001Call this meeting to order Monday, March 23rd at 6:00 p.m. Ross, would you do roll call, please? Jason is excused. Crosby's here. Mike? Here. Jake? Here. Tim? Here. Dale? Here. Eric is excused. Carolyn? Here. Craig? Here. This is an open meeting and it has been posted. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. All right, up first we have employee of the month, IT Services. >> Thank you. Zach, would you come on up, please? It is with great pride that we recognize Zach Fisher for employee of the month. With over 12 years of dedicated service to the McGuanago Area School District, Zach has consistently demonstrated an exceptional level of professionalism, technical expertise, and personal care for both staff and students. Zach plays a vital role in supporting the online testing and assessment, specializes in door
002and camera security systems, serves as a mentor to younger technicians, and provides close support to our technical operations manager and engineer in their roles. All while maintaining a strong daily presence at Rolling Hills Elementary School, where he is the value where he is valued as a dependable and responsive technician. Zach is known for his willingness to go above and beyond, even in the most challenging situations. His calm demeanor and compassionate approach set him apart, making him a trusted resource who genuinely listens to the needs of others and provides thoughtful solutions. Zach is reliable, takes great pride in a job well done, and often uses a sense of humor to develop and maintain healthy working relationships. Zach's combination of technical skill, tech dedication, and genuine care for people makes him an invaluable member of the IT
003Services team, and a shining example of service and excellence. He is truly deserving of this recognition as employee of the month. Congratulations, Zach. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, next we have Claredon El- Elementary School student presentation. Yep, the parents. Thank you. If you want to come up and record or take pictures, feel free to come on over. Hi, my name's Quinn. Hello. My name is Audrey. And we're both >> Both Claredon. We're both third graders at Claredon Avenue. We're here to give you an update of what's happening at one of the best schools in the district. We do our best at Claredon by following the Cougar Code. That's how we show respectful, responsible, safe words and actions. Check out this board. This is a picture of a bulletin board at Claredon Avenue that
004has all the kids that have received a Super War so far. A Super War is a certificate you get when you're seen being respectful, responsible, and making safe choices. Kids from fourth grade through sixth grade that are seen doing a great great job showing the Cougar Code are rewarded with a Super War. We want to give appreciation out to our Parent Teacher Group for their huge support. They help our school with low or no cost to family events. In these pictures, you can see our family bingo night and our family painting event held this year. Both had great attendance from our families at Claredon Avenue. And our glow run fundraiser raised enough money that our Parent Teacher Group was able to upgrade our new sound system in the gym, and we're super grateful. Next, let's
005take a look at some of our student data. This was collected by a survey. We love our school and the adults that also work here. Now, check this out. As students group, we are clearly know we have teachers that want to want to help us and to see our do our best. And 98% of Claredon students understand the expectations of the school, and that's really important for part of our success. Here are some pictures of 4K students after they completed uh write the room activity. Students are practicing fine motor skills skills and proper hand letter formation hand-eye coordination. And follow multi-step directions. Let's look at a music update next. Our third and fourth graders just finished a great concert a few weeks ago. The crowd loved it, and the PAC at the high school is
006always cool for performance. Now, Quinn, tell me a kindergarten update. Kindergarten students are working on writing six sentences with two parts in One recent assessment was their very own clubhouse just like the Super Kids. Students were asked to make detailed drawings. Next, they were asked to describe the clubhouse in one sentence and what they would do in the next. They worked hard to ch- hard to check their sentences and use describing words to make sentences with two parts. Awesome job, kindergarten. Let's look at some art. We're so lucky to have Ms. Phillips as our art teacher. She keeps our building looking amazing with student artwork. Here's a few examples of some of our winter artwork that we also just took down. Now, bring on the spring and bring on the first grade update. First grade
007is practicing fluency by performing reader's theater. This group performed their book in front of the whole school at our assembly a few weeks ago. They did a great job. Speaking of doing a great job, let's give a library update. The library is always full of books and fun projects. One event that was introduced in the library was the Reading Rumble. This group represent represented Clarendon as our district team for the last 2 years. They called themselves the dogs. Go dogs. They didn't win, but they still made us proud. They sure did. Now, let's hear about second grade. Second grade students recently finished reading Wagon Wheels, a historical fiction novel. Students also learned about the Westward expansion and Lewis and Clark. The for the final project, students reflected on the story by imagining what it be
008like to travel 150 miles without their parents, just like in the story. You can see the final project on your screen. Let's look at some PE next. One cool thing that's happening in PE class this year is something our PE teacher calls the impossible shot. Kids that show respect are picked to take a shot at the impossible shot at the end of each PE class. We have 502 students at Clarendon and only six students have made the impossible shot so far. I can't wait to get another turn because I almost made it last time. Now, let's check out our grade next. We got to create our own stories about the Oregon Trail. We even got to add in the names of our family members. My favorite part of this was acting like it'd be hard
009to survive out there, which it probably was. Let's go and see see what fourth grade has for us next. Students in fourth grade are seen here using the mentor text Fox by Margaret Wild to study character traits and then they are working together to organize their writing in a graphic organizer. Students enjoy working together to find evidence and the details from the text to support their topic sentence. There's lots of writing. No wonder we're such good readers. Now, let's get to fifth grade. Fifth grade has been focused on writing, too. Planning is a huge part of being a successful writer. They work on finding the differences in writing and responding. Through this repeated practice, students' writing have grown a ton as well as their confidence and how they respond to a prompt. One fifth grade
010teacher shared that she is very proud of this discussion and the progress they have shown as well as the seriousness in which they take with writing at this time. Now, I can't wait to be in fifth grade, but I also can't wait to be in sixth grade. Let's go there next. Our sixth graders are are engaging in science labs with some great hands-on learning. The picture shows our a lab which students are building an anemometer an anemometer to measure the wind wind speed of a fan rotating per minute. I love science. Me, too. Thanks for letting us show you more about Clarendon to celebrate all the awesome things that are happening every day. We have great teachers and we love all of our school. What questions do you have for us? Great job. That is
011great. Any questions? What grade are you two in? Third grade. Um we're both in third grade. Awesome. You did a really good job. You're great speakers. You should be very proud of yourselves. Thank you. Thanks. Any other comments? Questions? Thank you. Great job. >> [applause] >> Up next, we have citizens' comments. >> [cough] >> Good evening. We are now entering the portion of the meeting for citizens' comments, whereby citizens may address the board. It is important to note that the board will not dialogue with community members during the citizens' comments section of the meeting. Each speaker will have 3 minutes to make his or her comments. Carolyn will do the timing. We will signal you when you are at 2 and 1/2 minute mark to begin to wrap up your comments. We expect all speakers
012to honor the time limit, refrain from using inappropriate language, and be respectful in your comments. Citizens who do not meet these expec- expectations may be prohibited from speaking at future board committee meetings. Speakers are not to address the board, not the audience. The school board does not endorse any comments made by members of the community here tonight. We would like to remind our community members members of the community members of the impact of their words on others and our children are watching. We commit to listening to you in a respectful manner and ask that you do the same. We expect the audience will be respectful of the speakers and of the board and refrain from responding with verbal comments, cheering, applause, or behavior that will detract from the meeting. If proper decorum is not adhered
013to, the board president can suspend citizens' comments. Please note that no obstructions can be created between the board and the audience. Visual aids cannot be used and the area behind the speaker will be cleared during public comment. Also, to respect our speakers and meeting participants, please silence your cell phones. Thank you. Uh first up, Andrea Kokott. At the last meeting, I listened to the board's discussion surrounding the financial challenges we are facing. One comment that Mr. Carthauser made really stood out to me. He made the statement that essentially, no matter what you choose to cut, you will have a large number of people completely unsatisfied. While I understand and even agree with the general sentiment of what he was trying to say in this particular situation, I disagree with him. This community is showing up
014week after week questioning the expansion of administrative costs and increased spend in our district. In terms of both positions added and total dollars spent, the administrative side of our district has grown in the past few years while our enrollment declined. That is the area that we as a community are asking you to review and find cuts in and I highly doubt you would find a large number of people completely unsatisfied with that approach. Mcgonagall is a very fiscally conservative community and many of our board members ran for their positions expressing that they held conservative values. What that should mean is that our school tax dollars are being used in areas that most directly impact our students as much as possible. Right now, that is not what it appears has been happening. This community has voted
015to support referendums and spend our money with the expectations that the dollars were being used to benefit the children of our district, not to expand non-teaching administrative roles and costs. As a taxpayer, I certainly describe myself as fiscally conservative and seeing the administrative side of our district grow while at the same time hearing of good teachers either leaving or being very frustrated in their positions due to how they're treated by administration is extremely disheartening. This board has a responsibility to remember that the administration works for the board, not the other way around. Your role is to challenge them. Your role is to ask the tough and sometimes outright uncomfortable questions. Your role is to speak directly to teachers, not get information that has been filtered through admin first under the guise of following a proper
016chain of command. So far, Mr. Schwartz is the only current board member that I've seen demonstrate a willingness to engage in an uncomfortable discussion. The community is directly asking you, our school board, to exercise responsibility in bloated areas of spend, specifically surrounding non-teaching administrative costs. If you are willing to do that, to find some money, and then combine that with the most creative solutions to our scheduling model, our elementary programs can be saved. Personally, I support dropping the music requirement in seventh grade. The state doesn't require it. Students are old enough by then to know if music is something they enjoy or not, so we shouldn't be spending money to force students into music if they don't want it. I also believe there are other classes that don't do not provide sufficient return on investment,
017such as mandatory world language exploratory. Most kids who will take Spanish or German already know they're going to take that or their parents are going to make them try it. There are similarly >> Seventh grade life and career skills is very redundant with the required eighth grade build the business and employability skills class. I'm sure there are other classes district-wide that could be reviewed. My point is simply that there are other opportunities in both our administration and curriculum for review that could and should be explored instead of elementary band and orchestra for our needed cost reductions. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, Jonathan Kamenar. Hello. My name is Jonathan My name is Jonathan Kamenar. I would like to speak against the uh I would like to speak against removing the fine arts from the elementary
018schools. I know one of the reasons for removing the fine arts from the elementary schools is that people are will drop out when they move to different grade levels. But I my reason against this is that students are just trying this out and if they students will always decide to drop out if they do not like it or they find that they do not enjoy the activity. My second reason is that our our concerts may suffer from our lack or from from us not starting at an earlier age. So, high school music may be playing instead of high school music, it would be 7th to 8th grade music. So, we will lack skill. And my final reason is that our orchestra teachers are bring a smile to our faces every day and teach us not
019only to be great musicians, but to be amazing humans as well. Thank you for your time. Good job, young man. Thank you, Jonathan. Liesel Holsom? Good afternoon. Oh my gosh, that is loud. All right, that's Well, good morning. There we go. Good afternoon. >> move that. Yeah, I think so. Hopefully, there we go. Good afternoon. My name is Liesel. I'm a current freshman at Mukwonago High School. I would like to address the removal of the fine arts at Mukwonago High School. Mukwonago High School itself has stated that MHS students score a higher ACT score when involved in music. In addition, we can see this through numerous of studies including Harvard Health. For example, of those who reported often being exposed to music as a child, 68% rated their ability to learn new things as excellent
020or very good compared to 50% of those who are not expected or exposed to music. The daily practice that MHS students puts puts forth to this cause. I mean, simply removing music would not be a benefit and I understand the funding and the requirements, but if us as MHS and the Mukwonago High School District and elementary schools, why do we want to get rid of a benefit when we want to be well-rounded as a district? So, I believe that we should focus on the benefit of the students and obviously put forth >> Speak to the microphone, please, Liesel. Thank you. put forth into the funding. We can also do this through more involvement through MHS student government, um more going to the elementary schools, creating a more community within our school district. In addition, I
021would like to say through two class periods today, um not only people who are involved in music, but everyone. I've gotten more uh about 100 signatures throughout the hallways and and just through class periods. This shows that many students amongst your school district is within this issue and would like to address it at certain times throughout past meetings in additionally. Thank you. Thank you. Well done. Thank you. Next up, Angie Gellish. A couple of weeks ago, I saw the district had posted what can only be considered a marketing video to try to help with the declining enrollment numbers in the district. Not even a little ironically, the first image was Lori Waldeman teaching a class. The second was Anastasia Gountis, a recent MHS graduate playing the cello. So, let me talk a little bit about
022Sia for a second. I had the absolute honor of being her piano accompanist at solo ensemble last year and the year before. After making it to the state solo ensemble competition, Sia earned an exemplary performer award two years in a row. That's basically unheard of. Every year, the music teachers and I will pour through results and see that schools that invest in their students with high impact curriculum over low impact administration are always the ones we see with these high performing students. So, what I want to talk about more tonight is the fact that solo ensemble occurred over the weekend. Mukwonago once again stood out among the other schools as a leader. We had over 140 events and over 200 students involved. We had five instrumentalists from PVMS perform a class A solo during the
023during the event. If a student scores high enough on class A solo, they get to go to state. And something I've never seen in my own 35 years of solo and ensemble experience, every single one of them received a score high enough for them to go to state. All five. In just a couple of years, zero students will even be able to try. I played for 20 different events and 15 of them made it to state. Our success rate at this event is consistently the best in the state. But instead of investing in these students, it seems that we continue to look for ways to reduce these high value opportunities. And what do I mean when I say high value? I mean money. Your investment as a district translates to tens of thousands of dollars
024of scholarships every single year to our instrumental musicians. We've had more instrumental musicians receive full coverage of tuition and at least one known full ride at a D1 school in the last 10 years than scholarships received for all athletes across all sports, given that sports scholarships are limited to D1 schools only. So, let's go back to Sia. Do you know how many exemplary performer awards Sia receives with two less years of orchestra education? That's right. Two less awards or zero. Do you know how much that can change the amount of scholarship money available? Please don't just hear me when I say this. As a parent less than a week away from supporting my daughter in making her final college selection, in a few years there will be hundreds of children with parents who are going
025to face this same decision and I'm here to tell you that it has become a heavily financially weighted decision. Choosing a school district that invests in music, which so clearly gives parents a return on their investment >> 30 seconds. >> of time and tax dollars is something all of these parents will be looking at. Please listen to what we're all saying week after week, month after month. We, the people you represent, are telling you what to invest in. Thank you. Thank you. Kim Fickau? >> [clears throat] >> Hi, new face. Hello. Um my name is Kim Fickau and I'm advocating today for my children. 601 and counting as of this morning. That's the number of people in this community that have signed my petition since the last board meeting. This petition on change.org is entitled
026Save Mukwonago Music Program. It was created on the necessity to show support with the simple message, let's keep 4th and 5th grade band and orchestra intact. This community cares about what happens to the music program. We need the future bright by keeping this pivotal educational program alive. Board members, I implore to you that public education must continue to include music. Music education in schools is more than just an ex- extra-curricular activity. It is a pillar of the educational system. The March 9th meeting proposal of adding the music program as only an extra-curricular is not appropriate. To think that some of the board suggested that kids refrain from eating at lunch and sacrifice their recess as as a viable option in lieu of the current program is just unfathomable. Board members, are you truly proposing that
027next year my 9-year-old son would not be asked would Excuse me. that my 9-year-old son would be asked not to eat lunch or not be allowed his right to recess in order to have a musical education? Why was that even discussed and brought to the table as a viable option? Every child deserves to be able to eat and to play outside. Music should not be used as a punishment. No parent will willingly choose this for their child. At the last school board meeting, I was an observer. But today I'm an activist. I want my children to continue to grow and flourish in the Mukwonago School District. My daughter, who is currently in 5th grade, already identifies herself as a musician. My son is taking private lessons at Music Cafe and plans to play the violin
028next year in the 4th grade, just like his dad did 30 years ago at Big Bend. As a community, we can agree to see the importance of keeping the program. I would challenge the board to consider the alternate consider other alternate options as outlined in the petition. 30 seconds. Let's look at a way to enrich the and grow the community instead of cutting it down and dismantling it. Board members, let's invest in the future of Mukwonago. Let's invest in the children. Thank you. Thank you. Mike Fickau? Hello. I'm going to catch it for disagreeing with my wife, but the >> Mike, talk into the microphone. You got people watching on TV. Thank you. I'm going to catch it for disagreeing with my wife, but the actual number on the petition right now is 609. For
029anybody that hasn't seen that petition yet, I'd like to read it. Music education in schools is more than just an extra-curricular activity. It's a fundamental pillar of well-rounded education. It nurtures creativity, enhances cognitive development, and fosters a sense of community and teamwork among students. The MASD is currently considering a reduction in its music programs by discontinuing 4th grade orchestra and 5th grade band. This decision would not only rob students of its essential educational opportunities, but also diminish the richness of our community's cultural fabric. Music programs are vital for students' academic and personal growth. According to studies published in journals such as the Journal of Educational Psychology, early exposure to musical education improves students' performance in math and reading. Furthermore, music education has been shown to enhance critical thinking skills and boost self-esteem among young learners.
030In today's challenging educational environment, it is more important than ever to provide our children with diverse learning avenues that inspire and prepare them for the future. The Mukwonago community has a long-standing tradition of supporting arts and education. Our local music programs offer students a chance to explore and develop their musical talents and have consistently received praise for producing talented and passionate musicians. Cutting these programs will not only impact current students, but will also have long-term impacts on the music culture within our community. We risk losing potential virtuosos and diminish the quality of life for future generations. Financial constraints are often cited as a reason for reducing school programs, yet the investment in music program pays dividends beyond the classroom. According to the report by the Arts Education Partnership, schools with music programs report higher graduation
031rates and better student engagement. Instead of cutting back, we should explore alternative funding options such as partnerships with local businesses, grants, community fundraisers to keep these invaluable programs running. We urge the MASD to reconsider this decision. Keep the fourth grade orchestra and fifth grade band intact. By doing so, we continue to invest in our children's futures, preserve the integrity of our educational system, and uphold the cultural heritage of the Mukwonago community. Together, let's ensure that the sound of music continues to thrive in Mukwonago schools. >> 30 seconds. My daughter started to take orchestra in fourth grade and has recently expressed interest in my solo tryouts. She has her three besties in the program. It's a bond that's part of her identity as a musician. It's her support system. She asked, "Why are they doing this?"
032I said something like, "They're trying to keep the band and orchestra program going for future kids." And she said it best, "Why would anyone want to stop the music?" As a child, I moved to a district that started band orchestra in sixth grade. Kids dropped out partway through the year. Less kids enrolled every year thereafter. Numbers did not go up. >> Thank you. Thank you. Marlena. >> [clears throat] >> Good evening. My name is Marlena Warner, and I go to Prairie View Elementary in sixth grade. I'm here to talk about the possible band and orchestra cuts. Yes, we may lose 20 minutes of class time, but we also get pulled out longer for other things. This isn't that long, and we aren't missing that much. The things we do miss, we figure out ourselves or
033from a classmate, so we don't distract the whole class. Music helps with emotional regulation and helps reduce stress. My friend who plays the violin and played at solo ensemble told me that when she was worried and scared, she played her violin because it made her feel better. Thank you for your time, and I hope you change your mind about getting rid of or cutting fourth and fifth grade band and orchestra. Thank you. That's it? Okay. Did we cover the quarterly? It's all just on one. Okay. All right, up next we have presentations, strategic partnership update. Thank you. Um just wanted to update uh a couple months ago, we began the discussion around what strategic partnerships um do we uh currently utilize in the school district? What strategic partnerships are um ongoing in the state? Um
034the update that I want to provide tonight, and Tom's got the presentation up there. I don't want to go slide by slide, but if there's certainly any questions by the board, we can go back to it. Um on a Wednesday evening, um board members from Mukwonago are invited to an informational session in the Palmyra-Eagle School District to learn more from the WASB's chief legal counsel on what strategic partnerships exist in schools. Um and then also um uh what do school consolidations look like? What does grade sharing look like? So, all of the the areas where you can start to develop large-scale uh financial savings, large-scale uh budgetary stability um will be presented on that evening. So, I wanted to let the board know that that's upcoming uh Wednesday night. You've all been invited to that.
035Um and that will be hosted in Palmyra. Any questions? Comments? All right, thank you. Health plan financial performance. If it's okay, can we go to number three real quick? We have our food service folks here in the room, and then after they present, can we Is it okay with you if we go to number three? Okay. Okay, cool. So, I'll ask uh Chris Oswald, our food service director, to come up here and and join me as I pull up our um presentation we have for you here tonight. So, Chris, you got some teammates here. Do you want to introduce them? Or can you guys stand up real quick? We got some food service uh uh our crew here. So, can you guys stand up and introduce yourselves real quick? >> [applause] >> Gladys. Sally, working
036at MHS. Tina, middle high school. Gladys Mooney, central kitchen. Yeah. Gladys Mooney, MHS. Thank you. Will, Mukwonago High School. Ladies, thanks for coming. Good to have you guys here. All right, so uh Chris and I are going to uh in tandem present uh the results of the food service survey that we issued to our students about a month ago here. So, um what we'll do here is we'll present the findings of the survey, take your feedback, and then in April and May, in the next 2 months, what we'll look for from you guys is is feedback, things you want to hear about. If if you have questions of implementation ideas, uh we can bring back more information as to what those costs might be or whatever ideas we have. But we're going to make some
037recommendations here about goals uh as a result of what we found from the feedback from the students here. Um if it's all right with you, I I do want to start with an email um real quick before we go through these results here. So, I was We issued this survey back in February, and within about 10 minutes of issuing the survey, a student reached out to me and gave me his direct feedback. I want to share it with you here. I'm going to keep his name out of it. Um but I'm going to read the email here for everybody here. So, the email reads, "Please re please uh replace Asian Bowl with burgers as an everyday menu option. Burgers are extremely monotonous, and Asian Bowl with the options of General Tso's chicken or orange is
038craved. The whole survey isn't necessary when kids simply yearn for the Asian Bowl, or you could at least make it a more regular occurrence. Serving Asian Bowl every day would also be beneficial as a very high-protein option that people get because of its benefits, not just taste. As a student athlete, I find it severely important to have nutritious meal that keeps me full. Double portions of popcorn chicken keep me full the most, but Asian Bowl is a whole other ball game. The chicken isn't filling like the popcorn variants, and it comes with super good noodles or rice that entice me to eat the whole thing. I could write off the page, but instead I end here to emphasize my words. If you can't make a chicken {slash} Asian Bowl every day, at least make it
039every Friday. And if you can't make it every Friday, at least make it once a month. And if not, then I can't support the school any further. Thank you. A student, [clears throat] a junior at MHS, who speaks for the people in need of that delicious Asian Bowl much more often." Oh my god, Tom, I have to ask, is that my son? No, that's not your son. But what I did >> like him. What I did is I took that feedback, and I forwarded instantly to Chris. Chris, what did we do with that feedback? Um well, I did tell you that it's already on three of six weeks, but we will see if we can slide it in a few more times. >> [laughter] >> So, when the kids spoke up, we listened, you know,
040and that's really the theme of what we have here. So, I'm glad we issued this survey, and here we go. We'll get into it right now. So, we administered the survey to just about 3,000 students. So, all students in grades fifth through 12th got this. 53% of the students completed it. So, we have uh a meaningful response size where we can say, "Yep, this these results are valid, statistically significant." So, we're going to listen here as we go through them here. We're going to end with these, but we're going to kind of start as well with the the main question was, "How satisfied are you with the school lunch program?" So, elementary is to the far left, middle school's in the middle, and then uh high school is to the far right. And then students
041had a Likert scale of five options from extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied. And we're going to present here our our goals on how we want to move forward. So, when we come back 1 year from now, we reissue the survey, where do we want to take things right now? But um this is our baseline. We've officially established, you know, where we are right now. So, now it's all about where we're going to go. So, we'll come back to each of these metrics here and talk about where we want to move the needle on these things. Okay? Uh we started by asking students, "How often do you lunch?" So, we had always or most of the time about half the time is in orange, and then rarely or never is in green. For the students that
042indicated they rarely or never eat lunch, we just fast-forwarded to two final questions. So, they didn't take the whole survey. The survey was really intended for those who at least eat lunch half the time or more. So, for those that rarely or never eat lunch, we asked, "Why?" Um you can see there's various options, but mainly on the far left, there's we had an other category where they could type in some feedback and Chris and I have gone through that. Uh but they indicated that the taste or the choices. Um one thing that stood out and you're going to kind of hear a little bit of a theme here in the coming slides here when we say the food is too expensive. Um only 3% of elementary students indicated that and only 4% of middle
043school students indicated that, but 18% of high school students, a rather significantly larger number of kids at that school, um said, "Hey, it's just a little too expensive." You're going to hear that a couple times here as we go through the presentation. So, I just kind of wanted to highlight that there because that's the first indicator we got on that in that area. Um through the we're going to present these. We're not going to to help just for the sake of this material being concise. Here's the questions we asked. We asked, you know, students to rate the following of the amount of food, the taste, freshness, temperature, and variety. And then we asked about the frequency of us serving chicken, burgers, pizza, pasta, etc. So, we'll present all the feedback at each elementary, middle, and
044high school level here in the coming slides. So, I'm going to turn it over here to Chris. Chris, you got that clicker there, so if you want to All right. So, let's just talk about like what some of the questions that we asked. So, is school lunch a good value for the price? And this was just asked of the middle school and high school students. Um and as you can see, we have um a significant amount of maybes at the middle school um followed by 27% of no. And then just as um Tom had mentioned earlier, the high school doesn't find it a good value um really at 45 to 39. Um so, we have to try to figure out what it is that they want more of and how we could make it a
045better value for what they're looking for. Um here was a significant one cuz this is something that's happening around a lot of school districts in our area. Chris, can I actually I'm going to read the question here? So, the question in particular as we talked about the National School Lunch Program, which we've talked about as a board. We can be members in this program or not. And as members, we get a federal assistance and we can subsidize the cost of the lunch um provided that they meet nutritional value. So, the the full question here said, "And only high school students got this. MHS is a member of the National School Lunch Program. This means the school district is able to reduce the price of lunch if and only if certain nutritional requirements are met. If
046MHS left the National School Lunch Program, the food service program could offer more options and larger portions, but prices would increase. Given that information, do you think MHS should leave the National School Lunch Program?" So, there's three options there that you can see at the bottom. Yes, if we can get more variety and larger portions, I would be okay with higher prices. In the middle is I'm unsure, I need more info. And on the far right, we have no, lunch is good as it is and I don't want to pay more. So, Chris, do you want to expand on that? Yeah, so um I have looked at a number of um schools that are doing this and um there are ways that yes, prices may have to go up, maybe not. Um and we'll talk
047a little bit about this when we get down to our action um plans later in the slide. Um but really when I when I look at this and they've already have expressed that they're concerned about the value of the program, the very next question we throw out there is, "Hey, do you want bigger portions, but we're going to charge you more?" Of course, they kind of leaned to the um no, I don't want to pay more. Um so, that is something that really as the board we're going to have to make, you know, decisions will have to be made um even upon my hire a year and a half ago, it was mentioned, "Are we going to leave the lunch program?" That is a board decision. That is not a food service decision, but I
048will give you as much information as you need so we can decide if that is a fiscally responsible thing to do, if we're going to be listening to our students when we do it um or if we do it. Um so, again, I think that this is something that we just need to um definitely have more information about. We'll come back to this in particular at the end. All right. So, we did ask them, aside from orange chicken, "What is it that you would like to see and would you be willing to try these if we put them on the menu?" And one of the reasons we did this is we know that menus get very repetitive. They get repetitive for students, although we do have a fair number that eat pizza daily. Um it
049also gets very repetitive as we're making menus. I get tired of seeing the same things on the menu day after day after day. So, I want to know like, "Hey, like give me some direction as to what kinds of things you're eating when you're not in school and what would you like to see on our menu?" So, as you can see, 77% said, "Give me more Asian." Um we know that um again, not only by the email, but just from our participation when we have Asian on the menu. So, will more Asian show up on the menu? Absolutely. Um local is really important to me and it's exciting to see that it's important to the kids at the high school as well. Um 76% said, "Yeah, tell me when I'm eating something local. I would
050certainly like to eat that." Um so, we will be reaching out to more of our local farmers to establish some relationships. So, as they start planning their crops, um it would be great if we could plan that so that Mequonago can purchase a lot of what it is they're selling. It's great not only for our students to get fresh local foods, it's also amazing for our um economy in the local community to know that they have an outlet to sell as much of their produce and other meats as possible. Um beyond that, we've started some other cold options in the last 2 years and now we want to be like, "Okay, what else can we do?" Grab and go boxes, snack trays, um think of like charcuterie. Looks like that's something that the kids would
051like to see. Again, Latin American. A little bit less want to eat more healthy things, but then the one that really was a shocking to me, um there seems to be this big push like nationwide for these plant-based food options, but here at Mequonago, they're not looking for that. 57% overwhelmingly like, "Please keep it off my tray. Give me meat and potatoes." So, I was like actually kind of excited to see that cuz although we have to serve certain things, I don't think we're going to see a lot of tofu and tempeh on these plates anytime soon. All right. So, here at the middle school, if offered, how likely would you be to purchase the following? And what we are trying to do with this is we have had some conversation about should we be
052starting an a la carte program, which means kind of those supplemental items that kids can purchase in addition to their hot lunch or cold lunch. Um overwhelmingly, it looks like the students at the middle school would like to have some other options to purchase. Um we've kind of known this. It was just a matter of how popular would it be? It looks like it would be pretty popular. So, I think this is something that we'll definitely move forward um and we'll talk about that more as we talk about some of our action steps as well. Um but it looks like across the board whether it's a dessert item, a bottled drink, or other snacks, chips, yogurt, um you know, high high kind of healthy items, looks to me like they would be willing to purchase
053any and all of it. Elementary school, one of the things I wanted to know is, "Hey, should we be putting three options out and not just two?" Because, you know, in order to get participation up, we need to make sure that we're offering things that they want to eat. Um and overwhelmingly, 85% of those elementary kids that were surveyed said, "Yeah, like it would be great to have another option." Um and this is something that again, area school districts are doing. Um other districts I've worked in have done it and I think it's time as we look at how can we increase participation, I think it's time that we give our kiddos more choices. All right. Guys, this one's for you. >> Nice job, ladies. All right. >> All right. 90% or above, okay? Our
054food service workers are friendly. They're doing exactly what they need to do, which is treat each and every one of our kiddos with respect. So, this was exciting to see that for the most part, our you know, our kiddos love our staff. So. Always always good to have smiling lunch ladies. All right. Are there enough healthy options? Now, healthy, we didn't really define it and as you know, everybody defines healthy differently. Um but really, if you look at that, I mean, they seem to be like, "Yep, there's enough healthy options." Um so, we don't necessarily need to increase that, maybe a little bit at the at the high school. And again, I think this is going to be a matter of more conversation directly with our students. What do you What is your definition of
055healthy? How can we make it so that you feel that you're getting the healthiest meal that we can give you? All right. For those with special dietary needs, do you have enough options for your needs? And again, this one is going to take more exploration. Um elementary says, "Yeah, 81% yeah, I have a dietary need. You guys, you know, you guys are doing what you can to make sure that I'm fed a healthy meal." Um for those that are a little bit lower, the 69% and 61%, I will say that we do not have a lot of parents at those two grade levels that have reached out to us and have asked us um as a district to supply their students with a special diet with a special diet tray. Um so, this could be
056some, you know, due to allergens, due to um you know, other um other health conditions. Um so, I think at that point it's also we need to do a better job as a as a district and as a department to get the word out that we will work with students and their doctors to make sure that if those students would like to be fed by the Mequonago School District Food Service, that we are able and capable of doing that safely. So, I think part of this too is on us to make sure that parents know that that is an option. All right. Action steps, where do we go from here? All right. So, at the elementary responding excellent, good, or average, the amount of 79%. So, that's not bad for the about 80% of the
057kids like what we do. Variety of food, but one of the things that we looked at was 63% said the taste needs improvement. So, we need to try and figure out what it is about the taste that they're lacking. Um please don't say ranch dressing um because we can't put it out every day. But, we do have to figure out what that means when they say taste. So, again, um I've already started conversations with some of the um with some of the elementary students. I've been going into student councils. We've been having some conversation, which is wonderful. And I think it is that dialogue. Like, what does that mean? Because a taste to like a third and fourth grader is going to be different than what an 11th and 12th grader wants to eat. So,
058is it too spicy? Is it too bland? Is it just the fact that it doesn't taste like Culver's and McDonald's? Um what is it about the taste um that we can how can we improve it? When we look at the next two, temperature and freshness, we already know that there's some things we have to do differently. And what I say by that is we have a central kitchen here at Mukwonago, which means that there are some items that are satellited out hot from our central kitchen. And then they get in a truck. And then they go to the elementary school. And we try our hardest to keep it hot, to have it be as fresh as possible. But, the fact is if we could cook it on site we're going to see those numbers vastly
059improve. And when we look at the high school um rating of those temperature and freshness um in a couple slides, you're going to see that those numbers have jumped. And we know that it just seems to be the the further away the school is from the central kitchen and the longer it is from the time that that that food was cooked till the time that it's served, obviously temperature and freshness um both of the quality it goes down. So, Chris, can you stay right there? At at the very bottom of the screen I I note that taste, freshness, freshness, and temps all improve from elementary to middle and then from middle to high school. So, just to emphasize what Chris just said, the further away the schools are located from where the food originates, obviously
060there's more time that elapses, temperature fades, so on and so forth. So, investing in equipment that will allow for on-site preparation isn't cheap, but that is the way to to deliver a hotter, fresher, better tasting meal to our elementary school. So, um it's something that if we want to attack, that's that's the way we would have to go about that as improving the equipment at our elementary school so they can on-site preparation. Chris, did you want to add anything to that? >> I think that sums it up. All right. So, here at the elementary um you can see in the green just the I want more. So, what we did is we basically asked them like, "What would you like to see on your menu?" And we made it pretty easy. It was like, "I
061want more. It's served enough, you know, and please put less on." So, the I want more, tacos, nachos. They're already on weekly, but okay. Um I get it. I mean, who doesn't love a nacho? Um they would like to see more pasta, maybe more chicken, more pizza, maybe a few less burgers. Um salads and sub sandwiches, um I get it. They're not everyone's favorite. And they do show up periodically, but it's always against something that is higher participation um because we know that we need to feed the most number of students that we can on a daily basis. So, for all the all the stats that we have here, if it's 30% or greater, we're highlighting that whether it's for more or for indicating they want it less. So, just to highlight that or point
062that out. Yeah, so it was great that we actually got like really tangible numbers back from the students so we can really make sure that we are gearing a menu um kind of exactly what they would like to see. Um so, here at the at the elementary again, 85% were in favor of adding additional options, which I think going into the 26-27 school year will um will happen. And I think that just by doing that, we're going to see an increase in participation levels. So, right now, somewhat to extremely satisfied is around 60%. I mean, we would love to push that up, you know, every year about another like 10%. I mean, that's kind of our goal. So, it was great to have baseline numbers that now we can kind of um start working on
063and actually have tangible numbers that we know that we can reach. So, Chris, just keep it right there. What what you'll see across elementary, middle, and high school, excuse me, Craig, is that we're we're aiming to shift take 10% out of this bucket, move it here, and take 10% out of this bucket, move it here. So, let's take 48 and basically increase it by about 10 to 60. Let's keep it about 30% here and make this decrease from 23 down to about 10. So, that's the shift we're going to desire with some of the changes here and get student participation levels up through some of the methods that we're discussing right now. Okay, it's similar at the middle school. Um Excellent, good, average. So, the amount of food, yep, 82%. They're they're okay with that.
064Again, temperature, taste um falls into the 70. Um variety at the middle school. Um it says needs improvement. It was the lowest across all grade levels. So, again, this is going to be a conversation with the middle school as far as what they would like to see on their menus. One of the things I will point out is the way that we have to set up the middle school, the way that those lines are arranged um in the current configuration of the kitchen. Um it's just it's difficult at best to make what we would like to make um in the equipment that we have, which is basically two convection ovens. Um and then have to set everything up um in the two lines that we have. Now, when we look at the new kitchen at
065the middle school, we have already designed that kitchen to increase the variety. So, it's really going to reflect more of what we're doing at the high school because there will be the space not only in the kitchen, but um you know, within our coolers to hold that amount of food, within all of our cooking equipment to cook all of the different varieties of food. So, we may not be able to um make too many changes. We'll make some, but maybe not too many going into the again, 26-27 school year. But, by the time we get to 27-28 or even the spring of 27, if that's when our kitchen is completed, um I definitely see that that new facility will be able to meet um you know, what the what the students are looking for. All
066right. So, here at the um middle school, they would also like to see more tacos, nachos, chicken, and pasta. Kind of a running theme through all of the schools. Um and then again, less sub sandwiches and less pizza. And I don't think that it's less pizza they want to see. I think they want to see different pizza varieties. And again, with two um ovens, sometimes it's difficult um to do that, but um even going into this next menu, taking some of this information, I was like, "Okay, well, let me just throw a few more different flavors out there. Let me do some different things." So, we can try to get a feel for what it is that they want. Um until we actually have conversation, this is great data and it's a great starting point.
067And now it's just a matter of some trial and error and more conversation to see exactly what it is that they would like to see. All right. So, again, expanding all the cart options um something we will definitely look at doing for the 26-27 school year. Um we just had to figure out where to configure it in our new cafeteria um or in in the current cafeteria. We already know how it's already going to be set up. Again, new cafeteria is designed with all the cart in mind. So, we know it's going to happen in the new facility. We will figure out some kind of a makeshift all the cart area in order to make sure that the kids have what they're looking for um for next school year. Do you guys have any concerns
068about um do you want to bring some feedback to us or can you go back one slide? Actually, I'll get it here, Chris, if you don't I got you. for for an expanded all the cart offering at the middle school. Board, do you guys have any concerns or I'll I'll I I guess I'll ask the question now. Do you want to think about that and then at some point give me feedback in April and May? So, as we plan for 26-27, I we get your feedback on how you feel about that. I like the expanded um options. Question is, which I guess everybody'd want to know is how much increase in waste would we do anticipate by providing more options? Um well, that's why we use production records. So, honestly, um we might have some
069waste like the first one or two times that something goes out, but then we kind of see the acceptability of it and we cut back on it. I mean, it's no different than putting anything new on the menu. You know, there's always kind of a learning curve. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? All right. Thanks. We got a we got a couple more. This is the middle school wrap-up and >> so we covered that. All right. Action steps for the high school. Um 77% are good with [clears throat] the amount of food they're getting. Um the taste, the freshness, and the temperature. If you really look at those, the temperature and the freshness um yeah, good job, Jane. Um You know, at the high school, we are batch cooking for every meal. It goes
070really directly from oven to warmer to um to serving. Um and here, if you watch um ever come and watch those cooks in action, I mean, it is constant motion. You know, from 9:30 right up until the end of service at, you know, just after noon. Um and that right there solidifies why it's so important to be cooking on site versus doing some of the satelliting that we're doing. Um so, that will have to be something that we have conversations about because there is always going to be a cost to doing that, but as you can see, the acceptability goes way up when we do it. Those marks there are the best across all three, you know, age levels or grade groups there, elementary, middle, and high school. So, if we can find ways to
071produce food at the elementary schools, middle schools in underway right now, but at the elementary level, if we can find ways to produce food and serve lunches that mirrors the high school production, we think that will increase a lot of elementary metrics. So, Tom, are you talking about reducing the central kitchen, eliminating the central kitchen? Like, what are you talking >> [laughter] >> Okay. That's why I was like, we can't be doing this at every single school. No, but there's definitely some things. So, even even in the course of the last 2 years, we have increased the amount of things that are being produced at the elementary level as opposed to happening at the central kitchen. So, I think when we're talking about doing some things at the central kitchen, I think we're talking about
072um items like our vegetables and some other items that would be uh that we would benefit by batch cooking on site versus having it cooked and then having to satellite it out. So, now you're talking about a holding of an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours in some cases. Um and that's I mean, it's not ideal. We're not the only school that does it, but no, we would not in any way close the central kitchen. All that does to me is tell me that we have um more revenue um streams that we can come up with and more work that we can create for the central kitchen. Okay, so again, going over the high school. Um So, did you want to talk about why you put the salads at the top? >> [laughter] >> So, we
073I sorted this in the far right column. So, from less please, there's, you know, salads is at 13% and then burgers is the is the number one item they want less of. So, I sorted in the far right hand column. But, you know, salads, they're basically saying the number one metric there is served just enough. So, 2/3 of kids feel salads are served just enough. Yeah, I mean, that was something that again, introduced last year. Uh we started doing grab and go salads and it seems like we go through a fair amount every day. The kids are excited to have um something that they can just go in. It's a healthy choice. Um they can always add more vegetables to it, which a lot of them do. Um but it but it gives them something
074um that I think that they had not had access to um previously. So, I'm glad I was glad to see that the kids really do enjoy those and I can just tell them in the numbers that we do every day that it seems to be something that they gravitate towards. Um again, tacos, nachos. I don't know how to do more. Um it's already on once a week. We're all kind of sick of taco Tuesday, but hey, if that's what they want, we'll figure it out. Um pasta, again, right now it's on about three times in the 6-week cycle. I think it goes up against Asian. I think every other week is either Italian or Asian. Um so, we need to figure out how to get both of those on more often. So, I think our
075Fridays are going to have to start looking different and we can't just do popcorn chicken. Um and then burgers, they say that there's less of them and we do have those on the burger slide every day cuz it's an easy grab and go for those kiddos that just want to run in and grab something. Um but I think what we're going to do is instead of maybe like just getting rid of burgers, I think maybe we're just going to try a couple new varieties of burgers and different toppings for the burgers and just try to make the burgers a little more exciting. All right, so again, serve more of the following. Yes, we know that 77% are you know, this goes back to that one graph that we saw earlier. Um they definitely want to
076see more Asian, more local foods, grazing options, um and Latin, um which obviously Mexican, Cuban, Caribbean. So, this makes me really excited because these are all the things that I really want to bring in. I just hate to bring them in and then like you would alluded to, like how much waste do you have if it's something new? Um but at least I know that these are some of the items that kids are looking for. So, I'm excited to put them on the menu. All right, action steps for the high school. Oh, boy. Um number one question there, should we leave the National School Lunch Program? Um 28 yes, 28 I don't know, 44 no. Um so, I guess we just have to explore that more. Um cuz right now, is lunch a good value?
07745% also say no. So, it's not a good value, but they don't want to leave the National School Lunch Program. Um and then, why don't you eat um school lunch? 18% say at the high school say it's too expensive. So, yeah, those are the three degrees of evidence there is we like listen to what the data says. What what are the kids saying? Like, this kind of tells us, you know, at least something there. So, you know, if we're going to consider leaving the National School Lunch Program, so that therefore Chris and her staff could produce whatever they want, uh nutritional considerations aren't being mandated by somebody else. We can do as we see fit here. But, when we do that, we lose the funding that helps us subsidize the cost of meals. Right now,
078what the data says is probably not. Okay? We can certainly move in a different direction. Muskego and Elmbrook are both two school districts that are not members of the National School Lunch Program at the high school only. They are at the middle school and elementary level, but they give flexibility to their high school teams there to to make lunch as they see fit. Muskego does it with an outside vendor. Uh they use Taher. Uh with Chris, you have experience there. You were once an employee at Taher um at that school district, too. Um and then Elmbrook uh does it in-house production uh but also um you know, they're not members. So, what we could do is send a delegation of students there to go there. If that's something you said, "Hey, let's take a look
079at this before we discount the idea." And let's send in, you know, a few students over there to take a look at it, see how their food service program looks. And then we can take feedback from those kids. So, that's just one idea. But, if we're going just off the data, it doesn't seem that leaving the National School Lunch Program is something that people are saying, "Yes, let's do that." Do you guys have any feedback on that? Do you know if Muskego's high school that is not on the federal program, when they switched and did it cause an increase? You're going to know that better than anyone here. >> I do know all of this. Yeah, okay. So, they switched um in 2012, which is when the new regulations came out for the Healthy, Hunger-Free
080Kids Act. Um they were concerned about the high schoolers um and the acceptability of all of the new regulations. So, the lower portion sizes, all of the whole grains, all of those things. Um so, there was never a dip. Um it kind of held true with participation. I will say from a parent standpoint, um it definitely was more expensive. Um but um but they didn't I mean, I I'm going to say that they did not see any type of a dip. The kids just kept eating. Um and their fund balance reflects that those that that the kids at Muskego are happy with the program. Thank you. Mhm. So, from a nutritional standpoint, what would be one of the benefits of leaving the lunch program at the high school specifically? Cuz I think port- protein is
081a big one, right? Mhm. So, from a nutritional standpoint, I guess I mean, that's such a broad category. So, if you say, "Would I be able to serve a larger portion or label something as a high protein item um or a high calorie item um and serve those portion sizes like to our football players or wrestlers when they're trying to put on weight?" And I would have the leeway to do that. So, I could easily give larger portions for those students that want it. Right now, um you know, they buy the regular size portion and then they pay all the cart prices to get a second or a third. Um so, yes, it would give me more leeway from a standpoint of not having to stay at around 750 calories for a full complete meal.
082Just to put that in perspective, I think the new um Big Arch at McDonald's is over 1,000 calories. Um so, I mean, so when we're talking about a significant difference in calories from what the kids are used to on the um when they buy food outside of the school. Um from a nutritional standpoint, you know, does that mean that that's all we would serve as high fat, high sodium, high sugar? And the answer to that is no. Like, I still have to sleep at night and this is what I've been doing for the better part of three decades and um I wouldn't make significant changes and I mean, there would still be plenty of healthy options. Um I think the difference between starting it in 2012 and starting it in 2027 um is the fact
083that the students right now at the high school have grown up only ever knowing lunches under the federal program, which means they've only ever known whole grains and all of the fruits and all of the vegetables and all of those regulations. So, it's not strange to them to have to take a fruit or vegetable with every meal. Um whereas the kiddos when it started at the high school, like that was a significant change. They've only ever known one thing and then you know, cuz it was never it wasn't phased in. It was it was a light switch. It was now we're different. >> to highlight that just for a quick second here. In 2012, when new standards were introduced into the National School Lunch Program, the Mukwonago Area School District was featured on the front
084page of the New York Times and our students were interviewed saying, "We don't like this." Um you know, the mandates came down, said, "You got to increase the nutritional values." And portion sizes went down. Right. Um a little bit of chaos was being dealt by the federal level to everybody. So, Mus- Miss Muskego, you could say at that time said, "Well, let's not waste a good crisis and let's just change right now, leave the program and and do it." So, that's been in place. We stayed in the program. Um I can't speak for the board in 2012, but likely I would assume that like a lot of decisions, there are some financial considerations that they put a lot of emphasis on. So, keeping those federal subsidies were were kept around and we stayed in the
085program. >> Mhm. So, um changes changes possible. >> majority of your students, they're not sure they want to leave the program. We still have This is true. that that say no. So, had we asked the same question in 2012, 2013, I think you would have gotten a different answer. Yeah. If we were to leave the national program, does it automatically mean that school lunch becomes more expensive for kids every day or does it just going to increase the cost if they increase their portion sizes. Um the It would be structured differently. So, we probably wouldn't have combos like we currently have. Basically, a meal that contains all of the fruits, all of the vegetables, the milk, all of those things um at that cost because we would have to make up that difference somewhere. Um
086so, they probably won't be required to take everything. We could still do a packaged meal. But instead of $3.75, we might be looking at something north of $4 for that particular meal. And then they would just be able to kind of all a carte piecemeal their things together. So, um overall, would there be a cost increase? Most likely, but we're not talking about a significant price increase because now they're not going to be mandated to have to take certain pieces in order to call it a meal. Is that I don't know if that makes sense to you, but yeah. So, I think what we should do uh Chris is we can come back and and show you what the menu and prices are at Muskego and Elmbrook so you can kind of see what their
087options are for their students. You know, our lunch right now at the high school level is $3. And 75 cents. And you're going to see about uh I think it's I'll come back next week and give you definitive values, but Muskego kids are going to pay about $5 per a meal. And there's options like lower and there's options that are higher and they're going to gravitate to wherever they want to go, but there is a a wider array of cost options. Yes. Our meals are at three I'm sorry, $3.75. How much are we getting in federal subsidies per meal approximately? >> Um for the paid meals, um 50 cents. If we have um like our free students, we get about $4.70 total. Let's put it that way. And that that's between actual reimbursement rates um
088and what we get in USDA commodities. So, if for every meal we sell for a kid who isn't free or reduced, the federal government's giving us 50 cents for that meal, so we generate revenue when we sell that. We would lose all those extra revenues whether the kid is not free or reduced, is reduced, or is a free meal student. So, we would have to cover those costs ourselves. >> Yeah, and we can calculate that out and we can show you what that would mean just by pulling the high school out, like what that would do as far as a financial um implication. If you're interested in exploring more on this option. Yes, please. Okay. Any other questions, comments? I was curious, has the USDA guidelines for the free and reduced or for the lunch
089program changed since they've updated the food pyramid? >> They're in the um they're in they're in the works. Um I was in DC recently and we're starting to have the conversations um about what these new dietary guidelines will do to school lunch and they will do something um because our dietary guidelines for National School Lunch Program, National um School Breakfast Program are always based on those dietary guidelines. So, because the pyramid's been turned upside down, um our program will also be turned upside down. So, the same thing here with the just the shifting trying to take 10% out of the somewhat or extremely dissatisfied and moving that to the middle bucket and taking 10% out of the middle and moving it up to the next uh to the extremely or somewhat satisfied buckets when we
090come back next year with all the changes we're thinking and considering. That's that's the goal here. Okay? I think yep, that's our last slide. What do you guys got for us? What would you like us to come back with? I've written down menus at Elmbrook and Muskego along with pricing. Uh we can cost out what it would require if, you know, we lose those free and reduced subsidies along with all the others. Um do we you want us to come back with concrete proposals and pricing if we were going to um increase the the temperatures at our elementary schools so we can get a, you know, and what equipment would that require? Do you want us to come back with what it would take for us to to achieve some of these desires here? >>
091know what kind of shape like the old equipment's going to be. Is there a possibility of using some of that? So, I'm going to tell you we um a lot of our food service equipment it's aged. We've done a great job of maintaining it. Some of that older equipment is really built to last, but at that same time, it's hard to it's hard to impossible to find replacement parts for a lot of those things because it is so old. Um [clears throat] we've done a great job of maintaining it, but that stuff is just coming end of life. It's inevitable. We did a new oven over at remind me I'm sorry, a dishwasher over at Big Bend. >> Bend cuz theirs was completely falling apart. >> Yep, so like there's certain things that have shelf
092lives where those pieces of equipment are done. So, there's going to come a point time where we have to probably use like these are large one-time projects or one-time costs that have been deferred for decades. So, at some point we're going to have to do this. And it's just going to there's uh about 8 to 900,000 dollars of fund balance. I would say these are the types of things that that fund balance is there for. So, if you want us to cost out on improving the equipment to improve the the taste, the freshness, and all those things at the elementary schools, we can do that and just show you what that would cost and what the effects would likely be. Is that something you would like for us to do? Craig? So, the better the
093lunch, the better the grades? Any kind of correlation there? Happier kids, happier grades? I mean >> Well, I would like to think so. >> I saw many in the back that said yes. Cuz that's what really matters. >> we need to start about breakfast in a couple years, too. I hear that's really good for grades. Yeah, but I think we can all we don't need a survey to know that when you're hungry. Having options is a good thing. So, seeing the numbers is okay. We should bring that Mike. Uh going back to Crosby's uh question on the food pyramid, do we have an idea when they're going to settle that? And I guess when do we have to make a decision to leave the federal program or not? So, the leaving the federal program, we
094would probably have to make that decision within the next couple months if you wanted it to happen for the 26-27 school year. Um if it's for the 27-28 school year, we have some time. Um but yeah, soon we would have to figure out the contract for the following school year. So, we really would have to get on that sooner than later. If it's something that we're just looking at for the 27-28 school year, we definitely have some time if we want to do a little bit more more studies on it, get some students involved in those decisions, uh we have time. I I guess it it sure would be nice if we knew what the new federal program's going to look like cuz then it might already be good. Like we might say, "Hey, that's
095what we were going to go for anyway and keep it." Sure. So, one of the things um when it comes to changing the dietary guidelines, it doesn't necessarily mean I mean, we're already, you know, basically into April and um the new fiscal year starts July 1. Um I don't believe that anything that they come up with is going to be implemented for the 26-27 school year. Um they know that as soon as they start making changes, they also need to figure out um how they're going to support schools financially um because some of the changes that they are currently looking at with higher amounts of protein, more scratch cooking, they know that that means that schools are going to have to do more training. They're going to have to replace equipment just like we're talking
096about right now. Um uh all of those things cost money. And they know that they can't just start passing these new regulations and not offer with the schools something to be able to actually implement them. Um and industry has to follow as well. I mean, so we have to buy certain things with certain nutritional values from all of our vendors. Um so, I know that industry is involved in these conversations because industry right now is making food that will be available for fall. There's no way that they can change on a dime what they're doing within their manufacturing warehouses. So, I think when we start talking about dietary guidelines, we're going to see some small changes that are probably going to be easy to implement for 26-27, but the overall sweeping changes are most likely
097not going to be starting until July 1 of 2027. We should be prepared like with options just in case the board does want to change that, but I don't think it'd be a good idea to do that until we see what the mandates are going to be. That's fair. I wish we would have done this survey earlier. I apologize for not doing that. I think the feedback here in the baseline we established is really good. So, in terms of I Craig, what you just said about better food, better grades, you know, better uh more focused kiddo. Yeah, I think we can definitely make this thing a better um situation here going forward. So, we'll bring back those ideas over the next 30-60 days here for you guys to give us final blessings on. Um and
098we'll go from there. Does that work? Yep. Any other questions or comments? Okay. Chris and team, thanks for making those Asian bowls so delicious. >> [laughter] >> Just want to say I appreciate you guys being To the board, if you ever have an opp- ever have an opportunity go to the high school and visit the kitchen to see what they do, it's incredible. I did it once and it's amazing how much work they do like the scratch Over 2,000 meals a day, largest restaurant in Muskego, there's no doubt. So, kudos to you. All right. Thanks, Chris. Okay. So, I'll go back now to um Okay. So, just a small change here. Obviously, with the snow out last Monday and and us rescheduling for tonight, uh I am going to present here for um our health
099care presentation, Sarah Zimmerman as- excuse me, Sarah Hammes and Megan Zimmerman would normally have been here had we been here last Monday. They mapped their schedules out well in advance and they were already in their schedule booked here on the 23rd. So, I'm going to present some of the financial uh um updates here on our health care plan and I'll do this here and I'll keep it short. But I'm going to focus on the most important things here right now. So what we'll do here much like the food services. Here's the state of the union financially speaking in April and May in April will come back with a revised final. Here's what our rates are going to be proposed for our single and family plan. So whatever that cost increases we establish that rate the
100employees pay 12% the district pays 88%. We'll make a final decision on that in May. And then we have open enrollment for employee benefits that will follow the next day. All right. So as we take a look at our health plan results here. You've seen some of this information before but I think it's good for the community hear this too. In 22-23 this is when we were fully insured with Anthem we spent 8.4 million dollars. They asked for us for a 35% rate increase. This year reflects a 25% rate increase. We kind of humored ourselves saying they asked for 35 but we could talk them down to 25. What we did was ultimately drop our cost down to just over 8 million dollars. So we dropped our costs from 22-23 into 23-24 and then from
101that year as we look back at 24-25 the cost went up by about 800,000 dollars from year one to year two. Clearly if you look at that gap as to what fully insured versus self-insured was we are clearly saving a couple million dollars each year by making the choice that we did. So there's validation there most certainly. When we take a look at the results of 2025 the current school year through February. So you can see if I just look at the orange bars we kind of had our baseline here at 8 million then we went to 8.8 and now we're projecting to go to 9.8. I'm going to add the commentary here. So what are the cost drivers that is causing this? So I'm going to focus here just on this part right here.
102We have high HCC our high cost claimants. Those are people who cost 50,000 or more at the individual level. In the very first year we had 19 people at an average value of 87,000 dollars across those 19 people. This last school year in 24-25 we had 24 people at an average value of 162,000. Those 24 individuals ultimately represented about 3.8 million dollars. Okay. There's no plan design in the world that's going to eliminate high cost claimants when you have people who have needs. It is what it is. So high cost claimants from last year um was a driver. Okay. When we go out and get stop loss insurance they'll take a look at the last 12 to 18 months and that's going to be embedded in the data. The good news is the majority of
103those folks there are one of two things happens with people who get sick. They either get better or they don't. In this case all those folks have gotten better. So their their status for are they going to be an ongoing high cost claimant for the vast majority the answer is no. They're better. That's awesome. Um here on the right hand side we're taking a look at July 1 through the end of February for the 23-24 24-25 and then the current school year. Um I'm going to draw your attention to like the paid of the paid cost for each high cost claimants. All right. And then we have non-high cost claimants here. So these are just our average folks on the health plan. What we're seeing is the average person is going up in cost. I'm
104going to hypothesize for you right now is that our folks are realizing the value of the plan. They're realizing that if I had a hernia surgery with that I needed with Anthem and there's a 3,000 dollar deductible I will likely pay 3,000 dollars for that hernia surgery. In our plan there's a 500 dollar copay when you use a tier one preferred partner and in fact we waive that copay because we know the guaranteed pricing from our tier one partners is so favorable. So our people once upon a time if they had health needs that they were delaying because of cost concerns those cost concerns are now gone. So what we have is utilization is going up. I don't that is not going to be an ongoing thing. Folks are going to if they have needs
105they get the needs addressed. It seems that they are getting their health care needs met right now by our plan. So higher utilization in year two and year three is what we're seeing. I do anticipate that we're going to hit our long-term stride in year four and our costs are going to come down. I say that because we have the exact same plan design as Menasha and that was exactly what they went through and that's exactly what we're going through right now. So when you build a great health care plan that's affordable folks are going to use it. Makes sense doesn't it? So once delayed and deferred medical procedures are obtained and done we can kind of cross that bridge and then hit our long-term stride. Last year we added Olivia. Olivia's our our nurse
106navigator in our clinic. So when we take a look at the first seven months of last year from July 1 2024 to February of 2025 and then when we had had Olivia from July 1 of this current fiscal year through the end of February we went from 515 members on our health plan up to 727 they are using tier one options. As a reminder tier one indicates our preferred partners. The OAWs the the folks that have they show us their prices. We know what they are. They're typically not hospitals that have hidden prices because they show us their prices and they're very good and they guarantee their work. We identify them as a tier one partner and then we waive the cost the copays when our people use those. So we are steering our people
107to the right people at a much higher rate. Um the amount of money that we are are paying every time we pay more money to a tier one provider we are taking money out of a high out of a hospital system that's likely going to be much much more. And then when we take a look at the percentage of our spend here on tier one options we were at 28% of all of our medical spend was on tier one options. We're up to 37% right now with Olivia. We're going to the goal right now is to make that number 40% by the end of the school year. I have no doubt we're going to go there and we'll be at 50% next school year. So as we make more emphasis and more investments and more
108spend on tier one options we're basically shifting from high cost hospital settings in the more effective cost settings at at private independent medical providers. Okay. So we are on route. The game plan is coming along. There is some turbulence but I'm not phased by it. Okay. One thing I want to highlight here is the out-of-pocket spend. We have not designed a health care plan where we just simply shifted cost on to our employees. We have done quite the opposite of that. In our plan the individual max out-of-pocket cost in a given year is 3,000 dollars for an individual and 5,500 for a family. So even in a bad health care year if there's some major medical things the financial impact is going to be minimized at 3,000 individually or 5,500 as a family. The average
109out-of-pocket cost for our folks and during the 24-25 year was 342 and the median value was 80. We had a significant percentage of folks who had zero dollars out-of-pocket all year because they were able to get all their health care through the health clinic or through tier one options. Only 1.9% of all of our people so 26 total hit the max out-of-pocket at the individual level. That's extremely extremely low. So the those copays that we think about when you aggregate those and what that does at the individual level and also at the family level we are shielding our people from having to come up with a lot of out-of-pocket costs as they consume health care. We were not getting what I really want to highlight here is these these individual values here. We're not getting
110those values cuz people are avoiding the doctor. 99.5% of all the people on our health plan either got a prescription filled or got a medical procedure provided. So we're not our people are addressing their medical needs right now. As we would want them to. So the average out-of-pocket cost for an individual on a PPO plan which is similar to ours in 20 in the 2024 calendar year was 1,142 dollars. We are at 342 dollars. We have a really really strong health care plan. So we have invested in our workforce in our teachers so that we're not just having an invaluable health plan where there's a lot of out-of-pocket costs that come out. We have designed something that really helps them and right now they're addressing their health care needs. So utilization is up. But as
111I think about the metrics there I say that makes sense. I have a question about the 1.9%. Was that people having some serious health issues or is that them just deciding to go out of network? So no more than likely Dale that's going to be people who have serious health issues. So the if somebody is admitted into a hospital and they stay overnight it's a 1,000 dollars per night maximum of three nights. So the worst financial year somebody if if somebody got in a car accident or had a very serious surgery 3,000 dollars is the maximum amount during the 25-26 calendar year. 3,000 dollars is undoubtedly a large bill but in the grand scheme of getting health care you need to potentially save your life I would say that's very worth it. Very much so.
112So those folks there are typically having the a very bad year health wise um to answer your question. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So the point here is we're shielding our people from high out-of-pocket costs once they're on our plan. The preliminary renewal right now is going to be between 14 and 18% will come back and tighten this number up in April and say here's what we're proposing. What I would say as a school board, your decision here ultimately is we can certainly cost shift. We can change copay amounts. We can do, you know, other things that would reduce the district cost but we can keep it as is and shield our people from higher out of pocket costs or we can keep it as keep it as is and stay the course here at this
113time. Um, we will bring bring back what that ultimate renewal projection is for the 26-27 school year next month. And then if you don't like the numbers, you know, as it fits into the overall budget which I'll bring an update back as well, then you can say Tom, we can't afford this. We need to kind of shift something somewhere else or take something off the table and then we can do that in April and vote on it in May. Okay, so we still have 60 days to to make any changes that we want but we're just setting the table right now. Does that make sense? Okay, I'm just going to stop right there. Do you guys have any other questions here? Jake. Tom, if you go back to the the year over year cost, I
114think it was three. If if we were to put our participation rate over that, would we see a decline since we changed plans? Uh, the number of people on the plan like the number of people electing into a plan. No, it's it's held steady. It's about 360 to 380 employees about 1,200 total lives when we count dependents. So that's held that's held. Thank you. And another question, do we offer like flex spending accounts? Sure we do. Yep, so >> widely used? Flexible spending accounts are one of the more difficult employee benefits to communicate for whatever reason. But yes, we do offer a flexible spending account so for anybody who anticipates incurring out of pocket costs, they can at least pay for it on a pre-tax basis rather than a post-tax basis. So yeah, we do
115offer flex spending. >> And we can't do HSAs because this is not considered >> No, we're not considered a high cost health plan. Correct. When we were in that blue bar right there with Anthem, so we had $2,000 I'm trying to think right now. It's been feels like forever ago. For our family plans, I think the out of pocket cost the out of pocket deductible was 3,000 but as a district we gave we gave families 2,000 in a health reimbursement arrangement and HRA. So here's money, it's at Mid America. This money is here for you for your out of pocket medical costs. So you can't use that money on anything you like. But I did send out an email reminder to all of our people who still have funds remaining and some folks still have
116$8,000, $6,000 saying do not forget about this money. It's still there and some folks said thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot that I had that money. So No, we do not have an HSA option here but we do have a flex spending option here. We could never do an HSA because it's not a high deductible Correct. Yeah, we would have to increase copays and max out of pockets up significantly. Yeah, thank you. Yes. What what I'm saying ultimately though is that we are the the steerage here. So when we go to tier one providers again, we have people, we have surgeons, we have ambulatory surgery centers, we have MRI settings. We have a lot of great health care providers that are not attached to our hospital that are willing to come forward and say
117here's our prices. We guarantee our work. In exchange for us steering them there, they give us the absolute best prices. And so we always prefer these here. Right now, you know, for the average outpatient surgery, it's $500. Um if we increase that to say 750, we would get a much larger percentage saying I don't want to use I don't want to pay a 750 copay. What's your tier one option MASD? I'll I'll use it. So we can get these numbers up not by shifting the cost but by increasing the copay, we will get the steerage that we ultimately really want. So we'll bring back some of those options here when we come back in April. Okay? Any other questions from anybody? Greg. Good. We're good. Thank you. All right. So then I'm going to present
118now on school district funding and the 26-27 budget development. Thanks for stay sticking it out here, guys. Appreciate it. I try to really cut back on the amount of talking I do at these school board things. Absolute strikeout tonight. Um, but this one I this is this is an important topic here. So for the community, I'm delivering this presentation to help in efforts of transparency of all the chatter that we hear. I I'm delivering this information for folks to hear it. Some of this is going to be redundant. We presented this information in years past and previous months but um, it's important for our community to understand where I see us as the chief financial officer. I'm going to give you my absolute best information here as to why we are where we are as
119it relates to the conversation around band, music, orchestra, choir and the district as a total. So we just buckle in and let's go for a little walk here on this presentation. Our school district gets 26 sources of revenue. So 26 six different ways in which we get revenue for a total on the current budget of $70 million. Okay, the top four sources of revenue represents $94 million. So state aid and local property taxes are easily the most important, well over 80% of our total funding. Open enrollment tuition and per pupil categorical aids are another $9.4 million when you add them together but I'm going to focus on state aid and local property taxes. When we add those two values together, they are restricted and limited to a revenue limit. The state says when you add
120those two together, they cannot exceed a formula which says we take our three year average of students and we multiply it by a school district specific amount of revenue. These laws have been in place since 1993. So that that I'm going to call out that school district specific amount, okay? In the '93 school year, school boards had about a three year build up to figure out what their three year average is in the 1990-91, 91-92 and 92-93 school years. School districts school districts could ultimately influence the number starting in 93-94. As you can see, the Mukwonago Area School District was below the state average and the lowest funded school district in Waukesha County. Fast forward to 22-23, Mukwonago is still at the bottom well below the state average and the most recent school year, we've
121closed the gap but still tied for last lowest in the state at $11,650. The point I'm making by showing these slides is not all students in Wisconsin are funded equally. Mukwonago students for over 30 years has been in lowest in the county and one of the lowest in the state. This slide here shows how that if we were getting $11,650 per student per the revenue limit definition, those values are adjusted in the state biennial budget. So when lawmakers from the assembly and the Senate make a proposal that the governor signs off on, there's two years of funding embedded in there. So going back all the way on the left hand side in the 93-94 school year, you can see going forward that yellow arrow there indicates all those years were linked to inflation. So as
122inflation went up, student funding went up. That makes sense. Obviously, we know expenses are going to go up. So at that time, the state biennial budget process linked our revenues to inflation. In the 2009-10 school year, you can see we're getting a flat $200 in each of those two school years. We were delinked from inflation. Act 10 hit, all right? And then since that time, school funding has largely been held flat or at zeros. Okay? Over the last couple school years, you can see we're back to $325 increases in the last biennial budget and then in the current biennial budget. Okay, this stretch of time here though as we take a look for when we were delinked from inflation from [snorts] CPI, if we take a look at this, anytime policy is proposed by the
123state assembly or the state Senate, the legislative fiscal bureau is asked to price things out to say if we enacted this law, what would the effects be? So the legislative fiscal bureau showed that when we when the biennial budget process delinked revenue limit funding from inflation, you can see since 2009, school district revenues on a per student basis has lagged inflation by more than $3,300 since 2009. So we've made policy choices here in the state where we said we're not going to fund public education like we once did. All right, there is a handout here that I I have for folks there. It's available on the table still. This is from the Wisconsin Policy Forum and they provide some commentary here about the title of the article is Wisconsin education spending falls further behind the
124national average. Their article speaks for itself but I'm going to pull out a couple of graphs that are in this article. Wisconsin's in red. Uh, Michigan's in blue. You can kind of see the states in the Midwest here are using their their college colors there. So Badger red there. In 2002, Wisconsin led the Midwest in the investment on a per student basis at $8,500 per student. Fast forward to 20 2023, we have gone from first place to second last. Wisconsin is making a choice to spend less on students. On a national average scale in 2002, which is the year furthest to the left, Wisconsin was 11th in average spending per pupil. Fast forward to the 2024 year, uh excuse me, the 2023 year, we are below the national average. So, the national average is indicated
125in this dark blue here. All right, and then we have in this light blue, you can see that Wisconsin is spending less than the national average. Those are definitive policy choices again that our state is taking on here. So, we are investing less in students here uh in Wisconsin relative to the nation here. Locally, if we just kind of compare ourselves to four other districts that I I'd say are our our neighbors um that we should compare ourselves to at times academically or athletically, you name it. Franklin, New Berlin, Hamilton, and Kettle Moraine. From 1993-94 all the way to the current school year, we are in orange. You'll notice that every single year every school district has their funding values, we are last, the least funded school district here. When we compare ourselves to those
126school districts currently in the 25-26 school year, we are funded $2,400 less than Kettle Moraine and $1,000 less than New Berlin. We do not get as much money as other school districts do. That's a challenge. In the state biennial budget process, there is a low revenue ceiling. Okay, that is a threshold of funding, a minimum threshold of funding to ensure all students are funded at a minimum standard. From 2018-19 through 23-24, we were at that minimum standard. Okay, what I'm going to highlight here in 22-23, that minimum standard from 22-23 into 23-24 was raised by $1,000. That's a significant lift. In other words, that gap between us and them, they moved those at the bottom closer to the to their neighbors or to other states, excuse me, other school districts in the state to help
127kind of those in last place kind of catch up a little bit and close that funding discrepancy. The question or the information I'm going to show on the next couple of slides here, all right, is what do we do with the funding that we got as it increased by $1,000 per student? You can see in 22-23 into 23-24, teacher salaries over the 23-24 and 24-25 biennial budget, when we were given that money, we invested heavily in teacher compensation, over $3 million of base building wages. We invested this money exactly where we knew we needed to go with it if we got it, and we did get it. Uh in the 10 years that we're showing on this screen, you can see that the Mukwonago Area School District uh has exceeded CPI in every year with
128the exception of 22-23 and 25-26. In those years, we've met CPI. So, once upon a time, there was a situation where our teachers were underpaid. I believe we have largely eliminated that problem. We have caught our teachers up, and our teacher retention metrics would suggest we we did exactly that. You've seen this slide already. We were able to avoid putting that money we got into healthcare, and we were able to control our health cost and pay it to pay it to our our employees, to our teachers in terms of take-home pay. I talked about the out-of-pocket cost. If there's two things we did well over the last couple years, is catch our teachers up and give them great healthcare. We've done those things. Okay. So, enrollments here, our enrollment is going down. 68 out of
12972 counties in Wisconsin have seen declining uh student counts over the last calendar year. We are not unique here in Mukwonago. You're seeing this just about in most school districts um throughout Wisconsin. So, in summary of all that I just showed you, Mukwonago all school districts are not funded equally. The MASD is a low-funded district in a low-funded state. Our state legislature has not adequately funded schools over the past 15 years. These are my words. It's a slow financial starvation that's taking place right now. Some help would be appreciated is what I would say. The MASD benefited from the low revenue ceiling lift in 23-24. What did we do with that money? We invested in teacher salaries, we invested in our health plan, and teacher retention is at 95.6% as we enter the current school
130year. Declining enrollment has magnified the budgetary pressures that we have that we find ourselves in right now. I'll pause right there. Are there any questions from the school board on any of that information? I know some of you who have been doing this for some time have heard this all too often. I apologize for being redundant, but again, I want the community to know where we stand right now. We made a request uh Dr. Klick and I, we penned a letter. I'll show it on the next slide. Wisconsin is projecting a $2.5 billion surplus in the current biennial budget. On February 17th, we sent a letter that requested that the state legislature and the governor's office take 200 million of that 2.5 billion and increase special education funding. We're asking for a full commitment, not
131just a partial promise, but a full commitment to reimburse our district for 42% of our special education costs in the current year. That would give us half a million dollars more this year, and a full commitment, not again, not a partial promise, not an intention, but an actual execution of 45% of uh special ed reimbursements next year, which would give us a million dollars. If we got that, we don't have a funding issue for the next coming school year. It goes away largely. Tom, Yes. >> any of the parents that I've talked to, they would like to see a letter that they can forward to their representatives, too. So, if we can get that out to the community, I can do that. Absolutely. In addition to asking for the money here in special education funding,
132we also asked asked for more general aid, which the net effect is it decreases property taxes. We also asked for an expanded school levy tax credit. That's a way of also decreasing property taxes. So, I think it's a very balanced approach of saying we could use some additional help, but let's take some pressure off of our taxpayers uh in all school districts. Um here's a letter that I shared. This obviously is available publicly that folks can see what we sent uh this letter is to Senator Kapenga, but we sent this to all of our representatives. So, if people can see what we're advocating for. Again, we sent this back in February 17th. Our local representatives, uh part of our school district is covered by Senators Chris Kapenga and Julian Bradley. I've enjoyed working with uh
133Senator Bradley. He's uh I I've testified in support of several bills uh as it relates to healthcare. I think he does a great job. Senator Bradley, I'd love to see a little help here with the K-12 schools, man. So, if you could give us some consideration, I would appreciate it. Wrestle him for it. >> [laughter] >> I've been working out. I'm ready. That'd be a great fundraiser. Let's do it. Well, actually, let me think about it. I'll I'll get back to you. >> [laughter] >> Then our state assembly uh folks, Chuck Wichgers. I've had some great conversations with Chuck. He's over in Muskego. He's a great guy. And Cindy Duchow. I would advocate and suggest to our community that if you find a letter you like, and I will produce one and share it. These
134are the folks we have to talk to and make reasonable asks, not crazy asks to say give us everything, but we do need some help. I think that's reasonable. Okay, so district-to-district comparisons. I want to compare ourselves here on this screen, there are 16 uh 15 other school districts. So, we have West Bend, Hamilton, Hudson, Kimberly, Beloit, Oconomowoc, Franklin, Muskego, Wisconsin Rapids, Chippewa Falls, De Pere, Manitowoc, Waunakee, New Berlin, DeForest. All these school districts are within either 600 bigger or 600 smaller or somewhere in the middle. So, these are the six 15 most comparable school districts based on student enrollment. Okay? So, we're going to compare our staffing levels. We've heard from many folks here that they feel that we have too much administration or there's other ways to go. Let me help create uh
135explain the story here using the metrics here. So, these come from the DPI based on student enrollment counts and uh staffing reports that all school districts are required to post. We have 219 students for every one administrator in this school district. That puts us eighth out of 16th, right in the middle. So, are we heavy on administration? If we were heavy on administration, we would be on this side. If we were light on administration, we'd be on this side. What I will tell you is that some school districts will take associate principals and put them on a 220-day contract or something that isn't a full 12-month contract, and so they can kind of mask the number of administrators they have by simply shaving some time off of their schedule. Our administrators here are full-year, 12-month,
136260-day employees. So, when we take a look, if you said, "Tom, are we heavy on administration?" I'd say, "Here's your graph." The numbers speak for themselves. We're right in the middle. When we take a look at our student uh to teacher ratio, you can see most school districts are hovering somewhere in the range of 14 students for every one teacher. We are at 14.6. So, we are in, you know, very close to the middle. All right, the median value there. So, when we take a look at our pupil services staff, much like administration, here we rank ninth out of 16th that we are in the middle. There's 182 students for every one pupil services member. When we take a look at paraprofessionals, all right, we have shifted our emphasis away from hourly paraprofessionals and gone
137more into salaried professionals, be it teachers or what not, uh for the last couple of years and this is reflecting that that there's 80 students for every one paraprofessional and this makes sense and I know Christine probably knows it better than than anyone here of how we've kind of shifted our focus and our investments off of paraprofessionals. We still have some but not as much as we used to. Finally, we take a look at our student to other ratio. When we say other, it's really everything else. It's the front office people that you see when you get into a school. It's recess monitors, um it's school safety monitors. I'll draw the full picture for you in just a couple slides, but you can see we have 34 students for every one of these other folks
138here. So we have This is This indicates we have a lot of these others in in the second to last slide. I'll spell out exactly who fits in this category, okay? So in summary of those slides I just showed you there then, all right, we have a very high ratio of pair of students to paraprofessionals and the conclusion there is it reflects our shift from investing in hourly paraprofessionals over the last couple of hiring cycles. Our teacher ratio is fourth and another conclusion there is we are one of 10 school districts that are staffed in between 14 and 14.8 students per teacher. We are at 14.6. We're average there is what I would say. Our admin ratio and our pupil services ratio, we are in the middle of these 16 school districts. And then lastly,
139the other ratio, the low the low student to staff ratio reflects a high investment in office and other support staff. Again, we'll come back to that. So on these last couple slides, what I'm going to show you then here on slide one here is these are elementary requirements. We Offering first grade is non-negotiable. So if we're in a budgetary crunch, you know, we're simply not really reducing anything that you see on the screen here either cuz it's just simply required by the state or it's required federally. All right, we do adjust these class sizes right now to match student enrollment. So as enrollment declines, we also adjust class size the number of sections I should say. Last year, I did the math. Just bear with me for a second and grades kindergarten, it's 5K through
140sixth grade, we had um we have seven sections um based on where student counts are right now incoming 4K, incoming 5K and all things. We have adjusted those everything you see on the left-hand side to match student enrollments. So those aren't cuts but those are adjusted to meet student um student enrollment counts. When we take a look at what's optional, we have two buckets. We have academic support which is counseling, uh interventionists and literacy coaches. On the right-hand side, we have enrichment or specials which is for 4K, advanced learning program, band, library technology specialist and orchestra. We are offering full-day 4K for the first time in our school I should say um in every school that has an attendance boundary. We have 10 sections of 4K. So some community members want to know what are
141we doing to attract students into our district? Full-day 4K is the answer. We're going to get them here and then we're going to keep them here. But when we ask ourselves to do more with less or to find another area to do more with less, this is what we're looking at here. We have already taken library technology specialist and we reduced two FTE there as we entered this current school year. So we've already made a reduction there. Um Some of those other areas, as I said earlier that no matter what we decide to pull back on, there's going to be a group of, you know, affected individuals, folks that won't be satisfied with the decision. If we look at the left-hand side for academic support, if we were to make a reduction there, there would
142be some vocal folks that would say, "How could you pull back academic support?" If we did something in terms of enrichment or specials on the right, like band or library ALP, again, we would have a passionate group of people that would say, "We don't like this idea." There's nothing obvious as to where we should reduce or right-size on the screen. Likewise at the middle school level, we have what's required and then we have what's optional. Again, the same academic support buckets are there. We have now career and tech ed courses. We know from prior surveys to our families that this is These are options that our families here in Mequon really like, okay? Likewise with enrichment of um and special courses of art, band, choir, library technology, orchestra and world language, there's nothing there that's
143going to say, "Hey, that's an easy one. Let's reduce there." There's I don't see it that will draw out any type of reduction in the number of teachers providing those subject areas is going to be a difficult decision. There are no easy ones. Likewise at the high school, we have the same state and federal requirements. We adjust those again um when we need to based on student counts. I know that Rachel and her staff in conjunction with Stephanie Blue and her staff are doing exactly that to right-size those and make sure we have a proper number of sections to provide student to meet student demand. But then when we take a look at academic support, career and tech ed and enrichment, again, if we're looking for somebody who can do more with less, school board,
144I ask you, who's it going to be here? It's not easy when we take a look at it. There's nothing easy or obvious. Okay, I'm going to stop for a second. Rachel or Dr. Cook, is there anything I missed in any of this information here? Okay. Tom. Yep, yep. Go ahead. >> I have a question. Um and I don't expect an answer tonight on this, but could we see in each of those optional sections for at least elementary and middle school, how many students are impacted by each of those things that you listed? Like how many are impacted by kinder 4K kindergarten? How many are impacted by ALP? How many are impacted by band? Could we see what those numbers look like as we're I'm going to Rachel, are you writing that down? So yeah,
145we're going to enlist the help of our lady Marge and our lady Sue. And we'll get that information for you here. Thank you. You bet. And to return to open enrollment, what are we doing? How many open enrolled students do we have? We have 600 students that open enroll in and 300 that open enroll out. So we are a net open enroll winner. Um I think that largely speaks to what we have on the screen here, what we offer as a as a academic institution. People like it. You know, people like our career and tech ed courses. People like what we offer. So you know, there is no easy again, there's no easy reductions. These are all really difficult decisions. Okay, so when we talked about those other folks, you know, when we looked at
146those staffing ratios, other would really reflect anybody on the screen. So at the buildings and grounds level, we have our building managers. We have one lead building manager in every building. They're supplemented by full-time a couple full-time custodians and some part-time cleaners. We have two seasonal ground workers, three full-time maintenance gentlemen and a van driver who part-time does B&G work and does the food service delivery. His name is Bruce. Bruce is one of our biggest celebrities in the school district. Um So then on office staff, health and monitors, we have our administrative assistants. We have assistant attendance clerks. Um administrative assistants are full month 12 time. Clerks are typically 10 month full-time. So they would be summers off. Some of them are part-time. Um but we have guidance clerks, front office clerks, health aids. We
147have a full-time health aid in every building. As we reduce our library technology specialist, we have more library clerks, hourly uh individuals that take over those roles. And then we have recess monitors, school safety monitors and study hall monitors. School safety has definitely been obviously a priority of our school district. It has been, it will be. Um I don't see us ever really being You'll never hear me say, "Let's let's make reductions there." It just can't can't really take place. That that one's pretty much a non-starter. For IT support, you know, we had Zach Fisher in here earlier tonight. We have a couple of IT support specialists. Um every school district is really ingrained in technology. We can certainly have a discussion to what extent. Um but we have a number of a small number
148of people on our IT staff. And then we have paraprofessionals at the 4K and 5K level. Um a couple others based on when class sizes reach a certain level, policy states that we'll provide a paraprofessional. Um and then we have a couple other areas for early childhood education, special education. Uh and those are This collectively represents our hourly staff. Again, these are when we have to balance the budget and we ask somebody to do more with less, these are the options that we're looking at here, okay? Tom, can we, in addition to my request, can we also see which of these departments have already experienced cuts? I think they're typically through attrition and we just don't back fill. >> But could we see all of the departments that have already been affected? We can go
149back for about definitely all of last year. We've documented that very well. We know where the reductions have already taken place and I think we can get one more year beyond that. We haven't really been in reduction mode until the last couple of years. So I I can get you well we will get you that information at Crosby and school board. Um some folks again are asking for transparency and we provided a lot of this information in meetings past. So I'm just going back to the February meeting where we take a look at our five-year budget projection. Okay, at that time here if I just fast forward to the bottom line, this red number -750,000 dollars is the projected budget deficit I showed you at that time in February. As we take a look at
150to the next year after and the year after and the year after I don't want to raise alarms because those are dependent on future biennial budgets that we simply don't know what kind of funding get but on basic assumptions right there I can see that we are walking into a larger and larger budget deficit. So what I have at the bottom still stands. It's the same message. I have it highlighted in red fonts without right-sizing the budget or getting a substantial change in school funding we are headed towards significant financial problems. So in order to avoid those significant financial problems, we have to right-size our budget year after year. Or we need more funding. It's one or the other perhaps a combination of both. Okay. I also in February showed that we are not the
151only school district that is in a cutting mode. Kettle Moraine, Menomonee Falls, Mukwonago, Muskego, Oconomowoc, Waukesha, Arrowhead, we all have declining enrollments. These are declining enrollment exemptions. So when we look at the revenue limit math get into the details right now but those are showing the values of one-time last call funding amounts school districts got this year that will fade away as we enter this coming school year. So we are at that about million dollar value there. So in summary I said school board as of February we have a deficit of 750,000. I am changing that number to 1.1 million because our our change in health increase was a 10% percent excuse me a 10% assumption. What you heard me say tonight somewhere from 14 to 18%. I'm just going to pick 15% right now.
152As our health care goes up to 15% increase for next year, that increases our deficit to 1.1 million. Our goal as a board we adopted back in January was to build a balanced budget for 2026-27. So again we just are looking to right-size our budget. In summary here this is the last slide then. Band, music, orchestra and choir are full-time equivalent staffing levels. We had 13.74 FTE in 23-24. We added a choir and we added a band teacher excuse me a excuse me orchestra teacher in 24-25. We've maintained that for the current school year and we are not proposing a cut in FTE for music, band, orchestra or choir. All other areas and aspects of our school district are under consideration for reductions to building a balanced budget. We are not talking about band, orchestra,
153choir or music. They are being spared from a reduction of any kind as we enter 2026-27. I would say that's a good spot to be in. However, if you look at what I have in bold font at the bottom, if we adopt a model of education here that requires more full-time equivalent teacher additions we will have to cut from somewhere else in the budget to accommodate that. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul to use you know an analogy there. But that's what it takes. I walked us through that information earlier so that you could see you know what areas can we consider? What's out there? How do we balance this up with student declining enrollments funding the whole picture. I'm trying to put everything in front of us right now so we can see what
154the big picture really looks like. So that concludes my presentation. Is there any questions I can answer for you right now? Do you have any questions? We're good. All right. Thanks for sticking with me on that. >> [clears throat] >> Moving on to consent agenda looking for the approval of the committee of the whole meeting minutes of March 9th, 2026 and approval of the vouchers and receipts. Are there any questions or comments? Hearing none that's approved by consent. Moving on to policy information board discussion. Yep, we have technical corrections that are coming forward. Our policy state the technical corrections can be adopted by the administration and then the board can be alerted to them. There are all of the technical corrections are listed here with the policies the associated policies. We are not going to
155handle a new policy release that requires the board to know take action give feedback on but again this is the technical corrections and this is just a notification that these changes have been made and we're doing our duty to make sure that the board is aware that we made those changes. Any questions or comments? My only question is 5610 suspension expulsion. Um so what happens after you make the decision on a suspension and expulsion and somebody still wants to appeal that? Where does that go? Depends on what it was for. If it's a bullying if it's a harassment thing there's recourse through the DPI or the office of civil rights. But the decision on a suspension is final with me. Somebody's unhappy about it that I I can't make them happy but the final the
156decision that is final. And that's just on the suspension? That's on the suspension. If it were something other other area in the school district where a decision might come in there could be channel to the board under 9130 the board could get information on that and and review. Um but this in this instance as it relates to student discipline the step above this the expulsion is what the board has full control over. So the administration makes recommendations to the board. Um but the board ultimately is the decider if a student is going to be expelled from school. Any other questions or comments? Okay, thank you. Um moving on to personnel topics. I just have my director's report. So last week I presented on the middle school and the planning that has been going on around
157the new middle school. We actually had another steering committee meeting tonight and we're excited to come back and present to you um in May and then in June with our recommendations. Thank you. Student learning? Yep, I also have my director's report. Um so at the last committee of the whole meeting I had two information items. The first was an update on the work we've been doing around our music program. And so Rachel and I provided information to the board about the progress we've been making with our music subcommittees specifically around establishing metrics of success for our music program and then exploring various instructional ideas. We also presented regional comparisons about what other school districts are doing in terms of instrumental music offerings. And then the second item was in regards to the academic and technical
158excellence scholarships. Each year we nominate students for that based on the criteria from the Wisconsin higher educational aids board. And so we presented the nominees for that for each of those scholarships. Those names are listed on the director's report and again we congratulate those students. Any questions comments? Um some questions did arise. Can band and orchestra be taught during music time in elementary schools? >> Yep, so this is an option that we have discussed with our music subcommittees and we are continuing to explore that option. Okay. How about during win time? So win time is considered one of our academic times and one of our parameters was that um students would not be pulled out of academic times. So win again is when we are providing interventions, extensions and other academic um programming for our
159students. Okay, thank you. Any other questions or comments? When Crosby? When do you anticipate starting to kind of form a plan around band and music for us to see like I know we've been talking about it kind of at a higher level. But when will we start to see like some actual recommendations? So we have been going on a June timeline with um I think our goal being May bringing it to you as an information item to just hear about the plan and then looking at June being an action item for you to take action on the recommendation. Okay. Um if you'd like that timeline to be moved up that's something that obviously you can direct us to do. Um but right now that's what we've been operating No, I was just curious when we'd
160start to see some concrete suggestions. Yep. Thanks. How much time do you need for that? Like if we said, let's make a decision earlier, would you be able to do that? Get out more information? Kind of like let the community know where we're going. I think it's very feasible to come forward in April with um a a tighter recommendation. We've had at this point I think six different proposals. I think our music team has done an incredible job of evaluating those proposals and I would feel very comfortable by that second board meeting depending on where they land with spring break being in there, coming forward with um where we're at and to your point Crosby, here's here's the recommendation. I like April. Board? Okay. And we'll see some in April. Yep. Thank you. Any other
161questions or comments? All right, moving on to student services. Okay, I just wanted to bring forward um a topic around school safety. That's always something that's on our radar uh no matter what else is also on the radar. And so um it is a top priority for us and actually I see Andy Wagner and Corey Kirkpatrick in the back here. So uh the two of them, myself, and Rachel Crackford were able to attend a Wisconsin School Safety and Security Conference. Um and during that conference we were able to see survivors from um both the Virginia Tech and the Uvalde um incident. Um but along with learning with people who have gone through a mass casualty situation like that, we were also able to talk about our behavioral threat management and then also just looking at
162um how to raise the I generation of students which I had not particularly heard it uh referred to that way. So it was just really um enlightening and I felt like the four of us brought um back some information that we can share. So. All right, looking forward to that. Any questions or comments? Thank you. Moving on to finance and facilities and non-action items. Hires, retirements, and resignations. None? Okay. 10-year capital plan. So the 10-year plan is before you. The the projects are laid out. So we're looking for approval of some or all of those, preferably all. But it's up to you. So give us the direction and Andy Andy's here to answer any questions you might have. He stuck around. Thanks, Andy. Make a motion to approve the 10-year capital plan as listed. Second.
163We have a motion and a second to approve the 10-year capital plan. Any questions or comments? Hearing none, all those in favor say I. I. All those opposed say no. Motion carries. Moving on to unfinished business, the superintendent report. Thank you uh Dale. Um so just over the last several months, just want to come back and touch on a couple of points and do want to thank to all all of those individuals who've taken the time to come to meetings and and and speak out. Um those individuals have taken the time to meet with us. Those individuals have taken the time to send an email. But I do want to be very clear about the target that we are working towards as a district because in moments of challenge it's important that we remain grounded
164in what is ultimately matter what ultimately matters most. Our focus is on student achievement, student safety, financial stability, a strong supportive workforce, and building an organization that will serve our students in this community well not just today but for many years to come. When we examine the outcomes that reflect the health of a school system, we're seeing clear progress. On the 2024-25 DPI report cards, MASD ranked 26th out of 367 K-12 school districts in Wisconsin, improving six places over the prior year. We had the 20th highest overall student achievement score among K-12 public school districts in the state. We ranked 11th in Wisconsin for third grade English language arts and reading, a key indicator of early literacy success, and 13th in the state in eighth grade math achievement. An important measure of readiness for advanced
165coursework in college level mathematics. At the high school level, our ACT composite score increased from 21.4 to 21.9, the highest score since 2018, and the second highest composite for our high school dating back to the 2015. These outcomes reflect disciplined work over our system including continued efforts to support our students with mental health needs, our soar program alignment to behavior practices, the work of our behavior council, and a multi-tiered system of supports to help students receive the level of support they need to be successful. Our professional learning communities continue to mature, directly impacting instructional practice and student learning in the classrooms across our school district. We've made significant progress strengthening our workforce. Three years ago we defined a basic standard for teacher compensation of $49,000 per year plus $1,000 each year of teaching experience after
166that. At that time, only 32% of our teachers met that standard. Since 2023-24, we've made a substantial investment in our staff. The average community community cumulative raises totaled approximately 15% or just under $9,000 per teacher. And today 98% of our teachers meet or exceed this compensation standard. During that same time, we designed our health care plan. We now offer on-site health clinic and comprehensive health plan that will that with low out-of-pocket costs for staff and their families. The clinic currently has a 95% satisfaction rate among our staff and the satisfaction measures related to our health plan have improved each year. These investments in our workforce have contributed to a 95.6% teacher retention rate entering this school year, strengthening the professional culture that exists in our schools. This spring we saw the highest level of satisfaction
167on our staff survey. 78% of our staff would recommend this district to others compared with only 59% 3 years ago. We've maintained a strong financial position as our school in our school district. In May of 2025, S&P Global Ratings increased MASD's bond rating from AA to AA plus, placing our district among the top six school districts in Wisconsin rated by S&P Global. S&P cited the district's strong tax base, healthy reserves, and prudent financial management practices as a reason for this upgrade. You saw evidence of that earlier during Tom's presentation. We continue to move forward on the development of an outstanding new middle school facility that will our student that will serve our students in this community for decades. With regard to transportation, we've heard this come up over the last several weeks. Our primary responsibility
168is the safety and security of our students. In the recent event involving an adult member of our community boarding a bus during its route, several actions occurred that did not meet our standards and Dousman Transport standards for student safety. At the top at the stop in this question, the driver allowed 12 students to exit the bus into an environment that was perceived to be unsafe. During the stop, the adult was allowed to enter, exit, and re-enter the bus, which delayed the route and placed the bus in a vulnerable position. After the driver was informed of an unsafe situation, a call to 911 was not made and local in fort law enforcement was not immediately notified despite the Town of Mukwonago Police Department being located approximately 1/2 mile from the stop, which would have been allowed
169for nearly a near immediate response. We believe as the Dousman, the results of these actions that was the safety of our students was severely compromised. We take that responsibility very seriously and we continue to take steps necessary to ensure transportation practices reflect the level of safety our students deserve. With regard to music programming, I want to be clear. We are not reducing our investment in music as Tom mentioned earlier. We're maintaining that investment even as we make reductions in other areas of the budget. We recognize the importance of music education as part of a comprehensive educational experience and remain committed to providing strong opportunities for students in this area. In any organization committed to improvement, there will be moments of challenges and of disagreement. Leaders leadership requires maintaining focus on the long-term outcomes that define
170the strength of the school system. We will continue listening. We will continue communicating and we'll continue making adjustments where appropriate. But we will remain grounded in the work that produces the results for students. The targets we were working for working towards are clear. We are targeted to improving our academic performance. We're committed to safe and secure learning environments. We're responsible fiscal stewards. We're competitive. We have a competitive compensation and meaningful support staff model. We have a positive and professional culture. Our data shows that. And we're a school system that prepares prepares students for successful futures. This is the work in front of us. This is the work that we will continue to do. I'd like to thank our staff, our families, and the board for your committed uh commitment to our students and the future
171of our community. That's all I have. >> Thank you, Dr. Cook. >> [clears throat] >> President's report. Just want to like kind of remind our community when there's things coming up from our administrators, they can need to start taking the approach of these great people dedicated their lives to educating our kids. So when they're making decisions and tough decisions, they're coming from a good place. They're not looking to hurt people. So it's kind of shameful when there's certain people that are trying to tear them down, question their character or their livelihood. I think tonight was a was a great change hearing from people talk today. They're very respectful. Um when there's things that you don't like, come to the board with your ideas or tell us how it's going to affect you or the community.
172But tearing people down is not the right thing to do. So I appreciate all the people that came up here today. I thought it was very respectful and very productive. So thank you. All right, with that um I think we are done. So, looking to close the meeting, looking to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. We have motion and second. Roll call, please. Crosby, yes. Mike? Yes. Jake? Yes. Jim? Yes. Jill? Yes. Carolyn? Yes. Greg? Yep. We are adjourned. Thank you.