The biggest difference is we are now really confronted with low fertility that is the number of children a woman has to the end of childbearing and replacement is 2.11. Minnesota was at 1.73 in 2023 which is a little higher than the US at 1.62.

Historically your enrollment growth has been driven by K5... since 201920 only 23% of your growth is in K5 and that has in my opinion implications for the future that it is a it's a harbinger of slower enrollment ment growth because every growing district that I've ever worked with, their enrollment growth is always driven by elementary.

Students from new housing units do not automatically translate into additional students.

I can I can list many districts in the untold pain when they have now surplus buildings in various locations. You have been very fortunate in that it's population has been willing to shift from one elementary school or one school to another with out major catastrophe.

It seems like the projections are that we are still going to get more students and we are running out of room currently. So I guess you know if we're looking out five and 10 years does where does that leave us? I mean we still have to build for the increase and then at some point yes we might have to either hope that we can fill the space with open enrollment or I mean there will be buildings closing I guess how do we balance having enough space for you know in the next 5 to 10 years with not overbuilding.

I will be very bold and say you can manage your enrollment. I see you as so desirable that you open up open enrollment and you can fill however many seats you want. That's it's the question of whether you're you know of whether your community wants to build buildings that non-residents primarily use.

The surveys I've seen suggest the movement is more tied to values than it is per se to class size.

Of note, the only one that has elected to switch by running their next two odd-year elections as a three-year term is Richfield. All the rest have followed with the adding of one-year term to the current boards.

It's a little polarizing, one mistake of opening an envelope, sending it to the wrong place, saying the wrong thing to voters tends to end up in the news and I kind of consider one of my top jobs keeping us out of the public eye.

I think in my experience on the 12 years on the school board that this has that this was a that this was a pillar of the oddyear elections were a pillar of of what we do and and certainly we all know everything changed in 2021 in terms of the role of partisanship in our schoolboard elections.

I would maybe just add too that I think cost is increasingly a variable that we should consider. I don't know that it needs to be the thing or the one variable that would drive it.

If we don't do it ourselves, how can we expect that of our teachers and our principles and everybody who's in our classrooms? So that's something that I think there might be a cost to to having that and there might be a cost to, you know, even if it gets a little messy sometimes during elections, at least there is a fighting chance of us demonstrating a commitment to that.

5% in 2015 2017 and I don't know how much it was in 1921 23 25%. 5% voters out of 40,000 plus voted for two ele during two elections. That does not seem to be representative of of you know voters that that elect board members.