thank you very much we'll continue to look at that thank you appreciate all your time and efforts and all the time you spent and again i would for those that are interested again you certainly can talk and speak with um email address but also

181i thank the board of regulations 8 40 p.m uh february uh communications is school board policy revisions and dr killian plus i want to thank uh um thank you we have uh [Music] um uh okay we have uh two resolutions to consider the first one is that uh resolutions basically it says administration is authorized to utilize the flight of the [Music] the bond surplus bonds are held by the trustee name this resolution his authorization if race would go to such a point in the call days success to initiate this process so you know afraid to make a change three weeks to a school board meeting to start the process that gives you an authorization to do that under certain conditions one condition to initiate efforts can be initiated as well as refinancing billy gordon worked

182with baker kelly and ico council riding in theaters council corporation so this would give access or permission to begin the process district 2023 it's not renewed i mean then you don't have a choice uh uh discussions [Music] you is [Music] um and we're not changing the elementary limits which we've changed secretary president questions um [Music] um [Music] to the doctor [Music] um [Music] is yes [Music] the first do we usually ask the parents to provide feedback about the child care program child care um for families so um had an emergency where we need to remove them for a different reason they're very cooperative with us we just feel like they've been super flexible your parents have never seen anything negative that i have not asked the families that are from time to being that we're

183time offering the facility it's the organization that basically runs through those processes okay do the child care does the child care program provide some discount to low-income families that's up to the organization again they're the ones who do the financials they're the ones that build the parents we by laws offer the facility in contract with them but they're the ones that set the rate we're the ones that make that decision and then our third question is probably the same answer do they usually provide detailed activity plans for parents that's up to the organization and i have seen them operate they're always having okay questions opposed for a total of three million five hundred seventy six thousand eighty seven dollars a few idols who may be [Music] that's about john 2 27-10 we also made a

184quarterly payment to the greater lafayette career academy that pays intuition for our students who are currently attending the career academy we also had two payments just because of the timing of billing for franciscan health and the amount of and that was for our athletic trainers we also paid the lobbyists and started the canoe school corporation 99207 that's our annual bus storage and garage access that we subcontract with them so that's a brief overview of the claims steve whitehouse the difference in the payroll exactly is i'm sure that dr kelly will cover that um and then finally i want to give an update on the diversity equity and inclusion committee they met again we met again about a week ago that snowstorm pushed us to zoom again i'm looking forward to meeting you in person this

185week i think that tuesday meetings proven that maybe meet in person have a good conversation it is important to note that the charge on the committee is not to investigate or resolve specific complaints um there's been some confusion about that in the community but groups such as cares and other individuals in the community they brought forward comments and those are relevant as they're related but they are not in themselves of priority so the charge of the committee is a bigger scope than [Music] to bring recommendations forward to the board to capture opportunities for a cultural shift in a systemic way um and so i hope the clarification is helpful if you were to receive inquiries or questions about what the work of the di committee is the best place to refer those if someone has

186a specific concern regarding an internet then it would be appropriate for them to go to the administrator and their respective school or the superintendents beyond that that those the committee itself will not be receiving those individual complaints okay the pool of candidates again lindsay walls i've led the search when he comes from the development office as an extensive background plan um board policy committee as rachel indicated we're finished with tonight's revised the policy on title nine to finish with the fall updates and the next couple days will be in may or june and those updates will be based on the new school laws that get passed during the current legislative session i attended a february teacher discussion dr killian report on that glass will have an executive session this wednesday parkour gee cold weather was

187great for the riverside skating center but then the warm weather hit so unfortunately they did have to close for the season last friday was their last date those of you that are utilizing the offline dog park happy hollow car unfortunately that's closed for uh i don't know a couple of weeks or two or three weeks um they're the maniacs crew will be adding friendly features and they're working to control all the mud dog the community council is not meeting and looking forward okay [Music] and we also agreed that uh if you will be bored at some point that becomes a reality that there will be a re-evaluation of that the next school year we talked about the february 26 professional development day there is some information we're receiving that purdue is changing their spring break

188next school year and we're going to have to look at the calendar that transpires uh update about teacher staff and vaccinations and we started talking a little bit about considerations for the fall and then our increased enrollment of promoting west lafayette okay thank you um welcome and now we're about to take communication to the audience actually it's not on the bell schedule it's about the state of school should that still be perfect i went about 45 minutes longer than progress i'll give you the wire [Music] it's very intimidatingly competitive leadership because great leadership division um great leaders foresee the future and they study the honors for measurable goals great leaders overcome obstacles with termination and grit and we teachers see that in both our superintendent our school board our principals our administrators our colleagues and

189our parents and students great leadership does not power behind keyboards spewing verbal men great leadership does not help conspiracy theories while assuming that others are inspiring against them wlea appreciates the leadership of rocky and the board we may but we have never once doubted that each and every board member administrator principal teacher and rocky himself operates under one mining question what is best for our students so i've come to the conclusion that in addition to cobit some patrons are grappling with another one of them that's an addiction to drama i asked our listeners tonight could that admire you are you itching to mix it up if so i suggest that you divert your wrath to compliments i call them public education candidates number one and two two the first is coco we need to get

190right into that kind of classrooms we've been doing it all right virtually but they've been invested in [Music] and yes teachers need to be vaccinated we've been joking that we now need to tackle a marlboro or something because smokers are being prioritized leaders who are always very supportive but those who seek profit of the banks of our students indiana already rates number one in the nation we can't do any better than yet they're seeking to defer brilliance they're not even contending that their agenda is to kill public education and privatize so as for wlea as andy and i near the end of our term we share a new gratitude for your work and we look forward to the cooperative respectful relationship that we have always enjoyed in the month thank you um [Music] uh [Music]

191it all sound like as well um so i just wanted to let the school board know my thoughts and feelings surrounding the proposed changes to the junior senior high school daily schedule that represented just a little bit ago um as far as i understand the proposal would push back the current start time by 15 minutes in the morning which i think would be great for children i do have some concerns that a lot of children will still probably get there only five minutes later than they currently do so i'm not quite seeing the benefit in terms of extra sleep that probably seven of the ninth grade at least would not be getting um and then i'm really worried a lot about the lunch being reduced down to 32 minutes i have three children who are

192currently at a high school level one who is a senior she's a vegetarian and she also doesn't eat dairy and so she came home almost every single day for lunch pre-cooking days um and she would always bring a group of friends with her and it was a great time for her to come home um obviously have her lunch because she really is specific about what she could eat and there weren't a lot of options at school but also it gave her time to relax to unwind the girls would always talk about their day the good things that happened happenings that happened and the pressure they were under um i was typically there when they were moving home so i was able to hear their conversations and a lot of times they would just sit there

193and laugh and relax and enjoy that 15 minutes well it's a little more like 40 by the time they got there and went back but they really enjoyed that time together being away from the school building i know teachers and administrators do their best to provide a safe and nurturing environment but sometimes when you're in a pressure situation and the expectations are high you just need a break and you need to be able to get away and that's what they think about what they were getting um my sons who are sophomores in the school they love their open lunch and they love the 50 minute time period that they were able to have to be honest with you i think it was one of the most and the open um gave them the ability to

194get outside get fresh air and exercise hang out with their buddies they usually would go through the lunch line get their lunch go to a buddy's house and live close by they play basketball one of the most um memorable things that they talk about from starting i think especially when you move from sixth grade where you're still having a lunch that calls a recess and you're also having possibly another recess throughout the day having that open lunch time that's a little bit longer really gave them the opportunity to um [Music] that's a reflection of what an amazing group of kids we have that we've been able to do that for so long i mean i have family who went to west side and they all talked about the lunch and that was the 60s and

195i think it's been something that's continued throughout the time frame of our junior senior high school and i really need to see that um be taken away from our kids and so and this moment i just like to say that we require a lot of our students especially west side students you know we talked about um how we're um on the top you know 100 best schools in the country and we're number one at this and we're number one at that but in order to achieve those things we put a lot of pressure on our kids you know we expect them to have enough scores on their svts and we expect them to take all the ap exams and weeks by friend to play sports clubs or you know language groups band orchestra all these

196things are free but we need to still be giving them that time to unwind and i think that's what one truly did for a lot of kids and i just would like it if we could maybe get more opinions and more input from the community and from students and from families because the people i've spoke to it really doesn't seem like there's been a big involvement from families and students on how to feel about us so i hope the board really allows more time to be put into considering this plan in regards to taking in the community and the thank you very much uh thank you