001I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We have two members joining us virtually, just making sure that they can hear us and all that kind of good stuff. John says yes. And Mr. Meyer? I'm here. All right. Welcome to everyone joining us online. We have our usual crew here otherwise. And if someone would volunteer to do the review of the board norms. I could do that. Thank you. Begin meetings on time. Do your homework before meetings. Be professional. Discuss the idea, not the person. Be clear and concise. Seek first to understand. Support decisions. Praise the positive. Thank you. Mr. Johannes, can we also go back to the announcement of executive session
002before moving forward? Yes. I was just getting excited and moving quickly. The board will consider convening into executive session under Wisconsin statutes 19.851 and C and F to discuss employee compensation packages, administrator contracts, disciplinary data, and financial and social impacts of a program which, if discussed in open, could have a substantial adverse effect upon those mentioned. The board may reconvene into open session to act upon items discussed in closed. Thank you for that reminder. So next, we have the approval of the agenda and consent agenda with identification of items to be taken off, the consent agenda, and discussion and or separate action. So moved. Is there a second? I'll second it. Are there any items we would like to see removed from the consent agenda? All right, then we'll vote. Mr. Bychak? Yes. Ms. Willie?
003Yes. Ms. Stahl? Yes. Mr. Wenling? Yes. Mr. Lee? Yes. Mr. Meyer? Yes. And I'll vote yes as well, so we have our agenda. Next is if there is a volunteer to read the gifts to the district. I can do that. Thank you. We had a gift for the Zalinas Elementary School wellness closet from Jeffrey and Donna Burcham. The value of that gift was $50 to be used for the wellness closet, and we want to say a huge thank you to Jeffrey and Donna. Support like that from our community means the world to the board and to the staff, but especially to the students. Thank you. All right, thank you. Next up is recognition above and beyond. Dr. Ebert, would you like to discuss that item? I would, yes. We actually have two people that we
004were intending on recognizing tonight. One of them did call in sick today and wasn't able to make it. The other one isn't here right now, so we're doing a quick search of the building to see if he is here. I would just suggest, and Mr. Bajic just took a quick walk, I would suggest we keep going, and then if he shows up, we will recognize him for above and beyond. If not, we can just move him to the next meeting. All right, good. Do we have any community feedback? No. Next, back to Dr. Ebert. Tell me something good. All right, great. So love this segment of our board meetings. It's a time for board members, community members, anyone in the audience, employees, to share anything that they notice that is good around our district that
005they may have seen since our last board meeting. So before I jump in and share a few things, I guess I would open it up. Does anyone have anything to share? Tell us something good. Who do we have? Brad Hearth, principal, high school. All right, so today we had our staff PD session, and part of that was talking about the upcoming practice ACT and pre-ACT test. One cool thing, and I believe one really nice piece that we're adding this year is we'll be running a practice test also for freshmen and sophomores. We found a lot of success in running practice tests with juniors, and we've carried that over into the younger grades, and so they're gonna get a glimpse of what the test is, what type of questions are on the test, the timing, which
006is always really important, like how much time you have for sections. So we're gonna be running that next Wednesday. So that's coming up, and it gives us some really good feedback as to where our students are at currently and how we can help support them in the last couple months before they actually take the real test in spring. I had two shorter ones. One, last night, the middle school music program, I think, was on full display here at the PAC, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade bands and choirs, and not only, obviously, it's fun to listen to them perform, but also recognizing the size of those groups compared to the size of the classes is really impressive. And also, I don't think there was an open seat in the house, so our community came out
007to support them as they were performing, and it was a really, really nice night. The other thing I thought that was really good is for most of our kids who are at college, it's winter break, and for my oldest, Addie, she had a group of her friends over, and they were talking, and at first I didn't quite catch on what they were discussing because they kept talking about when, who's already a sophomore, or when they reached sophomore status, and eventually I figured out, again, kind of a positive of what they could do when they were here at Keele. Because of the number of credits they were able to earn, a lot of our graduates are already reaching sophomore status, which again, I think is a great tribute to the kids and families involved, but also
008to be able to teach those classes and award those credits, our staff have to go on for master's degrees or beyond, and then we as a board kind of made that as a priority and incentivized it and kind of aligned some resources to make that all happen. So I thought that was something really good as well. That's great. I would add something that Mackenzie and I have been working on. As you know, we're working on sort of the lead up to the revamp of the strategic plan, right? And so we've had maybe four, three or four full meetings with different groups of high school students, and so we, I won't even go with which groups, I won't share which groups we've talked to, but it's been incredibly valuable for us, and we just, we explain
009to them what strategic planning is and how often we do it and why we need their help, and we're just very simply pose, and many of them have been here their whole career. What do we do well here in your, and what do we not do well? What do we need more of? What do we need less of? Big, small, whatever it is you wanna share with us, and what's coming out of it is very intelligent, very thoughtful remarks from some of our most driven, highest achieving students, right? We're trying to get to a cross section of a lot of students, and we are hearing some common themes, and we're excited to share that with you as a board and all of those comments that they share, and they are, we try to create a
010safe environment so they feel comfortable sharing, and they sure are, and it's so rewarding, I can't even explain it, but just to get, to be able to have time with those students who are so busy, try to carve that out, it's during Raider time, during like some other club time, and we just steal a little time from their club, and their advisors allow us to do it, so I just love that work, and thank those kids so much. You know me, I always have something. I have two things. Really quickly, kind of echoing Mr. Johannes, the week prior, I was able to go to the elementary school music concert, winter concert, and it was phenomenal. Mr. LM does such a good job, and what's a joyful experience is whether or not you have a child
011there that you love, you just are brought into it, because of the music he selects. I remember back in my day, we maybe got one song that everybody really loved, and the rest is like, oh man, but every song, those kids were excited and happy, and they're doing things physically and musically, and I just think it was wonderful. Again, a packed, packed house, which is amazing, so kudos to our music department, to Mr. LM, but all the little people, because they just knocked our socks off, and then I happened to see a post recently from the district, and I just think it's cool because it's a fairly new club, but the fishing club was out on the ice again, and they did pretty darn well coming in fifth, but I loved all the photos, so
012tons of photos of our students who are involved in the fishing club with the fish that they caught, and everybody's looking happy and engaged, and I just think that's a really cool thing that we have at Keele, so those are mine. And speaking of social media, Facebook in particular, we have three people across the district that post for us, one at each building, and one of them shares with me statistics that you can get for how many views and clicks and users and all of this, and our numbers, I'll just say it like this, continue to rise, and I think it's because of their dedication, so they're given a small stipend because they're using their prep time to run around the building, to see what's going on, getting classrooms, so they're happy to do it,
013we're so happy, because one of our goals in the, I believe the current plan is to boost our social media presence and get our story out there, and it is really good, that feed continues to roll with real actionable things that are happening across the district in our classrooms, so we wanted people to see that. Good work there for those three. Okay, next up, our business items under academic success, there we go, open enrollment policy and spacing, which I think is something we look at every year. Dr. Ebert, if you wanna lead that discussion. Yep, I'll just give it a 10 second, maybe a minute explanation, we do this every year, and it basically gives us some guidance for the amount of seats that we, that you are approving for us to approve for open
014enrollment, all right, and so what I've said every year is that we look at every open enrollment application very seriously, we have deep conversations about every single student, a group of us do, depending on which building, or each school, or whatever it may be, and we take every student and their situation into account. Okay, why do you want to come to our district? So we talk through it all, can we support each student that comes into our district? We don't have any blanket sort of statements that we don't take students with IEPs, we don't take students in the elementary school, we do not do that in this district, we're very open and willing to look at every student that wants to come here, and we frankly feel, every time we get an open enrollment application,
015we should feel good about that, we should feel good that that's a, they want to come here for whatever reason, so we try to make it work for everyone, it doesn't always, but I guess that's what I would say, that's the biggest takeaway for me always with that chart, it is a chart, but we look at every situation differently, or as its own. And I know we got to see that chart. Yes, Todd. Do you notice open enrollment going up every year? I mean, does it keep going up every year? Currently, yes, our open enrollment numbers, that is a good question. Open enrollment, yes, is going up, we see that year over year. Enrollment continues to generally, not every year, trickle down. Okay, so like in-house enrollment in district, that's different than open from out
016of district, open enrollment up, other enrollment, regular enrollment, trickling down. It's not uncommon to see that across the state. Okay. Other questions for Dr. Ebert? All right, then if someone would like to make the motion. I move to approve, or excuse me, approve the open enrollment policy and spacing plan as presented. Motion by Ms. Stahl, is there a second? Second. By Mr. Bychak. Any other discussion? All right, then we'll vote. Ms. Willie? Yes. Ms. Stahl? Yes. Mr. Wenling? Yes. Mr. Meyer? Yes. Mr. Lee? Yes. Mr. Bychak? Yes. And I'll vote yes as well, motion carries. Next up, second reading of policies. We saw these last month as in our first reading. If anyone had any suggestions or concerns, they were send that to the curriculum committee. I don't think anything was received. So unless there's
017any questions, if someone would like to make a motion. Move to approve the policies presented on second reading. Motion by Mr. Bychak, if there's a second. Second. Second by Ms. Willie. Any other questions or concerns related to those policies? All right, then we'll vote. Ms. Stahl? Yes. Mr. Wenling? Yes. Mr. Meyer? Yes. Mr. Lee? Yes. Mr. Bychak? Yes. Ms. Willie? Yes. And I'll say yes as well. Then for other business, we have our annual convention with WASBE. And Ms. Stahl is gonna talk about some of the resolutions that she'll be considering there. Hello, everyone. As you know, you received a packet that outlines about 12 resolutions that were brought forward to WASBE to be voted on at the upcoming convention. These are brought forward by member school districts. It's my understanding, don't quote me, but
018almost every school district in the state of Wisconsin is a member of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, which is a group that helps us combine our collective power to hopefully come out with good changes that benefit public education. So this year, the committee that puts together the resolutions put forward 12 different resolutions that will, I mean, they range everything from, I think one that we're all interested here is, let's update the process on how the report, the state report card is set up. So things like that that help school districts, but also help our communities and our families. That said, there are 12. All of you received those resolutions in a packet. There was rationale behind them. And then everyone was asked to vote on those resolutions, seven of us separately. And then we
019got that feedback from the seven members. And everybody is supportive of the 12 resolutions that will be put forward at the convention. There were three that, or excuse me, yes, three that were unanimous that we did not support. So the role I play is simply to go to the delegate assembly and act as the one vote for the Keele area school district. So based on all of us taking a look at what those resolutions were, us coming together by majority, I will take the majority vote that was presented by all of our members and cast the vote for the Keele area school district. We had one resolution that was not unanimous, either for we don't support or we do. And that one involved, one second, that was an amendment to put forward about making school
020lunches a universal program. And some of the dissent was not that people don't support feeding kids and removing stigma, but that it's more of our members felt that that could be more need-based than universal. So before I go on, if you did dissent on that particular one, which was the only one, did you wanna discuss that at all? Or being that it's a majority, do not support that? Are you guys good with me going forward and voting in that way? I'm good with you going that way because I voted no. The reason I voted no is the cost, quite frankly. And that's more of a hit to our taxpayers. And it could be used for other programs as well. So if we go to the well too often and things like that, we might get
021shafted in some other area that's universally need-based. Any other comments or questions related to that? Okay, thank you. All right, there were no items pulled from the consent agenda, correct? Correct, all right. The next up, future agenda items. Any questions or comments there? Is it being called up? Oh, there it comes. Oh, no, maybe not. There we go. Any comments or additions? Looks good. All right. Then review and reflect. I'll throw one thing out there. This, within the consent agenda, I would never pull it, but I'm always tempted. We get our first look at some of our staff who will be retiring. And that's always kind of the bittersweet moment because these are people who've given decades of their lives and done a great job for our children and our families. But they've earned a
022chance to go and do other things. So our first group is on there. Some very great teachers are there. So it's always a little sad to see them go at the end of this year. I'm glad you said that. That's very appropriate, yes. And we do honor them at a ceremony at the end of the year. Good job, Tony. Survived so far. All right, then if someone would like to vote to convene an executive session. I move we convene into executive session under Wisconsin statutes 19.851C and F to discuss employee compensation packages, administrator contracts, disciplinary data, and financial and social impacts of a program which if discussed in open could have a substantial adverse effect upon those mentioned. We have a motion from Ms. Willie. Is there a second? I'll second that. Second by Mr.
023Wenling. Any questions or discussion? Then we'll vote. Ms. Stahl? Yes. Mr. Wenling? Yes. Mr. Lee? Yes. Mr. Meyer? Yes. Mr. Bichek? Yes. Ms. Willie? Yes. And I'll say yes as well. Thank you. Good job.