001This March 16, 2026 regular meeting of the Chardon Local Schools Board of Education is called to order. This meeting is being held in accordance with Section 3313.15 of the Ohio Revised Code. Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Blankenship? Here. Mrs. Clark? Here. Mr. Landy? Here. And Mr. Majet? Here. Welcome to the March 16, 2026 regular meeting of the Chardon Local Schools Board of Education. Prior to this meeting, each board member received for their review and consideration the agenda and materials associated with each agenda item for the board's consideration via the Electronic Board of Education Agenda System Board Docs. The public can access the agenda through the school district's website one day prior to the board meeting. Pursuant to Board of Education Policy 0165, this meeting is a meeting of the Board of Education
002and public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and not to be considered a public community meeting. There are two opportunities for public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda items designated as public participation. Board members have the opportunity to call the superintendent and chief financial officer for information concerning agenda items and to request if needed additional information. Upon request of the superintendent, the district shall make reasonable accommodation for a disabled person to be able to participate in this activity. This meeting may also be replayed for later viewing on the GTV network and video on demand site. The Chardon Local School District is not responsible for the video and or audio quality or future availability of such recording. The first thing we have is the adoption of the agenda that I
003want to recommend based on the recommendation of the superintendent appointed calendar committee. I am going to request that we remove the action item 5.3, the approval of the 27-28 calendar, but leave the presentation, Mike's presentation on this information and this action will proceed at a later meeting if everyone is okay. So with that, I am making a motion to adopt the agenda with that change. I'll second. Do we have any questions or comments? Hearing none, Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Blankenship? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landys? Yes. And Mr. Midgett? Yes. That brings us to the Pledge of Allegiance. Tonight, Aria Burch, is that right? Third grade Park Elementary student will be leading the meeting in the Pledge of Allegiance. Aria, would you? Of the United States of America, and to the
004great public for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you for coming out tonight on this cold, snowy night. In recognition of third grade Park Elementary student, Aria Burch, for your contribution and commitment in serving as the Board of Education's Pledge of Allegiance leader on the 16th day of March, 2026. The mission of Chardon Local School District, we commit to high achievement for all students. That brings us to the first hearing in the public for agenda items only. There are none. There are none, okay. Moving to Consent Agenda, Item 3. We have five items for this evening's Consent Agenda. Item 3.1 is Approval of Minutes, as detailed in the associated enclosures. Item 3.2, Approval of the Warrant List Check Pay Report, as detailed in the enclosure. Item
0053.3, Approval of Administrative Certified License Classified Supplemental Non-Contractual Personnel and Compensation Related Items, as detailed in the enclosure. Item 3.4, Approval of Addendum to the Interagency Agreement for NDE, as detailed in the enclosure. Item 3.5 is Approval of the Out of State Overnight Field Trip for the Chardon High School Wrestling Team, as detailed in the associated enclosure. I am recommending your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? Still moved. I'll second. Any questions or comments? I'm fine with the trip, but I open this up. It looked like this trip already occurred in February, if I read that right. It did. It was a tournament trip, and so the timing of that and the board meeting, we wouldn't have known if a student qualified to go to the trip. Okay. All right. Any other
006questions or comments? Hearing none, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. Mr. Midgett? Yes. And Mrs. Blankenship? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. I wanted to make a very quick comment. In Item 3.3, the Board of Education just approved the resignation for retirement purposes for Linda Eligante, who is our current Director of Student Services. Linda has served the district for 11 years in that role. She's brought many positive changes during that time and built the current program that we have, and I simply wanted to acknowledge Linda for her service and thank her for everything that she's done for Chardon schools. Thank you, Linda. Moving on, our next item, Item 4, is our Chardon High School Student Liaison Report. And we have two student liaisons here this evening
007who are very eager to get home because they've informed me that they want to hunker down because it's snowing. That's so bad. It's so bad. It's going to be terrible tomorrow morning. Right. Okay, hi, I'm Aubrey Fetchick. I'm Henry Sweet, and this is our March 2026 reports. Okay, so a bit of a sports update. Girls' flag football is starting up. That's why I'm so disheveled. I just came from practice. But it's a lot of fun. We're having a really good time. Maybe we'll bring another state champ. I don't know. Chardon Soccer, they've just made history being the first WRC title to have received that. And then Chardon Baseball and Softball are going down to Myrtle Beach to get some warm weather, get some playing. I'm a little jealous. And then our indoor track team made
008it to states. So they did pretty good. Caleb Nisek with third place. Madison Frost, fourth. Mira Palumbo, eighth. Daniel Mowry, 16th. Toby Rogers, 11th. And then the team relay, place 14th. Swimming states, our team did really well. Briella Hewitt got 27th. Braden Marker, 30th. Toby Rogers got fifth. And he made a school record with his backstroke. And he got 15th in the free. And then we also had a girls relay go, which was the first time in, I think, about five years, which is pretty exciting. One more states thing. Gymnastics. Angelina Columby placed eighth on the uneven bars. So, yeah. Exciting stuff. Very exciting. Okay, this is the Ohio Music Education Association solo and ensemble concert. We had a lot of students get ones and twos, which is Superior Ratings. Sorry. Superior Ratings, they did
009really well. So congrats to all these students. They did a really good job. Oh, no. Did I break it? Oh, yeah. I turned it off. Okay, there we go. All right. Some school activities. So seniors recently participated in, like, a slime making on February 26 for the class of 2026. It's like a monthly activity for our graduating seniors. And then some senior mentors. They planned Fun Day Fridays for our eighth graders. Some of the fun activities were a Hot Wheels track down our school hallway ramp, which was pretty fun. They liked that one. We did some clay modeling and slime making. And then on Valentine's Day, we sold carnations and donated the profits to a local food bank. The NHS ceremony was a really nice way to end up the NHS quarter. We have Micah
010Tagger as our president, Asa Nezakevich as our vice president, Maddie Crusho as our vice president, Gus Schneider as secretary, Jane Florman as treasurer. We're really excited. We got our cords. And I know the new inductees are going to do really well. And then it's a musical, not drama. But it was legally blind. I typed that twice. I was part of the stage crew, so it was a fun experience. Hopefully you guys went and saw it. I saw Dr. Hanlon. Yeah. It was sold out on Sunday, and it was a fun time. Great show. It was a great show. Yeah, they did really well. Our Science Olympiad did really well. They played sixth overall, got fourth in astronomy, third in code busters, second in dynamic planet, fourth in entomology, second in forensics, fourth in material science,
011and second in remote sensing. Very good, guys. Very good. That's all, folks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please make sure you get home safely and wait for my phone call. Just don't wait too long tomorrow morning. Moving on to the next section of our agenda, superintendents' report. I already commented on Mrs. Allegante. I just wanted to draw the board's attention to one other agenda item of note. Oftentimes, currently, there are questions about what our school district does to collaborate with those other school districts, reduce cost, and so on. And tonight, the board will be approving a resolution to participate in an electricity purchasing aggregation program called Power for Schools. We have been a part of Power for Schools really since almost the beginning of its inception. I know in my time in the district,
012we've been a participant in Power for Schools. And this is a great way for, through the Ohio Schools Council, that many school districts and other entities that utilize electricity can collaborate, lock in competitive rates for schools, and save taxpayers significantly on electricity costs. We do the same thing for natural gas. This just happens to be what we're doing for electricity at this point in time. Last week, we had our spring safety committee. This is a great opportunity for district administrators and other personnel to get together with representatives from our first responders, Geo-County Sheriff's Office, CPD, CFD. And during that time, what we do is go through refresher training on various technologies and things that we're using in the school district and how we can interface with first responders most effectively. In addition, we walk through
013practice scenarios and evaluate how jointly we would respond to that particular circumstance. Always a great exercise, and we appreciate the support of our first responders in making that happen. Capital improvements, just to report that the next phase of window replacement, and Deb, if you could just scroll down to see a photo. Next phase of window replacement at Park Elementary School was completed last week. The contractor is now out of that area, and we will continue to work on the remaining window replacements in the building. Also wanted to note that Calc is going to see about a $53,000 playground improvement over spring break. This will address some of the safety concerns related to the outdated equipment that we have in the playground. And continue to benefit our preschool program, which we have located at Calc. And
014then finally, spring break will occur March 30th through April 6th. And we certainly wish everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday break during that time. And look forward to seeing students and staff return to conclude the school year. Item 5.2, this is our teacher spotlight presentation. And I think Mrs. Dinko, you're starting with the presentation, right? I'm here with Amy Cohn, and we're going to talk about what's going on at Munson currently. We're happy to be here tonight. Thanks for letting us share. So right now we are in the midst of our one school, one author program. Traditionally, we've done one school, one book where all the kids read the same book. So we changed it up a little bit this year. And we decided to do one author and choose books that were more grade
015appropriate for the kids. And so the week of March 6th, the kids got clues to see if they could figure out who the author was. They figured it out pretty well in my class, I have to say. They did a good job. So we are reading books from Kate DiCamillo. And the... See, I knew I could not be good at this. What am I doing wrong? I think you're fine. I think it's just... Oh, I'm just doing the wrong thing. So the kindergarten is reading Mercy Watson to the rescue. And first grade is reading the Francine Paloo meets the Ghost Raccoon. And second graders are reading Mercy Watson is Missing. And the third graders are reading The Tale of Despera, which is a Newberry book. So they're very excited because we have a Newberry contest
016where kids can win medals for Newberry books that they read. So it's going very well. We're having a trivia contest right now where they can answer trivia questions and be entered in a drawing. They're having a cover contest where they can design a cover, an alternate cover for the book. And we're having some beautiful, beautiful entries for that. And we're going to kick off, or not kick off, we're going to culminate with a game show. Mr. Prezioso has created a game show host named Jack Gold. So they're going to do its old trivia game show with that. We will also end on March 26 with Literacy Night. And Literacy Night will be themed around the books that we've read. And we'll have that from 5 to 8 on that Thursday evening. And there'll be crafts.
017The PTO has come up with a craft for us. We'll have scavenger hunts, a book tasting where the kids will taste foods from the different books. We have bingo and there'll be prizes. Prizes, we usually do some kind of educational board games where the kids can take them home and practice literacy at home with their parents. And another thing that we're working on right now, our third graders are working on our annual Wax Museum project, which the third graders are currently writing reports, biographies about a historical figure that they have selected. And they will write, they'll create also a digital timeline, which turns out really well. And then on the evening of May 14, they will be doing their oral report, which they'll write in Wax Museum form. And Mrs. Clark, micro-recognizable, Ben there. So
018there's Ben Clark a few years back as Neil Armstrong. And we have Abraham Lincoln and Jane Goodall. So it's a fun night. The third graders look forward to it. It comes towards the end of their time at Munson. It's a very special night for them. I was just telling my husband if you have anyone who needs a Neil Armstrong outfit. We know where to make a call. I don't know who that is this year, but it's there. Well, thank you for that offer. And then I'll turn it over to Mrs. Clark. Okay. Also, we're looking forward to celebrating diversity and inclusion along with Park Elementary School. Usually we do it building by building and this year we're doing it together. So April is National Autism Month. And we will be joining together with them with
019facts each day and a special project in each building which takes a piece from each student and we put it together in a large project this year. It'll be an infinity insignia with everybody's hands. And then we have ongoing pickleball in our building. Mr. Prez for the third graders. You know, we're just trying to get kids to look into like reading for life and fitness skills for life and anything we can to have them carry on. So pickleball is a new and happening thing available in our community. And Mr. Prez is starting with the third graders. The younger kids don't quite have the hand-eye coordination for a ball and a paddle. But they're really having fun with that and they meet once a week. So that's what's going on at Monson. Thank you. I'll take
020that name. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Item 5.3, as indicated by Mrs. Blankenship. Mrs. Blankenship, did you want to acknowledge that Mr. Galhotra is on? Oh, yeah. Sorry, Ash. Mr. Galhotra couldn't be here tonight, but he is on, I guess that's the... Google Meet, right. Yeah, but he's listening in here. And he can participate. He just can't vote on anything. He can listen in and speak to anything he wants to. Thank you. So as noted... I think he said thank you. Sorry, I jumped right in there. As noted at the adoption of the agenda, the board is tabling action on this item. But the board wanted me to go through the presentation with information that was pulled together, so I will do that, and I'm certainly happy to answer any questions that you may
021have as we go through it. Starting with the mission statement of the Chardonnay Local School District, we read this at every board meeting, and we certainly work to support that mission statement through everything that we do, including our school calendar, instructional time, and so on. Again, we commit to high achievement for all students, and we attempt to do everything that we can from the programs that you heard about today at Munson to curriculum that we adopt to programs that we put in place to fulfill that mission in our school district. So first off, just the rationale for why we work on a rolling two-year school district calendar basis and why we're talking even about 27-28 at this point is this allows us to plan effectively for school trips. For example, our band and other groups
022look at taking trips, and this allows them to schedule those appropriately, make arrangements, and so on. Families also like to schedule trips, and again, having that calendar in advance facilitates that. And also not to be overlooked is that it supports our capital improvement plan in the district, which allows us to lock in contractors and get work completed in the school district in a timely manner and do it as competitively as possible to secure contractors for that work. Really what we've been talking about is two different issues. One is instructional time, and one is academic calendar. So we'll talk a little bit about instructional time to start with. The state of Ohio drives instructional time for school districts, and as I've noted previously, all school districts in the state of Ohio now operate on hours, not
023school days. So as you can see, in our particular instance, we have 910 hours for students in full-day kindergarten through grade six and 1,001 hours for students in grades seven through 12. And if you would like, there's a guidance document linked here from the Odoo website that you can review that. In addition, when we talk about what actually counts as open for instruction and defines time that counts from the state of Ohio, it's really when students are engaged in those four activities that are listed there, either attending regularly scheduled classes, participating in supervised activities, participating in approved educational options, or participating in co-curricular, not extracurricular events, activities scheduled during the school day. So what this eliminates is things like lunch, breakfast, extracurricular activities, even passing time are things that do not include in instructional time
024when we count. And that will be important in just a moment. So let's do a little bit of a dive into instructional time in the district. Deb, if you wouldn't mind. Do you remember the name of that spreadsheet? Yeah, it starts with version three. So V-E-R. There you go. Just back up. Not the whole word. V-E-R. There you go. I know this will be a little bit busy, but bear with me if you will. We'll work from left to right. We have each school and each grade level that we offer in our school district. All of our, and I'm going to go column by column. So every student in our, or every school in our district operates on 181 student days, which comes from our collective bargaining agreement with our Teachers Association. And that's how
025we start as the basis for the calendar. There are a couple of days that we are, it was pointed out during public participation at the last meeting, that we can take credit for school districts under revised code are allowed to take credit for two conference days. You can see we already billed that into the calendar and take credit for those days. Students do not attend. We can also take credit for, in the next column, two professional development days. We do that district wide. And our district offers an additional professional development day that students do not attend. And then finally, the last column there, or the next column there, we have days that our seniors, Deb, if you could go to the next column, G, column G. Thank you. And if you'll notice grade 12, our
026seniors do not attend four days, and those are four days that can be reduced from that 1001 hours state minimum. So if we go to that, and then if we go to the next column, sorry, one more deduction. Our kindergarten students, we back out three days of time at the beginning of the year where kindergartners are not in attendance on a phase in schedule that we do for kindergarten assessment as well as phasing them into the kindergarten program. So those days back out. That next column, I, will result in the net number of days by grade level, and you can see it ranges from 172 for seniors to 173 for kindergartners to 176 for most students in the district. Next column, J, currently we have on record for this year six calamity days in the
027school district. So if we go to column K, our net instructional days after backing out those calamity days, you can subtract six from all of those and see where we're at. The next two columns, column L and M, show the bell-to-bell time for students by grade level, and column N then gives us that bell-to-bell time converted into hours and minutes. The next column, column O, is the number of minutes in the instructional day. It simply takes the hours and minutes and converts it into minutes. Now we start a series of deductions that occur. The first column is deduction for transition time or passing time. This is when students are in the hallways, they're not engaged in instructional activities and so on. Mainly this is a high school, I'm sorry, passing time we have in the
028next column. This is transition time and this only appears for students in grades four and five. This is the opportunity for fourth and fifth graders to get in and get settled into their school day where they're not engaged in instructional activities. If we go to the next column, passing time, self-explanatory, basically middle school and high school, we have passing time for certain grade levels, 23 minutes at the high school during the course of the day, 12 minutes for middle schoolers that are having that passing time in their day. As noted previously, lunch and recess do not count, so you can see the minute deductions for lunch and recess. This results in the net instructional day, the time that counts for students at every grade level, and the next column, column U, simply converts that into
029year-to-date, actual scheduled instructional hours for all of those students. Then we have in the next column the calamity days converted into hours that our district has experienced so far. This is based on the actual student day, so the column has different values depending on the length of the instructional day that was lost due to the calamity days. This next column, column Y then, does the math and shows the actual year-to-date instructional hours minus calamity time that has been lost. The next column, column X, is the adjustment for our seniors only. This backs out the three days by law that seniors are allowed not to be in attendance, and it backs out their respective instructional day. And you'll note in the next column, this is then the state minimum hours, and for seniors you'll notice that
030that 18 hours has been backed out because that's the three days they're permitted not to be in attendance. The next column is the over-under from the state minimum. If the areas that you see in red for the elementary school, we are, by a pure calculation of instructional time, we are already under for this year based on six calamity days. As a result, the next column reaches back and picks up those two conference days and two professional development days that I mentioned earlier in the spreadsheet and reincorporates the time that we can take credit for, even though students are not in attendance and the net green at the end is the amount over or under the state minimum. A little bit of a history lesson that if you look back that most school districts are situated
031where we are because of the transition from hours to days, so districts are over what the state minimum is in most cases. You can see the elementary schools were running under. Middle schools where we have a bit of an overage admittedly, and I'll talk about that when we get back into the presentation as to how we arrive there. At the high school we have significantly lower but still an overage. Obviously if we took more calamity time that would be more time that would be backed out of the time that we are in access right now of the state minimum. I'll take a breath right there if there are any questions on the spreadsheet before I jump back to the PowerPoint. First of all, when it comes to kindergarten that's definitely concerning. For example, I'm just
032throwing this out there because I was thinking about it because it is snowing outside. So what will happen if we end up on a snow day tomorrow? We will fall under the state minimum. That's an area that we'll have to take a look at as to how we, I mean at the end of the day we can't fall under. Okay, so, and before we go any further, I just want to give a shout out to Diane Farizal, our EMAS coordinator for putting this together. I don't know of any other district in the state, Mike might, but I don't know anybody who's broken down our grade levels like she has to calculate our time. So thank you, Diane, for doing that. Anyway, anyone else have any questions or comments about the spreadsheet? Okay, hearing none, Deb,
033if we could jump back into the PowerPoint, please. So we'll talk a little bit about what no pun intended drives that middle school time in a few minutes, but let me kind of blend in the academic calendar and what we do and then we'll circle back to that question. So first off, the calendar that our district utilizes, and I think you're going to see near the end of the presentation that we are not an outlier in the state. We are very consistent with what most school districts do in the state of Ohio is designed around a few kind of core principles or events that occur. Number one, our mission is maximizing student learning and we do everything that we can do much like everyone else to align to state assessments that are given. And just
034as a quick history note here, you know, I've been asked before, why don't we pressure the state to move the state assessments back further in the year? They actually have been moved back from where they occurred previously. And if you look at what has to happen today with taking the assessments, scoring the assessments, giving the results back to school districts, making sure that the data are accurate, processing it through the state to issue the state district report cards, it kind of all falls in a cycle and it's about as tight as I think the state is willing to push the assessments back in the school year. So I don't think that there's much room to see any movement from the state level on changing the assessment schedule. In addition, we have other assessments like end-of-course
035exams that are tied to students' graduation requirements, ACT, SAT, which are important for college entrance, and I want to note scholarships for students and eking out every point on an ACT through instruction or an SAT is important to parents that are situated at that particular point in their academic experience. AP tests where families are paying to take exams to achieve college credit, again, providing as much instruction as possible front-loaded to the AP testing is important for parents that are paying for those exams. Another piece is that we have structured our calendar to complete the end-of-semester assessments before the traditional assessments that students do before winter break. In the old model, the semester was ending after in January and students were being on break and then coming back and having to gear back up. Instead, now
036they start a new semester when they return. This also kind of prevents rushed instruction and so on during the spring and aligns best with college calendars, career tech, dual credit courses, and things that students are involved in. These are just some of the academic balancing acts that we navigate every year with the calendar that we develop. As noted, it builds in flexibility for our winners. I'm not going to read all the slides' content to you, but it's important to understand to achieve that balance of semester and winter break and the fact that snow days typically fall in the second semester. We have more instructional days in the second semester to act as a sponge to absorb those days that are lost to instruction to result in a balance across both semesters. So it does provide
037a kind of a buffer, if you will, for weather closures and disruptions that may occur more than likely in second semester. Just a few other advantages that we have, everything from students seeking summer employment to interference with college orientations and bridge programs that we have as students leave us and go into post-secondary education, and this again facilitates that to the extent that we can. On this slide, it's important to note that many families are returning, and we'll talk about why in our school district, are returning to kind of regular routines in mid-August. Having students in school provides supervision, meals, support services to those students. To work with that and making changes to that could impact childcare and financial challenge and provide financial challenges for working families. The other hidden piece is the number of students
038that are engaged in athletics and student activities that begin August 1. We have a large number of students from especially middle school and high school that are engaged in marching band, extracurriculars, sports, all different kinds of things, and starting school at that time keeps students academically connected during that high activity time. A late start would mean that those fall participants would actually experience, if it played out on the end of the year, would experience a shorter summer than what they're currently seeing with school ending near Memorial Day rather than ending in June. Some of the common questions, don't families want more summer? We try to honor that nine to ten weeks of summer break typically in our calendar, and that mid-August start, I'll show some data that will evidence that it provides for a more
039balanced year without pushing that instruction late into June. Isn't it hot in August? It's hot in August. It's hot in September. It's hot in May. It's hot in June. We experience and our schools follow protocols. If we have heat, we do have discussions among superintendents about heat days. If it becomes necessary to consider closing school, we make those adjustments just like we would for a snow day. And again, kind of the post-Labor Day start is tied to kind of the agricultural industrial calendars that don't necessarily reflect all of the educational and economic realities that our families are facing today. So let's talk about a few Chardon-specific considerations in all of what we do. And as I said, I was going to circle back to time. This is circling back to what we deal with with
040time and that middle school day that we experience. Our school district did utilize for a few years a three-tier transportation schedule to bring middle school students in later in the day. And let me explain what I mean by tiers. First, under that model, our first tier was high school transportation starting at about 6.15 in the morning, coming into the high school, then going back out, doing middle school transportation, and then going back out and doing elementary and doing the same thing in somewhat the same thing in the afternoon. As the board members recall, that was a period in time where there were a lot of complaints about the transportation services in the district due to the lack of availability of bus drivers and challenges with schedules that the district simply could not meet that three-tier
041schedule. Our current two-tier schedule brings high school and middle school students riding in together and out, and it's alleviated those concerns within our transportation program. And we'll talk about the programming that was created for middle school students a little bit later, so it's not like there's just an extension of, you know, sit and get, if you will, but we've tried to create programming to support students during that time. So if we shifted to a later school start date, this is a separate consideration, we are obligated to provide transportation to every non-public school within a 30-minute radius of any student's residence in our school district. That's Ohio law. Alignment, better alignment with their calendars helps contain cost, and it's not a matter of, I know St. Mary's is very obvious or NDCL is very obvious, but
042there's only two of a number of non-public schools that we transport to, and alignment with their calendars is important. I don't expect that NDCL would align to us because they serve students from a number of school districts, and they have to kind of strike a middle line to what most school districts are doing and hope for the best to create alignment of their calendar. And then finally, adding time to the current school day, a longer day, which districts like Berkshire have done, in my opinion, in our district will adversely impact transportation for those non-publics. We're stretched very thin to meet the demands that we have every day, and it would certainly spill over into our own athletic transportation at the end of each school day, which is this whole other layer of transportation that we
043plan and provide every day. If we were to lengthen our academic day, it would certainly spill into that and have a significant impact on our ability to get students to athletic events. As I noted, we've created, I think, some very positive, which sets our school district apart, schedule enhancements at the middle school to address that additional time. We have double related arts periods every day for students, giving more room for things beyond the academic instruction. We are providing a basis for future skills with foreign language programs, STEM, media, digital design, the arts, and so on. We have a strong portfolio of extracurricular offerings and students are choosing from those during those academic periods. If we were to shorten that middle school day, that would likely be impacted. Another piece that we've built in our district
044that is not something that's offered is flex period, which ensures that we're doing everything we can to support instruction. This is a period of what's termed no new instruction for students. It's where we target our pullout services for students that require additional support and pullout instruction during the course of the day. It also allows teachers to more narrow or specifically focus for every student areas where they may need support and ensuring that students are prepared for success in their core classes. Dr. Hanlon, can I interrupt on flex time? So I have two fifth graders and a seventh grader right now, so I was nosy and I went and talked to middle school teachers about what they do in flex time. I am blessed all three of my children are gifted, so I actually have both
045of my fifth graders, I've talked to their teachers with their WEPs. One does reading, one does math during this flex time to try to enhance his education. They also both get their homework done, which for me I love because then when they come home from school, I give them an hour to do whatever they want and then we go to sports. I'm not worried about them getting their homework done. So to me, I understand that we have more time in that school day, but I personally would never vote to get rid of that flex time, especially after seeing it with my own children. I think if there are students, I'm not going to lie, at the beginning of the school year my daughter was ranting that she had nothing to do during flex time, so
046I had to have that conversation with her teacher, what can we do? And so she's reading, it's kind of like the Newberry Challenge back at Munson, she's reading higher level books now to continue to engage her and stretch her WEP planning. So to me that's more of a conversation with the teachers, but I think I would never take it away from my kids if I were as a board member chose to. And so if you're having issues there, please talk to your teachers. Thank you. Just a few staff considerations associated with what we currently do in our calendar, and it does tie back to state testing and a few other things. Our current collective bargaining agreement calls for 181 student days and 185 staff days. So under the present CBA we would need to fit
047those days into the instructional calendar, and that would include 27-28, because our collective bargaining agreements run through June 30th of 28. A start after Labor Day would likely result in an end date date somewhere in mid-June if we are observing the typical holiday breaks, unless those other non-holiday breaks, essentially I call them non-student days, are eliminated. I know that's kind of a double negative, but basically if you were eaten to break time you could absorb some of that. Staff evaluations in state tested grades are dependent at least in part on student performance on the assessments, and reducing instructional time has the potential to directly impact staff evaluations, and that's state driven, that's not driven by our district. Again, I've already touched on this point that it was brought up during public participation, that the state
048provides flexibility for school districts, we already use that flexibility, and have those days where students don't report for parent-teacher conferences, and for professional development we max out what is permitted under the code, which is two days for conferences and two days for professional meetings, and our students do not attend. The only time that those are factored in, as you saw in the spreadsheet, is when in the case of our elementary schools we have dipped below the state minimum number of hours, and we're reaching back to take credit for these days where students were not in attendance, but we can count them. And then potential impact, fiscal impact on our state report card. This past biennium, the Ohio legislature created a new incentive for districts that received four and five stars on the local report card.
049For our district that's 255,000, over this biennium about 128, 27 per year. So total for fiscal 26, 27 is 255,000, and loss of that incentive funding if the report card were to dip would necessitate or cause some impact reconsideration of staffing if we were to lose those additional resources. So we took a look at what's happening in the state of Ohio at this point, and we took a sample of 313 public school districts. Where does 313 come from? We checked every district that we could. 313 districts had their academic calendar posted for next year that we could take a look at. So we went to their website, looked at their calendar, and this is what we found. Of the 313 districts, the 12 of them had a post-Labor Day start, just under 4% of the
050districts. We had, I'm sorry, post-Labor Day, excuse me. Of the districts that had post-9 September 1st starts, that would include the post-Labor Day start districts. There were 30 under 10% of those districts. And of the 313 districts, 49 or about 15.5% had June 1st or later ending dates. Now again, that's just over half of the districts in the state, 607 school districts in the state of Ohio. If we take a look at the academic achievement of those 300, of those, I'm sorry, the 30 or so districts, 32 districts, and that is including Chardon now. Of the post-September 1st start date school districts, their average performance index score was an 89, just over 89. For districts over, there were two of those districts that had PI scores over 100, with an average of 101.35. And as
051a reminder, Chardon schools had just under a 102 performance index on that 24, 25 local report card. So fairly significant, and I do want to draw your attention that the 89.3 is an average performance index score. So there were districts that were significantly below 89, and that's pretty far cry from the 102 for our district. We also looked at the, of the districts that started in August, from that sample of 313 districts, there were 283 districts. And this is a frequency distribution of the starting dates. The earliest starting date we could find was August 7th and running through August 31st. Highlighted in yellow was August 19th. There are 75, the highest number of districts are starting on August 19th. And the asterisk indicates that Chardon is also starting on August 19th. But this gives you
052a sense of the distribution of start dates during that period in time. So then we pulled the top performing school districts in the state of Ohio based on performance index score. These are the top 11 school districts, some near us and others across the state. These are all five-star districts. You can see the performance index scores ranging from 112 down to 108. And for those top 11 districts who are the districts that we are admittedly working to continue to model programs after and help our students back to our mission achieve at high levels to make sure that that occurs. You can see that all but two are starting either 818, 819, or 820. Now this is for next year, next school year. So very consistent with what Chardon is doing and how we've designed our
053calendar. Their end date is very consistent with what we do in our calendar end date. And I wanted to note the two exceptions because as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, you can absorb days from breaks to make things happen. So the Marion local schools, they don't have what we call fair day. They don't take the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. They've shortened their winter break and they have a three-day spring break. That's where their days are coming from to start their calendar a little bit later. If you take a look at Versailles, they don't have a fair day again. They have a shortened winter break and their spring break is two days, Friday and Monday. Again, anything is possible. Those are compromises that those districts have chosen. No criticism, that's just what they've chosen to do
054to fit the time into their instructional calendar. So with that, again, our commitment is to high achievement for all students. That's what we focus on. And the calendar that our administrative team has put together, we believe represents the strongest balance among all those competing factors that we attempt to address and certainly recognize some of the concerns that have been mentioned previously on this topic. But I wanted to provide the rationale for why our district does what we do. That concludes the discussion. Thanks, Mike. Does anyone have any questions on Mike's presentation tonight? I think he covered a lot of information here. And what, 20-some slides or something? So you covered a lot. Sorry. No, no, that's fine. So does everyone have, my question to the board is, does everyone have the information that they need
055to proceed at a later meeting to act on the calendar? Or do we need to look at a work session? I know that a number of the board members have talked with Mike in the past month with some questions and additional information. Is there anything else that's needed or is this something we can put on the April calendar, April agenda? You know, one thing, and I've talked with Mike and Karen separately, but the concern that I've had is that the sixth grade is about 18 days over the state minimum and the fifth grade is 14 days over the state minimum. I know this is a factor around busing, but I mean, the number of hours, again, even if you've got flex time and everything else, we've got a bubble in the middle that there's significant,
056I mean, it's way over, 18 hours, 18 days more than the state minimum for sixth grade concerns me. So I've asked them, could we talk about it as a board? I'd like, when Ash is back, I'd like for us to have a work session. And I propose that, it's very important, the conversations I had were helpful, but I'm still, you know, trying to reconcile these numbers in between. And, you know, yeah, so that would be my recommendation. Okay, so if we look at doing a work session, is everybody in agreement to move forward with the work session? A couple things I would ask is, first of all, make sure to get any further questions or any information needed for this work session to Mike and Deb ahead of time so they can be prepared. And
057then I guess if everybody's in agreement for a work session, Mike, if you can facilitate everybody's schedules. Yeah, I can begin polling and see what we can do. And see what we can put together. I personally would like to do this sooner than later. I don't know what everybody's schedules are, but if we can do it sooner. But I know you might need time, too, to get information together, whatever questions the board has to help them make a decision. Yeah, two items, I would say. I mean, I understand Mr. Landy's, Mr. Galhotra, have probably the most transportation intensive schedules, or, you know, being travel, I should say. So we'll do what we can do to facilitate that. And yes, it would depend on information needs. It would also back into how much time may be
058necessary. Okay, so we will get that scheduled and hopefully we can move forward. Would it be possible to bring our middle school admin team in to talk more? Because I know I talked with Mrs. Sherwood more about those hours for this work session so that they kind of understood more. Yeah, thank you for the question. They were arranged for this evening, and then when it looked like this was going to be delayed to a work session, I told them we would reschedule them at that time. Perfect. So yes, we'll have Josh Nau, transportation director will be here, high school and middle school admins, and we'll have everybody that may be relevant to that conversation. One part, if I can remember from that discussion, just to get this point to be upfront, ready for this, the
059only question I would have is parents who brought this concern, they were mentioning about top floor, their students were with extra heat or something. I don't know if it would help us to understand. Sorry, it may be on my side that I don't understand the layout. So if there is any difference on environment from the top floor of that building versus first floor, so that assessment may help me learn a little bit more if there is any engineering solution to be a concern. But we can talk about that there. Sure, thank you. I'll try to gather whatever. You're talking about the park heat, right, Ash? Yeah, there was something about that particular, so I know if there is more about building levels, whatever, so just giving an idea that may be helpful for me just
060because I don't know that building enough. Absolutely. Well, moving forward, anybody who has more questions or need information, like I said, they can contact Mike or Deb so they can facilitate having that information available for the work session. Okay, moving forward, item 5.4, approval of resolution 2026-07, authorizing the filing of an original complaint against the valuation of commercial real property owned by Meijer stores as detailed in the enclosure. I'm recommending your approval. So moved. Do we have a second? I second it. Any questions or comments? Deb, if you file this and they change it, will that result in more property tax money for us? Yes. Okay, from the commercial entity then? Original new, yeah. Okay. Any other questions or comments? And Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Buckinship? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr.
061Laggis? Yes. And Mr. McJackins? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Next item is 5.5, approval of resolution 2026-08, authorizing the filing of an original complaint against the valuation of commercial real property owned by MB2K LLC as detailed in the enclosure. I'm recommending your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? I'll move. Second. Do we have any questions or comments? Here you go, Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. Mr. McGat? Yes. And Mrs. Blankenship? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Item 5.6 is approval of a memorandum of understanding between the Chardon Local Schools Board of Education and the Chardon Association of Classified Employees as detailed in the enclosure. I'm recommending your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? So
062moved. Second. Do we have any questions or comments? I did read this and it says through the end of this school year, so this is an additional aid at our overstaffed classroom at Monson. So it only is through the end of this school year. I was wondering what next school year looked like, but it doesn't sound like this is applying to that, so I'm glad we're making a short-term change to help them at least. Thank you. It'll depend on enrollment next year. Any other questions or comments? Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. Mr. Medjatt? Yes. And Mrs. Blackinshaw? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members. Our next item is item 5.7. This is approval of agreement regarding the electricity purchasing program of the Ohio Schools Council Power for Schools.
063I am recommending your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? Second. I'll make a motion if you want a second. Do we have any questions or comments? Okay, none. Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Blackinshaw? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. And Mr. Medjatt? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Next item is item 5.8. This is approval of the MIB's third-party managed services for on-campus broadband networks agreement, as detailed in the associated enclosure. I am recommending your approval, and we'll have just a brief comment following motion and second. Do we have a motion and a second? So moved. Second. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Just kind of to touch on this very briefly, you'll note in the item description that this is under the
064federal E-Rate program. Each year, school districts are eligible for E-Rate dollars through the federal government. These are charges that all of us pay as phone users. It's called the Universal Service Fund. If you take a look at your phone bill, and it goes into essentially a tax that's administered through the federal government that is distributed back to school districts, among other entities, but it's used for Internet connectivity and other resources. And while this is not full funding, the E-Rate program does provide some form of reimbursement back to the school district. This particular agreement is for layered management approach for our Internet broadband connection services that we have in the district. So I just thought it might be helpful to provide a little background on the federal E-Rate program and how it impacts school districts. Any
065questions or comments? Hearing none, would you please call the roll? Mr. McGat? Yes. Mrs. Blankenship? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landys? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. That concludes my section of the agenda for this evening. Thanks, Mike. Good. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. First item on my agenda, 6.1, which is the Treasurer's Report. For some reason, the computer doesn't want to go to it. Get a refresh. I'm just talking about Internet, and it looks like I'm realizing my connection. Thank you. I do, too? Okay, good. It must be the snowstorm. All right, it is the snowstorm. Okay, here we go. So we're going to look at the February financial summary, and of course, wow, it's hopping around. Of course, there's AI-generated video in here, too, for the financial
066summary for February. Okay, first report we always look at, bank reconciliation. We ended February with $26.9 million in the bank, balanced book to bank with just some very small adjustments. Second report we always look at is our cash summary report. We always look for negatives in this third column, and we really don't see any until we get down into athletics. Now, if you recall, athletics is typically negative most of the year. At the end of last year, we did a larger transfer in better terms to athletics. So now we're going, here we are, February, and we're just starting to go into the negatives. So we will have to transfer again at the end of this year. Lastly is the grants, which of course we use first and then are reimbursed. I'm going to go back
067up to permanent improvement, because although it's in the plus in the third column, after open purchase orders, it goes into the red. But we will see, and we actually did just get, our final tax payments. So we'll see that back in the black in March report. So we're now comparing to the five-year forecast that you just approved at the last board meeting. We collected $253 less revenue than anticipated, and was only over budget, about $33,000. So this is only a $33,000 shift from where we thought our cash balance was going to end up in our February, so we're very, very close, so that's great. For monthly revenue, we collected a little over $7 million. Last year we collected $7.9 million at this point. It was just a shift in tax collections. You can see right
068here. And then monthly expenditures, we spent $3.2 million. Last year we spent a little over $3 million, so we spent less last year, more this year than we did last year. We spent more in salaries, more in purchase services, and more in other expenditures than we did this month last year. When we look at annual revenue, we've spent $29,191,000 so far this year. I mean, we've received $29,191,000, which is more than we received at this time last year. We received more across the board, taxes, state, and other. But for expenditures, we spent $24,756,000. We spent more in salaries than we did this time last year, more in purchase services, but way less in other, because we've been talking about this all year. The capital outlay, this transportation center is done, so we're not spending the
069funds on capital outlay this year. Salaries for February, $1.7 million. We've completed 17 of 26 pays, and so far this year we've spent a little over $14 million in salaries. Here we are, we just completed February, so we're really right on budget. True days we look at every single month. Our average spending, about $3.4 million monthly, $174,000 a day. If you recall, this went up. We were down here. I like this chart in the bottom. It shows the last five years and how our cash balance changes. We are on upswing because we received an advance. We just received a second advance, and we'll get our final settlement in March, and then we'll start to see our cash balance dip again. So these true days are going to go up, and then they're going to come
070back down again. Food service, we had a deficit month of almost $28,000, so we have an ending fund balance of $557,000. Again, the goal for this fund is to end with about $300,000, so we're on track. We're on track to end a little bit higher, but Brett does tell me he's purchasing some equipment that's going to bring this down. Permanent improvements, as you can see we're right here. Here's February, so we saw in our cash summary report we're out of the black. We're going to get another, you know, our final settlement, which we just got for March, and then we'll spend that and end up, you know, somewhere just a little bit above zero by the end of the year. Where did we receive our money? The second tax advance is what we received in
071February, so we received $527.14 in our PI fund, $1.7 million so far this year. For spending, we spent $327,000, and we've spent a little over $2.2 million. What did we spend in February? Floor and wall rack, bin organizers for this building. We're working on the maintenance department now and getting everybody moved over there and everything organized. We also did the park elementary windows, which was in Dr. Hanlon's report, and then we did some instrument repairs for both high school and middle school. We only did half the windows of parks so far, right? Yes. A little more than half. Okay, so they're not completely done? No, but there's more than half for sure. And finally, we look at our self-insurance fund, our health insurance fund, which is fund 024. We were talking about this last month,
072and I had mentioned that the claims I was seeing for February were low, and they were. Total claims came in at $251,000, and you can see in the last several months, you know, $415,000, $653,000, $767,000. So the claims were low, and I can tell you again for March, our claims are also low. They're going to be closer to $375,000, so still lower than some of these other months. I'm not sure why. Everybody is really healthy, which is awesome. So our cash balance picked up a little. It's at $2.7 million, well over our reserve of $1.9. Are there any questions on the financials? Anyone have any questions for Deb? Okay, good. So now we're going to get into our Topper facts. This is something new we just started last month. And our first question, do schools
073concentrate on cost management, early containment, or cost avoidance? And yes, we certainly do. Cost management is the process of planning and controlling the budget to keep expenses in check. So these are just a few. We do a lot to try to contain costs. But we did reconfiguration. And when we looked back at reconfiguration, reconfiguration happened about 2018, 2019. We found over $7 million in savings over reconfiguration. We did LED lighting, and I want to say that was back in 2017. And then Mike also mentioned earlier with the natural gas and electricity aggregate purchasing. Electricity we just did earlier in Mike's section. We had this up on the screen a couple of months ago, but we saved last year $331,000 in one year in this aggregate program. We also had an EPC buyout. That was a
074retirement incentive that we did for teachers. And on top of that, even after the two years, we had an additional 14 retirements last year. My salaries were $1.4 million less than 26, and I anticipated they were going to be a couple years ago. Because we hire in new teachers at the bottom of the scale, and the teachers at the top of the scale are the ones that are leaving. So this saves us a great deal of money when we do these EPC buyout retirement incentives. We moved a preschool in-house. Again, Mike, help me with the dates, 2018. Thereabouts, yes. Reconfiguration time. We track preschool costs every year. Preschool costs are about, I can tell you, $670,000 to $690,000. When I went back and looked at preschool costs from prior to that, it was relatively $800,000.
075So we're saving $152,000 a year on preschool. And we're planning on doing the same thing with vocational. So I'm really excited about tracking the savings there. Go ahead. If I could interject. Yeah, absolutely. The preschool, just as a reminder, the school district is obligated to provide services to three- and four-year-olds that are identified with qualifying special education needs. So it's not simply a nice-to-have program, although it's a wonderful, you know, just outstanding program in the district. We are required to serve those students. And so prior to us bringing it back in-house, they were being served out of the district at other placements. And this was a much more cost-effective as well as instructionally effective solution for the school district. So when they were out of district, that was our budget paying those services up. Purchase
076services, yeah. So annually, we look at staffing to compare by grade level, by building, compare the amount of teachers we have to the amount of students, making sure everything's in line. We do the annual bus bidding through consortium, right, or through Ohio School Council. Health insurance analysis. Dr. Hanlon and I were just working on this. We're actually presenting to our health insurance committee here pretty soon, the next couple of weeks, three cost avoidance measures that we can take with our health insurance. Now, you see our health insurance is doing great, but we're always looking at something to continue saving, right? And these are three programs that are going to help our staff and save money for our school district. We're really excited about that. And then I don't know if most people know, but any
077job over, there's like a state set amount. It's right around $78,000 right now. That number does fluctuate every year. We have to bid these jobs. We can't just pick a contractor. We have to put it out. There's a whole process involved. We put it in the paper. We put it on the builder's exchange. We get packages in. We do a bid opening. We have to assess all of this. We have to score it. We present it to the board. And then they are the ones that decide who do these jobs. Any jobs that are under this buy policy, we require two prices. We want to see shopping done. We want to see that we are getting the best price. And Mr. Koepfel is amazing at all of that. So the second thing I wanted to
078look at was, how does Chardon's expenditure growth compare to the average rate of inflation? Now, I'm not crazy about this chart on the right, but the red or orange-ish line is the rate of inflation, and the blue line is our spending. Now, if I take the average rate of inflation from 2019 to 2026, it's 3.46%. If I take the average expenditure growth of Chardon local schools for the same time period, it's 2.72%. We are staying under the rate of inflation. Yes, are we all over the place with this blue line, but why have an explanation? Because you guys all know me. I like the why, right? So we had COVID, so we came out of COVID, and then we got back. We right-sized. We figured everything else out. Then we bought this transportation center, and
079we had a lot of extra expenditures for this transportation center. Now we finished it, right? And now we're back to normal, so we're way back down here again. And we have 3.9 built into the forecast moving forward for the rate of inflation. So does the board have any questions on either of these top effects? Any additional comments? Okay. I just want to say I think it's a great addition to answer some questions that the community might have, so it's a great addition. Yeah, we're going to start incorporating some of these into social media as well. So after we present them at the board meeting, then Mason's going to take them and start posting them out on social media. Okay. My board docs is being really silly, so let's get back to... Okay. So if everybody's
080good, let's move on to 6.2. 6.2 is very generous donations as detailed and associated enclosures. I am recommending you Google. So moved. Do we have a second? Second. Any questions or comments? Deb, I have a quick question, and I apologize for putting you on the spot. Do we cover any of the costs of Science Olympiad, or is it entirely club-based and they have to fund themselves? It was always a question we had in the foundation and I wasn't sure. They fund themselves. Okay, so we don't pay registration fees or anything for them? We do provide transportation. Okay. Yes. And we also waive facility use fees. So we do try to partner with Science Olympiad insofar as a club and their accomplishments are considerable and we want to support that. Yeah, I wasn't sure if they
081were a team or a club and what the funding was, and it was always a question. The foundation just popped up in my head when I saw this, so sorry. Any other questions or comments about donations? Once again, I know I say this every month, but thank you to the community for all these donations. It's very much appreciated by all of our students and staff. So thank you. Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Clark, is that you? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. And Mr. Mujet? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Next item on my agenda is equipment disposal. As detailed as associated closures, I am not going to be needed for your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? So moved. Do we have a second?
082I'll second. Any questions or comments about disposals? Hearing none, Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Blanketschip? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. And Mr. Mujet? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Next item on my agenda is the final appropriations measure, amendment number six, chart fiscal year 26. As detailed as associated closures, I am not going to be needed for your approval. Do we have a motion and a second? So moved. Second. Andrew, second. Do we have any questions or comments? Deb, would you please call the roll? Mr. Mujet? Yes. Mrs. Blanketschip? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. And Mr. Landis? Yes. Thank you, Madam President, members of the board. Last item on my agenda, 6.5, which is approval of resolution 2026-06, accepting the amounts and rates as determined by the budget
083commission and authorizing the necessary tax levies and certifying them to the county auditor. I am recommending your approval. So moved. Do we have a second? I'll second. Is that you, Deb? Mm-hmm. Do we have any questions or comments? Hearing none, Deb, would you please call the roll? Mrs. Blanketschip? Yes. Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landis? Yes. And Mr. Mujet? Yes. Thank you. That concludes my section. Thanks, Deb. So that brings us to the board reports. School foundations, Gordon? Briefly, last meeting I mentioned, they put out the new application for winter. There's been two grants that were approximately $1,000 each that were approved by the foundation. They only received two applications. I mentioned it would be great if people asked for more money. There's money there and it can come from a teacher. It actually can come
084from an individual. There's five different people or ways to ask for an application. So if you have something in the schools that you're concerned about, I think everybody just thinks that it comes from the PTO. It comes from a lot of different sources. But they have money and there are two small grants that have been approved so far. And I don't think there's been any, there's no other applications pending. Do you know what the two grants were for by chance? One was in Munson and I think one was Park Elementary. Next meeting. They don't have schools foundation emails. They have every possible kind of email. There's like seven people on the foundation and they email back and forth. I'm going to put it all in a folder right now. We were discussing this before meeting.
085We can never find what they're doing in our inbox. Thank you, Gordon. Andrea, legislative. Yeah, I didn't have a slide, but I did look through some stuff today. Governor Dwine did give his State of the State address, I believe it was last week. And Governor Dwine always hits a lot on education and or children. So he again mentioned the science of reading in his State of the State address, which I know Chardon does teach, and he wants to continue driving that home. So there's more implementation teams training available and stuff like that. I don't think Chardon needs that. But you guys can tell me if that's something we still don't do well. I think we do. There's a program to continue or a new program called Ohio Vision C program because he says if kids
086can't read and see, they can't learn. So kindergarten through third graders would be eligible to get free glasses if determined that they need them. So that's kind of nice. And then he's announcing that Do will launch a new state attendance dashboard. So I'm very curious to see what that looks like in April. I know like you can go on their website right now and find our state report cards. So I'm assuming that will also have attendance information on it. And then last but not least, he talked about recess, which I think plays into some of the stuff we were talking about with instructional time. And there's a new House Bill 304, which two representatives are saying that we need to double the amount of recess time for kindergarten through eighth grade. So if you're looking
087at those four, five, six, seven, eight students, and especially the four, five, six students who have too many hours, if this passes, we would have to figure out how to push that through. And without an auxiliary gym, that could be very fun to figure out. And I think that's it. Oh, and then he mentioned screen time again because they did ban cell phones. But he's not pushing anything else on the school districts, just stuff for artificial intelligence companies and tech companies to try to do better at parental controls on cell phones. Andrea, I have a quick question about legislative. I read where there's also a proposal, I don't know if it's made it to a bill yet, but there's a proposal to add more hours to the calendar. I think it's 54 hours, and they're
088equating it to like 10 calendar days. I don't have it on my list here, but I can look it up. Okay, so maybe it hasn't made it to a bill yet, but there was a proposal for that. I can definitely look it up. So I would say I had a couple here also that Dr. Hanlon pointed out, the ones that struck my attention, House Bill 326. It says permits public and non-chartered public schools to select a nationally standardized assessment like the ACT, the SAT, or whatnot. And so I went in and read about it, and basically it says colleges will have to accept whatever the school chooses as their assessment, so we can reduce barriers of this college or this trade school requires this and that. If that passes through, it is currently passed the
089House and Senate committee. There's a career, college, and workforce starting in 26-27, deeming that we are required to develop graduation planning addendum for everyone who we fear will not get a high school diploma, and well as career expiration units, which my daughter's in seventh grade going into eighth grade, that was on her selected schedule, so I know we already do that. That is currently in the Senate committee and has not passed out of that. And then the one that caught my eye probably the most was House Bill 420, which is only in the House committee so far, but they're proposing we sunset continuing property tax levies in 2029, and it will only allow for renewal of fixed term levies. So our current voted millage, the inside millage is not voted on, the outside millage are
090all continuing levies. So if we sunset these in 2029, you're looking at roughly, I think I was doing the math from Deb today, $22 million disappearing from our revenue stream. So if that passes, that will be interesting, but I guess that it's only in the House right now, something to keep an eye on, email your House representative, because that isn't even, we're not taking private taxes away in general, that's only attacking basically anyone with a levy, so a lot of that is school districts. And that's I think what I have. Okay, thanks Andrea. So Auburn. Yay, I get to talk again. So Todd and I both said at Auburn, Todd's the three year, he didn't drop anything in, so I thought I would just quickly run through our March 3rd board meeting. They did email
091out their offers to the students who submitted applications. In the past, this was letter based, so this is the first year they've gone electronic, and within 24 hours they had over 50% acceptance rates of those kids. I have not checked in with Adam Tomko to see how many of Chardon's accepted, but Dr. Glavin was super excited about that new system and the increasing communication speed. They also had the most applications this year, so we're hoping that turns into the most acceptances as well to grow Auburn. Phase 4 of their sports medicine renovation is underway, so that will be like physical therapy and stuff. If your kids want to go into that, this would be a place to start. So that will be at the Auburn building, hopefully done by the spring. I guess pre my
092time at Auburn, there was a cosmetology program eliminated. There was previously two, then there was one. They just voted to bring the second one back because there's a need for it. They also voted to bring on another part-time health care instructor. The nursing profession is popular, and so I believe Dr. Glavin is trying to get a one year nursing program up and running with that instead of just the two, so that will help that. And then there was new employment positions for classroom assistants. We did have to rip some people in the admin. Dr. Glavin is very, I'll say, firm in that they were admin heavy over there, so there was some reduction in forces made in their admin team. And then we voted to approve a lease with iSTEM. So iSTEM used to be
093at Auburn. They moved out to Mentor, and they are going to be back in the Auburn building, but they are going to be paying rent. So this will be a revenue stream because three, four years out, Auburn starts running at a deficit, so that will bring iSTEM in. It will also have shared services of food service, school nurse, security officers, which will allow iSTEM and Auburn to share those costs to save Auburn more money. And all of the renovations being done to the part of Auburn not currently being used will be at the cost of iSTEM. So that will bring roughly a K through eighth grades, no, just kidding, sixth through twelfth grades, I believe, and it also allows districts outside of ours, because I'm told we do it very well by Dr. Glavin, to
094have opportunities for students to do some of their curriculum at Auburn, like English and math that they would do here. They could also do it there through iSTEM. So that will be ramping up, and we'll see where it goes, but it's nice to have them back. Those were previously, Dr. Glavin explained them as excess labs that were used, but he moved them back into the school so they had the space, and it would make more sense to rent the space out to make a profit for Auburn. So lots of things happening. Again, Dr. Glavin moves at the speed of light and has great ideas. Thank you. Student staff liaison, James. Yeah, thanks, Karen. So first, thank you to our communications department for preparing the stories tonight. You can find stories like this on our social
095media and our website, Facebook, Instagram. So first, congratulations to, actually, the student liaison is touching the story already. Congratulations to CHS's recently selected National Honor Society officers for 2726. They are Maddie Kruscho. She's the VP Communications. Probably going to butcher this name, but Addison Deshkovich. I heard him say it earlier. I was paying attention, but then they said it really fast. I didn't quite catch it. All right. Jane Fullerman, Treasurer. Addison is the VP of Service. Jane Fullerman is Treasurer. Gus Schneider, Secretary, and Micah Tagger, President. So NHS is a nationwide organization that recognizes students who maintain an overall cumulative grade point average of 3.5 or higher and are role models of the four pillars of NHS. They are scholarship, leadership, character, and service. The CHS chapter of NHS holds regular meetings and hosts group
096service projects in the community. Congratulations. On to the middle school. CMS recently held its annual science and arts fair. The event showcased the amazing work of our students, scientists, and artists. Friends, family, and community members attended and enjoyed the hundreds of science projects, works of art, and technological designs on display. They also enjoyed musical performances as well as a robotics competition. Thank you to all who came out to celebrate the amazing work of our middle school students at CMS. And Science Olympiad. The Division C Science Olympiad team placed sixth at the Northeast Ohio Regional Tournament and is advancing to the state tournament. Coach Emily is extremely proud of all the hard work that the team put forth to ensure the number one goal at the beginning of the season was achieved. Additionally, the Division B
097Science Olympiad team took sixth at Northeast Ohio Regional Tournament. While this did not afford them the opportunity to advance to the state tournament, Coach Michelle is extremely proud of all the students' results throughout the season this year. Great job to our Science Olympiad students and good luck moving forward. The Chardon Job Training Program students recently had a behind-the-scenes look of our high school cafeteria operations. The visit offered a great opportunity to bridge classroom learning with workforce training, as students observed professional-grade tools and systems that mirrored the tasks they performed at their own job sites. Along with their tours, students took initiative in interviewing Chardon food service staff, gaining first-hand insights into the daily operations and teamwork required to serve our school community. And finally this evening, the Munson Elementary and Park Elementary celebrated the 120th
098day of school in style. Each building enjoyed fun activities, including building with 120 Lego pieces, counting 120 licks toward the center of a Tootsie Pop, stacking 120 paper cups and more. So counting and writing numbers to 120 is an important first-grade standard. These students demonstrate their skills and their commitment towards mastering this standard through this fun celebration. That's my report for this evening. When you're talking about the 120 licks toward the center, I think it would be ow. Yes, I remember that. I'm wondering if they got to the center with that. Now I want to know. How many of them made it? Well, thanks, James. That brings us to the second hearing of the public. Are there any agenda items? None. There is none. The board has a reason to recess to executive session pursuant
099to Board of Education Policy 0167.2. The board will enter to exec session for two matters. One, the appointment, employment, and compensation of an employee or official. And number two, matters required to be kept confidential by federal law or state statutes. Do we have a motion and a second? So moved. Second. Okay. Just so everybody knows, there will be action taken after the exec session. Any questions or comments before we recess? Hearing none, then would you please call the roll? Mrs. Clark? Yes. Mr. Landes? Yes. Mr. Medjad? Yes. And Mrs. Black, I'm sorry. So give us some time to go to exec session.