- Skaar. - Here. - Streiff Oji. - Here. - All right. First item on the agenda would be B1, Lakeaires Elementary update. Dr. Gillespie and Cary Krusemark. Welcome. - Thank you everyone,it's great to be here. Appreciate the opportunityto speak to the Board today and share just a little bitabout Lakeaires Elementary here in White Bear Lake. So just a little bit aboutLakeaires Elementary. Every year, sometimeswe come up with like, what's our kind of a theme, this year, we had a little activity,threw a little AI into Gemini. It was amazing. It worked so awesome the first time and it created what you see,that little graphic there, roots to grow, wings to fly. What a great way todescribe elementary school building that foundation. Then I should have stopped, tried to do some refinements. Thank goodness I savedwhat I had first created and it just went downhill from there. So clearly my AI skills andnavigating that needs some work, but it's a good growth area for myself. But it is kind of amazing what AI can do. And that was just one prompt. So kind of the world thatour kids are walking into. A little bit about Lakeaires,our mission statement, I won't read the whole thing for you, but I'd just like to point outa few key words that resonate with our school staff,our community, our parents that created this missionstatement several years ago, really is about compassion. Lakeaires is about empowering kids, giving 'em that confidence to be learners and also advocates for their selves. We really strive on thinkingfrom an equitable lens or approach to what we do at our school. Really thinking about kids as individuals. What can we do to meet their needs? What are the things we don't know that we need to try tothink about and get to know to make their student experiencethe best that it can be at our school? Really inclusivity is ahuge thing at Lakeaires, we have a lot of diversity,a lot of different backgrounds that our kidsand families come to us from. And just making sure we'rereally a welcoming community. And also of course ourjob is to teach kids, support kids with not only academics but social emotional learning and making sure we follow those guaranteed and viable approaches to instruction and giving our kids what theydeserve so that they are able to be not only lifelong learners but aligned with some of ourkeywords that I mentioned with our mission statement. Just a little overview of just kind of thebreakdown of Lakeaires. We're a little smaller this year. We had a big fifth gradethat went on to sixth grade, little smaller kindergarten this year. So we're about 355 give or take. Every day is a little different. We get new enrollments,kids leaving every so often, about 355, with our pre-K, we do have one pre-Kprogram in our school, so we're right around that 372. Pretty diverse from asocioeconomic perspective at about 49% ML I believe. Sarah Spear from Vadnaisis not here to correct me, but we are the secondlargest ML school I think in White Bear for elementaries with 14% of our students learningEnglish as a second language. Special education is at 21. I just like to point out that that is a little higherthan the district average, but that is also because weprovide a quite a handful of kids that come to our school that are non-publicschool students, Magnusson and other private entitiesthat those students, you know, that need special educationservices, they come to our site and receive those supports inspeech, language, academics, whatever their IEP or needs are. So sometimes my front officeis kind of a revolving door with lots of friendsin and out, in and out. They have the routine down,they come in, they say hi to Ms. Summers and away they go. So again, kind of thatinclusive welcoming environment. And then just a littlebit about, you know, what makes up our diversity. You know, we have 60% ofour students are white and we have a lot ofdiversity with Hispanic, Asian, Black students,Native Island, Pacific. So a good variety of students in ourcommunity, really reminds us like what Lakeaires is all about. And that's why goingback to that inclusivity and really empoweringour students to see them as who they are and embrace that and what are their strengthsthat they bring to our school. Some accomplishments andinitiatives here at Lakeaires. One thing, if you remember and were here last year whenI shared we are an AVID site. We are an AVID, elementary, Advancement Via Individual Determination. We started that in 2019. We are also a BARR elementary site, which is Building Assets Reducing Risk, just helps us with a framework of how we are supportingstudents both academically and social emotionally. A little more about AVID, this is kind of my quick little overview. If a parent asks me anddoesn't have a lot of time or maybe they don't wantto hear the full in depth because I can talk forever about AVID, but it really is like best practices. Good teachers at any school,White Bear Lake, anywhere, are doing good instructionalstrategies for their students. AVID is just that with alot more intentionality. We're really aligninginstructional strategies that are in those we callWICOR, W-I-C-O-R areas. And there are lots of strategiesin each of those areas, but we really kind of think about like what are the anchor ones? What are the ones that we want to see our kindergartners starting to learn? And they've reallyexpanded it by fifth grade. So there's consistency stuff that they see and they're exposed to, but it also, they canexpand on those skills. And of course that is stuff that they can take right intomiddle school and high school. Everything focus note taking. I know I could have usedthat in college a lot, how to take notes 'causeI didn't know how. And one of the things withnote taking is teaching kids how to take notesincluding kindergartners. And then BARR, the multi-tieredsystems of support. Again, it's a process that helpsreally align the work we do with our students and theneeds of our students. Helps our teachers kindof focus in on kids. But one thing about BARR and you maybe you've heardthis from other schools that do BARR, it'sreally, it focuses us on that strengths-based approach. I always like to say teachers are fixers, principals are fixers. We see kids, we want to helpthem learn, grow, expand, what are they good at? What can we make them better at? But sometimes we forgetthat they already come to us with lots of great things and this just helps us havethat intentionality of like what are the strengths? Start with that. And not that our teachersdon't do that, it's just, but like we get caught up in the, but we need to help our studentsand that's just outta love. So BARR is one of those great things that gives us a good framework. Student achievement. Just a few highlights, there's lots of data that we're digging through because we've hit that midyear, but just a few things to share. We have a midyear goalfor our kindergarten and first graders this year to be at 60.5% in low risk on the earlyreading composite score. And we had a 12% increasefrom the fall baseline and our spring goal is67%, we're already at 66. So the kindergarten and firstgrade teachers are really, they're locked in as theytold me the other day. They're like, we're locked in, look great. And you know, growth andnumbers are wonderful to share but sometimes also anotherpiece of data is like, well how are some ofthose kids that are some of our most at risk students doing? Are we moving them, arethey making changes? So as it says on the bottomthere, 55% of our kids that were high risk in the fall score are now some risk. So that is a huge number of kids that were that most risk academically in K-1 are now in thatkind of that middle bubble, that means they're growing. So kudos to that K-1 team. They were really, likethey said, locked in, grade 2-5, a little bitbroader group of grade levels. Again some things that theyare really focused in on and proud of this year with their goal as a grade level 2-5 band in our fluency, 35% of the kids that werein high risk in the fall have shifted to some risk. Again, that's a bigchunk of kids moving out of the most needy areas and 23% of our kids inthe some risk will be kind of those bubble kids we like to say are now in low risk. So again, we're making goodprogress but we're not done yet 'cause we wanna keep moving more and more kids up and growing. As I said, you know we havea good number of students that are ML, multilingual students. And again, when we think about those kids, they have another piecethat they're working through learning English. And this is somethingour team is very proud of at Lakeaires is that 50% of those students that scored in the highrisk winter, we are at 28%. So we had 22% growth ofjust those ML students. So again, on the righttrack, making good growth. Some of our focus areas this year, two key areas we're workingon this year really were to align into our new evaluation tool called the 5D and the five dimensions of learning. But our building has reallyfocused in on everyone is really working on learning targets that are connected to standards so students really know whatit is that they're supposed to be learning through I canstatements or learning targets and then really usingformative assessments. Teachers do a lot of things to see how their kids are learning, did they get that concept or not? But then using it, what are we doing to intentionally use formative assessments to inform instruction, future lessons, reteaching and so forth? But really that alsokind of aligns with some of our data driven dialogue,really thinking about what do we know about ourkids, what can they do? What do we need to focusin on for growth areas? And then with ourinstructional coaches, we are engaged in coaching cycles,which is a really powerful tool where our teams can collaborate with our instructionalcoach in a student focused collaborative conversation and really deciding whatdo they want to tackle. Is it a math, is it a literacy strategy, is it a lesson that they're working on? But that ongoing dialoguein the coaching cycle that really focuses it on the students and the student experience. And how does the teacherhelp that student get to where they want their students to be? Like any school, we're alwaysthinking and reflecting and where do we wanna go? What do we need to refine,adjust in real time 'cause that's what we do. One of the things we'verealized is there's a lot of best practices, instructionalstrategies that align with a lot of the work we do. And one of the thingsthat we want to continue and we realize is timein real estate, right? Time is always valuable andwe never have enough of it. So prioritizing some morework during the remainder of this year to really bringmore professional learning around our AVID strategies. Making sure new teachersthat are in our building are getting those foundations and helping our more veteranteachers get reconnected or go back and be like, ohyeah, I used to do that. Why don't I do that anymore? It's like, well we get busy and we forget. But again, aligning things toinstructional best practice and continuing that ongoinglearning as a staff. And so the rest of this yearwe're planning on three more PD sessions around AVIDlearning strategies and then our site team made up of a few differentgrade level team members and staff will think about, you know, what do we wanna do this summer? Get feedback from our staff and how do we want to continuethe learning into next year with our professionallearning, not only with AVID but other areas that might come to light. Student experience. We have a goal this year to really make sure we'redoing everything we can with attendance. One thing that I'm veryproud of at Lakeaires is our goal is to have 85% of our kids attend 90% of the school days. We're currently at 94% ofour kids are attending 90% of the school days. Now, knock on wood, the flu bug and all things can derail my data. But that is a greatstart to the school year. A lot of it goes down to some action steps in our building improvement plan, which is good teacher communication. Parents are connected there. If there's something that we need to make sure they know about attendance or just checking in, Heywe haven't seen Johnny for three days, like what's going on? You know, it's not a gotcha but it's more of a we care about your kid, is there something goingon or are they just sick? Did you forget to call? Just making sure wehave good communication and making sure parentsunderstand the guidelines 'cause sometimes they don'trealize that, oh I do have to call in and communicatethat my student's out. And then oftentimes those phone calls lead to our community connect team,which is made up of myself, our social worker. And we discovered that there's a barrier and we're able to atleast try to navigate that or learn more or help the family. More times than not we arepretty successful in figuring out something to support the family,whether it's homelessness or transportation needs or maybe there's just someother dynamics that we can help with outside resources, pointthem in the right direction. So I went fast, I knowtime is precious tonight, but any questions, things that I piqued your curiosity or any comments? - Do we have any questions? Ms. Beloyed. - For AVID, how many students do youhave participating overall? - In AVID, all students K-5. - Every single one? - So it's, yeah, so middleschool's a little different where it's more of an elective but AVID in elementary isreally like a framework of how we design instruction. So teachers are teachingusing those best practices and all students are experiencing the strategiesbased on teacher instruction. Some schools I will saythat are not in White Bear, but others might be onlya third through fifth or a fourth and fifth. It just depends on howthey're designing it. And it just sort of how it came to be. We had the opportunity tohave all staff get trained in in 2019. - All staff has been trained in AVID? - In 2019. I want to have new staffcoming in that's, you know, making sure we get themonboarded and trained in. But you know, but like it'snever a one and done right? We always have to keeplearning and growing and collaborating. - For the instructional coaches, how is their time structured? Like how many instructionalcoaches do you have visiting your building? Like how many times per weekare they in the building? - Yeah, so I have oneinstructional coach that I share with another building, butright now we do that with basically like building student size. So I have my instructionalcoach 60% of the time and another building has her 40%. And we just work out aschedule that works well for both myself and the other school but obviously having consistency. So usually we're like three weeks on, then they do a sessionand then we have her back. But it's nice being, WillowLane is our partner school, so there's always things that are coming up andteachers wanna collaborate. So the principals,Willow Lane, Jen Sexauer and I would just like, we're flexible, like what can we do tohelp each other out? - Do they do any type of evaluations? Maybe not like official evaluations for different teachers or different grades on maybe where there's some gaps in things or what they're doingright that we could pass on to another building or another classroom? - So you know, the instructional coaches, we have to do peer reviewand that's part of statute with observations, but that's something theinstructional coach does. They'll partner with the principal and like who are the teachersthat are on that rotation of doing the peer review andthen they do an observation, they're having feedbacksessions with that teacher around growth and opportunities. But that's between them and that colleague and I know a lot of times fromconversations they're always talking about, oh you know,you are asking me about how you can increasesomething or this strategy or you wanna learn more, maybe you want to go watch this teacher. I know there's lots of conversations that they have aboutgrowth and opportunity or they might just say,let me get back to you, I'm gonna learn more about that and maybe we can partneragain in the future on that particular question or strategy that you are curious about. - Well I'm excited to see the percentage of growth you're seeing. So thank you for that. - So am I. - Thank you.- Okay, Ms. Ellison. - All right, couplequestions, Mr. Krusemark. First how many, do you knowhow many of the elementaries in the district have AVID at this level? - One.- So just Lakeaires. Okay. And maybe this is a question for, for Dr K, is that somethingthat we're considering expanding or are we keepingit at Lakeaires only? Or Ms. Babish. - Hi, I can speak to that. So really it's about theinstructional leadership I think of the principal. Really seeing a need for an instructional frameworkthat's specific to college and career readiness and things like that. So it really needs tobe a fit for that school and the needs of that school. So we have entertained and I have talked with someother elementary principals, but as of right now, it's just Lakeaires and then we have the AVID elective at the middle school and the high schools. - And then I have thesame question about BARR 'cause I know that we'vereally been expanding BARR in the last couple of years. Are there other elementariesthat have BARR as well? - So my colleague Sarah Spearat Vadnais is a BARR school, Willow Lane, Jen Sexauer,myself for the elementary and then I believe both middle schools. - And the high school. - And then, yeah, andthen the high school. - So we were luckyenough to receive grants so that we could expandit at those elementaries. We're very active in looking at our whole student support framework, the multi-tiered systems of support. And BARR is well aware that we'd be interested in expanding it to other elementarieswith that grant support. And we also try to managehow many initiatives and how many things our,you know, principals and staff are receiving. So we had Cary andSarah, it was like right before we started LETRS thatthat grant came for them. So continuing to workwith the principals again, but it is my desire with them to have BARR at all of our schools. It'll just take a littlewhile for us to have that. - Yeah, I mean it's been really successful and I remember when we first went to elementary schools,that was a really big deal. So thank you. The other question I have, andagain this is Mr. Krusemark, but also Mr. Weld, Ms. Johnson, when you were talking aboutspecial education students coming in from outsideschools, from charter or private schools, how was that funded? I'll just look right over here. - We capture ADM,adjusted daily membership, for those students as well. So their attendancecounts towards funding. - Okay, okay. So it's not coming necessarilyfrom the charter school, it's coming from? - No, it's state aid.- Okay, good. I just wanted, yeah, Ijust wanted to make sure 'cause that's something thatI wasn't as familiar with. So wonderful. Thank you. - Ms. Streoff-Oji. - Yes, a couple of things. Thank you for your presentation and your work, yourgrowth around literacy. If I were to ask yourteachers, it's exciting, so very exciting to see. If I were to ask your teacherswhat is the number one thing that changes that they have made or strategies that they'reusing, what would they say? - I think one of thethings that they will say is LETRS, the LETRS training and the initiative wetook in prioritizing that is really had educators think differently about their practice. And of course connecting it to the science of reading and the research. And just, again, it'sfounded in best practice and sometimes it's going back to, well what does our LETRS training do? What taught us, you know,when we're struggling with, you know, instructional decisions or with how to approachinstruction for students that might still be struggling. And then probably anotherthing they would say is, you know, part of theprincipal's job is to, you know, keep using the same importantphrase but guaranteed and viable instructions. Like, are we doing whatwe're supposed to do? Are we doing the curriculum with fidelity and my kindergarten team forexample, they will just say, well we don't do anything special, we just teach the curriculum. Well I know there's more to it than that 'cause they are just specialthemselves and do great work. But that's probably thefoundation is like starting there and making sure you do that with fidelity and with high integrityand quality instruction. And then the rest, you know,is just makes it even better. So not drifting away fromwhat has been designed by many people in our district,including many educators who are part of that instructional team that has helped design and make decisions around curriculum. - Thank you. AVID, I don't know enough about it, but is it something thatis aligned with standards? - It's really, for elementary,it's really founded in instructional practices,best practices strategies. So, you know, if I was to pick, you know, like the reading strand or the reading area forWICOR, we like to say, how do you make it rigorous? You know, there's, oh now I'm drawing a complete blank on the strategy. Jen, you probably knowwhat strategy I'm talking about reading.- Marking the text. Focused note taking orcritical reading strategies. There you go. I had it, it disappeared. So, but yes. You know, so really again, what are some of those key strategiesthat are high impact to help students grasp those concepts? - So not necessarily the standards, but how to help them meet those standards. And the last thing, have you seen any, you were talking aboutyour attendance rates. Have you noticed anychange in the last month in your attendance rates in relation to the activity around ICE in the region? - A little bit. It's been very, like, Ithought we would have like, you know, going into it, Ithought I would see, you know, a certain number of kidsjust not coming to school. But it's been very day to day. We'll have families giveus a heads up that yeah, we're probably gonna be out for a few days and then they show up the next day. And I think it's just forevery family it's different and every family's comfort level of what they're dealing with. And you know, I can't imaginewhat they're working through. I just know that if they'recoming into our doors, you know, we're ready for 'em. Keep school as consistentand safe as possible and you know, with all thethings that are going on outside for those little friends, likethe best thing we can do at our school is just, youknow, make it nice, easy, calm, consistent 'cause then they can predictwhat the day will bring and that brings safetyand security as a student. So it hasn't been as significant as some of my other colleagues, even though we do have aquite a diverse population. And again, every day is different. You never know. - Thank you.- But I'm glad they're there. Most of them are therealmost every day, so. - Great.- Okay, Mr. Skaar. - You go ahead.- Go ahead. - I was just gonna thankyou for the presentation and also you probably regret having talking about AVID and BARR because now I got another question. So maybe note to self, don't include it. So for AVID, would you use that for where you would have moreinexperienced teachers or what would be the drivingforce for using that? - So with AVID, as I said, it's good teachers. Any school, White BearLake, somebody across, not too far away that wedon't like to talk about. You know, those competitingschools around here. Any school, we know goodteachers do good practices in all of them. And you could go into any of those schools and if you were aware of what strategies kind of fall into the AVID strategies, you would see ithappening in many schools, they just don't call it AVID perhaps, but because we have identified, well, AVID has identified reallystrong core strategies and we know there's many, many more. These are some of thehigh impact strategies. And we want kids to reallylearn these skills or be exposed and engage in these strategieswhen they're doing learning. Philosophical chairs isa great way to debate and not just debate because I like, ourkindergartners get into using philosophical chairs, for example. We teach them how to read atext, learn something about it. Literally they will saydinosaurs or unicorns, but they have to then I thinkdinosaurs are better because, and they have to go backto like why they think the reasoning is behind that and it's going back to theevidence that they read. But you know, that's a kindergartener. But as we, you know,get that with older kids with more complex texts, they can really, they're using a lot of analysis and synthesis of information to engage in pretty highlevel debate conversations. And so that's just anexample of like a strategy that would be good in any arena. - I'm just curious, Imean, do you benchmark that with other schools that maynot have that same framework? You know, you seem veryconfident that it's working, so that makes, I thinkthat makes everybody in the room feel good. But how do you know? - Well, I think some of itgoes to the data of like, how are we doing academic? I know I don't have AVID datafrom the national perspective, but there's a lot of data that we could referenceand share that later. But one of the things likeyou said, like how do you know or what that decision like,it creates a foundation for all teachers in my building. And it depends on what'sthe makeup of your building. You have a lot of youngteachers, old teachers, old teachers, veteran teachers. Oh, that was recorded. - We know what you meant,we know what you meant. We're not offended. - So, but you know, the thepoint I guess is just, you know, it creates high impact strategies,which we're just doing it with more intentionality. Good teachers will do alot of the same things, but maybe they're not as intentional. So if we have the same core three or four strategies in the writing area in kindergarten, wellit's gonna look different in kindergarten, but thenfirst grade, second grade. And we just keep building onto that, making it more rigorous. And with all thosestrategies, it allows our kids to really have a goodfoundation of being successful as they continue throughthe school grades. - All right, thank you. And the other thingjust on the attendance, that's great and youknow, I think the parents and the guardians ofthose kids also deserve a shout out as well. Thank you. - Yeah, no, we appreciate that too 'cause when they get 'em to school and that's half the battle,then we can do our job. - Right. Thank you. - All right.- Ms. Daniels? - Yeah, just hi. Just wanted to, I'm glad you mentioned special education and realizing that you'rea little bit higher than the district average. So you get the Communityof Grace kids that our district is obligatedto evaluate, write IEPs and provide services for all the private schoolswithin our school boundaries. So there used to be five orsix, I don't know what we're up to now or if we've lost a couple. I know St. Pius I think went to Liberty Classic and we have St. Mary's and we have a Montessori. And so it's, I just wantthe public to realize that our public schools provide all that for our private school kids and we develop good relationships with those principals, with families. So we know that we want all of our kids in our community successful. So it's great that yousaid it's kinda like a revolving door, like kids are coming in and they're coming to their services at your building and welcoming them in just as you would any studentcoming from the community. So I think that's great. And I know you have quite a,I think you have a cluster of level two program theretoo in your building. You're providing lots of good special education services too. So thanks for that. - Thank you.- All right. I just want to close by saying thank you foreverything you're doing. You know, one of the thingsthat caught me was when you talked about your teachingyour students to take notes. And I thought that's great because having studentstake notes is one way of transferring knowledgefrom your working memory to your short term. And so that's helpingthem remember it then because we get so muchinformation, it's easy to, your brain is gonna filter it out, but by taking those notes, it lets your brain know it's important. So keep that up. That's great, and keep up your attendance. That looks awesome. So thank you for everything you do. Sure. - Just because you broughtup charter schools. So I was gonna say public charter schools, we do not provide specialed services for it 'cause public charter schoolsare like their own district, so they have to provide those. So it's the private schools. - Point of clarification.- All right. - Thank you for your presentation. - Thank you.- Thank you. - Okay, we're gonna move on to discussion item, excuseme, B2 Lincoln Elementary, Dr. Gillespie and Mr. Morris. - Hello, my name's Brian Morris. I'm the principal at Lincoln Elementary and I want to thank Mr.Arcand, Dr. Kazmierczak and the Board for having me here today. So I'm just going to, similar to what Mr. Cary Krusemark did, just share some things about Lincoln and about the things,the good work that we do. One piece about Lincoln is that, you know, we think about Lincoln isour goal is to create a safe and respectful learning environment where our students canattain their hopes and dreams and explaining to get intomore detail about that. But just this evening, I just wanna give you abrief overview of Lincoln, sort of who we are andour goals and initiatives for this year. Snapshot of our currentacademic progress in reading and math and sort of how we respond to student data in reading and math, our work on school climate and culture. So that's our house system that we have is a large part of that. And how we're building student and staff connections within the school. And then our ongoing work, right? This is, we're getting late into January. We've got a lot of workthat has been done. A lot of work still to doover the course of the year. So just to sort of share some of those efforts with you as well. So I come into this thinking,oh, the School Board, they know where Lincoln Elementary is, but just to give the publicas a whole that information. We are in a very vibrantneighborhood school, very close to downtown. We have our musical going on right now. Our rehearsals just began at the Central Middle School auditorium. We are in walking distance. I walk the patrols overat the end of the day, those that are in the musical. So we're in walking distance to Central. When the weather's nice, we're also walking distance to downtown and we take advantage of that. Lincoln is known for itsfocus on student achievement, welcoming climate, activeparent involvement, and just our passion topartner with families and guardians, just toprepare the whole child to reach their hopes and dreams. And also just as Mr. Krusemark did, we had a group ofteachers, community members and parents come together twice over the past 10 yearsto lay out a mission statement. Again, the pieces that I, you know, I am not a principal who has every part of the mission statement andevery action move memorized, but just that safe andrespectful learning experience and achieving hopes and dreams,like those are the words that I feel sort of embodythe work that we do. Those are the words that, you know, I think charge get families and teachers charge to serveour students the best they can. So who are we? Right now, we have about 451 students. That's 16 K-5 classrooms. So that's three classrooms per grade, except we have a small incoming kindergarten class this year. We have just two classes, small outgoing fifth grade class, two classes. We also host the Explorations program and we have three classrooms there. And those are multi-age gradesthree through five classroom for our sort of a magnet for the district for our advanced learners. Like most of our or allof our elementary schools, we offer PE, music and art classes. We also have a specialservice cluster classrooms within our school as well as partner and have onsite servicesfrom a licensed therapist through North Homes andadditional student support and Reading Corps and Math Corps. Our building goals and initiatives just, we're gonna focus on our academic and student experience goals. Our academic goals for theyear is at more than 80% as a building, but thenin some of our grades where our students arestarting at a higher percentage rate in thefall, we have the goal of 85% or higher. We'll score low risk in reading and math, and that's as measured byour FastBridge assessments, our screening tools that weuse fall, winter and spring. We have a goal of closinggaps between student groups and academic achievement, reducing that by at least five percentagepoints this year, as well as gaps in attendance and our student experience goal. So that is how our studentsfeel about the school, whether or not our studentsare coming to school. We were looking at at least 90% of students reporting positively to a measure of school belonging. And at least 90% of our studentsin attendance 90% of days. So how are we moving towards those? If we look at academicprogress, this is kindergarten and first grade, I know you've seen some of these graphs before. We're looking for as many kids as possible in that green low risk range. So in reading this year in kindergarten, we started off the year with close to 72% of our kids in low risk. And our kindergarten team hasgotten our 86% of our kids that sort of our halftime check-in in the winter to get into that low risk. In first grade, we startedoff the year a little bit below 72%, we're stillin that 71 to 72% range. So our kids, our percentage of kids at low risk hasstayed about the same from fall to winter. And again, we're looking for that increase in kids in low risk. And just a reminder, you know, and I think it's important justlooking at these two slides, when the percentage of kidsin low risk stays the same, those kids, we still have kids growing. They're just growing at thesame rate of the national norm. When we have an increased number of kids in the low riskbucket, we are achieving accelerated growth comparedto the national norm. So I don't want to just like right now, our reading hadn't increasedlow risk from fall to winter. Those kids are still growing. They're just showing growthat the national average. When we look at math at ourprimary years, we see increased percentage within low risk in both kindergarten and first grade. We started kindergartenwith close to just below 80% of our kids at low risk. And by now, the wintercheck-in, kindergarten team has gotten us to 95% of our kids in the early math measureare in the low risk. In first grade, they've takenclose to 83% of the kids at low risk and moved that to 87. So both of those areas showing that accelerated risk higherthan the national norm. Looking at our upper grades,they have another band level, the blue band is quote advanced. So we really focus onthe green and the blue. And really what you wanna seeacross the board is, again, I talked about with the primary age, the green expanding here, Ithink it's a little easier to look at, is the red andthe yellow shrinking, right? Are the percentage ofkids in the high risk and the medium risk is that decreasing? And you'll see at a lot of our grade levels in reading, it is. In second grade, we're seeing that, or you know what, I've got my next slide just gives you a bar. It makes it a littleeasier for comparison. That bar is the, if we can get a red and yellow down belowthat bar, then we have 80% or more of our kids at low risk. So you can see second gradehas a little bit further to go, but they're moving in that direction. Third grade in readinghas increased the kids in the low risk andadvanced, getting down to that 80%, fourth gradestayed about the same, right around 80%, in fifth grade, we've got our kids that are in low risk and advanced has decreased a little bit. So there's, you know, we've got, I feel for the most part, our kids are heading in the right direction. What do our teachers dowhen they see, oh, we don't, you know, our winter check-indoesn't show us moving towards that 80% goal, that 85% goal. Our kids are still growing, but we've lost a little bit of ground in the percentage of kids. And that's really where, youknow, I think when I spoke at the work study meeting last year, we had a really heavy focuson our collaborative teams and building that collaborative team time. That's where a lot ofthis work takes place. This week, we're having ourdata, team data meetings that are related to these winter check-ins where we look at who areour kids, our specific kids that are not where we want them to be. What are we gonna do bothin our core learning time, in reading and math to pushthem in the right direction? What are we gonna do in ourWIN time, our 30 minutes of what I need time where teacherstake into smaller groups and really focus on some of those skills that might be holding them back. So we're at that part of thecycle right now with that goal of having all of our kids atthat low risk for being behind by the end of the school year. Just looking at mathreal quick, you'll see that our second grade,again, moving our kids accelerated growth comparedto the national norms. Third grade, the same,fourth grade, the same, fifth grade, about thesame as the national norms. All of them getting to that 80% line or getting awfully close andmoving in the right direction. Just next, transitioning from sort of that academic progress in reading and math to sort of what we'redoing to come through on some of the parts,sort of the kids' feeling of belonging, providing that safe and respectful environment,making Lincoln a place where families and kidsfeel like their hopes and dreams can be accomplished. Actually, I see I can'tclick through slides and follow my own notes at the same time, but I did wanna share, we had our kindergarten open houses two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And at Lincoln and ata lot of other schools, we asked families and some kids, what are your hopes and dreams for your kidsas they enter our system? And I brought a few ofthem with me tonight that I just wanted to share. Some of the parents and likesome of the parents shared, you know, to make new friends,become a good learner, listener and friend,to be happy and healthy and feel accepted by peers, to be a kind and a respectful man and to help improve the livesof everyone he interacts with, another parent, other parents shared happiness, well-rounded, kind,independent and confident. And then the last one, I'm pretty sure this is a student hope and dream. I want to go bowling and Iwant to go to kindergarten. So if that we can take care of, give the kid a 20 anddrop 'em off at Flaherty's and Iron Hills, but we are gonna getready for kindergarten. So just that idea of, you know, we get kids in the door, we work hard to help them learn reading,math, writing, science, social studies to be goodfriends, members of a community, members of a community thatgive back to the community. And that's not just in thereading and math, right? That's building a communitywithin our school, that's making our school avaluable part of the community. And one way, so a way thatwe are building community at Lincoln is through our House system. And that's really the core part of those sort of community building,nurturing the whole child pieces of our mission plan, the House system. You can switch your mind toHarry Potter a little bit. The House system, ourstudents are all organized into five different housesand within those houses, we have house families, right? I'm part of House Quantum. Quantum is the House of Respect. We also have Fitus, Unitatus,Forditudo and Compassio. Each of those are built onsort of one of these core attributes that we wantto build in our students. And really a lot of the workhappens in our house families. So within Quantum for instance, the kids are in familiesof 25 students per family and two adults that area part of that family. That family are students K-5, they are students from Explorations, from Neighborhood Lincoln. And the staff are not justteachers, they're teachers, they're principal, they'reother professional staff. They are custodians, they are clerical, they are nutrition services. And we really work hard to, you know, I'll be with my housefamily for 15, 20 minutes and then I'll hustle down. And so that either the nurse or my admin assistant, Joel,can get up to their houses or nutrition services can get up and at least support theirhouse family for a while. But it's building those relationships. The idea is that our kidswill have another adult in the building that is their adult. It's not just their classroom teacher. It's not just their PE,music and art teacher. It is me, it is a fifth grade teacher that is another adult that is, is a go-to person for a kindergartner. And that kindergartner isgonna be in that house family and with those adultsthroughout their six years. Again, building that relationship. They're also buildingrelationships vertically. So you'll see kindergartnersworking with fifth graders as they make placements for Serenity. We have, we'll be making,doing service project for Children's Hospitalcoming up in our next House family time. So that collaborating, learning together, building those relationships so that we really feel like a family. Again, like I said, we do it through family days throughout the year. We have four family days, wehave four House assemblies. Back to feeling a littlebit like Harry Potter again. We do collect House points. A student earns a Housepoint if they are caught by an adult going wayabove the line in some of our core values ofresponsibility, respect, and readiness. Kids earn those House pointsat the end of the year. One of the Houses wins,last year, Team Quantum, not that I have favorites, but I am a member of House Quantum. House Quantum won the House trophy. This year, Compasio is really strong. And even there liketeaching how to be positive yet competitive, yetsupportive between the houses. That takes effort. Like we have had to do some work to teach kids that like thisHouse point thing is fun, but we're not gonna go overboard with it and we are gonna cheer and support everyone in their successes. This House system ismajority teacher driven. It came from our teachers,the House committee is who steers it. I am sort of like the focus leader, the keeping us on trackleader to the good work that the House committee does. The House committee alsocollaborates with the PTA and the PTA provides a lot of the, both the functional support and some of the monetary support for things like our T-shirts. The fact that we have houseflags hanging in the building. The PTA is very collaborativeand supportive in that. So that just gives youan idea about one of the things that we aredoing to build community, a community that kidswant to be a part of, a community that we see kids hopefully taking beyondLincoln Elementary. Some of our ongoing work,like I said, it's only January and we want to keep thegrowth going academically and in social emotionaland building relationships. Coming up, professionaldevelopment is looking at best practices for supportingmultilingual learners and all kids and how that ties into this LETRS learning that we did over the, most of our teachersdid it three years ago, but just the foundation of best practices in teaching reading. We're working to build ourinstructional capacity in math. We have a series of shortprofessional development around the eight most effectivepractices in teaching math. We're doing that both tobuild our current skills as well as prepare forchange in our math curriculum that's coming next year. And a change in the mathstandards at the state level, we're working to support student agency. This really came out of one of the areas in our 5D plusinstructional framework. One of them is building student agency. We have our teachers atthe fourth grade level really went all in on that and are looking how to build,how to help our kids become independent learners. How to help them beconfident in asking questions and some of the success in work. You know, that type of stuff, sort of bubbles around the building. And we're hoping to do someprofessional development for the entire staff along those lines as well as to continue to refine our collaborative practices. We have two to threecollaborative inquiry time by a grade level team on Thursdays over thecourse of every month. How do we structure those? What are the best practicesat looking at student data? Identifying a need,adjusting our instruction or reteaching, coming back,seeing did we get the job done? Did we move our kids the way we needed to? That's what that has looked like in our professional developmentover the course of this year And moving forward. And questions, before you have questions,our musical Willy Wonka, we're in full swing. That happens at the end of February. Look for it at, like I said, Central Auditorium, end of February. - Thank you for that presentation. Do we have any questions? Ms. Streiff-Oji? - Thank you. Thank you for your work thatyou're doing with your students and I have a question about the, and I don't know if you knowthe answer to this or not or how this has played out over the years, but when I see 86% of your kindergarten students went from 72 about to 86% low risk, is that a predictable indicator ofhow they'll do in first grade? Have you seen a patternof that kindergarten data? - I would say yes and no. Right? I think because of thatwe start off first grade with strong, kids comingin with strong skills. You always see some sort of summer, I call it backslide, right? But we do see kids comein with strong skills. You also see patterns between grade levels that you have a hard time explaining. Like just, you know, I would say this type of increase at thekindergarten level we've seen for at least three years nowreally as they really went whole hog into LETRS and yet still over the summer going from spring to fall, we see it recede a bit. And whereas you would expect it to stay exactly the same, right? Because things staying exactly the same. Kids are still growing but they're growing the sameas the rest of the nation for some reason from spring to fall, we do drop back a little bitcompared to that national norm. And that's hard to explain. And I can say that that'sa three year pattern that I've observed and I don't have real strong explanations for it but so yeah, so many things go into our student's success but yeah,we look for those patterns and look for how do we affect them and move them in the right direction. - I know it's much more complex. - It's really complex. - Than it seems like it should be in having taughtkindergarten, first grade. I understand that. I have one last questionabout your House system and how you have it set up. Is it multi-age or single grade? - It's multi-age, so it's the whole school and when you're in afamily you've got just as many kindergartners asyou've got fifth graders there. And that's really, it'sa nice to see opportunity for the older kids tolead, for the younger kids to be paired up and learn from and follow the example of the older kids. That's one of the things that I think in immediate practice that feels the best 'cause you see that andyou're like, oh, yeah. That's how it's supposed to work. - Do you try to keepthem in the same house? - They stay in the same house. - All the way through, same teacher. - And you know who theadult is might change if a teacher moves, retires or moves to a differentbuilding or something like that. But we work hard to keep it consistent and then you don't have toget a new t-shirt every year. Saves money.- Kids grow. - Kids grow. That's true. We have said that we buyt-shirts in kindergarten and we buy t-shirts in third grade and that was a little ambitious and so, I dunno, some kids aresqueezing into some t-shirts and we gotta do somethingabout that right now. It's like when they stillwear their be a bear and they're in second grade, it's like, you know, it's time to retire. - Thank you. - Mr. Skaar. - Thank you for thepresentation and being here. I just have a question onenrollment is where is enrollment? Is enrollment going up,flatlining, declining? - I would say this yearwith a small second, or I'm sorry, smallincoming kindergarten class. We have 45 kindergartners right now. That is surprisingly small. We always start the, you know, we always assume we're gonna have 60 since this is my fourth year at Lincoln and since I've been here,this is the first time we've, you know, usually we're atthe 57 to 62 range, right? And this was the first time we're 45 and I'm having a, I'm really, I don't have a good explanation for it. So I'm really hoping thatwe bounce back this year. We've been working extra hard. We all made sure thatwe had this kindergarten open house early. I know that our communicationsdepartment district wide is really working on it. We are following up with the families that are within our census numbers that we haven't heard from yet. So I don't know if thisyear's lower number for my school's incoming kindergarten 'cause it's not thesame all of our schools. I think we had a little bit smaller of a kindergarten classthis year district wide, but we did have schools who, whose kindergarten increased this year. So yeah, I was surprised by it. Some of the otherprincipals are like, yeah, that happens every once in a while. Don't worry about it. But I am worried about it, but you know, I want itmoving back in that direction. I want three kindergarten sections. I want 60 kids. - Actually, I think you'reright to worry about it and I think it would begood to get an explanation and I think you're gonna needhelp from the district staff to find that explanation,especially with the parents that have chosen competitive schools and not White Bear Lake. We should find out why and figure out why and see if we can, youknow, bring 'em back. - Yeah. Well, and it's, yes. And I think about like,just thinking about knowing what parents want for their kids. Like what, you know, like we asked the question atour kindergarten open house, what are your kids' hopes and dreams and both parents to know that we care what those are and forus to know what those are so that can guide our work. Right? And yeah, I mean, we feel that when we havekids in our classrooms, we put our whole heartinto it and we work hard and do well by our kids, by our families and we need them here. - Thank you.- Thanks. - I have a quick question for you then. - Yes.- Knowing that the location of Lincoln and how close it is to Otter and with the start ofthe Spanish immersion. I'm wondering how many of those kids, because they could almostwalk there from Lincoln, so I wonder how many went there. - Right. And I might, I'm gonna say not a lot. This past year, I think we,if I remember correctly, it was three Lincolnfamilies made that choice. So, yeah. And that's actually, to be honest, that's a little less than I expected 'cause that's a pretty strong program, but it was not a huge drawon the Lincoln community. - Okay, thank you. Ms. Beloyed. - The Explorations program. How many students, Iknow that's multi grade. How many students are inthat particular program? - Right now, our classes are at 26 and 27, so that puts us a little under about 80. So three classrooms there. We usually invite about 30 to 40 kids every year. And you know, last year I wanna say wehad a big incoming class at 28 or 29. - Has that been pretty consistent? - It has been, we'vefluctuated between two and three classrooms overthe course of the program. It's probably, is it 10, 12 years old now? And we've been prettyconsistent for the past. This is our third yearwith three classrooms and right now, they're kindof big, like I said, 26, 27. And so I don't see it. - So you have three teachers then? - Three teachers. - Not everybody probably knows what the Explorers program is. Do you maybe wanna?- Sure. So it's a district wide,I'm gonna say magnet, that might not be the exact correct, but it does serve allstudents in the district, plus some kids that come infrom outside the district in grades three through five. And they're what wecall advanced learners, gifted and talented students. We base invitations tothat on three measures of ability, I'm gonna get it wrong, three measures of ability, achievement and sort of the skills needed to be successful in sort of that type of, I wanna say heavy on project based and self-directed learning and growth. And all kids across the district,similar to like Matoska, any student in the districtgets busing to Matoska. Any student who's part of Explorations in the districtgets busing to Explorations. We also have a handful of younger siblings that'll introduce, transfer to Lincoln. And yeah, it's the programreally, it really focused on on project based learning,really focused on sort of these explorations. So explorations of culture, deep dives into our city and community, deep dives into history. And through those explorations,that's where a lot of the math, the science, thereading and writing is taught and learned as well. - The current teacherssubmit recommendations for students. Correct, for that program? From other schools.- We screen all kids in the district for the program well, I should say for advanced learner identification and then invitation to the program. Part of that is, so the part that is sort of your executivefunctioning skills measure is called the Hope Scale, and that is based on a teacher survey. So we're getting thatpiece of data as well. - Okay, thank you.- Ms. Daniels. - Yeah, I just wannasay, my great niece goes to your school, she wearsyour T-shirt proudly. Loves Lincoln. Loves Lincoln. - She's a lovely young lady.- Well, thank you. See her around all the time. We always talk about Aunt Kathleen. - Great Aunt Kathleen. And I just wanna say, youknow, just anecdotally, my own kids went to Lincoln. They're early 40s, late 30s. But I look up and down our street and up and down, I mean,this is maybe getting to not a scientific answerfor why maybe you only have 45 kindergartners or, you know, Dan wondering that too of kids left the district or not. But I look at our street,long street, lots of houses. They used to have kids in them. And now people like me are staying in our houses a long time. And so we don't have theneighborhoods that we used to have, at least in my area ofthe Lincoln neighborhood. So maybe, you know, some ofthat is some of our house, they're not big houses,they're average size houses. People stay in them. You know, maybe, it's not scientific, but maybe that has somethingto do with, you know, the people are stayingand the kids have grown. I don't know. A little bit, maybe a little bit of that. - Yeah, it's a wonderful neighborhood. It does have everythingfrom starter homes on up. - But yeah. And some they were newerwhen my family was younger. But I know a lot of those families, and they're, again, around my demographic, are a little younger and they're still in those family homes. So I don't know. Who knows? Lots of questions. - No, and it is, so, you know, I've been in the district a long time and used to teach high school. And right now one ofthe fun things is a lot of those families, theirparents, there's a lot of former students of mine. - I'd like to come back to Lincoln. A great school. Thank you. - Can I just respond toKathleen for a minute? I think I was talking to somebody from theWhite Bear City Council and they were talking about how they want to bring families in, but people like it somuch they don't move out. So we probably need, you know, you and some of theother people have to move to make room for the people with kids. Is what I would suggest. - I know, I know. Ours was a great familyhome and still could be. - Right? - But we're still doing the stairs. - Yeah. I get it. - Thank you. Let me know when you're moving. Thank you very much for the presentation and keep up the great work. As a student from Lincoln,many, many years ago, I started there in the 60s, so I have a special placein my heart for Lincoln. - You've gotta stop by. We have a much nicer gym than what you had when your children attended. Was basketball going on? - When I was at Lincoln, that small gym I thought was very large. - It's a very nice cafeteria now. Thank you very much. Now we're gonna go ahead and transition to B3, fiscalyear 24-25 annual audit report. Mr. Wald, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Eichten. - Thank you Chair Arcand. Annually the district contractswith an accounting firm to conduct an audit ofour financial records for the previous year. Here to present on theaudit for fiscal year 2024. 2025 is Jim Eichten from LB Carlson, our certified public accountant,who audits our record or audited our records for this past year. So welcome Mr. Eichten,we'll turn it over to you. - All right, well thanks Mr. Wald. Members of the board,Chairman, Superintendent. Thanks for having me this evening. I did have a PowerPoint. Look at that. Well done. My name is Jim Eichten with LB Carlson. As mentioned, I'm here this evening to provide the audit results for the year ended June 30th, 2025. It is a requirement in state law that the district complete anannual financial statement. That particular financialstatement has been expanded by the district to complete what's called an annual comprehensive financial report, an ACFR, that particularACFR is about 160 pages long. So there's a lot of information and a lot of historical information, both from the financialresults for this year, but also from a 10 year perspective. As well as some supplemental information regarding activities of thedistrict, some strategic plans, as well as some financial analysis. That particular ACFR isrequired to be audited by an independent certifiedpublic accountant, a CPA, which is my role with the district. The audit process isguided by various agencies, both the MinnesotaDepartment of Education, as well as the Office of theState Auditor here in the state of Minnesota guide theaudit process for us. The federal government alsoprovides audit processes related to the federal singleaudit of federal awards, which I'll get to as well. As I mentioned here, thoseparticular audit processes include us auditing the financialstatements as mentioned, but also auditing yourcompliance with Minnesota laws and regulations as well asfederal laws and regulations. So as part of this particularaudit process, we issue a multitude of documents. One of which of those documentsis a management report. That management report ismy document that I issue as part of this particular process to summarize the audit results in a format that can be understood in a, you know, a quick consumed methodology. So what you'll find inthat particular document, one of the items that is highlighted is this particular year, we have not issued or completed the single audit of federal awards. The single audit of federalawards is really our auditing of the federal monies you received. The federal government hada delay in the issuance of the compliance supplement,which is the standards that we use to audit federal awards. As a result, the MinnesotaDepartment of Education extended the deadline to March to complete and submit that particular audit. So this evening I'll bepresenting the regular audit, if you will, and thenI'll be back if need be to present the singleaudit when it's completed prior to that March 31st deadline. So the audit results, as mentionedin the management report, are summarized as follows. On the district's financialaudit, we were able to issue an unmodified opinion. It's a clean opinion. It was the opinion that you were looking for going into the process. That particular auditopinion does have an emphasis of a matter specifically related to highlighting the implementation of an accounting standard, governmental accounting standard 101 on compensated absences wasa pretty significant change in the financial report. And as a result, we'rerequired to highlight that particular element. It doesn't really changethe opinion, just emphasizes to the reader that weimplemented that change. So in the financial resultsof the audit, as mentioned, we did audit your internal controls over the financialactivities of the district. We did have one audit finding to report. That particular audit finding relates to a duplicate payment, which ultimately resultedin an audit adjustment that occurred as part of the preparation of the financial statements. That particular audit finding is summarized in boththe management report, but also in the specialpurpose audit reports. One has a little moredetail than the other, but ultimately what occurredin that particular finding was we noted as part of our searchfor unrecorded liabilities, as well as in conjunctionwith our auditing of your purchases ofsubscriptions, a duplicate payment. So the same invoice was paid twice for the same subscription, which is mostly a technology subscription in this particular case,that particular process in our audit was identified as a finding. It is something that wenoted as part of the process. It wasn't identified by the district. And as a result, it becomes afinding in the audit process. What does that mean tothe district specifically? You know, this audit finding,as I've mentioned many, many times, that these presentations audits come with findings. Our goal and the goal of the Board as well as theadministration, is to develop some corrective action plans around that particular finding. Ultimately determining why did this occur? How are we gonna look intodeveloping corrections, and how are we gonna worktowards correcting it so it doesn't happen again? And I'm not back here nextyear with the same finding. So there has been a corrective action plan issued as part of this. That was a summary documentthat was submitted. When I complete my presentation, I'm going to open up this particular discussion and the district staff isgonna actually talk about the corrective action plan. We did briefly talk aboutthe corrective action plan when we had a opportunityto meet with the members of the Board earlier. Forget the actual groupthat that entails there. But we did go through anumber of items previous to this discussion, and we can talk about that more once I complete my presentation. So continuing on, we didhave, like I mentioned, testing related to the MinnesotaLegal Compliance Standards. We do audit statutes thatare on a list that are guided by the Office of the State Auditor. And we did not have anyfindings to report specifically to our testing of thoseparticular laws and regulations. So continuing on, there was a finding lastyear, as I mentioned, you know, as part of our auditprocess, we are required to look at prior audit findingsand develop audit procedures in and around those particular findings so that our audit does ensure that the same finding didn't happen again. So we adjusted our risks, weadjusted our audit process so that we tested sufficiently to verify that those findings didn't reoccur. That particular finding last year was in and around the accountingfor contracts payable and construction and process. And as you can note,based on my presentation as well as the documents that didn't, we did not have any repeatfindings in that area. The district did an exceptional job of looking into last year's finding and correcting the actions that were noted and developing better andimproved standards related to that particular finding. So moving forward in mypresentation, my report does go through the financialresults of the year, as well as utilizing somecomparable information that are provided bythe state of Minnesota. This particular graphical presentation that's in my reportsummarizes fund balances that are fund balances as apercentage of expenditures. So fund balances as a percentage of expenditures is a widely used ratio. This particular set ofstandards and information is really provided by theDepartment of Education, so people can use it ascomparable information. So what you're seeinghere is the yellow graph is the statewide fundbalances as the percentage of expenditures reallyaccumulating every district in the state and comparing thatto their overall operations. What's occurring in our state from a fund balance perspective, is it's been pretty flat probably from years prior to 2020. It was about 20% of operations were infund balance and equity. The fund balances actually statewide increased during the pandemic. It was ultimately lesscostly to operate a district during the pandemic 'cause ofremote learning environments that were occurring. As we got out of the pandemic,fund balances started to go down related to lessavailable federal dollars. As you remember, a lot ofCOVID funding was provided, and once those dollars started to dwindle, fund balances statewide became lower. In 2024, there was aone-time increase in funding, if you remember, it wentup to 4% of that one year in general education aid, manydistricts actually determined that it would be best if wedon't spend all of those dollars and utilize them as we move forward. So you can see that there's a one time kind of increase infund balances statewide, which we anticipate is gonnago down as we move forward. The district's fund balances here again are statewide percentage calculations. I'll show individual district percentages, which are subtly different based on rule and based on district's calculations compared to how the state does it. But you can see over time, thefund balances have gone down after initiatives that wereput forth by the district during those eras,during those timeframes. And it really settled in atpercentages in between 9%. And at the end of theyear, this year was 10.9%. And I'll get to individualdistricts percentages as we go to the next couple of slides. So this particular slide shows the fund balance position of the district for the last five years in comparison as well to a cash position, as well as just showing expenditures, which really shows the volumeof the district's activities. You can see that the district'sexpenditures increased from 139 million to 147million showing the change, the overall increase ofthe district as a whole. You're a growing organization and that is reflectedby your expenditures. For the year ended June 30th, 2025. The fund balances of thedistrict did increase as reflected in this particular graph. They increased by about 1.3 million, that compared it to a fund balance budget that projected about a $700,000 increase. So the actual results were very close to what was expected in the budget this year and are reflected herein this particular graph. We do provide informationon this particular graph, which shows the breakdown ofthe fund balances by category. You can see here that thetotal fund balance is now 15.9 million comparedto 14.5 the year before. The unassigned amount amountsthat are not set aside for various restrictions or assignments ended at 12.7 million. Why that's important, thedistrict does have a fund balance policy in place. That particular fundbalance policy strives to maintain a minimumunassigned fund balance of 8%. And as you can see for the year ended, you're at 8.6% of fund balance as a percentage of operations. So you are meeting year fundbalance policy as of June 2025 as shown on the presentation here. I did provide quite a bit of additional information inmy report regarding budget to actual results comparisons of last year to this year from a revenueand an expenditure perspective. I wanted to reflect on a few of those items in thisparticular presentation. State aids revenues this year were, were over budget mainlyin a couple of categories, general education and transportation aids, as well as other revenuesspecifically related to things like studentactivities and other revenues, gifts and such, which aregenerally conservatively budgeted. The district state aids increased almost $5 million this past year. Most of that was increases in the formula as well as increases inspecial education aid, which are generally relatedback to the increase in the overall costs ofspecial education program. Your district is experiencing a decrease in federal resources as spending or available grants are goingdown, which was to the tune of about a million dollars this past year. On the expenditure side,the expenditures were over budget by about 3.5million, which matched at some level, therevenues ultimately netting to a very close to budgeted expectations. Many of the amounts overbudget were very typical to other audits that wework on in this area. Things like transportation,contracted services, special education costs are areas that are growing in almost all districts that we're working with. One area that the district also had was a technology purchasetowards the end of the year, which wasn't ultimatelyin the original budget. And we were activelypurchasing that to get ahead of those particular purchases. The same with the expenditure trends. I looked at my report as it came here and things like health insurancecosts is a major increase that we're experiencingall over our community and you're no differentwhen it comes to that. Other areas like transportation, long-term facilitiesmaintenance are also areas that are increasing in your district, but others are increasing similarly. The district has other operating funds as well, a food service fund,a community service fund, the food service funds, as you can see here, is doing quite well in terms of its overall fund balance. It ends the year atabout 33% of operations, which is a good position to be in. The community servicefund, as you can see here, is functioning at a deficitfund balance position. Most of that is in school readiness. In the preschool program. In my previous comments and discussions with theBoard, there's an active working environment to work on eliminating that particular deficit that we're seeing on that particular page. The district also has a pretty significant self-insured health benefits fund. This particular fund isa self-insurance program, which ultimately can havea lot of ebbs and flows. Health insurance isbecoming very expensive, if you will, and theseactivities can be, you know, all over the place, if youwill, in financial results. You can see at the end of the year you did have a positiveincrease in fund balance in this fund of about 700,000. After interest, it was 800,000. At the end of the day, thisparticular fund's sitting at about 35% fund balancecompared to operations, which is slightly below theaverages we're experiencing, but nothing to be concerned about overall. So in my report, we do gothrough a lot of the other funds. The building constructionfund is certainly a significant portion of this audit. About $62 million were utilizedduring this fiscal year, which is a significant number of activity for a district like yourself. You also have a debt service fund. I mentioned the internal service fund as well as an OPEB trust,which is accounting for the other post employmentbenefits of the district. So to highlight in myreport, we also do support and communicate otherchanges in accounting. The Governmental AccountingStandards Board is very active in changing accounting standards and this past severalyears, if not the last three or four, have beensignificant in overall change. Looking forward, thereis another report, GASB, that will be implementednext year that modifies some of the reports from a financial modelimprovement perspective, unlike past years, most of the work to implement these standardshave been on staff. This particular improvementwill actually fall on me. I'm sure staff will be happyto hear that particular change. So that's the end of my presentation and I'll open up for questions, but just to summarize, I wasable to issue a clean opinion on the district's financial statements. We had the one finding to report that we'll talk about a littlebit more here in a second as we open it up for questions. I will be back to talk about the single audit of federal awards. The district fund balances areimproving in the general fund as well as you're adheringto that fund balance policy, which is probably most importantpart of this discussion. And then we talked a little bit about the other operating fund balances and the implementation ofthe new accounting standard. But lastly, I did wanna state, as you see at the last bullet point there, the district is very committedto this audit process and it always has been. This process goes on for almost six months and there's a constant back and forth of information and requests. And I would say, you know, asI work through the process, it's always been veryefficient and effective. And as well as thedistrict is very committed to the results that we have. And that's always been the case. And I don't always say that, and it doesn't always look like that. And so it's important to understand that the environment that I'm working in. So with that, I'll openit up for questions. And we'll turn it overto them for a second. - Yeah, well, thank you Jim. Great presentation. Very thorough, appreciate that. We wanna address the findingthat Mr. Eichten identified in his presentation tonight. As a school district and asdistrict finance officials, we take any finding and our fiduciaryresponsibility very seriously. So when we do have a finding, we act very quickly inthe corrective action plan and make sure that allof that is addressed. We look forward to workingwith Mr. Eichten and his team because going through the auditprocess, part of the value of it is having conversationsabout our internal controls and where are those areas that we can improve from year to year. So we appreciate yourwork and your team's work. During the audit, therewas an error was identified regarding duplicate paymentfor curriculum subscription. The vendor sent two invoices with different invoice numbers for an item about six weeks apart. Each invoice was submitted for payment resulting inthe duplicate payment. And that kind of a unusual invoicing method by that vendor helped contribute to that error. Andy will talk a little bitabout our corrective action. - So I wanna note that the issue at hand occurred during the summer. So part of it was at theend of one fiscal year. And then at the beginning of the next. Given the time of the audit,the auditors caught it before we had a chance tofinish all of our audit work. But I am very confident that had we been through our audit process,we would have caught it and we would've made the correction without the audit finding. We've already taken several steps to, or in our correction process to make sure that we don't make the same mistake. So we've reviewed our softwareand our internal procedures and provided additional trainingto our staff to make sure that we're following those procedures. We've worked with the vendorto receive our funds back for that duplicate payment. And then finally, to continueto improve our protocols, we're in the process ofworking with a third party to come in and review ouraccounts payable procedures and our records, and then identify if we have any vulnerabilitiesin our controls and if they have anyrecommended strategies to strengthen our controls going forward. - Yeah, so I want toemphasize a key point. Mr. Eichten, you know, noted that this is a significant finding. We don't disagree with that. In our conversations thoughwith Mr. Eichten, we noted that when we asked the questionwere there any concerns that you might have aboutfraud or any willful abuse? And he said, no, there'sno evidence of any of that. And so then as the correctiveaction plan is developed, we've actually exceededthat corrective action plan by moving toward a third party review of our internal controlsrelated to accounts payable. So we'll continue that work as we're moving forwardand we're looking forward to that work. So to that point, gonnaturn it over to you. - I just want to ask acouple clarifying questions and I'll turn it over tothe group if that's okay. My first question is,how is a business audit for a small business different than like a government or school district? Are they the same? How is it different? - Yeah, so a governmentalaudit is guided by a variety of standards. You know, first and foremost,the financial reporting is guided by a GovernmentalAccounting Standards Board. A commercial audit isguided by FASB, if you will, Financial Accounting Standards Board. So they're two separate setof accounting standards, first and foremost. So they're significantlydifferent in that stance. From a regular audit perspective. From the audit of thefinancial report, if you will. The financial reportaudit is very similar. They're guided by the same standards. The AICPA, in this case, the American Institute ofCertified Public Accountants are guiding our audits in thefinancial statement standard. How they differ on the governmental side relates to how we auditthe internal controls, as well as how we audityour compliance with laws and regulations as wellas your compliance with government auditingstandards, if you will, which is most of our auditingof grants and the oversight and of our auditing of youraides, your state aides is definitely guided bygovernment auditing standards. And they're significantly different. A financial auditdoesn't have any of that. You wouldn't have to oversee or test compliance with them with a grant or a state aid that you're getting. A government also has a, what's called the singleaudit of federal awards. Anytime you're over a certain threshold of federal dollars, you'rerequired to have that audit, which is generally not atall in a commercial entity. It does occur in nonprofits. Nonprofits get somefederal awards at times, and if they exceed the threshold, they would need a singleaudit of federal awards. So that's the majordifferences that occur. - Is it common when you do these audits that you have a finding? Or is this unusual?- What type of audits? - Like school government audits. - It's very common to havefindings in an audit like this. There's a lot of compliancethat's happening here. So it's common that we have findings, audits like this come with findings. - And then maybe this wouldbe for Mr. Wald that and Emma. My question is, how werethe invoices that we had for the construction handled,were they handled the same way that the invoices were forthis? Or how was it different? I mean, I'm just kindof trying to figure out, you know, how they were done. - So any time we receive an invoice, it's always signed offby the budget manager. We have two people in ouroffice who would check to make sure that they'reappropriately signed off. So we get really good at knowing everybody's little squiggle. And then on the construction side, it actually has an additional check where our construction manager first goes through the invoice, you know, they know on a progress billing how far is appropriate for the billing. So they review it forcompleteness, accuracy, they sign off on it, thenit goes to our director of building operations. He reviews it, he signs off on it and then it goes forward for payment. So there's an additional check and balance on the construction side. - Okay, thank you. I'm gonna open it up for questions. Ms. Beloyed. - So from the finding from the prior year, you say it was tested againthis year, no issues found. What do you mean by tested? How did you test for it? - Yeah, so every auditthat we begin with starts with a risk assessment. So we spend time as agroup, my audit team, assessing our risks going in, right? So risk assessment can be a lot of things, but one of the risk assessments that's automatic in anenvironment like this is what was the findings from last year. So we take risk in that particular area and move it from moderate to high, right? That's a high risk area now for us, which means we do more testing, we increase our sample size,we increase the invoices that we might look at. In this particular case, if youremember, some of you might, may or may not remember, but it was pretty much a spreadsheet error from last year. And so that spreadsheetwe dug into very deeply, if you will, to make sure that that particular accountingwas done accurately and correctly. So we added testing mainlyfrom a sample size perspective on that particular area. - Andy, it's probably more for you. So you said we probably would've found this error, or what do you mean? - So all of our budget managers review all of the accounts assigned to them, right? So whether they look atthem monthly or quarterly. So I have absolute confidencethat the person responsible for this would havebeen reviewing accounts and seeing, oh gosh,we paid this one twice. And so they would've thenreached out to the vendor, well they would've workedwith us too to see, okay, how do we go about finding this and getting these funds back? It's just that the timing was such that the auditor saw it before we did. - How was it found thoughif you've got an invoice? If you got an invoice that hastwo different numbers on it, how does that get identified? - Oh, just because of thenature of the subscription. So when we review, we look ata very detailed report to see what exactly is flowing through. So we've seen thissubscription, wait a minute, we paid this last year. We paid this subscription, youknow, in June of last year. We paid it again August of this year. So that's how we would've seen it. 'Cause we have this, youknow, budget amount earmarked, like I'm expecting tospend a million dollars, whatever that number is. And this amount would'vebeen spent already. And there would've beenthis like worry like, oh no, I need that. I have a different, youknow, plan for those funds. - So this amount was paid,say if it was summer. So what you're saying isit was paid like June. - June and August, some likesix weeks apart approximately. - So July or August iswhen the next one came in. - Correct.- Okay. You're saying we're takingthe corrective actions by bringing in a third party. Do we know who this third party is? - Yeah, we're working with CSO. They have a lot of school finance experts. So we're in the processof designing what that review is gonna look like. We're gonna be lookingat that in February. - Okay. If we're building that, whatare the assumptions about around how you're building that? What time period are we looking at how, what's the scope of whatwe're gonna need them do? - I anticipate that we'll be looking at probably invoicesprocessed in the last year. We'll establish a threshold,you know, maybe $5,000 and any invoice processedduring that time. We'll make sure that we don't have any duplicate payments for those. - Do we know how longthat'll potentially take? - No, we haven't gotten to that point yet. It will probably take some time. You know, we see the paymentreports, we have a lot of invoices that we process. - I think that's all I had. Oh, our transportation,looking at the numbers, transportation andspecial education were two of the big factors for expenses. - Yeah, there were really three. Transportation was a verysignificant increase. Tuition bills related toboth special education and regular ed. So those students whoattend districts, not ours, we get invoiced for those costs. And the other one wasrelated to some devices that we purchased in anticipationof the tariffs coming out. We worked with our vendorsand we were notified that hey, we anticipate prices for your devices that you're anticipating you'repurchasing these this summer anyway, we anticipateprices going up quite a bit. We really recommend lockingthese prices in now. So that was a really intentional purchase of like a million dollarsof devices in fiscal year 25 that had been planned for fiscal year 26. So really it was those threewere the major outliers on the budget on the expenditure side. - And someone said we had an increase of special educationstudents this past year. Do you know how many additional students? - From 24 to 25, I don't know that number off the top of my head. We're up about 120 from last year to this current school year. But I don't know. - How many?- About 120. - 120. Do we know what the level ofservice is for a lot of those? I mean, we're talking a prettyhigh level of services needed to be provided or canyou even estimate that? - But yeah, we've seensignificant service needs as students have enrolledthroughout this year. - Yeah, I would say thatthere's a range of services, but we definitely are seeing that we're starting more cluster, which is setting threeservices for students that have more significant needs. - Is it possible to give a percentage of how much we are reimbursed for those special educationcosts by the state? It costs this much for us to provide these services 'cause they're mandated, the state provides thismuch in their formula. - I think just what is ourcross subsidy estimate? What is our cross subsidy for? - How much do we have to pull over? - Five or six million at this point. Yeah.- Five and a half million. - So we're five or six millionshort state level. Federal government has never provided anything more than what, 14%? - Oh no, it's much lower than that. - Seven, 14, I don't know? 14 was the number off the topof my head, I could be wrong. So that has to be pulledas a cross subsidy. That's what the cross subsidy is. We have to pull the moneyoutta the general fund to pull and pay for thespecial education services. And that's not covered. And that's part, that's increased? - Yes.- Okay. Oh, I did have one correction on page 48 of the report. The number of years for, or the year for KathleenDaniels is incorrect. Oh gosh, really? - Is that on the Board's?- 2026, instead of 2028. - I haven't looked at that. - I know Mr. Eichten has another presentationto do at another district. So if you need to leave, we understand. - No, I don't need to leave actually. They're aware that I'm hereand it's eight miles that way. But can I comment on that? - Sure. - Well you can send mea note about that error or Andy can probably get directly and we'll correct the files when there's informationthat is incorrect. We want to get it corrected. - Thank you.- All right, Mr. Skaar. - Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. You mentioned that you have, you know, we usually find findings, right? You do, right? I was an auditor and you find findings, but there's different types of findings. On what scale of severityis a material weakness? - That's at the highest level. - Right. We've had 14 of them since 2019. Is that a lot? - I would suggest that's more than normal. More than average. - And I'm just talkingabout this particular one. I just want to read what you wrote, which is on page 218, the criteria management isresponsible for establishing and maintaining effectiveinternal controls. Condition, during our audit, we noted the schooldistrict paid an invoice for technology subscriptiontotaling 538,218 twice. That's a big number. Cause, district personnelmistakenly submitted the invoice, the same invoice for payment twice. The district's internalcontrols over accounts payable and cash disbursementswere not effective enough to detect this duplicate payment. So those are the factsin the audit report. And I hear some of the discussion, but that is the fact. Do you know, do we have any other ones? Can you guarantee that wehave any other ones out there? - Are there other duplicate payments? - Yeah or any other anomalieswithin our accounts payable or cash disbursements? - I can't 100% state that there aren't anyother duplicate payments. You know, my audit is basedon a materiality, right? And so we do sampling oftesting, you know, we do samples of testing to use statisticalsampling to validate and provide an opinion. But to state that there wereno more duplicate payments, I can't, that's not in my opinion. - I understand. So you just provide reasonable assurance on the financial statements. How many adjusting entriesdid the district staff have to make in order to get ourfinancials in accordance with, do you know off hand? Was it more than 10?- How many they had to make? - Was it more than 10? - Yes. Yes. We make a lot of entries at year end. And that's not atypicalof any school district. So yes. - How many adjustingentries did the auditor? - One. - Just that one?- Yes. - Okay.- Yes. - Now, I wanted to also ask you about, before I get into the other14, I don't know if you want me to talk about other 14, butthey're all material weaknesses. And two, two of the 14 were repeats. One was segregation of duties, and the other one had todo with state funding. So there were repeats. So when you look at thisand I assess compliance and enforcement at the federal level, that's called recidivism. Correct? Repeat violations. That makes us higher riskfrom an audit standpoint. In fact, in 2014 or 2024, when you did an audit of the federal funding, the question is, does the auditee qualifyas a low risk auditee? You checked the box no. And the reason for that is we had a material weakness ininternal controls, correct? - That is correct.- One thing, do you as the independent auditor have a conflict of interestform that has to be signed by the Board that you review? Is it your form? - Do I have a form?- Yeah. Do you have a form thatwe're supposed to sign? - Yes, we have an annual form that we require either thedistrict complete on their end, but it can be a districtform or it can be our form. - Does this, I got a note on this. I want to say and tell meif you think this is right. This is from district staffregarding the conflict of interest form from thedistrict's independent auditor. All board members must fill out the form completely and accurately. It is the responsibility of the auditor to determine whether or not the form has been completed satisfactorily. Sorry, I butchered that. Not district staff. Does that sound right to you? - It's really up to thedistrict to ensure compliance with conflict of interest. - Right.- It's up to the district to make sure that they're complying. - So it's not your responsibility for compliance with that form? It's the district staff. So this response that I received fromdistrict staff is incorrect and also raises an alarm to me about what their responsibilityfor oversight is. Their responsibility. You're responsible for compliance. So that form, even if itwas generated by the auditor or whether it was generatedby us, you're responsible for making sure that it'scorrect, not the auditor. And that's part of thisissue with the payments. We're responsible for that. Right? We're responsible for it. - Yes.- We've had 14, I consider these material weaknesses car wrecks with injuries. These are not minor fenderbenders, minor findings. This is an issue that thisBoard needs to take seriously. This financial oversight of this district. - Mr. Skaar. I would say that we do take each one of those findings very seriously. And that's why if you look at the following year's audit report, Mr. Eichten has always said that that finding was addressed satisfactorily. So they're not cumulative. Each one of those was addressedand six of those findings, and maybe even more, Ionly looked back to 2020, but six of those in 2020were prior to my time here. - I understand that, oneof my jobs in the past was to assess the complianceenvironment of organizations and what their commitmentwas to compliance, to making sure that we don't have errors, that we catch things. We always rewarded companies and organizations thatcaught things and fixed them. We didn't penalize them becausethey're doing their job. We've had 14 car wrecks thatwe could have prevented. - No, that we have fixed.- Fixed. But it keeps happening. - They're all different though. - No, you're fixing a individual problem, not the overall issue of oversight. - Okay, we can agree to disagree on that. The other thing is, well, when we have a, when you see a pattern where we don't take these,where we continue to have material weaknesses,doesn't that raise the level of our risk from an audit standpoint when you're doing your audit planning? - Absolutely, as partof every annual audit, we do a risk assessment process. And that particularrisk assessment process is done annually and redonebased on the prior year results. So things like findingsthat we had last year raises the risk of that particular area. It doesn't raise therisk of the entire audit. It raises the risk ofthat particular area. You stated in the singleaudit of federal awards, there was a finding, that raises the risk in thesingle audit of federal awards for that particular year. But does the entire audit risk go up? No. - Okay. So with one of the things that somebody had just askedme last week about, well, hey Dan, they win these financial reporting awards. So what's your issue? What's your concern as to why with this financial oversight? And I explained it because, you know, those reportingawards have nothing to do with the integrity of the financials because Robbinsdale, as you probably know, hopefully you weren't theauditor at Robbinsdale. They had a $23 million finding and a month later, they wonthe financial reporting award. The same one we won. Do you have any comments on equating the financial reporting awards with effectiveness, efficiency of, or integrity of the financials? - Well, the financialreporting award specifically relates to the financial, the 160 page annual comprehensive financial reports. So the district is receivingawards for financial reporting for that particular document. So the integrity of thatparticular document, and they're being awarded for that. Absolutely. The ATFR program or the award program isn't providing any sort of opinion on the internal controls of the district. The compliance with laws and regulations, the compliance with federal awards. It's really on that part ofit is not related to that ATFR but definitely the integrityof the financial report and the financialreporting that's happening is part of that award. - So you could win thefinancial reporting award and still have significantoversight issues and concerns and deficiencies and still win the award? - Yes.- Thank you. - Are you done and letsome other people talk? - Well, I was just gonnaask, you know, this, are we going to, 'cause the annualcomprehensive financial report is also included in this. Are we gonna cover that separately? Because I think in theaction it's to accept the whole package, whichincludes that report. And I have a couple ofquestions on that as well. - Do you think the report is wrong? - I think it could.- Because I think that we're accepting it as presented. We're not saying.- Well then yes, I'll say that. You think it's wrong? - I think it could be improved. - Okay.- Yes. - So when we get to that point, you tell us why. Ms. Daniels. - I was just gonna say, Ido disagree with Mr. Skaar. And in saying that, you know, our district or our Board does not takethese findings seriously. Every year I've been on theBoard, this is my fifth year. And then prior to that,participating in the audits for 11 years as a director. I mean, I think we've alwaystaken the audit report and the findings very seriously. And I think just by youtalking about hiring, is it CSO hiring anoutside agency to help you make sure this doesn't happenagain, you know, tells us that you're taking it seriously. And I know in the past other things that we have found in thepast and have been corrected, and again, then you'rereviewing them more strongly, the next year shows that we do take all of this very seriously. And I don't think any, I don't,you know, I don't think any of it points to fraudor anything like that. It points to human error. And not only on thebilling, the billing vendor, they made an error andsomeone in our district didn't notice that and signedit again and paid it twice. And we recovered thosefunds, which is great. And so you know, I understandthat we wanna take all of these findings seriously, but to say we're not paying attention or we have a negligent financial or finance department, I disagree. - Kathleen.- And can I just say that what I heard Mr. Skaar say was he wasn't saying that anybody was doinganything, you know, stealing or that he was questioning the oversight. - Exactly.- Of it, that's what I heard. - That's fair.- Right. I'm not saying we don't take this serious. - You said that the Boardwasn't taking this seriously. You said that. - Oh, maybe I did. I think I stand by. So what I'm saying is the oversight, we have a systemic problem inthis district with oversight because we keep gettingthese material weaknesses and we're fixing them as we go. But that's like a bandaid, that's not fixing the overall issue. So we need to raise up the altitude and find out, well, what is going on? What is the culture around compliance and meeting requirements? That's what I'm saying. So bandaid approaches fixthe immediate problem. It doesn't fix the systemicproblem that this district has. - If I may, I did go back and look. So in 2019, there were three findings. In 2020, there were six. So in my tenure, we've had seven. So the sound bite sounds quite different. In five and a half yearswe've had seven findings versus since 2019 we've had 16. - Well, I have the facts here and it's 14 and if you want, that's why I asked if youwanted me to read 'em. I don't think it's necessary. And I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I'm just saying we have asystemic issue in this district around financial oversightthat we need to address. And bandaid approaches don't work. - Ms. Streiff-Oji. - I would argue it'snot a bandaid approach unless it's the same thinghappening over and over. If it's something new, wefind it, we address it. We're not seeing the same things repeated. Correct? Thank you. - You've had two ofthem that were repeated. - Point of order Mr. Skaar. You've not been recognized by the chair. - Well, that's just away to keep me quiet. - Point of order.- Point of order. - Are you done, Ms. Streiff-Oji? - I have some questions. - Okay.- Will you walk me through the GASBcompensated absences change? - Sure. So Governmental AccountingStandards Board, GASB came up with a standardon compensated absences, which is compensatedabsences includes things like vacation, sick leave, personal leave. Those are the, under that definition, the GovernmentalAccounting Standards Board basically came out and told us how to calculatethose compensated absences by very specific regulation or rule. Prior to those rules, it was really an estimatethat the district could kind of use theirown rules to calculate. So by implementing that standard, they just followed therules provided by GASB. - So that's why there's that significant, was it $18 million change? That was because thatwas the change to GASB. - So the specific changeultimately in what the district had versus the standardin previous estimates that were under standarddidn't include sick leave. The sick leave liabilities weren't, were in the liability,weren't required to be. GASB basically said you had to include those in the liability now, which increases the liability, if you will, by thatnumber you're telling me. - Okay. Thank you. So then, you know, we're having a lot of discussion here about findings and addressing those findings. We were given an unmodified opinion. So can you please explaina little bit more about how an unmodified opinion is granted, even when there are findings? - Right, so each individualopinion stands on its own, if you will. So I'm giving opinionson multitude of things. One's on the financialstatement, one's on compliance and regulations, one's on compliance with Minnesota laws and regulations. So each one stands on its own. The unmodified opinion onthe financial statement is an opinion on the 160page financial statement. So we're providing a clean opinion that you as a district completed that financial statement inaccordance with standard. - So what would it taketo have a changed opinion? Would it be multiple findings? Would it be, I'm just trying to get a sense of. - Right. And there's a number of modified opinions that can take place. You can have a district that's unable to provide records at all. You couldn't even issue anopinion, I can't audit it. There's been situations whereyou have a going concern, if you will, meaning you're not able to sustain yourself financially, which can happen in districts that have stature operatingdebt would be a situation. There's a multitude of things that would cause a modified opinion, but generally, that's pretty severe. I mean, it's pretty rareto get to that level. - Okay. And so the idea behind the audit, I just wanna be be clear, is that you are assessingfor six months, I wrote that down, six monthsprocess with the audit, with everybody in the finance department, you are assessing the fact that we, that our financial statements are accurate and that you are lookingat our internal controls to see where we can improve and that we addressed any issues that were in, that were past findings. Is that kind of the elevator speech? - On the internal control side,we're actually assessing it to that you have adequateinternal controls, not just that you know, that you have them,but that they're adequate. - Okay.- And that they support an operation of this size adequately. One of the comments or one of the findings inthe past, not right now, so don't get me wrong,that was a past finding, was you didn't haveappropriate segregation of duties, that's an example. - I remember that one.- Meaning you don't, you're not segregatingresponsibilities enough so that, that things, that errorsare being corrected. So there was an assessmentdone at that time to improve controls sothat they were adequate to substantiate the size and really the organization as a whole. So that was the corrective action for that one particular one. So it's items like that, that you have to have appropriate controlsto support your organization. - Exactly.- And that's the opinion that I'm providing. - I mean, it's a big andcomplex organization, but what you're saying is that we have, every time there's been afinding, we have caught it and we fixed it, which is the goal. - Well, ultimately the audit found it. - The audit, yes. I'm sorry. The audit found it. And then the districtstaff has corrected it. - Yes.- Okay. So I guess my question for you is, we do continue to have findings, but that's not unusual and we are fixing it. - Yes.- Because we're human beings and we work in a school district where we are constantly asking students to correct their mistakes. And when we find our mistakesin this very complicated, huge set of data, they haven't been the same mistakes twice. Is that correct? - Yeah., I don't have all thedata that's in front of me that was provided, but I willagree with Andy in the sense that under her administration or their administration,we haven't had that, that's been the norm. - Yeah I mean, I've beenon this board eight years and, you know, this is something that is constantly in motion because as soon as this audit is done, we're gonna start the nextone, prep for the next one. And so I would say that we pay attention. This is not a insignificant finding, but I appreciate that it's not an insignificant findingthat is being addressed. And that this Board then to hold our staffaccountable can ask about at future Board meetings. Okay, thank you. - Anybody else? I would just say again, I mean, you always have findings, but we've had 14 since2019, material weaknesses, which are the most severe, and two of them were repeats. Thank you. - I just have one kind ofquestion to wrap this up. I heard that we don'thave enough oversight. Was the same oversight or procedures the same foreach finding that we've had or because it makes it soundlike we just fixed this, that it's all, but there's different reasons. And so how easily is thatto address it overall, say this is it and then they won't occur. Does that make sense? - Well, I'll try toaddress it in this manner. The internal controls ofthe district don't just stop and you create 'em and they stop. Internal controls area constant evaluation. So that is one of theitems we look for is, is there people in this organization that are constantlyevaluating the processes and the controls? And if they're seeing theirown weaknesses, they change it and oh, well gee, that even without me sitting in the room, I'm not here. You know, it should be aconstant evaluation of controls. And that is what we see. The district here takes it very seriously. Back to my commitment to theprocess, it's a commitment to the controls. If they see weaknesses, changes are made. You know, I had a conversation, or with you, you were on thecall when we talked about the audit report. One of the constant evaluationstake place is, is you know, there's some change in personnel. And one of the things thatwe're talking about is, well, let's not stay stagnant withthat change in personnel. Let's reevaluate and dowe need a different role? Do we need a different person? Do we need more people? That's a constant evaluation in controls. - Okay. Yes, Ms. Beloyed. - This for Andy, yousaid during your tenure, how many findings?- Seven. - Could you briefly describe the findings just so I have a memory, better memory of what they were? - Yep, so in 2022, we had a time and effort for a federal program. - Had a what, I'm sorry?- A time and effort. So related to documentation of time on a federal grant. Then we had one related to investments and collateralization, and thenan unauthorized investment. So both of those we workedwith our investment advisor and they would typicallyhelp monitor those items. - Yeah, can you explain that one? 'Cause that one in particular was. - Yeah, so those two also go in line with the next one that we received in 2023. There was another collateralization issue. And so we work with an investment advisor who typically are experts onwatching these items for us, making sure that we're investedin the correct investment type accounts, statute sayswhich type of investments we may invest our funds in. And I don't remember exactly the details because this was back in 2022, but I believe it was something about like a credit rating wasn'tquite at the right level, or it had dropped downor something like that. And the investmentadvisor hadn't caught it. So as a result of thosefindings, we parted ways with that firm and now we'reworking with a different firm. - Have we had any findings on that since? - No. Then the next one in 2023was related to a bid issue where the bid wasn'tpublished in the newspaper. We sent it to the newspaper. We have documentationof it in our sent items. We believe it probably endedup in their spam folder. And so it didn't actually get published. We worked with the newspaperand they apologized. They didn't have it. The next one, and then it was theconstruction spreadsheet one. And then this one. - Would you describe those as car crashes? - Would I describe them?- Those findings, are those car crashes? - Well, I'll useterminology that I would use based on standard. I'd have to remember if all of those, most of them are legalcompliance findings. So we audit your compliancewith login regulations and any of those that arelegal compliance related are considered findings. There is no, it's either yes, you complied or no, you didn't. So I don't use theterminology car crashes. It's not my words. I'm gonna utilize the words that I can use in standard. And those are, it's a findingor it's not a finding. - The finding is a finding is a finding. I guess, in my opinion, some of them seem a whole lot worse than others. But I'm also, I've beenin all of the meetings and we go through all of that, but all of those have been,we have not had an issue with any of those since. - Correct. Yes. If you've listened to me, if you have in many multitudeof meetings, I say this to you, I say this to all of my clients. Audits come with findings and the focus should beon the corrective action, what are we doing to correct it? - Well, if the thought is thatover a period of seven years, 14 findings, you said is a lot. - I didn't say it was a lot. - You said it was unusual.- It was more than normal. - What's normal?- There is no norm to be truthful. I mean, there's no norm, - But that's what I'm trying to get to. If you averaged it out, that would be two findings a year. Depending on the severity, I mean, the one this year tome is a lot more severe because it was $500,000 paid twice, which I am happy that Ihear that we are bringing in an outside party to lookinto it more to make sure that we're not finding this again and again, that would be a big problem. - Yeah.- But it'd be a big problem for everybody on this board, and it would be a bigproblem for the community. I'm trying to find what the norm is because I'm not getting,I'm not getting the sense that I have an answerbecause we know we're going to have findings. I would question ifyou were doing your job if we didn't have findings. I mean, to be quite frank. I don't like this terminology. If you've got a finding,then you've failed. You failed in something. A mistake has been made. To me, the failure is if we don't fix it and if it's systemic, whichI don't see any of these as systemic, at least not yet, because they're in all different areas. And a lot of those, howmany different federal, there's so many differentrules for all of these that it's really easy forthose things to slip by. I mean, there's hundreds, so it is a big deal. But I think we need to havesome perspective on this and understand that it is what it is and it needs to be fixed. And I have no doubt that they'll fix it. If they don't, it'll be an issue. That's all I have. - Chair, can I add a comment to that? - Go ahead. - My perspective on whatyou said there is important because every year as part of the issuance of this report, the Finances Committee or a subset of the Board meets with me as part of a committee, right. And I provide thecommentary about the finding or overall these years, whateverfinding it might have been. And this year there wasa different response to this finding, becausewhat you just said, supporting what you said,there was more of a, that's more significant situation. And you as a Board member and other members of the Board as well as the superintendent, said, yeah, we should do more than just the average corrective action plan. And that's what I would've hoped to hear. It's not my role, if you will, to act in the role of the Board. I'm the auditor. But that came as a verypleasant reaction, frankly. And that's what I would'veexpected from the Board. - Well, and I found it anappropriate reaction too. And it was the reactionthat I was also hoping for. So I was glad to hear what it was. - So I think one of the common things I'veheard is there's nobody in here that is happy about this error. And we want it to, we want toknow, we wanna get it fixed, and we want to make sure ithasn't happened in other areas, including, I know Ms. Johnson, you want to also clear this up. You wanna look at it. You have that timeframe. We want to make surewe're doing it correctly. And that is, I think I want to, we're all about in that boat. We wanna do it correctly, and we don't, like, we'renot real happy with this. That's somewhere as aBoard, we can continue to work together and move forward. Because that's the one pieceI think we all agree on. And we're all gonna havedifferent opinions of, you know, where we're going. But that's gotta bewhat holds us together. If you move forward and ask questions, that's gonna be really important. And as they tell us how they're fixing it and how we're moving forward, that's gonna be equallyimportant to find out. And so I think we can all agree on that. - Just one last thing. I just would say that, you know, we can feel good about,hey, these were, you know, out of the 14, 12 were different. So we feel good about that. But still the pattern is there. The pattern of a material weakness or a finding that is elevatedto a report is significant. You know, you want a goal. The goal is not to haveany material weaknesses and not have any findings thatare reportable in our report. That's the goal. I've never, you know, my own view of this running a nonprofit, I can't remember everhaving a material weakness. I would've went through theroof if I would add one. So would my Board. - Yes.- I'd just like to say that our budget is how much? - Close to 150 million. - I doubt anybody in thisroom has been audited on a personal or yourbusiness $150 million, so to say we're comparing apples to apples, I just don't think is accurate. - Point of order. Point of order. - Yes. - I just wanna say, can we get a, an update scheduled ona future Board meeting to get an update on the corrective action? So I would suggest, you know, I know you said it's gonna takesome time, so perhaps April, if we can get an agenda itemso that we can, as a Board, get an update on where we're at. I would appreciate that. Mr. Chair. - Thank you. - Mr. Skaar. I know you had somethingyou wanted to say. - I would just say, you know, I've audited multi-billiondollar companies and I've been seniorexecutive at companies that are much larger thanthe school district at this. - Can I ask how many schooldistricts you audited? - None. No school districts. But I've used the same playbook you use, which is the GAO, right? Yellow book used the same to audit. So it's the same. It's the same thing. It's not that much different. It's like riding a bicycle. - But you fall off, you don't get back on. - Well, I'd like to say that, but I mean, I can ride alittle stingray or a 10 speed. - All right, can we closethis discussion then? And I wanna thank you forcoming and sharing with us and so we can kind of seehow we can move forward. We appreciate all the work you do for us. - All right, thank you.- Thank you. - And then I'd like to move us along to operational item C1, action on the fiscal year24-25 annual audit report. Ms. Johnson, you haveanything you wanna say? - Earlier in the meeting, Mr. Eichten from the auditing firm LB Carlson presented the fiscalyear 24-25 audit report. So the next step in theannual budget process for the Board is to vote on acceptance of the report that was presented. - All right, so we've hadthe recommendations accept the audit as presented. Do I have a motion to do that? - So moved.- Okay. - Ms. Beloyed a second.- Second. - Ellison, open discussion? Yes, Mr. Skaar, I think youhad something you wanted to. - Yeah, I was gonna ask, does the annual, what is it, the annual financial, the annual comprehensive financial report. Is that included in this motion? - Yes.- Then I have questions on that. - Okay. - So on page 44 of the report,and it's paragraph three, it says since, and the second sentence,starting with, since 2003, the level of funding provided to the state of Minnesota has notkept pace with inflation. Now that's true. However, total fundinghas kept up with inflation and has actually exceeded it. So should we put a sentencein there that says that, and I know that there wereissues with the Fallon report and I referenced this annualcomprehensive financial report when that report was being criticized. But right here, and I mentionedthat all those numbers are in this report. So unfortunately Mr. Wolf passedaway on October 13th, 2024 after I received thenumbers from Mr. Fallon on July 24th and wellbefore I was elected. But his death, Wolf's deathdoesn't diminish his expertise. And I think using Google searches to disparage the valuable work of a dead man is not very helpful and we should do more criticalthinking based on facts. So I prepared an analysis from the 2024 annualcomprehensive financial report found on the district website and identical results. - Does that include state aid only or does that include?- Total general funding, - Because I think whatthis was saying, if I may, I'm asking is we're talking about what we get on our state aid,they're not speaking to the, any kind of levy or other funding, Ithink, is that correct? If I could get an answer on that? - I haven't been able to find what you? - I'll give it to you. - Page 44, you said?- Page 44. Page 44 doesn't match up. - Page 44 of the PDF file. It's called FinancialFuture of the District. - Okay.- That's all. And all I'm asking is, shouldwe put something in there that says, yes, that's true, but total funding haskept up with inflation. Something like that. That's all I'm asking andI'll give you the numbers. And the other thingthat I wanted to mention was even when you look at total general fundexpenditures per student, and that's on, well it'son page 123 of the report shows that in 2025, thenumber grew by 5.5%. And if you look at the CPI or inflation was between 2.7 and 3%. So all I'm asking is thatwe put something in there that says, yes, that's true, but total funding haskept up with inflation. So the other question I hadwas on the next paragraph where it talks, and this is talking about, remember this is talkingabout the financial future of the district. So what I was thinking is weshould put something in there around enrollment shortfalls and the impacts to future funding. Because if you look onpage 70 of the PDF file, it says, and this has to do with factors bearing onthe district's future. And it says the amount of funding a districtreceived is also dependent on the number of student it serves. Meaning attracting and retaining students is critical to the district's financial wellbeing. So I always thought wewould triangulate that back to the financial future of the district so that we can let thereader of this report, which would be the public, know that hey, enrollment also factors into funding. And that's also something that they should be concerned about. So those two amendments. - Ms. Beloyed. - I'm not in favor ofamending that whatsoever unless we add in that iskept up with inflation because we've had to increase levies and pull from the general fundthrough the cross subsidy. Do you understand whatthe cross subsidy is? Can you explain it? - Probably not tonight.- Well then you really need to understand what the cross subsidy. At the center of the whole discussion that you're going around. We have to pull moneyfrom the general fund in order to support and pay for other itemsthat aren't covered. So has it kept up with inflation? Semantically, I guess we could say it has, but has it kept up withwhat we have to spend? No, because we are pulling from a fund that we shouldn't have topull from in order to pay for things that aren't paidfor by either federal funds or state funds that wereguaranteed at some point in time and have never come through. - Can I respond to that? - Go ahead. - I would just say I understand that, but I look at the general fund revenues and you just, you cut through all of this, you cut through all ofthis, general fund revenues were 142, 322, 288 as compared to 130, 218, 478. And the taxpayer, they don't understandall this funding stuff. All they know is our numbers are going up higher than inflation. That's all they care about. They are. So if we were tryingto confuse the taxpayer and the public with alot of funding things, we need to net things downso people understand, hey, our general fund revenues have gone up. Now which bucket? That's important, I agree with you. That's important. However, the numbers went up, even though despite all of the obstacles that we have with the state funding and cross subsidy, we'restill figuring out a way to fund the schools,right, above inflation. So why can't we just say that? - That we could say, finding a way. But that's through taxes,that's through the levies. - And that's what'simportant to taxpayers. - I don't think that makes it clear. - Point of order, thank you. - You can go, I'm gonnacheck She was gonna talk. Do you have something else? - That's the semanticsthat we're getting into that they need to understandwhen you're saying it's kept, when they say whoever yourgentleman were that has kept up with inflation, we've hadto keep up with inflation through raising the taxes,which nobody wants us to do. But the reason we've had to do that is because stuff isn't funded and we're pulling, we'rerobbing Peter to pay Paul. So it's important that,I don't think that's that hard to understandfor the general public. - All I see is the numbers. - Well, the numbers don'ttell you the whole story if you don't to meexplain the whole story. - Go ahead, I'm sorry. - Okay, anybody else? - I agree with Ms. Beloyed and I also don't feelcomfortable amending our, amending our financialreport with information done in the investigation ofa single board member. It is not our responsibility,it's in our policy that we do not conductseparate investigations. And so I don't feel comfortable taking the informationfrom a single board member and putting it into something that the entire Board needs to approve. So I would not supportmaking those amendments. - Yes, I would agree thatwith that in principle, however, I didn't do any investigation. I just went to the district website because folks had an issuewith the Wolf Fallon numbers. So I went back and are theyright and they're right. That's all. I didn't do an investigation. I'm not doing that. But I think as a board member, if we're not looking at our reports and critically thinking aboutthe reports and looking at 'em and comparing 'em to othersources of information, we ain't doing our job. - We're not doing our job. Yes, go ahead. - I believe that evenaccessing the numbers from those two individualsconstitutes an investigation. I agree. We need to do our homeworkwith the information that we're provided, but it isnot our role as board members to do specific researchinvestigations outside of what we are receiving. And my critical thinking skills, I take umbridge at the factthat my critical thinking skills are at issue here. I think what we need to do in order to move forward is we needto remember what our roles and responsibilities are. And that is to look at oversight, at governance and to fulfill our roles as board members as we have laid out in our policies. - Yes, Ms. Daniels?- I agree with Jessica. - Okay. - I just say I didn't dothe Fallon Wolf thing. I didn't do it when I was elected. It was before I was elected. So I don't understand the issue. - Okay.- I'd like to move to call the question ifI could get a second. - Second.- All in favor of calling the question, say aye. - Aye.- Opposed? Same sign. Okay. Calling the question meansthat we've closed discussion and now we are gonnacall a vote on the motion to accept the annual report as presented. So this will be a roll call vote. I'll ask the clerk to call the roll. - Arcand.- Aye. - Beloyed.- Aye. - Daniels.- Aye. - Ellison.- Aye. - Skaar. - It'd be nay if you'renot gonna accept it. - I just have a point of clarification. - No, you're calling the vote. - So are we voting for the? - We're voting to acceptas has been presented. - Plus the annual comprehension? - Everything in that audit report that was in there presented. - Then no.- Okay. Is that it? - Keep going. - Streiff-Oji.- Aye. - Thank you. - Okay, motion carries five to one. We're now on to D, adjournment. Can I get a motion to adjourn? - So moved.- By Ellison. A second?- Second. - Second by Streiff-Oji. All in favor say aye.- Aye. All opposed same sign, we are adjourned. (gavel banging)