Good evening and welcome to the Rochester Community Schools Board of Education regular meeting called to order at 06:04. If you would please rise with me and join in 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. This Board of Education regular meeting is a meeting of the Board of Education in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not a public
community meeting. However, there is a time for public participation during the meeting. General public comment will be heard under agenda item six. If you wish to speak tonight and have not already filled out a yellow card, they're located on the table near the entrance to the auditorium. Once you've completed the card, please hand it to a shield officer. Please note that cards must be completed prior to speaking, and I'll call the names of those who I have a card for during public comment. I call on my board colleagues to abide by the norms that we've agreed to. These include keeping comments germane to the agenda item, that we don't surprise each other at the board table,
that we have one speaker at a time that is recognized by the chair before speaking, to be honest, to to refrain from attacking others motives, to uphold the chain of command, and to truly listen to each other. To those in attendance this evening, I'd like to remind you that this is a meeting for the board to conduct our business. We believe that there we request that there not be any outburst from the audience. Outbursts or any other behavior that disrupts our meeting will be seen as a breach of the peace and those individuals will be asked to leave the building. On behalf of my colleagues on the board,
we're grateful to be able to serve this community and we appreciate your support. For roll call, all board members are present. Moving on to our agenda, is there a motion to approve the agenda as presented? Moved by Trustee Annas with support from Trustee Gupta. Is there any discussion? Madam President? Trustee Lecui? I move that we add an item to discuss submitting the student privacy policy to the SPCC committee for review, which I emailed to you all last Wednesday. Okay. A motion to amend the agenda to include
this student privacy policy? To discuss submitting the student privacy policy to the SPCC committee. That's the superintendent's policy Yeah. We don't need the motion. It's just the item to add to the agenda. So it would be just to include a discussion of the student privacy policy. And that would be under new business, so that would be item 9.5. That would be item 9.5 if it did pass. And I'll be honest, I don't remember seeing that. So, so that was moved by trustee Lecui,
supported by trustee Lausanne. So motion to amend the agenda to include item 9.5, student privacy policy. All those in favor, please say discussion of why it should be added to the agenda? Oh, sure. Go ahead. The reason that I'm adding it to the agenda is because I've not heard a response from any board members about my request, and we have a clear desire from the community to create a policy that addresses protecting students' rights to privacy from the opposite sex in their bathrooms and locker rooms. Anyone else have a comment at this time?
Alright. Trustee Lozano? Hello? Oh, sorry. I just wanted to, support that and back up because I was sending some emails regarding this, and I would like holding invites for this also. As being on the FCC, I think it would be a good idea to at least discuss. Trustee Blake? So the way that it works when you're on the SPCC, which I was on last year, is you just bring your proposals to the meeting. You don't we don't have them at this meeting. You start at that meeting, and then it goes here afterwards. So that's why I'll be voting no. Oh, trustee Lecui? Yes. And just to clarify for that, I'm not suggesting that we discuss the policy today.
I'm discussing that we suggest that the SPCC committee review it. I also was on the SPCC committee, and when I was on that committee, I would just bring up my proposals right there. But I haven't heard from any board members. I have no idea if the SPCC committee is even considering it, So I'm just trying to see if we can get the SPCC committee to consider the policy and discuss it, and then it will come to the full board after they've made their determination. And I I will just say that once again, you could have easily emailed me or told me ahead of time that you wanted to add something to the agenda.
You did not. We have a long agenda, I believe, as we as is already written. But at this point, is there anyone else who wishes to make a comment before we vote on this amendment? Madam president? Trustee Lacour, you've already spoken twice. Well, it No. Good question. Madam president. And my question is, could you please just respond next time when I send you a policy with your thoughts, and then I wouldn't feel the need to bring it up at the meeting. You didn't talk about bringing it here either. It was addressed to the SPC and to cover it. So at this point, all of those in favor of amending the agenda to include item 9.5,
a student privacy policy, please say aye. Aye. Was that, was it two? Those opposed, please say no. No. No. That's a two five vote and the amendment does not pass. The motion again is to approve the agenda as presented. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote and the agenda, the motion to approve the agenda passes. And at this point, we're moving on to our spotlight on success. And I think, mister Cusmano, you're gonna kick us off. Yes. Hello. Good evening.
At Rochester Community Schools, we are proud of the comprehensive music education that we provide our students. Through our choral, instrumental, and orchestra programs, which are taught by extremely talented teachers and staff, RCS students have the opportunity to develop the skills, knowledge, and appreciation for a variety of music genres. Tonight, we are highlighting jazz band. Joining us is mister Dave David Urig, director of bands at Rochester High School, and students Vaughn Campbell, Taimin Susuela, Ty Keller, and Owen Smith. Before I turn it over to mister Urig,
I'd like to mention that all three high schools, Adams, Stoney Creek, and Rochester are hosting the RCS jazz showcase on Thursday, March 20 at 6PM at the Flagstar Strand Theatre in Pontiac. All community members are invited to attend. I also wanted to share an invitation for board and community members to join us in celebrating our district's orchestra program. This year, our graduating seniors will be the first class to have the opportunity to experience the complete and complete RCS Orchestra curriculum.
A special performance will be provided by orchestra students grades six through 12 on Tuesday, April 1 from seven to 8PM in the Adams High School Gymnasium. At this time, please join me in welcoming mister David Yerg. Thank you, mister Cuzmiano. I'd like to first introduce, again, our saxophone quartet from Rochester High School. They are called the Smith sax quartet named after mister Owen Smith, our Berry sax player. They're gonna play first for you, a jazz arrangement of Fly Me to the Moon. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Two of these guys are gonna come back and play one more in just a
second. I wanted to highlight again the jazz showcase that we have taking place this Thursday, just in three days at the Strand Theatre in Pontiac. This is a really exciting event for all three of the jazz programs, in RCS. We've been doing this now for four years, and even a little bit before that in COVID, we used to play at Cliff Bell's, jazz and Aretha's jazz cafe in Detroit. And then the last three years we were playing at the Detroit Music Hall. Scott Quinell is a local jazz artist. He has a big band of his own. He's a instructor at OU, and he's organized the event the past three years and brought all of our jazz
bands together, and it's been a really great event. Unfortunately, this year, he wasn't able to put that event together, so we did a little research. Matt Harris, the band director at Adams, found the venue, in Pontiac and Strand Theatre and worked out all the details. We just actually toured the venue about a couple hours ago, myself and, Lauren and Matt, and we're able to see all the ins and outs of the venue. It's gonna be a great place, a very historic venue in Pontiac if you've been there before. If not, we encourage you to come check it out. Adams has two jazz bands performing first from six to seven.
The Stoney Creek High School big band will play between seven and eight along with some jazz combos. And then the Rochester High School, blue and white jazz bands will perform from eight to nine. We're really excited for this. We're showcasing over a 50 students. Just alone at Rochester, we have 87 students in the two jazz bands, which is pretty massive, and, it's gonna be an exciting concert. So if you can come out and check out the event, again, this Thursday, the twentieth, from six to nine. Tickets are, on sale on Ticketmaster, which is neat, but you can also get them at the door at the venue on Thursday evening.
And again, I'd like to just, introduce once again, Timon Sowela and Vaughn Campbell. They're gonna play a little duet here to wrap this up. This is Tuxedo. Thank you so much, Mr. Uhrig, and, to the students that you brought with us, so talented and it's great to see the opportunities that some of our younger kids have as they move into middle school and high school, so thank you. Moving on, agenda item five is communications and this is where we reference various communications that have been received. Item 5.1 is communications received by the board. Trustee Blake,
can you give us an update? Yes, the board received, 22 communications, and they are all in the packet for reference. Thank you. And, next we have an update from our student representatives. And, are you I didn't get a chance to talk to you ahead of time. Are you doing it together or separate? Separate? Alright. You can come up one at a time and, give us your name and what school you're representing. Good evening, everyone. My name is Stephanie Javieras from Rochester Adams High School, and it is my pleasure to report on our recent events tonight. Rochester Adams, Stony Creek ACE, and the International Academy are continuing preparation for the upcoming SAT testing,
which will take place the week of April 7. In order to ensure students maximize their performance throughout this testing period, there are two prep methods in place. The first is an SAT training session every Tuesday after school in the media center with test taking advice, practice modules, and, of course, snacks to entice students to attend. Additionally, our schools have SAT prep during the day every Tuesday and alternating hours each week. This period of time slightly alters our typical schedule to provide more time for practice modules during the designated class period.
During this time, seniors are offered college advice or are able to complete homework and prepare for the next hours. We really enjoy this time. These preparation methods have been found very useful by our student body, and we cannot wait to see how this helps them in their upcoming testing. Good luck, students. In regards to Adams specifically, our clubs have been busy this past month. 64 DECA state qualifiers spent Thursday through Saturday competing in Detroit. We are proud to recognize and congratulate 25 state finalists and 10 ICDC international qualifiers.
Our Business Professionals of America Club also competed this past weekend and were recognized on stage more than any other competing high school. Additionally, our theater department performed an incredible show this weekend, Little Shop of Horrors, enjoyed by many, shown through this sold out auditorium. Finally, today marks the beginning of foreign language week at Adams, where students, all language classes, and clubs celebrate their culture with daily presentations, homemade food, and decorated hallways. To encourage participation in these incredible clubs,
Adams held our eighth grade parent night on March 13 to welcome incoming freshmen to join some engaging extrovert dealers. This month also concluded our charity week. Emma from Stony Creek will elaborate on our combined efforts, but I would like to send a big thank you to all of our supporters, students, and community members. It is because of your generous donations that we are able to make an incredible contribution to Camp Kesel. Additionally, our winter sports have come to a close. Some season highlights included Adam's first individual wrestling state champion since 1999.
Congratulations, Jace Morgan. Two pool records broken and boys swim and dive, and our cheer team finishing third at states. As our spring sports gear up, we would like to wish all teams good luck and congratulate students on their new rosters, which are sure to provide a successful season. Thank you so much for your time this evening, and I look forward to reporting back next month. Hi, everyone. I'm Anna Grumwold, and I'm the representative from Rochester High School. I'm gonna start off by talking about texting week that's coming up right after spring break. Testing week will start on April 7. The testing week will include things like the digital readiness check.
Roger is also doing two more SAT workshops coming up one day, March nineteenth and one day, April second. These workshops will be helping students with math, reading, and writing to help them prepare for the SAT. Next, as the school year is almost over for all the seniors, we have some big senior events coming up that all the seniors are so excited for. The first one is prom, which is the week of April 28. After that, we have honors complication, which is the second week in May. Congratulations to all the seniors who are going to be at honors complication.
Next, the senior walk will be taking place on May 21, which is the the day after the last day of school for all the seniors. And lastly, for senior events, graduation is coming up really fast, and all the graduations for all three schools will be taking place the week of May 26. Next, Rochester has been up to a lot the past couple weeks. First, a huge crash congratulations to all the boys swim and dive who competed at the m a, sorry, the MHSA state finals where many of them did very well.
Congrats to all who competed. Next, the Rochester Stony sorry, the Rochester social studies department and some of the Rochester Students took a trip to San Francisco where they were able to learn all about the different history about sorry. The different history of San Francisco and all the different places there. We also had our Rochester Feds robotics team who won the first Impact Award at their last competition and will be competing again at Troy coming up very soon. At Rochester,
we also wanted to give a big congratulations to Eli Watson, who got a full ride to Lawrence Tech for eSport. Congrats and good luck next year at Lawrence Tech. Next, we also had our EdCareer students take home 13 medals from the competition that passed one two last week. Congrats to all of them who competed. The RHS Chamber Orchestra earned a division one rating in their, state solo and ensemble. Congrats to all the students who are part of Chamber Orchestra. Lastly, on March 13, we had our Rochester sorry.
Future Falcon Night and Learning Expo. This event was for all the future Falcons who are wanting to hear more about the life at Rochester, learning about clubs, activities, classes, and we're also able to go on a tour of the campus. Thank you for listening to all the updates, and I will see everybody next month. Hi, everyone. My name is Emma Chico, and I represent Stony Creek High School. March is always a busy month for our school with the end of winter sports, the beginning of spring sports, and, of course, Charity Week. I want to start by giving you all an update on how Charity went Charity
Week went for our three schools. Unfortunately, I don't have the total amount of money raised by all three schools yet, but I can assure you we are not disappointed. All schools had a variety of events scattered throughout the week in order to raise money for Camp Kesem and topped off the week with a charity ball dance hosted by Stoney. The entire week was so much fun and a complete success. Moving forward with some sports updates, I am proud to announce that our cheer team closed out the season strong by winning states for the second year in a row. We are so proud of all that they accomplished because it wasn't easy by any
means. This makes the first back to back win in Sony history. As for our girls' basketball team, Izzy Abezai, Calista Avezai, and Jadilyn Freeman all won OAA Red First Team, and the girls made it to district finals before their season came to a close. Taylor Fulkerson, Jenna Cook, and Merrick Schwabach also got an an honorable mention. Lastly, our swim team ended their season with a bang at States this weekend. They placed fifth at States, which is the highest our team has placed in Stony history. I'm proud to say that Will Chico, my twin brother,
got first place in both the 200 free and the 500 free, earning not only state titles in those events, but also All American. The relays consisting of Will Chico, Gorka Morales, Jonathan Nelson, Austin Pearsley, and Joey Vaccari placed fourth and sixth in their respective relays. We had various other swimmers at place place at states and are so proud to see how they were able to close their season. Heading into our spring sports, boys and girls lacrosse have their first game on Wednesday, and baseball has a scrimmage at Romeo. We love supporting our spring sports,
especially when the weather starts to get nicer. Theater is prepping tirelessly for their spring musical every day on this stage, so we cannot wait to see when that is ready to perform. This past weekend was DECA States. Sony students did a great job with multiple finalists and four students even making it to nationals. Also, our choir is going to Portugal over spring break, which is such a neat experience. Speaking of spring break, I think the whole school is ready for a week off and can't wait to get the final tests of this week wrapped up, including myself. That is all for Sony.
Have a great week and an even better spring break. Thank you. Hello, everyone. It's great to be back this evening. My name is Minjun Kim, the International Academy representative. I hope everyone is enjoying the beautiful weather and without further ado, I'll be diving into some of the things going on at IA. Overall, we're moving at a pretty standard pace except for the seniors who have just wrapped up their final internal assessments in their foreign language classes. This includes a fifteen minute oral examination in their language that's made up of a presentation portion and a casual dialogue with the teacher,
which acts as a tool to measure fluency. And then seniors are also wrapping up CASS, which stands for Creativity, Activity, and Service, a two year long task that all students must complete before receiving the IB Diploma. Some examples of CASS are volunteering at a food bank, making a cake, or even just playing soccer with a friend. But ultimately, it's just a way to, make our lives a little bit more balanced. I have one quick update about IA's clubs, and it's that both the Science Olympiad team and the mock trial team has made
it to the state competition. So we're very proud of all their hard work and wish them the best at States. Now tomorrow is our honors convocation, so it's definitely much earlier than, the other schools in RCS, but, the students will be nonetheless recognized for their hard work over the past four years. Categories of awards include National Merit finalists, department awards, where teachers nominate one student, per subject, and finally the academic recognition based on GPAs. The final day of school for seniors at IA is Thursday,
April 24, which will be followed by a clap out. After that, the seniors will undertake a month of IB testing that encompasses all of their class subjects as a finale to the IB curriculum. And that's all for IA. Thank you so much for your time and have a wonderful week. Thank you so much for those updates. Always appreciate hearing everything that's going on in the schools and looking forward to hearing more about charity week and what your total ends up being. Moving on to agenda item 5.3. This is the section where members of the Board of Education share any communications that
were shared directly with them and were not sent to the full board. Did any board member receive communication from the public? Trustee Blake? I received a communication from Kelly Helfrich or Helfrich? I'm not sure which it is, about her experiences with caring steps and and her hopes that we can continue that program. Trustee Lausanne? I received communication from Jenna from McClelland, asking if there was a math interventionist available at Hamlin Elementary. Trustee Alspaugh? I received, a thank you from the IAGD, interfaith co chair Nishta Haq for attending their interfaith dinner during Ramadan and it was
a wonderful experience. And if you ever get a chance to visit IAGD, it's a beautiful and very friendly place and I highly recommend it. It. I received a couple of emails, one from Jamie Rockliffe regarding virtual campus and founders day, one from Tina Watson regarding caring steps, an email from Pat Binkier regarding the 501 West University Building. From Antrece Sykes regarding a reference for Ray and Associates. And Selena Eunice, regarding a college class project. Alright. So, next up we have Jamie Rockcliffe who will be providing us with the PTA Council
update. Good evening. It's been a busy few weeks for the PTA Council. At the February, we held our annual Founder's Day celebration recognizing the efforts of 70 student, staff, and parent volunteers in the district. In conjunction with the event, we held our online auction. We'd like to thank the community for a banner year. We earned nearly $6,500 which will support our high school scholarships and district wide enrichments. This year, we will be awarding six scholarships to seniors from Adams, Rochester, and Stoney Creek. On March 4,
excuse me, we held our district reflection ceremony where we honored about 200 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in a host of categories including film production, visual arts, photography, music composition, literature, and dance choreography. Twenty six RCS students placed at the state level, nine of them taking first place in advancing to the national level competition, first we've ever had, that many students place. Our high school battle of the books competition wrapped up last week. Stony Creek took first place this year, preventing Rochester from getting the three peat.
In addition, three of the authors of this year's books joined via Zoom, including one from Switzerland, to talk to the students about the writing process, getting published, and so much more. It was an amazing opportunity for our students. Our health and wellness team has been busy with the fourth grade health fairs getting underway at all the elementary schools. Students rotate through 12 stations on a variety of health topics, thanks to our parent volunteers. Parent walks will be starting up again on April 12, and they meet every Thursday at 09:30AM at Innovation Hills.
The walks are open to all and the path is child and stroller friendly. In addition, the Health and Wellness Committee is hosting its annual health fair on Saturday, May 3 in partnership with the district's new wellness committee. More details to follow as the event gets closer. All 21 schools just submitted their green schools applications, and it is expected they will all receive green school certification. Upcoming recycling collections include empty paper towel rolls for the Detroit Zoo and broken and unused electronics such as cell phones and tablets.
Authors in April is gearing up for our four author visits next month. The week kicks off on April 28 with the annual banquet and evening with the authors. This event is open to adults and students in ninth grade and up. In addition to visiting all of our elementary and middle schools for presentation throughout the week, two of this year's authors will be visiting the high schools for career talks on illustrating and publishing, And they will all be at the Rochester Hills Public Library on Wednesday, April 30 for an autograph party from four to six. That event is also open to the community.
April 23 is our Legislative Committee's annual Careers in Public Service event. This webinar is geared toward eighth through twelfth grade students who are interested in learning more about careers in public service by hearing from those directly in the field. Finally, the PTA Council is hosting two parent enrichment events this spring. On April 22 at 7PM at Adams High School, Richard Gary will present digital safety and mindfulness. This event is for parents and kids ages 11 and up. And on May 13 at 7PM at West Middle School,
we are hosting college one zero one, an evening for parents and high school students on the college application process. We will have presentations by admissions and financial aid officers from Oakland University, and we will also have Zara tutoring and the hub of college consulting there to talk to parents about opportunities for their students. Both events are free and open to the entire RCS community. Thank you so much. Have a great night. Thank you. And now we will hear, pack update from Melissa Hoffman. Good evening. I'm Melissa Hoffman, I'm president of the Special Ed Parent Advisory Committee for Rochester Community Schools.
Our last meeting was held February 18 at Musson Elementary. This was an information packed meeting. Some highlights included an update from Mr. Russo, including the much appreciated unanimous passing of the resolution from our Board of Education in support of full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, as well as an overview of changes in government, and further affirmation of our district's continued support of special education regardless of shifts in funding. While shifts in government continue to be a source of uncertainty to many families who
count on these services, PAC remains grateful to our administration and Board of Education for our continued partnership in assuring our families that we remain steadfast in our commitment to special education. We would also like to thank the Special Ed team for holding their transitions conversation on March 10. About 60 parents came to learn how to better support their students moving up to the next building. We appreciate the shared value of getting ahead of questions and building face to face relationships. On March 13 at West Middle School, PAC presented enrichment,
presented an enrichment topic, behavior and regulation. We had nearly 50 parents, staff, and community members in attendance. The topic focused on improving behaviors from a neurodiverse affirming viewpoint and recognized all behaviors as a means of communication. Our next public meeting will be tomorrow at Brewster Elementary at 7PM with our meet and greet time to speak with available special ed administrators and PAC board members at 06:30. At this meeting, we will be starting a conversation about how we can better serve students with chronic
and mental health concerns, continuing to address special ed discipline, and also introducing a conversation about bringing more inclusive extracurricular activities to the district, particularly for those students who may not benefit from more traditional extracurricular offerings. Parents and caregivers of students with IEPs and 504s are encouraged to attend, as well as interested staff and community members. Coming up on April 10 at Hamlin Elementary, we will have our annual IEP training at 06:30, led by Special Education Executive Director Tiffany Gauthier.
This will be delivered as an overview. So while it's perfect for parents and caregivers new to IEPs, those of us who have been around can tell you, IEP knowledge never ends. I know I learn something new every year and there will be an opportunity for questions as well. And finally, Sparkle Awards. The night where we celebrate all things special education is coming up on April 15 at Adams High School. Nominations are now closed, and we beat our own record again. This community has proven one more time that we are unstoppable, and we continue to find more reasons to celebrate.
Last year, we had 411 nominees. This year, including teachers, staff, paras, bus drivers, kitchen staff, students, community members, and even some furry helpers, we received nominations for 516 people and two dogs. And many of our nominees have received more than one nomination. That's a lot of celebrating. Our judges are now very hard at work choosing special recognition winners in each category who will be announced at the awards. We wish them the best of luck on some very tough decisions.
We will also have inclusive entertainment from the Meadowbrook Music Makers, our American Sign Language Level four High School performers, the Rochester High School Chamber Strings, and an inclusive ballet performance by a group of secondary students from Rochester's own North Oakland Dance Company. Please mark your calendars. We cannot wait to celebrate with all of you. Any families in need of special education support can reach out and let us know how we can help. We can be found on the RCS webpage under special education, on our Facebook page, or on our website,
rcspac.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you. Thank you. We're now moving on to agenda item six, which is public comment. This provides an opportunity for board members to hear from community members. If you wish to speak tonight but have not already filled out a yellow card, please do so now. They're located on the table near the entrance to the auditorium. Once completed, please hand it to the shield officer. At this point, we have seven individuals, so I think we'll be able to make our thirty minute time frame that we have here. When your name is called, please move to the microphone and address the board.
When addressing the board, you'll have three minutes to speak, and I'll try to let you know when you have thirty seconds remaining. Please be mindful of this time limit. When addressing the board, please state your name and relationship to the district. To protect to protect student privacy, we ask that no one identify a specific student without their permission even if the student's name is not used. Also, we ask that you address your comments to the entire board and not to individual board members, school district employees, or to members of the audience. The board will not be responding to comments or questions during the meeting, however, someone will follow-up if needed.
At this point, I have, Shelley Brown followed by Charles Hebert and Richard, I apologize, Burgess. And you can go ahead when you're ready. Can you hear me? I can't tell if this is okay. Alright. I'm Shelly Brown. I am a taxpayer and I'm a resident in the Rochester Community Schools district. I have previously provided public comments and emailed the Rochester Community Schools Board of Ed on the district's stance with regard to title nine and the potential physical and psychological
risk that stance poses to biological female students and potential financial exposure to taxpayers from lawsuits. I've listened to other citizens, including parents, grandparents, and female students voicing their concerns about biological females actually having to share their bathrooms with biological males identifying as female and that these same males would be allowed to use the girls' locker rooms and play on sports teams. Trustee comments, some oral and some written, from Trustee Alsbach,
Guttag, Blake, Butel, and Annis indicate their belief that this stance does not pose legal issues and they appear willing to hold this stance until it becomes a legal issue with only the lawyers winning in the end. I was unable to attend the February Board of Education meeting so I watched the recording. A parent provided public comment that biological boys should never be allowed to share a hotel room with girls while on an overnight field trip.
I couldn't believe it when the parent went on to say, trustees Gupta and Boutel on 01/29/2025, stated to her directly that biological boys were in fact allowed to share hotel rooms with girls and parents were merely notified ahead of time. To be sure everyone in this room hears this, I'll repeat it. A parent at the February Board of Education meeting provided public comment that trustees Gupta
and Boutel on 01/29/2025 stated to her directly that biological boys were in fact allowed to share hotel rooms with girls and their parents were merely notified ahead of time. I replayed this three times to be sure I heard that correctly. I waited but neither trustee denied the conversation took place. And And neither said that this was a misunderstanding. I have no words to explain this position. But back on planet Earth where I live,
the five members of this board remain derelict in their duties to safeguard children, they demonstrate a lack of fiscal responsibility to taxpayers, and they truly have no understanding of risk. If this situation leads to the loss of federal funding or lawsuits, or a child is injured, I will personally assist anyone that launches a recall memo for the five named board members. Charles Hebert followed by Richard Burger. Thank you. And then Gregory Longart. Charles? Yeah.
Hi. So I'm Charles Hebert. I'm a parent of a caring sub student. First, I'd like to thank the board for providing the survey results, for caring staffs which I previously requested for, in writing. I believe these results of the survey show a strong need and demand for the wonderful services and support that our caring steps staff provide to all the kids, of all ages, up to k prep. I also appreciate the consideration for making the caring steps director position a direct hire at Rochester Community Schools. I feel this will help engage additional qualified candidates as a much needed role for
the caring steps program to continue. Given the abundant amount of data provided, through emails and public comment here, I like to, ask the board to to keep, Canningsoft's operational, consider these, data points in their decision and that they make an informed decision when considering, their vote for this. Thank you. Thank you. Richard Berger. Good evening, Board members. My name is Richard Berger and I live in Oakland County and we're part of the RCS School District. And we currently have our two sons enrolled at RCS
and appreciate the excellent care and development that is going on in there. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight because the decision that is in front of the Board directly affects my family as well as hundreds of other families and children within our community. Caring steps is more than just a daycare, it is a foundation for early education and a direct feeder into the RCS school district. It ensures that our children enter the district prepared and engaged, strengthening long term enrollment and student success.
Currently, there are over 200 children that are on the wait list with over 100 full time spots, showing that there is a strong demand for the quality education and preparation that is provided by the RCS staff as well as RCS staff. I know that the issue here is financial sustainability, but please do consider before any reduction in providing care whether that be I see the option of removing infant and toddler care as well as closure completely,
we must look at what is practical. And at this point, I would like to say we should try and attract top educators in addition to the ones that are here, pay them accordingly and I'm sure that there are many families that would appreciate even a modest increase in fees to enable RCS to stay open and provide the quality care that they currently provide as well as enhancing and enabling it for even more families to take advantage. Again, I reiterate the fact that more than 200 families are looking for a spot.
Additionally, I would like the Board to please consider any modifications, to please push them out as far As possible because at this point enrollments are done for the year and for next year. Please do consider the parents of young children that will now if there are any detrimental impacts that you're going to consider, It is going to be extremely challenging to find spots for childcare. This is why RCS is a crucial provider for this both in Northern Oakland as well as for the area in general. I know that people come from outside the District as well to get their children
prepared for their future lives at work. So, in conclusion, please do consider options before, including at this point even removing food as part of the survey, as well as modest tuition increases if that is what it takes to make sure that it is balanced. I would also appreciate it if we can, compensate teachers accordingly. Thank you. Thank you very much. Gregory Bungard followed by David Tallman and then Jessica Renick. Hi. I'd like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak on this. And I'd actually like to thank, you know, everybody who was involved with the creation of Caring Steps.
I think you were way ahead of your time, in putting this together. I think that it's honestly the future of what school systems should be involving, in in child care and education and development. I think it goes without saying that, children don't start learning at five years old. They start learning pretty much the moment they are born. To act like there's not a continuation of care and development and education from day one through day five is a weird stance.
I I think you should, like, just look at, you know, for those who garden or or or plant, you plant a seed, you don't just plant a seed and forget about it until you see a bloom. You water it and you take care of it. You provide fertilizer and nutrients so that the seed can grow. You don't start when you start seeing something later on. It starts right at the beginning. We have well, we had, our daughter is now at Baldwin Elementary. But we have two, my two of my sons in nearing steps right now. And to hear about the potential,
for for the, facility closed down is what was heartbreaking for both me and my wife. We have had two different, forms of childcare. We were at a private, school or a private daycare, prior and had a terrible experience. Kids getting sick all the time. There were questions about the maintenance and cleanliness of the facility. There was a stretch of a few weeks or literally every other week, my son and daughter, were getting sick, which cut into our my wife myself and my wife's ability to take time off
to be at home. Hearing steps is has been phenomenal. We, it's not so much as, like, could we find an an alternative? Probably. Like, you know, as we reform, he said, it would be very, very difficult if it's done on short term. But more importantly, you're offering a service that other districts don't offer. You are ahead of the curve on this. Do not look backwards. Like, you will regret this. Especially if you close a facility. If you close a facility, you will lose some of the most talented caregivers and educators that I've ever seen. Have you ever taught a baby?
Not easy. Okay? They don't talk. Being able to grasp those those kids into the pre k system is is fundamental. On top of that, the pre k system prepares them for kindergarten, which makes the jobs of our teachers easier in the future. Please do not get rid of it at any age. Thank you. David Talman followed by Jessica Renick followed by Charles Hebert Ebert Senior. Hi. I'm Dave Tallman. I am a RCS superfan. Fifty four years ago,
I walked into Brooklyn as a kindergartner, and, I've had over 20 kids in the district, as my foster parent now. But, saxophone Von over here, I've known, he came trick or treating six months old, him and his twin sister in a wagon, dressed like peas. They were two peas in a pod. Now he, I'm, I'm very grateful that he's able to be an example to my sons that, I'm raising now. And, he has been for about 12 of the kids that we get. But I'm just I I can't tell you how blessed I feel every single day by the quality and the excellence of the education,
not just the education of, you know, the normal learning, but the education of life that all of my children have received the register at at Rochester Schools. I got one there at Brooklands now that's, Sarah Crowley is watching out for. One's at Reuther with Wendy Darga, and soon we'll both be at Rochester High with, yeah, you know, with Josh Ringgold. And I'm telling you, between them and the other administrators that handle things, I'm 1000% know that they're gonna get the best education possible in this country. Now let's talk
about the board. I've been before you 30 times. I've said the same thing all 30 times. Every single one of you are wonderful people who really care about children, and you do your job great. You level up and work as hard as anybody in this district. But why do we still have these same issues that come up? We need to get together and figure some things out. And I know there's national politics that several of us are involved in that maybe stands in the way of of resolutions and answers.
We've gotta stop that. I keep saying that. There was a a post recently of, of one of of someone that was, you know, looked me in the eye and tell me that you wanna cut special education. That that it it that it it means a lot to me. This is a very good post. These are things that we should do. I'm blessed to look a lot of high schoolers this close in the eye every morning at 7AM and say good morning, the look in their eyes. I'm telling you right now, there are some children in this district that are feeling anguish and sadness.
And they're feeling fear. We don't need that. You can do this. You're great people, but you gotta work together. Don't ignore each other's emails when it comes to a subject you don't wanna talk about. Don't ignore parents who come here with things that they wanna talk about. You can do this. Get together. Come up with a solution. Don't leave it for national politics. Don't leave it for state politics. It's gonna get worse. It's not gonna get better. Fix it right here. You can do it. Thank you. Jessica Renick followed by James Munce and Charles Hebert.
Good evening. My name is Jessica Renick, and I have two children in the district, one of whom attend parent staff currently. I'd like to start by thanking the board and administration for tabling the discussion on March 3 to provide the opportunity to gather additional context and options for caring staff in preparation for tonight's discussion. In previous meetings, the conversation folks focused solely on the business justification of the center, discussing terms like breaking even or profitability. If that train of thought were to continue, the conversation should also include the return on on investment to capture the educational value.
If the district is concerned about the education occurring at Caring Steps to be wasteful, please consider that the that a child's brain absorbs the most before they even start kindergarten. The value proposition in influencing our youngest learners is there. And that investment is funneling children directly into the Rochester District school district elementary schools, helping improve the problem of declining enrollment. A quick review of the twenty twenty four meeting agenda has shown that RCS has spent over $250,000,000 in 2024. Paring staff expenses were 1,680,000.00
in the twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four fiscal year. But considering cutting a facility that's currently costing the district less than 1% of its annual expenses seems to be looking at the wrong piece of the pie. Now no parent here is stating that caring steps should continue with the status quo, but and we agree that restructuring and leadership is required to move forward. But if a sports team isn't winning championships, do you end the program? No. You find a new leadership to help morph the staff and players into a cohesive team.
The fact that Caring Staff has been without a leader for over a year and still functions should be recognized by as the as an amazing accomplishment by the staff, amazing accomplishment by the staff. If the financials are the end all be all for this board, a wait list of over 200 as mentioned before should keep your interest. The need of the in the district is there. And families drive further to get to caring steps not for the convenience, but for the quality of education expected from the Rochester School District. Whatever the outcome of the meeting is,
I ask that RCS quickly and thoroughly communicate the fate of each classroom and timeline. The financial and mental impact on making alternative arrangements for the summer and beyond is not insignificant. Even the discussion have been here tonight is being supported by families, not by, administration. There's been zero communication from RCS to caring for families that this dialogue was even happening. If tonight's vote meeting does not result in a vote, please inform families when a vote will take place because it's bringing families along.
Honesty and timely communication is a fair act. As you discuss it today, I just ask that you please consider the positive, positive education impact hearing steps can continue to have on the district and community. And I'm here and really passionate about it. And that's why I'm speaking here today. Thank you. Thank you. James Muntz. Hello. My name is James Muntz. This is actually my first time in Stony High. It's a really beautiful building and it looks like it's a really amazing community. So I'm very, happy and proud to be here in front of you today. I represent Empowerment Education.
We're a company based in Oakland County, and the purpose of my coming out here tonight is to, one, introduce you to, who we are and what we're about. We do after school enrichment, but we also really care about entire communities and the sustainability of these kinds of programs. We offer steam based programming, but we do so in a way that generates funds for the schools and ties into national competitions as well as, grant and even community business partnerships.
And so we really try and build up, not just an offering that we can give to the schools, specifically elementary and middle schools, but we try and really come up with a sustainability plan that can enrich entire districts. And so we have a couple of schools that we work with right now. The big client is Roper and, we're so confident in these programs that, you know, we're reaching out, we're coming to the school board meetings because, well, we just think it's really, excellent. And somebody was mentioning today that there was a need to create programs that everyone
can access and everyone can attend. And so in that, we offer programs like BeatLab and Movie Magic, programs that offer really technology, modern twenty first century relevant skills, things that kids really love, and things that can really impact students through the rest of their life. I know that these kinds of programs really meant the world to me when I was in high school. And now as a father of a seven year old, we regularly attend a lot of these programs that other companies offer. And I make it my mission to take the best parts from those and integrate
them into ours, and create plans that really work for schools, work for communities, and work for families. So I'd love to drop a packet off, to the superintendent's table and give business cards to anyone else who's interested. And I just really appreciate you letting me speak to you tonight and I hope you guys have a really wonderful evening. Thank you for all that you do. Thank you. Charles Ebert Sr. Hi. First, I wanna thank all the board members because, I know it's a hard job and it's a thankless job. I, I'm a local CPA resident of Rochester Hills.
Actually, one of the founding members of the Rochester Community Schools Foundation Board, which was started when this building was built. And, actually, I helped build the Herring Steps Building also when that was built. I've been in that building, and it's a beautiful building. I'm not familiar with any of the numbers even though I'm a CPA, but I kinda heard indirectly. Boy, the wait list. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So there's obviously demand. And I just want the board to keep an open mind on that facility. I really think it's part of our mission statement as a school district and a school board.
I don't know the financials of what it takes to run it or anything like that, but I know you couldn't replace that building very easily. That's really all I had to say. I just wanted to keep an open mind and try to make it work. Thank you. Thank you. We are now moving on to agenda item seven which is the consent agenda. All matters listed under the consent agenda are considered routine in nature by the Board of Education and will be acted upon by one motion. There's no separate discussion of these items. If any member of the board requests discussion of an item, that item will be removed.
Please note that the items removed will now be discussed separately under the consent agenda and will retain the same number. For instance, if item 7.1 was asked to be removed, we would vote on item 7.2 through 7.6 and then come back to 7.1 for a motion discussion and vote. You may still request just one item in a report to be removed from the consent agenda. If this is the case, we would approve everything else and the item removed from the report would receive a new number. In this case, it would be 7.7 but still under the consent agenda. Our consent agenda consists of item 7.1,
current bills payable for 02/01/2025 through 02/28/2025 in the amount of $19,846,725.28. Item 7.2, the human resource recommendations. Item 7.3, the Board of Education regular meeting minutes from 02/24/2025. Item 7.4, the reimbursement for superintendent Russo in the amount of $289.94. Item 7.5, Oakland County School Board Association dinner meeting for Michelle Butel,
Julie Allspa, and Barb Annis in the amount of a hundred and $35 Item 7.6, Michigan Association of School Board behind the scenes at the capitol for Julie Alspa and Barb Anis in the amount of $330 Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented? Moved by Trustee Blake. Is there support? From Trustee Alspa. Does any board member wish to remove an item? Madam President. Trustee Liqui. Item 7.1. Okay. So at this point, we would be voting on item 7.2
through 7.6. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote and item 7.2 through 7.6 on the consent agenda have been adopted. Before we move on, I'd just like to thank and congratulate, Debbie Messina, who has already retired, and acknowledge that Tracy Bullock, Lisa Dimiewski, April Homer, and Lisa Lam, have submitted their notice, of their upcoming retirement, but not until June. I'd also like to officially welcome Gary Davis as the new CTE teacher at Rochester
High School. I don't know that any of those people are here right now, but thank you. At this point, is there a motion to approve item 7.1? Moved by Trustee Annas. Is there support? Support from Trustee Gupta, Trustee Lecuey. Did you wish to say anything at this point? Sure. I will need to vote no on this action item until I see documented actions that reflect that we won't allow override of the financial controls process, which we've seen before and have gone unaddressed. Alright. And I'll just say I believe that we had talked about,
the new controls and we've had a, report on that. Any other discussion before we move forward? Trustee Alsbaugh? I have a question for Trustee Lacoue. So this has been a regular behavior of yours to consistently affirm that you need some type of proof. We've had a work session that's talked about financial controls. We have, increased our transparency by board members now being able to look at invoices. You personally said you didn't have time to look at all the invoices. And I do understand there are a lot of them. But I'd like to know, exactly what you would need in order to be able to vote on this.
What type of documentation? What are you looking for? Trustee Lacoue, would you care to answer that question? Sure. She said I I don't have time to look through all the invoices. I guess I'll explain that part first. We get thousands of invoices every month, so it's not really quite reasonable to expect board members to read through thousands of invoices. We're counting on our staff to follow the very good financial controls process that we have in place. The right I think it was May twenty second of last year. We had a work session about the financial controls and it's a good financial controls
process. The problem is the financial controls process doesn't work if you're not following it. And enforcement of the financial controls process is the problem. We've seen invoices that were marked okay to pay that didn't have a proper description on them when the district was funneling money to a PR firm through a law firm and there were no marked invoices. The integrity issue remains. Because despite that we've witnessed that violation to the financial controls process, we've never seen enforcement or consequences to follow that up. I did submit a conflict of interest policy that the superintendent policy and committee,
the superintendent policy and curriculum committee is looking at. And we'll see what results from that. But it's it is very difficult when you can't be sure that your good policies that you have are being enforced. What good are policies that aren't enforced? Alright. And I I guess I would just say that, the specific motion is about the items that are on our accounts payable at this time. And as others have said, we have reviewed our financial controls. No other issues have been identified either by this board or through our financial audits.
And our superintendent has assured us that such an issue will not happen again, and this commitment has been communicated to all trustees. So, I find it that when we're voting, we should be voting on what's actually on the agenda, which is the approval of the items on the accounts payable list. So anyway, at this point, we have a motion to approve item 7.1, which is the current bills payable for 02/01/2025 through 02/28/2025 in the amount of $19,846,725.28.
All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. No. Is that a six one vote? Alright. Moving on. We have, our strategic plan update. To keep our community and the board updated, we have monthly updates on our strategic plan and dive deeper into a few of those plans. Today, we'll be hearing about a tiered behavioral response framework and professional development. Mister Russo? Thank you, madam president. Miss Simpson. Good evening, Board of Education. I'm here to speak this evening about strategic plan 12.
Is it can you pull it a little bit closer if it's on? Strategic plan 12, better, in the, area of teaching. And that vision statement, recognizes that RCS will utilize a multi tiered system of academic and behavioral support, the deliverable that, encompasses the structures for district and school MTSS teams to address remedial and advanced intervention needs. The rationale or incentive or area that we're really trying to, enrich within within this particular plan is improved differentiated instruction, improved student performance,
and improved MTSS implementation. And you heard a bit about how those processes are unfolding in their current state at our March 3 work session, when we were looking at some of our I Ready information and how our schools are responding, to those, datasets. The team that is addressing this particular plan, includes a variety of professionals from across the organization, including social workers, psychologists, learning consultants, interventionists, classroom teachers, administration, and also our multilingual teachers, English language development teachers. The goal within, this particular plan is to continue to study the best ways to meet unique needs across the district.
There's an elementary and a secondary subcommittee sitting with, underneath the umbrella of this plan as as we understand that the needs and and structures that support students within these frameworks are different, whether you're an elementary school student, a middle school student, or a high school student. And so when you look specifically at the success criteria that are outlined here, one of the criteria number one, by 03/28/2025, '1 hundred percent of educators participating in a pilot cohort will implement the priority best practices in building MTSS processes that address remedial and advanced intervention needs.
This is considering the whole child approach both in their academic needs as well as in their supports to any behavior intervention that they need, to be taking place within a school setting. And at this point, the team has been analyzing that team structure that you heard a bit about on March 3, a child study process, if you will, where we're looking at, the artifacts that come in, the data points that come into those particular meetings, and thinking about how datasets are documented, to show success with various intervention approaches and or to think about how,
various intervention can be compiled in ways that create a useful library for staff. We know that there's some, things that come before a team or a child study group, may be typical, not always atypical kinds of, challenges being addressed. So thinking about a best practices handbook in areas of intervention is one of the, milestones that this particular group has taken up to address this success criteria identified here. Criteria two and three look at the way that, those best practices will be situated within the behavioral response framework,
in its own right. So, thinking a little bit about how positive behavior supports come into play across schools and what are the current structures that our schools are using, that may be working really well and where areas, either for continued study or improvement. The Committee will deliver a report of findings and recommendations of those MTSS best practices, for district and school teams to use to address remedial and advanced intervention needs and the goals and timeline for the Committee for year two as measured by the presentation to the Central Office curriculum administration
team. What questions might you have about plan 12? I guess I just have a clarification question to understand. So in the project title, it makes it sound like it is more behavioral in nature. But yet, if I'm reading or understanding the March 28, it's actually looking at non behavioral items as well within the MTSS. Is that correct? Yes. My understanding is that several areas in the initial strategic plan work came forward under this domain, and that the initial slice for this body of work was sitting within that behavioral
framework. You can see that mention has been made about best practices within that full process, related both to academic and behavioral support as noted in the vision statement. And so as we're looking at this then, for this March 28, we have now identified best practices and they're being implemented in the classroom. Is that correct? So what the pilot group that's identified within that first success criteria indicates that a pilot cohort, will be identifying practices. They have compiled those practices in the first draft of a handbook and they are
giving feedback to that process at both the elementary and the secondary level at this point. The success criteria that would continue in that third bullet for year two, would consider the ways that that goal and timeline would, move across the entire organization. Right. But on March 28, so a % of the educators who are in this pilot Yes. Are implementing interacting with those. So so we've already this group has already identified best practices, and now they're implementing some of those best practices. We yes. We imagine that'll be a working document.
But there certainly are things documented within that draft or handbook that are working within this arena that those pilot groups serve. Some are in classrooms. Some might be, at English language development table. Some might be in an intervention class or in classroom. Not all, the participants are, direct classroom practitioners within that pilot group. So we're thinking about ways that, from that multi tiered system, approaches are documented and and given feedback to as a part of that process. As we and I guess,
Mr. Russo, this is to you. As we get through some more of these, dates on here, will the board and the community hear some specifics about what items have been identified, new things that we're doing both on the MTSS intervention for remedial and advanced as well as the the behavioral response framework to better understand what it is that we've changed or are doing. Some of those MTSS processes are internal, madam president, so, like, we we can talk about them at this table so that people are aware of what the changes will be.
I don't know. We'd have to come back, I think, to to discuss what exactly you know, how we got to there in the first place. I don't know that it's common. Some of the things that we have here in education is lingo heavy. So to to to talk about them is a % fine. The issue would be how much is how much understanding is received about that. So I think we'd have to go back maybe even if a work session on it would be fine. Any other questions on trustee Lecui? So it sounds like, the deliverable for this, it sounds like it's within that best practices handbook.
Is that am I following that correctly? The team is looking at both the best practices handbook as well as the process for how students come to a child study or a team process so that we are, doing our due diligence, for lack of a better term, to make sure that we've exhausted all access to high quality instruction within the classroom. Sometimes, whether it be behavior or academic in nature, when student progress is being discussed there, there may, in some cases be a very rigorous approach to multiple intervention types or small group
instruction that may occur in response to a particular behavior or academic concern. And in other cases, the educator may be coming looking to be resourced with the tools or ideas that may they may put into play. And so the way that we document how that process moves is really meant to create some strength in the alignment across the organization and how we conduct this data driven work. So I guess what I'm wondering is, how will we know if these processes or this handbook is working or improved compared to what we were doing before?
That's a great question. The needs analysis that the team is conducting, you know, one of the things that they've been doing is visiting team meetings at various buildings, gathering feedback from educators in how they can support this progress or this process. I'm sorry. You can imagine that the feedback they might get from our school psychologists may differ from the feedback they'd get from a classroom teacher, from an interventionist, from the social worker. So, what they really have been trying to do in a comprehensive manner is understand the current state and, where we can draw some greater alignment by level,
again, from elementary or middle to secondary that may look a little different in terms of how these teams come together. The goal would be that if we're considering not only in class supports as well as any necessary out of class support, in a more cohesive way, we're also able to make sure that we can resource the organization consistently. And that one experience you might have on the result on, you know, on the back end of a child's team meeting at one school, may result in in, a similar sequence or set of tools or resources that could be used to support
learning for that child. I I think that right now our buildings are doing that very well individually and thinking across the system how how 13 elementary schools may do that, you know, working in that together smarter, not harder kind of approach, not only with our data collection and documentation, but then also with the resources that support those students on the back end of that. Trustee Anderson? Yeah. To follow-up on that point, this is Hampton. I think that a lot of times at this table and as educators, they tend to talk in in office code.
And, my concern especially is how what we're doing here in this particular, strategic planning, phase is going to impact, the students that we serve and then also how we're communicating that to the parents. Because when you think about the multi tiered system approach of interventions, you you've got a you've you've got a spectrum. Right? And you've got kids that have needs because they're falling behind, but you also have kids that, are advancing and they still have needs as well. So how are we planning on,
informing parents, how this system we're revising is any different than what we had in the past. And then also too, I love the idea of having a an MTSS intervention, handbook that could be utilized to spread best practices across the district. And I guess my question, would be how are you planning on rolling that out to educators as they join our district? Because I think personally that seems to me it should be something that's integral into their training that they get when they come on board on their onboard training into
our district. Because you wanna make sure that folks understand, the culture that they're coming into and how, the different types of intervention that we provide are really important regardless of where the child falls on the learning spectrum. But just being really mindful too of how we're communicating this to parents. Because I think one of the criticisms in the past when you talk about differentiation in the classroom, especially with parents, is that there are parents that feel like, that differentiation doesn't really meet their child's needs, especially when they tend to be on on the advanced end of the spectrum.
So, it's definitely something that I think we need to be mindful of in terms of once we get to a point where we have a product in that handbook that is solid, that we are able to roll it out to parents in a way that is understandable, and, that is approachable by parents to have that engagement with teachers in the classroom to implement it it for their students' best interest. Okay. Any other questions on this one? Okay. We can move on to the next. Okay. Plan 18, in the area of leadership talks a bit about that professional learning plan. It may, also provide a platform to unfold some of what was,
just discussed. The vision statement is that RCS will continue to utilize a variety of assessment methods to identify the needs of individual employees, schools, and the district. This is related to, the assessment methods of our professional learning. So when we think about the way that we identify individual school level and district wide professional development priorities, our goal here is really to amplify the way that our feedback structures help us design into meaningful and purposeful professional development. That development, of our educators is, dialed in, to their own needs.
Certainly, as was just described when we're onboarding new, folks to the organization, we want to make sure that they are aware of medical merit curricula and resources available, but also the approaches we take, with children within instructional models in the classroom. The idea that the plan here would create stronger alignment between the district my KIPP or the Michigan Integrated Continuous Improvement Plan alongside the District's strategic plan and that both individual teachers, the buildings in which they serve, and then the larger District would have alignment and cohesion within those professional development offerings.
The criteria for, the end of June here is to assure that 100% of District professional learning for certified staff will be aligned both to our vision and to our strategic plan as measured by the twenty five-twenty six school year professional learning menu and plan. We've begun to, make tracks with this work this school year when we have thought about, our asynchronous professional learning in November, both aligned to the strategic plan as well as a place for live and ongoing feedback with educators about their individualized needs within some of these plan areas.
And then also with our elementary and secondary edcon, these, as as you may know, are are facilitated by our educators. And so very often, these are topics coming forward that they know are pertinent to their peers and that really, become very practical, strategies and structures strategies to be sharing within the organization, with their colleagues. And so as our work with the strategic plan continues to advance as well as our our district improvements work with my tip, the conversation around how to dovetail each of these, priority areas in ways that are meaningful for educators is really the work planning.
Any questions? Trustee Gupta? Yeah. So miss Hampton, I love that we, have a lot of offerings that come from our own educators peer to peer, and and I'm kinda sharing strategies and practices and what we've learned and things like that. I also value and think is is it valuable to get like, you know, fresh eyes and like that external perspective on things, something new outside of the bubble, if you will. So is there opportunity in the city plans for a mix of that? Yes. Thank you. I I think that as we look towards planning for next school year,
we're looking to strike the balance the best balance that we can based on that survey work, of the individual strengths that our educators have, how some of those best practices come in come alive, when they work with their their peers. And also, in response to some of the, direction from the Michigan Department of Education, for example, in the arena of elementary education, May is is reflected in plans one and two as we've spoken about, but will also, need to surround the organization and what some of those outcomes are. And so there's a a bit of, a push tool in terms of where we have some choice and where we really
need to enact what the legislature has has put us on a timeline for. And certainly, that will, be on the forefront for the 2526 school year at the elementary level, for certain. But we we know that there are areas that our our teacher leaders, our our curriculum consultants are continuing to, study and look to ways to stretch the organization. There are a lot of plan areas that, intersect with one another where this is concerned, whether that's our innovation group or a book study that's happening around feedback and instructional
practices that grow the literacy of a particular discipline, thinking about AI, thinking about the way that our our staff also learn in job embedded ways within their school day, will pull us a little out of the conversation of of Matt in just those four or five days, but really thinking about the way that educators grow and evolve over a school year, in the company, you know, the good company of their their colleagues. Anyone else have any questions on '18? Okay. Thank you. That's all we have, Mr. Russo, Ms. Boutel. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Russo, I know we had talked about before that, you know, when this strategic plan was originally developed and they came up with a whole bunch
of steps for each of these plans, that much of that has changed as they dug into it and that they, you know, learned along the way and some of those times and things had changed. Was there an update when the board would receive a revised, kind of listing of those steps in the strategic plan? Yes. We can provide an update, for what has and when you say change, there could be content that has changed. There could be a dates that are moved because of certain meetings took place. We moved ahead on certain things. We can get we can have that quarterly if you'd like as an update. I think to just to come back to,
number plan 18 that miss Hempton talked about, the the push pull, the balance of what we do internally, right, and what is kind of mandated from from outside with the state. As we move into year two, as we we're starting to look at what from the strategic plan survey, what is listed for the years two and five? What can we build upon from year one to move into year two? And what other pieces do we need to put in the strategic plan that might be different than we started? Right? I think that's important to to note that it's not just something that if something
from the state comes that we have to that's mandated, we we can't let it sit outside here. If it's gonna be part of something we do as the fabric of our culture, we're gonna put it inside the strategic plan. So it may not be something that came out from the survey. But, yes, to come back to your question directly, madam president, we can update you, quarterly with those with those, changes. Sorry. Moving on now to new business. 9.1 is a second reading, to update policy 01/2002 and 04/2003. Mister Murphy? Thank you. Good evening. First item I have for you tonight, again, is the second reading of policy update for 01/2002 and 04/2003 as you've stated.
As a quick reminder, 01/2002 was differentiating between the board annual organizational meeting and the district annual organizational meeting and listing specific items, that would be handled at the June district annual organizational meeting. And four thousand three was updating the policy to match the previously updated administrative regulations. We missed that on the front end, so this is correcting that reversal of order. I will note on both my printout and it looks like your board update,
backup, there's four words cut off from the end of the remote work policy. That's my error. So it should end, the superintendent will promulgate administrative regulations quote consistent with this policy. That's not a change, it just got cut off from the, the printout. So again, we're seeking your approval for these to go into effect after tonight. Thank you. Alright, is there a motion to approve the changes to policy one thousand and two and four thousand and three as presented in the packet? Moved by Trustee Gupta. Is there support? Trustee Blake,
is there any discussion on this? Alright. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote, and policy one thousand and two and four thousand and three have been updated as presented. And then, Mr. Murphy, you're up again with the first reading of policy 5,003. Thank you. And just a reminder on those, the ones you just approved, there'll be a slight lag in when those show up online, but I'll stay on top of it and ensure that those are updated as soon as possible from our third party vendor.
And mister Murphy, I guess, but just to say even though they're not updated online, they're still in effect. Yes. They are in effect, as the action of the board. And I've taken the liberty of sending about two or three days in advance knowing that I could cancel that if something happened at the board table. Trying to trying to make that as quick as possible. So alright. Our second one tonight is a first reading. I'm gonna read the paragraph to you as an intro. This is for a proposed policy update to 05/2003 at the request of a board member for legal advice on clarified and consistent purchasing guidelines related to board responsibilities.
The following recommendation was presented to SBCC members for consideration. The committee recommended including the proposed edits in this board update as well as I'm sorry. The committee then recommended that we place this on the March 17 agenda for a first reading. Additions are in yellow. They're in the second paragraph where the sentence, the board of education will approve all construction bid awards has been added. And in the sixth paragraph, under the title real property and structures, the sentence, board approval is required for purchases or acquisitions that exceed the bid threshold and all
other purchases required by Michigan or federal law. Bid threshold is something that can change. So that would be a live link that would update along with the timing of the bid threshold changing. And for the board's information, the current bid threshold is 30,512. So I could answer any questions at this time or as a reminder, this would come back to a future board meeting for a second reading and questions also to be asked in between this meeting and that meeting, if needed. Thank you. Trustee Blake? So is this different than what we do now?
What is our current threshold that we have to bring purchases in front of the board? My understanding is that the bid threshold is for bids, but this would also be for per all purchases or acquisition that exceed that same amount. What do we do now? What do we have to do now? I think that's individually decided. Maybe Superintendent Russo can clarify, but I'm not sure that there is a stated amount currently specific in your board policy. Thank you, mister Murphy. Trustee Blake, one of the reasons for bringing this forward because board was because board members wanted
to have, a more clear and concise understanding of when something should come to the board and when something doesn't need to come to the board. And so so and I think the I think your question actually is asked for me is asking two different things. The the current bid threshold is $30,005.12. When when, that changes annually or sometimes doesn't. Right? It can go up. It can go down. It's not something that we set. It's the state. And I don't know if that's the question you were asking, but I wanted to be clear with everyone in the room and and who's watching. That's one piece of that.
Right now, I think there's been, a a preference of, well, this is a large amount of money, so we should take it to the board or this doesn't feel like something we should take to the board, and so it hasn't been as consistent as some board members would like. And so this was the purpose of bringing this forward. This would mean in the two highlighted areas for you that the board of education will approve all construction bid awards. So anything that goes out to bid that's related to construction, we you would approve or you would have to vote to approve. Does that make sense? It does. But so construction, we would have to approve it if it was over the bid threshold.
But what about other types of bids? All construction bid awards. All construction bid. And then any other purchases that are over the $30,000 that you're And just let me follow-up on that just to so real property and structures means all? Because it falls under real property and structures. So that's I just wanna make sure that we're all clear on that. Yeah, I believe so. With Mr. McDaniel not here, who's who's kinda responsible, and this is a first reading, we can make sure that that gets answered before a second reading goes into effect.
I I I think I have the answer, but I don't want him to the expert to be able to speak to it. Trustee Lacoue? When I read this, I thought maybe this was just documenting our current practices. Is that what this do this is doing, or is this any different from what we already do? I think, again, I'll have I'll I'll have mister McDaniel answer that question to the board and our and our superintendent superintendent Kevin updates that everyone is aware. But I think there was a there was a question of whether, okay, well, sometimes something comes to the board, something does not. For example, for example,
Syntegix, we can't looking into the board, right, is not a construction bid. It's a service, and it's not a real property. And we brought it to the board because it's it's at the time, it was $1,200,000 spent over five years that was very important in terms of safety and struct safety and security and the enhancements to our building that I felt like the board should be made aware of. And so that's something I still would have in practice, but this is putting in what a minimum threshold would be, so there is no confusion moving forward for these items here. Okay.
But in the case if this is falling under real property and structures, my question is, isn't this just documenting what we already do? Because Syntegix isn't actually real property and structures. A % no. So I don't get So I'll I'll get back to make sure that mister I'm not gonna answer for mister McDaniel. I'll get back to you on that answer. And I'll I'll just indicate that I had shared with the SPCC as well that there were a couple of items that I had hoped that they would include as well.
And I guess they're going to discuss that at their next meeting too. So while I have no objections to what's here, I think there should be a few more items included. So. Madam president, is there any interest in delaying this vote then for now? Well, it's not a vote. It's a first reading. Oh, okay. Quite honestly, if the SPC, is meeting, and I don't know if they are, between now and when we vote on this, they could change it and we could have another first reading if it was a, you know, with the changes in it. Right. Or if it was, I mean, if it was minor, we might go ahead and say we'll go ahead and approve it at this point.
But that could be changed at any time. Okay. Trustee Annas? Yeah. Trustee Lozano. And I just checked, and our next meeting is April 9 for SBCC. So that's obviously before our next business board meeting. So we'll be able to review your suggestions. Alright. Anything else on this before we move on? Alright. So next, we have, a bid award for restoration work at Adams Rochester High and Hugger. And, mister Murphy, you get this one as well. Yes. Thank you. Tonight, we have one recommendation for your approval. The scope of this request is to address water infiltration issues at Adams High School,
Rochester High School, and Bugger Elementary School. On 02/06/2025, the district advertised a request for proposals for the structured tech restoration project in the local publication, The Rochester Post, and posted RFP documents on the purchasing pages of the district website, Sigma@bidnetdirect. On 02/20/2025, the district received 16 responses for four categories of construction trade. Their proposals were evaluated by the district's director of capital projects and facilities and a
team from Frank Freewald and Son Incorporated. Bids were analyzed for bid content and inclusion of required submittals by the purchasing supervisor. The source of the funding is the sinking fund. Based on this information, we recommend that the Board of Education award the following contracts to Jacqueline Contracting for site work in the amount of $28,000 Davenport Masonry Incorporated for concrete restoration and sealants in the amount of $179,200 Superior Designs Incorporated for exterior insulation and finish system in the amount of $74,624,
and B and D Glass Company for glass and glazing in the amount of $36,292 for a contract sum of $318,116. We recommend the Board of Education approve the allowances in construction management fees as detailed in the attached analysis in the amount of $162,716 for a total of current recommendation costs for 03/17/2025 in the amount of $480,832 Thank you.
Alright. So at this time, is there a motion to approve the restoration projects at Adams, Rochester High, and Hugger in the amount of $480,832 as presented, utilizing our sinking fund? Moved by Hey, Trustee Blake with support by Trustee Gupta. Any discussion at this point? Trustee Lecui? I was curious. I I just recall that we approved a drainage project for Adams High School and Rochester High School last month at the regular board meeting, and it looks like this is more water infiltration problems.
So I was curious what this is for. I see mister Musio heading to the microphone. I will let him take that. Hold on. Hold on. Your mic I don't think your mic is on. Can we get that mic turned on? Try again. No, do you mind walking up here? You can sit next to Mrs. Hampton. Hello? Okay. You can hear me. Okay. Just wanna make sure. This is above the fly Loft area. So the area above the stage here, the small part of the building, both the atoms. The other one was the outside storm drain. Those flood was coming in now. This was water that actually enters in the exterior of the building.
Those they're precast concrete panels, and they get their caulk in between each and one of those. All that caulk's failing. It's, like, twenty five years old. So yeah. So we're replacing all the caulk. We're pulling out all the bad caulkings and recaulking all those panels. And is that the same issue at Hugger, or was there actually some replacement of the exterior sheeting? Well, at at Rochester High and Adams, we're doing the auditorium, the fly loft area. That's the water intrusion in those areas. And then also at, Rochester High in the a wing, there's a window that's being replaced. There's water infiltration in a wing.
There's a classroom that still has a window in it, and then all that's that, it's called EIFS. It's a insulation type exterior system that needs to be removed and replaced there. And then Hugger has eight windows that's being replaced. And those are the original windows to the building. There's still 20 left that we're not replacing as part of this. We're just doing the eight that are leaking. Any other questions on this? Trustee Licuy? Just one more little question. Do you happen to know I noticed in big big package too it said the low bidder withdrew. Do you know what factors might have caused that or when when we sit down
with them, so what we do, we do post bid interviews. So we bring the low bidder in and interview them. We walk walk through their bid. You have this. Do you have this? Do you have and they missed a couple things on their bid, so they withdrew. We said either it can honor your bid for what you submitted it for, you withdraw and said they withdrew. So, yeah, that happens sometimes. Alright. Well, seeing no other questions then, all of those in favor of approving the restoration project, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote and the motion is approved.
Thank you, Mr. Mercio. At this point Madam, madam president, before we do We're gonna take it for you. Okay. As I said, I was gonna suggest. Alright. So it is 07:48. If we could take just a quick break here and be back by like 07:55, please. Thank you. Alright. We are now moving on with agenda item 9.4, which is carrying steps. And, Mr. Russo, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Madam President. So as we start, this presentation, I know that, you've had a chance to look at at this, that was posted online, but we wanna make sure that there's context in every slide.
So we're gonna take a you know, this might be a little longer than a thirty minute presentation because of the context we wanna provide. We're gonna start with the caring steps background. If, we go to the next slide, please. We're gonna start with a caring steps background, where the nope. Come back. Nope. Come back. There you go. A board we're gonna talk about the board approved budget, moving into the survey data that was that was rendered in February. Then we're gonna go to current options, removal from food from the current budget till the end of the year, a closing option, what that would mean to staff and to community, investment options,
and then we're we're gonna run through those investment options, and and take some time to do so so that you understand what what the context is. Excuse me. If you can, we would like to save all questions to the end, only because I think as we go through, one slide might build on the other and information might build on the other, to continue. If if it if there's a burning question that you don't understand something, please feel free to indicate that and we'll, you know, if it's a clarification piece of the current slide, for sure we want to answer that as we move through. So carrying steps background. It opened in the fall of twenty eighteen.
There was a business plan that accompanied the opening of that, of the caring steps that projected profitability within three years. Unfortunately, COVID, COVID nineteen shut the shut the program down for six weeks, and and then it reopened for essential workers only. We had one summer program there in 2020. It was a school aged care program, because it was questions from the community about how many how much money does the those programs make. We only have one in that summer of twenty twenty. When we reopen in the fall of twenty twenty, despite the labor shortages that were that were surrounding the country and and pervasive in
in every facet, we did open. And again, this is just a timeline of a background to get how we got here. Food service has been continuous, although it's been in different forms. At some point, it was served family style, but, it has always been continuous. It has never had a break in service. One of the one of the things that that kept caring steps, into, into a near profitability was federal childcare stabilization grants, which you supported for used to support the center for the last three years. The peak enrollment we've had there is around approximately a hundred for a 15 full
time enrollees. That's, students in the center. We've had three different directors since 02/2018, and we have not had a director, but have we we've had site supervision other than a director for the past fifteen months. We have so I put this in a little bit of a context. The director position was open. We have, interviewed and people who have, been close to being offered a position or offered a position did not pan out in the end. This has been kind of a cycle that miss Hampton has been working through, since she got here as well. So prior to the fifth prior prior to myself and miss Hampton getting here,
just to be clear, I don't have a lot of background for how that first seven or eight months of no director panned out. Ongoing challenge and highlights of the center. I'm gonna start at the bottom on this slide and go up. I wanna be very clear that the professionals that are supporting our English learners and caring staffs, we we hear we have seen them in action. We hear nothing but outstanding things from our community on this, those who are attending there. This is not this is 100, discussion based on on a financial piece and whether the sustainability is going models are
going to work. But we wanna say how much we we we value the professionals who have who have who continue to work at Cary steps. The staff that are they're they're dedicated to children and their families and the relationships forged with those families, are very noteworthy as as the board has been made aware, I think, in the past few weeks for all the emails that have been flooding in. When we go to challenges, early childhood continues to experience staffing shortages on a national and statewide scale. Early child and it's a little bit of, you know, I'm I'm taking liberty liberty here to say, for those who have been in human resources or around human resources since the pandemic,
all in person jobs have been a little bit of a staff shortage. You couple that with, the ability to care for their for the youngest of our of the youngest of the kids we have in our district, it's definitely, a problem that we see in RCS but around the state information. The third party contract challenges is not that we have problems with GECS, with our third party contract. What that really means is that the mix of direct hires and those employees at the at the center, There's a little bit of, cultural differences between those direct RCS hires and those,
that are third third party at Caring Steps. It's not about an issue with, our third party contractor, which is GECS. Leadership turnover. The three directors that I mentioned in in, the last in the years that we've had and also in the superintendency and in the board, some of the leadership turnover has changed or looked at, you know, should we should we do this? Should we do not? And it's had not had a full, I think, backing behind it at times. And leadership turnover from the superintendency seat and from the director is kinda combined to be, for lack of better words,
a little bit of a storm that wasn't expected. And then has yet to meet anticipated financial projections, and that is seven years in a row. So that's not just because of leadership turnover. That's not just because of national and statewide, staffing shortages, but that is because of all of those things combined to make the puzzle of, anticipated financial projections have not been bad. Ms. Hampton. So continuing, in the budget conversation on February 24, just to remind, the Board and the public, that the Board approved a budget amendment, in the amount of $265,904
transfer from the general fund to support operations for the remainder of this fiscal school year. And, that particular amount does not include, the director's salary as was noted, by Mr. Russo. I think one of my first tasks in my almost my first week here was to begin, interviewing and we have been very diligent with all applicants, for that particular position doing our best to fill it, in the time that I've been here and likely prior to that, from my understanding with District leadership. I know that in spring, the survey,
district administration, conducted a survey in May of twenty twenty four. And the goal of that survey was again, to take the input and preferences of the community that uses the Caring Steps Children's Centre to consider, what might, be providing some amenable approaches to cost savings. So, when we look at that survey result on the next slide, you'll notice that one of the questions posed was related to the reduction of meal service and, which option would you prefer? To remove the meal service, requiring families to send food each day for their children?
Or to continue regular food service, with a tuition increase to cover that cost. And you can see, in blue there are the folks who preferred to remove meal service, and in red are those who would continue regular food service, with a tuition increase to cover those costs. The next item that was asked was related to, continued enrollment at Caring Steps. Should food service or meal service be eliminated, and that was not a barrier for the majority of families. You can see that 75% of families would continue their care.
The next question that was asked was related to the center's hours and, the idea that we may need to consider reducing hours of operation from the 06:30 to 6PM that's currently at this particular juncture. If the closing time were to change, would you continue enrollment? And overwhelmingly, families did say yes and this survey information was used earlier this fall as a strategy to enact to avoid, continued classroom closures due to the inability to stay in ratio, based on current enrollment in those classes at that time.
The next, survey point raised was related to, the challenges of attendance fluctuations and what partial, enrollees create within the staffing model the way that classrooms are or are not in ratio based on those staff number, and of course based on the revenue, achieved from tuition. And so this question posed relates to, interest in continuing in full time care as compared to part time enrollment options. And would families continue their enrollment at Hearing Steps should full time enrollment become a
prerequisite for attending. It was a bit less amenable to 44% of the respondents last spring and in conjunction with the tuition rates, this data has led to some of the options that we'd like to share later this evening related to the dollars that can, come into the center related to enrollment, and realizing the waitlist, participants and some of their interest within full time care. I want to go back, in the next slide to the notion of removing food from the current budget. You saw the amendment dollar amount that was passed on February 24 for that transfer
to the General Fund. Should we have discontinued food costs Sorry, my mic is singing at me a little bit. Should we have discontinued food costs? I think I might be on on two places now. Let's shift over here. Okay. Did you have me good on the mic? Okay. The idea that removing food service would have been amenable to many families within the caring steps, community was examined in, early August before the launch of a new school year to think about how the removal of those costs, may be communicated to families either in a tuition adjustment or in providing meal service
from home. And you can see that first line item there indicates that had we done that at the start of the school year, that would have realized a savings of $66,000 from that total transfer. Unfortunately, during that same time, Oakland Schools was prompting districts to expand GSRP services wherever possible. And, in addition to that, in mid August, timelines around income eligibility for Great Start Readiness Program or pre k for all for four year old students, was also adjusted. And so, as a result of that timing,
it prompted us to reconsider eliminating food service entirely from caring steps as the Great Starts Readiness Program does require the, food to be provided within the center. So rather than removing food for families at the start of a school year and then needing to to re employ that or to get, Chartwells back to, operation at the Caring Staff Center in the event that a GSRP classroom were to come to fruition, the decision was made at that point to continue meal service, for the fall. And you can see how those numbers would adjust over time,
for there were to be removal of food for these next three months and what that would would do to the original amount that was transferred at the February 24 meeting. Meeting. Next, Mr. Murphy is going to talk about some, options to, support staff. Yes. Thank you, miss Hampton. The first, slide I'm covering tonight would be a question around if there was an option to close or a decision to close and the board was as interested in providing bonuses to retain staff for a certain period of time what what that would cost. So to that point listed here is 19 full time staff and three part time.
To my knowledge, since this discussion began, we've either lost or in the process of losing at least three additional staff from this amount. And so these were the numbers as of I think two weeks ago. The first model here is a bonus structure of $250 monthly for full time staff and a hundred and 25 for part time with a 17% markup and that would be a total monthly cost around 6,000. Again, that 6,000 is based on the staffing numbers up above,
so it would be slightly less than that having a few less staff there now. And the second, structure is $500 monthly for full time staff and 250 for part time with the 17% markup would be roughly $12,000 monthly cost based on the staffing number at the top of the page. Okay. So we're gonna go into investment options. First, we're gonna cover a few slides that go through what the common assumptions are over the next set of slides. So all of these upcoming investment options include the following assumptions.
With the wait list currently totaling 228 children with the breakdown you can see, approximately one hundred of those are known to require full time care, and it would assume that every one of those offered a spot would accept. The next slide will take you through the other I'm sorry. The other kids that are on that list, approximately that would leave about a 30 on the wait list, 70 of which did not indicate a specific preference, and 60 of which indicated a part time preference. The following assumptions also would assume no changes to the current tuition rate,
And you can see the current tuition rate on the next slide. It's dated 09/01/2023. My understanding is these are still the current rates, today. Mister Murphy? Yes. Just a quick question for clarification. So the two slides back, there's 228 kids who are currently on the wait list, but then you're is it the assumption that only a 30 would remain? We have to build the models based on something. So the assumption of the models is that the 100 that indicated they're interested in full time are the ones we're enrolling.
And then the the rest would remain. So, again, it's an estimate, but, if the model is assuming full time enrollment, we took the ones that we knew wanted that. Yes. Alright. Thank you. So skipping ahead past the current tuition slide, further further assumptions. Staffing, we are assuming that all positions would be filled by July 1 at the rates in whatever that projection is. We're gonna go through multiple. So they all would assume that the positions will be filled by July 1. All staff would elect health benefits. All children would be enrolled from open to close,
and all ratios would be maintained. Again, is all of that likely to actually happen? No. But we have to base the assumption, the model on some assumptions. So just so we're clear that those are included in all. Additionally, that no food would be served, that no GSRP classrooms would be housed in the center, and that credit card fees would be paid by families. So that no food would be a change and the credit card fees would be a change. There are no currently GSRP classrooms housed in the center, so that would not be a change. Okay? Following slide is sort of the first model,
which is titled the optimal projection assumption, optimal meaning, best case financially, not necessarily optimal learning, best case financially, assumption. So specific to this first one, this would maintain GECS as a third party for all employees. It would make all lead teacher pay $40,000. My understanding is there's currently one or two maybe above that and the rest below it. So it's a slight increase in overall cost. All other lead caregivers, fifteen dollars per hour, similar that this would average them out,
but this would be a slight overall increase based on average. And that the director would be hired at a director pay rate of $85,000 annually. So you could see if all of those are done, the optimal projection or budget or overall picture would be a net profit of a hundred and $73,022. Give you a second to look through that. Again, as a reminder, this assumes the following, the ability to hire all these positions, the optimal ratios, the fact that they're in all day, the fact that there's credit card fees charged to families,
no food provided, and again, full time only. Alright. Keep going. K. Next option would be higher staff wages maintaining third party for all employees. So maintain GECS lead teacher pay increased to $50,000 All lead caregiver increased to $18 per hour, director pay rate of $112,000 annually. We consider this package to be on the higher end of comparable pay for similar services. You know, whether that would lead to full employment,
I've I've not can't guess to that, but this would this would be competitive. This would be attractive to, to have that opportunity. So if you look to the next all other assumptions remain the same, obviously. If you look to the next page, that model would be a net cost of a hundred and $39,790, maintaining those same ratios. And you can see by age group what the net gain and loss is above based on those changes to pay. Okay. Now we're gonna look at some options that include
some of the staff becoming RCS employees. So back to miss Hampton for those. Thank you, mister Murphy. We heard some questions and feedback regarding direct hire, of employees and so the the options ahead, have also been costed out in a variety of configurations. The investment option that considers the director as a RCS direct hire and continues with the GECS, contract for staff, projection assumptions indicates, back to that lead teacher pay of 40,000 and all other lead caregivers at $15 per hour with, health and and full benefit package for the director.
The cost analysis of this particular investment option does show a net profit, slightly less than the first version, that mister Murphy had shared, again, based on on some of that benefit cost structure, with the RCS director. The next option, shifts for all caring steps employees to be RCS direct, hires. And, that would, transition both the lead teacher, the director, and caregivers, at that same rate of pay, 40,000, dollars 15 per hour, health benefits, director pay with benefits. And that moves to the next
financial projection of a net loss at $112,000 1 hundred and 30 1 dollars $112,131 And then the last configuration, I believe this is the last configuration, that we wanted to make note of, relates to the enhanced pay rates or more competitive wages that we feel would be considered to attract, the staff that we would need to realize all classrooms at that full 100 student enrolled, mark. And that would transition the entire center to RCS Direct Hires with a lead teacher
pay of $50,000 All lead caregivers at $18 per hour, benefits packaged within, and then the director at a pay rate of $112,000 with full family benefit. Assuming full enrollment, this brings us to a net loss of $479,911 Mr. Russo will speak in the slides upcoming, how this particular configuration with all RCS direct hires, may compare to models in other school districts, and and address some of the questions that have been asked previously by the community
and the board. Mister Russo? So in this next slide, these are the investment notes for all options. So we do have we are licensed for five more rooms at Caring Steps, and we had some resignations. So we would have five if you look at the first set of data here, five additional rooms is currently reflected with our licensing. And the second set, we would need to hire at least three or four more people, to get to where we are, and this is as of 02/24 or '25. So that's we're talking about two and a half, three weeks ago at this point. So staffing numbers, as mister Murphy alluded to,
have potentially changed. But that director obviously would not. So in in in terms of in terms of that, this is what we're looking at for our following, option notes. So if I go to the next slide, please. So based on the projections that missus Hempton, kind of walked us through and mister Murphy, this would be, in order to in in in what resulted in losses from the projections they just shared with you, this is what we need to do with tuition to bring it up to break even. Does that make sense? So on the on the projections for that were indicated for losses,
if we wanted to put any of those models into play, this is what we'd have to do with tuition. And I'm gonna walk you through that. Would bring it to you. Yes. So into, so going through this, it could be increased to breakeven for the all all RCS projection. That would be normal with RCS staff as 5.2% increase to to tuition. And the higher wages projection would be a 6.5 increase. Higher wages and RCS projection is 22.4 increase in tuition. For so so there's the percentages that that we played out. If we look down at the bottom section now,
it's infant toddler rates full five days. So we had to to back to mister Murphy's point, we had to make some assumptions that they were full time, students coming there. We didn't put any half time built into these models. The current rate would be for infant toddler would be $16.46 per month. The current rate is $16.46 per month. The all RCS projection at a 5.2% increase is $17.32 or $86 monthly increase, And you can read those numbers as we go. Go to the next slide. Beyond preschool rates, full five days.
The current rate is $14.38 To bring this up to all RCS staff projections would be $15.13 dollars or a $75 monthly increase. All higher wages gets a $93 increase or a $15.31 dollars intuition, which is which is a $93 increase from what they're paying now. And then higher wages and RCS projection is a $322 a month, monthly increase. If we look at preschool k prep rates, full five days, the same thing applies. If you want me to read these to you, I can with these right here. It follows the same model as we were talking about in the last two slides.
We go to the next slide please. So investment options considerations. These are just basically things we have to think about, if we want to invest money, or if we, you know, for all options actually. For whether we're considering closure, whether we're considering an investment option from the board. How many families on the wait list may have found, care at another center? How many families will enroll when a spot opens up? We have we go back to some of our, staff the data that we have. There was 24, if I'm going back to my memory. A portion of of families did not want to go full time,
so, we have no idea as we make these if we were to make an investment, if those students have aged out of the current on the current wait list that they're on. And if so, would they be interested in full time? We know that in the three year old preschool that there are many families that were not are not interested in full time. How long will it take to become fully staffed? Are the pay rates high enough to attract staff needed? It says, what impact will increase rate increased pay rates have on other district programming? So because of a shortage and if we would decide to do an investment option, it's important that the board would recognize that if we raise rates,
our wages for folks at Caring Steps, whether it would be, GECS rates or RCS employees, that that would that would impact our other employee groups across the district potentially. So that's just something to keep in mind. Moving on to the next slide. Will part time families stay? Again, if we go back to that survey data, there was, I think, 24% that said they, we did not want to stay if it was we only offered full time. Will the loss of food cause any families to leave the center? I think that number was around between twenty five and thirty as well.
Well, families like to pay tuition when it could be free with GSRP. So if we go with a since we don't since it looks like right now, and it's very difficult, you know, if we look at the last seven years and we look at the closing option and the investment option, does it is it reality that we would make money and it's fine to break even, but is it reality to make money on infants and toddlers? I would say if we get to a break even point with infants and toddlers and GSRP becomes a free option for four year olds in our community, the only availability to breakeven and or make money would be on three year old
full time day care or full time service. And that's what those under GSRP, that's really what we're trying to say there. And then budget, what aspects of these projections may or may not come true? You know, we we've talked about this, and I say we. I really I've only been here for nine months, but the conversation has been had at the table is my understanding and inside, you know, with with the with the former superintendent, the former cabinet members about, what what here's what we have to do to break even or to make money, and that profitability never came to fruition. So it's something that we just have to consider. And then,
can families afford the tuition hikes at any one of these? It looked like that most of them said they would in that survey, that that if it was a percentage increase, would they be able to pay it or would they want to pay it? I can't remember the exact wording, but it's it's a significant amount of families that said so. But even at 20 to 30% of families saying that they they wouldn't come back if there was a tuition increase, then that might not make our assumptions come true at that point. Moving to the next, childcare in comparable public school districts. So in comparing, there's been a lot of talk in the community that I just wanna clear up first from just information Right?
When you when you compare early childhood centers that people talk about in Oakland County or otherwise, when they when when we talk about early childhood centers, some of them don't offer in fact, most don't offer the infant and toddler portion. They might have infant and toddler parent classes that they come two times a week, three times a week, etcetera as a as programmatically for the families, but they don't have daycare during the day in some of those early childhood centers. Some do. In the in the centers I'm talking about in which some do, I can verify that that,
and I won't be naming the these these school districts. But there are four that we have been in touch with that are also, they're not in a profitability model currently right now. And some are similar size and some are much smaller than than us here in in Rochester, and it's something to just, when when I think some community members asked to do a comparison to other districts, you can look at other school districts that have their audited sheets, their their audited numbers on their on their website, by talking directly to superintendents and and etcetera to fee to say what what is
happening? Are you making money on this? Are you not? I wanna be very clear with the board that, there are four that the only four we reached out to that could be considered comparable, are not making money either. And so there is a problem with, tuition matching what the pay rates are to bring people in to have full time care for families, you know, having staff who's willing to to to work. It it just falls into that that mechanism of the problem we have with the national shortage and the statewide shortage of of early childhood edge educators. And I think that's all
oh, the one thing on this slide that I wanna make sure that we understand that it says early on in childhood special or the early childhood center focus center's focus areas in that bullet point of early on in early childhood special education. It's really important to know that no matter what decisions are made here tonight, that early on are not affected by this. So if you're a special education student, if you're identified or need help when you are zero to three years old and you need early on services, that is not part of this conversation at all. I just wanted to put it clear to the community and to our board members.
Excuse me. So based on, based on the the models that we've seen and our history of of not being able to, provide profitability for the district for the past seven years, knowing that we're going into to the general fund at 265,000 this year in addition to not having a director. So that that number would be larger should we have had a director at the center. My my recommendations are listed up here to continue invest in in strong preschool programming, to discontinue infant and toddler care at RCS Caring Steps Child Center,
and strengthen early childhood integration with early on ECSE and three and four year old growth opportunities and board direction on next steps. So what this really means is, we have we have a center right now that has been underperforming in terms of, not not in terms of the care of students. I wanna be very clear. And not in terms of our relationship with DECCS and then not in terms of the professionalism among staff members. But in terms of profitability, it's been underperforming historically since it opened. And it seems to be pervasive across Southeast Michigan of of k 12 institutions who
are, who are entering this arena of service. And I don't know that it's a different I don't know that it's different for privates. Right? One and a couple of meetings ago when we talked about this, I mentioned that, and I don't think that was clear. So I wanna I wanna provide a clarification point too that when I mentioned it's really difficult to get to get wages for private childcare centers, I don't know if that came across differently or if I didn't say it appropriately. We can get tuition rates. You can call and say, how much does it cost to do that? It's hard to compare yourself to a private center when I can't get wages.
I'll be we don't call and say, well, what do you pay for for this? They just don't come forward with that information. They're not required to by law. And, therefore, unless you were interviewing and really got into it, you wouldn't know that answer. So I wanted to be clear about I think there was confusion because we had a few community members reach out to say that was you know, mister Russo was not talking. It was either misunderstood or I wasn't clear is what I'm saying. So that's why I wanna make that clear. But it would be my recommendation to the board, to discontinue infant infant and toddler care at RCS, carry steps,
and continue to see if we would need that building for GSRP programs, three year old programs, or not. I wanna be clear that right now, the master property planning process is going on. So the Caring Staff Center is is being looked at in terms of we know what the capacity is, in terms of little humans. We know what our birth rates are. We know how many four year olds are inhabiting the RCS, in the area. We know how many three year olds. And so, I don't have a recommendation for if you were to vote tonight to to close caring steps in infant and toddler,
what would that become in, let's say, whatever arbitrary date that we either invested or, you know, invested in in more three and four year old programs or invested in, infant and toddler. But if you follow my recommendation and and discontinue infant and toddler, I can't turn around and tell you that on on June 30 or September 30 or December 1 that we'll use it for this. We have an advisory panel that's made up of zero of of representation from zero students of zero to 26 years old in in every facet,
every region, geographically in our district. And so whatever decision is made, we wanna kind of walk through that and where our options could be. So I wouldn't wanna make a rush decision on that tonight. And with that, I will turn it over to, the board for questions. And if and when you have a question, can you please just aim it at the person that that went to the slide if you can remember? That would be helpful. If you can't remember, that's okay. I just if you could, it'd be great. Alright. Trustee Blake? Well thank you for putting this together. I spent a lot of time reading through this and I still miss something that just popped out in your presentation,
so thank you. But I, I have a bunch of questions, but I know I'm not only one person. So I will ask the two general questions and then I have some questions on these options. Maybe I'll wait on those until people have had their chance. But you touched on this, but I'm really curious about this wait list. Like, we're putting a lot of stake in this wait list. And how old is this wait list? How stale is this wait list? Because I know I've you go out and you put your name multiple places hoping that you get a a spot. And then when you get in somewhere,
if you're happy with it there, you're not gonna easily pull your children and go out when somebody else calls you. So how old how long ago did these people get on this wait list? Have we talked to them since? And what can we reasonably expect? That's part one of that question. And then part two, have we considered the fact of, you know, all of these people who say twenty five percent will drop out if we don't have food, thirty percent will, you know, drop out if we close earlier, forty five percent will drop out if they have so we're gonna lose people before we even get to the wait list.
How does that all play out in? Yeah. I can jump in and then, miss Hampton, if you wanna jump in whenever you feel that it's appropriate. I think to your your first question, I think, is better handled by miss Hampton. But the second question, I'm just gonna jump to. It's very difficult for us, trustee Blake, to have and to the board, it's very difficult for us to have a read on when you do a survey in May of twenty four and then the results say that whatever numbers, you know, that that come out of that, does that apply to the same situation a year later when forced with a very
different decision that, well, now it's closing. Am I going to or now it's going to be, you know, the tuition is 25% more, 22.5% more. I think there's a lot of factors that that impact, what that graph represents, and it might look different now. If I take it at face value, because we did do all of our assumptions were static. Right? We said a hundred students. We took the survey results and said this is what we know. Right? So if I just take it from the static, we'll lose that percentage. I believe they will lose that percentage before we even start this process. Is it realistic that we would get a hundred students for full time care to
come to come to Caring Steps? I'll be honest. I don't know if it's realistic. 80% maybe? Yes. But to have a hundred students off the wait list that want full time, I don't think is, a re a reality. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? So what what ages are the p in other words, like, the wait list, the person signed up, did they sign up a month ago or do we have people on there who signed up two years ago? I can answer a bit of that. The wait list has been robust since the opening of the center. And as Mr. Russo spoke about at the start, we know we've had all types of challenges in terms of being able to draw
that down, including a global pandemic. The staff at Caring Steps has been very diligent to monitor, families that have great interest in Caring Steps. Many of the families will call back and check-in. But there's also been, some monitoring of the list in terms of checking in with folks to gauge their interest. But certainly, as you mentioned, when I entered the wait list with a two year old, my needs may have Changed by the time I get a call back. Right? I've either found care elsewhere or I'm still waiting with anticipation. But, I likely now need a different type of classroom than I may have needed.
One of the ways that the staff have been working to really maximize, the tuition rates coming in as well as maximize the opportunities within the classrooms for families is to be mining those lists by age to see where an availability or a vacancy, if you will, may come up that they can provide offering for a child, whether that's in, a part time or partial capacity or a full time offering. The ratios, of course, in each classroom are determining some of that availability. But there has been great interest on the part of the caring staff staff to, continue to energize,
not only the revenue from the tuition side of things, but also to have a robust family structure that's supported by that particular center. In the nature of early childhood, particularly considering infant or young toddler, as I said, children are growing very quickly and may have different needs, than what were originally signed up for. So, while we do have that data, in a a comprehensive manner, Mr. McDaniel has also been working with staff at the center to, provide some analysis of where those full time age ranges, situate. And, in each of those,
investment options that you see, those were broken down also by what tuition rates would be for infant, young toddler, toddler, preschool, pre k I'm sorry, Craig prep. Certainly because those cost outs are different as well, right, as mentioned. And I'm sorry to keep harrying on this, but I still am not clear. Are all of these people at least people that have been in contact or signed up in the last year? The 200 and some? Yes. Can you hear me? Hi. My name is Diana. I work at Caring Staffs. I'm one of the, secretaries up there. I'm one of the ladies that used to monitor the wait list.
Sorry, I'm a little nervous. But, a lot of our families that are on there have been on there since '21. We do send out emails asking them if they wanna continue waiting on the wait list. They always say yes. Our wait list also as the kids grow out of the infant room into the toddlers, we move them into that position. So, we do send out emails, probably for the last four or five months. We haven't put anybody on the wait list because our wait list was so long that they were calling back every two, three weeks wanting to get that on the waitlist. So Trustee Gupta? Well,
and that that brings up a point I was thinking of which was that even if somebody's not on the wait list, the fact is people know we don't have capacity. So who knows what the potential is for a longer wait list. Right? Or Yeah. We usually get about capacity. We get about four to five calls four to sorry, five to 10 calls every day to be added on the wait list. And the reason they do want us is because we are part of Rochester Community School. Madam President. Trustee Annas.
Well, I I have one comment and then I have a couple of questions. The first comment is when you said, that, what currently, that there's three staff in the process of removing themselves from the from the district from carrying staffs. It wouldn't surprise me based on where we were a couple of weeks ago because this is this is a very unknown and volatile discussion. But the, the tuition rate, graph that you had up that had the Caring Steps logo, if you could go to that page. And it says tuition rates beginning 09/01/2023. So my question is,
have we raised tuition recently? And if so, when was the last time tuition was raised at this facility? Mister Murphy, is there any information that you My understanding is it hasn't changed since 2023. That's why that's the one included. Okay. Before that, I don't know. Okay. The answer to that. So we have not raised tuition since 2023. Before you continue, can I just ask a follow-up on that? Have we done any comparisons since that time period? I'm sorry. I can't personally, no. I have not, but I don't and I don't know who has or not. Okay. I have not since I've been here.
I haven't done any type of tuition comparison. I will tell you that, in the last week, as we as I reached out to other school districts to the comparable models Mhmm. They had one one school district. One superintendent did try to do a comparison and thought that, while they were much under us, that he felt that we were right on par with tuition rates. With private tuition rates? No. With with other k 12. Other k 12. School districts that might be doing it. Oh, okay. But that's just what was reported to me I have not done my own research
on. Okay. My other question was, the, one that has the projection models assumption, which talks about the staffing. And then it says no food is served by the center. No GSRP classrooms are housed in the center. And maybe this was asked and answered last time, but I I need I need clarification on, first of all, why we're not utilizing that facility for GSRP classes. And do we have the ability to do so with this facility? We absolutely do. There are not GSRP classrooms operating there currently.
The reason that on that slide those assumptions were named because if we were to remove food, we would not be able to offer GSRP services there without creating two different lanes which would then incur different costs with Chartwells that So, in order to have a GSRP program at this facility, we would need to provide the food. That is a requirement of GRACE already. Yes. Okay. That's all the questions I have right now. Trustee Lecui? Alright. Well, I'll I'll focus my comments not about making money but about breaking even because school districts operate as break even entities and if we were to run at a loss
for six consecutive years, the state would take over and the board would be removed. I don't think anybody wants that. But as for my position with caring steps, I'm not anti caring steps, but I do support good management, both fiscal and general. So in our board packet, I think we have about 15 letters advocating for keeping caring steps open. And I would expect that because there's approximately 74 kids there and it fits their needs based on price and other factors. However, at the same time, many of those families have also voiced strong criticism of the management as well.
And after six or seven years you'd expect that they've tried everything they know how to do. So if the model still isn't working, then I think we have to acknowledge that and make some tough decisions. A couple board meetings ago, we asked the administration for recommendation on how to move forward and we received a partial answer that we should continue investing in early childhood education but it doesn't quite say how and that's part of the problem. There's obviously a need for pre k services. But which ones? Right now, in our district,
we have three different flavors of pre k. And many find the choices confusing. And, we've also been given a few different pay raise scenarios, but no guidance on which ones to pursue or really the odds of success. So, we have to acknowledge that too. One thing that I keep wondering about is the attachment to this building rather than the service it provides. Our elementary schools have over 900 spots open. This is something we're discovering in facility planning. If we want to offer high quality early childhood education,
we'll probably need to raise wages to attract and retain staff. And if that's the case, shouldn't we try to reduce unnecessary expenses? There's no need for the expense for another building. Why not reduce our overhead better by better utilizing the existing space that we already have? I think one thing is clear, pre k families are gonna require some flexible options. According to the survey results, anywhere between 25 to 40% of the existing Caring Steps customers has said they'd leave if there's certain changes eliminated like the food or the early closing times or the
full time enrollment if if many of those things were implemented. But about half are fine with the current hours offered and the other half require wraparound services that provide childcare for both before and after school so they can work. Extended hour services are always paid services that require additional staffing. I guess one thing I'm thinking about is if we offered pre k options and we offered GSRP for full time enrollment students and maybe a paid pre k option for people who want half time options, We move them to our school buildings.
We focus more on SAC to provide before and after school. I'm wondering if we can think outside the box a little bit and see what we might be able to do there because that would reduce some of these some of this overhead cost of that building. Mister Russo. Yeah. I just wanna address, Trustee LeCoultre, you bring up the point, during the master property planning and we're looking at facility use utilization and what's available in our buildings. For context, 900 students across 13 schools doesn't mean we have seven open classrooms in one single school.
I just wanna be clear that the community and the board members understand that at 264 classrooms that are being utilized for general education k through five right now or TK through five. Correct, Kimberly? At TK through five, that that's really like 3.3 or 3.2 students per classroom for availability. So which I I agree that we have space for 900 kids, but it's just not condensed. We're talking about 74 kids at the moment. So if we've got 900 spots and we're looking to move 74 kids, it just seems like we have space.
74 kids is made up of infant, toddler, pre k. Right. I I I just feel like are you saying you don't think that this could work moving to the elementary schools? So last at the last meeting, I that question was asked and answered about the schools with their licensing is different. So our our size of our toilets, the size of our counters, the size of our sinks, the accessibility to those things, it looks different than it does for a third grade classroom, for example. And licensing plays a part in that. When that if you say, will it work? Yep.
We could we could use some bond money or general fund money to change some classrooms around in class in buildings that are existing. But please note that that that would be something we'd have to address is all I'm saying. I I agree with you. And I think that if we reduce the overhead cost of maintaining an entire building somewhere else, we might have extra money to lower the counters in other rooms that are in our existing buildings and do what is needed to turn those rooms into rooms that are fit for pre k. I'll just ask a clarifying question. Is a room licensed or is a facility licensed when you're talking about childcare centers
or or that age, you know, toddler element, toddler, infant, preschool, that type of thing? Each room requires licensing. Trustee Alsma. Hello. So I have a simple question then I have a follow-up. So is this is Caring Steps the only place that for right now allows a pre k three and pre k four tuition in our district. So do we have pre k the pre k three and pre k four programs outside of in other spots in the district? I'm wondering if because your proposal was to, recommendation was to eliminate infant and toddler.
Can you talk a little bit about the, I'm assuming like three year old preschool, preschool, K prep, what you think the likelihood is of the, like which model do you think you would follow and do you think we would break even with that? And is that based on these same assumptions here that we had before? Thank you, Madam President. That question is, that's a very big, that's a very big question in terms of what we'd do next and what steps we would take. I can let I'm gonna turn it over to Kimberly for anything additional. But what I would say is if we
to speak very frankly about the building of caring steps, that if infants and toddlers, if we if that was a decision by the board to, divest in that and then increase our, let's say, classroom footprint for three and four year old, I I believe that a pre k, let me back up. I believe that a GSRP experience, when explained to the community and making sure that most and and that that we we talk about qualifications for that, that it's a free program that's five days a week,
we would have extra space to house that at Caring Steps. That doesn't mean that we would only do that, but that is one option. The other option is which is why I'd like to make sure that our master property plan committee is looking at everything, is to is to increase the number of GSRP or tuition based preschools at other schools across the district. That's not an either or as well. We could do both. Right? So there are when when you ask the question, madam president, I there there's a lot of options,
because it does open up space. It's also an option, coming coming back to, do we want to, you know I'm not trying to make this simple complex, but I wanna say that there are that way I want to say that there are many options moving forward. Right? You could you could build, you could build things on current buildings and sell carrying staffs. You could there's just so many things to happen there. I think the first step, though, is understanding what we want to provide as a district. Are we going to be a district that's providing k 12 and not dipping into our general fund to do so? Or do we feel that it's a more imper moral imperative to do so and
keep infants and toddlers because we've proven and and I say we, I'm talking about the district. I have not been here, not everyone on the board has been here. But it has been proven that it's seven years of of not profitability. You know, it it doesn't make sense to continue the same thing. So something should change in terms of our service model. And what makes me nervous about the entire process is the staffing problem still exists. If we had a 50 students that tomorrow they said, yes, we we wanna take you up on it or a hundred students just like our
models say, my concern would still reside in the fact that early childhood has a staffing issue. It's not an RCS problem, to be very clear. Trustee Blake and then Trustee Lecui? Trustee Lozano had a question. I don't think she's spoken yet, so she can go before me if she works. Okay. Go ahead, Trustee Lawson. I didn't see your hand down there. That's okay. Thank you. I had a couple questions. So in regards to the teacher staffing, are they year round or are they just the school year?
Okay. So those wages are for year round. Okay. And then what's that? Okay. $6.30 to $5.30. In regards to what Carol Beth was saying, I understand what she was saying about bringing more into our existing buildings without the daycare. So a three year old, four year old preschool, which we do have three schools that have preschool programs currently. Do these current preschool programs have already the smaller bathrooms and everything in the classrooms, or is that only the daycare portion that needs everything downsized? The day the daycare portion is required is a different licensing mile than GSRP.
So a four year old that could fit in a kindergarten classroom or pre k classroom, TK classroom inside our building. Okay. And then currently the district does not offer five day week preschool programs. GSRP is also not that. It's Monday through Thursday for GSRPs. Correct? Okay. Yeah. Monday through Thursday is GSRP. But then the preschool programs, there's no full there's nothing is offered full week for the little kids. Is there something that we could do for that? We do have full day tuition programs but they don't extend right now past 03:30. Right. Okay.
At caring steps, there's, as described Which they have thirty five thirty. Like their stack is at caring steps type thing. Like their after school care after that time? Takes place in their classroom. Yes. Okay. Trustee Blank. So, I want to dig deeper into these options because, I think we need to do that. And with respect, I think we need to view all of this skeptically because your projections have never been right. And I know you as in the district. So, I'm looking at these and out of the five, first of all, the biggest the thing that we've identified as our biggest problem is staffing.
Right? And I think we've identified pay as part a big part of that. And so three of the five options, option one, option three, and option four, are keeping basically keeping the pay lower. So, meanwhile, we're making the assumption that we're gonna bring all these kids off the wait list, we're gonna hire one director, we're gonna hire two lead teachers, we're gonna hire 11.5 assistant caregivers, everyone's gonna come full time, nobody's gonna eat food, the families are gonna be willing to pay Well,
they're gonna bring their food, I would think. The families are gonna pay the credit card fees. So all of these things are gonna go in our favour. We're not gonna really raise the pay significantly for any of these people. And yet, and yet three of the options still end up in the hole when you do that, unless we're doing tuition increases. So to me, the lower pay options, we're never ever going to be able to solve our staffing problems. So those are three, you know, option one, option three, and option four you can toss out because they're not gonna solve our problem.
So then you have option two and five are the only ones left. Option two is paying higher wages, but keeping, you know, everything the same. That one leads us to a $140,000 deficit. So that's transfer. Now, that doesn't include increased tuition. So you could make that up with a 6.5% tuition increase. 6.5% is not terrible, although I was surprised when I saw these amounts. I had been under the assumption that we our people were paying out that much tuition and it's not true. They're paying a good amount. They are. But you could potentially make that up with six and a half.
So put option two as a maybe. Option five is the only other one we got left. That one is hiring them directly and giving them the higher pay. You've got almost a half a million dollar transfer out of the general fund. And the only way to counteract that is a 22.4% tuition increase. You're paying over $2,000 a month to go there. And I know it's a good facility, and I know some people would do that, but I know not everyone can pay $2,000 a month. So I think option five is not realistic. So we've really got maybe one that could possibly work,
which is option two. And that's if everything works perfectly. And so this is my dilemma here. I mean, we could try that, but we've tried seven different times and it hasn't worked any of those times. So this is my because I want us to be able to have this. I would like us to be able to have this, but I'm just not seeing it work. I guess, I'll just say based on what you were looking at, you were taking all everything in to get together. Right? Like, you weren't looking at the option of getting rid of infant and toddler Yeah.
Which would Yeah. No. I was looking at keeping the whole center open with the options that we were given. Right. Okay. Hold on a second. I think it was Trustee Lecui and then we'll go Trustee Gupta and then Trustee Annas. Well, Trustee Gupta couldn't go. I don't think he's had a chance to speak yet. Well, I was just wanting some clarification on that, from trustee Blake because I also saw, what I was thinking about was the option of, with the RCS director and the GEC staff projection assumptions that that reflects some modest
increase in wages, if I understood that correctly. And that shakes out to a a net profit of a hundred and $36,000 projected. And so and I know I know that assumes all sorts of things that aren't realistic in there. So I guess what I'm wondering is, like, how off would our assumptions have to be in terms of enrollment for that to be result in a loss? Before you answer, can I just make clear? Is the I took this as the RCS director is hired,
directly, but the GECS still handles everyone else. So Right. But still with the increased But I didn't see these 50. I don't know where you're talking. The 40 and the $50.15 dollars? I think you're saying I think if I can clarify. I believe you're saying two different things. No. I think what you're saying is on this slide where it says investment options, RCS director slash GEC staff projection assumptions, that that that maintain I don't know where my slides are. Thank you. Letter learned. Thank you. Correct. But the but the lead teacher pay of 40,000 and all their carriers 15 is comparable to what exists now is what So right.
So that's no no rate. That's what Trustee Blake is saying. I I thought I made a note when it was first, brought up on a previous slide that that reflected a slight increase. It's like Well, I guess my question is, the people that work there might know better. Do you think a $15 for, lead caregiver, forty thousand lead teacher is going to solve the staffing problem? My understand my understanding is that there are currently teacher, maybe one or two, I'm not sure, that are over the 40,000. That's true. And a current, few current that are over 15.
But, yes, it's a slight increase. I think it's debatable whether that would entirely solve our staffing issue. And I wouldn't describe it as, in the upper area of pay compared to the other one, which if all centers are struggling with staffing, just from an HR perspective, you have to be in the upper realm to truly solve an overall staffing issue. So I'm not disputing that that could be pay raises for some of our employees. But on average, when you average the total cost of it, it is a slight overall increase,
which to your point, trustee Blake, I wouldn't be able to guarantee that that would quickly immediately solve our staffing issue permanently. Mister, so I I think you had said something about a director and maybe a way to handle that. Is do we need to bring in if we went to the not infants and toddlers, can the person who's in charge of our preschool across the district handle that, or does additional director need to be hired? Yeah. I think that's two different things we're talking about, but this projection here includes infants and toddlers.
Yes. Mhmm. Right. But I'm I'm asking about the your proposal and whether it would include a director in that or if you were looking to write your recommendation. So I will talk I will lean into mister Murphy who knows of a recent retirement regarding this and, what the expectation would be for overseeing that program. I missed that. Could you repeat that? So if if infants and child and please, madam president, if I'm misspeaking, if infants and toddlers were removed from programming and we had a more robust three
year old, four year old preschool program that took its place or we spread it we it was more robust across the district, do we have would we have to hire a director? I'm sorry. Would we have to hire a director? Correct. I think the question is right now we have someone who's overseeing pre k. I think that I think it depends on what that structure looks like. If we're going to have a center that needs a director or need some version of leadership, so it's not a it's not a situation of partial closure or partial removal and an
unknown set of circumstances with how to handle the remaining three and four year olds. I can't answer a hypothetical about whether we would need a director for that. Maybe miss Hampton has an opinion on that. We would wanna be fully within the the scope and responsibility of licensing and certainly a site supervisor, is required at minimum. I think that one of the pieces of feedback that we've gotten, that I have received since I've been here, is the gap, in leadership has caused some challenges across, the time, that Caring Steps has been under my purview and I know that that is a
top priority for staff as well as for families. I think one of the circular challenges here, whether we're looking at, the hourly rate or the director rate or, the benefit packages, to Mr. Murphy's point around shortages in childcare, are that to be on the competitive end of that still puts us, you know, running in the game the best we can but without a guarantee of full staffing for any one of our programs. Whether that's talking about fourth grade teachers or three year old caregivers. Caregivers who care for three year olds. I think that the challenge that we've encountered is direct feedback,
from some staff who have left around rates of pay. That's how we've gotten the most deal of our information around competitive rates of other centers are for folks who, need, a higher wage for their family and to be accounting for the work that they do which is, having a big lift, right? We have committed folks who are leading wonderful work for children and at the same time, our pay structures just from a national perspective don't necessarily respect that work, in compensation. And, I think that one of the pieces of feedback that we have gotten is that our we're,
struggling to stay staffed at the correct capacity to be fully evolved into 13 classrooms. And some of that is related to pay rate. Madam President. Trustee I think it was my turn. I just let a lot of people go in front of me. Alright, go ahead Trustee McCooling. Alright, so, I guess one thing I was wondering, although I am I am listening to the discussion as this has been going on, and, again, it just reminds me how we have these three different versions of pre k in our district. We have the K prep, which is offered at Caring Steps. We have GSRP, and then we have the pre k,
the paid tuition pre k that we offer at the four different hubs in the elementary schools. And so again, my my suggestion the last time I spoke was why not expand our pre k offerings with the elementary schools? You wouldn't have to hire an additional director. You're just essentially expanding that program instead of trying to do three different versions of pre k and confusing everybody. But, my other question that I had was, why are we continuing to use Genesee education consultants for when staffing is our biggest problem? We've been using them for six or seven years and they have not been pulling
through. I can I can talk to I can't I can't talk to you why for seven years we've used a third party specifically that brand? Right, guys? What I can tell you is the direct hire the the other districts I talked to who are direct we have those those folks are direct employees. They're not using a third party, source have the same issues that we are having in terms of staffing, in terms of pay rate, in terms of raising tuition to meet it, wondering if their families can pay it. And it's not a and and and that's just it's a very limited source,
just being very frank, to have only four others to talk to. But it's it's with whether it's direct or whether it's someone who's been, you know, contracted as a third party, we're we're experiencing the same conditions. I hear you on that. Although Genesee is not local either. So you have to wonder if that plays some kind of role and why wouldn't we try using if we wanted to stick with third party provider, which I understand with the cost savings, maybe we would try a different third party provider. Alright. I have lost track. So did you already Excuse me?
Okay. Trustee Anderson. This is somewhat frustrating, this discussion, because I was a part of the original board that, launched this program because we felt there was a need for an investment in early childcare, to help pave the way for the future students that will be in our district. But a center like Caring Steps cannot succeed when ignored by the organization who created it. And, the position we find ourselves, this is where we're at because we've been ignoring this this center. The fact that, we've not had a director there for over a year and a half is appalling
Because that same focus that we put in our TK through 26 spaces, we should be applying that to the same investment that we made at Caring Steps. As the presentation showed, at its peak it enrolled a 15 children. But while this board has spent the last two years dealing with superintendent transition, a lack of leadership allowed a public childcare center under our watch to operate without a, with a site supervisor versus a director. So it's no wonder the enrollment and hiring for this center remained stagnant and unable
to even break even, which was ultimately the goal. This coupled with a vocal minority on this board and our community sharing their opposition to a decision made prior to their involvement does make one question. Why are we bothering with childcare for the youngest in our community? The answer for me is simple. Because there was and still is a need for it. And our community and our district felt that this investment was worth it at the time, especially for the learners we anticipated having in our district from kindergarten through graduation.
No investment in a child is wasted as evidenced by the parents that came to this meeting and spoke. And some of the words that I gleaned from their their what they said, it's a value proposition. We are making an investment in our youngest learners in our community. And it's also looking towards the future. And that quality that we can provide as a district that we know we already provide in a pre k or a T k through 26 system, we can, and I know we provide in caring staffs.
But we have been neglecting the kids basically. Since 2018, the total operating budget for caring steps was $8.98733.05 36. Since 2018, our total RCS general fund budget has been $1,411,000,000 2 hundred and 6 thousand 4 hundred and 70 9 dollars Which means, Caring Steps has comprised 0.1038 of the total RCS general fund budget.
When we averaged that over eight years including the '20, '25 budget, that's 1,100,000.0 per year. Most of which is covered by tuition. So this discussion, really frustrates me because when you look at the bigger picture, this is minuscule in terms of an investment that we should be making. These numbers are operating costs and, you know, it's not the cost of the property of Caring Steps. I know trustee, Lucuy has mentioned why are we keeping the property. We bought the property. We've invested in the property. We should keep the property. Some questions that I've considered,
what are the short term and the long term investment costs versus benefits to the children we serve in the community? I think we heard from the parents who currently are have their children enrolled. And I think that there's a need for quality childcare for parents who work full time. And it's in our community. And we should be able to address it. I appreciate the parents who currently have their children enrolled in caring steps and contacting the board to provide insight and their perspectives as I definitely took that feedback into consideration. I'm not here to convince anyone at this table to change their opinion on what
is important. But, as a trustee for this community, I see value in and believe we should continue to be looking toward the future and continue to provide and offer more than what is expected in a traditional public education setting. And as one parent said, we are ahead of the curve in terms of this and I believe in. With that said, I would like to see this board expect the hiring of the caring steps director, approve higher staff wages for current and future staff. And I also expect to see this center increase their monthly tuition to be on
par with the going rate of any private facility because what we do offer at Caring Staffs is incomparable to any private setting. Madam President? Trustee Olsba? So my question, you know, I know trustee said we have lots of different options and it's can be confusing. But correct me if I'm wrong on any of these things. GSRP is a four day week program that does not cover the length of day or the same need. And there is a GSRP five, that they pilot, but that would be piloting. And it's a challenge to negotiate how prep time gets worked out in that.
I know deeply. So if I am a family that needs and I my own children had a wonderful experience in the pre k that are at the hubs among the elementary schools. However, that was only a few days a week, and it had very limited hours and it was very, we would only pick up in a certain loop and only at a certain door and we were considered kind of second class citizens at the building and and it wasn't there was a little bit of friction. So it wasn't, it wasn't the best solution, but at that point in my life, I was blessed enough to be able to stay home and not need full time
care. So, I'm just this is the only place if I need a three year old or a four year old full time, like a daycare set of hours, that I can get that in RCS. Is that correct? And then my other question would be, if we do decide that the infant toddler program is not where we want to go and we want to focus on more the pre k, how many families are totally enrolled in the, infant and toddler, programs right now? How many families would be discontinuing services for? Madam president? Just a second. I think, missus Hempton or the staff person was going to Right.
I was gonna talk about that just because, like, I actually kind of enjoy this, you know, calling out from the crowd and hearing what the people who work at Caring Staffs have to say. I like this, but you are setting a precedent that you don't allow for any other means. I think Melissa's coming out from scratch. Who's I or mister Russo should be directing if they need someone to answer the questions. So, but I think it is for Mr. Russo or Mrs. Hampton to, you know, if you're unable to address it, if you would like assistance from someone else who's here. And I don't know if this is on,
but I don't think the assumptions have taken into account the fact that you have families across all of these classrooms. I'm paying for three boys to be there. And Oh, I'm sorry. Are are you you're a parent? Yes. And if you cut Okay. I'm sorry. It's not it's no public comment right now. Sorry. No. It's okay. But if you cut those toddlers, you're absolutely one of them. Alright. So, Trustee Mussoy, did you have a comment? No. It was the same. It was, as I said, either Mr. Russo or someone at the table would have to be directing that someone else would need to fill in the blank of something that they needed.
Can you repeat the question? Trustee Allspa, what was your question? It was about the If we discontinue infants and toddlers only, how many, families do we have enrolled? I understand that it might you know, I have three children that are all two years apart, so I understand there might be a multiplying factor for other. But in the infant and toddlers, how many families are we talking about? We know that the, current we have some current families waiting for infants to be added to the center that we've been unable to add based on staffing. But as was referenced here, one of the appeal for families in that age range of six weeks through,
nearly five years old, we have families that lay over many of those different classroom types. The enrollment data that we have, is two or three weeks old now at this point, but we're currently, at that point in time, six infants and 19 toddlers. Alright. Trustee Olsba, or I'm sorry, Trustee Lecuye. I'm Trustee Lecuye. Yeah. Alright. So, maybe, maybe people don't like my idea of, of moving the Caring Steps operation into the elementary school. So I'm just trying to think outside the box again. And maybe this would be too difficult too,
but that's we're just trying to discuss. So have we considered trying to find a buyer for the whole establishment that might be willing to retain the staff? Because that could be a win win situation. It would get new leadership that might be able to keep it afloat and could be a win for the Caring Steps families. I I think that was a question. I don't know if anyone has considered that at this time. We have not looked at, I mean, in order to do that, you'd really have to look at putting something up for sale, and we don't we're not there. So right now, I'm gonna come back to center. I'd like to come back to center on the purpose of today's discussion,
what the new business was, how we got here. We went we took you through this, bold presentation about $265,000 into the general fund, why we started talking about carrying steps in the first place, etcetera, and what we do with building spaces, etcetera. When even if you chose to say, we're gonna we're gonna stop, all all of the services. We're not we're not gonna remove early childhood special education in the short term. We want them to finish the school year. So we're not in the I'm I'm as your superintendent, I'm not as I said before,
I'm not at the stage of here's what we're gonna do with the building. Right now, we're talking about what kind of services do we wanna provide, what programming are we are we willing to either divest or invest in. Well, my understanding was that this was gonna be just not for this school year, but based on the last meeting, it was supposed to be for the fall. So I guess I'm wondering what is the purpose? What is it that we're deciding at this meeting? Well, right now we're having a conversation. There was a recommendation that was made to eliminate, infant and toddler. Part of, you know, part of my questions are, do we have any models for,
you know, your proposal if we do the young preschool preschool k prep, what those financials would look like and what you would base realistic expectations on, on that standpoint. Do we have have you have you done that? Where does that come out? What's the potential for being successful with that? Because I think part of it would depend on which wage option you're looking at, how many classes you think you might add, those types of things.
So we have space at Caring Steps just to kinda walk us through this. Yeah. We have space at Caring Steps, and we may have a couple, spaces across the district for a pre k experience no matter what we want to call that just just to start the conversation. We also have increased special education classes coming in, so we have to balance that against what our space is available completely. Right? And when we add special education classes in this district, again, this is not a Rochester situation. This is a national situation. More categorical programs in special education are being added annually.
So if we did GSRP, that's funded at a little over $10,000 per per student to do that. Right? So you're getting more at a at a GSRP than you are for ninety six zero eight in our k 12 funding mechanism. There's a push to to to pay the teachers and put them on, like, almost like a on the collective bargaining agreement where they're making as much as a kindergarten teacher. There's a big push that way. So have we done models of this? Again, I'm going to say no. We you asked us to bring models for what it would look like to invest
in options because and so we did. When when I say I don't believe that these options are viable, I didn't turn around to say I think we should fill the caring steps, building with this many four year olds and three year olds, and maybe I should have. But I was waiting for our our process to go through when we identified, through the master property planning process, and and trustees Lozen and, and Gupta are part of that process where we can have a number of how many four year olds are in the district. Now does that how many four year olds and three year olds are in the
district? Does that mean that they'll all choose a preschool experience? I mean, well, average of numbers is no. They're not going to choose that right now. They're not. But I think we're talking two different things. Like, to me, GSRP is not the day care where someone is working and they need coverage from, you know, 06:30 in the morning till 05:30 at night. So are you saying that the GSRP would take the place of a k prep class for certain hours, and then there would be before and after care to cover that time.
I'm I'm I'm just not following. Or if you're saying we would still have K prop, but you're talking about GSRP and some of the other classrooms. Excuse me. I think there's a combination of all of those options. And can we Mrs. Simpson, do you want to speak to that at all? I think as we have done, a bit of research around Oakland, and Macomb County, what we found in early care centers, some of which have been have been offered up for us to examine, either by community or or by connections that we we may have in our professional lives. These centers are affiliated directly as direct hires with the school district.
And so I think the recommendation for expanding those preschool offerings at whatever level that starts, whether I'm two or 18 or I'm three and a half. I think that the the goal would be that we can bring some cohesion among offerings, whether those are for tuition or whether those are sitting under, you know, an eligibility criteria with the Governor's Pre k for All. I think though that to bring, in alignment the idea that we're able to drive not from, profitability margin, but from a service model,
coherence among care in early childhood with the decision point here is to determine at what point that starts. And so I think in the bullet that was named around infant and toddler is not to suggest that families don't have infant care needs. In fact, one of the recent webinars I was just listening to around this this, challenge that we are having nationwide around our care for our very youngest is that, no different than a than a preschool challenge is also an incredible shortage in infant care. So our wait lists don't surprise me because there frankly just are not a lot
of options, regionally. And and I don't think we're unique in that struggle. And so I I too as an early childhood, and and, specialist, if you will, by by trade and background, would love to see stronger investment all the way around. At the same time, I also recognize that as a public school district, there are a lot of things that we would like to offer for our children and that sometimes we need to put that on the balance of of what is, able to receive our ultimate attention and investment because I would not disagree that this particular location is is not receiving,
at this time, the the leadership that it needs in terms of bringing its best feet forward. The folks that are there are are passionate and knowledgeable and giving great care to young children that are there and and are very invested in their time that they are spending. And I think it's important that if we are planning to continue with this center in its current configuration, that we look to the way other districts service these types of settings. And and we presented one of those options here tonight. I'm not sure if that is is amenable to the board,
but I think that to trustee Blake's point, looking at options two and options five as as all RCS direct, hires are commensurate with the amount of feedback that I have received in the last six months. Madam President. I'm sorry, just to follow-up on clarification, you're saying that making everyone an RCS employee would be the way to go? Is that I'm not making that recommendation. I believe it is difficult to create cohesion among programming with not only so many different titles, but so many different funding sources and areas of placement around the district.
Alright. Trustee Blake, Halspah, and I'm sorry, Gupta, and then So I am torn on this, for a number of reasons. And I do appreciate all the families that came out. I appreciate all the letters that we've received. If nothing else, I mean, you have shown the effect that this facility has had on the kids. And we do not question the care, the the learning. We don't question any of those things. And out of everybody sitting here, quite frankly, I think I'm the one who maybe, understands most about good child care and how how much it's worth.
You know, I it wasn't long ago that I depended on center based care for my child. I'm a working parent. I'm a single parent. So I had to. I had to have a place for my child to go every day. And I had to know that he was safe, and I had to know that he was taken care of. And there were two child care centers that I used in in my child's life. The first one was highly recommended. I took him there. I never felt right from day one. Something was off. I I couldn't explain it, but I was inexperienced as a parent,
and I didn't see the red flags until the day I came to pick him up. And I had dropped off five bottles, and they returned him to me, and I unzipped it, and four bottles were still full at the end of the day. I just about lost my mind. They had to call the director. I was talking about calling the police. That was it for that place. So I moved into a new place that was recommended to me. And for four and a half years, my child went every single day to that place for eight hours or more. And I will tell you it was the best because they earned my trust.
I felt safe. I could drop them off. I could go to work. I could concentrate on my career. I didn't have to worry about what was happening. I knew he was safe. But then as he got older, once he turned three, he wasn't just safe. He was learning. They were teaching him things. He was learning social skills. They taught phonics at this place. They had, numbers. They did all of these things. And by the time he was four, I mean, he knew his numbers. He knew his letters. He knew the sounds. And I say all this, and it's probably like, why are you telling me about your life?
But I say all this because I understand the value of this center to you, and I understand the risk of losing this to you and how this feels to you. And I I really do. And in a perfect world, in my perfect world, society would value families. They would value parents of young kids more. They would value kids more. And we would do more to help out people in these situations, but we don't. It's not our society. So I say all that because I want you to know that I understand. Now here's the but,
and these are some big this is a big but. We get paid money for k through 12 kids. That's what we get from the state. We also get money for special ed kids from zero to 26. And we get some money for GSRP kids. We don't get any money for children that are from zero to three. So when we have to, year after year, transfer money from our general fund, it is a true statement that that is money that was designed for k through 12 or the special ed kids. So we are, in a sense,
taking money from them. Now this year, we were told that we were gonna break even. We were we were I don't wanna say guaranteed, but we were pretty well promised that we will break even. And we didn't even come close. We were $265,000 off. $3,500 per kit. We have the business plans. I've looked at them. I think that they're flawed. I I want one to work. Our biggest problem is staffing. We need to pay more and but yet when we do, you know, it puts us further in deficit. So I guess what we need to do as a board is decide.
These positions that we're in require hard decisions. We have to make decisions that will either make people mad or not. So either we're gonna say that this is not financially sustainable and we need to get rid of the The the in in it I hate to do it, but the infant care and the toddler care or we have to say that we're willing to keep subsidizing this semester after semester after semester when this plan doesn't work and that plan doesn't work. And so I guess it's up to the board and decide. I I think I'll just say this, I'm gonna be very unpopular. I I think we might it might be time to figure it out soon.
Okay. Trustee Gupta? So I wanna go back to, the question that I had posed earlier because we kinda ended up getting off track about whether or not it is reflected an increase in pay or not. It never actually got to the meat of my question within that, which was, on the option of hiring a director through RCS directly with GEC staff on that projection, which is on page 10. It This is the second slide on page 10. Understanding that the assumptions baked into this are not all realistic.
Like, we're not gonna have full enrollment, all of those things. But it is higher pay, so we may increase our ability to recruit staff and a director. My question is, and this if I'm understanding it correctly, this doesn't reflect any increase in tuition yet. So that's still an option. Right? So we could have a modest of some sort increase in tuition in addition to this. And we could maybe because of that, maybe we could if we feel like the salary is still not competitive for the director,
for instance, maybe we could increase that a little bit. And the projection says that based on this model, we would net a profit of a hundred and $36,000, and that doesn't include an increase in tuition. So I guess I would wanna know, like, how bad would our enrollment have to be in order for that to not break even at least to to require more transfer from the general fund. Because I do, I value early childhood education. I value this program. I want it to work.
I wanna figure out a way to make it work. But, I mean, there are so many competing interests and, you know, our mission, our core mission is a 12 education. And we don't you know, we're we're trying to meet a lot of needs with finite resources. So I'm just trying to think creatively, about, you know, what would how bad would and understand better. How bad would those enrollment numbers have to be off, in order for us to not break even in that amount. Yeah. Thank you. Trustee Gupta,
can I just clarify one thing? Are you are you saying and the question you're asking, are you saying build in the increase in tuition when doing that formula or not? I'm saying that could be an option if if we needed a way to increase our salary for the director if if what's in there isn't considered competitive. But, prior to that, I guess, just based on what's on the page, and the assumption, of enrollment that we know is probably, you know, a % enrollment is not realistic.
Like, what level of enrollment could the budget tolerate without going into the rest? And and that might not be a question we can answer in this moment. Right. It might need some analysis. But I think, for me, at least, that is something I would wanna explore and understand better. I mean, if you look at a hundred and 36,000 is the profit and the tuition ranges anywhere from 16,000 to 19,000, I mean, you're talking about, what, seven, eight kids. So if you missed out on seven or eight kids,
you would you're not gonna make it without raising the Alright. That's why I was asking the question. I'm just I'm sorry. I'm just gonna use the calculator a little bit to make sure I'm not off. As a follow-up. Yeah. As a follow-up, I mean, I just I I feel like there may be some ingredients here to work with and and to build on that could make for a feasible model to at least, you know, personally analyze and make sure it's feasible to to explore further, but and then maybe pilot it for a year,
you know, and say, look, we're giving this one last ditch effort here with a plan, that, you know, we've taken all these things into consideration with on, And we're gonna do give it, you know, our best go to try and make that work and give it that that one chance. I don't know. I mean, I think I don't think any of us wanna keep transferring quarter million dollars a year out of the general fund to VNTN it. But, at the same time time, the programs do have a lot of value for our community.
So if there's a way to figure out a model, where we do have what I think would be a reasonable increase in tuition given we haven't increased tuition at all, lately, and, be able to pay a little bit more, to attract and retain our staff, particularly a director. You know, I don't know. If if we could do that and and, you know, even if it I don't know. I I think there's a way to maybe address it and and try it that we're not totally exploring it. I guess I mean,
I'm just gonna say that, I feel for all the parents and the staff who work at Caring Steps and, you know, the unknown of what's gonna happen and the the parents for what am I gonna do with my kid if the infant toddler or the whole preschool or the whole day care center is no longer here. But I feel like we've been doing this for seven years. And, we had a we did have a setback with, COVID, obviously. And but, I mean, it seems like every year, it's like we're gonna give it one more year.
And I think a model where you can only have six or seven kids who don't fulfill it before you break even, I mean, it's another, you know, on a wing and a prayer. And that's my concern. Personally, I'm more comfortable with continuing with the young preschool and doing that area, I think we have potentially a better chance. But quite honestly, I don't know. Right? Without having the information of how many stew or how many families have kids in the infant toddler as well as the other,
because I would think if you get rid of the infant toddler, they're gonna take their kid out of the preschool if they're in that spot as well. And I don't have that information to know how many kids that would occur and how many of those five to 10 calls a day that we get asking about openings are more for the infant toddler or are they for the preschool? And I don't know, missus Hampton, with your background or experience, you know, what you foresee in that in your magic ball,
foresee happening if we leave here today saying, you know, that we're no longer going to have infant toddler? I mean, what would that do to our numbers? We only have 74 there now. I think we said twenty five are in infant toddler, so that would put it down to forty nine. But I don't know how many of those others that are there would be leaving as well because they have a sibling in the infanttoddler area. Certainly, we would anticipate an impact to that, right? Families are thinking about, you know, a comprehensive care structure for their family.
So to have a a precise number for you this evening, I know that we would have that for you when mister McDaniel returns. I don't have that for you this evening in terms of how many, direct families would be impacted by such a choice. I know that the the challenge that has been ongoing, certainly does leave, both both families, current and past, to say, I'm on a wait list at another spot. I'm not sure about the future of this place. How do I line up my next possibility, whether that's a staff member or a family? Each each of these vignettes have been shared with them. I don't think there's I I guess in short,
I don't think there's any universal answer to that. I think each family's situation is unique where that decision would be concerned. Trustee LaCouille and then Trustee LaCouille. Thank you. Well, like like President Butel said, it's been six to seven years, and this conversation is long overdue. It's really not coming out of nowhere. Our superintendent's recommendation is to focus on the pre k portion, eliminating infant and toddler. And I can really understand that. Under most of these investment options, infant toddler operates at a loss. And like Trustee Blake said, which I've said many times before too,
we're actually taking designated state funds that are intended for k through 12 and special education kids and putting it somewhere else. And it's just not right to steal from those kids. That's what it's doing. So another question I had was, are paid it is. It's taking funds designated for certain kids and putting it somewhere else. And it's just not right to do that. So our our paid pre k program, I had a question about that. How is our paid pre k program doing? And, mister Russo,
this question is is for you. How's our paid pre k program doing? Because I understand that that's a really great program. It really fills up fast. I'm wondering with that model, are we breaking even? How does that work? Because if we wanna focus on pre k, maybe that's the direction we wanna go. Mister Murphy, do you have any information on that? I don't have readily available financials for our pre k program. Sorry. We can get it, but I don't have it on hand. Trustee Lazard. I do have a question regarding the current pre k too because enrollment is happening right now. I I have a child in preschool right now,
and she's not in the district as we moved here during COVID, and I couldn't get her in because of the exact capacity. So we kinda just stuck with where we started. So I was wondering if we you know, if the need's there to expand the three and four year old program preschools, maybe if we could try to figure out how to offer a sack for preschool kids, that would be something for the working parents that would find that need. I do know that GSRP students, they do we do get more funding from the state than our regular, k through 12 students. So that's also something to consider expanding on too since we do get income from
for those kids specifically. And I wanted to touch on the point again regarding the staffing pay. Mr. Roose brought up the point of we still have to be careful of the pay increases over at Caring Steps because we don't want to insult, our our main district, like, the k through 12 staffing. We don't wanna insult the pay there. We we know that the paras, are in that range of pay, so we we have to just be care very careful. And and I agree with, like, we don't wanna scare us, you know, make them angry or, you know, scare them away in that sense. We have to be careful with that one. Trustee Annas?
I just wanted to caution folks here to, refrain from using inflammatory language about stealing in order to provide an education for all kids in our district. We are not statutorily required to do so, but if you sat on this board when caring steps came to fruition, there was a discussion about the moral imperative of being able to provide a high quality public education for kids beginning at birth. You may not agree with that.
You may not understand why that decision came to be. It was also based partly at the time on a strategic plan and, community demand. So this just this wasn't some, you know, rabbit that we pulled out of the hat and said, hey, let's get into the childcare industry. This was a demand that our community asked for and we fulfilled it as a K-twelve public education system. And, you know, I just I guess I wanna just say that I think it's important that this investment that we make at this age will pay us
in ways we don't even know yet once these children in our caring step system continue to matriculate in our TK or our K through 12 programs. I think it's an investment that we should seriously consider making. And I think it's disingenuous to also say that, COVID did not take a huge hit on this model. It wasn't just, the way that this, outlines that it was closed for six weeks. I mean, literally our district was recovering for almost two years from a global pandemic.
So to say that it didn't also impact this model is really, I think, not fair. So what I would like to see us do, and I agree with Trustee Gupta, is to give more consideration. We have at least one model here which shows, on page 10, that we hire a director. We continue to staff with the GECS group, it doesn't factor in what a tuition increase could potentially be. I think we should pursue that. I think we should pursue that because I think it's the right investment to make
and that's how I feel. Well, I think I mean, everyone has had a chance to speak. We've asked questions. I'm not sure we've had all of our questions answered. But at this point, we have to decide to, you know, either do nothing, which is continue with what we're doing. You know, the options are as I see them right now. I'm sure there's many iterations of it, but it's either we continue as is, we continue or we discontinue the infant and toddler room, or we discontinue all of caring steps.
I mean, those are kind of the the three options that I see before us. So I don't know if, there's someone who would like to make a motion that, we would then vote on. I mean, I'll in fact, I'll I'll I'll do it and see if there's support for it. I move to discontinue the infant toddler rooms at Caring Staffs, by I don't know what's a realistic time frame, mister Russo, like, July 30, June thirtieth. No one can hear you. July 30 seems realistic if we were gonna use the spaces for something else for
the come upcoming school year. Alright. So I moved to discontinue infant and toddler rooms at Caring Stubbs by 07/30/2025, and I need to know if there's any support for that. Support from trustee Lecui. We've had a lot of discussion. I don't know if anyone else wants to make some comment before we continue. Trustee Blake? I just have one question. I don't know how how this works, but would August 30 be better? That's the end of the summer and the school year starts December or does that not really matter?
Mister Russo? Yeah. I would say that if if through the processes we're going through now, if that space is determined to have use for the upcoming school year, it would be very difficult for us to get that ready for an upcoming school year should we need to use it. Alright. So we'll see where we are with this then. All of those in favor of discontinuing the infant and toddler rooms at Caring Steps by 07/30/2025, please say aye. Aye. Aye. You know what, I'm gonna say you need hands because I couldn't tell who that was. I see four. Those opposed,
please say no. No. That was three. It is a four three vote, so the motion does pass. And I know it's for what? You know, and I I completely understand how disappointing this is to anyone who was looking to use that program, who is in that program now. And, I am sorry for, you know, the position that this puts you and our staff in that's there. As far as any of the, options for do we need to do anything with the staff to talk about,
what what am I looking for? The Yes. To con in order to continue there? So my recommendation would be if you go to that slide just so that people can see it maybe on the if it's possible. Thank you. Trustee Lozan. So they The bonuses to retain staff. Yes. Give me a second. The or so I'm here on the bonuses to retain staff, not knowing the exact numbers of staff on the on the weekly. Right? Right now, when this was printed, it was 19. We believe it's down to 16 full time staff. Mister Murphy, please correct me if I'm wrong. My recommendation would be to do the first,
iteration of that, which is the the middle of the page of $250 for full time staff stipends, monthly and $125 for part time staff. That would be approximately, if those staffing numbers stay at 19, about $6,000 at a cost monthly, which would run us through July 30. Now I guess the question is, is that for all staff or only those in the infant toddler program? And and does that seem sufficient for We've got there are two options for you to to consider. You asked me for a recommend you said I I believe that,
the two fifty and the one twenty five for the infants and toddlers, to remain to help them remain here until, closure, because we have 19 total students. Is that correct? Six. I'm sorry. 25. Six and 19? Right. Right. That this was 25 students. 20 five students, but I'm I'm I'm coming back to total staff. This number actually represents total staff at the center. Right. So, David, mister Yeah. The number is budgeted for all staff. And if I can offer my thought on it Please. There's an impact to this. Right?
We've had families talk about having siblings and so on. We've got staff seeing what's happening. If you're going to incentivize staying, my recommendation would be to incentivize it for all staff that are still there. Trustee Alsbaugh. So we just passed a motion that we're going to discontinue the infant and toddler care. At this point, I think we should ask the administration to regroup with that direction because, here are my concerns. We still have a staffing challenge. I don't think it's equitable to incentivize the toddler and infant staff to stay and
not incentivize the other staff, but if we're not closing their rooms. We've talked about the waiting list being a huge challenge, and we've talked about staffing being a huge challenge. So can we offer those people other spots to open up more of the other age group of rooms if they're interested? I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't suggest a forced transfer. And we haven't solved the issue of leadership and attention to this program. That is a special needs, not a special needs. It is a particular type of program that needs a certain type of leadership and dedication, and it has withered on the vine because we haven't,
given it the attention that it deserves. So my recommendation is at this point, the board has made a recommendation, and I would ask the administration to regroup based on that recommendation. Does the board want to look at entertaining that then at our work session would be which would be our next meeting rather than waiting until the next, regular meeting? Trustee Gupta? Do these bonuses require board approval? I didn't think they would because it's a dollar amount. So, I mean, it's good to know and be a part of the conversation and to be in
the in the in the know, but I just I I agree with trustee Alsace that we just made a monumental decision, and I think we need to give our administrative team some time to absorb and digest that and, regroup on that before we take another step. So at this point, what would we like to have the administration come back with, if anything? Madam Parker? Trustee Lacoue? Could we look at some of the different ideas that were discussed at the board
team table? Even including some of the ideas about, you know, whether or not we're going to continue using the building or offer the services elsewhere. Can that be part of the conversation as a scenario so that we see what all the options look like? Because, you know, now that we've discontinued part of the function of the building, it does make you wonder what this is what this is going to look like. I I think the property, master property planning group, I would assume is looking at some of that. I also, I think, mister Russo had indicated too while you're talking about,
you know, you're seeing the number 990 students, that doesn't mean that there's multiple rooms available across the district in order to insert these programs into. But I would be interested in seeing what you think is realistic from a going forward standpoint too so that, you know, we're all on the same page with this model. But I guess that was my question of whether you think anything else on here needs board approval at this time. So just to be clear, are you asking for realistic options for the space?
The use of the space? I was talking specifically for the program at Caring Steps, you know, to continue with the preschool three, preschool four, K prep, whatever it's called there. Like, what do we think that that program is going to do in this coming year? I think the master property planning, which I believe will have a update in at our next, at the second meeting in April. I would assume it's going to maybe give us some update if there's other things planned at that building.
Is that true? That's why I'm asking you to clarify, madam president, because if that's if that's what we're talking about, on April 21, we'll have, recommendations for use of space. It's from Plant Moran, RealPoint who's running that, and it does not mean that we will give one single option. There'll be multiple options on the table based on the advisory panel. So it could be to like I said before, it could be to expand pre k, across, buildings and at Caring Steps or one or the other. They don't live in separate silos at all times. So, I I do think that that's
realistic to have something on April 21 as to the progress of that committee. But when you're asking, what will pre k do in the coming year, meaning you're looking at the moment caring steps. Like, what what we've called caring steps, the day care. Do you mean K prep? Because that's a different k prep and pre k are different as I've said. I'm I'm talking about the day care program. Right? We only discontinued the infant and toddler. So there are still three different programs that are listed there. Right. Young I would like to see what we think,
you know, after talking to families and staff, I'd like to come back saying, you know, we think we can hire someone for this amount. I think we can, you know, raise it to $16 or do you know what whatever it is in order to make this as realistic as possible and have a a business plan of what we're expecting in the coming year. For three and four year olds, you're saying? What whatever kids we are going to be providing, whatever you call them,
k prep, preschool three, preschool four, what whatever you're calling them. So I think the board has been floundering a little bit during this discussion and, part of the problem is we've made a big decision here and this has lots of ramifications and it doesn't solve all of our problems. So I'm going to make a motion. I'm up for discussion and amendment to this, but I think we need to give our administration the gift of some clear direction. So I move that the board ask the administration to make recommend, to make recommend recommendations regarding the new configuration of caring steps that address leadership,
rate of pay to reduce the waiting list, and a break even cost to the board no later than May 2025. So I'm thinking so that's my motion and I'll wait till discussion. It looks like you're reading that. Can you email that to me or something so that I can can you send that to me so that I can have that? Yes. Yeah. And because I had some questions about what your terminology meant. What were the items that you were asking for? I move that the board ask the administration to make recommendations regarding the new configuration
of caring staff that address the leadership, the rate of pay to reduce the waiting list, and break even costs to be given to the board no later than May 25. Now my thinking is that's after, the strategic the facility plan, the property plan would be due so we could have some more input. But I think the problems we haven't solved is what will the leadership be? Our you know, we haven't solved the staffing problem, which is where I'm addressing, you know, the rate of pay to reduce the waiting list. And we haven't seen a business model in seven years that this really works. And your last
one, your your last was a business plan? It was a breakeven model? What was what was the terminology you used? Let's let's say a bit a a business plan to provide a breakeven cost. No later than May 2025. And like I said, I'm up for suggestions on this, but I just think we need to get somewhere. Well, I I agree with you. Unfortunately, your email is not coming through. Yeah. Okay. So, that was moved by, Trustee Allspa. Is there a second for that?
Okay. I I I'll second it so we can get to a discussion. Alright. Did you wanna speak anymore about it or suggest Well, just be a little bit more coherent and then I'd love to hear what Trustee DeGita has to say. So I think the challenges that we haven't solved with this reconfiguration is, you know, again, I think we need to address the leadership of this program somehow. You know, I'm not saying, I've heard and this you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that we had some candidates in the pipeline that would have been interested in being a direct hire.
So I wonder if a direct hire makes this, gives it the attention that says we're committed to continuing this. That also could help us develop staff. The other challenge is, you know, we have the staffing issue that, you know, trustee Blake has said that, you know, I don't know that we're gonna solve without increasing the rate of pay and reducing the waiting list. And then, you know, as we've talked about, trustee Lacoue has talked about, you know, this business plan hasn't worked for a long time. So, we need a plan that will work,
that will give our families, you know, some consistency and faith that we're gonna continue to invest in this. It will give our professionals that are working there because, you know, we've heard so much about what a wonderful program that is and how much our parents love it, what a small percentage of the budget is, what, you know, the indoor space it provides to still allow, physical activity on bad days, the wildlife space it provides to explore during nice days. You know, there are some really wonderful things happening here and if this is the board's configuration
that we're gonna go no infant, toddler, You haven't solved a lot of the other problems that were presented to us. Alright, so here is what I have since I still haven't gotten yours. You move to request the administration to provide a recommendation regarding the new caring steps configuration that addresses leadership, rate of pay for staff, and a business plan to provide a break even cost by May of twenty twenty five. Is that correct? Close it up. Okay. And then trustee Gupta and then trustee Luzon. So I just wanted to add maybe it's a I I move to amend to
add, and a, some sort of report about what will happen to will there be any change to staff who are not part of the caring steps program but are housed in that building? So the, ancillary staff that work out of that building that are part of the day care for special education, like, how will this impact them if at all? Is there early on staff? Mhmm. I consider that a friendly amendment. There's really, unfortunately, no such thing. I'm sorry. I can make it up. But Save me some time. But I guess I I I thought that had been addressed.
So the question was and or the motion was to add and impact on any current staff or programs at at Caring Studies. Okay. So the amendment was to add and impact on any current staff or programs at Caring Staff. That was made by Trustee Gupta. Trustee Alsbaugh, did you want to second that? Sure. Okay. Do we need any more discussion on that? Trustee Lausanne? So maybe I'm confused on how this would work.
If we are going to expand, potentially, I will I agree with we need a plan as to what to do with it, the caring steps without the day care. If we are going to be expanding potentially the pre k program, wouldn't we just follow the district's current model and pay and hiring the same nature? Because we do have existing preschool programs already. It wouldn't be we wouldn't use a staffing service to staff. We would just do it through the district, and my understanding would that That would be one of the things that I'd want administration to figure out.
Yeah. Because the the pre k program we have in the four hubs, it's my understanding that that's not the extensive hours and doesn't serve the same type of needs. Correct. So that would be one of the things I would wanna see. And I would even like to add, potentially, since enrollment is happening right now, if we even sent out or had a survey to the parents that are interested in enrolling, if they would take their children up to caring steps, because for me personally, that's a hike. It's about twenty ish minutes from my house, so I don't see people in my in the South the South area that would
want to drive out there for three and four year old preschool. So that'd be maybe something to ask people that are on a wait list for the preschool programs? Because I know that there's not enough classes for the needs usually. Okay. Well, right now we have a motion on the floor, which is, to to to amend the original motion to add, and I'm gonna say we're going to add it, before the date listed and impact on any current staff or programs at Caring Steps. So can we vote on that piece? Can you read the whole thing? So it would say, to request administration to provide a recommendation regarding the new Caring Steps configuration
that addresses leadership, rate of pay for staff, business plan a business plan to provide break even cost, and the impact on any current staff or programs at Caring Steps by May 2025? Okay. Trustee Blake. I usually prefer a date 30 rather than just a month. Do everyone in the end of the month, Beginning of the month? What's your thought for me? I wanted to leave it flexible because I know that a lot of the questions, especially trustee Lacoue has raised, are about the property.
So I believe the property plan will be done in April, So I wasn't gonna set a date. But if you want to, I mean Our our meetings are on May 5 and May 19. '19 fifth. But you would want it before then, so it could be reviewed, which would be in the packet by the fourteenth. Done. April. So by May 14, which would put it in our packet for the nineteenth meeting, is that okay. So then we would need a motion to amend to add the nineteenth I'm sorry,
the fourteenth. And that was moved by trustee Blake. I'll second. I heard multiples. Trustee Gupture. I'm sorry? Amending it to add the fourteenth, so it's a specific date. So all of those in favor of adding the fourteenth, to the motion, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. So that's a seven o. I apologize. So we we never voted we never voted on the other one. We're we're it's but it was wrong. So anyway, we I have a motion to amend, to add,
and impact on any current staff or programs at Caring Steps. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Let's just I'm just gonna abstain. I'm abstain. Okay. So that's a six zero one vote. So, now the full motion is, move to request the administration to provide a recommendation regarding the new caring steps configuration that addresses leadership, rate of pay for staff, a business plan to provide break even cost, and the impact on any current staff or programs at Caring Steps by 05/14/2025.
Alright. Madam President. Trustee Lacui. I just have a question because this feels a little bit confusing to me. I I get the impression that that, administration is wanting the master property planning process to play out a little bit to better understand how to use the different facilities that we have. So it sort of feels like this motion right now is a bit premature if we don't know how we're utilizing our building space and what we wanna do. And even based on the recommendation, that's why I was a little confused, we have three different versions of preschool and pre k that we're currently offering in
the district. And the recommendation was just talking about continuing on with preschool and pre k. And so I don't know what that looks like. If that means we're doing k prep, if that means we're doing pre k, if that means we're doing GSRP or two or three or one or I don't know. Which would be explained? So right now, the way the motion reads, we're talking about hearing stops as if it's the exact same thing without infants and toddlers. And I don't know if that's what it would look like when you're done with the master property planning process. So I'm wondering if we should hear more from the master property planning process.
Well, that's why why we picked the date May 14 because we'll get the date by April. Don't know. We're ask, like, how do we know what we're even asking until we're ready to go? Information. We're asking for them knowing this change and taking into consideration what the master property plan is going to come up with, provide us with these items. I know. What I'm saying is what if the master property planning committee comes up with a different idea of what that should look like, of what carrying steps would even mean at that point? Well then, I guess they would come back and tell us that. So anyway, we have a motion that is here.
We've discussed it for a long time. Does anyone else need to speak before we vote on this? Alright, all of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. Alright. That is a I'll abstain. That is a six zero one vote. Okay. Now are we? You have everything you need at this point? We do. Alright. So we are moving on to agenda item 11. This is additional comments by members of the Board of Education. Individual board members may use this time to share information about school visits, updates from committees or organizations they're assigned to,
or to address their personal opinion. With our updated handbook, please note that each trustee has three minutes, and there's a timer on the smart board for your reference. If we run over that time, I'm happy to ask the board if they're willing to extend. At this time, Trustee Lausanne, did you have anything? Okay. Trustee Licui? Alright. Recently, as a trustee, I requested public district information, a list of members on a committee in accordance with district policies. I was refused. So I sent a FOIA request for the information as a regular citizen, and I obtained the list.
It's such an odd scenario. A public document which is available to all citizens was withheld from a board member. When I asked the superintendent about this, he acknowledged the policy violation saying he made that decision to protect people on the committee, believing it was in the best interest of the district. He said, if this violation of the board handbook is a concern for board members, this can be represented in my evaluation. It's a bold statement. Of course, in this case, violating the board policy didn't serve much purpose. It slowed me down, but I still got the information.
However, it certainly raises other questions. Do these kinds of actions make for good working relationships and help us move forward? Does it help us trust our policies will be enforced? Those are just some questions to think about. Trustee Annas. Thank you. On Tuesday, March 4, I attended the PTA Reflection Ceremony with Trustee Alspaugh to celebrate our student artists, and it was a packed house. And I especially love the poem, read by Isabelle, entitled What I See in Me. Last Monday, I went to senator Michael Michael Webber's in district office hours to speak with him
about the state's school aid budget. I shared with him the following points. The prescriptiveness of the MDE's approved reading tools to meet the new dyslexia slash reading law and asked our superintendent Russo to speak with, him and share firsthand what RCS is currently doing to proactively impact all students reading and how giving districts the autonomy to pick vendors that meet our students' individual needs best serves all of our students. I asked them to fund public education at the rate of the current inflation rate of inflation before considering any additional categorical items in the 2526 education budget.
Record, record per pupil funding is great, but when it still lags behind the current rate of inflation for decades, school districts in Michigan, including RCS, will continue to have to do more with less in educating every child. I requested that he put back the 5,000,000,000 in, the school aid fund that came out of the house and includes school meals for all students because when kids are fed, kids kids can learn. Make a law to ensure that regardless of who is governor, that all federal block grants, funding for special education as proposed by the US House of Representatives Republican,
majority is used as intended and not diverted to other Michigan budget items, including higher education. This was done back when Governor Granholm and the state needed to shore up their lack of funding in higher education, so they took k 12 public education dollars claiming that it was just quote unquote temporary. Stop balancing the state budget at the expense of the students we are mandated and morally obligated to serve. The US House per so proposed Medicaid cuts, which will severely impact special education students in public education. I asked our state senator to reach out to our congressional representative,
John James, and, remind him that he represents three of the largest school districts in, our area of Southeast Michigan. And, he also has a school age, child who has a special need, which will be negatively impacted by these Medicaid cuts. I also followed up in an email with him that the current Republican administration and his supporters in the House and Senate are proposing a national school voucher system. I'd like to know from our state senator what's his position on using public tax dollars for private, religious, or homeschool choice,
and can he pledge that he would not support or vote in favor of using any additional Michigan tax dollars for public school vouchers? This Thursday as March is reading month, I'll be reading to the students at Meadowbrook Elementary. And then that evening, I'll be at the RCS Jazz concert. And I hope everybody has a happy spring break. Alright. Trustee Blake? So this is one of those meetings where you don't feel good at the end. You didn't, you made made some people unhappy, and we do a lot of fun stuff on the board.
We we go to a lot of fun events. We, you know, we go to graduation. We go to, you know, performances and and athletic events. And we also get to pass things that people want, like adding a class and, you know, things like that. And and part of it, though, is that sometimes you have to do not fun stuff and things that are hard, and that was this was one of those nights. And I remember we had to get rid of Chinese, class a while back because there wasn't enough, interest, and that was a night that wasn't fun either because people were upset. But I really firmly believe that we're here in these positions to make hard decisions.
And I do respect the people who felt differently, but that's I voted the way I felt needed to be done. As far as the district, I have done a number of activities, lately. The critical incident team, I think Mr. Delico mentioned last time, but I wasn't here. I sat in on the tabletop exercises and actually participated, which was a three hour long thing where we had multiple different scenarios and the different groups did what they would do in those scenarios, and I was able to give, participate, but also give my critiques at the end. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I did. And, I but there's a lot that we do for for safety,
and I think that people need to know how much this district is putting into to that every day. I attended this, the my new committee, which is the superintendent business operations committee and learned more about our finances. The PAC, hosted me for my first meeting as the official representative to the PAC, and they were very gracious. And, and even after I spilled all over the place in their table, they didn't hold it against me. And I learned a lot, and I'm gonna continue tomorrow on my second meeting. And, hopefully, they're gonna they're gonna teach me everything I need to know,
and I I really appreciate it. It was a nice feeling in the room, and I learned something. So that's good. Last weekend, I attended, along with my son and a couple of other trustees, the Little Shop of Horrors at Adam's. And I surprisingly, because I like to go to plays, I had never seen Little Shop of Horrors, and I didn't realize, spoiler alert, that the plant wins in the end and everybody dies. So that was, but it was fun. It was a great performance. I can't believe that we have three months left in the school year, and, it seems like every year just goes faster and faster.
Spring break is coming up. I hope everyone enjoys their spring break. I certainly plan to, and thank you. Thank you. Trustee Allspa? So, since our last board meeting, I went to several celebrations of our culture and our students. I attended the Raya Youth Recognition Event, with Trustee Butel, and it was wonderful to see us celebrating our students. I attended the PTA Reflections event. I think Tristan was there with me, and that was a well oiled machine that honored, I think, it was 200 kids in,
like, forty five minutes. That was that was my type of presentation. I also attended the PTA meeting, at Adams, although it was not just the Adams, PTA. I went to the University Hills International Night that has gotten so big that they can't hold it in the University Hills anymore. They actually did it at, the Rochester Mall, that enclosed area. And that was wonderful to see us celebrating the many cultures we have. And then, you know, my standard little shop of horrors, I always love that play because the plant does win, and everyone dies. And it was wonderful to see the talent,
and especially, the singing talent we have in our district. So it was really good to, go to those events. Oh, and I also attended the interfaith dinner for Ramadan at the, IGAD. So it was wonderful to see the celebration of our students, the celebration of our talent in there, giving back to the community, and the celebration of the many cultures and, diversity we have within our district. Thank you. Trustee Gupta? Yeah. So, since our last meeting, I visited one of my liaison schools here at Stoney Creek High School, spent some time with mister Shelton and mister Kluszak,
and, was able to be here on a day when they were having a special schedule that works in some SAT prep time. And also, simultaneously, they held a, coffee and donuts with, seniors and their parents. So they, did a program where making use of that time with the seniors while everybody else is doing SAT prep. It was really creative. Good good use of time, to, kinda inform the families of of seniors about all the senior activities they have going on there. And then, I also attended the, last master property planning meeting and look forward to the upcoming meeting,
and also attended SPCC committee meeting. I also I wanna address, this comment that has been made a couple times. I I hate to address these things, but sometimes they grow legs, so I feel compelled to address it. This comment about, that I I told a community member that boys and girls share hotel rooms on field trips. This is, completely false. I've never said that because it's, a, not true, to my knowledge. I've never heard anyone say that that's a thing that happens, and, b, I would never say that to anybody,
and I didn't say it to anybody. So I'm not sure why that's being made up and it's out there, but it is. And I've heard it now tonight for the second time, so I wanted to clear the air. Finally, I just really want to, thank our caring staff staff. I know that, sitting through this meeting had to be somewhat torturous. And, please know that any decisions that are made, regarding programs at Caring Steps are not in any way a reflection of our amazing teachers and staff in that building. They're not easy decisions, and that they're decisions that we,
you know, just have to make responsibly and in an informed way and, taking all the variables into consideration. And that's all I have. Thank you. I'd like to comment similarly to what trustee Blake said that, you know, sometimes we have to make decisions that we really don't like making, especially ending a program that, the people who were in really appreciated and, that it was a a great program. And so, as I said before, I really feel for that staff, and the families that are in that. But obviously,
I hope that in the long run, that makes the rest of that program successful and that, the families that are using that and future Families have that program available. And I do wanna highlight a number of other amazing things that have been occurring in our district. I've been able to attend a few of those, including the PTA PTA Council Founders Day where some amazing volunteers were recognized for the contribution they make to our schools and district. I also the PTA Council monthly meeting at Adams and the PAC meeting at Musen where valuable information was shared and programs were discussed that positively impact our district.
I attended the Musen intercultural night that included music, dancing, and martial arts performances from a variety of countries, food sampling, and informational displays. It was wonderful to see a great turnout in attendance, but also the number of countries that were represented. Last week, I was invited to attend Mrs. Hensley's eighth grade research presentations at Reuther, And these students had researched some pretty weighty topics and they presented solutions. I was thoroughly impressed with the students' presentations that were given to their peers and
parents, and appreciate Mrs. Hensley and all the staff in our district who provide these great opportunities to their students. And finally, I was able to attend Saturday night's performance of Little Shop of Horrors at Adams with, two of my trustees, fellow trustees. And kudos to Mrs. Pillsbury, the cast, the crew, and a host of other volunteers who made that such an amazing performance. We're truly lucky to have so many options for our kids in this district. In addition, as the liaison to Rochester area youth assistance, I attended their monthly board meeting, assisted with the overcoming frustration and anger workshop,
which was offered to fourth fourth through sixth grade boys, and I attended the youth recognition reception that recognized students within our boundaries who had overcome obstacles and or went above and beyond in helping others within our community. We are honored to have Mr. Russo in attendance and he was able to present these awe inspiring students. Finally, I hope all of our students and staff have a safe and fun spring break. And with that, we'll turn it over to, members of the administration. And these are comments that they I'm sorry.
Comments that they would like to share, with the board and or community. And these are comments and not discussion items. Mr. Russo? Thank you, Madam President. Miss Hempton? I'm all set. Thank you. Mr. Murphy? Yeah, just a quick, congratulations as President Buteau stated earlier to our five retirees that were in the Board packet tonight. So the Board's aware, we will do a retiree celebration again this year in June where we'll recognize all the retirees. But even in this group of five, we had over a hundred and thirty years of experience represented there. So congrats to miss Bullock,
miss Dimefsky, miss Fulmer, miss Lam, and miss Messina. And happy spring break to all staff. I know there's some twelve month employees that don't necessarily have a spring break that will still be working, but a vast majority of our staff and, of course, students are ready for a well deserved week off. So I hope everyone has a great spring break. Thank you. Thank you, mister Murphy, doctor DeLuca, miss Gauther, mister Cusimano. How's the sound of me? Just a couple things. Master property planning, we've had a few discussions about it today. Just wanna we've get to give the give the community a full picture of what's
happened. We've had two middies two meetings. The committee saw data about enrollment projections and looked at our numbers in special education, CTE, and magnet programs as the latter two were outlined in the survey responses from the strategic plan. So that's the foundation for our work. Special education continues to grow, so we need to maximize and accommodate that within our footprint. The next meeting will look at potential configurations of these three items, not looking at specific programs, only how to accommodate them. Legislation. There's not much change, at the state or federal level, except one thing that we are monitoring constantly is the health insurance,
PA one fifty two. Those changes did not go to the governor. So those expected changes for some municipalities and or for all municipalities and schools, there will be no change, per the PA one hundred and fifty two as presented, but we continue to monitor the, the monitor monitor the rise in health care costs. I was trying to get a good word for how insane those are because it's, it's coming. March 5 PD, state of the district, we had a strategic plan update for all staff, safety and security updates as well as parent square information. Survey results indicated the staff learned what was intended,
eager to learn some more. For our board, I wanted to mention that our superintendent cabinet notes, will skip the week of spring break. It's over Zoom, on April 4, and safe travels for all of those families who are experiencing a nice journey and adventure on spring break. Thank you, madam president. Thank you. Just a few announcements. We do have spring break. Like we said, March '20 eighth. April fourth is a half day of school, and April 7 is our next, Board of Education work session. It will be at Hart Middle School,
in their cafeteria at 6PM. And with that, if there is no objection, we will adjourn at 10:35. Seeing none, we're adjourned. Thank you all for attending and have a good night.