Aaron Giese, South O’Brien Business Manager, reported “fund balances remain extremely healthy. If you look at PPEL and SAVE we’ve had a lot of expenditures coming out of there too and they just keep building and building so that would be a plus, I would say.” He also noted that the activity fund was a little bit lower than last year. The nutrition fund remains extremely high. The free breakfast chips away at that a little bit. Giese was explaining the balance in part due to COVID relief funds for the nutrition account that has very limited spending options. Currently, in an effort to spend those funds, the district offers free breakfast to all students.
Mrs. Kim Poekes provided the board with an overview of the JH/HS DISCOVER program. Poekes is the secondary science instructor. A joint effort between Secondary Principal Denise Phillips and Poekes along with a group of teachers in the building, once referred to as model teachers, now known as building leaders to develop the program. It was implemented in the last school year.
D – Develop
I – Innovate
S – Study
C – Create
O – Observe
V – Volunteer
E – Enrich
R – Reason
The program takes 30 minutes of each day for intervention for students needing particular instruction or for enrichment for students who are not in need.
Each student receives a slide show with a list of topics available for instruction. Student ranking (top 5) is the methods used to group students into the topic of choice. Students not performing at grade level or poor performance on ISAS are given this time for learning interventions.
Intervention students have options for the discovery part of the program at different intervals. Teachers are kept apprised of the student performance.
Reports by administrators were given. Wade Riley provided a matrix showing student learning growth from grade level to the present and past years for the entire year. Board members had several questions to understand how the format and measures demonstrated student growth in learning throughout the year.
An amendment to the district policy of posting meeting agendas to each of the district’s 4 post office bulletin boards was read and passed. Two more readings will take place. The amendments simply allows the district to post agendas to building doorways and the website rather than running to all of the post offices. Any person can also request being provided with a notice.
A lot of discussion took place about meeting the required number of hours of student/teacher contact. Six late starts and 1 early dismissal – total of 57.5 hours missed for this school year by January 30. Riley stated that he wants to get some of these hours back and is concerned about the seniors. “You can’t move graduation,” said Riley proposed February 13, a no-school day; and 20, the first snow make-up day. He also proposed eliminating all the Professional Development (PD) days except the first Wednesday of each month. March 8, 15, 22, 23. Those get 6 more hours. He also suggested and April 10, the day after Easter. May 26 will become a school day and May 30, AT THIS POINT, is the day after Memorial, would be a school day also. Schedules are being scrutinized to avoid Saturday classes for seniors and going into June. This plan leaves sixteen hours of two school days to get back to avoid going too deep into summer. He explained that he and Mrs. Phillips would devise what 16 hours of additional work time outside of 7:45 and 3:45 (for teachers) that they could accomplish to get back 2 of their teaching days so that we don’t have them here that whole last week.” Details are still being considered. Flextime at the beginning of the year was spoken about well at this point.
The expectation is that there will be more snow days. Additional snow days will most likely cause school days added on to the end of the school year.