Call call Independent School District two two seven Chatfield Public Schools to order, board of on 02/12/2025. We'll look for a roll call, Josh. I think we have Katie and Jill. I'm missing. Everybody else is here. Alright. You have a quorum. I have a quorum. Stand for the pledge. 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. Okay.
You'll note the agenda has a couple of items added, actually some hires here and Jill is joining us as well. So, motion, I need a motion to approve the agenda. So second? Second. Second. Any further discussion on the agenda? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Agenda approved. Alright. Approval of claims and accounts. Yes. That looks good to do. I make a motion. Alright. Motion to approve. Second. Second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed?
Motion carried. District patron time. Anyone here speaking? Okay. Nobody out of line or okay. Alright. Seeing none, let's move on to reports. School board. We'll start with Dave. Nothing there? Alright. Mark? Nothing for me. Okay. Jill? Nope, nothing for me. And Josh? Nope, nothing. I do have a report. Typically, I try to send out the HVED's, kind of highlights from the director, but they've been so busy down there with this renovation, she hasn't gotten it out yet. So, and actually, I was just on a call here prior to the meeting. We've been meeting on a weekly basis,
looking at different contracts, approval of bids, etcetera. So things are underway down there at the old Winona Mall. So that's what I have to report. I think that takes care of that student senate. There you go. So just recently, we, had some cookie sales for Valentine's Day. So those will be handed out for, Valentine's Day this Friday. And they were $2 each. We'll be delivering them from the Saint Charles bakery. And then we're working on March madness brackets again this year, and we're trying to figure out if we're gonna do a spring activity for like
we did last year with the bonfire, but we don't know yet. How do the brackets work again? I I kinda remember that. It sounded I thought it'd be pretty cool, but I don't remember how it works. Yeah. Aidan found an online, like, bracket website, and then he got them to waive the, like, fee for it. So it was a better bracket. And then he just, like, everyone got sent a link, and you just, like, clicked on the link and then filled out your bracket. And then the, like, website would rank it for you and, like, see, like, who's in first, second, and third, and then all the way down. Who gets to play? All every Yeah. All students? Yeah. Seven through 12. Is there a prize,
like a cookie? Yeah. Like, first place got prom tickets last year. Oh, fun. Second place got, like, a basket. Third place got bubblers, but we might be changing the prizes up this year. That sounds fun. I just have a question. Can you still order the Valentine cookies, or is that deadline gone by? Oh, that's fast. Okay. That was that was last week. I got behind them all on that one. You're out of luck. Out of luck. You better not come to school. Just don't tell Julie. I know. Okay. Well, thank you, ladies. Thank you. The principals. Good evening, members of the board. Couple of things I wanted to point out to you.
I have just completed a big civil rights report that is required for some data information that we have to do every five years. And, it asks questions on, gosh, seemingly a million different questions on different aspects of school and things like that. And one of the areas that they looked at is the enrollment in programs, related to five zero four and special education. And I was quite surprised to find that our last year, our numbers of students that are on one of these two specific plans was twenty
five percent of our high school population or rather our seven-twelve population, which means that we are certainly engaging in some fairly intensive, assistance to a lot of our students and as somebody that attends those meetings, I recognize what is going on with each of those and it's pretty rare that we find a situation where it's not appropriate. But I in your board packet, I'm not going to get into it now, but in your board packet my stuff, I talk a little bit about the difference between five zero four and IEP.
So that as board members you have a little bit of a background if those terms come up for you to kind of familiarize yourself with it. There's no action or anything related to it. But, it's good for you to know that about twenty five percent of our students are getting highly intensive assistance with their academic needs and things like that. So, I think one of our goals always is to try to intervene before we get to that point. When we are doing programming related to that, it's highly intensive, it's a lot of resources and it's appropriate use of resources and things like that.
But I think that when we have opportunities to try to address issues earlier on, hopefully we can be able to avoid some of those things and provide assistance that can move us in a different direction, but wanted to give you that background. Also our registration has begun, we are in the process of that. I think it will be important for us to be careful with our registration process. We are obviously going to be impacted a little bit if there is some kind
of a some pullbacks on staffing and things like that related to our budget and things like that. So we are going to have to be careful about not moving too quickly in that process of assigning courses and things like that. But we do need to get started on that portion of our work. I'm super excited about a couple of different course options that we're going to be offering next year. Our upperclassmen will have an option of taking an elective called World War II in-depth. Nikki DeBoer approached me with an idea about teaching this course.
She has a background in European history and is a fantastic teacher, teaches world history and European history for us. And I was super excited when she offered this. I think it's a really interesting offering that potentially hopefully would keep some kids that might otherwise look for that kind of a course at the PSCO going the PSCO route, hopefully being able to keep some of our kids back for that great course. I'm super excited. We also are looking at offering for the first time a different option for our
ninth graders to meet their PE requirement. Right now we have three options for the second half of their requirement, all of those are really better served by having, upperclassmen taking those, but this would offer a different way so that a student could get it out of their way, if they wanted to as either a ninth or tenth grader and be able to take more advanced coursework as an upperclassman. So, that's there. And then, wanted to I I if I'm gonna hold off on, making comment on policy five twenty seven that's going to get a first reading tonight
from you. The high school leadership team made some wording suggestions that I think will would potentially move us from some pretty generic Minnesota School Board Association recommended language to stuff that really matches with what we do and our realities here related to student parking and things like that. So I don't think it will be too controversial or anything like that, but I think it's good language. And finally last month I talked about one of our new teachers, Michael Christie, doing some really good things for monitoring student social emotional health and things like that.
And one of our other teachers that's brand new this year I wanted to highlight that Superintendent Harris and I were in, Ms. Grace Jones Hoover's class the other day and she had a really well executed lesson and I usually don't come here and talk about lessons and things like that, but she had a great lesson where the kids were engaged in some creating proposals to the Minneapolis City Council. Superintendent Harris and I role played as council members and the kids pitched ideas for addressing some social issues that existed in Minneapolis,
created had a budget to work with and created really wonderful presentations and we had the opportunity also to critique them a little bit and make some suggestions and I had a blast and it was a really great use of the kids' time and it was a lesson that really put them into a position to be thinking thoughtfully about challenges that exist and how you address them and was a perfect lesson for her human geography class where they are looking at the impact of humans on the world that they live in
and it was great. I don't know if you want to comment, but we certainly had a lot of fun being in there that day. It was a challenge to keep up with the kids. They're presenting a lot of information. And it was wonderful to see Mrs. Hoover and her class in action and have Eric there and to commentate and offer and listen. It was a lot of fun. Look forward to doing it again at some point. Thank you. Eric, I have a couple of questions if I might. 25% of students is basically in some of these programs, that's high, right?
Yes. I mean, the history is playing. It's grown over time. I would say that ten years ago, we would have said that nationwide, you typically see about 10% to 12% of student population on an IEP. That's crept up. Five zero four plan participation has certainly crept up. It used to not be as large as it is. So I think that we it is high. I don't think that we're exceptionally high compared to other schools. I think that over the last decade certainly numbers have been increasing,
but it is something that we want to deliver the services that we need to the correct kids, but at the same time we also want to make sure that we are are allocating resources correctly and we are legally required to provide education in the least restrictive environment. That's a legal term. So we students that have a disability, we're supposed to educate them in an environment, in a setting and doing things that is as closely related to what their non disabled peers would be experiencing,
but still meeting the needs that they have. So there's always a delicate balance of trying to make sure that we're offering the right services to the right kids. Any idea why that increase is occurring? I think greater identification. I think that we are looking at data more. I think that physicians and mental health professionals are looking at more information. I think parents who have struggled with their kids at times in the past are asking more questions about is this an appropriate thing for my kid and approaching us
about it. Yes, there's a lot of those different things that are contributing to it. My understanding too is this is one of the drivers for the deficit in the state that they're going to be looking at the next bienniums? Ed may be able to share a little bit more about that information, but certainly the particularly special education services are always a consideration in any financial school financial discussions and that's always at the capital something that's being talked about. A lot of the aid that is received comes from the federal level.
And right now there's a lot of discussion about the future of Department of Ed at the federal level and where those services and those programs may be coming from, that only time will tell what happens there. But, yes. Just specific questions, Superintendent Harris might be able to address a little bit. Just want to mention that, that's something we will be aware of. Second, just two more questions. If a student is in this one of these programs, do they come out? We would love that to be the case. I think we are always every year, there's conversations with pulling back on services because they're no longer needed.
And again, we're always trying to have that student educated in the least restrictive environment. There are students that come off of services, some of them are going to carry it through the time that they graduate. And how many years of Fied do they need to have? You mentioned You're talking all students, right? All students. Okay. Students in general, yes. Correct. At the seven-twelve level, they have to have two semesters, at the high in nine through 12 and then they also have a two trimesters nine through 12 and then they have a trimester in seventh grade and a trimester in eighth grade.
Okay, thanks. Yeah. Any other questions for Eric? Could you give or would you give an example of what a restrictive and then making it least restrictive, I don't understand what would have to take place? Sure. So let's say we have a student who has a learning disability and they are in seventh grade and they have an hour a day that they're being pulled out of the general education classes and they're working with the special education teachers on their learning goals,
things like that. And then at their annual meeting we make a determination that the next year instead of being pulled out they're going to be in general education courses all day and instead of being pulled out for an hour now they're doing fully immersed into the general ed curriculum that would be less restrictive. Yes. Ed curriculum. That would be less restrictive. Yeah. Because it mirrors more what their non disabled peers would be having in their educational program. And one final question there. Is this the same kind of going on at the elementary as well? Okay, transition. I wasn't exactly prepared to talk about the number of kids that are on IEPs
and five zero four plans, but we do see, we have a lot of interventions in place at the elementary with our ADDSS program and our Title one program. And so when we talk even least restrictive, those services or those interventions are what we really want to have in place so we can, in a sense, prevent a child from having to go down the special ed route. You know, our goal is to keep our kids, you know, as like what Eric said, is immersed with their peers or their non disabled peers as much as we can. And we have our student support teams that meet. We met today.
It's a group of teachers, interventionists, our school psychologists, special ed, and general ed classroom teachers and myself. We meet every Wednesday and talk about, the progress. We look at our fast bridge scores. We talked our teachers will bring students to our student support team meeting and we have, you know, that group of folks that are there to to provide different strategies that we can use as more of a pre referral approach. And a lot of times we can find things that we can do in the classroom that will help a child so they can remain in there and not have to have, go down the road of special ed and accommodations and and such.
Of course, early intervention is best, and we've got a pretty robust program which I think prevents having to go the special ed route. But there's times when that's most appropriate for a child. And then our goal is there's goals within the IEP that we have, put in place for our teachers to to work with those those students and and we monitor the growth and hopefully, you know, they're they're exited or graduated out of that that program so that they don't need those services anymore. One thing I think to note too with what Eric was talking about,
I didn't look at, well, I put the numbers in, but I wasn't prepared to, off the top of my head, talk about the difference or the changes at the elementary level. I can look that up and get that to you. But, it also includes our speech only kids. So if a child is working with some, speech articulation skills, a lot of our kids in speech do end up exiting. So, you know, that and that might be, you know, smaller scale services and but they're still included in our our special ed numbers too. I appreciate that. I would say the board I sub occasionally.
Yeah. And And thank you. Yeah. And, did some of the payroll work and, that's I have a strong interest in that. So, yeah. Mhmm. Thank you. Well, I might have an opening tomorrow. Yeah. I figured we'd talk today. I can I go ahead, Shane? I guess Yeah. I've got some recognitions and just some some basic things to talk about this month with the elementary. First and foremost, I wanted to thank our staff and thank those for that do come in and substitute. It's we've been hit with kind of the flu bug the last couple weeks And it seems like it's a daily,
daily conversation between myself and and Desi and Brooke in my office on how we're gonna navigate through people being gone. So those folks that are willing to sub and can help us out, we definitely appreciate that. And, I know Tom, you come in and that's that's helpful too. And usually when I call you, just so you know, it's not not that we don't want you in the elementary, but we're we're really trying to find bodies. So, Hera and custodian appreciation week, we held that the January. And, there was a lot of things going on at the elementary school from,
dress up days, scavenger hunts, potlucks, you name it. And then we capped it off at the end of the week with our celebratory kind of walk through that we do with our state participants. And, Paul Graff, our custodian, he led the paras through the hallways on the little Zamboni, the floor cleaner. So that was pretty neat. There was music and signs and, you know, those those folks that do a lot of the work in our our roles as paras and and custodians, those are those are some pretty crucial jobs during the day. So we appreciate all the work they do.
Then we rolled into school counselor and social worker, week that we celebrated, the February. So I had some things there. Math Wizards is is up and running. And thanks to Mrs. Meyer and Mr. Wagner, they've had a couple of meets now and the kids are doing a nice job there. So I wanna recognize that. Next week, we have our second live session for our redact training. So all of the staff will be participating in that next Friday during the workshop day. And then I love to read week as we gear up for our MCAs.
We've got an I love, to read week, and also we'll have I love math week coming up too. So I don't know if you had a chance to walk through the building last week, but it was a Candyland theme. And we started the week off by having, the king and queen of Candyland. So Johnny Shufflebine and Rebecca Copeman came down, and we had the, library kinda decorated for them and they came in and are all dressed up and did some acting and reading for the kids. So thank you to missus Johns Root for her work and coordinating a lot of that. She puts a lot of time in,
get some of the kids, including her own kids to help out. Mark, I don't know if you got in on that. Maybe you cut some stuff out and I'm not sure, but so it's a pretty neat neat event. We had a carnival at the end of the week, So each class got to come down and do a bunch of little activities in the cafeteria. And then just final thing, MCA testing, of course, is coming up. We finished our fast bridge winter assessment. So we're gearing up for preparing our kids for for that. So it's busy, but pretty exciting and the days fly by when we're having fun.
Alright. Thank you. Thank you. I have a couple items to report upon. First and foremost, our election effort, came to a conclusion yesterday. As you know, it wasn't successful. Results were posted and whatnot. I just want to thank all of the community members and staff members and everybody who engaged in discussions all the way through I felt the process itself was successful in getting- people's opinions heard and discussed and we've we had the best turnout ever at our public meetings and they were productive. And people were honest and direct and respectful.
And I greatly appreciate that. I want to thank the board for patience and attending those meetings and being a part of those things. And so you know, we're going to continue forward with doing the work that we can do every day to help our kids and programs no matter what we have to work with and that is our mission. A couple of housekeeping items on that. Canvassing of results is a requirement that the board needs to do. We have that meeting scheduled for Thursday the twentieth at 6PM. If there's nothing else added to that special meeting agenda, that'll be probably about a five minute meeting.
We just have to basically acknowledge and vote upon the results as being official. Taxpayer cost simplified. I wanted to to throw this in there today. In the last couple of weeks, we've had some discussions about the financing and there's some discussions about the financing of the project at at one of two of our three meetings. And I know that the project is not going forward, but I think it's helpful for folks to have have, some information that even internally between administration and board, we had to kind of sort out together to understand what was and what was not part of the plan. At any rate,
this is a very simple round numbers. The cost of the project $11,000,000 the cost to finance it at 5% over twenty years using a wrap around financing technique over the top of the existing bonds that cost was about $8,000,000 So the total cost over time project financing $19,000,000 of that the state pays for six and so the net cost of the Chatfield taxpayers was about 13 and change. So I just wanted to clarify that as because there were questions and I got
an email on it. A couple days ago from a from a community member saying, can you kinda explain this to me? So that's how I explained it to that person and I thought, well, it might be worth sharing here. So, I have some gratitudes to pass along. I wanna, thank, thank you to, F Mike Tuohy who passed away recently. As most of you know, he was a board member for eight years, and served this, the school community and school district, very well as he did in many other aspects of this community, you know, in in all kinds of ways. So,
recognition to Mike's service. We have a retirement, that is on the agenda tonight, Anne Bolton, teaching currently now in third grade. She'll be retiring after thirty one years. She's she is doing great and is ready ready to pass the torch, and we're gonna miss Anne. Just appreciate somebody with that kind of service and dedication. I also want, the election topic. A big thank you to Renee. She was pretty much put in charge on a daily basis of making sure that everything was happening as it should, when it should, including early voting people,
going all the way back to when we started this together back in October. It's been a lot. We have never hosted an election like this in the district because early voting was never a thing when we had previous previous questions. There was a lot going on. A lot of work, a lot of time, and I wanna thank her immensely. We brought Lisa Kollmeier in kind of along the way, and she helped out a ton as well with with some early voting and whatnot when things started to get get tighter. Sue Peterson from ISG, most of you probably remember her. She did a heck of a job providing information, providing all the publications. They built the website.
Everything you see that went out on this, was by their bare hand, including the mailings and all of the required notifications and so forth. Amanda Kiefer at Olmstead County, a wonderful resource. She's in charge of elections. They have a department at Olmstead County. That's all they do is elections. And she was amazing. She gave us, all kinds of help to make sure we were operating properly. Also, we had some really good ongoing support from Sue Kester, Jocelyn Benson, and Margaret Reiner. They were on our ballot board. And for a while, they were coming in weekly and processing the early voting ballots that were coming in
with Renee. And until we got the automatic machine, then things kinda changed. So team effort, I have so much, gratitude for for everybody involved. It was it was a lot, but, I'm grateful that it that it went off fine. Mister Nelson, I wanna recognize he, went to the state capital not long ago and provided some tremendous testimony, on on PSCO, the challenges of it, and maybe some things that we want legislators to potentially start to consider. I included it in my report, and it shows you here where on the time stamp you can see,
what what mister Nelson offered. Well done and thank you. Also kind of in the legislative, realm, here's coverage of a area superintendent meeting that was held in Cannon Falls. And this is an annual event where superintendents talk with legislators about what their concerns are, what their hopes are, thank them for their service and things of those sorts. There are not much to report in readings. Eric is going to talk a little bit about the first reading in a moment. Second readings are posted from last week, no changes. There is no discussion. The action item we have has to do with revising
the FY 2025 budget and I can make a few comments on that when we get there. So thank you. Ed, can you go back and just go over that financing thing? I had a question. One of them is, is you talk about wrap around financing. Is that taking like an existing loan and wrapping it all together? How's that? Basically, you're paying interest longer and paying a bulk of a principal off a little later. Okay. Because there's there there are some of our there's some bonds that are dropping off at the end of this twenty year term. And so the principal, can be paid off in larger amounts without having to have the annual taxpayer tax
impact higher than than what we proposed. So this is a pretty common, strategy used by by districts or municipalities in general who have long term bonds, where they try to keep the tax impact low and sort of fill in, you know, down the line where some of the previous bonds would expire. So there's a financial advantage to that basically for that? Well, I mean, in the long run, you end up paying more interest. You know, what you're trying to do is make it more affordable in the meantime for your taxpayers, your annual basis. That's the idea. You know, you can always pay as much as you want upfront depending on how much you
have upfront and what you're willing to pay, you know. But this Ehlers are financial advisors, you know, who do this. They they try to find a sweet spot that number one, keeps the bonds, preferable on the market so that they so that they sell it at a premium rate because that's helpful for the financing and improves the project finance, you know. So the length of term, what it is you're financing, the amount of it, there's there's a, kind of a range that they look for, you know, and in there, how do you how does it fit with your taxpayer, tolerance potential, you know? And then you create your monthly and annual tax impacts and boards decide,
you know, do we or don't we based on that. And, you know, it would have had we financed it straight like you would in a in a traditional without a wrap around that would have changed. For example, the annual impact of a $300,000 home by about $40. So Ellis proposed that feeling that it was maybe significant enough, you know, to to use a wrap around strategy. Okay. What that amounts to on the levy would be about $100,000 a year. You know and as spread across the taxing district pretty hard to notice it. Now it is money over time that is we don't dismiss that,
you know, but the momentary here now effect is fairly minimal that's why they use it. And the cost by the state, coverage that is $6,000,000 is that for that agricultural credit? Correct. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions, Brad? Alright. Moving on, do I have a motion to we have the consent items, basically new hires, and some registrations as alluded to. Do I have a motion to accept the consent items as presented? So moved. Do I have a second? Second. Second. Any further discussion on the consent items?
I see four sub custodians. Are those replacements or? So how many custodians do we how many custodians do we have now? Full time regulars? Yeah. Well, in the high school there are, two. Okay. Excuse me. Three. And in the elementary there is 2.4. So these sub custodians would only be on call. They're not paid regularly. Is that what I They would come into sub for one of our regulars who's gone. Okay. So this would be like a part time job for them. Well, probably even less than that. It's you know, they may not they may not get called for three weeks.
They don't Okay. So okay. It it's only Like like a substitute teacher. Oh, okay. It's they're only on call. Okay. Correct. Yes. Do we have job postings then? Like For subs? Some of those. Like, I'm just is like, Bailey Shaw Oh. And Bolton, they're retiring at the end of the year? Correct. Okay. And then, like, assistant varsity baseball coach, is that filled? Or we have to post that with baseball coming up and starting Ron Henry? I think that's been filled. This is probably just a a catch up. Okay. I believe. I'd have to check with Dan. Okay. Just seeing that. Yeah. There's some transfers and I I think they moved some people up and they're filling
in from the bottom. As far as I know, I Derek, correct me if I'm wrong. I think I think we're staffed for spring. These are these are just keeping up with with Board actions. And I guess one of the questions with these retirements particularly the teachers, we'll be filling them this summer then? We're not it's a little premature to recommend staffing for next year, that's an April thing. When we get into fiscal twenty six budget, we have some work to do and we'll be sharing that out as we go. So, they were giving us plenty of time of notice and so we put it on the board agenda, but those decisions will become later in the year.
Okay. That will be part of the overall. Yes. Just like last year for FY 2025 you got a list of budget reductions and budget changes that we went through openly. We're going to be doing something very similar to that here in the near future. Any further discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried, consent items approved. First reading of the district policies 05/27, student use and parking of motor vehicles, patrols, inspections and searches. Eric, did you want to speak to that? Or do we have to have a this is just an information This is a first review, but you can give you a few bits of Yes,
there's a few small recommendations to the existing language that's there. The existing language related to student use of vehicles on campus says that students can only be driving on campus in a situation where there's an emergency or with the principal's permission. I'm just recommending that we add language that says as another reason as the student is arriving or departing campus that we have kids coming and going for all sorts of perfectly appropriate reasons throughout the day.
And we certainly aren't in a situation where we want to limit it to just emergencies and things like that. That's just it just doesn't fit our particular realities. The other language that's in there is the one section heading we're removing the word student because some of it parking language that we have in our board policy would exist whether it's a student or a member of the community. If somebody decides in our front parking lot to camp out their camper for a month, we reserve the right to tow it.
And if there's also some language that deals with the realities of the towing business. The current language basically says if we tow somebody we just are supposed to dump it in a safe place. The reality is tow companies are the way they make their money is by getting storing it at their lot plus the toll cost and things like that that are incurred. We don't want to be just dropping cars on the side of the street somewhere and assuming the implications and the liabilities related to that.
So it would allow us to work with a tow company to have them tow it to their tow lot, impound lot if that's appropriate or some other appropriate location. I kind of like to check the principal as to okay at that. Every time somebody comes or goes, they have to check interview. I I would really love that. Do we currently have a procedure? I mean, do you have a tow company that you can call tomorrow if you needed to? Or We don't have a it's almost never done because we the one nice thing
about being in a small town is we pretty much know who drives what and we can tap somebody on the shoulder and say you got to move your car. We had somebody parking in a pedestrian way the other day and had to move that. But, you know, generally the issue is just, really if we had somebody like I was describing where somebody was just in the community was parking on our on our site. And and if we didn't know who they were and we made an effort to try to get them to move and they weren't, we would probably take that step. Yeah. All right. Thank you. The biggest reality probably would be an abandoned vehicle.
Yeah. The notes are in your, or the commentary on the changes are in this for you to look at in my report. All right. Anything more further discussion in the first reading of five twenty seven? All right, moving on we have readings for second reading and actually approval for eight zero one equal access to school facilities, nine zero one community education, nine zero two, use of district facilities and equipment, and nine zero six, community notification of predatory offenders. Do I have a motion to approve these as written?
So moved. I will move. Do I have a second? Second. Any further discussion on these? Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Discussion items? I have one thing to I'd like to say. Sure. So I'd like to reiterate what Pat had said about the community. It's great involvement for the gym project. A lot of people got involved and that was great. I don't wanna say this, but I need to say one thing. Code of ethics, our policy two zero nine states, as a member of the school board, I will support the decision of the school board even if my position concerning the issue was
different. I feel that a letter to the editor does not match up with the policy by a school board member that was published on Saturday. That's all I have to say. Alright. Well, I had to do it a little bit. Alright. I think a discussion just worthy of and maybe whenever it'd be a while before we have something like this again, but I think we need to have some discussion about what the appropriate method of conversation is, or we have a responsibility to get information out to the public. However, there's a time and a place for that.
So to add on to kind of what Mark is saying, we've had we had at least one school board meeting where the information that was being shared unsolicited, and kept pushing and pushing in a letter to the editor in what I think was an attempt to sway votes, which adds to any appropriateness of that policy that Mark just read off. The time and place for that would have been a school board meeting, to to sway, try to manipulate, and I'm gonna be careful with how far those that was meant to go,
was, but we had opportunities to have that discussion and share that information in board meeting settings together, and have discussions on that and not just go off on our own to make decisions and do things. And, yeah, and I just feel that was inappropriate. And I think we need to be under the come into agreement of what an understanding of how if this type of thing comes up again, how we're going to proceed as a board by doing things off kind of on our own, that is kind of different or in opposition to what we've already agreed upon together.
We should be having a unified front on things. Sometimes we might decide or vote on things that one or more of us might not have wanted to do, but we need to share. We have to we should really be having kind of a unified front and doing that with communication, amongst each other here and not just all of a sudden a surprise that board member is doing something that none of the rest of us are even aware of or and what that attempt or what that appears to be. And maybe it was different than what it appears to be.
It appears to, me without trying to speak for others, it seemed to appear to, many of us that that was done in kind of a inappropriate way. So leave it at that. Anybody has any thoughts or not? I think it is important as we move forward. We have lots of other decisions to make, whatever they might be. We need to make sure that we're representing everybody else on the board appropriately. Any further discussion? Just I wanted to reiterate what Ed had said. I think our having been involved in public service,
I think the efforts on behalf of the board, in particular you Ed, with staff as far as the four day a week and the gymnasium was excellent, getting public input and getting the information out there. And I would also commend, the district, residents for their interest. I mean, my God, the people that showed up. I mean, certainly there was a lot of concern or questions and stuff, but that's great to see. And finally, if you're interested at all in subbing at the school, it's a fulfilling opportunity. I have to say I got dragged into it and I do enjoy it immensely
most days and, it's better it's it's I have to admit, we've got some pretty good kids. What Tom failed to mention is that he might be the favorite sub in the building. When he walks down the hall, he kinda it's the norm treatment from Cheers. You know, and that does scare me because I don't know if I'm doing something right or wrong. Right. Yeah. Everybody remembers their favorite sub, Tom. Yeah. That's right, too. Sheila Schrucker was ours. But, yeah, I would encourage that and hopefully the people of the community know that too. So, you know, so. All right,
anything further on discussion? Next action item is the approval of the revised budget. Sure, I can comment a bit on this. I provided you some information to try to give you a glimpse of where we were and where we're at. I would say by and large, our proposed budget is performing as we wished. It is coming in, at or slightly above, you know, what what the, where it was set, which is a good thing. We try to budget a little bit of conservatism, conserve conservatism into these budgets and and that that has worked out. And I want to thank Dan Schroeder.
He's been really doing a nice job for us and providing information that's timely, easy to digest and he understands everything that that he needs to. So just a little bit of a recap. You know, a couple of years ago, we decided when we knew we had a long term budget journey to go down that we were gonna do it in in in, kind of a hybrid fashion. We we were didn't feel good about about cutting people in budgets, to a strong degree, you know, when when the fund balance at that time just after COVID was at an all
time high cause it was kind of artificially inflated by by some of the the additional revenues we had received. So we thought we would kind of do a very slow, buy down of our debt through fund balance along with some timely cost cutting, and opportunistic budget reductions along the way. So far that has proven to have held up. A couple of years ago our fund balance was at 2,700,000.0. At the end of last year it ended at about 2.26. For this year it's going to look to be right around
2.1. So it's coming down in pieces that aren't dramatic, and eventually, you know, they'll need to level off. But a couple of things to note, we're gonna come in about 126,000 ks this year compared to last. To me that's a pretty modest reduction in fund balance for a single year based on what our scale of of operations has been. So that's a good thing. However, keep in mind for this year's budget, we did cut about 200,000 last summer, but that's the reason why we're doing this,
we're taking a dual perspective on this. So at any rate, every time every every year at this time, we take the current budget and revise it a bit to make sure that we understand how it's tracking And so that our predictability for year end is clear and that's really what today is for. And Dan put together in the word document some of the changes for revenues and expenditures that were a little bit notice a little bit notable, and, that, you know, amounts to about a hundred k better than what what the the budget was built
upon. And the second file there is the, actual budget form. So this you've had for a while and you can see, some of these things will make a little sense. Some some probably need a little explanation. I know Mark had a really good question here earlier that we talked about. You know, Some of these numbers are large in and of themselves but depending on the budget they're in sometimes the context is appropriate. For example, the basic formula $80,000 that came in higher than projected And that's our basic state revenue generation for operations.
That's about $6,900,000 projected. It was still $6,900,000 just $80 higher. It was like 6.91 came in at 6.99. So from a budgetary standpoint, the variance is only about 1.1% on $6,000,000 So it was accurate, you know, even though 80 ks is that's a that's a lot of money, you know, in and of itself, put it in that context. And it was a good fluctuation. We'll take 80 k all day long. But keep in mind, we're we're we're where the fluctuation is at.
These are all revenue changes. Some of these are protected, streams of money, you know, teacher redact training. These are these are momentary funding streams from the State of Minnesota intended to pay staff for their staff development efforts regarding and relating to the redact. Title one, another example of a special program that comes to assist you know primarily in reading and math. You know we get an approximate allocation on those types of, allocations and that's what we base a budget on. We get this time of year we get more fine firm numbers and you know
it was 17 ks different. But there again, you know, that's in the neighborhood of a couple hundred thousand dollar budget, so it's still pretty close. And nothing in here is dramatic in terms of a variance between between, adopted and and and, revised. Probably the one thing that you would notice or maybe know about it make the most sense to you, we had a changeover in business management, staffing. And so we had, a proration of, not continuing, you know, with our previous business manager and bringing on a contracted service was basically a wash.
However, what we were able to save was that we no longer needed the, financial subscription to frontline, which was very expensive. And, you know, between those two things, saved about $35,000. So, here is the reduction in expenditure from the proration contract that was shortened, obviously, and then here is the replacement fee for service for SMS business management. So there's an example of kind of an in and out change. So there's all kinds of things here we can go into it. Nothing in here is is unusual. Can we have any questions specifically?
You had an enrollment number on top. Is that the current enrollment? And how does that compare to, like, September 1? We're within about four. I think we I think right now, we're using eight eighty one. Yeah. Yeah. So we we haven't gained or lost to a great degree over the course of the year, which is alright. I mean, stability is is a good thing. Yeah. Now keep in mind enrollment, how they calculate it and how they pay it out. It goes by not who you start with or end with. It's how long were they here during the year. So a lot of these FTEs are prorated as well.
You get a kid that moves out halfway through the year, you could have the money. Even though they started with you and they're on your rolls at September. You know, so it's it's a very complicated real time funding mechanism. Alright. Then I'll just show you the the sheet that was included in my packet where you can see the these are these are this is a large fund summary as you can see general fund, one down through food service, debt service, community ed, and whatnot. You can see on the left hand column the adopted budget, revenues and expenditures,
adjustments, and what the projection is supposed to be coming up here at the end of this this fiscal year. And top line is kind of the one that we watch most closely. The unassigned fund balance you can see is going to decrease by about 100,000 which is a moderate excuse me. Very mild decrease as far as fund balances go for the negative. But that was also supported by a $200,000 budget cut. Had we not cut anything, then that number would be, you know, three as well. 300,000 rather than one. Makes sense? Okay. So again,
this is a pretty standard, moment in February that the budget is acting as intended and we don't have any big surprises coming up. Our biggest discussions will be coming on fiscal twenty six and we'll engage in that in the next few weeks. So we're in some form of deficit spending? Correct. You wouldn't consider that being in debt, right? In debt? Yes. Not necessarily. No, we're using reserves to soften the amount in the pace of budget cuts. We still have over $2,000,000 in a fund balance. I think that's the messaging that I heard
and I've heard this through students. And so I'm not sure where this messaging is coming from is that that we're in debt. And so somewhere, I think that messaging needs to be cleared up so we don't have, especially if there's staff that feel that we're in debt and that's being expressed to students somewhere, as a concern. I think we just need to make sure messaging Right. Is out there that Well, technically understands where well Technically, we I mean, it depends on how you look at it. I mean, if you compare it to We're not having to borrow currently because we're in debt, whereas some school districts currently That that person are in debt.
We They're, you know, we are We are easily making our paying our bills. Correct? Our our bills are being paid. It's just we're we're having as we go along, you know, some of those reserves, you know, are are gonna be less than they were. So that's a tough concept for the adults to to get their head wrapped around. I mean, if you start bringing in all of the bonded debt we have, are we in debt? Yeah. By about $45,000,000. You know? But but it just depends on how you look at it. You know? So What is the snapshot in time? A $2,000,000, fund balance is very healthy and would every district would would love to have it.
You know, and and that's great. I I feel very blessed and fortunate to have this position. You know, we we we do have a future though that as we know, and I'm not gonna try to beat beat the drum here too hard, but that, you know, we still have to maintain the course. But but we're in a fairly healthy situation compared to Correct. That that part of the street. Yeah. I I I prefer our position here than to A lot of districts are in touch. Some of the folks are struggling really hard with real time,
you know, right now, budget crisis. It is very difficult. Do we need to is there a minimum fund balance that we have to maintain? Do we have to? Yes. Does not. Okay. There's board policy says that you're gonna strive to maintain two months worth of operating money, which is about 1,700,000.0. Okay. 1.7. Okay. Now that, you know, that that's the goal. You know, right now our districts are most districts maintaining that? No. You know, will we have to maybe bend that to kind of continue our chosen path?
Most likely. You know, but that hopefully will be, you know, a decision for a couple of years from now. You know, for for example, you know, there's there's plenty of districts that operate on fund balances that are less than a million. You know? And so when we get to that point, we'll do a cash flow analysis, and that'll tell us more specifically at that point in time, what does that mean for monthly bills, revenues, you know, short term borrowing, do you or don't you? You know? So it'd be too early to tell for that. So just to kind of summarize too, as we had talked about the need to have a funding referendum, operational referendum in the next few years.
And it appears to me what I'm hearing is that we're on that track, but we're coasting along okay. Well, my my hope is that we won't need to have that reality for for at least three years. Okay. That's that's my hope. We're just not in a dire situation where we have to do something where we can plan. Yes. We have time to plan. That is and we're used to that. And the staff has been good about that. And they've trusted the math and we've had good tools to work with from a financial projection standpoint that have been helpful.
I have a, I've heard something so I just want to share it with you. Have you heard of anybody kind of trying to shop around or try to recruit students to their district with open enrollment? Like like a school district doing it actively? Yeah. I have not heard of that. Okay. I've heard that I don't have it on you know? But I've heard of school districts, you know, I don't wanna just a song. They have a nice gymnasium going around and trying to recruit kids from other districts to come there. So I'm not saying it's never been done, you know, I but but as far as a school district making a habit of actively going to
try to get other kids, that's generally not, you know, that's that's pretty much a full pie in the education world. However, families shop themselves around for the most part as far as I'm concerned. You need to present a good service, a good product and be desirable and that's your best bet. Like I said, I just I heard some rumors and I just wanted to I I have not heard of that. Okay. No big deal. So alright. Any further thing oh, we need to have a motion to approve the revised budget. Do I have a motion to approve it?
So moved. Second? Second. Any further discussion? All in favor say, aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Second. All in all in favor say aye. Aye. We need to adjourn. Alright. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Tom. Well done. Okay. You're natural.