It's five o'clock. Welcome. Thank you for coming. I'm Michael Bowman, superintendent, Lakeville Area Schools, and uh have the opportunity this evening to talk about our capital projects renewal that uh we are taking to the voters uh for November 4th. Um just want to point out that our board chair is in the back of the room there, Mr. Matt Swanson. Um, just make sure I identify him. And, uh, I'm going to give you a short presentation and then happy to answer your questions best that I can. And if I don't have the answer, uh, if you're willing to give me a method to communicate with you, I will get you that answer uh, as quickly as I can. Is that fair? All right. Um, I'll start with this video which gives you kind of the gist of our renewal. uh presentation and then I'll share some details with you about what exactly this funds uh for Lakeville area schools. So if you would grace [Music] this fall, residents in the Lakeville Area Schools community will vote on whether to renew our school district's capital projects levy. Renewing means there is no new tax increase. This levy was previously approved by voters in 2015, and if approved for renewal, the levy would sustain $4 million annually for the next 10 years to maintain staff and student devices, educational technology, infrastructure, and security technology, and continue to invest in career pathways, and STEM education opportunities. If voters do not renew the levy, the district will face budget cuts for the 202627 school year. These cuts will include delaying device, equipment, and system maintenance, leading to decreased cyber and physical security. Staff positions will also have to be reduced. You can learn about the maintaining our schools powering our future levy renewal by visiting our website. And don't forget to vote on or before November 4th. [Music] So that's a short succinct uh explanation and again I'll share some details as we typically do if we are going to voters on any levy we survey our community and back in April March April time frame uh here in Lakeville we had Morris Leatherman do a survey of our community and I just want to share a few results that are uh from that survey relevant to this particular levy. So when asked the question uh of our voters uh 76% said that college and career readiness programs are very important or essential in public education and 84% said that Lakeville area schools is doing a good or excellent job of doing college and career readiness uh teaching and learning for our students. And then when asked the question around educational technology, 71% said that educational technology is very important or essential and 79% say that educational technology here in Lakeville area schools is either good or excellent. So we think those are pretty good numbers for us. But finally, uh, we also asked the question of our community, again, voters that, uh, say they would support our renewal at an 85% return. So, we think that's pretty positive. Uh, I think one of the major driving factors with renewals is uh, because it was approved 10 years ago, we're not asking for a tax increase in order to sustain this particular uh, $4 million over the next 10 years. So why levy renewal? One of the biggest challenges we have in K12 education across the state of Minnesota is if you have any technology requirements and I think that if you look at any business whether it's a small business or a very large business uh technology is integrated into how uh your systems work whether it's administrative or educational technology. There are no mechanisms in the state funding system to provide for school districts to secure that kind of equipment and that kind of capability. So we do have to go to uh levy and go to our voters to do that. We have no other mechanism. If it passes, what we will be doing is sustaining that $4 million over the next 10 years. We want to maintain our staff and our student device capabilities, not adding to or making it uh uh bigger, better, faster. Uh we want to keep up with where things are going in in educational technology. We also want to make sure that our infrastructure support for our security systems are maintained and then also invest in STEM and career pathways. STEM is is um a very important program. science, technology, engineering, and math for our students. Uh, a lot of work has been done and, uh, with the monies that we got back in 2015, we've been able to do, uh, some really important work with getting STEM from K through 12 in our system. Before, we didn't have that capability. If you can develop the interest of your elementary students, you can really better and more robustly enhance uh interest in those science, technology, engineering, and math uh curriculums that a lot of kids uh can benefit from, especially in the tech world that we live in today. Some of the things I want to make sure are are clear and and um articulated about our school district. From 20 prior to 2015, we did not have in our classrooms a standard package I call it, of um information technology systems. We had a lot of very different things that were difficult to maintain. And one way I would describe it is we didn't have an enterprise solution for our school system. That can be very difficult to um manage. It's very difficult to administer and it gives you a lot of variation in your system rather than differentiation. And um what we are able to do with these dollars is we are able to put projectors, whiteboards and speakers. So, our teachers can literally have the ability to have a essentially a microphone similar to what I have here, but it projects their voice within the classroom because uh they don't they don't have to raise their voice. When you have 25 30 kids in a classroom, that can be a challenge. Uh so, they can speak in normal tone and and be heard across the room. Our Apple TVs for wireless screen sharing, we're using that right now. We can do multiples at the same time and it's uh very instructionally helpful for our uh single teacher again with 20 to 25 kids in there. Um and then we use Apple classroom which is it gives the the teacher the power and the control of all the devices that are in the room. So when they're doing instruction it can be interactive and intentional. It can be locked down so that the kids are engaged in just what it is that the instructor is trying to uh communicate. It makes it far more focused and I think it also helps them with classroom management. Again, I don't know how many times you've been able to get in classrooms recently, but uh there's a lot going on in our classrooms, especially uh in our our uh larger class size areas uh in our school district. So this these capabilities are very helpful and uh very focused and that's what we wanted. We wanted to create that enterprise throughout the K12 system. And here's just a little explanation video of how we are using our technology in our school district. Our Lakeville area schools 1:1 iPad initiative was launched in the fall of 2020. The program is part of a broader technology ecosystem with the goal to create a dynamic learning environment. Teachers have been leveraging tools like Apple Classroom to support student learning, manage devices, and provide real-time feedback. >> At its best, technology brings us together. The fundamentals of teaching of like collaboration, critical thinking, investigative learning, inquiry don't change depending on the tools that you have, but tools can augment those basics. They're kind of discovering things for themselves and learning skills like digital literacy. And so that enriches my teaching because I'm giving them the skills that makes them kind of more in the driver's seat of their own learning. >> Looking ahead, we aim to continue preparing our students for a future where technology is an integral part of their personal and professional lives. [Music] So uh as you could see there and very briefly demonstrated that the kids are interacting and doing their assignments and doing their work. Uh but it goes beyond that. Uh if there's homework assignments and things like that can also be handled digitally. I don't know if you've looked at college courses of late, but almost everything comes through a learning uh management system. Uh and we're able to replicate that in in our systems as well. This just gives you an idea of the scope of the number of devices and the things that we have are that are technology capital things which are are more about the the hardware than the software. But you also have a whole infrastructure of server capability. The different kinds of wiring systems you have. We have uh we have fully integrated internet capacity within our school system which then also requires a very robust uh cyber security capability. We can go to the next chart. So we were able to fund and enhance our cyber security within our system because obviously if you're going to grow and have a onetoone device scenario in your system, your kids need to be protected. Uh there's a lot of difficult things going on online all the time and we want to be highly protected. We also want to be able to have the right applications uh that our students can use and our teachers can use to do the teaching and learning uh that's consistent with our curriculum and our state standards. So our ability to monitor our systems. So anybody that gets on our network is going to be uh monitored through our cyber security system. All our devices are restricted to educational use purpose and um being able to again get that right app system uh you've probably heard of Google Play or Apple Store that's we have our own uh which is just educationally focused uh to have the right apps in the system and they're secure. So, uh, keeping our kids safe online is key and essential to our success and what this funding is for. The other parts of of our needs, uh, talked about STEM, uh, science, technology, education, and math. Um, plasma cutters. I don't know if you've ever been able to get into any of our high schools or middle schools. we were able to fully outfit them with the things that our students need to do hands-on work, whether it's woodworking kinds of things or plasma cutting or welding. Uh all those things are available in Lakeville area schools. The one of the biggest uh capabilities that I think is great for kids who are maybe not instrumentally uh into music or corally into music is music production and having the capability uh to do music production or graphic design. I think again if you're out there online anywhere uh or you're in any professional setting today uh graphic design is everywhere and there's a lot of opportunities for our kids in that. So those are just a few of the areas that we're able to do with uh again these dollars are being used for those purposes. Physical security and technology. So, uh, one of the things I when I came to the district in 2013, uh, and I don't know if if you all were around back then, but you could pretty much walk in any one of our schools, we didn't have access control, uh, robustly deployed in our schools. And we've, these dollars gave us that capability and we were able to put access control. We also were able to update our security camera systems and go from analog to digital so that they could also now support our um 3D response system which is a very robust state-of-the-art uh protection system within all of our schools now and the uh camera integration is phenomenal and necessary uh for that system to be optimized in in uh any lockdown situation that we might face in our school system. So, these dollars are being used for that as well, and we would like to be able to sustain that. Again, we're not asking for new taxes, just asking for a continuation of our uh 2015 um support in in our budget. If it fails, and I think I said this in the video, uh we're going to have to take a look at where are we going to cut $4 million out of our next fiscal year budget because we're operating in fiscal year 26 right now. That's an approved budget. We wouldn't take it from there. Of course, we might have to slow our expenditures, which is all part of the process, but also uh in fiscal year 27, we would have to remove the four million from the budget. Um various ways to do that. uh some of them are articulated there. I think in the end it's going to have to be staff cuts because so much of our budget is salary and benefits and that's the way an institution that is uh like ours very people centric uh will have to do that. This is a depiction of what will be on the ballot. Um, and I won't read that whole thing to you other than to tell you that uh by voting yes on the ballot uh on this question, you're voting to renew the existing capital projects levy. So, we're not asking a new levy. We're not asking for more money. Uh, just try to sustain what we had in the past. So, you can vote on or before November 4th. Uh, the first voting opportunity is as early as September 19th. We will have voting stations here in the district office and they'll be open from 8 to 4 Monday through Friday. And then you can vote early by mail and uh if you go to isd194.org/voting-info you can get the details on how to do that. And then finally on November 4th we will have all of our polling stations uh operational from 7 a.m. to 8:00 pm and uh ask that you go there to vote in person.