Ready? Good evening. The time is now 7:01. The Visetta Public Schools Board of Education regular meeting for July 14th, 2025 will please come to order. Will the clerk please call the role? Heidi Kedar here. Sheila Prior here. Sarah Johansson is absent. Harris Mende here. Valentina Ays here. Dan Janestra here. Milan Sahony present. Chase Anderson here. Thank you. We have a quorum. Please rise to recite the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. If you wish to speak during the audience opportunity to address the board, please fill out a form placed in the back of the room and hand it over to our district admin assistant, Amy, sitting to my right. All right, the first item on our agenda is the approval of the agenda and the consent agenda items. Consent agenda items are considered routine in nature and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a board member or a citizen so requests in which event the item will be removed as a consent agenda item and addressed the consent agend agenda items are listed in the materials. The recommended action is to approve the agenda and the consent agenda items. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Moved and seconded. Will the clerk please take a roll call vote? Sheila Prior. Yes. Heidi Kedar. Yes. Valentina Ays. Yes. Dan Janestra. Yes. Sarah Johansson is absent. Harris Bend. Yes. Milan Sahonyi. Yes. We have an agenda. Thank you, Sheila. The next item on the agenda is recognitions. In the spirit of inclusion, board members who agreed to opt in take turns to go to the podium. Director Jinestra will join Dr. Anderson at the podium this evening. Good evening everybody and welcome to our school board meeting. My name is Chase Anderson and it's my honor to convene the recognitions portion of our school board and uh meetings and we have uh two recognitions this evening. Uh in a little bit we're going to be having a presentation from Jenny Eert from our community ed department and uh we're also recognizing some team members from uh the community ed department at this point as well. So, uh, before I read the script that's been, uh, put together in recognition of our three employees of the month, I would like to invite these folks to please come forward. And they are our welcome center specialist, Judy Aou, and Jonathan Blight and Shirley Ross. Please come forward so you can stand up here while I read this nice script on your behalf. Welcome and thank you for being here and congratulations. And I would like to share the following. The community ed team is very proud to honor and recognize the welcome center team. These three individuals that I just called up here as the July employees of the month. Less than a year ago, we set out to reimagine our district's welcome center. This was a major initiative with the goal of ensuring a warm, efficient, and super family-friendly location for every single new and returning student and their amazing families. What this team has accomplished in such a short time is remarkable. From the outset, the team considered the best location to ensure the welcome center at the district service center is more than a place of transaction, but a space of comfort and privacy. They reconfigured the conference room with child-friendly furniture, toys, and activities and swapped entry area furniture in both the common area and created a family meeting room to provide a more inviting atmosphere. When staff, visitors, and families walk in, they are immediately greeted by a welcome center staff member at the district service center front desk, ready to provide enrollment support. This thoughtful approach immediately sets a positive tone for families entering our district. Our district's new welcome center specialist, Judy, was hired in August of 2024. With her leadership and expertise, the team has been engaged in ongoing training with our tech and finance teams while also seeking opportunities to learn and grow from other school districts. The commitment to continuous improvement ensures that they are always equipped with the best knowledge to best serve our community. At the heart of our revisioning was customer service. Through extensive listening and learning, including consultant support, leadership listening sessions, and actively incorporating customer feedback into their daily work, the team has gained invaluable insights. Their adoption of the fresh service ticketing system in close partnership with our tech department has streamlined email responses, ensuring consistent highquality service, balanced workloads, and invaluable data tracking. They reinforce our Weisetta public schools core values and in of integrity and respect into their daily interactions, including reviewing policies and practices, revising documents in multiple languages, and simplifying forms. The welcome center has fostered a critical partnership with our family liaison who now regularly join weekly team meetings and provide invaluable on-site and home visit support, including in-person enrollment support for kindergarten night. The family liaison shared the following. Weisetta is committed to ensuring that all students feel a sense of belonging. The welcome center is the first interaction new families have when enrolling in our district. We have witnessed and heard from families that Judy, Jonathan, and Shirley provide a warm welcome. They greet each family with a sincere smile. They take the time to answer every question, no matter how big or how small. They thank families for choosing Weisetta and enrolling in our schools and wish them a good school year. They never hesitate to help co-workers and our great partners by sharing helpful information, always with a smile. We love working alongside the Welcome Center team. The team recognizes that families are our cherished customers. They provide a positive experience for new and returning families, helping to facilitate a warm handoff to the students school. The team remains in regular contact with school principles and administrative professionals, providing consistent updates on enrollment activities and the materials. the welcome center is sending out to families. Their ongoing efforts to meet with school staff and gather feedback from principles and administrative professionals demonstrate their commitment to seamless coordination across the district. The team understands that collaboration is key as everyone is impacted by enrollment and they believe working across our district is essential to providing the best experience for our families. While the full website redesign is in progress, the team has already made minor updates to the content and all the enrollment forms for clarity and simplicity. This includes updating and simplifying paper forms to enhance clarity and define acronyms. Working closely with communications, they developed new welcome center folders filled with essential materials like academic calendars, educational benefits flyers, and community ed cataloges with digital versions linked to enrollment confirmation emails. Finally, they have worked in partnership with other departments to make process and procedure improvements and to create a foundation for future efficiencies. This was especially important considering the 202526 attendance area adjustments as they engaged with family to notify them of the changes. The team has also worked collaboratively with our tech team to assess Skyward for automation opportunities, setting up automated emails and creating reports for data updates. Recently, a colleague reached out and shared, "I just want to let you know how impressed I am with the changes that have been happening at the welcome center. The new staff are truly welcoming and there is such a positive vibe as you enter the building. Leading transition and change always comes with challenges. I appreciate the effort that they put into helping our district live out our mission of serving each and every. The Welcome Center team has met and exceeded expectations with passion, professionalism, and unwavering commitment to our families. The work has reinforced and strengthened our efforts to ensure welcoming, efficient, and supportive entry point into the Weisetta public schools community. We're so grateful to the Welcome Center team for their exceptional dedication and outstanding achievements over the past year. Thank you for making such a profound difference on the lives of our students and families. A round of applause. That was quite a long nice list of very positive things. So, thank you for being here. Judy, I don't know if you wanted to make a few comments andor Shirley and Jonathan. Sometimes winging it is the best way to do it. Or you can respectfully decline if you wish. I can see it. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. The mic is yours. Oh, thank you so much. Hello everyone. My name is Judy. I serve as the welcome center specialist. Um, we are just so grateful for all the support that we've gotten. Our team is brand spanking new. So, lots of learning going on with our department. We're super grateful for Jenny's leadership, but also super grateful for all the collaboration we have across district. We could not do this without our principles, our directors, and various departments and people just being willing to say, "Hey, here's my idea of how I better support students or here's what we've seen or here's what's working or here's what needs to be adapted." So our goal moving forward is to continue that collaboration, continue to build relationships across our district because ultimately anything we can do to better support our students and our families as they come in and give them that really good support to have that relationship with our buildings and whoever they might interact with is something that we want to be a part of. So thank you [Applause] together. Thanks. Thank you again so much for being here and congratulations uh for work well done. Um the only other recognition we have this evening is it's our tradition at each board meeting to uh read the names of those individuals since the last board meeting who have indicated their intent to uh retire. And we have one on that list tonight. I do not see this person here, but we would like to recognize and thank Demay De. Rocher, who's been an administrative professional at the district service center for 15 years. Dé, congratulations and thank you. So, we'll give her a round of applause. And that concludes our recognitions. Thank you so much. Congratulations to the honores and thank you Dr. Anderson and thank you Dan. All right, moving on. Community ed director Jenny Eert will now present community ed goals for fiscal year 2025 26. Jenny Good evening, school board and Dr. Anderson. Uh we are so excited to have an opportunity to share some information about community ed tonight and celebrate the good work of our team. We're very very proud to um recognize our welcome center team and the work that they've been doing. And so we thank you for celebrating them as our employees of the month here in July. So as we get started here today, um I want to start by just saying a little bit about community ed. I know our board is familiar with this, but for the folks that might be watching from home, um very excited to tune in tonight. Just a little bit about community ed. So, we are unique to Minnesota in that um there is actually state funding to provide resources to our community through the departments such as community ed. Um this happens in school districts all across Minnesota. Here in Wisetta, we have about 300 full and part-time staff in our department that do the work that's laid out in the wheel here in the image. a wide variety of opportunities that we take to really be of service and help our community grow and thrive and learn. And this is for people of all ages, babies up through our senior citizens in our community. We are located in all of our school buildings to do this work because we really want to focus on how do we make this accessible to our community and bring bringing it out to our school buildings is one way to do that. Uh we're also proud to say that we oversee the Wisetta Early Learning School. This is where learning starts here in our district and um that is an important part of what we do here in community ed. As Judy mentioned in her speech, we also focus on relationships and making connections. That's not just in our welcome center, that's in all the work that we do. Briefly, our funding is um a separate fund from the general fund. It's called the community services fund, fund 4. Our programs are supported primarily through fee generation. This year, we're projecting over $16 million in revenue for community ed with about 80% of that coming through program fees. The other 20% is state funding and local levy through a variety of different programs. Again, our work is really focused on service to our community, affordability, and sustainability. And now I want to take an opportunity to introduce the people who are next to me. So part of my leadership team here, this is Michelle Bador. Let you introduce yourself. Thank you. Well, thanks for having us here tonight. I'm Michelle Bador. I'm the director of early learning school and I supervise early childhood family education, full impart preschool, early childhood screening, connect at three outreach, and early childhood special education. So I'm 50% community ed and 50% special ed. My name is Hillilary Dish. My title is the out of schooltime youth coordinator and what that kind of means is I oversee everything that happens outside of the school day. So Wise a Kids childcare, our volunteer club out of the high school, our youth classes and camps and our facility rentals fall under my umbrella. Also rounding out our leadership team is Rachel Hicks, who's our manager of Wise Kids, uh, who does a lot of support for our Wisetta Kids programming, and then Zach Nelson, who's our manager of communications, doing all things marketing and communications for community ed, as well as supporting our partnership work such as Partners for Healthy Kids and our district liaison group. Um, I just want to take a moment to thank these amazing people who are next to me and my leadership team. The amazing work that I get to share about in these upcoming slides is really due to the wonderful leadership of this group. Their creativity, their dedication, and their service is really what makes this all possible. So, we're going to go through a handful of slides that highlight um programmatically some results for the year and then after that we're going to talk about some of the goals results specifically for um our programs. Uh want to start with the welcome center. You've heard a lot of really good things as part of our employee of the month uh recognition, but wanted to highlight again, we have three new members that joined our team and spent the whole year focusing on how do we really dive into customer service and really listen and improve the work that we do to welcome our families into our district. This was in response to Dr. Anderson's goal around reinvisioning the welcome center and our team jumped in head first and made a lot of amazing accomplishments as you learned about. Some of those are listed here as Dr. Anderson mentioned in that recognition um implementing fresh service to improve email efficiency, job forms to streamline processes, a lot of communication out to our families through letters for the attendance boundaries as well as a lot of emails around that. Really focusing on the spaces that families are entering. Our our district service center has a wonderful space now that families can come and partake in asking questions and registering within the district. Um, for those people watching, you should come in and check it out. Come say hello. We'd love to see you there. And, um, our team will continue this work. This is, you know, one year of work so far, but there's a lot of really wonderful ideas coming out of this team, a lot of baseline data that we've been collecting for this year. So, we're excited to bring that back for you all next year as we do more learning and growing. Additionally, uh, we have some great results from a data standpoint around our classes. Our adult classes continue to grow. This is an area that can be a little bit challenging for community ed departments. Often adults focus on um providing resources and opportunities for their children and they tend to put themselves second after that. So, we're happy to see that we are engaging in our community in different ways offering almost 430 different classes this past year with 3,500 plus enrollments. Going to let Hillary talk a little bit about our youth classes. Yeah, definitely. So from our youth class perspective, um we've had over a thousand youth classes offered with 70 or 7,000 registrations. Um and jumping to Wise Out of Kids, you can see that um we had 1,200 K5 students enrolled in before and after school and non-school day programs uh for school the school year last year, receiving over 400,000 individual hours of care. We're very busy this summer. We currently have um 1,253 rising first through sixth graders attending summer uh care with us in Weisetta Kids. And so far that's over 100,000 hours that we're providing of care. And we're having a lot of fun doing it. On the volunteer side of things, we have our literacy volunteers, which are adults from our community that come in and provide uh literacy support within our classrooms. We had 153 community volunteers this year serving 306 elementary students. Um this is an area where we always get really great feedback from parents and teachers from students and most importantly from our community members who value that opportunity to be in our classrooms and connect and um be part of our school community. And in the volunteer club this year, we have uh 976 high school students that um partaked in the volunteer club over the course of the year with over 1,200 projects and almost 12,000 hours of service um with those students in the volunteer club. So I know that they had um some new activities that they were implementing this year along with some um tried and true ones that they always do, but they had a really successful year in the volunteer club. I'll editorialize. They're just the best. It's a wonderful group of students and um whenever I'm out in the community, it's the one thing that comes up consistently is just how wonderful it is to have these great students from our high school giving back to our community in amazing ways. And as we transition to facilities, um this year in our facility rental program, we had about 115 user groups or individuals rent our space. Um that's about 113,000 rental hours. Um, we did a survey within the last year just checking in on our um, renters to see how their experience was and 93% of renters shared that they would use our facilities again in the future. And 92 of them shared that our team provided them with excellent customer service, whether it be how they received um, the rental or the on-site support that they received um, when they were partaking in their rental. So, that was a a great thing to find out on the partnership side of things. Um, I appreciate Zach Nelson's leadership in these particular areas. The Partners for Healthy Kids program, which is the Family Services Collaborative for our school district, uh, really focuses on how do we bring together a variety of members of our community and community organizations and support our students in our in our in our district along the way. Um, through that group, we were able to award uh $445,000 worth of grants to 22 different grantees. that all of that funding is to support students and children within our community. So that's an amazing impact doing a wide variety of things. Um also we have the district liaison which is members of our PTAs and PTO's that come together on a regular basis. There's 34 members. We had nine meetings and this is really focused on listening and learning. I know our school board gets to be part of that as well and it's a really important piece of what we do in community ed to really keep our ear to the ground on how do we continue to support and grow and learn and do better. Uh lastly, interfaith outreach is another partnership that I want to highlight particularly. Uh they have done an amazing job supporting the students in our community. They fundra uh for great opportunity scholarships and provide opportunities for students. So within community ed, 264 children received 113,000 plus dollars in scholarship funding this last year. Uh a lot of that went to or about half of it went to driver's ed scholarships which is a really important piece to provide our our youth with um opportunities to have transportation which that can be a barrier for a lot of our students. So we are extremely grateful for that ongoing support from interfaith outreach. They also provide caring for kids scholarship for 10 preschoolers this year. I think we just checked recently that's up to 18 for next year. and they also supplied school supplies for 465 K12 students this past year. So, an amazing amount of support that's coming out of IOCP for the students in our community and we are extremely grateful. Okay, I'm up next. So, we have about 121 um rising K's coming to the early learning school this summer and learning to uh seek some independence and get ready for kindergarten. So, they're doing a great job separating from mom at the door and not being walked in and carrying all their own belongings. It's a big job when you're that little, but they're doing great. Um, this past school year we had 683 preschoolers, 485 came to our partday program and 198 at our nine elementary sites and those were our older kids, our fours and fives. We had 193 families attend ECF classes weekly. We screened 808 kids and we had 119 new families join our connect at three community. Um, our outreach staff goes weekly into parks, um, apartment complexes, libraries, events, one-on-one support, navigating school, navigating early childhood. It's too many things to count, but they do a great job. They just did park play last week and they were huddled under somebody's balcony because it started to rain while they were there. So they just adapt and do the things and the families love it. So that's a little bit about um the numbers and the details of who we supported this past year. And now I want to talk a little bit about the goals and the and the work behind all of that. So, as we kicked off last fiscal year, our leadership team got together and really focused on what are the challenges, the opportunities, and the priorities that we needed to be thinking about while taking in our district's strategic directions and equity commitment to think about what does our priority work need to be for this this past year. So, we came up with two goals as a team. The first was to deepen community engagement, belonging, connectedness for student, staff, and community. And the second was to retain and develop district talent across all levels. From there, our broader team of specialists and managers kind of plotted out similar questions about challenges, opportunities, and priorities and came up with a list of objectives that they wanted to accomplish. Um, and each of our our main program areas that you saw on the wheel then came up with specific goals for themselves within that. And they focused on um those areas that are listed on the slide. So really families with children feeling connected, welcome and embraced by our district, fostering and growing staff connections, enhancing the student experience, and then some really important work that our early learning school did around their site growth plan, which Michelle will tell you a little bit more about as well. And then our second goal was to retain and develop district talent across all levels. As you heard from Hillary, we continue to grow in our programs. Um, we are service-based. So when we grow for students, that means we're growing in staff and we want to have the best staff to offer these programs and we want to be able to recruit and retain them and support them through that process. So that's what goal two was all about. So we uh Dr. Anderson had the great pleasure of getting my six-page report of all the details. Um we also provided I think it was an hour and a half plus presentation for our community at advisory council this spring diving into the um every single one of the different areas that we focused on. But for you all, we'll just give you the four slide highlight. Uh so some key things that we wanted to share. And so one of the focus areas was engaging community through parent and caregiver classes. We received a grant through partners for healthy kids to do that. We also received some funding from our district liaison committee. And with those we offered 15 free sessions um on 10 different topics for parents and caregivers throughout our community. 893 people attended. Feedback was amazing. our parents want more and we were able to secure additional grant funding and support from district leaison to continue and grow that for the coming year. We also focused on expanding outreach for our incoming kindergarteners. Michelle talked a little bit about summer rising KS. Last summer was our first year doing this where we pulled out our incoming KS from Moetta kids to really give them a specific experience to help them kind of kickstart into the coming fall. Um we do that the early learning school 120 plus kiddo as part of that. We also offered jump start for K which is a summer camps also funded by partners for healthy kids which is free for all of our incoming K to again get that experience of what it means to come to school, find the gym, find the lunchroom, find where to hang up your backpack and all those things that seem small but are really important when it's new to you. Um, it can be a great comfort to our families as well to know that kids get the opportunity to practice these pieces. We do all this also in close partnership with our communications family leaison and our welcome center team. Really focusing on how do we find our families? How do we find them sooner? How do we connect with them and listen and kind of get them the information that they need and really help them feel supported as they get into kindergarten. Uh, the third item there is reinvisioning the welcome center. I won't say any more about that as we we talked a lot about that already tonight, but just am really grateful for the talent of that team, the dedication to really u be focused on our families and how do we do what's best for them and really welcome them into our district. The last item I wanted to note again was that reduction of barriers to participation. um interfaith outreach providing that scholarship funding is really um an opportunity for students who wouldn't otherwise maybe be able to participate in some of our programming to be able to attend after school classes to attend camps to go to driver's ed. We wouldn't be able to distribute that funds without the support of our family liaison and our family partnership leads. Our team work really closely to reach out to them probably on a weekly basis to say, "Hey, here's what's coming up. Do you know any kiddos that would be interested in this?" and help make those connections so that we're getting people signed up and using the grant funds efficiently, which happened really well this year. So, I can dive in here a little bit to our next um part of the goals. So, one of um the goals that my team especially in Wise Kids focused on was establish establishing a professional learning PLC model um within our site manager team. Um, so I think that this is the first kind of department besides teachers that has really dove into this with teaching learning was a great partner and really trained us on what a PLC is and what it means to be a PLC and what does it look like? Um, and we spent most of the year um doing that training and then really diving into um how can we best develop our leadership skills so that we are benefiting um the students across the program. So that was a really really fun um goal. We are going to continue with that goal as we dive into year two. Um I think we learned a lot and I think we'll um we'll just gain even more knowledge as we continue to focus on being APLC within that group. Um and in alignment with that, our second goal was system improvements to the hiring process. Um within community, but more specifically Wise Out of Kids, we have focused on um consulting with Radar Talent Solutions. And Radar is a company that was actually started by a parent who could not get into his school age, his children could not get into their school age care program in their own district. And so he decided that he was going to branch off and start a um employment recruitment company to recruit really specific um staff in school age care. And um they have been really great to work with. They um do a lot of the back-end work. So they do a lot of the marketing and a lot of the um setting up of the interviews um and then the reference checks. They do all that um for us. so that we can really focus on getting the staff hired and getting them trained to the um high quality that we want them to be. Um and along with that, we've really worked to develop our um interview processes. We've done some behavior-based interviewing and really developed our questions to focus on um the high-quality staff that we want to employ. And with that, then we've really spent a lot of time this year um evaluating our new hire orientation and our induction process to ensure that we're giving staff what they need in order to be successful in their roles. With that, I'm going to hand it off to Michelle then to get some highlights on the Early Learning School. Thank you, Jenny. So, um, some things that we've been doing to remove barriers. We applied for and received voluntary prek funding. We scholarship to 20 kids. Woohoo. Very excited about that. We gave them the option of transportation. They came a regular school day. It went fantastic. We were really happy about that. We asked for a little bit of expansion. We got told no, but we still retain our 20 seats, so we're happy about that. Um, all of our teachers went through and completed the letters training. We got uh statemandated to do that. But I can't tell you how amazing they have been and taking the information they learned and really thinking about how they're going to change their teaching for next year and what things are going to look different. So they're focusing on that language and literacy through their PLC, through monthly data collection, all things literacy are super important. So that's that one. And then we are always looking at the social emotional because unless you're well regulated and understanding your emotional cues, it's hard to pay attention. So we've been working on that in our PLC's, our monthly data collection, and then every Friday we have a staff newsletter. So, we're talk uh jockeying between language literacy and social emotional lessons or suggestions in those newsletters. The last item I want to highlight is around again that retaining and developing district talent across all levels. Um within community ed within our team, I think it's really important to continuously focus on professional learning. we have hard work that we need to be continually listening and growing and learning and changing and and that doesn't happen without really um intentional professional development. So our team or kind of our manager team we call it is about 20 people. Each of them made professional learning plans this year as part of that learning that they engaged in. They came back and reported back to our group and shared their learning um so that all of us could be better at those various topics that they were being um participating in. And we also really focus on how do we um engage in in some broader learning as well. So listed up above is some of the um various trainings that our staff participated in like cognitive coaching. MCA which is our Minnesota community ed association provides some various trainings letters as Michelle talked about um engaging our well-being adviserss within the district within our manager meetings. Uh there was a recent compass MTSS conference that Hillary and I were at and some of our our team trauma care informed care and learn which is kind of the parent company of all community ed across the nation. They have a variety of online opportunities that our staff participated in. Um this is just a short list actually of all the different pieces. People were worked hard to find free opportunities and to share their learning and to um really dive into what was interesting to them but to also grow their skill set. and I'm excited for what that means for our community as we look to continue to um do better at what we offer and meet our community's needs in new and different ways. So with that, I want to say thank you. I want to thank my team here again for joining me. I am surrounded by amazing leaders at all levels within our department, 300 people that are doing really great work. I can present these things because of that team and because of the collaboration that happens across our various departments. So, I want to say thank you to all the people who helped make that happen and we are so excited to continue serving our community this year. Any questions from the board? Thank you, Jenny, and thank you team. It's always good to hear from you and listen to all the good things you guys are doing. So, any questions? Uh, Sheila. Hey everyone. Um, thank you for coming and um, presenting that to us. It's it's always a good reminder of how lucky we are to be in this community. Um I mean you guys do great work and just having these community partners. Um you know that help out so much. We're just extremely grateful. Um and I hear all the time from the community how much they love you know so all these programs. So much so that for example why kids we never have enough room for everyone who wants to participate. Um, can you tell us a little more about the limiting factors there? Why we can't, you know, accommodate everybody who wants to be in Wise Out of Kids? Yeah, I mean staffing I think is probably the the biggest barrier as I spoke about. We are consulting with the radar on talent solution and so we were able to grow last year 200 kids from um the start of the school year through the end of the school year. So we are making movement off of that pending list. So that's really um a good thing. Um as we continue to hire though, we also want to make sure that our staff are trained accordingly, right? So as we continue to bring those staff on board, it's really important that we still provide a high quality experience for all the students in the program. And so ensuring that we bring staff on board, we train them um correctly and making sure that they have the abilities to um provide the best high quality experience is is really important to us. So I do foresee us continuing to grow in small increments as the as years go on or months go on. Um but it will be that probably slow just because we ensure we want to ensure those other factors are being taken into account as we grow. Yeah, I would add we continue we will continue to contract with Radar to um help us with that staffing component of it. We're engaging in some new professional learning opportunities too so that we can have a high quality experience as Hillary talked about and then we will need to look at spaces within our schools too as um that will become tighter as we put more and more kids into our program. We have been growing very very quickly. So we want to make sure that we're not growing too fast so that we still have a safe and quality high quality program. But we the short answer is we're working on it. Thank you so much for being here. Um it's always special to hear your presentation and really get a strong understanding of what all you do to serve our community. It's incredible work. It's something that helps make Minnesota. Um it makes Wisetta the wonderful place it is. So, um, from all the, you know, support for our driver's ed students, the grants that you offer, you know, and making kids more comfortable and maybe some less than familiar surroundings so they can adjust well, just it all means a lot and it, um, serves our community well. So, thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. Thank you all for coming here. A few questions. Um, there was mention of scholarship funding on several slides, whether it is IOPC or voluntary prek funding. What is that? how the process work works. Yeah, we work with a to Dan's point a wide variety of partners um to engage in scholarship opportunities whenever possible. So, uh great expectations or great opportunities, excuse me, is one of those through interfaith outreach. They do the fundraising. They grant us the funding that we can then provide out tou to students within our district. In early ed, we have even more scholarship opportunities. Some of them are through the state like the voluntary prek that we talked about. We receive school readiness funds through the state. Pathways one and two. Caring for kids also counts for interfaith outreach. What am I forgetting? Henipin County childcare assistance. Feel like there's one more. We we try to be real scrappy and find find opportunities whenever we can. So is there any recommendation any guard rails that you would want to call out for the community? How do we keep an eye on such opportunities and bring those to you? Yeah. When you think of Yeah. Yeah. So on the wheel, we have partnerships as one of our wedge for for that exact reason. Like we want to be the place within the district and I think that was Dr. Anderson vision a little bit when I was hired seven plus years ago is to think about community being a place where the people can connect from the community within the district and find a way to to give and to support. And so when people have opportunities um such as scholarships if they want to be part of that they can certainly reach out to me and my team will work through sometimes it can be a little bit of a dance right schools have a lot of rules as we should and so we help to kind of navigate and put the pieces together to make it work whenever possible and then when you look at the programs right so again I'll take an example if somebody wants to offer cyber security course for students right how do they approach or are Are there any again guardrails and what are the timelines like they should talk about it in summer, in spring, in winter like what what would be your suggestion? So we take proposals for youth classes and adult classes year round. There are different timelines that are listed on our website for each of the different cataloges. You might be familiar. You get them in your in your mailbox. Um and so there's timelines associated with each of those, but it's a pretty simple Google form that you fill out. talk about the topic, what you're interested in, what days you might be available, and then our staff will reach out and do more learning, talk you through what it looks like. Some people volunteer, some people get paid. We just kind of work through what works well for them and try and tie it to you with what we're seeing. Okay, sounds good. And my favorite question to you that I ask always so is there any challenge anything given an option you would say hey this is I would like to see community right and what what would be your ask I'm going to let I'm going to let Michelle and Hillary jump in on this I'll go first so I I think we see a really high demand Jenny could probably tell you but I think there's 69 kids wait on the wait list for our four-year-old program at the elementary sites and that's just a space issue. So last year as an example we had three classrooms at Kimberly Lane. Next year we have one we are we'll take a extra classroom anywhere there is one we can fill it. So that for me is the biggest that parents keep saying we want full day at the elementary sites and we don't have any classrooms. I think um from my perspective it's just yeah helping to support the ever growing needs. Um we like Jenny talked a lot about is we really value um staying um in alignment with what our customers are wanting and needing and so um and we're growing very very fast and have been for quite a few years. So, I think just the ongoing support of helping us to ensure that we're meeting those the needs of our community, um space, staffing, you know, um training, all of those pieces are really really um important when it comes to ensuring that we're providing high quality care. So, just the continued support of all the departments in our district, I feel like is very helpful. Thank you. I I would build on that just to say that's such a good point, right? We don't do this work alone. We do it in partnership with all the different departments, buildings, and grounds. We couldn't do this without them. Our finance team, our HR team, our communications tech, everybody um really is what makes this possible. And so um yeah, we we're grateful for that support and grateful for the community support of our district because that's how we're able to do this. Sounds good. Thank you. Thank you. Uh I already repeated uh maybe I'll be repeating what I said last year. Obviously I learned from peppermint fence about you and at the time it was like 5 minutes you lost your first ch first choice so uh you were so popular but from this presentation I would like to tell that it's very visible that you're working together very well and that you are supporting each other um that's uh nice to see one more question I would like to ask I was again it's for me it was learning curve I was amazed by the culture sure that if there are families who can't afford or if there are some hardships that uh things were available. Uh but hardship can be not only at low income level because sometimes to be honest nowadays uh some families receive additional um support from other entities. My question is where areas some families who might be on a paper um better to do but they might uh face hardship like medical bills like something unexpected. How do you knowing that you already have a waiting list and all? How do you make that choice between um you know uh lowincome families or families who might be um for judgment uh appearing as if uh we are well to do but none of us um uh how you call it none of us are shield from something what can happen in your life and I would like also for families uh who experience that kind of situation to know that there is where is somebody thinking about them? Yeah, I'm going to start and then hand it off to Michelle. Um we absolutely see that there might be a loss of a job or as you mentioned a medical um emergency or something that's happened that impacts families. So when possible when we have the flexibility, we do try and make the scholarship processes really um open-ended and flexible. We try not to ask too many questions and make it really easy for families because things do happen. Um, and we don't want that to be a barrier, right, to to having to be able to be part of the work or part of the different programmings that we have to offer. There are times though when there's funding tied to the government and they're going to make us ask more questions. They're going to require different funding guidelines and so we do our best to help families navigate where we have flexibility and where we don't have flexibility. Want to talk? Yeah, I would say for for early learning especially, we have a scholarship process that we believe is um open-ended enough that we can help families. We have Jenny listed them all, but we have VPK, we have Pathway One, Pathway 2, school readiness. Some of those have more flexibility in them and we can kind of pick and choose which one fits the family the best. And so when a family fills out a scholarship form, they will meet with one of our outreach team members or one of our teachers and really talk about that. And we don't make any decisions on scholarship until we've had that meeting with them to determine what kind of class are they looking for for their child first of all and then what are those things that we need to consider when we're looking at scholarships. And we give anywhere from a 20% scholarship all the way up to 100% scholarship. And that's not just based on income. It's based on a lot of different factors that the family shares with us. So it could be all of those things that you listed. So that's how it works in early learning. And we're lucky that we have this especially school readiness funding is a little bit more flexible where we can just say there's an identified need that we feel is important. I'm very glad to hear about this because uh we just learned for example from swim team even though we're not there we still get emails that one family got hardship and I was wow um looks like people who are within that are trying to help that family. I myself experienced hardship and it was amazing if one or two persons showed up at your door. I I know what does it mean when I during that situation and I really appreciate that one. Uh one more compliment uh looks like I need to use your classes more but even looking for catalog you are changing things are changing demand is changing you are changing that one is very complimentary to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, first of all, thank you for coming tonight. Community Ed Night is always such a fun time. Um, my family uses your services and I know I tell you this all the time all the way from like, you know, my after school programming to summertime to when I got to take um one of my favorite experiences was getting to take a Tai Chi class with my mom. Super fun. So, it's it really runs the gamut of everybody in our community and that's I'm so appreciative of that and all the work and effort you put into that. Um, what I didn't see and I can't remember if you are the ones who run this is kindergarten bus night. Is that also happening this year? Yes. Yes. We're excited to have the bus ride and information night coming up in August. It's the first Thursday. Um, families will all be receiving invitations if they haven't already, uh, to come and join us at the high school, ride the bus, uh, meet with, I think just about every department in the school has a table there, as well as each of our different nine elementary school buildings. So, it's a great way to again dip your toe in the water and do some learning and get ready for kindergarten. We'll see you there. All right. Okay. Thank you again. I have two questions. Basic finance. If you do not know the answers, that's okay. Maybe we can ask uh Jack or somebody else from finance. But you mentioned that you get 80% of the revenues from program fees, 20% from state and local collections. Right now, is that ratio predetermined or, you know, is it the same for all districts? How how is how is that figured out? Yeah, it varies by each district depending on what you might qualify for. So, um, for example, the 20% that we get in funding from the state, some of that is determined by the number of people in your community. So, we get it per individual person within our community. There's a rate associated with that. For early childhood family ed, it's the same thing. Number of zero to four year olds, 5-year-olds within our community. There's a rate that we get of funding particular to that. Um, some of the things like school readiness that we talked about are based on needs within your community. So it can economic factors economic factors. So that can really vary for a district that maybe has higher free and reduced lunch numbers. They might get additional funding that um we're not eligible for currently. Uh and some of it's just based on demand for programming. We're really fortunate to have a community that um wants to participate in our programs, is able to pay. We have partners who are able to support with scholarships. So that that funding balance really can shift from district to district. Um, we consistently have been at that 75 to 80% during the years that I've been here. Um, and I anticipate it'll probably continue around that amount. Okay, good. Thank you. The other question I have is I don't know if it's the third or fourth slide where you had the number of adult classes 429 and I forget the number of attendees. If you can go back to that slide. I don't know that I have Oh, there we go. There it is. Thank you, Amy. Yes. M so 429 adult classes offering offered with 3 3587 registrations 1,32 youth classes offered with 7,364 registration. So quick math adult classes class size okay is just under nine. The youth classes class size is just over seven. With such a small class size that probably means that you are hiring a lot of employees right to teach those classes. And so your costs are very high as well although your revenues are high but you know that's that's I think it's good class size small is always good but but how do you manage that balance between expense versus income? Yeah, we take there are a lot of factors that come into play because not all classes um are taught by a paid instructor and some instructors might charge $5 per participant. Some might charge more. So it's a whole wide range of ways that we get to kind of balance the budget and figure out how to make classes run. And so we take many factors into consideration. And so if it's a free class, for example, sometimes the instructor just really wants to share their knowledge and they'll run it with five people. And then we have other classes where we'll pay for a kind of a higher named speaker to come in and we'll have a 100 plus people at those. So it really there's a wide range of participation. So that's a totally different model than you know the general fund or you know the 01 fund similar to basically parks and wreck in a city right city of Plymouth also does the same thing you know I offer my services to teach a class somewhere I don't charge them and so basically I'm I'm available for free so but so good thank you thank you for that answer um I don't have any other questions anybody else uh has a question thank you again and thank you again for coming and know impressing us every every time every time more than the previous time. So, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, Amy, do we have any speakers public? No, no speakers. Okay, so we will skip the audience opportunity to address the board. There are no speakers who want to speak tonight. And so the next item on the agenda is administrative reports and recommendations. And so this is an election year for the school board. And so first the district election clerk Amy G will recommend a resolution establishing dates for filing affidavits of candidacy. Are you is Amy going to do that or? Yes. Yes. At this time I'll turn that over to Amy if you would please. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Members of the school board, uh this evening, I'm requesting that we approve the general election that is going to be held on Tuesday, November 4th. Um at this election, there will be three board member seats up for election with a term of three years. Again, this is uh following last month's vote to switch to even years. So, there will be three seats available for three-year term. And uh as set by Minnesota statute, the period for filing of the affidavit of candidacy for a schoolboard election begins on July 29th and closes on August 12th. Um, just for our listening audience and anyone interested that might watch this later, um, affidavit for candidacy can be will be available on the Secretary of State's website, also be available on the Weisetta Public Schools website for election and um, can be picked up and turned in at the district service center. The address is 1330512th Avenue North. And it's during our business hours, 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with the exception of August 12th. will be open until 5:00 p.m. to accept affidavit of candacey for that day. The recommended action is before you. Okay. Thank you, Amy. Um colleagues, the recommended action is to adopt the resolution establishing the dates for filing affidavits of candidacy for the November 2025 election. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. And I wave second reading. A second. Thank you. Uh is there a discussion? If not, I do have a question for you, Amy. Um, filing deadline is August 12th at 5:00 p.m. Uh, typically there is an additional time where those who have filed can withdraw. That's correct. So that their name does not appear on the ballot. Do you can you tell us what That's correct. That would be 48 hours. So by August 14th, I will need to know. 14th. Yes. by 5:00 p.m. That's no 400 p.m. I've not staying late that day. Sorry, folks. But so that is 7:30 to 4 on the 13th and the 14th. Correct. And that can be done both in person and via phone call. Okay, sounds good. Thank you. All right, no other questions. Uh again, the recommended action is to adopt the resolution establishing the dates for filing affidavits of candidacy for the November 2025 election. Uh this is a roll call vote, Shila. Valentina Ays, yes. Dan Janestra, yes. Sarah Johansson is absent. Paris Bende, yes. Sheila Prior, yes. Heidi Kedar, yes. Milan Sahonyi, yes. The motion passes. Thank you, Amy. And thank you, Sheila. All right. There are no teaching and learning reports this evening. We'll now move on to the finance reports. First, I would like to welcome our newly appointed executive director of finance and operations, Trevor Peterson. Welcome to Weisetta, Peter. And tonight, our accountant, Yisetta accountant, Jack Sterns, will first present combined financial reports for the month ending May 31st, 2025. Okay, thank you board. It's nice to be here. I'm going to switch the next slide here. So, for the statement of revenues, this is 11 out of 12 months out of the fiscal year. Uh, one more month left until we're finished within our school year financially, which is super exciting. Then we just get the fun of doing the audit, which is honestly a time that I actually enjoy because we get to see how we did. Uh, going through the financials here. Starting off with property taxes. Uh, as expected at 11 or 12 months out of the year, um, property taxes, we've received all of our payments, so that's at 100%. Um, as for state aids, we are about 85% through uh, for the budget to actual at this point, which is in line with previous fiscal years. Uh we'll receive a few more state aid payments um in June and in July. Uh but we expect everything to come in close to budget uh which is super exciting. Uh federal aids, you'll see that the actuals to budget is a little bit low. Uh this is just due to when we do our draws for federal aid. Uh the $521,000 um that is sitting in there right now is based off of ESSER. Um this was when we did our last draw in uh September 30th of 2024. Um, so that's the portion there that you see and then we'll do the rest of the draw to get up to budget. Um, at year end here for the miscellaneous local revenues. Uh, the miscellaneous revenues can kind of change depending on the school year. Um, this year we're we're high by 120% over the previous fiscal years. Um, last year we were at 100% and the year after that we were at 100% as well. Um, this is really just due to some items that we weren't completely expecting when we budgeted. Uh we received a very large - rate payment for some reimbursement of tech supplies uh as well as the sale of tech equipment. Um additionally uh we received a lot of very generous PTO donations for some playground refreshes around the district. Uh so that really bumped up our miscellaneous local revenues for this fiscal year. Uh food service and community ed both are right in line where we expect them to be at this time of year. And then debt service as well. Um debt is debt. So we were expecting it to be at 100% by May. And then finally is that construction fund. Um actuals are at 155,000 out of the budget. This is just the crude interest um on our bonds for the uh abatement bonds um for that fund. Next up is the statement of expenditures for May. Uh salaries and benefits. Uh we always like to watch throughout the year and as expected we are uh right on line with those. Um, as you all know, salary and benefits make up about 70 70% of our expenditures. So, we really like to make sure that those are on budget and we're monitoring them throughout the year. Uh, so we're really happy with where they are ending up this year. Uh, next up is the purchase services and supplies and materials. Uh, these can sway throughout the year just depending on timing of payments. Um, but we expect that everything will come in to budget by the year end. Uh similar to capital expenditures, this is a big portion of capital expenditures is LTFM. Um so this is also just depending on when projects are wrapping up in the timing of payments. Um but that one also is to be expected. Uh other expenditures, this one's a little low uh to to budget at this time. Uh this is just due to year-end entries that our auditors provide us for TRA benefits and parah. uh once the auditors come on site and provide us those year-end entries to move some expenses around that other expenses will be on budget as well um for expenditures related to food service and community service fund as well as debt service. These are all in line with where we expect them to be by May. And then finally is that construction fund. Um that $2 million is what we've spent down or what we spent um out of the construction fund for some um like pavement improvement projects out of that abatement bond. Um so we budgeted 4.5 million. Um actuals to date is 2 million for those uh payment projects. And then finally here is our cash on hand at the end of May. Uh we have about 78 million in cash uh sitting in our mislife accounts and PMA accounts. And then below that there's still 2.3 million sitting in a max investment class for our abatement bonds. Um so as we continue to do payment projects we'll be spending that amount down as well. And now open to go ahead to questions. Thank you, Jack. Any questions, comments for colleagues? No. Okay. I have one question on the last slide that that you have on the screen there. It looks like it's been a long time since that Mislaf fund, Mislaf Liquid and Mislaf Max funds, you know, the yield seems to have been stuck there at at 4.2 4.5 2%. Is that true? Right. Uh that bottom the alt facilities bonds. No, the yield on the on the on the top part. Oh, the yield the Oh, sorry. So the the percentage. Yep. That's been sticking right around that 4.2% over the last few months. That will just that will change once the Feds jump in and change the rates, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, it kind of was dropping there for a few months and then we've kind of stuck right at 4.2. Okay. Um it hasn't really been moving since, but like you said, it could change in the future. All right. If there are no other questions, thank you Jack. We'll move on to the next item for finance. Thanks. Uh so Jack will now present the long-term facilities maintenance 10-year plan following which there will be a recommendation to approve it. So, the next finance related item that we're bringing to the board, two of three, which we're excited about, is the 10-year long-term facilities maintenance plan. Uh, this is a annual plan that we bring to the board. Um, and unfortunately, John Deutsch, our director of facilities and maintenance, wasn't able to be here today. Um, but I have Trevor, so I think we're going to handle it. So, the agenda for the FY27 uh LTFM plan is what is the LTF plan? What is the annual 10-year plan update and why? Uh the 10-year revenue expenditures plan, next steps and questions. So, what is the long-term facility maintenance plan or LTFM? Uh LTFM is a program under MISO statute that establishes the long-term facility maintenance uh revenue plan where revenues can be uh used by districts for the following. So there's deferred capital expenditures and maintenance projects uh necessary to improve the future erosion of facilities, increasing accessibility of school facilities, health and safety capital projects or by or by board resolution to transfer uh money from the general fund reserve for LTFM to debt redemption funds to pay the amounts needed on our GO bonds. So what is the annual LTFM 10-year plan? Uh annual requirements. School district school districts, intermediate school districts and uh school district cooperatives such as joint powers districts are required to annually update their LTFM 10-year plan and submit the board approved plan to the commissioner um for approval by July 31st of the year. Uh once approved by the school board, the 10-year plan is submitted to MDE. Uh the 10-year expenditure plan should show that the health and safety program is maintained accessible accessibility expenditures are reasonable and that the school district is planning deferred maintenance projects expenditures appropriate for the age and condition of the school district owned buildings. Um and additionally with the expenditure and revenue plans is the statement of assurances. So the S SOA uh this is signed by the superintendent. By signing the super uh by signing the superintendent provides a written commitment the that the district will operate according to state and federal laws. So this is a fun slide. We just threw some of the finance codes up. Um this is kind of our speak in finance. So we like to speak in codes, but it's nice to actually show what the codes mean. Um, so on the left side is kind of anything that's related to health and safety for our finance codes, um, such as physical hazards, uh, fire safety, indoor air quality and accessibility. And on the right side are some other LTFM codes that are being used such as electrical, interior services, plumbing, and so on. So, the Wisetta public schools 10-year LTFM plan. Uh, the district has been operating off of a 10-year plan since 2010. Over the last 10 years, the district has expended 90 to $100 million in LTF fund funded projects. Uh, the district has targeted between 8 and $16 million per year on the LTFM projects. Um, the difference there is just if we run into any situations where we cannot complete projects during the calendar year, those usually will go on the next LTFM plan. So between 8 and 16, if it was a perfect world, we would hit the 15 million every year that we budget for. But sometimes there's outside factors. So that's why there's a little bit of a sway between um what we can get done in a year for LTFM. Uh the 10-year revenue projection spreadsheet is used and that's in the packet we'll talk about later. Uh the 10-year revenue projection spreadsheet is used to project the funding for completing the 10-year expenditure plan. Um, so both the revenues and the expenses always tie out in our revenue projection plan and our 10-year expenditure plan. So whatever we're budgeting for is also what we're budgeting for revenues. Um, LTFM revenue is initially calculated based on a projected pupil units average building age and the project cost data. Um, Wisetta is considered a 1A district. Uh, so we are pay as you go. uh then it's just a better way to um handle our deferred maintenance projects because we're able to pay as you go rather than have to um pay for it all up front. So on the other side is the expenditure plan. Uh the 10-year expenditure plan spreadsheet contains the dis uh the school district's best estimate of project costs that will be incurred each fiscal year for 10 years. Uh the expendure plan reflects how the district is using available revenue to best meet the facility needs of the district. Um the 10-year expenditure plan should show that the health and safety program is maintained and uh accessibility accessibility expenditures are reasonable and that the school district is planning deferred maintenance projects uh project expenditures appropriate for the age and condition of the buildings. So the next steps are uh we've provided the uh revenue plan, the uh 10-year expenditure plan as well as John Deutsche's uh LTFM budget spreadsheets. Those all kind of work hand inand together. Um the cleanest form is John's LTFM budget sheet because it lists out all the projects by Finn code and the job uh the project description and it gives an estimated cost for budgeting. Um, so what we do is we take that 10 the John's both FY27 budget and his 10-year budget for planned projects and we bake that into the uh MDE forms which are a little bit harder to understand, but um they also tie out to the amount that we're budgeting for on his uh budget sheets. So um those are kind of the sheets that were attached to your packets as well as the statement of assurance for uh Superintendent Chase and the board resolution. So, I'm open for questions. Thank you, Jack. Anybody? Yeah, Valentina, go ahead. I sent an email today with bunch of questions and uh some of them I probably leave alone because it looks like um I mean, we can find out, but uh some some of them I'm going to say on public so that um it can be uh public can hear. Uh what's your answer? Uh first my question is about uh gender neutral. Um one of the item was that it allows to renovate uh if it is gender neutral bathroom. So um my question is as if right now where we are at asetta and what is your plan for future? Is it one gender genderneutral uh bathroom per uh floor? How does it look like? Um, so since John isn't here, it's a that might be a question that's more suited for him, but I think for the most part, we're trying to have a a gender neutral bathroom in every single one of our school sites with the hope of adding more um depending on how many floors the school site has. Um, I know we are in ADA require uh ADA compliance right now for our schools. Um, but I do think in the future there's always open room for conversation about adding additional um, gender neutral bathrooms. I think one of the responses on that question too, I think from John was that we do have genderneutral bathrooms and each one of our school buildings. Um, I don't know that there's necessarily a goal to have one on each floor. Most of our buildings are one or two floors. Um, our high school is four floors as probably most people in the room know, but um, I don't know that that's a specific goal, but I think there's a general interest in uh, uh, maximizing privacy of restrooms and providing choice and options um, that help ensure that all of our students are comfortable and uh, have facilities that uh, meet their needs and and uh, serve the district. Well, but I don't think that there's a a rule that we've established that uh sets as a goal to have genderneutral bathrooms on each floor. And in that connection, uh another uh question about bathrooms, I saw that there is uh uh 250,000 for high school and 250,000 for middle school. um replacing uh the statement was the uh new partitions question I have um I believe I heard that uh high school have a some stalls like literally ceiling to wall so it's almost like separate bathroom why I'm asking um uh John explained to me about pricing and all if we are changing it in I mean big quantities I it makes sense but my understanding we have some bathrooms at least at high school where where is a like almost separate bathroom because it is from ceiling to floor emirate am I correct uh yes mhm um Mike I would like to hear maybe it's obviously question to them and to administration too and I don't know when when else is the best time to ask this question on one side it sounds like privacy it's uh positive uh because uh I mean it allows you to feel I mean what what kind of needs you would like to have on another side. I heard from teachers from other districts in fact actually from rural area uh and if it is happening in a rural area. So I am assuming that something like that can happen in either happening or can happen in this district too. Since it is enclosed area, it is hard to see what is happening and I'm hearing especially obviously on high school level kids um smoke marijuana then uh they wipe and there are some other activities going on. So in that case uh first of all why I'm asking it I don't want to put this responsibility into teachers because I don't think that this is their job to to watch. So it is like uh chicken and egg situation. On one hand it sounds like privacy being met. On another hand there is another problem we might be looking at. How can we solve it so that students um uh other students who are not doing it are safe? I think I can start off with that question. So, I'll respond both as having served a good part of my career as a superintendent or district administrator and a high school and middle school principal. I think restrooms are always challenging to fully supervise in any school. Probably becoming more challenging at middle school and high school. Um, based on all my experiences and I don't have a high school administrator here or middle school to speak to that. I don't think that we have a rampant problem. I know that you mentioned that I hear from other districts that we have that issue. I'm not trying to suggest that we don't have issues, but we do have a number of uh supervising staff that are out and about. They do uh enter bathrooms and monitor um you know during the course of the day to minimize uh hopefully uh prevent the uh types of activities that you've mentioned. Um, but again, I I don't feel as though we have a rampant problem that um keeps our administrators busy all day, specifically with issues that are occurring in our bathrooms. And as most people in the room know, our buildings have been increasing in uh enrollment. And as a result, we've needed to expand restroom facilities so that kids have opportunities and staff as well to utilize restrooms uh passing times and at convenient times during the course of the day. So there have been bathrooms added at the high school both uh in the new wing that was constructed wings I should say uh standard classrooms on the what I think is the east side of the building and also in the uh activities part of the building uh adjacent to the gyms etc. So, some additional bathrooms were placed there and there was uh uh some constructed in the center of the building. Again, trying to help kids meet the needs during the uh passing time. Uh we're up to almost 4,000 students. Probably will exceed that in the coming year. So, uh moving from about 2500 to 2,800 in the time when the high school opened to a significantly larger number of students, uh we've needed to expand the number of facilities available for students and staff. So can I can I just interrupt Jack? I I forgot that there's a recommended action for this one, right? Uh so maybe I should have done that first. I apologize. No, he's bringing up a document that might Yes. So we should have started with the recommended action then gone on to discussion after the motion and the second. Right. Thank you. Thank you Amy. Okay. So I'm going to read the recommended action. Recommended action is to approve a resolution that the school board of independent school district number 284. State of Minnesota approves the fiscal year 2027 long-term facilities maintenance 10-year plan. Is there a motion to approve? I so move. Second. Moved and seconded. Now we can have a discussion if there is any. I'm sorry about that. Thank you. I appreciate it. Um and as I said about bathrooms, I just want uh to know how does it look like a big because again there are pluses and minuses. I mean so that um we're aware of it. And uh looks like John also said that in high school and middle school it's going to be partitions. It's not going to be uh ceiling to floor uh kind of uh separation at least. So that Yeah. When I was connecting with John, that's how it sounded as well. Mhm. based off the email. I would concur that there'll be a combination and again going back to my principal of years um bathrooms are heavily used during the course of the day and those partitions the best of the best that are designed over time take a lot of wear and tear and do need to be replaced periodically. So that's kind of the I think we're on like a rotational cycle with our LTFM plan. So every x number of years we routinely replace. If there are some in perfect condition and aren't in need of replacement, I would assume that we don't do that. We leave them in place and and not change those out. But um they are high volume uh facilities utilized in our schools every day. So they are going to take some wear and tear and do need to be replaced. Uh this one I understand perfectly well. The only thing I just wanted to picture and maybe since once we started visiting school buildings I'll have better better picture but I want just clarification how does it look like uh as for design. I'm not against having replacement of um partitions. Um next one is about uh district service center. I saw 150,000 uh we just purchased this building. Are these um panels need to be ch is it a need or is it a want? That's I think a better question. Um I believe that there are small leaks coming through the panels on the se on the roof is my understanding. So I think for LTFM for just a general like a fix um is to kind of switch up the panels. Um I'm not sure. Sure. I know the like you said the budget was 150,000 um for the worst case. Um but that's kind of what John was mentioning to me that the 150,000 was what we're budgeting for worst case scenario with the panels. So it could be less than that. Um but we were just budget he was budgeting on the high just in case it they start removing panels and there's more um issues underneath than we think from water damage. Mhm. Uh and last one if we are putting I mean we approved that 15 millions uh I mean it's our uh how to say it's our ceiling. Uh so given the fact that nowadays um there is quite a bit of inflation and items uh can be costly and obviously contractors you never know how much it will it will cost given the fact that you're showing 15 to be exactly how you're going to be handling if all of a sudden contractors ended up more expensive or items needed uh ended up more expensive. How I'm why I'm asking I'm hoping it's not going to be an option. I'm s uh sorry 15 million didn't work. Uh we need a little bit more. That's that's my reason of my question. Yeah, that's a good question. It's it's certainly a fluid budget. Um a lot of the items that we have on the budget are not set in stone budgets and um if something comes in higher than what we have planned um then it's a rep prioritization. you know, does something come off the list or vice versa if something comes in under? Um, is there something else that we maybe have projected to be a year or two out that we can push into the current year? So, um, all of those things are pretty fluid as we go throughout the year. Um, knowing that LTFM, um, yeah, it it is a state statute as to what it can be spent on, but it's also pretty generic, pretty general is what you can um, what you can use the funds for, too. So, um those even though we're having this plan come forward one time a year, it's a constant monitoring throughout the year of what we can use the um the funds on and how and how the budget is planning uh playing out to actual um throughout the year. And I I do want to comment too, I I just want to make a point that um it might be worth some clarifications when you see fiscal year 27 um as to why we just started fiscal year 26. Uh we in the finance world like to say we're always working in three f fiscal years and this is a prime example of that. So uh we still haven't had the audit for 2425. We're living in 2526 and now we're talking about this is the first item for fiscal year 27. Uh the reason being this is uh the LTFM is is based on the levy um for school districts and and we'll start the input for the for the levy as we look at that in September and then again in December um for the 25 payable 26 levy which provides revenue for school districts for the fiscal year 2627 year. So uh that it might look a little weird and people say like oh that looks strange that it's fiscal year 27 but that is correct and and that is why. Just wanted to clarify that too. Uh thank you for taking time and uh clarifying and giving peace to be honest. I really appreciate it. Um thank you so much. Um it was very special having you uh in finance committee. Um to meet you for the first time, Trevor. Um and thank you uh John and to Jen for you know answering questions um that I had in committee. Um my question is um just singular. um you mentioned on one of the slides that um project cost data figures into you know how you cost things out and ask for um you know the the fund draw. So we're talking age of building, square footage of buildings. I was curious if you could elaborate a little bit more on project cost data. Are there certain um you know uh parts of that or is it just straight dollars and cents? Um yeah, so a lot of it is based on age of the building and the square footage of buildings and then also uh just looking at what buildings need um renovations based on well the year of the building kind of leads into this too, but based on the last time that we did do renovations on a building um John's really good about I feel like right as a building is, you know, getting renovated and having long-term facility maintenance happening, a next another building is needing a roof replacement um just with the way that things are flowing. Um, so it's use looking at pupil numbers, um, square footage, and then also kind of looking, like you said, um, working with some of our key key partners to kind of figure out what the cost of these projects will be before we put it into a budget. Thank you so much. Uh, I have one question. Either of you can answer that. So you mentioned, Jack, that we started the LTFM 10-year plan the first time in 2010. So would I be correct in assuming that the next plan 10ear plan was in 2020, correct? Um, yeah. So it's it's kind of a rolling 10-year plan. So we budget out 10 years and then every year we kind of come back and then whatever year is kind of coming up, we have more accurate numbers. Um, it's a little bit tough to always plan 10 years out with projects, right? Um so we'll look at the 10 years, figure out what we think is going to be coming down the pipeline. Yeah. But then every year we'll come back to the board. Um so what is what is the real significance of that 10 year then? Because every year we are looking at it renewing it. So 2010 2020 next one would be 2030. But we we keep looking at it right almost every year. Every year we have to approve the new plan. So no that's correct. That's just part of the MDE requirement for the LTFM revenue. So now we're looking at fiscal year 26 through fiscal year 35 or whatever it is. Next year will be 27 through 36. And um you're right, it's like Jack said, it's very difficult to to plan out 10 years. We do the best we can, but um for the most part um it is a yearby-year thing. Um but knowing that um it is the MD requirement to look out 10 years the best we can. Um, but whatever we have in for year two this year is going to look different than when it's year 1 next year. There's there's no doubt about that. It'll change. Okay. So, I I misunderstood then. I thought you would make a 10-year plan in 2010 and in 2011 you approved that plan again. In 12, you approved that plan again. And in 2020, you make another 10-year plan. That's that's what I thought. No. And after every year, right? Yeah. If we were to go back to uh 2015, for example, I guarantee you the 10-year plan looks a lot different back then than it does today. But yeah, I would say it's a little bit like 10 year enrollment projections. Every year we update them. Jen was reading my mind. I was reading hers. I think um every year you have new information. So year one is going to be more accurate than year 10. And that's why that there's that rolling update on an annual basis. Yeah. And I do think too maybe even to your previous question too about the exact 15 million. We we know it's not going to end up exactly 15 million but um in the accounting world whatever is either over spent or underspent then results in a either positive or negative restricted fund balance um for us to utilize in in the following like the next year or the next two years. So we try to get as close as we can. we don't want to um it's frowned upon to to levy 15 but then only spend 12. Um that's not allowed and they would actually the state would come back and pull back some of those funds. But there is a little leeway there. I don't know what the exact percentage is, but we try to best we can to get whatever we levy for in the pay as you go portion of it. We will do the best we can to get as close to that dollar amount as we can but it will not be exact. So it's like a nonprofit organization. You're not supposed to make a lot of profit, right? And it's we call it a self-correcting levy in subsequent years. So So for all you know, they could have said a 5year plan or a 15-year plan or a 20-year plan. It really wouldn't matter, right? The longer the plan, the less accurate your projections would be. Anyway, thank you for clarifying that. Yeah. So before we take a vote, I just want to say thank you to the finance um committee and to the facilities committee as well for constantly staying on top of this. Um, thank you for to the district for staying on top of making sure that we have the best facilities that are available to our entire community, but especially to our students. Um, and thank you for keeping an eye on every single possible revenue stream to make sure that we do have everything that our families and students need. I just wanted to add something as well. I just wanted to welcome um um Travis, right? Travis Trevor Trevor Peterson. And I apologize as you you're new so please forgive me. Um but we are happy to have you here and thank you know thank you for for joining our team. All right if there are no other questions uh I'm going to read the recommended action again is to approve a resolution that the school board of independent school district number 284 state of Minnesota approve the fiscal year 2027 long-term facilities maintenance 10-year plan. We already moved and seconded. Uh, this is a roll call vote. Sheila Sheila Prior, yes. Heidi Kedar, yes. Valentina Ays, yes. Dan Janestra, yes. Sarah Johansson is absent. Paris Bendy, yes. Milan Sahony, yes. The motion passes. Thank you, Sheila. One more one more item, Jack. Uh the the finally the board will vote on approving the general obligation building bonds series 2025A. Right? That's your agenda item. And will Matt present this or Matt Hammer? Yes. Okay. As he comes forward, I'll give a little more context. In a in a prior meeting, the the board did um authorize the issuance and sale of $5.5 million of the general obligation capital facilities bond series 25 2025A. Um the proceeds to be used to finance capital improvement projects districtwide um specifically including improvements and repairs to to West Middle School. So um Matthew is here. Um we have retained Ellers who uh Matthew is is representative of of to um as our mun municipal adviser um to talk about these bonds. Um we do apologize it was maybe a little chaotic today as we um inserted things into the board packet. The reason for that is we just sold these bonds at 9:30 this morning. So um Matt and his team had to to get to work to get the resolution finalized and um get everything that we needed so we could present it tonight. So with that, um, Matt will talk a little bit about the results from this morning's bond sale. Yeah, thanks Trevor. Uh, good evening, um, Chair Sony, members of the board, uh, Dr. Anderson, um, as Trevor said, we we took sale competitive bids on this district's bonds this morning, and this is a project we've been working on for quite some time. Um, as the districts secured the bids for the projects, now we have the funding for the projects, right? Um and we're planning to close on those uh clos on the bonds here on August 7th. Um the award today is going to and the resolution will be awarding the bond sale to JP Morgan. Um they were the low bidder today and we ended up with 10 bids and I think um when we always want to when we go to market we like to always see at least three. Um, if you go back to our pre-sale estimates, we were assuming a little bit north of 4%. And the bond sale uh results we received this morning were at 3.18% 3.17% um and JP was the low bidder. Um, Huntington Securities was the cover bid. Um, which was about a half a basis point higher, right? So, the bidding was very tight. And then TD Securities was the high bidder at 3.29. Um so our our uh market timing was very excellent today. Um market conditions were good and I think you can kind of see um the results of uh people wanted to buy Weisetta bonds this morning with the AAA rating. Um and that was the reason why we saw the number of biders we saw today as well. And ultimately that drives down um when we have demand that drives down the cost. Um we also received uh what we call a reoffering premium as part of the sale. So, we are going to be able to at the same level that we were expecting prior um during the pre-sale um be able to deposit a pretty significant uh amount of additional proceeds for the project which going to help the project right as we kind of look at where the funding is. um for the overall projects and the bids that were received. Um that reoffering premium comes through um the yields that we're receiving and we're able to deposit about another $390,000 of funds um at the same level of funding that we were planning as part of the project. And just as a reminder, um these uh these uh we're funding this project with existing resources for the district, right? So there's no additional taxes. There's nothing uh additional. This was part of the overall plan to to not only manage the district's budget over the um short term, but also get the funds in place within the existing revenues. And this was the stream revenue stream we were um utilizing through the capital facilities bonds to do that. Um overall uh the revenue um estimate we're using about 20 2022% of the district's operating capital revenue. Um, and that was a set aside the district already had in place. And we're just repurposing that set aside to get those funds in place and get this middle school project going to get the space um that the district needs for the for the um upcoming um pressure that the district's seeing from an enrollment perspective for the West Middle School. So, uh the other important thing to note and then I can answer any questions folks have. The district did go through a rating process. I think it's important to note public schools is one of three districts in the state of Minnesota that holds a AAA um bond rating. Um you see the report that rating was affirmed as part of uh this process. Um as part of that process, the conversation about uh future referendum discussion was part of that and that um um affirmation was included there accounting for some of that potential um forecasted ask that the voters might see um coming next spring potentially. So that's already included as part of the part of the or part of their methodology and their accounting for that. Um so with that said, I can answer any questions folks have. um the financial performance and the building and reserves have been an important part of maintaining that rating and I think uh as you move forward um the trajectory that you've been seeing from um the enrollment growth and where the fund balance is going is playing an important role into maintaining that AAA rating and ultimately keeping the cost of um these types of projects down for um the district's budget and district taxpayers. So with that I can answer any questions folks. Yeah, before we answer any ask any questions, there is this there there's a vote on this, right? This is correctly this time. So, the recommended action is to approve the resolution relating to $5.5 million of general obligation building bonds series 2025A authorizing issuance awarding sale prescribing the form and details and providing for the payment. Is there a motion to approve? I so move. I second. Moved and seconded. Now is there a discussion? Any questions or comments for Matt or Trevor? So I just want to commend um finance team here and administration um Moody's AAA rating. It clearly shows how financially stable the district is and it's not it doesn't happen on its own. There is discipline behind it. there is that fiscal conservativeness if you will especially coming out of COVID. It's a big deal. So really kudos to the administration and folks who are on the team who were on the team. It wouldn't have happened without you know your guys' dedication and sort of that foresight. So thank you. Really appreciate it. I have a question. Yes. Uh could you remind us in more more detail how does having that AAA bond rating save the district money? Yeah, it ultimately lowers the interest cost, right? Because as the rating um with a lower higher higher bond rating um comes with lower interest costs when you go to market um and ultimately keeps the interest cost down when you look at projects and borrowing like this. So, it's an important factor um one of the factors and when underwriters look to purchase bonds that they're accounting for um as part of how assured they're going to get their investment back. Um and when you hold a AAA rating, it's pretty good assurance um that those bonds they're going to get um investors are going to get their money. I don't Oh, go ahead. I was going to say in addition to that too, it's it like Matt said earlier, this is this is existing funding source for the district. So it is not an additional tax impact. And uh we we get about $3.5 million annually in operating capital revenue. So um the payment of these bonds, the principal and interest payment of these bonds each year um is applied against that. So we're we're essentially using a portion of that 20 to 25% as Matt said, um to pay for these bonds. So yes, the interest cost of that also then allows us to um save some funds within our operating capital fund to to do some of these some more projects within our buildings that we we find as priority. So it it's it's definitely multi-layered into how that benefits the district. There's no doubt about it. Do you have like a rough estimate? Sorry if this is an unfair question, but like about how much are we like saving because of this AAA bond rating? Yeah, I mean it really depends on the market day, but we always kind of say between five and 10 basis points per rating. Um, so think of that as like a half to.1%, right? Which is in isn't insignificant when you account for that. Um, and like I said, you're one of three districts in the state that hold that AAA and there's a few that hold um the double A uh classification. Um, and then most districts are more in that single A um category. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um this has been a very special process to be part of. Um we visited West Middle School who seen the bulk of these proceeds spent a few months ago as part of our facilities committee. Um and just to you know see the space and what it's going to be turned into a music suite. Um and then to you kind of put the final touches on tonight but so much more work in the future means a lot. I appreciate your advice and counsel during this process and um making sure we got in at a really low rate. So, the work is on our finance team and um they really came through. Thank you so much everyone and um we look forward to the uh building renovations at West and you know making more space for all these wonderful students we're seeing coming in. So, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. I have one question. Um so the pre-sale deposit you know 390,000 you said like we are getting that 3 weeks before the actual deposit right August 7th versus now is that also based on the fact that we have a AAA rating if we didn't have that would we not be approved of that is that connected yeah there's some connection um this is getting in the weeds a little bit right but there's a typically an underwriter will take a discount and you'll see the discount that was taken was like only a little over 4,000 in your case, which means that reoffering premium and based on the the yields that the district was able to get, your premium was much higher, right? And um that's because likely because um it was easy for them to sell the bonds, right, in the secondary market. Um which is kind of directly related to your AAA rating likely. Um, so that's having an impact on obviously the the type of bid that we were able to get today. Um, and they really wanted to buy your bonds just based on how that was uh how the pricing was today um from JP. Were you surprised at uh the difference between what we had projected? Yeah, I mean the markets have been I mean as you've talked I mean um the questions on the yield curve right with where the yield curves kind of um stabilized a little bit on the short end. Um but the bond market is forward looking so rates have been up and down. Um so we were very pleased when we saw the results this morning with the with the bond sale results and um being 70 or 80 basis points underneath pre-sale was an outstanding result. We were super pleased with seeing that this morning. Okay. All right. All right. If there are no other questions, I'm going to read the recommended action again is to approve the resolution relating to $5.5 million general obligation building bonds series 2025A authorizing issuance awarding sale prescribing the form and details and providing for the appro for the payment. This is a roll call vote for Sheila Heidi Kar. Yes. Valentina S. Yes. Dan Janestra. Yes. Sarah Johansson is absent. Paris Bende. Yes. Sheila Prior. Yes. Milan Sahony. Yes. The motion passes. Thank you both. Uh sorry. Thank you all three of you, Jack, Matt, and uh Trevor. And we appreciate you're coming here, Matt, and presenting this tonight. I always appreciate um being able to serve the district. And I'll just say, I mean, this process doesn't come without time investment from your finance department. um and Chase um and Superintendent Anderson participating in the rating process and all those pieces that go into this behind the scenes. Um and I think you guys can be proud of the representation you had as part of that process. It's it's super important to the process. Um and it results in results that we were able to see today. So, thanks for the opportunity. Um and we hope to see this project go as well as it can be. So hopefully we're starting off good and you'll get a good result when we get out of here with the the projects completing as well. So take care. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. So moving on. Um next we have the human resource services reports. First we have newly appointed executive director of human resources Dave Luds. Uh congratulations Dave and you will be recommending the approval of 2025 2026 unaffiliated handbook changes. All yours. Thank you board chair Sony, members of the board, Superintendent Anderson. Um I'm presenting tonight uh the recommended um attachments for the unaffiliated salary schedule and handbook changes for 2526. Uh so the summary of of language changes were provided uh for unavail unaffiliated staff in levels two through nine. That recommendation includes a salary schedule improvement of 2.25% for the 2526 fiscal year. Um which is within our district's budget parameters. Um and the human resources board committee um committee chair Sheila Prior uh and committee members Heidi Kedar and Sarah Johansson uh have u reviewed this information along along with uh me and our committee the board. So at this time I put that recommended action before the board. All right. Thank you Dave. I think there are two votes on this right. The first one is is to approve the 202526 unaffiliated handbook changes as recommended. Is there a motion? Is that correct? Yes. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. I second. Moved and seconded. Is there a discussion? I'd like to say that yeah, as part of the um human resources committee um you know we've had an opportunity to talk about you know all the considerations that went into the changes um there you know the work has been ongoing for a while and you know David has done a lot of stuff very quickly to kind of get things consistent um and better to be you know better able to be understood because I think there was some confusion sometimes in the handbooks previously. Um I don't know if um Director Kater would like to add anything, but I feel confident that this is going to be a really good update. I'll just say thank you to the HR department. Um you guys have done a phenomenal job of bringing things up to speed and making sure that we're aligned with our current practices and with the expectations of the district and the board. Um, and so thank you for reviewing all of the changes with us in depth in committee. Um, and I'm looking forward to voting on this and getting it moving. Yes, Melina. Um, I have some questions. I sent an email today. Um, although I had troubles with internet connection, so that's why it's ended up uh going uh late. uh question I have is um in on several items like um last year we uh for PE for uh personnel who are working uh five up to five years we changed from 12 days to 15 and for others we changed from 15 to 20 so it happened last year and it was 1.5 increase in salary salaries and uh this year we are asking to change it uh five days. So um for five additional uh vacation days which means that um within 2 years we had been asked to approve uh uh for some uh personnel up to 5 years it's up to 8 days and for ours after you served u for five years it's um I mean total will be 10 days. I um asked in the email what what is um how much is is it going to cost uh to us as a district. Thank you. Um so I I responded in the email and I'll respond here tonight. So vacation is one of the things in the the handbook that it doesn't have a um cost in a sense the same that a salary or benefit increase would have. Um yes uh for a department uh more vacation days would mean that there's uh you know more responsibility for other department members to help provide coverage when individuals are gone from work. Um but for many of the individuals in the unaffiliated handbook um when they take vacation they come back you know from vacation to their work etc. It doesn't increase the amount of salary that we're paying for that person for the year. So um these are places in the handbook that we don't take the change lightly. Um one of the benefits of of moving from the director of human resources into the executive director role um is that I've been able to experience um those salary negoti th those those hiring negotiation pract um been in discussion with individuals that we are looking to welcome into our district from other districts um and and have experienced firsthand. And I think I put this in my response that um we really do need to increase that to keep up with um what the expectations is for individuals entering these positions uh is of our district. And so uh we we put uh salary and and benefit information out with these positions. Uh and by including that increase in in vacation time um again this is for the level two and three uh employees. Um we hope that that will uh not only uh provide um a comparable vacation level for our current employees but also if these positions become open um that will have the opportunity to secure the you know best possible hires for the district. So, um, I use I'm able to use that lens, uh, now as the executive director of human resources to make sure that, again, we're we're keeping up with trends from comparable districts as well as for some of these positions, we are competing um with the private sector directly. And so, we have to make sure that our our pay plans and benefits are are competitive. Um yes I sent uh via email and you gave me answers but I would like it to uh to make it public that's why I'm repeating it. I need that's fine. Yeah. Uh the only thing what I am asking is uh you are saying even uh you're bringing uh business while I asked um my questions right now might be sounding that I am uh trying trying to hold vacation days. Uh but at the same time I'm trying to put uh piece to give peace for myself that we keep saying that we don't have enough money uh for like uh make class sizes smaller or to hire uh additional uh pira and then uh we will be running out of money. I'm not trying to be mean to specific uh people but I'm trying to uh hear I mean have some sort of a discussion so that at the end of the day we are open for students uh we are not for vacations we are not for as for uh business world um I actually double checked nowadays business world is changing pretty stiff in fact many are losing jobs And for any additional many uh businesses nowadays are changing into that you get one vacation day per year but I want to clarify within these two years we already uh given to some uh I mean the ask is to give eight uh days or even 10 days um and it would be much more better if we would have like um meeting uh I mean I'm not talking about meeting as right now the meeting when we can discuss in um other districts close by would be analyzed then I might be sold as if right now we are kind of um having different perspectives uh might might be that's that's what I want to clarify I understand that uh luckily there is looks like not additional cost associated with this but it means also that the colleagues colleagues uh have to take additional responsibilities um quite often uh within a building. Um can I ask one more question? Um sure. Mhm. One more question is uh specifically about I was actually surprised to be honest to hear that we have staff who are working remotely and uh the question is how many um I have last year uh data and based on that looks like we have 80 uh people as an unaffiliated and a question is how many staff members had been um uh working under remote I mean not in the buildings this year. Yeah, thank you. So on that one uh in our unaffiliated handbook we have uh previous language that talks about the ability to arrange for a remote workday with your supervisor. Um those are instances where uh you can still perform the the functions of your position. Um and usually there's a reason for it. So it may be a special project. Um, an example of that might be an individual that that works in a you know um a shared uh space uh but is attending a a webinar all day. Um and so they're they're listening in a on a webinar. Um it might be uh someone who's running a series of of interviews all day and again they they don't have um a private space uh to conduct those interviews. So, uh, those are just a couple examples of of projects or or, um, instances that might come up, um, where a remote day, um, may make sense. Um, we have had in previous, uh, you know, previous years prior to the the again recommended changes, uh, a handful of individuals that that have had a recurring remote workday. And that is uh something that that uh after discussion with executive leader Superintendent Anderson um we feel it's time to to pull back from um at this point and and maintain that um you know the the in-person uh customer service model that our our district is is uh really has embraced for a number of years is is something that we'd like to ensure uh happens every single day. Um and so um you know one of the parallels that I've drawn to is um you know postcoid there was a lot of uh discussion and opportunity around online schools um and as Wisetta public schools if if uh a number of you were were listening in on some of the sessions when we were making some decisions and having discussion about that um we decided that you know we were going to kind of stick to the in-person experience. that's where we felt like we benefited the most from um it's it's you know what reflected the service that we wanted to provide and so postcoid there was a lot of exper uh you know experimenting with different businesses and that's not unique to public schools with you know are there opportunities for some remote remote work um you know based on specialized positions that it might make sense for um and again uh this is an a time where We we did that for a period of time and have kind of made the decision, you know what, um we're going to come back to that in-person um experience for for our employees as well. Now, that's not to say that there might be a circumstance where uh a remote day is merited and so there's that language still in the handbook um that says that a specific instance um an example might be an accommodation for an employee. So, if we have, you know, an ADA accommodation or another accommodation for, uh, something that that really does make sense, um, we still want our our district leaders to be able to make that decision with their employees. Um, my, uh, belief is that the overall number of days that remote work is occurring will will be significantly reduced um, with with the implementation of these handbook changes. again that's um just working to to kind of reset the norms and you've seen that that trend occur um not just in school districts but in industry overall um with uh returning to office uh etc. Uh kudos for you recognizing that being in person is uh much more better. Uh and especially I will connect to what we heard in the past when we were on budget cuts uh mode. Uh district service center had been uh bought because they were saying that putting everybody together supposed to work for collaboration. That's why it made me I was very surprised to hear that there are people were working remotely. So I understand there is a need once in a while especially since this technology is nowadays available. Totally fine. It might be your b your child is sick. At least it allows you to do your job. Uh so I'm I'm I mean I'm perfectly fine with it. I'm just curious how many uh staff we had who were on um working from homes on regular basis. That was my question. I think that I need to clarify more. Yeah, I think I answered that at the start. So, I said we had, you know, about a maybe I didn't uh but but if I didn't, I'll answer it again. Um we had about, you know, a dozen or so uh formal agreements in place that again, as of mid August, um we'll be suns setting those formal agreements and going to really an individual circumstance type of a situation like you described. So, it wasn't a huge number. Um there were a few staff where it seemed to make sense with their role. Um but we've just made that decision uh as a district to to uh you know shift course a little bit and and tighten those standards. That part I appreciate recognizing again and making sure that people are coming back and working within a building and working collaboratively with each other uh not choosing to work from home because there are many instances when people would productivity is not the same. Thank you. Go ahead. I just on that note, um I very much appreciate the district's commitment to an in-person model. Um especially for our students and so I think when we expect that of our students, we need to expect it of ourselves. And it starts from leadership, right? So if we expect our students to be in schools, we should also be in our schools. Um, we've got great buildings, we've got great facilities, and I'm really excited for all of the unaffiliateds to be in that big, beautiful building and fill it up. Um, and I just wanted to say thank you again for the conversation that we had um during our HR committee. Um, and I'm I am hopeful and I trust that I know that this is going to be a transition for those individuals who had plans in place that were formalized. It is going to be a transition and um I trust that you know we're going to treat it with a human heart as we do everything else. Okay. Sorry, I had one more question. Um I looked at the um salary how it looks like. Um we have levels and we have steps. My question is I my understanding specifically in this case jumping from level to level it's it's pretty significant. I mean if somebody can do it, it takes quite a bit of uh time. In this case, I'm more interested in about moving from step to step. Um how quickly can you move uh from step to step? Uh can it be every year or is it if you can explain more please? Yeah. So the the step changes in the unaffiliated contract or handbook are similar to um other contracts where um assuming you meet an hourly threshold for the year um that you would advance a step each year. Um and so the the levels are specific to positions. So uh certain positions are in in in certain levels. So the only way you can really advance the level on the salary schedule is is in a different position. um whereas the steps are annual um and so that is one of the things that's accounted for um when I when I give you the the total cost um increase um we have to account for not only the salary schedule change uh the the percent recommended but you also have to account for the number of individuals that will be moving a step uh the following year um you have to account for increase in benefit costs um any any other you know language in the contract that change that has a has a cost uh against it. So that step change that that you're referring to is a part of the the total cost um that we factor in with the costing model for each group. Um again other groups have uh step changes as well. Um all of our groups with salary schedules uh most of them unless it's a cluster step has a step a year. So that's not uncommon and has been in practice for a while. Uh but it was written uh knowing that that fact right now it was written that it is the overall cost for updates to unaffiliated handbooks is 4.36 but if you calculate this 1.5 we gave last year and VCA is 2.25 then if a person is moving from step to step if you do math it is coming about 5.6 six. So the the 1.5 from last year last year would be a cost against the 2024 25 uh cost for 2526. You'd factor the the uh 2.25% change from the base which is the 24 or 25 school year and then the other other cost. You don't compound. That'd be a two-year cost. Um, if you're looking back at the the 1.5 uh percent salary increase from 20 uh 425, so that'd be a two-year cost that you're talking about. I'm referring to a one-year cost. Um, that may be that may be confusing because some of our other uh employee groups do negotiate contracts for two years. Um, and so that's not our unaffiliated group. um our unaffiliated handbook is established on an annual basis. Um I did math and uh to be honest making that math it was coming like if you hired at certain step with 1.5 and next year you are moving to next step obviously that next step already was 1.5 and then that since you're moving second year yes it has to happen second year then it is already that second step was 1.5 and on top On top of that it's becoming 2.25 which is then becoming is uh four uh 5.6 in total. If uh between steps increment, again, that would be if you're factoring a 1.5% salary increase from the 20 the fiscal year 24 to fiscal year 25 uh in with the proposed salary increase for fiscal year 26. That's a 2-year costing model. What I am discussing is a one-year cost. So a fiscal year 26 cost allin is the 4.36% and that's the change uh from our base which is our fiscal year 25 cost. Okay. Then clarification is last year total package and this year total package. How much what kind of percentage increase is that uh within this if you compare package package like um what I was going to say benefits health care and all um because last year when I was at cafe negotiation I learned that total package was because uh there are some increases was over 12%. Not like 4% like it was written on the contract. I mean this is how much it is costing to the district. Yep. So the total package cost last year for unaffiliated was 3.54%. And that was at the 1.5% increase to the salary schedule. So that was the the comparison total package cost for fiscal year 25 was 3.54%. Including health care and benefits. Yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. So one thing I might just mention too if I may. Go ahead. Um so in consideration to one of the questions that came up about funds being utilized to decrease class size or add classroom teachers. Some of the sources of funding for some a lot of these positions come from categorical areas and uh either Trevor or Dave might want to listen to make sure you correct me if I'm incorrect on this, but we have categorical funds. So, we have a number of our unaffiliated staff members that work in community ad, which comes from some of those resources that were referenced by Jenny and her team tonight. our technology department. Many of these positions are funded through the tech levy and and uh technology uh funding streams that come to the district. Uh many of these positions are special education leaders and uh some of those positions are uh funded as well through special education funding and several of these positions are in our food service uh program and are funded through revenues received for food service. I might be leaving some off, but those are four that came to mind. So, of those approximate 80 uh unaffiliated staff members, just a quick guess, I would I wouldn't be shocked to find out at least half of them are funded through these categorical funds from those areas. So, those are all four of those funds that I just mentioned are not funds where you can skim off some to buy a first grade teacher or a science teacher at the high school. Those are you can't co-mingle those fun those funds. So, is that accurate, Dave? and or Trevor or others. Okay. Right on. Thank you. All right. So, I I just wanted to make a quick comment. We were talking about exceptions for unaffiliated for remote um you know being being at home or not being in an office. We saw an example here right itself on the board on June 23rd when we had a remote presence right from a director. Valentina was on remote uh on Zoom. So yeah, we do have we do have that once in a while. I also want to commend Dave um for those I want to make this public as well. Uh Dave was in the negotiations meeting this today from you know and Heidi and I are on on that negotiations committee uh teachers contract and Dave was in that meeting from 8:00 this morning until what 3:00 or so. Then he he got the questions from Valentina and answered them as quickly as he could. So thank you for that. Thank you for that diligence. Uh we appreciate that. So if there are no more questions or comments, I'm going to read the uh recommendation again. The recommended action is to approve the 25 202526 unaffiliated handbook changes as recommended. Uh this is again a a roll call vote. Sarah Johansson is absent. Paris Bendy. Yes, Sheila Prior. Yes, Heidi Kedar. Yes, Valentina Ays. Yes, Dan Janestra. Yes, Milan Sahonyi. Yes. The motion passes. Thank you, Sheila. And then the final item for the night, uh, they will recommend that the board approve the supplemental salaries pay raise pay rates for 2025 26. Dave, thank you. members of the board, uh, board chair Sony, Superintendent Anderson. So, these, uh, this list of salaries is something that we put in front of the board each year. Uh, they're supplemental salaries that are not covered by another handbook or contract. And so, I'll read through them for you. Our reserve teachers, uh, that the recommendation is a $5 increase uh, for each level. Um, and and, uh, that's something that we did last year. I'll make a a small note with that one. um you know, our our uh substitutes in our district um help out immensely uh on a daily basis when our uh teachers fall become ill or need to to be out for professional development and whatnot. Um we also compete with surrounding C uh districts like we do um with other positions for our substitutes. So we want our uh substitutes to to stay with us and and work as much as they can. And um this increase again helps us uh stay competitive with with reserve teacher rates um in our area. Uh the technology department casual employees. So the recommendation is an update to the student re uh rate to meet minimum wage requirements. So that's something we have to do. Uh and then a 50 cent per hour increase to the hourly cap for the second tier of high school student tech workers. Uh for classified staff substitute pay guidelines. those rates are really aligned um with existing uh identified contracts and so it's just noting that uh they tie into those existing uh contracts and then the health office substitute is articulated with a rate there. Um the activity fund um we did uh reach out to our activities office um and no changes were recommended. It it felt like our rates were in line with where they needed to be for that. So, it's just relisting um what those rates were uh from the 2425 school year. And then community education facility attendance. Um again, as Superintendent Anderson uh mentioned, this is a group that would be paid out of a different fund um would be our our community education fund for um for that group. A 3% increase for the 25 26 school year is being recommended. Um and then why kids site managers um the rate of 2.25% 25% which follows the unaffiliated uh recommended increase is what's being uh recommended. Uh so you have those attachments and the recommended action uh before you. Thank you Dave. Uh so the recommended action is to approve the 202526 supplemental salaries as recommended. Is there a motion to approve? So move. Second. Moved and seconded. Is there a discussion? I will just say again on the human resources committee we had an opportunity to go over these and and understand all the considerations that went into it and um I would will be supporting this. Thanks for all the bits and pieces that make a good experience for our kids. Um there's there's just no way to be able to explain all the little pieces that come together for choir concerts, for wisetta kids, for all the things that have to happen to create a fun and happy academic experience. So thank you for putting this all together and um I really do love the reserve teacher um opportunity because it does create a a piece of consistency too within the schools which I think is invaluable. I I just want to thank the HR committee uh Sheila, Heidi and Sarah for helping out Dave and the board and the district to come up with the with the with the you know with the recommendation here. So again the recommended action is to approve the 202526 supplemental salaries as recommended. This is a roll call vote again. Paris spend yes. Sheila Prior yes. Heidi Kedar, yes. Valentina Ays, yes. Dan Janestra, yes. Sarah Johansson is absent. Milan Sahonyi, yes. The motion passes. Thank you, Sheila. All right. So, we have no other board action tonight and we do not have board reports. And so, the next board work session is on Monday, July 28th at 4 p.m. This concludes the Wisetta Public Schools regular board meeting. Is there a motion to adjurnn? So moved. Second. All in favor say I. I. Opposed. Nay. The time is now. 911. The Visetta Public Schools Board of Education regular meeting for Monday, July 14th, 2025 is adjourned. [Music]