in their own language they'll be able to read what they would need to do to uh ask for that help so that we can get that trans or that interpretation surface available for them.

last spring we started piloting a two-way text messaging. So I can send you a message in English, you can receive it in Portuguese, you can type back and it comes back to me in English.

We do have the Civil Rights Act that ensures that people have resources and that language is not a barrier.

what we're doing now, in part because we are required to, but also because it's just the right thing to do as we're communicating with families about what's available.

I think initially MTN was suing the school district for $15 million and to get them to completely withdraw it at the end of the day um I think is a a significant uh um victory I think for the district.

if we lost the trial, um we would have significant exposure because again, this is not protected by our insurance company.

I'm relieved to put this chapter behind the district. I know there's this this has just been an ongoing um drag on the district itself...

this sticks with me as a board member more than any other decision that I have observed. um the long-term ramifications of going against a recommendation of the professionals who do this day in and day out and it's hurting us now as we can see with all the budget cuts.

Minnesota as well as I would say nationally we are experiencing a child care crisis and really the major factor is is that child care is very expensive if you are going to pay the staff the wage that is going to attract them and so it's always this balancing act.

as a result of that, we are currently at just over $19 an hour as a starting wage for our adventure club staff and we're we're pretty um pleased with that.

Last year, our youth enrichment, we had 69 kids registered on the first day. This year, 359.

I'm pleased but not satisfied. And I I think uh that's the that's the direction, but you and your team have just done a remarkable job and just keep up the great work.

our rough bus routes are already out. parents received an email on July 28th with information about bus routes. That's three weeks early before the start of school year, which um in my time 17 years in the district is the earliest that I can remember them ever going out.

we have a new help desk ticketing system which has also been one of the improvements we made and that has let us more efficiently respond to the requests that parents are sending in.

these are hard decisions. And what's what's multiplied that factor is I have to be the bad guy at some point to help centralize because everybody wants to stop at their location, but yet the next call is the bus rides too long.

I particularly appreciate your um adherence to the budget um that the and understanding how challenging it is our transportation budget. we we've gotten an update. It's pretty big. Um and we really do want to keep those um dollars in the classroom as you said.

Multi-grade classrooms provide us with the respons with a responsible student centered way to achieve those goals within our current budget constraints.

Generally research shows that multi-grade classes and same grade classes academic achievement is about the same but students in multi-grade classes have more confidence um more empathy and uh report feeling happier and connected in school and have um earlier developed leadership skills.

the dual fact of we were cutting, you know, $5 million plus an additional $700,000 impact we did not foresee. We had no cushion whatsoever.

Then I leaned on the principles because they know their teachers, they know their school communities, they know their students, they know their families. So the principles and I partnered on here are the different multi-grade options.

is within Benchmark Advance, the curriculum that we just adopted, they have um entire scope and sequences and uh classroom resources for multi-grade classes.

enrollment is really probably the one thing that's going to get us out of our financial problem that we're in right now because um, with new students comes new dollars and that is we've seen we can't just cut our way out of our financial situation.

When people say well give us an average pupil funding amount. Well you can't really do that because it's not really representative of all students. Students are all different.

So, any fluctuation there can have a huge impact on the budget. Um our budget's about 152 million in just the general fund.

historically if you take our very first day of school over the last 10-15 years and you compare that to our October 1 numbers we lose kids and that's historically over year. So that's why we don't want to get into what our numbers look like right now because they change on a daily basis.

The real key date is that open and alternate enrollment is January 15th... We want to have a boundary decision in January. So any of those affected students, affected families have time to if they choose to fill out that alternate enrollment form before that January 15th deadline comes so they can be considered in that same pool.