one of the biggest challenges uh with elections is the heavy amount of administration associated with it.

Lakeville itself doesn't bother me for condensing uh, voting areas. it. You know, driving five miles should be nothing, honestly. But the thing that I do have a little bit of pause on is going down into Scott County and those southern areas...

So every school district in Dakota County combines their polling places. Um, Lakeville is the only school district that does not.

if all these other school like I feel like this is a repeat conversation. You name the topic like Lakeville just is not in line with our peers on on many things it feels like and so if we is doing this and why school district is ginormous too right and they have one polling location I I don't see the argument why we would spend more money spend more staff time when this is a model that our peers are using for special elections.

Scott County doesn't have an elections department like Dakota County does. Scott County turns over all of the absentee ballots. All of the work of the elections comes to us to do where Dakota County does the absentee processing for us. They also do all of the equipment programming...

at the beginning of the document, we have our baselines spring data. And so, you'll see all of the areas under student achievement that align to the executive dashboard... at the bottom uh there are two areas that we are sharing for a uh quarterly um review and as as Dr. McDonald said those are areas that we have new data for since the spring data that we shared earlier.

The second thing that caught my eye was the um failing one or more classes. And and I I know you're probably not uh enthralled with these numbers either, but when I when I looked at the kids in middle school, uh 6 and a half% of them are failing one or more classes. And then in high school, just a hair over 18%.

We have a gap. We have a gap.

I feel like that's a failure at like the teacher level, the department chair level, the principal level, teaching and learning, all the way to the top, right? like at all these levels, no one thought, wow, we're not teaching what the test is asking.

what we see from the MCAs is a systems level problem. It's not the teacher problem. Um it's the system. we didn't have the system set up for those teachers to be successful to get the professional development that they needed to best teach our students.

And so I think we're in a space now too where it's time to look at like where we are with AP and where we are with concurrent enrollment and is it some sort of a yes and which is usually what it is to meet the needs of your your students and then how do we resource and support that from a from a budget standpoint.

our most pressing situation or need is to have space for our middle schools. Um, the bigger question and the bigger longer range plan uh obviously needs to be predicated on a TNL vision.

it it's not how many students we need to fit in school, but what kinds of learning do we want to make possible?

I don't feel like there's this collaboration amongst the departments to figure out how to all bring that vision together because if we go to a le for a levy for buildings and we go for a levy later for teaching and learning one might pass and one might not and instead how do we create a vision for our community where we are bringing these things together that everyone can buy into and support both of those things.

My thought around it was I I do feel like the middle schools obviously there's there's an issue there and we need to figure out how we're going to address that. But my my thought was could we access the land that's by south and have a career center and a middle and add on the middle schools at the same time, right?

That's what I'm thinking.

There are there are no no wants in that list.

A tennis court, you know, a big a big new performing arts center. I I guess that's just not part of my priority list, especially when I have like the ALC students that are in a locker room learning without any windows, without any cafeteria access, without any gym access. The tennis courts are kind of down here for me.