More on the annual meeting.

The Herald-Independent covers the Annual Meeting here.  It has a rundown on the numbers and budget challenges facing the district:

Our expenditures such as utilities increased by 5 percent, 7 percent, health insurance by 9 percent,” Rossing said. “The district has worked very hard [to balance the budget]. We had to cut $811,000 out of the budget to get to the balanced budget tonight.” 
Last year, the district cut $929,531 from the budget. “It’s definitely changing the way we’re educating our students,” Rossing said.

I would add that the $811K cut in services is on top of a $1.1M reduction in staff compensation.

On a related note Jerrud reported last night that our September count of district resident students has decreased by 36 over last year.  This will negatively impact funding over the next few years.

I agree with Mike Mikalsen's point about the decision process at these meetings.  With the small number of residents present voting on the levy and property dispositions, it is not particularly democratic and may not reflect the wishes of the district as a whole.  But whether we use a special meeting or the annual meeting the same process is the one dictated by the state law.  This needs to be fixed.

The article does misstate the number on the tax levy, the $126 figure given is the reduction in property taxes on a $200K home compared to last year's taxes.  The estimated levy for that home would be $2462.

Annual meeting follow-up

Thanks to everyone who attended the annual meeting last night -

After significant debate the community approved the motions authorizing the board to lease the Maywood property and sell or lease the Nichols property.  Concerns were raised about capacity for future growth, appropriate use of the sites, and the facilities for MG21.  These are all issues the board will have to consider before taking any action.   The district doesn't have any "deals" pending, but the authorization will IMHO increase the chance that we will be able to take advantage of any appropriate interest that comes along.

Authorization is only the first step in the processes that will involve the district, community and the municipal governments, and any agreements would have to conform to local zoning and use provisions.

Post Game Wrap-up

I arrived back from a camping trip about an hour and half before tonight's meeting, so couldn't post a preview - but here is the "postview":

We had a long agenda of somewhat bureaucratic items including approval of contracts with Chartwells for school food service; changes to the new alternative High School charter (henceforth to be know as the MG Liberal Arts Charter School for the 21st Century); approval participation in Impact Concussion program; adopting Opportunities Inc. as alternative education site (this is a school to work vocational training program in manufacturing); the new Extracurricular Code of Conduct; and acceptance of a bid from ABM Janitorial Services for custodial services. 

In other business we discussed and approved a plan put forward by Craig to restructure the Continuous Improvement/Assessment Coordinator position until recently held by Ed O'Connor.  Craig proposed, and the board approved, splitting the duties with Deb Lyons (currently part time Assistant Principal at Maywood) picking up the Continuous Improvement responsibilities part time and School Psychologist Christa Macomber picking up the Assessment Coordinator responsibilities part time.  The duties/responsibilities of these positions are expected to evolve over time.

Ed, by the way, has started a consulting business offering districts his expertise in assessment and continuous improvement.  Ed apparently was even offered (but didn't accept) a position in Madison similar to the one he held at MG.  Given Ed's experience and the great deal of progress he helped us make at MG, I think he is in a position to do a lot of good for his new clients. 

On a similar note, the board approved a plan to restructure the Diversity Coordinator position currently held by Charlie Ellis, creating two part time positions: one focused at the High School and including responsibility for he Monona Elementary schools and one focused at Glacial Drumlin and including responsibility for the CG elementary schools. 

Craig did give an update on the issue of the over payments made by the district:  Due to a clerical error, about 50 teachers were paid more than the contract (I won't say they were "overpaid"!) over the last 2 years.  The amount is estimated to be $20-40K in total, less than $1000 per teacher.  The error is apparently related to calculation of the longevity of some of those teachers who have been with the district since the pay freeze in 1996.  

The board also approved a contract with Jerrud Rossing as the new Director of Business Services.  Jerrud comes to us from the Hudson School District where he is the Financial Services Manager.

Lastly, as Craig noted the Board received a summary of the appraisal of the Nichols property in closed session.  The details of the appraisal won't be made public for now,  but it does raise the question: what do you think the district should do with the property?

So what's been going on?

At Wednesday's board meeting we received a report from several Maywood staff members who detailed the implementation, management and results of the RtI programming in the school. I thought the presentation was an excellent illustration of how leadership, support services, professional development and science of education all need to come together to deliver a quality education.

Other items of note:
The board approved final notices of layoff for 11 teachers; 5 of the notices are only reductions in hours, and 2 of those eliminated were part time- the total reduction is 6.44FTE.

Some of these reductions are not related to budget cuts, but are the usual changes we see each spring due to things like leave of absence returns and adjustments for changing numbers of students.


We also spent some time discussing committee responsibilities. I have proposed that the board take some action to either expand committee roles or create special committees to address specific issues. I think we have a lot of public interest in helping the district this year and I don't think the traditional committee structures will be able to take full advantage of that support. The areas that I am concerned about are the budget and performance. We have very difficult budget problems before us, and we are really in need of innovative ideas if we are to avoid a death by a thousand cuts in the coming years. I also believe the board should create or adapt a structure to formalize its attention to issues of performance in the district. The idea is to institutionalize a focus on educational performance at the board level so that these issues get the recognition and attention that they need.

The board also discussed the location of the Alt. High School. Currently we are leasing space in a separate building, the idea is to bring the program into a district owned building to both provide more space (needed for expansion and enhanced programming) and save a bit of money. We had been considering moving the program into Nichols, but last night we also considered utilizing space in Winnequah School. The board needs to make this decision by the end of the month. In the end the board asked for the administration to provide additional information associated with the costs and issues of both options.

The third rail...

Peter McKeever kicked things off last night with a thoughtful call to the board not to cut the budget.  Peter is right that the future rests on the investment we make in educating the next generation, and that cut backs can be short sighted.  This is particularly true in the situation where we are not talking about a one time reduction due to the economy, but an ongoing structural deficit that will year after year erode public education.  Peter called for additional public investment and taxes to restore school budgets and asked the school board to take a leadership role in strengthening public education.    I would add that according to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/index.php, WI state and local spending on primary and secondary education has declined by 7% (as a percentage of GDP) since the year 2000.

The board moved to hearing the results of the annual financial audit, and received (as usual) a clean unqualified report from the auditors.  We also heard from a reports concerning the new teacher project and the January head count (up 12 students since September).  The board also decided to issue preliminary notice of non-renewal to several administrators.  These are due to budgetary considerations and unrelated to any job performance issues, it also does not necessarily mean we will be terminating these staff members.  In a related action the board approved one year (down from the standard two year contracts) for several other administrators, in order to keep these options available for next year.  Again, none of these actions are performance related.

The board then had a brief discussion concerning the Nichols property.  Although no consensus was apparent, IMHO the location is a valuable piece of real estate and the best interest of the district is that it should be on the tax rolls and working for the economic development of the community.

The board then approved a recommendation from the administration concerning the 4k-8 study report.  I don't have the language, but essentially the motion stated that in consideration of the costs the district not pursue separate 4k-8 programs in each community.  We talked about some of the other grade configuration committee's recommendations, there was particular focus on the issue of studying combining 6th grades in GDS. The consensus from the staff seems to be there may be significant cost and educational benefits to this move.  Personally, I would be reluctant to approve this without a significant show of community support as the current configuration was approved in the 2006 referendum.

The board then reviewed the board and administrator surveys of the budget cut items.  The surveys were designed to solicit judgments about the impact of each proposed budget cut relative to the board goals.   A copy of the board version of the survey can be found by clicking here.

The compiled survey results can be found clicking here.  There are three pages: administrator averages, board averages and a comparison of rankings.

In general I found no surprises in the results, with general agreement between the board and administration on nearly all items. 

I don't have access to my original answers on the survey (when I clicked the "next" key it disappeared into cyberspace) I will reproduce my answers to the best of my ability and post them here tomorrow.   Its the best I can do.

Craig then presented an initial proposal from the budget reduction list totalling $1.008M dollars.   I will publish that list separately also.  There was some discussion about a few items on the list, such as the teacher mentor program, and some items that aren't, such as the proposal for Maywood-Winnequah consolidation.

The board and the district are faced with some stark choices, and the current proposal falls heavily on our music, related arts and encore curriculum.  The Maywood-Winnequah consolidation may give us the opportunity to significantly mitigate the impact of these cuts to staff and curriculum; I believe that we owe it to the community, students and the dedicated teachers responsible for these programs to take a hard look at this option.

Nichols Usage

I have been asked for a summary of the current usage of the Nichols building. This is the information I currently have:

room 119: Excel Program

Rooms: 108,110 Pupil Services.

Room 202: District Office records storage.

Room 204: Barb Waara Food Service Director Office and meeting room.

Room 205 and 203: rented to the Dane CO. Consortium School to Career program at cost.

3rd Floor: District Offices.

All of the above usage is in the North "Administrative Wing" of the building. The Nichols gym is currently not available because it is on the HV system for the school side of the building- using the gym would require heating and ventilating the entire building at significant energy costs. Mark Scullion is looking into solutions for that.


Any other questions I can answer?