Mukwonago Area School District - Committee of the Whole / Board Meeting - 04/14/25

001calling this meeting to order. Monday, April 14th, 6 p.m. Crosby, do roll call, please. Jason, Mike is excused. Jake here. Jim, here. Dale here. Eric, here. Carolyn here. Craig is excused. Crosby is here. All right. Thank you. This is an open meeting. It has been posted. Please join me for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the stands for Caroline. There's none. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Up first are recognitions. All right. Sarah, where are you? Please come up. So, this month we are uh recognizing Sarah Sheiel. Uh and her nominators said, "I'm thrilled to recognize and celebrate Sarah Sheiel's exceptional contributions and talent as an HR executive assistant. Her professionalism, dedication, and commitment to supporting the HR team and our organization is whole is as whole as are

002invaluable. Sarah's ability to manage multiple tasks with precision and efficiency has made a significant impact on our daily operations. From coordinating schedules and handling sensitive information to ensuring smooth and effective communication, she consistently exceeds expectations. Her organizational skills and attention to detail are unmatched, and she handles every challenge with grace and determination. One of the standout qualities she brings to the team is her collaborative nature. She consistently fosters positive relationships with her colleagues and works seamlessly across departments, making it easier for everyone to achieve achieve their shared goals. Her willingness to lend a hand or provide valuable insight to others reflects her team first mentality and makes her an indispensable part of our success. Additionally, her problem solving skills have been nothing short of impressive. Time and again, she has demonstrated the ability to think

003on her feet and find creative effective solutions to enhance processes and systems within the district. Whether learning learning new platforms to increase efficiency in our work like Qualrex, addressing employee concerns or handling complex situations, she approaches challenges with a calm and strategic mindset, ensuring that obstacles are overcome. Sarah has also demonstrated versatility in filling in for various roles when needed. Whether stepping in to support the HR team during busy times, assisting with administrative duties outside her typical scope, or managing tasks beyond her regular responsibilities, she consistently rises to the occasion. Her adaptability ensures that our operations continue to run smoothly regardless of the situation. Sarah is funny, kind, relatable, smart, and a hard worker. We appreciate you and are incredibly lucky to have you as part of our team. Thank you for your outstanding work

004and for continually contributing to a positive and productive work environment. Your efforts help move us forward as a team and create a culture of excellence. Once again, Sarah, thank you for all you do. We look forward to your continued success with us. [Applause] Thank you. and great support from the DO staff back there. It's awesome. Okay, up next we have citizens comments, but we do not have any. So, we are going to move right on to student reports. We are going to have a little flip of the schools if you don't mind, please. Um, we're going to have Rolling Hills up first. They have a scheduling conflict. Come on up, guys. You're not nervous, are you, Zoe? You're not nervous, are you? A little bit. And just make sure this mic is really close to

005your mouth. Okay, parents, if you guys want to come to the front, you guys can take pictures head on. Go ahead. You can come right up here and just have it kneel down if you like or behind or get a reflection. Whatever. Call me bald. Arlo. All right, we're ready for you. Hi, this is Eva and Liv from Student Council here to talk about the amazing things at Rolling Hills. Contra Contrapt Wisconsin is STEM Forward 6th through 8th grade school contraption competition. A contraption accomplishes a simple task in the most complicated fun way possible, like a Rube Goldberg machine. This year's task is to feed your pet in 14 to 20 steps. These are some of the beginning stages of our contraptions. We have had two teams win awards. Last year, all of our sixth

006grade teams finished in top 13 out of 45, mostly seventh and eighth grade teams. Last year's task was to roll a dice. Here is an example video of our fourth place finished machine. It landed. Hello. Hello. I am Olivia from sixth grade, a student council representative. Our library is amazing. This year, we got a new 3D printer. Students got an opportunity to make a 3D printed object on a website called Tinkercad. In our library, we have a variety of books for all ages. Every year we have a March Madness book bracket for the whole school to participate in. Each class reads short stories and vote on a winner. This year the book Moohoo won. So far we have checked out 20,082 books. Here are some of our 3D printed objects. Thank you. And here are

007my favorite books. Hello, this is Joselyn and Zoe. We are student council executive board members back in action here to tell you about our reading rumble here within the Mcuanico school district. This is when fourth through sixth grade teams participate in reading a list of books which at the end of the year play they participate in a cahoot asking questions about what they read. It is an activity that can teach students to help collaborate with others and use teamwork. Zoe actually participated this year. Zoe, what's your favorite book? I really love Ben Yokodama and the Cookie of Doom. I didn't participate, but I love out of my mind. So, I think I will love the sequel out of my heart. Gassy, I think we really need to tell them the most fun and exciting part

008of this. The top groups from each school will compete again against the others that won from the other schools. Really fun. Rolling Hills participated in Battle of the Books, something similar to Reading Rumble, for 15 years. Plus, this year we have 30 teams and 107 students participating in the reading rumble. We are also here to inform you about rolling hills student council and what we do. We recently had our all our all school family game night. This is when student council hosted a fam a game night in our gym and learning lab. We had activities like our rock wall, giant Guess Who, card games, giant Jenga, Cubids, Brain Builders, and the game 24. The people that came had so much fun. I will never forget how much the night entertained me. There was such a

009good turnout, we decided that we will probably do it again. Yay. Hi. Hi. This is Arlo and Max to tell you about the art show. The art show is a chance to show off the art skills of Rolling Hills. Miss Crow is our art teacher and she selects a theme and we get to paint or draw the artwork to put on display. This to put on display. This year is is the theme of food. Hi, my name is Ma is Max and fifth grade made a cake that has a shadow inspired by Wayne Thibo who uses the color blue to create shadows instead of using black. Everybody in the school has their art displayed. Each grade does a different type of project. Some use pastels, clay, and other methods. We are inviting you to our

010art show and hope you come tomorrow from 5 to 7:00 at our school. Hope you are hungry because we have a spaghetti dinner, too. We We are also here to tell you about our PTO. Our PTO supports our school with some awesome opportunities. In January, families have a chance to win a prize a day raffle to support our school. During the book fair, the PTO gives every every student a free book. We have the book fair during parent and grandparent lunch week. Also, former RAS students can apply to the scholarship program. Lastly, this year we are having a color run, all thanks to our amazing PTO. Thank you. All right, that was great job. Next up is Section Elementary School. We're competing competing against each other. [Music] Hello, welcome. Hi. You can begin whenever you

011are ready. Good evening everyone. Thanks for allowing us this opportunity to share with you all the wonderful events that has happened at section elementary these past few months. And give us an opportunity to share with you what is yet to come. All of us are student council members at section. I'm Addie Seir and I'm in fifth grade. I'm Lexi Nelson. I'm in sixth grade. I'm Elliot I'm Elliot Pullman and I'm in fifth grade. And I'm Aurora Web in sixth grade. Let me take you back to February. And during this week of February 10th through 13th, we celebrated our bus drivers. Each day that week, we started with announcements about what it takes to be a bus driver and reminders about how to be safe while riding a bus. The week ended with something to say

012or do to show appreciation for our drivers. The students the students signed cards and the d drivers were given little gifts each day at during that week as a small token of gratitude for from our students. Towards the end of the month, section students had the option of participating in a project fair. This is this is an event that where students can choose a topic that interests them and share all the knowledge they know about their topic. Some students share by creating a poster board displays models of their items or pictures of their experiment. Other students in classes have the opportunity to visit and explore the wonderful projects their peers have created, gaining inspiration and learning from each other's ideas and presentations. On our last day of February, section took their annual staff versus sixth

013grade basketball game. The sixth graders who participated on the school team took on the staff. It was an hour of cheering and entertainment as the sixth grade narrowly beat the staff. But don't worry, the sixth graders will be ready to win again when the sixth grade and the staff battle out on the last day of school at the staff versus sixth grade softball game. We started the month of March with celebrating all of our hawks that demonstrated positive behavior. Those hawks were rewarded with a games day the first Friday afternoon of their month. Students could bring a age oper appropriate games or use a game that their home room teacher had in their class. EBIS kicked off trimester 3 with an assembly. Students who were chosen to be Hawks of the month for trimester 2

014got to participate in relay games in front of the school. Trimester 3 traits that we will be focusing on from March to May are perseverance, honesty, and integrity and having self-control and positive attitude. All students who display these traits do not have any major behaviors or less than that specified amount of minors per grade level get to participate in different reward options at the end of the school year. This year, students get to choose from a dance party, outdoor games, technology activities, or art activities. During the week of March 10th to 14th, students were allowed to enjoy sandwiches with someone special during lunch or donuts with someone special before school started. After having their special someone over for lunch or breakfast, students had a photo booth set up to take pictures. They could visit the

015book fair with their special person or pick a balloon for a staffed lift me up. Together with the PTG and help of several of several of our student council members, we were able to help make this a successful event, inviting roughly 800 plus visitors into our school. In conjunction with a special person's week, during the week of March 10th through 14, we celebrating reading at our school. Each day we had a theme day that went along with a reading and dress up. From reading is everywhere and the students were encouraged to read a book about a place and wear clothing with places on it to reading is madness where students were encouraged to read a book about sports and encouraged to wear something with their favorite sports team. Each day was designed to make reading

016come to life. During the week, students visited the book fair featuring a vast amount of books and other items related to literature. And as we begin to wind down our final stretch of the school year, we have a few more a few more events to look forward to. Like many other exciting events at section, we have an event made specifically for sixth grade advanced math group. This helps build communication skills, group problem solving, engineering, and creative skills. This contrapt competition is a competition that accomplishes a simple task in the most complicated and fun way. This year's theme is feeding a pet. For a section, we have three teams representing us. I'm included in one of these three groups. It is a fun, new, exciting experience for many. Friday, May 16th is Highin Interest Day. High

017interest day is a student- centered event where learners will have the opportunity to choose from a selection of presenters in order to experience something new and interesting. We are looking forward to learning in these sessions like mini golf, sewing, sponge painting, learning about different animals, am towing, and other professions. We really enjoy exploring these topics and appreciate the community and how they volunteer the time. Our all school event at the end of the year is our section extravaganza, a day that is high energy, fun-filled for all of our students. It is a a time that we celebrate all of our accomplishments as a school and look forward to the start of summer. And on the final day of school in the morning, the staff will take on the sixth grade in the annual staff versus

018sixth grade softball event. The entire school comes out to cheer during the game. Yearbooks are signed and final farewell is given to our sixth graders. Thank you for your time. Awesome. Great job. Thanks again to our two schools. Moving on to our presentations. uh Park View Middle School project update. So Sean and Chris and Clint and Kurt, if you guys wouldn't mind coming up to the table there. Um back in November, we passed uh referendum to renovate and do a substantial addition at Park View. Uh we have been working while there's not much visual work that's been done uh on the site at all. You might have seen some surveyors there, uh, traffic study folks. Uh, behind the scenes and in meetings, we've been working to design that new school within the scope of the

019budget to meet the goals of the project. So, we've got the team here tonight, uh, to walk through the presentation and answer any questions that the board may have. And I don't know how we follow up what we just saw at all. Right. I'm Chris Sager. I'm not in school. Uh, but I I do work for Bray Architects. Uh Kurt Weeble, uh owners rep for the district. I used to be on staff uh in the facil as a facility director here. So now operating as the owner rep for the school district. Sean Cullen with JP Cullen. We're construction manager. And Clint Sully with Bray Architects. So I'm going to just go through a little bit of where we're at in schedule right now. Um we did move through SD, so schematic design. that is really

020looking at the program and verifying everything with our CPT team. Uh going through user group meetings, making sure we have the right spaces in the right location. So that has been accomplished. We're now into design development. We're about a week into that. That's where we're going to start really getting our engineers involved and uh moving into the CD phase where we will create the documents that is going to use to build off of. Um so that's where we're at right now in that green section in DD. Want to move on? Uh so this is an image of the site plan uh that we plan to move forward with. This is in front of the village right now. So we will have probably some tweaks and changes along the way. Uh but you can really see

021uh this starting to shape up. We have an entrance off of Veterans Way to the north that will probably have a stoplight. Uh that will be your main entrance for visitor parking, parent drop off in the morning uh and pick up in the evening. And then off of uh Rochester, we will have an event staff parking, but also the bus parking. So, we really are separating those two uh areas on the site to make sure there's a lot more safety uh than you have currently. Um we do have parking lots really all around the building, which is great. So, we will have an event uh entrance to the south. Uh the main entrance to the building is really to the north off of that drop off. And then we do have a bus entrance that

022may also be used for uh the cafeteria space at night when you guys have uh you know musical events and things like that. So there's really a good spread of parking around. Um you can get all the way around uh with an emergency vehicle. Uh so that's something we wanted to make sure we had. And then we are redoing the track uh in the rear uh in the south of of the building along with a couple of throwing events. Um, so you can see the renovation uh is the yellow portion. The new building is the blue portion. Probably not a lot different than than you saw during the referendum, but the interior of the building is is much much different than you than you remember. Um, we are still doing a three-story portion to the

023east of the building and that's where all the classroom areas will be. So on this first floor plan, we're going to move to Does this work? What was that? Oops. Uh so as as I mentioned before u we do have several entrances. Uh this is really the main entrance here. Um there is a a nice uh straight concourse uh between the main entrance and the athletic entrance to the south. Uh all of your core academics are really going to be on this east side of the building. Um so really more of the public events are on the west side and and a lot of the core academics on the east side. Um so we do have a three-station gymnasium in the center. Um main office right at the secure entry and then support services for

024the students on the other side of that main entry. Uh special ed just to the left of the office area. Then a large cafeteria uh with stage that will be new. So this is really the the line of the existing building right there. Um that existing building is really going to be support spaces, kitchen with teched spaces, a new wrestling and multi-purpose room here. Uh music to the south along with a fitness room. Uh so that's really the main area on the first floor. You want to move to the second floor. similar setup with the core academics to the east of this. Uh the main library which will be above the main entrance uh really kind of a double height space. So this whole lobby is going to be a tall space. Um a lot

025of daylight coming through. Uh we do have some classrooms here above the office area. Uh we do also have a track around the gymnasium and part of that track comes actually into the gymnasium. Uh which I think will be nice. So, you'll be able to actually view sports from up on that track at times if you want to go to the floor. And then this is the third floor. Again, similar core academic spaces. Um, so really keeping those students uh together one side of the building. We haven't decided yet who's going to be where, but it's probably sixth, seventh, and eighth from bottom to top. So, we we talked a lot about uh I had the pleasure of helping design the high school uh when that was built. Um, and we so we wanted a

026really timeless and warm uh set of materials for this project. So, you can see we're we're really in the more warm tones. We've got some wood tones. Uh we're using natural stone. Um and then we've got a lot of masonry on the project. So, some of the exterior views that we're going to be showing you. Uh, starting with number one, moving around the building, uh, to the south and back to the west. This is a view from the corner of Rochester and Veterans. Uh, so really seeing kind of that uh, seating element that we're going to have uh, as you cross over the intersection. Uh, and that in in the flag area and that really points you to the new cafeteria space that you can in the distance uh some of that existing building still

027uh with that onetory area and then you can see really the main entrance um a little further away. So this is a view of that cafeteria space. Again that's a double height space. A lot of daylight coming into that space. The use of stone at some of those main uh really important areas of the building. Um so you're seeing some of that stone here and at the main entrance. This main entrance. We go to the next slide. Uh this is the main entrance to the school. Uh so we are starting to see that threetory portion of the classroom edition. Uh and a stair next to that double height library which really is above that main uh entrance into the into the office area. Uh and we do have stone at all of those main entrances

028building. So way finding I think is going to be very simple. All of them have canopies uh as well going into the the main entrances and that that wood look um all the way around uh flanking those entrances to bring warmth to that main entrance. This is a view looking uh looking west towards the threetory spaces. Um this is really again where most of your classroom areas are going to be. A lot of the staff will be able to park in this parking lot and into uh the building on this side of the on this side of the building. So, you're really keeping the students staff a little bit more separate. Uh we are introducing some of that wood look into this elevation as well. And and then multi-brick color uh similar to what you

029have on your existing building. That lower brick will will match and bring that that existing building into uh you know, so it really is going to read together pretty well. This is a view looking north. Uh so this would be the entrance, the athletic entrance in the rear of the building next to that threetory space. So you'll see the stone again, that same canopy, the wood. So this is a view straight on to that main entrance. Um I think this is going to be a really nice you guys, you know, probably more night uh some of your night um events will happen in this space, but it has a really good connection all the way through the building. So, parking is going to be very simple coming to events at night. Um when we meet

030with the village, we aren't going to have enough parking initially uh for what they require, but what they do require is a lot more than uh you're going to need for this building. So, we are asking for a variance from them. We would need 800 spaces if we were to use their current ordinance. We really right now 200 spaces park at we're adding the sixth grade. So we're asking for a variance from that for them for about 480 spaces. So you're more than doubling what you have now. This is a view looking uh east at the existing building. So this is where some of your support spaces are going to be on the building. Uh but you're seeing that double height um cafeteria space above that building. Uh this is where a lot of the

031students are going to come in. So we have some bike parking there. Uh this is where the buses are going to drop off uh so that students enter the building into that large cafeteria space as they move through the building. Another view of the existing building. So we are replacing the windows. Uh and there's some new metal panel going into that. existing building and also a new roof. So, it will look different than it does now, but we're we're maintaining a lot of the brick in that building. So, that's what we're really trying to match on the other side. So, this is a view again of the existing building. You can see the music wing right next to that. A little higher uh ceilings in that area. So, those are uh that is a single

032story, but it a lot higher for the volume of those spaces. Music requires a little bit more volume. And this is just a night shot uh of that main entrance. So, starting to see a little bit of the branding come in at that main entrance. Some of the lighting uh seeing the warmth um at that main entrance as well. Anybody have any questions? What is going to be the height of those music rooms? Uh, typically we try to go about 22 feet to the ceiling where we can. The more volume you have, the less it's it's going to be live space still, but uh the more volume you have, the less you're going to have uh hearing issues. Um, so a lot of the teachers and students um are not going to have that base

033that you would have if you were had a much lower space. Um, so it's something that we did at the high school. So, I don't know if you've had a chance to be in those music areas, but really helps you with uh sound and absolutely quality. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you. It looks great. Thanks, guys. Up next, we have our German presentation. Hello. Hello. Welcome and begin whenever you're ready. Okay, we'll do that. Thank you. Oh, go back. Yep. Nope, you're good. So, good evening. My name is Ashley Hayman, and I teach German at Park View Middle School. I am joined tonight by my counterpart, Jude Elliot, who teaches German at Maguano High School, and we are here to talk about our German program here in Maguano. We first want to thank the

034board for inviting us to be here tonight and present about our program. All right. Um again, yes, thank you for your time and this opportunity. Um so for our presentation, it's not too long. Uh we're just going to be Ashley and I will be highlighting um enrollment history um since our respective employments uh began here in the district as well as the efforts um this year towards increasing enrollment and um our proposed efforts for upcoming school years and the tentative timelines that would um go towards the implementation of those. So I will start. Um I've been employed here since 2022. Uh my first year here I had one section of German 1 and that was the year that I proposed a new course. We had a course called Germanic cultures and upon my hire I

035was uh shown that I could not teach that course as it was written by my predecessor before me. So um I proposed intro to German since we had an intro to Spanish class but not an intro to German. that was approved by you all for the following school year. 2023 to 2024, I had another section of German one and one section of intro to German. And then on the far right, this is my current year. I had one section of German one and two sections of intro to German. Currently at PVMS, these are some of the things I have implemented since my um hire here. The first and probably one of the most important is correcting misinformation about German and its value. Um, throughout my time as a German teacher, I've heard many times that

036German is a useless language. And I think it's first important to address that German does have its benefits. There's a lot of values. Um, I'm going to be showing some handouts that we have created that we have implemented and used in our p uh starting this year to kind of change that narrative. We've als I've also had a strong presence during National Foreign Language Week. This is a week that is a national celebration across the United States that we um do activities with our students at Park View. This year I created a sign for my students to create. It's in that bottom lefthand corner where they were able to make a sign and hang it on their locker that shows their pride in their learning of German. Additionally, we've also had a strong presence during

037Parkview's open house and c course information night. The two handouts that I have for you are the images that you are seeing on the right hand side and in the middle. This is just our way to kind of not only showcase our languages that we offer here in Maguano, but also really show that German does have its benefits and there's a lot of uses beyond just learning it in the classroom. I've also collaborated with many German teachers in southeast Wisconsin to find ways to engage students in learning sustainability of a program promotion and program growth. My biggest collaboration was with a prior um colleague of mine in the Elm Brook School District. My last year in Elbrook, she was hired for her first year. Her name is Dr. Kelsey Patillo Miller. She came from W

038Milwaukee and I was very fortunate to have one year with her, but I've really been working as she's been trying to grow the program in Elbrook. So, applying not only my previous knowledge of how to grow a program, but working collaboratively with her as well has been extremely beneficial. I've also collaborated with school counselors at Park View to support the German language options and information. That kind of goes back to um you know rectifying that image that German is not valuable working with them. So when students ask them questions, they are able to provide the same answers that I would give them. And then lastly, um we currently have a German exchange student at Maguano High School. He is the exchange brother of one of my current intro to German students. So he will be

039visiting my intro to German classes um in a few weeks. Some goals for growth at Park View. Um just to point out the goals are listed on the left and then the tenative timelines are on the right. Um first and foremost starting next year I have the goal of doing some postworld language exploratory outreach. Um world language exploratory or wix for short is our exploratory class that we offer in seventh grade. It gives students the opportunity to learn German and Spanish to hopefully inform their decision of what language they would like to learn in the future. So, I hope to do some outreach when students conclude their time with me as well as reach out to parents um as well to see if they have any questions about what their students option or sorry, their

040child's options are for future language learning. I also plan to start a German club next year at Parkview. I also will continue to have exchange students from Germany that are attending MHS to visit my German students um at Parkview. So those would be starting again next year. In the 2026 to 2027, I'm hoping to do elementary outreach. This will be in conjunction with MHS, which Judah will elaborate on in the future. Um I also once the new school year o, excuse me, the new middle school opens, I would like to do some local German and cultural field trips such as going to Maiders in Milwaukee to have a German meal or Keglesen, which is located in West Dallas. There's also the Milwaukee Public Museum European Village for students to uh visit as well. Additionally, I

041would also like to take students to the German immersion camp in Baiji, Minnesota. This is a full immersion camp where students can attend. There is only the target language spoken there. They eat food from those respective cultures and they learn um how to interact with students from other um states, other schools who are learning German as well. And then lastly down the road in tenatively 2028 and 2029, we would also like to plan a community event. This is again in conjunction with MHS which we will elaborate on um brief uh soon. Thanks Ashley. Um, all right. So, at the uh Maguano High School, so this is my second year uh with the district. I began last year for the 23 24 school year. Um, last year I had a section of one, two sections of

042German 2, a section of three, and then uh I actually combined German 4 and five based on the the recommendation of uh another staff member in the district who had worked closely um with the students that I was inheriting. um and just based on level suggested that they learn together and differentiate as needed. So that was the decision I made last year. Uh that decision carried over to this year, our 24-25 school year. Um so they are still combined. However, I did um create an AB curriculum over this past summer so that um next year's or this year's fours when they're fives, you know, they would be getting something new even though um they're still in that combined class. Um there was an increase in German one, so we went up to two sections this

043year. Um and then just kind of tentative numbers again nothing finalized but looking at next year um in December I know the the board was um requested to see um increase in enrollment in the upper levels as that tends to have dropped um traditionally and so um this upcoming year I do have an increase in my German three, four and five numbers um which is excellent because that was part of what we were hoping to be able to do. Um, so currently at MHS, a lot of the things that Ashley has already mentioned, um, we are doing in conjunction at the middle school or at the high school, excuse me, at MHS. Um, that really big one being correcting that misinformation. Um, letting the counselors know what is available for students when they are learning

044German, um, how to use that postsecary. Um, so we shared those I shared those flyers and um other uh teaching and informative uh brochures and whatnot with them prior to enrollment time. Um, we also during foreign language week uh also were putting up those uh cute little flag posters. Students were slapping them on their lockers although most don't even know where their locker is in the high school. And so, um, a lot of them just ended up on display outside of my classroom, but, um, a lot of students proudly signed their names after coloring them and let their their peers know that they were studying German and excited about it. Um, we also had um, a strong presence during our high school course information night. I had lots more uh families and students coming in

045this year than last year. You know, asking what what is the the program going to be doing in the future and um so sharing those flyers with them, the ideas I will be sharing with you in a couple slides. Um all that great stuff. Um additionally, one of the initiatives I took this year was providing um or What's the word? Not providing. No, that's a I anyway. Um, proctoring. Thank you. That's that. Thank you, brain. That's the word. Proctoring, the national German exam. Um, it's through AATG, American Association of Teachers of German. Um, it's a na nationwide uh exam that students at level one, two, three, and four can take. And so um this year as just kind of a trial run I administered it with my German three, four and five students. Uh a

046number of them did achieve above average recognition. And one of uh my German three students, Miss Aaron Johnson, you see pictured there, she was one of 12 in Wisconsin that actually earned gold. um meaning she earned 90th or higher percentile on her um her test and she reached 91st percentile. So she received honoral recognition on the AATG website. Um she got a lovely certificate and and gold medal. Um additionally she was then uh in the running for um an interview and additional testing um for a scholarship travel opportunity. She did make it to the top 100 for that. Um, unfortunately she was not chosen beyond that, but that is an amazing feat. Um, and so I cannot wait to see what she can can earn next year. Um, she does have a dinner I believe

047in two weeks honoring her and all the other students that earned awards through this exam. Um, so that's amazing. and uh we're so proud of her and we've been putting this picture and this accomplishment in social media um the Waka Freeman um our Facebook page that's all getting sent out to that. So it's um great great opportunity and and um visuals for our our program. Um, additionally, a lot of the um the draw to keep students in these upper level German programs is, you know, how is it going to help them post-secary? And so, I am in uh currently in the application process uh with UWGB for the college credit in high school. Um, I do have to continue working on my masters and um take a proficiency exam for that. So, that is probably

048at least two years down the road. Um, but I am currently in communications and the process of that right now. Uh, much like Ashley, I have been in communications with other professionals in the area. Um, I have attended some conferences including uh, ACTFUL uh, big nationwide training. In November, I was one of 20 to earn a scholarship grant for that um, through AATG. And then most recently in February, I went to an immersion weekend um for the teachers rather than the students in New Glaris that happens every year and was able to connect with a number of um teachers not just in South Wisconsin but also in Northern Illinois. It was the South Wisconsin Northern Illinois chapter. Um including the colleague of of Ashley's. I was able to speak with her as well. Um I'm

049also in talks with the department chair of world languages at UWM and have been getting amazing ideas from her. So just tons and tons of ideas um flowing ready to implement please. Um, additionally, kind of more extracurricular, um, MHS, uh, we always do a March Madness, um, bracket, which is for music. And this year, the students were really into it. The, um, final two songs were really, really close. And so, on their own initiative, students this year started reaching out to students that are not in German um, include or at the middle school. also in their younger siblings, they tried to get their their classes to to vote. So, actually over um 70 students who were not on my roster participated in this competition um this bracket that really fueled that interest and engagement in

050German um across the schools which was amazing to see. Um, additionally, we run a German club one to two times a month, depending on what else is going on in the school calendar. Um, lots of cultural, um, movies, food, uh, games, music, all sorts of events. And it is all planned and run by the students themselves. So, it is is all purely their interest um that I just help facilitate. And a number of those students are dually enrolled in my international club. And so they are really just showing their initiative to to be these global scholars and global citizens. And I just love it. Um and again in December I did take our students to um Chicago for the Chris Kindle Mark that's down there. I took over 40 students. I could not take fit

051any more on the bus unfortunately even though there was way more interest than I could fit on the bus. Um and that's something they ask every year in September. Are we are we doing the Chicago trip? So um another great opportunity for them. We're hoping to maybe get um Chicago's go to institute involved in future trips and see if we can add some additional activities on that excursion while in Chicago in the future. Thank you. um for tentative of the proposed growth um we would love to get a personal exchange going um especially if it's through GAAP which is our German-American partnership program um but that does take some time and approval and whatnot and so in the meantime um I'm looking next year to implement a virtual exchange so the German American virtual exchange

052gave um that is run through go to institute um they provide everything. It comes with built-in curriculum. The students can use their their language um and they connect with students of a similar age in Germany. Um kind of like a pen pal sort of situation, but once or twice through the program, you do a um a online live feed uh lesson which is facilitated by myself and the German teacher in Germany. Um, in conjunction with the middle school, we'd also like to do some elementary outreach and really get that interest going at that younger age. Um, maybe one or two of our elementary schools to just to start with next year. Um, uh, Go to Institute also has a really great program called Spark to to provide curriculum and activities and and um just kind

053of a outline for that. Um and then the students actually the upper level students would be able to run that and Ashley and I would just help facilitate with the students. Uh additionally I want to continue providing the national German exam um showed great uh you know effort and uh results from this year. So I can only imagine it going up next year. Additionally, um helping the students understand and practice the UW placement exam for those that would consider taking German um staying within the UW system for their post-secary plans. um until we can get a personal exchange going. I do a lot of promotion for other certified and well-reviewed um travel opportunities such as AATG, CIE, and AFS, which many of our exchange students come through um the high school. That's one of the

054the big programs. Um so far, I have sent um students last summer and the previous summer through um both AATG and CIE. So, I hope to continue that and push that just schoolwide also because they have programs that aren't just German related. So, um and again, additionally working with WGB for that CCHS um potentially for the upper levels um three, four, five, whichever that ends up working best for in our curriculum. And lastly, that community event that we're looking forward to in a couple of years um creating something um between the middle school and the high school that we can get community involvement and and outreach and really get our program visible and um showcasing all the great things that our students are doing. Any questions? Any questions? Thank you, Caroline. Uh, I think Ashley,

055I think this is on one of your uh maybe actually Jude I think it was your slides with German one. Can you go back to that with the that had the percent increases maybe? I think this Yes, this was it. What were the do you recall the numbers or does does anybody know the numbers for what German one was when you had because you started 23 school year correct? Yes. I do you want the numbers for German one in 2023? Yeah. Do you know them? Uh yeah, I wrote it down. So um the year I started that 23 24 school year, there were 15 students uh registered at the beginning of that school year for German one. Awesome. How many did we get in the following school year when there was two sections? So then

056when we added a section um we went up 20 students. So we were at 35 then 35. Okay. Yep. One class I had 15 students in and the other class I had 20 in. It was pretty pretty well split with those increases for three, four, and five. What is do you know what the count is versus percent? Because I don't know what our account levels are. I'm just wondering if it was um so for German three um there was an increase of there. Uh German 3 was a increase of three students. Um German 4 was an increase of one or two depending how you looked at it. I had one student um an exchange student who kind of joined in a couple weeks into the school year. So if you include her or not. Um

057and then um and then she had technically got put into German five even though it was a combined class. So um then German five's increase was two or three depending on if you were counting that exchange student or not. So what are the total numbers for enrollment that we're looking at then for 24 or I'm sorry for 25 26 do we have we have yes are you looking just for the high school or Park View as well for Parkview as well like all of them so Park View we are looking at 25 students for German one which has pretty much kind of been the status quo it's fluctuated we had 25 my first year 26 this year. Oh, wait. I'm sorry. 23 my first year, 25 my second year. This year there's 26. Next year

058will be 25. So, that's been pretty status quo. Um, as far as intro, so again, my first year intro was not a class. So, my second year 19 were in intro. This year I have 34 in intro and then next year will be 24 in intro. So, only technically a decrease of 11 students overall. Okay. And then what about 345? So um German 345 um next year the for German three um right now the requests are at 14 students um and then German 4 is at seven and then German five is at five and so if run that again as a combined course would be at that 12. Okay. Jason, how much interest are you guys getting with pursuit for the uh college credits after German four and five through the extension programs? Um, so

059a lot of um my students already in German 3 have started asking, you know, if I go to German five or four, can I get that college credit? Um, and that was not in place when I started. And so I have started to make those steps towards it. Um, but because we do offer that for Spanish five, it is a pretty high interest of the three, four, five students. Um, because they they want to be able to if they continue that long with the language to to get that college credit for it. So, um, yeah, I I do have quite a bit of interest. Is the process pretty straightforward? My son was a German five uh student here in at uh the high school and it was somewhat muddy at that time. The the program

060the five he was in. Um yeah, so UWGB the um my contact person I've been working with um typically you have to have a master's in the language. Um and because I do not have a masters in German, I'm currently working on curriculum and instruction. um I can still teach it. I just have to take an additional proficiency exam um which the uh UWGB sets up and and all that. And so um right now I have done like the official application process of applying for the position to UWGB. Their board goes through it. They set up um the exam for myself in probably the next year. Um and then they work with um whoever they need to uh as far as classes. So I assume maybe maybe Angela um about you know getting that certification

061approved and and everything like that. So thank you. Yeah. Caroline, I just want to come back to your question about numbers um for specific courses because I think that this is something that teachers like Jude and Ashley um as well as any teachers who might be watching, right, we they pay really close attention to as they should. Um but I want to just state that numbers depending on the time of year fluctuate. And so, um, I I say that because I'm going to be giving a presentation here a little bit later. And when we pull our data, we typically rely on third Friday count. Where are students the third Friday of the school year? Because things have typically settled down. And so students choose courses in February. Where they eventually land could look very different.

062And so, um, I think that's just important to keep in mind because I don't want anybody misinterpreting when we hear, right, like this is how many students requested a course versus this many students became enrolled in the course because something that we also have to keep in mind is scheduling conflicts. And so something that Jude is very familiar with working at the high school level is we might only run one section of AP chemistry and that section might end up conflicting with German 3 and students then have to make a choice. Which course do you want to take? Now luckily students right oftentimes can say you can take German 3 this year and take AP chemistry the following year. But students have to make a choice and I think that that's important because when they

063make those choices that does tell us something about right what their priorities are. So I just share that um because I think you know as I was looking right now my numbers for German five say four students have selected it but those numbers were pulled two weeks ago versus right Jude might have had one more student who in the last right week has enrolled where he's getting up to five students have enrolled in German five. Um, and so I just I share that because when we fluctuate by one or two students, I think sometimes it's a narrative that those numbers aren't accurate, but numbers change. The bigger picture that we're looking at, right, is are we growing the program? Are we not growing the program? And then what do we do about that? Side by

064side to that is when we have courses of four students, of five students, of six students, really anything under 15, we really have to start asking um do we again have the staff to employ that to run those courses? And so um Jude spoke to com combining right courses is that an option and and again when we have those really low numbers that's what we start to look at. So, I just share that context because I think again people watch and then we get a little bit caught up in the actual number and again it's the program as a whole. Just a follow up on on Rachel there. Um the one thing that is great about our um position in teaching German is that we can really easily do those combined classes. We can differentiate

065really easily within the classroom with language. It's not like trying to do, you know, geometry and calculus in the same classroom. So, that is one benefit to being a world language teacher and don't mind doing it. So, I did it again this year. And our growth is definitely there. I think it's important to also recognize we've been here in less than three years collectively together. And I think we can both collectively say things were not great when we both arrived. But I think those numbers, regardless of if they're still below your threshold, showcase the work that we have done and our ideas are showing you the work we are willing to pull in put in to make this program really really thriving. Rachel also made a really great point with when students are faced with

066a choice, you know, am I going to take AP or am I going to take German? Um, you know, I do not fault students for saying I'm going to take that AP class and I'm going to get that credit. Um, which is another reason that I'm I'm really pushing to um get this program this C CCIHS with UWGB. So then it's a bit more of a fair grounds of you know AP Chem versus college credit with German as well. But additionally that is also what the W placement exam is for. So that if a student cannot get college credit through me then um I can help ensure that they can get some retroactive credits in college through the the placement exam. So I I am providing some different opportunities one way or the other. Rosie

067question. Yeah. Um can we go up to slide three for a second please? Thank you. Um I don't think this was touched on but it says can we talk about this weight list that's kind of at the bottom in the box? Absolutely. So in the yellow you can see the stars for 24 and 25. We actually had above 30 students request to enroll in German one and um the max number of students is 25 with the hope to avoid no more than 30 students in a class. So because the enrollment at that time was exceeding that number, students were offered to switch to intro to German or to be weightlisted in case a student dropped from German one and then they could enroll. So when it was all said and done, were there students that

068were still weight listed or did everybody get into the class they wanted to get into? Um, two students switched to intro to German. So like I said, even though that exceeded the number for German one, we do have the alternative of intro to German. So two students elected to do that and then I believe the other elected not to take um another language like they didn't continue on the wait list and they didn't switch to Spanish. Okay. And then I think last time you did this, but I don't know if this happened today, can you differentiate between German one and intro to German? Absolutely. Yeah. So German one is the high school equivalent course. It's all year round. Um it's for students who are looking to earn that high school credit and it's run just

069like German one at the high school. With successful completion of German one, they earn that high school elective credit. So in other words, they have a credit towards graduation already. And that is the route to getting to German 5. If you don't take German one, the other option is intro to German. That's a semesterr run course. Students take that if they're not quite ready for that high school intensive. Um, they get a dabble of what German one is all about, but they don't earn the elective. And then, uh, freshman, they would take German one. The highest level they would able be able to get to would be German 4. So, it's just another option because we understand not everybody's ready for that high school intensive course. Um, it can be very rigorous at times. So,

070we like to give students more than one option because again, we understand not everyone's ready for that high school intensive, but we also don't want them to skip a year of language learning. Um, we want them to be able to have uh just a brief preview of what German one would be like. You're welcome. Caroline, just had a question about the goals for the next the upcoming years when we know the numbers are low for German. Why are we waiting to reach out to the elementary schools to start recruiting? I'm just thinking from a recruiting standpoint that I would be out there right out of the b like right out of the gate like speaking in classes and recruiting these kids in sixth grade to join us. So Jude will be starting that next year

071with the German club. I want to establish a German club and then I will support them the following school year with the elementary outreach as well. So it is starting next school year. The plan is for high school students to definitely start reaching out next year and then um to have the middle school join or kind of do um at another elementary school that the middle the high school excuse me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But just I was just wondering why we hadn't started yet just because we hadn't started yet and that's it can just be that reason too. Yeah, I I think it was just more at least at I can't speak for Ashley, but at the at the high school level of just really trying to get students on track with their proficiency and

072and making sure they're comfortable and enjoying and wanting to continue. Um and and just making sure we had that interest at the high school. Um and then that's why next year we were like, hey, let's reach out and get get those younger ones. and um especially seeing the enthusiasm of the middle school students with our March Madness and um I'm very hopeful elementary schools next year. I think it's also partially due to we haven't been in the district all that long. Um this is only my third year. So I've been here two and a half years. Jude's one and a half years. So that's why we included those tenative timelines because those kind of things take time and I think in order to maintain our rigorous program I think it kind of does start with

073that four five we want to ensure that students have that opportunity to reach that higher level. Um and I think that's important. I think the elementary will certainly come and we will establish that starting next year for sure. I don't think it's something that we initially thought of, but when we were collaborating to think about some goals, we wanted to also make sure that they were realistic with our timelines. Um, because I think the reality is is we can't make this big change overnight. It's something that takes time and it's important to recognize that because we entered at a really difficult time and I think what we have done in our short time is commendable and we've worked really hard to get to where we are now. Obviously, we still have work to do, but

074we believe in this program and we believe that we are the people that can make this happen for Magguano. And and just to add on to that, in December at December's in December's board meeting, um it sounded more like the the focus was they wanted to see those upper levels raised. So, we were focusing more on that rather than the the elementary outreach. But, yeah, not that's not important, though, because it is. Oh, can I Sorry. Can I go ahead and chime in one more time? Sorry, Caroline. Can I chime in one more time? Um, so I agree that these two are are leading the charge and spearheading the program. I want to again make sure that you're not hearing conflicting information when I present big picture system data around scheduling and course information. So,

075um, Tom, can you go to slide seven, please? So, you're going to hear from me in a little bit that German enrollment across the system is down. And so while you're hearing that German is up in other areas, and that is true, German one is down, not by colossal numbers, but a little bit. And so it's not on the slide deck. Um, but in 2526 at the high school, we are back down to one section of German one. And at the middle school, we're down a few students as well in German one. And so I'm not saying that to again negate any of the presentation that Ashley and Jude have put together. I'm not saying that to again they are they are working their butts off to increase the success of this program. But I

076also again don't want conflicting information between what I'm going to present to you and what you're seeing in this presentation. And this presentation is about how they are going to continue to grow their program. Um but I also think you need to understand like the full scope of right the program and um again when I present I just I want to make sure that you're understanding that that component and again we're not talking about colossal numbers. They didn't see a decrease of 30 plus students but that that did happen. And so I think that that's something that again I just don't want you to hear conflicting information. Any other questions? Jake, how about two? The only decrease we had was in German one by 22 students overall between middle and high school. Correct. All the

077rest maintained or increased journal with sixth grade joining the middle school. Right now we have Welllex for seventh grade and correct me if I'm wrong then I'm sorry. Yeah. Seventh grade, eighth grade, they have the option then to do uh German one or Spanish one or the intro to German or intro to Spanish. And that's kind of based off of like I think as my seventh grader explained it, how old they like it kind of like you said, are they going to be on that track to further themselves or are they more exploratory into the language itself? So they have those that's their eighth grade option intro or German one or Spanish either one. With sixth grade coming in, are we now going to be thinking about moving Welllex into sixth grade and then providing

078earlier languages or have we not given any thought to curriculum yet for that? We don't have the full middle school program laid out yet. It's just just like you can see in seventh grade kids get more opportunities than they had in sixth. Sixth graders are still going to have required classes that they need to take. Okay. So what what that looks like in sixth grade has yet to be developed. Okay. I think one thing just for perspective and the the data was not complete. We didn't have the full uh data set but we did send out that survey that we talked about in December and one of the the the the unique things about the survey there were 518 responses and we'll have a formal presentation at the end of the month on this. There

079were 518 responses but when you look at how the responses one of the questions was please rank uh you know what what do you believe is most important um our career in teched families ranked that uh the average score on that was 1.87 so of all of the 518 people the average for teched was 1.87 987 for all other elective areas. They clustered very closely together out of the this original or this this initial set. Art was 3.3, music was 3.43, physical education was 3.35, and world language was 3.05. So what we're seeing is is most of our families are saying the career and teched program is what is the most prior, the biggest priority, the thing they see the most value, and then they're ranking all the other classes essentially and not classes. uh

080course areas in a similar fashion. Um and we'll be able to dig into that a little bit more at the end of the month. But as we talk about this conversation and you'll hear some presentations tonight, you know, as how do we come up with our staffing? Where does that come from? From course selection, where does that come from from enrollment? What does that mean for budget standpoint? If you are in a pattern of declining enrollment and you see a priority area as far as what do people value the most, what is most important to them, you're going to see more kids cluster in a career in tech ed in the future because we surveyed, I think, three, four, five, six. You'll see more families in that regard. And then with fewer numbers, you'll see

081some of those other areas where, you know, we have to start to look at what courses are offered and when they're offered. So that that is all going to be part of this and we'll have more details for you at the end of the month. Just to build off that, WLEX is a required course for seventh grade students. So, while there is no design yet for what the middle school would look like, I can personally say I would hope that that would continue and move down to sixth grade. Carol, last one. I'm sorry. Apologize. That's why we're here. you're going to walk away and be like, "Wait, uh you can email us for uh the college credit for four uh German four and five." We do have AP Spanish or college credit for Spanish. Is

082that correct? It's through WGB also. It's that college credit in high school for Spanish 5. Correct. Is there an option for our German foreign five students to just take a virtual or online class now where they could still attain the credit? That's is is would it be through McGuano or would it not be through McUo or how would that work? they can take it through um what's called early college credit now, start college now. So yes, they can still take um college they can still earn college credit through our the current programming that we have. Okay. I do I don't know anything of the specifics of that curriculum of that program. So I'm not sure how aligned and well it would work where 45 currently is but we do have that opportunity for them. Yeah.

083So the way that works is through our early college credit program. Um it is college courses. So they are college level courses. They can take them at any university um either live or online. So it we do look at the course descriptions. They are pretty closely aligned. Um and that is what students will typically do for those courses. Any other questions or comments? All right. Thank you. Thank you for all your work you put into this course for your time for the future questions. Much appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Up next is consent agenda. Approval of the school board meeting minutes of March 17, 2025. Are there any questions or comments? Hearing none. That's approved by consent. Moving on to policy number one. Policy 2431 5411. Yep. So we have a

084couple of policies that uh we we had an opportunity to look through and draft. Our current intercolastic athletics policy is about a paragraph long. It doesn't fully capture what Andy Trudeell what I uh you know have have taken a look at as far as what is good policy language and what does it promote from an athletic standpoint. So, um, first reading tonight, you can see the language that we have in 2431. Um, you know, capturing, uh, what, uh, what we need to capture as far as what do we value from the program, what do we want the program to do for us, uh, how are we're going to interact with the WIAA and their constitution on some things, um, and then, uh, just the behavior expectations that are associated with with participating athletics. So you

085can see that. Again, it's not up for vote tonight, but first reading this evening, happy to answer any questions that the board may have. Any questions? I have a question. So where it talks about the we adopt the eligibility standard set by the constitution of the WIA. Yep. Does that mean that we are always going to be in align with their policy? And if they change their policy, do we have to change our policy? Can we eliminate the WIA and just set our own policy so that it is set in stone? Like how does that work? We in order for our sports teams to move on and compete in the sectional, regional, state competitions, we have to be in line with what the WIA is asking us to do. There are some areas where we

086can go beyond what the WIA is saying, but generally speaking, they have a minimum number of standards. So for instance around grades, around number of failing courses, around alcohol, uh we have to make sure that alcohol, drugs use and so on and so forth. We have to make sure that we have those things uh that that we are in align with. Um and then if there's something that we say needs we want to go beyond that, then we're in a position where we can go beyond that. Okay. So, we're not I understand like grades and things like that like we are tied to what the WIA says, but there are certain other areas where we can do what we want regardless of what the WIA says. Uh we can we can do that. Uh yes,

087we can. All right. Um Yep. Okay. Thank you. You questions with that. Is this one of those areas we can uh we can we can uh be in line with what the you know I mean the current guidance came out um you know they updated their constitution uh I want to say a month ago uh provided a new guideline in there uh for us so you know we can be we can be in line with that and go beyond it. Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Second policy 5411. Uh these are new first readings tonight. Uh so when uh act 20 was put into place, uh they require in act 20 for us to have a uh promotion uh policy in place, retention and promotion. So what you see in front of you tonight, 5411,

088uh we got the template for that. uh Angela and her team uh went through and are making some policy recommendations uh as a matter of good practice and then to be in compliance with this uh the uh requirements of act 20s. All right, thank you. Uh the next one we have a stack of policies that we had uh come forward back in March. Uh those are on the agenda. Uh if there are no questions on those, we will agendaize them for action uh at the end of uh end of April. So on the 28th any questions on that? Thank you. And then the final item uh that we wanted to talk about or just bring some ideas forward. So next uh at the uh 28th on the 28th uh the board will do a couple

089of things. First uh the board will reorganize at that time. Uh so there'll be a vote for president, vice president, uh clerk, treasurer. Um and the board at that meeting will also then uh adopt uh the calendar of board meetings. And so we put two options uh came forward. Uh we have a couple of meetings a month uh or a couple of months a year where our normal cadence is a committee of the whole meeting on the second Monday and a board meeting on the fourth Monday of the month. We have a couple of months where due to holidays we go the second and the third. So we have a what we call just our traditional calendar uh where in May we would have um a oneweek gap. Uh in June we would have two

090we would have one schoolboard meeting in July. In August we would have two meetings. Uh we have the option in August of doing the annual meeting at that time. Uh which we you know like to consider uh uh as an option for us. In September our meetings would be backtoback again given the calendar. Uh in October we would have two weeks. In December we would have two weeks or I'm sorry in November we would have two weeks but sometimes in November we only have one week between again when uh when the Thanksgiving week comes around. uh in December uh due to uh the Christmas holiday we have uh one week in between meetings. January two, February 2, March sometimes goes down to a oneweek gap between meetings. Uh and then April. So we're proposing all

091of our meetings go on the second and third as an option. We're not requesting that, but just want the board to consider it. Um it would allow for I think greater continuity month by month just based off of when our traditional holidays fall, which are usually at the ends of the month. So just discussion, something to think about over the next couple of weeks. Uh and then we will come forward with recommendations and an opportunity to vote uh on the 28th. Any other questions? Thank you. Moving on to personnel topics, course selection and staffing. All right. So I'm going to just present some highlevel overview around where we are essentially state of the state around our enrollment, our staffing and our scheduling. I presented a similar presentation back in February February. And so just again

092wanted to give you an update as to where things are currently. So in terms of our enrollment narrative, so Tom has presented on this on multiple occasions. he's going to present around it again tonight. But as you can see um in the blue graph here uh we have been uh facing a pattern of declining enrollment. If you look in the upper right corner as it currently stands. So the students who are currently registered bodies in seats for next year, we are currently projecting a current 199 student decline for the 2526 school year in comparison to the 2425 school year. Now again, that's current enrollment bodies and seats between now and the start of the school year. And again, Tom's going to speak to this. We hope to see that number um decrease but right now

093today as it stands that is what we are projecting. I have a question. Yes. When do we find out about open enrollment students? Sure. Open enrollment closes at the end of April. So April 30th open enrollment closes and then we'll make decisions on um whether we've accepted where they go. Y So what is the implication of that? So every student that we have in our right, every body in our seats equates to student dollars. When we lose a student, we lose dollars. And so based on those projections, the implication for the 2526 school year is a projected $1.4 million deficit. So when we are facing a deficit of that magnitude, we have to look at people and programs. We're beyond cutting right the lowhanging fruit. And so we have to look at, and I talked

094about this in my last presentation, how do we continue to be effective while being efficient? And so if we look at some history here, when we look at the total certified and professional staff we have in our system in 2017 2018, that school year, we had 365, we're just going to round, right, professionalcertified staff. Even though we decreased in our number of students that we were serving over the course of that those years between 24 now and 25 we increased our certified staff to 409. So it was a total increase of 44 what we call full-time employees. 44 FTE. If we look at where those positions went, 17 were added to the classroom. 16 were added into student services, psychologists, counselors, occupational therapists. Four were added to district-wide support. So, we added a buildings and

095grounds person. We added a technology um support. Six of those positions were added into the district office. So, we added a human resources department. It didn't exist in 201718. We added some student learning positions. There's not a person that's going to argue that when those positions were added, they were not warranted. There's not anybody that's going to argue that when you look at this list of positions, these people are not of value to the system. These are all people who are coming to work every day doing the jobs that they were hired to do with the best of intent. And so when I say that we have to look at people and programs when we look at a $ 1.4 million deficit, we have to look at where did we add, why did we add,

096and how do we look at doing things differently. We're not looking at the individual, the individual person, right? I'm not looking at Christine and saying, is Christine good at what she does? I'm looking at what is the position and what is the position support in our program. And so as we look at staffing in the midst of a deficit, our staffing priorities remain the same. We are aiming to provide the highest quality educational experience for students. We want to maintain rigorous course offerings. We want to meet the needs of our students at secondary. You've heard us talk time and time again. We want students in the classes that they want to be in. That is what is will promote the highest level of engagement for those students. And then we want to maximize the impact

097of our employees. So we want teachers teaching in the content areas that they're certified to teach. I don't want a teacher who is certified in math to pick up 50% of their day doing a study hall. That's not impactful. I want a math certified teacher teaching math. And so we want to maximize the impact of those employees. And so we're doing all of this in order to achieve our mission, right? Every student a graduate. That's what we come back to around every decision that we make. So what is our staffing process? Again, in February, we ask teachers to let us know if they want to retire, if they want to request a transfer. Enrollment is set. So in secondary, our enrollment is essentially set at the end of February after students have selected their courses.

098So again, you just got done hearing about um the German numbers, what students have selected in terms of courses. We try and stick pretty close to that. Again, it varies usually by a few students. Um, we've really developed a what we think is a really great process going into 2526 to avoid what you heard in the past, right? 1,000 course requests. We are not anticipating anything close to that um because of the processes that we've since developed at elementary staffing really becomes solidified by the end of April. And that uh Dale to your point comes after we secure open enrollment. Most of our open enrollment seats are happening at the elementary level. That's when students or families really want to come to the district and make that change. Um we determine the number of sections

099at elementary and then the courses that are going to run at the secondary and then we start to assign staff to those sections. If you remember this year again when faced with um some of the uh again budgetary implications we were looking at we decided to conduct a deep analysis of our programming. And so at the elementary level we looked at enrollment trends. We looked at where were students historically enrolling? When were they enrolling? Are we going to see an influx of students in June that we need to account for? Do our 4Kers usually wait to register until you know August? And so we we started to look at that data. At the secondary, we evaluated the past four years to look at historical trends to look at courses that were running significantly below capacity.

100And capacity was identified as a 75% um fill rate. So courses that ran with fewer than 15 students, we looked at and then we looked at courses that had declining or low enrollment. So again, if you ran below that 75% capacity and we looked at that data because again when we're making decisions about should we run a class, right? So Jude talked about he's got a German three course that's running with 14 students. That's a decision we have to make and we make that decision by looking at well what's what is the historical data tell us? Is the historical data telling us that the program is growing and so we're going to run that or is the historical data showing us that the program is declining and we need to make a harder decision, right?

101And and perhaps not run that program. And so having this historical data helps us to really determine some of those harder decisions. Uh the high school administration met with all of the department chairs in February to share the themes that were uncovered through this data analysis. So, high school courses that really uh stood out to us as having historical trends with declining enrollment, our computer science classes, our German multivariable calculus, advanced placement, government and politics, auto service tech 2, building trains, trades, machine tool, and then project lead the way principles of engineering And so just I presented this already but just as a reminder in 2023 24 33% of our courses at the high school level we're running at 75% capacity or below. That is fiscally irresponsible when we are facing a budget deficit. So

102while we want again students in courses that they want to be in, we want to run an academically rigorous environment. We can do that work and still not run classes 33% of them at 75% or below. And so in 2024 25 we got a little bit better. We got that to 24% of classes running at 75% capacity. And uh this year uh Stephanie's goal is to get that above the 80% mark. 80% of classes will run at 75% capacity or above. So here is the current data as it stands. And this is where again if any of our teachers are watching I ask that you be you know give us a little bit of grace. Um and again like I said these are these are numbers that can fluctuate. They're they're not fluctuating by 100

103by 200 but they may fluctuate by a few. So this is based on the number of requests. The master schedule at the high school level has not been built. And so again, those scheduling conflicts that might take place, the actual enrollment in the classes, we don't pull that data until the third Friday. By the third Friday in school, that is when kids are in seats. That's when we really get the determiner of this is how many kids are in these courses. Um, but what we can start to see is are there are there trends where departments are again being impacted more than others. So at the high school level in technical education between 24 and 25 25 and 26 we saw a decrease of 148 requests in German one. Again Ashley spoke to this we

104saw a decrease of 20 requests at the high school level. In art we saw a decrease of 131 requests in science. We saw a decrease of 71 requests. And our current projections for elementary. So we ran 90 sections across all of our schools last year. So that means we had right three sections of first grade at section three sections of second grade at I shouldn't use section that was a bad example. Three sections of first grade at Clarendon, right? Does that make sense what a section is? This upcoming year we are anticipating running 88 sections across all of our elementaryaries for a decrease of two sections. Now, we're very fortunate that in most situations, we can we can um what's the word I'm looking for, Joe? Um thank you. We can absorb these losses through

105attrition. So, through retirements, through resignations. Um but again, we have to we have to be fiscally responsible and when we don't have students who are enrolling or when we have this decrease in enrollment, we have to respond to that. So with that said, this is not doom and gloom. This is not a oh my goodness, the the ceiling is falling down. Our district will continue to be high achieving. I look at what is happening at the high school. I look at what um is happening at the middle school, our elementaryaries. Our district is still going to be incredibly high achieving. We have some of the best teachers I have ever seen working with students passionately working their butts off again to prepare every student to be college and career ready. That is not going to

106change and we're going to continue to monitor our enrollment. So if we see an increase, if when the schedule is right, begins to be created at the uh high school level, if we start to see shifts, we're going to be responsive to that because again, our goal, our priorities around staffing remain the same. And so if adjustments are needed, we will make them. There is nothing black and white about this dance of scheduling and staffing. The goal is to be a student centered organization, and to do that, we have to be right be willing to make adjustments. And so again, we we have every intention of still being a high achieving district. Um and that's not going to change. So what are our next steps? Um we're going to work with department leaders to prepare

107curriculum instruction for the upcoming school year. So just like every other year, we'll we'll have this coming year teachers who are going to be told you're teaching a new course or you're teaching a new grade level. And we'll work with them to prepare them to do so. Uh we give healthy stipens for teachers to do that work. and will again continue to do so. Uh Stephanie and her team are building the master schedule. That is no easy feat. Tomorrow they have uh their our platform infinite campus coming in to help guide that work. And so again that's it's a huge undertaking but that's going to be work that's happening. Our goal is always to communicate student schedules out before they leave us for the year and that will continue to be our goal. And then

108we'll continue to plan summer learning and staff development. uh the focus will continue to be on all of the things, the opportunities, the strengths, the the areas that again we have to celebrate because while again we're facing some declining enrollment, our district is not immune to that. All of our surrounding area districts are facing this in some way, shape or form. And just like them, we will again continue to be high performing despite that. And I think that that's the narrative that we need to continue to make sure that people hear because while it can feel like again doom and gloom, um there's still really great things that are happening here. Questions? Yeah, Jason. So, I know decisions haven't been made on what, you know, if there's going to be things on the cutting block,

109but I saw up there you multivaried calculus and some of these other uh technical options. Is there going to be any kind of options for exploring online options? Look at something like that. Those do end up at the chopping block and that's a decision that has to be made. Absolutely. So, anytime that we have students who enroll in a course and then we tell them, you know, hey, we we might not have the enrollment to run it, we are having those students meet with our high school counselors to talk about what their options are. And so, Angela spoke to our early college credit uh program that for I would say almost all of our upper level uh high school courses, those courses are also available through that program. um early college credit now. And so

110if we have to tell a student because those are the courses where you typically see the lower numbers, right? Those higher level, junior, senior, advanced courses, um if we have to tell a student we can't run that, we are always meeting with them and giving them what their alternative is to still have that experience and still have access to that learning. And I would say, and again, Angela correct me if I'm wrong, but 99% of those courses, we have an alternative pathway for them. So, we communicate that out with them. We generally, if it's something that's, you know, affecting a bigger population of students, we will send out some sort of a communication to parents to let them know as well. Um, but our high school counselors are fantastic that they're meeting with students to

111give them what their options are. Any other questions? I have a question on dad. I think this was when I did my very first walkthrough of the high school. Um, we were told that we were turning away students in teched for and I don't know if that was for very specific classes, if there was general classes. Um, but this is a a large decrease in teched. So, where is it seems like a little bit of a disconnect to me. So, where's that coming from? Yeah, the teched decrease is really across the board. So we have incredibly robust technical education offerings and sometimes what happens is when you have a span of right like 20 offerings and you see declining enrollment so the high school is down roughly a 100 students Tom I'm looking at you

112to confirm yes rough so sometimes what happens is you see there's There's 20 right courses and right it could be 18 but right there's 20 courses and CTE in our district has been something that's I think it's one of the highlights right of what we offer but when you see that decrease what sometimes happens is it's four students out of this class and five students out of this class and 11 students out of this class and that equates to that total um decrease. So it's not necessarily that we see one aspect of the CTE program taking this huge hit. It's it can sometimes be we offer so much right we offer welding one welding two welding three welding that students sometimes just right they drop off by a few in each area. I think that

113our CTE drop is more indicative of the declining enrollment than it is of student interest. And so I think that that's something that I know Dustin is monitoring incredibly closely. Um and so is his his team. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Thank you. Welcome. Went on to student learning science resource for adoption. Okay. Um tonight we have an update for you on the secondary science curriculum process. As we have shared with the board, we have several different um curriculum resource pilots happening at the secondary level that is part of our ongoing curriculum renewal cycle. So tonight, Michelle Ziggler and I are going to present to you the process that we used for the secondary silent science pilots um as well as the recommendations that we are making for secondary science um resources. This is

114an information item tonight, but we will be bringing this back for action um at the April 28th board meeting. Sorry about that. All right. So, anytime we have any sort of course or curricular area that is up for review, we follow this four-phase process in our districts. You see it on our district website. Um, I've sat before you many times to go through the process that we use. Um, tonight Angela and I are here to discuss the research and the pilot years of the science adoption cycle. This clicker. All right. Um, so in our research here, I just want to point out that this research started last school year. So that was when Stephanie Blue was the director of student learning. So she began this pilot process with the research um with the science department.

115And so during our research year, we do a lot of standards work just like um anytime we go up for a course renewal um we look at the standards with the teachers so that when we're looking at resources, the teachers have an idea of exactly what we're looking for based off of the standards that we use. Um we're using the Wisconsin state standards for science. Um through that process, we also identify focus standards because as you will see in a few minutes when I show you one of the slides, um there are tons and tons of standards for science. And so we sit down with the teams of teachers and we identify essential standards so that we know that we are hitting on the most important things that we know students need to know and

116be able to do by the end of their grade level. Um as a team, we also work on the science belief statement. We are still in the process of working through that with our teams. Um they do a lot of research on what best practices in science instruction are and also um review a lot of different resources before finally deciding on which ones to pilot. Um what you can see on the screen right now is that the science standards span quite a few areas. There are three major categories. Um, and so when we were looking for a resource, we were looking for something that would really integrate all of those pieces seamlessly across all of the different units. So the science and engineering practice standards that are listed up there, there's eight of them. Um,

117and then the grid column, which is the cross cutting concepts, there's seven of those standards. We're really looking for those particular standards to weave in to the different domain specific areas. Um so for us we have decided that physical science will be covered in eighth grade, life science will be covered in seventh grade and earth science and space science is covered in sixth grade. Um so all of those domain specific standards we looked at for each grade level also will then have those science and engineering practices and those cross cutting concepts. So that's what we were looking for in a resource. So then moving into this school year, we moved into the second phase of our curriculum renewal cycle, which is the pilot phase. So during this phase, we're really exploring those curricular resources and

118best practices. Um really digging into the resources as Michelle had mentioned, we are looking for that tight match and alignment to the standards, um to the rigor that we're looking for. and then best practices in instruction. Um, through this process, we are really looking closely at the materials. We're trying them out with the students and then we're continuing, as Michelle said, to work on that standards work and revising our curriculum. So, in the area of science at the secondary level, we had several different pilots occurring this year. On the screen, you can see a list of all of the teachers who were involved in the pilots. At the middle school level, we had all of our seventh and eighth grade teachers who were piloting two different resources. Um, we are looking at this adoption for

119sixth through 8th grade. And I think I had shared before with the board that sixth grade was not directly involved in piloting the materials. Um the reason for this was that when they planned the pilot, the sixth grade teachers were not departmentalized. That decision was made a bit later and we were a bit far in the planning process. So we were not able to loop them into the pilot. However, those teachers did have the opportunity to look at the materials for the sixth grade level. They met with the reps. Um they also met with the seventh and eighth grade teachers. multiple times to talk about the resources um and then uh work on the curriculum together. Then for the high school, our entire bio biology team piloted one resource and our chemistry team also piloted

120one resource. So um I would like to just take a moment to recognize the work of the pilot teachers. When we are engaging in a pilot, it truly is a heavy lift. Um there is training that goes along with this. There's a great deal of planning and prepping. They're learning a new resource. Um there's lots of meetings and all of this is occurring while they are doing their regular daily teaching duties. So we really want to give a shout out to the pilot teachers and really thank them for their efforts. When we are doing a resource pilot, we start in the research year and we start by casting a pretty wide net. So on the screen you can see that even though we have narrowed it down to two resources that we are piloting at

121the middle school level and then one resource each for biology and chemistry. We started with a much wider list. So these were all of the things that were looked at and considered before we got to the pilot process. So again, we're looking at all the things that are available um when we get to the pilot. We want to narrow that down so that we have a manageable pilot. And some of these resources um as we dig into them before piloting with students, some of them we can tell are not going to fit for us in terms of our standards or what we believe is best practice. So this is what we ended up with for our pilot for the sixth through 8th grade. The seventh and eighth grade teachers piloted two different resources. They piloted

122the issues in science by lab aids one unit from that resource and then they also piloted one unit from open sed which was published by Carolina biological supply for our high school pilot. Our biology teachers piloted the text biology by Miller and Lavine which is published by Savis. And then our chemistry team um piloted basic chemistry by Timberlake and Timberlake and that is published by Pearson. All right. So the timeline for this school year, which was the pilot year, um in August, the science science pilot teachers came in and they were all trained on the different pilot resources. Um then fall and winter, they had additional science pilot training. Um and then Angela and I created a pilot feedback form that basically is like a look fors document so that as the teachers were using

123the resource, they could give it a score and different categories that we felt were important um for this adoption. Um, and then we also had science pilot meetings and check-ins with the pilot teachers and the department chairs. And then this spring, um, Angela and I sat down and we thoroughly reviewed all of the content, um, and shared review notes with the board. Um, from that pilot feedback form, Tom, could you click on the 68 one for us? Just want to show you what it looks like. So basically the teachers are given a scale and there's different content areas that we ask them to assess. So basically were the materials aligned to the standards. Um they were able to leave feedback and then give a score. And you can see that OpenSID and lab aids were

124side by side so that we could see a comparison. Um and the teachers were able to kind of see pretty easily then too which ones they felt were the strongest on each of those areas. So there were things on there like are the activities really hands-on? Um do they apply to real world scenarios? Do the kids have access to materials? Um, how friendly are the teacher resources and the student resources? So, you can go back to the slides, Tom, and then to the next slide. Yep. So, then the strengths for both open sad and lab aids. What we did was we took the average score. So, anything that was scored a four or higher, we considered to be a strength. Um so what you can see is that both open siad and lab aids the

125first four were areas that they had scored highly and they had those areas in common. Um lab aid scored slightly higher in each of those areas but both of them were very well aligned to the standards had real world connections um and inquiry inquiry involved which is super important. Um they all were um activities based and had materials that provoke collaboration. On the lab aid side, we also found that the materials were fostering learning of skills and concepts that they were thoughtfully sequenced and the student and teacher materials were just much friendlier and the staff appreciated those and the students appreciated those more in the lab aids particular resource. So then as far as the challenges, we looked at scores that were two or lower um or 2.5 or 2.8ish it looks like um differentiation

126on both sides. What we did with when we sat down with the staff, we asked them what are the challenges and then what are the ways that we can overcome those barriers. So for example, differentiation well that's like an instructional practice piece that we can pull in differentiation activities and strategies as opposed to relying on the resource to provide those pieces for us. Um for open sight ed obviously you can see on that side that there were um areas that they were ranked a little bit lower. Incorporation of technology was a lower area. um the technology activities to deepen learning um suggestions for teachers on what kind of technology to use and the student materials which was concerning for us as well is that the student materials were not as friendly as in lab aids.

127Um and so again lab aids we felt we could figure out differentiation pieces. We felt we could supply supplemental materials if needed. um and suggestions for teachers on technology was the other weaker area. We had for the secondary middle school teachers, we had five teachers pilot and all five of them voted for lab aid. So you could see that 100% of the teachers were in favor of lab aids being the um resource that we recommend to the board. So based on all of that, we are recommending moving forward with the lab aids resource. This is a breakdown of the cost for a sixth through 8th grade adoption of this resource. This is a six-year adoption. Um, and a couple of things just to point out, and I think Michelle kind of touched on these, but

128um, this is an incredibly interactive resource. So, all of the units have numerous hands-on labs and investigations. Um, and additionally, the units come in standalone units. So, it's not one giant textbook that you work from beginning to end, but standalone units, which gives us some flexibility. Um, we can move them around in the scope and sequence of the year. We can also move them around between grade levels if we would choose to change our scope and sequence that we currently have. So that gives us a ton of flexibility, but there is some added costs there. So um you can see all of the things that are included with this adoption. Um some of the bigger costs are of course the books. The class we are going with class sets of books. So not one book

129per student, but each classroom would have a set of textbooks. There is one um book required out there, please. There is one book per unit and with sixth and seventh grade there are five units each and then with eighth grade there are six units. So that's a total of 16 units. Um so that's uh a lot of textbooks. Um and that's the cost there of $61,000 for the text. Then of course there are teacher manuals and different resources. um we did receive a number of those um gratus from the publisher that's based on the number of student texts we were purchasing. Another large cost in terms of this adoption is the equipment packages. So I talked about the fact that there's a lot of hands-on labs and investigations. So, every single unit has an equipment

130package and we need one of those per unit per teacher. The cost of those really vary by unit. Um, these equipment packages include many different things. Some of them are consumable items that we will replace just like we do now with our science experiments, but most of the things in these equipment packages are reusable items. Um, again, very hands-on. So, there's lots of different things in here, electric motors, um, there's force meters, all kinds of different things that the students will need um, for those labs. Then there is the cost of the online portal. So, students will have access to all of the materials online. Uh, parents can access that as well through their students login. And the cost there is for a six-year license. And then the last two costs there, shipping and handling

131and professional development. There will be one day of training for each of the three grade levels. Um and that is the cost for the professional development of 2500 a day, bringing us to a total of um close to $31,000. Again, that's for a six-year adoption. All right. So, moving on to our high school pilots. We used the same process that Michelle outlined. We had the feedback forms. We collected that detailed feedback from all of our pilot teachers and then we met with them and talked through the strengths, the challenges and um the um things that we could do to address the challenges. So these were the strengths that surfaced for our biology pilot. The teachers really liked this resource. It had a very strong alignment to the standards and it matched the rigor of the

132standards. One of the key features of this particular biology text is it has something in it called interactivities. Um this is similar to the lab aids approach where it uses a phenomenabased approach. So they give the students a real world problem and then the students are led um through learning projects um lots of inquiry and lots of discourse between the students. So the biology teachers really enjoyed those as well as did the students. The lessons were very thoughtfully sequenced and one of the key things um that was really important to the teachers is that the text is accessible to the students. Many times at the high school level especially in the area of science um the text is written more at a college level and so this text is accessible but still challenging and rigorous

133for the students. And then finally there were many additional resources that are available to the teachers and the students through the online portal. Some of the challenges that surfaced here um similarly to the sixth through 8th grade the differentiation was a little bit of a challenge for the teachers. While there were suggestions in the textbook for differentiation, um there were not specific items that were already differentiated as well as some of the things that were available to them were not customizable. We also had some minor issues with the digital platform. Two different things. Um first some connectivity issues and then a little bit with navigating the portal. So those are things that we have been working through. Um it was good to find those out in the pilots so that we could work through and

134troubleshoot those with our technology department um as well as working directly with the vendor. So overall just a few challenges that we feel um we have solutions to. So our recommendation would be to move forward with um adopting this biology text. Um this is the breakdown of the costs for the biology text. This um again would be a six-year adoption. So we would get six years of that digital license for the students and the teachers. Again, students would have access to everything online. Um, and then this is for one text per student. So that's different than the sixth through 8th grade. Um, at the high school level, we felt it was important that the students had the physical text that they could take home um, and utilize. So the total for this adoption is $63,694

135and some change. And then for the chemistry pilot, we are not re recommending um moving forward with um the textbook that was piloted at this point. Although the text did have a logical sequence and the teachers really felt that it matched the scope and sequence they were looking for, we really struggled with this pilot. Um we had difficulty from the very beginning with support from the company and the sales reps. um there was a lack of resources that are included with this textbook. Teachers would have expected to see some labs, some note aids, things of that nature. Those did not exist. Um as well as most of the resources were online only. So our recommendation is to continue with the pilot into next year. I will work with the chemistry team to look at some

136different resources that we can bring in to pilot for next year. All right. So, on April 3rd, we had a community viewing night where we invited everyone to come out and look at the resources. We had 11 families attend. Um, and it was nice because I I feel like we had a pretty constant flow throughout the evening. Angela and I were there. Um, and the feedback was positive. Um the parents that I spoke to really liked the fact that um specifically with lab aids that the activities are really hands-on. I know I'm a mom in the district as well and so as I was reading this I was really excited that my daughter will get to do um some of the things because I never got to do labs as a kid. Um so I'm

137really excited that the kids get to do things like that to learn. Um the content is engaging and um I had a really great conversation with a couple parents about how much they appreciate the rigor um that we bring in McGuano. All right. So next steps for the science curriculum process. Um as I stated at the beginning, we will bring this back for board approval at the April 28th meeting. If um that is approved, then we would move forward with purchasing the resources, make sure that we have all of those in hand um by summer so that we can provide the appropriate training for all of the teachers this summer. We would also be engaging in some summer curriculum writing work, aligning our curriculum um to those resources. And then, as I stated before, I

138would be working um with the chemistry team to look at some new resources to pilot for next year and planning what that pilot will entail. Questions? Caroline, could you flip back to the slide for I believe it was seventh and eighth grade that had the cost breakdown. Yep. Oops. Awesome. I know you mentioned with high school the importance of having seventh and eighth grade bringing books home. I have a seventh grader who has I'm currently keeping her math book safe for her. I have to keep it on this one shelf so it doesn't get destroyed by my other kids, but she doesn't use it, but she can't bring it back. So, I have to watch it. So, that's math right now. Who's a He's a wonderful teacher. So, I'm definitely not knocking the teacher. She's

139doing really good in the class. So that's nothing against that science. I've never seen a book come home. So I'm wondering what are our cost savings if we just do a digital versus actually purchasing these books that these parents have to keep safe for these kids throw in their locker on day one and pull out of their locker on June 9th. Um I used to be a science teacher so I also didn't I wrote the c you know we did everything out of it. Maybe the kid that went on vacation for a week would use it, but if they have access to digital learning, they would just pull the book out there. So, there would obviously be a significant significant cost savings if you did not have the books at all. Um, the way that

140the books work is they set up the interactivities that are within there, the labs and the investigations. So, um I think the the science teachers would um echo this that in class it was important for them to have that physical textbook. Um they were doing a lot of different activities with it in class. Not as important for them to take that home, but in class as they are working through those labs, having that physical text was kind of a critical piece for them. So with the digital, if they we just chose digital, they would still have access, I'm assuming, to those labs where there would be a printed sheet or print something where we could just print the lab. Would we not have access to that? Because that would be if we purchased the digital

141option knowing that there would be a digital option available, that would be So the digital option um for the text is a digital text. I don't believe it's something that would easily Um, it just would be they would have to have their Chromebook with them and they would have to flip through it on the Chromebook. So, it is something I mean we can definitely consider. I could ask the teachers their thoughts on that and bring that back to the next meeting. Are there separate textbooks and lab books also that are offered or is it just a textbook? Because they're not writing in said textbook. Correct. So, they're just looking at the book like they would look at a Chromebook. Yep. It just would be navigating multiple screens while trying to do the um labs and

142activities alongside it. Yeah. Yep. What would be the cost savings if we didn't is that if you didn't any of them it would be 61,000. Okay. Yep. Mr. Schwarz. So on that same subject it's one per student for the online portal which is 1100 students but then we have 2,45 books. Yep. There are multiple books for the units. Got it. And there are different amounts of them based on sixth grade class sets and seventh and eighth grade class sets. Okay. Thank you. So that's the difference for the discrepancy there. Um, going to the chemistry pilot, not a question, but just a comment. I greatly appreciate that you are willing to reject a curriculum if it does not meet our standards and our teachers needs instead of just accepting something to accept it. So, thank you

143for doing that. Any other questions? Thank you. Just one more. Sorry, Caroline. Sorry. Going along with the class books, I'm assum assuming shipping and handling would be the charge for the books and maybe a small portion for the equipment packages. Correct. With the equipment packages, things that would be reusable, did they note what those items are? Are they like the earlier flask or beers or stuff that the teachers already have that we don't need and can we allocart it? Um, they're pretty specific items. so I can send you the book that lists all of the different things that are in there. Um, a lot of it is very specific items that I don't think we would be able to source elsewhere. Um, each of the kits has for different labs. Some of them are like

144cards that are set up in specific ways for them to conduct these labs. Those are obviously something we would not be able to um replicate. There's specific molds. Um, some of it would easily be able to replicate. I'm just not sure if they have an option for just purchasing pieces of it and what that would look like. I think it sounds cool. It sounds kind of like you order that like HelloFresh where you get the meal kit and it's all there. Yeah. Knowing I used to prepare all the labs old school, so that was tough. But yeah, that it would be nice to have it all in one. But just wondering if there is an option to be like, we got the equipment, just give us the chemicals. I can definitely check on that. Other

145questions? Think we're good. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to finance and facility topics. All right. So, here we go. What's uh first, let me just peek at the agenda here. First one we have, so fund 73 OPED results. I just provide this to you every three months. So, here we are as we wrapped up the third quarter. Um the investment uh interest earnings are at 4.59% the most recent month in March and a 5.18% rate of return. And so board policy says I have a report on the uh board's investments uh and the information is there. So if you have any questions let me know. Okay. Next one then we had is uh the memorandum of understanding. Um so I have an updatedou. Uh we worked through this. Uh it was revised quite a

146bit here. Uh but we had our help uh from um Brian Waterman from below better revise this protect our interest. Make sure that it's just aligned. I've reviewed it with the village. uh with Ron Bitner and others who work in the Moango Village so that we can share our fiber optic networks. This is a win-win for the community, for the school district, for the village here. So, um if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, we'll look to adopt this um come uh two weeks from now. Dale, has this been this has been on your agenda then this month at the village level? Correct. Okay. Yes. Um, one thing that does come up, maybe you can address it here as well, is people are concerned about security by sharing lines with the village. Yeah.

147So, I mean, you're asking me a technical question that I prefer to ask Kelly and Eric Kirch in our IT department, but my understanding is there is there's no chance of information sharing. I couldn't, you know, one way that the village will utilize this when they when we connect. Uh, we had 32 strands of fiber that's laid in the in the telephone wires and we essentially give them access to one set of that which we would never use all 32 strands. I don't even believe we're using half of that amount right now. They can connect uh and and connect to the uh water tower down here um to our east and then there there's some village pumping stations. We could not get access to theirs uh and they could not get access to ours because

148they're separate strands. Yes, correct. Thank you. All right. The next one that we had was the St. James attendance boundary. Um St. James has asked us to um I guess just let me back up for a second, just give a little history real quick. Public school districts are um by state law required to provide transportation to schools uh to private schools within our boundaries. Um, so you know, if there's Lutheran schools, Catholic schools, um, you know, there's some private schools that we do transport to. Transportation can be a yellow school bus or a parent contract. So, if there's a school that maybe only has six kids, uh, we wouldn't provide a yellow school bus at a cost of $30,000. um the the threshold of if the cost of the bus costs uhund on a per

149student basis more than 150% of the average cost it costs us to transport our regular education students that's excessive and then parent contracts are offered so um the current value is about $600 per student um s if I just scroll down here um we have two Catholic schools and I just bear with me I need to Rotate this here. Um, this is our district map and we have two Catholic schools operating in the area and actually technically three right now. Uh, once upon a time it was four. St. Paul's is in Jese to the north. It's technically in the uh, Kettle Marine School District. We have St. Peters to the south and and East Troy. And then we have St. Joe's which is in Big Bend. Um, St. uh James I think they closed down

150somewhere in the early as you know 2008 2009 do not quote me on that but we didn't have transportation anymore going to St. James so the arch dascese of Wisconsin really oversees all the Catholic schools um in this regard and when St. James went away St. Joe's attendance boundaries are what you kind of see outlined uh in the dotted lines there. Okay. So, it spans into Mosquo into Maguano up to the north there and in the Kettle Marine area. So, we provide transportation to those students. Some of them are getting a yellow school bus where St. James uh excuse me, St. Joe's Catholic Church and Christ Lutheran which is also in Big Bend. We have uh I think one or two dedicated yellow school buses for those two schools. So, they combine. they have common

151start end times and then there's other students outside of where that bus can reach where those are those students are getting parent contracts. Um you can see that in our areas to the east and to the the excuse me to the west and northwest um there's some unclaimed area now that St. Paul's to the north is no longer working uh or and and and um teaching students. St. Peters to my understanding in East Troy. My understanding is that this is they're not going to be operating after this school year. St. uh James is asking if the rest of the territory in our district can be recognized as their attendance boundary. Um so I guess like I I don't know enough about how many students might be attending St. James who lived in those areas. Uh

152but my safe my guess is that it's a handful of families. Um, and then they would likely receive parent contracts. So, there just wouldn't, maybe I'm wrong there, but I just don't think there's probably enough that we would have a bus uh sweep through those areas uh and deliver those students to St. James. Um, the request from St. James came in on April 3rd. By state law, uh, a parochial school is, uh, I should back up. The arch dascese of Milwaukee has as as an superintendent and assistant superintendent and there's uh reached out and said we are not going to adjust St. Joe's attendance boundary at this time. They're going to leave it as you see today. But if that attendance boundary for St. James and um St. Joe's is changed then we would recognize

153a part for St. James and a part for St. Joe's. So obviously there's some impact there that the arch dascese has to work out on their own and then the request will be made for you to consider. Ultimately, you have to recognize these lines and accept them um to move forward here. So, um the the deadline for a private school to request attendance boundaries by state statute is April 1st. The request came in April 3rd. It's your call if you want to make this consideration. Otherwise, um you know, again, that's your call there. So what the timeline is is private schools submit an atten attendance boundary by April 1st to the public school board and then by May 15th they have to submit a roster of students who will likely be attending so that as

154we plan school bus routes for the following or the upcoming August September uh we can plan accordingly. So this request has been made for the areas that are in our district that aren't belonging to St. Joe's at this time. Do we get reimburse from the state? So, uh, state, yeah, we get it's a it's a very, very, very minimal amount of state transportation aid. We get $160,000 for transportation costs. Our costs are about 2.7 for regular education and about uh another four or 500,000 when you counting special education routes. So, about like for private schools, if we have a bus for a private school, that just comes out of our funds, you don't get Yes. Yep. So it's kind of I think that's not very well understood by many people and I and I don't

155blame them, right? Like who really studies statute 121 or chapter 121 state statutes, right? That's public school transportation. But yeah, the public school districts are financially responsible to provide transportation to the private schools. Mr. Bennett, without having the roster, is there any way to project what the cost to the district would be? I can ask St. James to submit that information to see if they'd be able to give it to us. I I could do that. I I did not get that information to say how many families are are we ultimately talking here. Um you know, you really got to fill up a school bus to justify the cost. And um yeah, that's my guesstimate. I I could be totally wrong about that. Um I could ask for that information before you make a determination

156in two weeks. RBY. So, since they missed the deadline, what would happen if we said, "Hey, sorry you missed the deadline. Try again next year." The parents who would likely be driving their kids to St. James would not be getting a $600 payment from the school district to provide that transportation. They basically um you know, if a parent from St. If let's say like in the upper northwest corner of the of the district there at the top of the map, if they want to attend St. Joe's, they can attend St. Joe's, but we don't have to financially provide yellow school bus transportation or parent contract. People are free to go where they want. Um, however, like there's certain like reasonable attendance boundaries, right? We're not going to transport students from Big Ben over to section

157and vice versa. Like you have an attendance boundary. If you live within that attendance boundary, we'll provide transportation. So when you have two two um schools of a religious denomination like they're not state law says they can't overlap boundaries. You can't you know have buses passing each other going to different Catholic schools or Lutheran schools what have you. So uh there has to be an attendance boundary recognized submitted to you and then recognized and approved by you. Caroline I was going to ask that. So that doesn't mean the attendance boundary doesn't prevent them from going. You can go to whatever school you would want. Yep. at the school. But that's what we would where we would bus them or volunteer to bus them. Yes. So, we're in a deficit or looking at a deficit and

158we would be looking at paying parents to drive their kids to the Catholic school of their choice. Is that what we're looking at? If you look at the map outside the dotted lines, like the the lower left, that's green, that's, you know, Rolling Hills area. The the orange that's Prairie View Elementary. If if you were to recognize all those areas not claimed by St. Joe's, anybody living in those areas and attending St. James would be getting likely a parent contract from the district to give them transportation because it probably wouldn't be enough students to bring a bus out that way. Yeah, that's again my assumption. I think it's probably reasonably Yeah. probable. Yeah, but we are already paying for everybody that's inside the dotted line. Yep. Right. Yep. I I'd say like in the purple

159areas uh in the purple areas there's a yellow school bus everything that's pink and blue pink is Claren blue is section if those people are attending St. Joe's. They're probably on a parent. They are on a parent contract. Okay. So, the dotted line that's outside of the red line, we're still paying to get those children schools. No. So, that that like so up in like that pointed area there up that's in the white. Um, I'm just going to hover my mouse there real quick. We're not paying for this. These students live in Kettle Marine. This is the St. Joe's attendance boundary that Kettle Marine also recognizes, but then Kettle Marine would uh be on the hook for that. We only transport students in our boundaries. Gotcha. But yeah, even like out here to the east

160then this is the Mosquo Norway school district and that is in their district, but they can that's the attendance boundary for St. Joe's. It spans multiple public school districts. Any other questions for that? Okay, thank you. I can I do we know the enrollment for St. James for the upcoming year? Like is the enrollment for the whole school 20 students? And we don't No, it's more than that. I mean, it's this is hard for me to say. I mean, they run 2K or 3K through 8th grade, I believe. I want to say it's like 130ish. Is it operating this year or is Yes, it's operating. It was already operating for And please, I don't want anyone to quote me on that. I believe that's what the number is. Gotcha. Right. Thank you, Kevin. Yes. All

161right. The next up is then just uh prepayment of referendum debt. Um we're going to uh as we finalize our financing plan here, I'll just go down to the second page of the attachment. We're looking to defe is which is another word for prepaid debt um of $3 million. So some of the details are down the lower lefthand corner. The savings by doing this is we would be trimming off and let me make this a little bit bigger. 384,000 of savings of avoiding interest payments. So this is our like our debt schedule before prepayment. This is our debt schedule after prepayment. We would this is $1.785 million. And then this orange box here is 2.855 million. You can see that we would uh eliminate this blue payment. That 1.785 million's gone. And then this 2.85

162855 million is reduced down to 1.048 million. So, uh we continue to prepay debt, which has always been our strategy. Uh with your permission, we will uh defeat approximately $3 million and we could take action next Thursday. And this ultimately leads into all the financing plans that we've talked about at Parkview Middle School. Any questions? Question. Okay. All right. uh designation of a newspaper and bank depository. So every year we have to uh identify the official uh newspaper and bank of the of the district. Uh we are looking to just continue to do what we've always done which is to recognize citizens uh bank and the local government investment pool as our official depositories. Uh the LGIP is is uh um the local government investment pools where a lot of uh villages, towns, um school

163districts can safely deposit their money and it's known for having good rates of return um and having uh liquidity. So when you need to withdraw your money, it's available for you. Citizens Bank has a deal with us where we've had this in place for decades where whatever rate of returns the LGIP pays, they they pay us onetenth of a percent more. So it's the same liquidity access. We have a great relationship with Citizens Bank, but we recognize two bank accounts for flexibility. Uh we do the vast majority with Citizens Bank. So we're looking to recognize our official bank depository as Citizens Bank and the LGIP and then our official newspaper as the Walker Freeman. All right, no questions. Then uh I'll I'm going to uh kind of just take a quick opportunity to go through

164just a couple slides here. Uh update on the budget. Some of this information was shared in January. This kind of plays off of the information we've heard tonight. So I'm just going to quickly go through, you know, why we're where we are and where we kind of started where we are now. So we had to make some large budget assumptions as we build out the 2526 budget. Again, we're trying to guess how many students will be having on the third Friday counts and how much funding will be received from the state biianial budget going forward. So, there's four major um pieces of uh assumptions we're going to make. 87% of our funding is going to uh be dependent on the third Friday full-time equivalent count of students that uh reside in our district and the

165amount of money we get. So, the revenue limit formula this year, we got $11,325 per student. And then there's per pupil um categorical aid, which is $742 per student. So, that roughly $12,000 per student represents 87% of all of our funding. We could certainly talk about, you know, how much do we raise through student fees or how much do we charge for tickets at the football game, but by and large, those two things are the life blood of the school district. So the assumptions we use is is really going to impact the budget. So first thing we have to assume how many students will we have on the third Friday count. Third Friday full-time equivalent is not butts and seats. It's not the count of students like physically in your classroom because that uh you

166know you're looking at students who open enroll in and that's a different funding amount. that 87% is really a count of students in our district boundaries that live in our district boundaries and attend our public schools. Okay. So, uh while we have more students in each of those school years than you see on the screen, uh that's that is our membership students uh that live in our district boundaries and attend public schools, we have to guess what we're going to have next year. We did five projections. So, the yellow uh excuse me, the orange is 4,343 students. That was our third Friday FTE this past fall or the current fall that from uh 2024 September. As we look at those blue um shorter boxes there, that's projecting through five statistical methods of what will we

167look like next year. And you can kind of see we have a range of values that each of those statistical methods projects. Ultimately, what we have then is we start with our 4343 students this fall. We subtract out this year's senior class, which is very large at 438 kids. We're projecting growth of how many moveins will come into our district. And and Caroline, as we've talked here over the last couple months, you know, home sales are kind of slow for whatever reason. They have been uh interest borrowing rates. What's that? Not with the Simon Loan team. That's Yeah, caveats. I love it. Way to plug it in there, Caroline. I like it. All right. So, we have we were projecting a growth of 69 students from current 5K through 11th grade. As they come back

168next year as first grade through 12th grade, we'll have about 69 students. Um, and that's, you know, a guess that's a a statistical guess as to where how we'll look. And then when we add in next year's cohort of 5K students, that puts us at 4215 students, which is a minus 128. We adopted a minus one. We just kind of round that number for for round purposes of minus 125. Um, as we heard earlier, um, if we took a third Friday count today, we're at minus 199. My hope here is that we have more moveins in April, May, June, July, and August where that minus 199 approaches what we have. I think that our assumption was a good one. Um, you know, and time will tell. You know, all we can do is take a

169best guess right now. Eric, did you have something? You good? Okay. So, yeah, what we assumed back in January is different from where we are today. It's different from where we will be uh September 20th. All right. So, that's the the the uh student full-time equivalent assumption. Now, we have to again guess what's the state bianial budget going to provide for us. Here you can see the history of how much money we got per student going back to the beginning of the revenue limit era. So back in 9394 we received $5,320 per student which was the lowest in the state at that time. Um all the way through 20089 uh we increased with inflation that was written in state statute in state law where whatever the CPI increases that's how much student um funding would

170increase. So as inflation went up our funding went up. Uh that was kind of cut off and changed with minimal increases throughout you know 2010 to recent times. And then we finally received a a bump here in 2324 and again in 2425. Current state law as it's written today would provide a $325 increase now for like the next 400 years. Whether that remains to be constitutionally upheld. Time will tell, but we're waiting on the state bianual budget to ultimately tell us that. Um, we adopted here a $325 increase, which I think is not bullish. It's reasonable. Um, and again, this is the year-by-year increase of the revenue limit. All right. Grew with inflation. Act 10 drew it back and minimal increases since. So, there's the assumptions we ultimately made. Minus125 full-time equivalent, plus 325 on

171the revenue limit. That $742 of per pupil categorical aid is not going to grow. And then special education reimbursements would slightly go up. With those assumptions, we have a uh a $1.4 million deficit going into next year. And the goal that we adopted here was to build a balanced budget for next school year. So, I know we've had some new schoolboard members who have joined us since we did some of this work. So, this is just an opportunity to kind of circle it back to where we started and what path we're on. Is the 1.4 is that based on 125 or 199? 125. Thank you. So, one thing I'll say about that, it's a great question then, is that in school funding, without going too far down the the economic explanation, I'll give you the

172cliffnotes version here. Um, whether at we're at minus 125 or minus 199, the funding will stay the same because we're in a pattern of declining enrollment. um is that we are we would receive a um something called an exemption where the state says muanago you're losing students so here's your funding for the year but this amount here is your last time you're getting this so between September 3rd Friday September 2025 and third Friday September 2026 make plans to lose this declining enrollment exemption so it's it's a it's a I think a good safety mechanism to say hey kind of um whether if we were at one a minus125 and that's actually what happened. We'd have a $900,000 funding source that would expire the following school year. So we'd kind of be in the same boat

173we're in right now um until enrollment flips. You know, more moveins occur. Simon loans, you know, really really takes off and uh we bring more students to the district. Dale keeps approving apartments. There's some houses going on too, right? There's some There's something for everyone perhaps. Okay. Any questions about that information? All right. So, then the last thing that I had then uh is just our health insurance renewal. So I will just the the short of it is is that we're looking we adopted two um in addition to the assumptions we had earlier that I just reviewed with you. We adopted two more assumptions. Um CPI is defined as 2.95%. So our our teachers union in particular can bargain up to that amount on base wages. Okay. So we adopted a 2.95% salary increase or

174compensation increase. We will look to actually settle that over the coming months um you know with board permission but we uh approved a salary compensation increase of 2.95 and a and a health insurance increase of 10%. Medical inflation is really its own animal. It grows as it grows and uh we're doing everything we can to really minimize that rate of growth. In years past we were facing 35% increases. um you know to think that we would find a health plan that simply would not grow that those costs would be fully contained I think is just not realistic. So we do our best to manage that. Um what we're doing right now is asking for a 10.7% rate increase. So you can see the full cost the family plan goes from 22,600 to 25,000. Uh the

175total increase is a $2,400 increase. You can see the single cost there on the right hand side. employees pay 12% of this amount. So any employee currently on the on the family plan um has this cost deducted from their paychecks in a tax-free manner through payroll deductions. Uh this money here then each year goes into a medical liability account where we pay our medical bills. The district pays the other 88% of that. Um so ultimately you can see that the the uh employer an employee increase there. Um the information that supports this comes from our partners uh Megan Zimmerman at Marsh McClennon Agency and I'm simply just going to point out one slide here. Um some of the mathematics that goes into this is you know actuarially speaking. So this is using our actual experiences

176and assumptions on medical inflation. You can see that there's they're projecting $6.7 million in expected claims costs 1.5 million in fixed costs for total cost of 8.2 two uh million dollars, which is a 10.7% funding increase from this year to next year. Um this column here is what we're looking at right now. Um it's this orange, we have multiple bids that took place here. Um what we have here then is you can kind of see a little bit more of a breakdown of what those fixed costs are. Um it's our stop-loss insurance at $800,000. Um it's working with our pharmacy benefits manager. Uh so on so forth. So that gives you an idea there that 10.7% rate increase. Um ultimately when you look at this chart here, it tells us this is again a best

177guess. 52% of all funding scenarios, this $ 8.2 million or this 10.7% increase will cover us in 52% of scenarios. In some scenarios, we might find ourselves overfunding ourselves. In some scenarios, we might not have enough. We're financially doing very good right now, but I it's important to kind of keep your eyes forward, acknowledge medical inflation, um, and to make sure that we have enough money set aside so that if we do have a terrible year, we're okay. We're currently on that path right now. I wish the increase was less, but I recommend that we go with this um, as we move forward into next year. We have it in the budget right now as we move forward. And uh as we move forward building a balanced budget, I I believe we'll be able to

178do exactly that even with this increase. It's my hope that in years to come when we do this next year, we're into the single digits and we're able to say the reserve is strong. We're uh we're positioned well and we again can get to those single digits. I don't want to overpromise and underdel, but that's I think the path that we're on. Any questions? to say I had a employee reach out about the clinic and just raved about the clinic. I guess she went there for her first time last week and she had nothing but great things to say. So, thank you. I want to defer all of that to Becky Halverson and her team at the clinic. That's that's them. We um yeah, we we picked a good one in her. I like to

179say she's a Maguano graduate who benefited from all the science education she had when she was a student here. So, um Awesome. Yeah. Job well done by everyone. It's paying off now. All right. Thank you. All right. Moving on to action items. Hires, retirements, and resignations. All right. We have not had any contracts uh offered so far for this year. Um well, for this month, for this year. Um but we do have two resignations. Michael Johnson who is a business teacher at the high school and John Leonard who is one of our rise interventionist teachers at the high school. Both of those effective at the end of this year. And then we have two notices of retirement. Becky Bretza who is a library technology specialist at Big Bend Elementary and Terry Loren who is an

180early childhood special education teacher at Clarendon Elementary. I make a motion that we approve the resignations and retirements. Second. We have a motion and a second. Are there any questions or comments? Hearing none. All those in favor say I. I. Those opposed say no. Motion carries. Up next is executive session according to Wisconsin statute 19.85. We will be discussing employee compensation. Uh confer with legal counsel on litigation and personnel matters. We'll take a fivem minute break. Thank you. Motion roll call. Roll call, please. Need a motion first. I motion to move into executive session. Second. Motion and second. Crosby, do roll call, please. Jason, yes. Jake, yes. Jim, yes. Dale, yes. Eric, yes. Carolyn. Yes. Crosby. Yes. Right. We'll take a five minute calling us back into session on Monday the 14th at 9:22 p.m.

181We are going to take action from what was discussed in close session. I'd like to make a motion that to recommend preliminary non-renewal of three certified teaching positions based on declining enrollment and budgetary constraints impacting staffing allocations for the 2025 2026 school year. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any questions or comments? All those in favor say I. I. Those opposed say no. Motion carries and take a roll uh take a motion to close the open session. Make a motion that we close open session. Second. Roll call, please. We had that second, please. Jason, yes. Jake, yes. Jim, yes. Dale, yes. Eric, yes. Heroin.