Is anyone else surprised that it's already April 17th? I know that I am! Spring has sprung....finally? The Hallsville Board of Education met yesterday evening.
A few highlights that I'll touch on include:
Our new board. We swore in Tonya Schleeter as our newest member, as we said thank you to David Athon for his service. Jessica Hassler was also sworn in. In our reorganization time, our new officers are as follows: President: Jon Bequette; Vice President: Bryan Wildenhain; Treasurer: Craig Stevenson; Secretary: Judy George. We decided to continue to meet on the 3rd Monday of each month for our regular meetings. Planting Seed #1: After discussion and review over the last school year, the board agreed to provide 60-day notice to OPS and cancel our contract with them as of July 1, 2018. OPS has taken care of the maintenance and custodial work for the past several years. The Board has been unsatisfied with the ability of OPS to keep up with the necessary work, response times of fixing things, and lack of proactive support to our building staff, teachers, and administrators. The district has consistently not had the staffing numbers that were indicated and promised by OPS management who spoke to the Board in the fall. Some of the individual employees are amazing and our staff does speak very highly of some of them. What does this mean? It means that beginning July 1, the district will no longer pay for OPS in our contracted services and we will work to hire and maintain custodial and maintenance staff. The first step in this process is hiring our Director of Operations, which should be completed soon. That person will then be able to compile a staff using the staffing charts discussed here. The two spreadsheets vary based on if the director of operations is a certified staff member or not. The position was posted and open to both types of applicants. Planting Seed #2: Bond Updates. We are so grateful for the district's support of the passage of our bond! I want to remind everyone that unfortunately, this doesn't mean things will move super fast. Here are the next steps:
So, as you can see, things will move a bit slow in the early going. We are working and will be moving forward, but lots of things will be happening to get us ready for the project. I'll keep you all updated each month with our discussions on the bond. Beginning of Budget Season: The board approved budget amendment #2 for this fiscal year. You can see the document that outlines the minor changes. We then moved on to our preliminary budget for the FY2019 school year. What are the highlights?
You can see in the preliminary budget that a few things happen in the long-term planning.
Otherwise, President Jon Bequette said in his report that we would have a standing agenda item for Safety and Security and we would be removing the School District Foundation from Unfinished Business since it has been formed (and is working toward obtaining their EIN and 501(c)3 status. In the district reports, there are a ton of celebrations and recognition of students, faculty, and staff. Congratulations to each of these individuals! It's so good to read about the cool and awesome people that we have in our district. (Also--a shout-out to the paraprofessionals for their work this month during a time to celebrate their presence and hard work!) It's easy to get carried away in the details of all of the above topics---but at the end of the day---our student success should always be on the forefront of our minds. Seeing their success reminds me how proud I am to be in our district and for the work of our staff, the students, and their families. Until next month...enjoy the Spring!
0 Comments
|
AuthorHallsville resident. Foster Parent. School board member. Politico. Jesus Follower. Cardinals Fan #MizzouMade Archives
June 2020
Categories |