001I call to order this meeting of the Stoomen Monroe Falls City School District Board of Education on Monday, December 1st, 2025 at 6 PM. Roll call, please. East Jenkins >> here. >> Meridi >> here. >> Sheen >> here. >> Sodonic >> here. >> Wind >> here. Are these working? Please join us in the pledge of allegiance. >> Not very loud. United States. Everything we do is designed to provide a future ready student- centered learning experience for every single child. Our strategic plan for 2021 through 2026 will help us accomplish this goal by considering every facet of a student's learning experience from curriculum to infrastructure to wellness and everything in between. As members of the board of education, we serve as trustees. Therefore, this is a business meeting being conducted in public, not a public meeting.
002We are grateful to serve an engaged community and therefore encourage and respect input from citizens. We expect that everyone present will behave in a manner consistent with the behavior we expect of our students. We reserve the right to have those who do not comply removed from our meeting. Okay. Our next order of business is comments from the audience. At this time, we recommend or we welcome any comments and concerns citizens wish to bring before the board of education. All comments must be directed to the entire board and be no longer than three minutes. We will listen to and consider your remarks, but there will be no conversation aside from clarifying questions. If you are seeking a direct response or further information, we ask that you submit your request in writing. Please begin your remarks with
003your first and last name. >> Hi, my name is Aaron Joerger. I'm a STO alum and the secretary of STO collaboration for change, a local nonprofit. Um, I just wanted everyone to know about a fundraiser for STOH high seniors that's running for Giving Tuesday, which is tomorrow and it ends next Tuesday. Um, we are raising money for seniors outstanding student lunch debt and debt from class fees, which can prevent them from requesting their transcripts for college applications or job applications. You can donate to the fundraiser at sc4c.orgfundraiser or you can get a flyer by talking to my friend Rachel who's seated right over there. Um, lastly, I wanted to note that this fundraiser is being run by the STOD DEI Alliance, which is a partnership of local organizations including SMF NICE, the SMFDEI initiative, SMF
004LGBTQ crew, the SMF Democratic Club, and so collaboration for change. Thank you for your support. Hi, my name is Evelyn Kremar. Um, I have some questions regarding item C under the superintendent's recommendations on tonight's agenda, specifically policy number 5223, which is the revised guidelines for release time for religious instruction during the school day. I would be grateful if you could address these questions in your discussion of this item tonight. I think it is very important for parents to have a clear understanding of the changes that are being made. Number one, were these policy changes put in place after conferring with the uh board's legal counsel? Two, the current policy states students shall not be excused from a core curriculum subject to attend release time instruction. Removed from the current policy are these words. The board
005deems all graded courses to be core curriculum. Does this change mean students can miss art, music, physical education, and other specials to attend RTRI even though those are graded courses? Three, the current policy states, quote, "The board of education requires sponsoring entities to conduct criminal background checks of any instructors or volunteers." Removed from the policy are the words, quote, "The district will not release students to a private entity for religious instruction release time if the entity fails to provide the acknowledgement and/or to satisfactorily complete follow-up criminal background checks as needed. Does this change mean that even if the private entity refuses to provide the required background checks that students can still be released into their care?" On a related note, I'm hoping you can provide an update on the progress of Lifewise Academy, which is
006working to establish itself as a provider of release time religious instruction to students of the Stone Moner Falls School District. I think it is important for everyone to be aware that Lifewise is a Christian nationalist organization whose founder Joel Penton has ties to the Heritage Foundation, which were the creators of Project 2025. Please know that I am completely understand that in amending these policies, you are at the mercy of vague and ambiguous legislation passed by our state government. It is indefensible that these decisions made in the Ohio State House have only complicated the many challenges our public schools and especially our teachers face. I hope you will be able to address my concerns at this meeting. Thank you. Hello. Uh my name is John Moyer and I wanted to address uh one of the items
007on tonight's agenda which is the personnel recommendations and for Martin Pter. Um, I got a chance to know Martin Pter over the years with some leadership work that uh he and I did together and then also his leadership work uh that he wanted to do with his um coaches and players. And uh I I I for one will miss Coach Pter and his influence in our community and I applaud him for not only being a football coach but also desiring to grow young men as leaders, both coaches um and players and I appreciate the opportunity to work with them all the years. So, thank you. Thank you. Okay, seeing no further comments, our next item of business is the superintendent re recommendations. First, we have personnel recommendations. Do I have a motion? So moved. >>
008Second. Any discussion? Roll call, please. >> East Jenkins. >> I reli >> I. >> Sheen. >> Hi. >> Sudonic. >> I. >> Wend. >> I. Next item of business is the Neola policy update transportation supplement. This is up for a vote tonight since it is our third reading. Do I have a motion? So moved. Second. >> Any questions? Discussion. Roll call, please. >> East Jenkins. >> I. >> Mody. >> I. >> Sheen. >> I. >> Sodonic. >> I. >> Wind. >> I. Next is item C. Neola policy uh package. This is our third reading, so it's up for a vote tonight. Do I have a motion? Is there a second discussion? Dr. Gold, could you address some of the questions, please? [clears throat] Uh, we have been in discussion uh in regards uh to Lifewise
009Academy, which is the only religious group at this time who has approached us about using our facilities. Um, at this time, Lifewise uh does not have a director. They were supposed to begin in January of 26, but due to not having a director, that has been placed on hold. Uh the school that has been selected for uh Lifewise is Echo Hills and the church uh Life Vine Life Vine across the street uh is where the program was going to take place. Uh when talking about participation and scheduling, yes, the requirements are that they do not um engage in any of the core curricular uh and so that we would be looking at lunch, recess, and release time during uh specials. uh the release time for that is only one period uh for elementary and they
010were targeting a specific grade level and I want to say that I think it was first or second grade uh where they uh were targeting um that um as far as um I think the other question that was asked is in regards to background checks. Yes, they have to provide background checks as that is our policy for anyone who is entering our schools. Uh so they would not be exempt uh from that. I think I answered all of your questions. >> So Dr. Gold, previously um it was limited, I believe, to lunch and recess. And so at this point, this change in policy expands that a little bit to the specials. It expands it to the specials because that um as the state defines it um corecurricular courses. >> Okay. >> So that's a limitation
011by the state. >> Yes. And this has been run through legal. >> Okay. >> That was the other question that was asked. >> Thank you. >> Just to clarify, these are not policy changes that we've sought. These are state mandates. Correct. >> Yes. because there was a um we had already passed this policy and so these were revisions that came from that uh law and state. Okay, any further questions or discussion? Roll call, please. >> E Jenkins, >> I >> Sheen, >> I sick. >> I >> wind. No. Our next item of business is make sure I'm not skipping something. New business. Uh, our interim contract for treasurer coverage. Do I have a motion? >> So moved. >> Second. >> Okay. Um, I want to emphasize that this, um, has us covered for treasurer of
012record, treasurer duties, um, after Mr. Galano sadly moves on um, until midFebruary. So, it gives the board that will be sworn in in January some time to consider what the longer term plan is, but ensures that we have coverage for that short term. Any questions or discussion? I I just wanted to point out um that you know we did put a lot of time and effort as a board into making the decision on how to handle the vacancy um that will occur. It is a legal um uh we legally do have to have a treasurer of record. Um so we can't leave it empty while um waiting for the new board to be sworn in. But it was important to all five of us that we wait on um the new board and did not
013try to rush anything and make any longer term decisions. Um even if it's a long-term interim. So, we all agreed upon um well, obviously subject to a board vote, but we all kind of agreed that it was in the best interest of the district to um have a a stop gap before such a time as an interim could be even selected or a a longer term solution. And um I did take it um upon myself to reach out to um the two new board members um that will be sworn in just to communicate this ahead of time and let them know where we stand. um and to um find if there was any um specific um you know objections to the to the way we were doing it and I didn't find any. I'm um
014so I I hope that this is an agreeable solution to everyone at least to get us through till we are um with the new board. >> Thank you. I really appreciate you taking that that time to reach out. Um and obviously it's the new board who will be figuring out what that search looks like, what the timeline is going to look like. Um so um we definitely wanted to leave uh room in January for the board to have those discussions. There is an option with this contract to extend it if we um if the board at that point decides um that they would want to. Um, but there's a lot of directions that could go for that search and, uh, we just need to cover things in the interim until those discussions are able to
015happen. And I just want to say too, I do believe that they're both working very diligently to try to make sure that they're ready to go when this when we're when we are faced with the actual search. So, thank you for that. >> Anything further? >> Roll call, please. >> Ease Jenkins. I >> Melody >> I >> Sheen I >> Sudonic >> I >> wind >> I >> Okay, next we have our discussion items. Uh first the board of education meeting dates. Um do we have any further discussion of this? I know we have brought it forward already. Um obviously it won't be decided until January. Anything further on that? Okay, not seeing anything. Let's move on to discussion item B. Um, this is when I invite um our folks who attended OSBA capital conference
016to share a little bit about um what they learned and what benefit it was to go to that conference. Miss Meritty, do you want to start us off on that conversation? >> Uh, sure. Uh, first of all, I'd like to uh say that it was really a very helpful and educational experience to go down there and meet with um school board members from all over the state. Um even though we all have different backgrounds, we all have similar goals in mind and um it's it's kind of good to collaborate and get ideas and see what other people are doing. Uh since we are all facing uh very similar issues with our school districts, uh I I took the opportunity to attend sessions that mostly were focused on school funding. Uh also uh some sessions on
017some of the changes coming up in state law um and what the potential impact would be um mostly on our budgets if if various bills were to pass. Um, one of the things that they really emphasized was that if um the property tax was completely eliminated that it would just be um disastrous for not only schools but law enforcement, uh, fire safety, EMS, uh, parks, zoos, libraries, pretty much anybody. body uh that uh depends on those funds. Uh we uh in the state of Ohio, the way our tax structure is set up, uh they told us that if you combined our income tax and sales tax together, it would not equal what we take in in property taxes. So to just completely eliminate it and um without any plan in place would just be completely
018disastrous. Uh so uh that was a big part of the focus and then also basically 30 years worth of um reduction in funding from the state of Ohio uh as they've uh reduced uh the income tax. Uh we used to have um seven levels of income tax and now there's one. Uh they've reduced the income tax level uh at the highest level used to be 7.5%. Now everybody pays 2.5%. Uh so it's really gone down a lot. Uh schools when it was found unconstitutional, our our funding was 42% uh from the state of Ohio. Uh we now receive um on average school boards receive about 28% of their funding from the state of Ohio. So it's actually gotten worse and they've completely ignored the fact that um they don't meet our constitutional standards. Um you
019know the cornerstone of democracy is having an educated public and um they uh have decided that they uh they don't want to fix that or fund that or make it a priority. Uh and that's obvious since it's been 30 years. They've had plenty of chances to fix it and they just don't want to. Uh so that was um a big part of the discussion uh in several of the uh classes because that's kind of number one in everybody's mind is what we're going to do if we don't have uh that kind of support at the state level. Um also I was the delegate. Um part of our membership with the um Ohio School Board Association is they act as uh a representative for all the school boards to uh the state legislature and uh the
020governor to represent us. And uh there were some uh areas that were changed in uh the platform that they would help to uh represent us. Uh they emphasize local control uh as the state uh has been passing more and more uh unfunded mandates and uh various uh curriculum changes. uh they are chipping away at uh the control that we have locally as school board. And so they wanted to emphasize uh that they will help us support more local control uh as we uh choose things for our school district. Um they also uh did support the school lunch program. So they will be uh advocating for fully funded uh meals for children uh during COVID that portion they could see the results of feeding every child and how much better they did in school. So, um
021they emphasized that and it was uh passed unanimously uh by our by the group of delegates that were voting. Um let me see where else we did. They also supported um programs like our six district compact and want to advocate for additional funding uh for those programs. There has been talk of not having matching funding for those programs anymore. So they wanted to make sure that we were clear in the fact that uh these career classes that are offered by these school districts have the proper funding that they need. Um they also were opposed to um and this would be the delegation was opposed to um any program where schools would return money that they have uh saved because the levies are usually passed on a five-year basis. this when you first get the money,
022uh, you're going to have more money in the account and it looks like you have a lot, but by the end of the five-year process, you have less money. And so, they wanted to make sure that our legislators understand that uh, and don't think that that's just extra money because it's not. So those were really the main points and u the changes and emphasis that were made to the platform. So they will uh lobby for us and advocate on those positions. >> Thank you. It sounds incredibly educational for you as a new board member. I'm really glad that you were able to make the time and to go. >> Um Dr. Did you have some feedback from administration on from capital conference? >> First of all, I want to apologize to everyone in the room.
023The speaker is not working, but everyone who is online can hear us uh speaking. So, I want to apologize because I know everybody's probably thinking why are the mics not working? But they are. Um so, apologize for that. Um just want to share a little bit about the whole purpose of the uh Ohio School Board Association um uh capital conference. It is a conference that is held annually for all school districts and that includes the school board members and those usually at the senior level of cabinet. It's an annual conference. And so you're looking at about 611 school districts who are all in Columbus at the same time. And so what the Ohio School Board Association provides is an opportunity for governance training uh for all schoolboard members as well as the superintendent and treasur.
024Uh it offers policy support and updates. Uh they act as an advocate uh for public schools. Uh and so that is what uh Miss Maretti was sharing. It also provides an opportunity for schoolboard members to network with other schoolboard members and school districts because the presentations that are happening in uh the conferences are from school district. Uh they're from uh school leaders. They're from schoolboard members. They're from other central office leaders. Even sometimes there are students who are also uh giving uh sessions as well as well as legal counsel uh and treasurers. Uh it also helps to strengthen both the superintendent and the school board uh partnership in promoting uh clarity and communication uh that happens across the district. Uh so this school year uh as the attendees from the uh cabinet leadership team uh
025we look to uh really focus in on our sessions. So each person that went with a different strand so that we could make sure that everything was covered. And so we looked at advancing career pathways and student voice structures and operational excellence. We also looked at strengthening relationships with labor partners, students, families, and community. Elevating safety, compliance, and staff and student boundary expectations across the district. uh deepening coherence and curriculum uh evaluation and accountability systems responsible for integrating AI to support teaching and learning uh and operational efficiency and reinforcing governance communication policy alignment. So what does that mean in a nutshell? board policy updates, uh, looking at curriculum and instructional planning, facility and operational strategies, leadership development, levy preparation and community communication, strategic plan development, and student voice and family engagement efforts. And just um
026as we start to think about this strategic plan development as one of uh the areas we looked at, I would like to thank our community uh and our staff and our students because we have received 1,048 survey responses for our strategic plan uh for um our next upcoming strategic plan. So I want to thank everyone for that. But that was uh really uh how we focused what sessions we went to. And so we had a uh opportunity to kind of cover everything and then come back and talk about what that would look like uh for um us. And so you'll hear a little bit tonight um when uh Mark shares about the facilities planning as well. Thank you. Okay, moving on. Our next item for discussion, item C, uh the board handbook. We had paused
027this a couple of weeks ago. Uh Miss Su Dolnik, did you want to pick that up? >> Um yeah, I just wanted to say that, you know, as as it has been told to me, it is since it's not policy, it's not something that would require three readings or anything like that to change. So, this is definitely subject to to change from any future board. This is it's not meant to be um to restrict anything in the future. Just sort of to provide guidance. So hopefully it does and and anything that needs to be changed can. Thank you. I'm glad that we got some clarity on that. Um, which is good because the the goal with a handbook is that it is a living document that it is um providing up-to-date helpful information to anyone
028who is on boarding from contact information to information about board policy. Um, so that's obviously something that needs updated when board policy is updated or when staff member changes happen. Um, so thank you. >> Then is there a need for a vote? If it can be changed at any time or is this just something that we're kind of rolling out to >> as as far as um I'm aware there's no need for a vote. We could amend the agenda to include a vote if we really wanted to put that on record. Um but it's my understanding that it's, you know, simply an internal document uh meant to help on board folks. So it doesn't require a vote. It's nothing that changes policy. >> That's the same same as I was told I should say. >>
029And in the in the last um month or so, I haven't heard from anybody who felt that any something important was left out. Um so I think this draft is ready to go. Uh and hopefully um you know the experience of folks on boarding using this will give the board some more feedback about what what could be um changed over time. Um but yeah, I think it is ready to go. Anything further on that topic? Okay. So, we are ready to move on to discussion item D, our facility plan update. So, good evening. Uh this evening we're going to have uh Mark our director of um operations come and he's going to share an update on our uh facilities planning. Uh we have been working on this um for some time now. Uh, and so
030I want to make sure that I say a disclaimer that this is not this is not this is not an opportunity for us to come before the public and asking them to do anything in regards to uh putting anything on the ballot for facilities or anything of that nature. This is really to update everyone where we are in the process of facilities planning and really taking an in-depth look at all of our uh facilities and um where we need to go next. Again, this is not this is not an opportunity for us to be asking the public for anything in regards to facilities, levies, or anything of that nature. And now I'll turn it over to Mark. >> Well, thank you. Uh I'm excited to be here and provide the board with an update over
031the last uh six months to eight month eight months of the work that uh the operations team has been uh uh doing a lot of evaluation. Uh and this presentation is basically a a carbon copy of the presentation that I did in the in the month of October for the facilities task force. Um, and so we thought it was important just to kind of bring it out into the public sector uh and have these discussions with the board uh and and get some more feedback. And so with that, we always start our meeting with the portrait of the bulldog. Um, you know, that just focuses our the work on our students and our teachers. uh because at the end of the day everything facility related uh goes back to uh K students and teachers and
032how to properly serve them uh so that they can achieve at at their greatest uh their greatest levels. So our objectives object our objectives for the meeting uh they were to provide basically a retrospective and perspective analysis uh related to facility planning. What that means is basically what happened in the last six months and what's going to happen in the next uh in the next six months as well. Um big portion of the meeting was and you'll you'll meet you'll meet a a new vendor here today that has assisted us is a a roof analysis in our K to8 locations and then ultimately sharing a cost update uh if we were to uh look at that master facilities plan that uh that appeared before the public in last November or two two November um ago,
033but we wanted to share an updated plan total cost with that. And then of course uh probably the most important piece was to reframe the master planning committee uh into uh into a different type of committee uh one that not only talks about just how do we um how do we tackle largecale problems from like a K to8 perspective but how are we get how are we creating feedback loops with what we're doing in operations based upon uh what our community uh believes the priorities should be and then how how to ultimately create a plan moving forward. And so that's where we started uh in October was how does this differ than a master facility planning committee I think after uh being in the role and one of the one of the my reflective points
034was uh when you go when you undertake master facilities planning it doesn't it doesn't just mean that we are attempting to create uh plans that are that require additional revenue sources from the public. A lot of this should be what's happening in six months, what's happening in 12 months, what's happening in 18 months, what's happening in five years. And part of that is getting a committee uh together. We changed it from a facil facility planning committee to more of a task task force a task force approach. This would allow me to kind of have a a a sounding board of community members that I can say, "Hey, this is what we're thinking about. Uh what do you what is everyone's thoughts?" Uh but this this right here on the slides, I'm not going to uh
035review it u word by line by line, but this will be the the the feedback and the the objective of the committee moving forward. So I was kind of joking with Dr. Ghoul uh earlier today, this is going to become my monopoly board. It reminds me of that. But every month since uh since last January uh we have met um and we have been able to kind of lead the committee into uh through different exercises and uh I was I think I was before before the board in June. uh the updates since then what we did was we met with uh cabinet leaders uh we had met with TDA uh to ultimately try to narrow down our LFIS and our LFIS locally funded initiatives uh that would um in the event that we would go
036for new monies the LFIS would be the portion that would be 100% derived from the local community uh our goal there was to ultimately reduce those and which I'll address later in the presentation uh what we did in October was we met with the facility task force. Uh we had we had um presented the results of a of a roof study all K to8 all all K to8 buildings and basically saying hey if we had to if we had to get this warm safe and dry plan and focus on the areas of dry how much would that cost and then of course I'm here before the board and here in Dece uh December and we're just kind of rinse and repeating making sure that we are staying aligned and at a at a good cadence
037with providing updates. So our Um when we look back in the last six months and and and really last year, our focus has been around the areas of of basically procedures, written procedures, uh in the areas of maintenance, cleaning, and custodial work. Uh that sounds very it sounds very um simplified, but that's where we started. Uh the reason for that was when we did our insurance audit in the spring, um if we had to if I had to provide evidence about the ongoing preventive maintenance task that that our operations um team does. Uh we want to make sure that we have written memos in place and that we have um proper data in place so that we can ensure and show evidence that we are doing our jobs to maintain our facilities. And so that's
038what we did. We instituted uh procedures for roof walks. Roof walks are super important at Woodland Echo Hills, especially Woodland is due to the trees, the amount of trees we have to get up there on a weekly basis to ensure that those roof drains are un unobstructed. Uh we implemented procedures around mowing uh mowing and grounds. Hopefully uh you notice a big change in the curbside appeal um of our buildings especially over the late summer and into the early fall. We wanted things to be clean, crisp um so that uh we can present a good um united front to our community because the majority of our community does not step into our schools. uh we uh evaluated our our work order system and we aligned the terminology to the facility assessment language and that was
039um kind of building upon what the work that we did in June. All of our facility assessments they have certain categories and now all of our all of our work orders have those same categories. So in the event that we have to pull the data uh that says hey what areas do we support the most uh is it plumbing is it um is it exterior doors interior doors uh technology we will be able to show the amount of tickets in each of those um those categories and then after an audit of our equipment uh we basically made the the investment to in our in our grounds equipment itself we noticed that there was a lot of um lower quality commercial grade uh equipment out there that was uh had 3,000 hours on it. And so
040in order to support the idea of making sure that our facilities look good, we wanted to make sure that they had the proper tools to do that. U weed whackers, leaf backpack leaf blowers, uh down into um sprayers for uh for weed control along fence lines. you know, all of that we audited because we wanted to make sure that every building, each custodian had the ability to do some minor t some minor tasks to uh alleviate uh the work for our for our grounds department. So, from a from a when you think about when you think about a a capital planning perspective, uh we had budgeted or green lit green lit uh projects of nearly a half million dollars. What I learned is a half million dollars doesn't go far. Um Kim was a was
041a priority. The Kimpton parking lot front parking lot was a priority that has been addressed. Uh we had to um replace the s the chiller at the high school. Uh that where what we did with that was we took both we took the payments and we spread it over uh two fiscal years to mitigate uh the financial implications of that. That was about a um that was a very expensive purchase. We had a French installed in the media center or near the media center. The media center at the high school is um can give it get very damp. It can flood. This was our first iteration of trying to address the uh um the overall climate in the media center. And then com commissioned a lot of split unit repairs at Lake View. And then
042of course boiler number two at Lake View uh was was in need of uh was in disrepair. And so that was replaced before um the winter uh heating season. What we're looking for in the next six months right now is we have a critical issue that we we need to address in the bus garage. Our bus garage has three underground storage fuel tanks in it. One with u unlimited gas for our white fleet or our vans, our diesel and then our spent oil. Uh they are 36 years old. And uh when you get involved with Buster, uh that is the that is the um that's the overse the the oversight body of the state of Ohio. Uh we have to pull we have to remove those and we have to make sure that we take
043considerations for uh environmental concerns. Uh and so that project is going to be about $200,000 uh to get that done. And that is actually coming from not only uh the the age of the tanks, but the vendor that does the inspection has recommended that. And then our recent Buster um inspection, they also said it's a great time to get ahead of this 3 36 years old in the ground. That's well done. Uh but it's time to get them above ground and that cost will be about $200,000. And then starting in the late spring, I got connected to a company called TMCO, which we have here. Uh TMCO, uh they are a a roofing vendor that assisted me in providing basically an overview of all of our K to8 buildings and what could be a potential
044path forward to address our K to8 roofs. And so I have Mitch Dorfman here from Trunka and he'll take over and give you a high level view of the the roofs on Arcada 8 campus. Hi everybody, Mitch Dorfman. I'm with TMCO uh Construction Products Group. Uh our parent company is RPM. Just going to do a overview of kind of who we are. So, uh, RPM is located out of Madina. And there's really four segments to RPM. Okay. So, we have the construction products group, the specialty, uh, products group, and also the uh, performance coatings and consumer group. A lot of you would probably be uh, familiar with Rustoleum, DAP cocking. You can get those in Home Depot. And then as far as TMC coat's concerned, so we're more in the specialty line as far as
045we don't go through distribution. In order to get our products, you have to have a rep and somebody that's going out there actually analyzing the roofs and then ultimately helping you through the process of hey what actually works and what's meant to go down on this um roofing situation that you have currently. And kind of really what we found going across all the schools is there's a bunch of different uh scenarios going on and truthfully a lot of it is ponding water and just solutions that were put down that really don't work for uh the existing construction. So um Again, like Mark said, we went in and ultimately we did an analysis of a lot of the K through8 schools and then really where we focus again just to go more into TMCO. So, roof
046repair, HVAC, facade, uh we also get into flooring solutions, facility safety, and then parking decks, which isn't a huge concern for you guys. So, these are just some schools that we work with uh locally here in the Northeast Ohio market. We are a national company. Our headquarters is actually out of Beachwood, Ohio. Again, this is the Northeast Ohio uh schools that we work with currently. So, we are a part of the Ohio Schools Council as well. So, there's a cooperative purchasing agreement called the APA uh that's locally bid out, which is pretty unique in the cooperative uh environment. A lot of times you see the cooperatives bid out in multiple states or states that are nowhere near call it Ohio. And for us with the APA that was locally bid out so everybody had an
047opportunity to go after that contract. The key to that is really streamlined procurement but more importantly it's change orders and I'm sure all of you have been familiar with uh construction product or construction projects where change orders have come out of nowhere. You know, really the idea for us is to be there on the forefront, analyze the roof, understand what's going on, the construction makeup, put the specification, the scopes of work together, and then ultimately come together with the contractors to hold a pre-bid, make sure everyone's on the same page, and then that deliverable back to you really should not have any change orders. And if it does, it's something that we've already talked about, and there's a line item in there saying, "Hey, this is exactly what could potentially occur. So really our entire
048goal is to ultimately go in assess these roofs and the conditions and how we do that is with uh core cuts understanding exactly the roof construction and we'll also do diagnostic surveys which I'll go into a little bit more in depth later on which we did at Riverview and that can include infrareds or nuclear scans and then ultimately we talk through a which roofs can be uh repaired or have preventive maintenance done and then which roofs can we restore which I'll get into what a restoration is as well and then ultimately we can't make miracles happen sometimes we do need to replace roofs and then capital avoidance again our goal is to repair or restore and the capital avoidance there with restoration versus replacement is typically 40% so lake view this is a good example
049uh of one of the roofs that I would say is um in need of repair and replacement. We analyzed RI Lake View and uh what we really saw. So if you look at picture four over there on the right hand side, that's a pitch pocket that's meant to have a penetration go through the roof. And ultimately there's supposed to be sealant that goes up all the way to the top end there. And clearly you can see you don't need to be in construction or roofing to realize that that's a problem up there. And then on the far right, the last picture there, that's a control joint. So any Any time that you have large spans of brick or facade, you typically have a control joint and ultimately the sealant there is completely gone and pushed
050out from the control joint. Then if you look at the middle picture there, a systemic problem across Lake View, really Lake View, um we'll say Lake View, Kemp, Highland has some and then um Also, Indian Trail, that one had some ponding water as well. So, again, large amounts of ponding water and sorry, Echo Hills was really bad as well. This is an example of a repair that we did up on, well, an issue that we found up on Lake View. Uh, a previous repair had been done. We went in, analyzed it, and then ultimately went in with our repair materials, uh, and repaired it properly. And that's us sputdding back the gravel to get to a substrate that we could actually adhere to. Then putting down mesh and reinforcing fabric and then ultimately coming over
051top with the uh mastic which is called a three course treatment. You'll see on the right hand side there the finished repair elementary school. So really where I would say a lot of the issues are up on the upper section there is actually the flashing. So if you look at the roof when it turns up into the parapit wall or the side wall there, you'll notice that in that second picture, I could actually put my entire arm down into the flashing. So it's completely wide open. And some of the reasons that you won't see leaks on scenarios like this is because you have a concrete deck. So ultimately that is leaking. It is causing problems and it is deteriorating that brick. And a lot of the reason you're not seeing those leaks again is because
052of the concrete deck. Echo Hills. This was probably u you know call it the worst roof that we looked at and just ponding water almost everywhere which for us us being able to go in there and repair or put a restoration together. We can't do that with ponding water. So ultimately a lot of those roofs unfortunately are going to have to be replacements and cannot be salvaged. And then some repairs that were done. If you look at uh picture two and three, those were overlays of the existing roof system that was there and a bunch of leaks were occurring in that area. So we can assume that they just covered up wet insulation. Okay, which is typically a no no. You don't really want to do that. And I would even argue too if you
053look at picture how they ultimately fastened that in. You're probably going to have leaks within the next year or two. Then Echo Hills, just to give an example. So, we broke it up into roof sections. You can see on that picture on the left there. So, roof 7 271,000, roof 10 259,000. And those are replacement budgets. And again, how we operate, we write the specification, scope of work. At the end of the day, we're a material manufacturer. So, we bring in contractors to competitively bid everything back to you and then you go with the lowest number. And again, these are budgetary figures. We know that they'll go in underneath that. And Riverview, like I spoke about before, so we always want to do diagnostic surveys if we can just to determine, hey, is this a
054candidate for repair or restoration? And what that entails is infrared scans or nuclear scans depending on what's there in the construction of the roof. And what we're doing is trying to determine how much wet insulation there is. So if there's a limited amount of wet insulation, call it 20% or under, we can typically go in and restore that roof by cutting out those areas and replacing them. And it's cost effective to do so. We did a nuclear scan over at Riverview based on the construction there. There's uh 7 and 12 in between the two roof systems and a bunch of lightweight concrete. It's kind of a nightmare scenario as far as tearing off and replacing. And when we did the nuke scan again, trying to hopefully salvage the roof, we determined there was 81% of
055the roof was wet. And that was between different levels of the insulation and lightweight concrete. And ultimately, again, that's a nightmare tear off replacement just because the lightweight concrete is so difficult to deal with. Thought I'd just give an example here of what a restoration looks like. So, this is a modified roof system up here. You know, truthfully looks not fantastic, but we did an infrared scan and that ultimately determined we were able to salvage the roof. So, when we go in at night, we determine where those wet areas are. We mark them out and we do core verifications to determine ultimately is that actually wet or not. So again, two verifications, infrared scan and also the cores inside and outside of those painted lines. And then when we go in, we want to make
056sure that any defects or issues are taken care of. So on the left hand side there, cutting out blisters, on the right, repairing them. Doesn't need to look pretty because ultimately we're going over top of that restoration. And this is cutting out that wet insulation that we found with the infred. We'll go all the way down to the deck if you look at the left hand side there. And then we'll come back with new insulation and build up the roof to ultimately make sure that it is dried in. And then with our restoration system on the left hand side there you'll see a base coat and then a reinforcing fabric. Now the neat and unique thing with a restoration is that we can take a roof that has seams and penetrations and make it completely
057monolithic. So we essentially eliminate all of those seams. Where do roofs leak? Seams and penetration. So we took care of call it 90% of the potential leak areas when we go in and do the restoration. And this is what a finished uh restoration ultimately looks like. And then as far as budgets are concerned, so we went through again uh eight schools. You'll see there the total budget uh little under 11 million for all the schools. >> That's it. Any questions? What what would be a recommended timeline for that kind of project >> as far as all of the schools? >> Yeah. So I would I mean obviously in a perfect world if you have the ability yeah probably a fiveyear plan but you know we broke this down and gave Mark a 10year call it
058projected outcome of hey let's knock out the worst roofs and sections first and then go from there. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> So, I'd like to thank Mitch and his team. Uh just um one of the biggest thing through this project was the the attention to detail that TMCO provides. Uh they have been in district with fixing some some leaks at Lake View, at Highland. They've been out at Kimton. uh and they pro they provide uh they provide a kind of a end of job report that has a checklist. Here's what we did. Here's the before and after pictures. And so we can properly catalog those um for our facility planning. Um and we appreciate that that level of detail. Uh and all of the all of this all of these conversations have been
059performed for free uh at at no cost to the district. And so to kind of so there's our roof our K to8 roof analysis. Uh we have some work to do and in terms of uh you know projected timeline that's something that we're always working on and we're trying to put something together. Um, but what we're going to do is we're going to kind of take this, we're going to pivot back to uh the idea of locally funded initiatives and if we were to uh head down a a larger scale project, what does that look like? And so when we when we came in front of the board in June, uh we had to we had some work to do after June and we had to basically look at our LFIS and establish which ones
060were necessary and which ones optional. Uh and as you can see when we as you can see when we uh when I presented in June uh that that LFI number was 53 million. Those are 2025 costs. And uh in October of 2025 uh after evaluating them we removed the the Hley the Hley site allowance for uh for site prep. Uh we don't know if that's the best site for us. Um there's a lot of great things about that site, but in terms of trying to get a project done, we did remove that. We kept uh the new middle school auditorium because we thought that was important due to the fabric of of uh the DNA of our district in terms of the fine arts. Um that additional square footage, uh that third line went from
06125 to$22 million. The primary driver, that's an additional square footage cost. primary driver of that is how we service our students in some of our elementarymentaries. Uh but that was a that was a that was a that was a there was a lot more work in that area than just $3 million. We had to look at the level of support we would give to our students. What type of where could we um kind of sand off the the rough edges to get that number down. We did remove uh the allowance for a stadium um renovation at the Lake View site. The theory there was, hey, well, if we're building, why not build a new middle school stadium in a new field, a new track? Makes a lot of sense, but is that necessary right now?
062Uh so we went from we eliminated 6.4 million. uh the additional collaborative collaborative spaces in the fab labs. That was again more more square footage that we were removed optional square footage. It would be great to have but ultimately not necessary. Um and of course we removed the the middle school baseball field. Uh that is almost a million dollars. And then of course we kept our our our contingency fund uh for for potential cost overruns there. And that is um you we went from 10.6 to 9.7. The reason why you're seeing a little bit of variance in that numbers, uh we we adopted our 2024 enrollment as our to help us with these projections. Um it's a per it's a it's an enrollment calculation and a square foot is calculation. So because our enrollment went
063down, um our price per square foot is also going to be uh impacted. And so ultimately we went from $53 million in locally funded initiatives to $41.2 million. So like I think the big question is how did that impact the total draft plan of a new facility project like a large scale a large large scale replacement of our facilities and we were able to do that. Um we went from four elementaryaries to three three plus one middle school. Um and so essentially going from five buildings to four buildings, you gain uh operational efficiencies as you continue to reduce your footprint. Uh and the total cost of the potential project went from 238 million 238 million in November of 2024 to 205 million in December of 2025. And so that's where we kind of left it
064at was to, you know, that number is still quite large uh and quite staggering. And so this is kind of where we're at. Um the good news is our equity rating went from 27 to 29%. That's great. Um we we know that the cost of renovation and updates and improvements and repairs, they're only going to rise. Um although the metrics continue to point to building new facilities, um there's still there's still a conversation to be had about okay, what does renovation look like? But the metrics still drive uh the fact that we should do we should replace all of our K all of our buildings K to 8. And then ultimately, how do we get there? Well, we're gonna we're gonna we need to get there within the parameters of the five-year forecast because we're
065not um you know, because we're not able to maybe go back out to the community for additional uh revenue. Uh we ultimately have to figure out a way to uh keep our students and teachers warm, safe, and dry. And so our next steps is really to drill down in ter in terms of that warm, safe, and dry plan. That warm, safe, and dry plan where we left off in June was still 40 million. We know that we don't the the five-year forecast does not have $40 million in it to get to accomplish this. And so the way that we're going to pick and choose our our key um priorities will be one of ways will be to explore the value of of current district asset assets and then use that potential to uh subsidize future
066facility projects. So that's kind of where we left it with the facilities task force and I appreciate your time uh tonight. Thank you. appreciate all the information. That was quite a lot. Do we have any questions for Mr. Tree? Okay, we're all just absorbing it. Thank you. Okay, I will entertain a motion to adjurnn at this point. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Roll call, please. >> He's Jenkins. I >> Merlin. I >> Sheen. I >> Sonic. >> I wind. I >> where you're adjourned at 7