Corbett School District Regular School Board Meeting
Wednesday January 21, 2015
The below notes were taken by Karina Lande. Approved minutes and agendas can be found here.
* NOTE: This web site is provided as a courtesy for those interested in following along with the happenings in our district, especially those that live in Corbett. This site and these board notes are not meant to replace official CSD board meeting minutes, which are usually online 3-7 months from each meeting. Thank you to Karina Lande for sharing the below update from the above meeting. Audio is also available if anyone questions the content.
Todd is late-coaching basketball, Mark Hyzer absent, Victoria Purvine absent-husband had surgery today.
Approval of previous meeting minutes not passed due to absences. Randy states we must have December meeting minutes approved to give to ODE by February meeting. Will need to revisit later in meeting.
Budget committee vacancy announced. Will hold interviews and make selection at February meeting. Budget process starts early in March so need someone right away.
Presentation by Desiree Chiu regarding special education. This is the 2nd presentation given at board meetings. These are quite lengthy, please see district site for meeting minutes if your wanting the presentation details. The topic was providing equal access to core curriculum. Talked about how they use google documents, iPads, and other technology, to help special Ed students.
Financial Reports
Kristy
You have a handout and there are basically 3 points of interest that I want to talk about.
The first being that the audit was complete in December and I feel it went very well. We are just waiting for finalization by auditors.
We have a beginning fund balance that’s about $60,000 higher then we estimated, this is very good news. We estimated $700,000 and we ended up coming in at about $759,000.
The third thing is one that’s on the agenda a little later, regarding hiring another individual in office staff. It will really help us to get these timely reports to the board.
Charlie
Are we expecting that beginning fund balance to go down at all?
Kristy
We are expecting it to go down slightly, yes.
Charlie
Budget law training information item, today is the last day to sign up for that. (Victoria Purvine was our only board member to take the opportunity and attend the training.)
Meeting minutes approved now that Todd has arrived.
Randy
speaks to the need to add office staff but no clear duties or position requirements, just another body. We’ll hire someone and use them for whatever need their abilities happen to be best suited for.
Approved by board; the hire of one full time additional office personnel.
Superintendent Report
Randy
I can’t find my self eval I wrote, does DeeDee or Robin have theirs I can use? OK, so typically what I do is go off what the goals are for the district, as my self evaluation.
Fostering intellectual development:
I tried to focus in on math specifically. I mentioned throughout the year about bolstering our math, we’ve made some changes to direct instruction and added more resources to math. It’s going to be hard to measure our math achievement from last year to this year due to testing. Last year the OAKS test we were using is not being used. The new Smarter Balance testing will be used. If you believe the state, the passing rates will be around 30-40%. It’s going to be a challenge to compare. Also, last year we had district and charter as separate scores, this year they won’t be separate.
Randy
continues on regarding the districts PSAT scores. This was pretty well covered in the December meeting notes if you’d like a recap.
Annette
asks if Randy has any test scores for the lower grades?
Randy, no.
Annette
well I’m concerned with how our lower grades are doing because by 10th grade it’s too late. How are our lower grades doing?
Randy
I’ll be happy to send you stuff. I know I talk about this lots of times, we focus on a K-12 program. At other schools they focus in precisely at these grade level standards and they get very keyed in on each of these standards that change every year. If you look at other schools you’ll see when they reach high school the achievement rate goes down. So I’m not prepared to abandon what we are doing around a test that is going to change when our final product is what it is.
Annette
I think that state tests matter and I think other schools do a great job at catching those kids that are behind. Those tests do tell you a lot and I think that data matters. We should be looking at all the data. Not just the data that we want, I think it’s important. We are missing a lot of kids who are struggling in the lower grades.
Todd
so we’re kind of getting off topic. Let’s just keep going.
Randy
so the SAT data…..
(Again covered in December notes)
Maintaining and planning for adequate facilities:
We replaced all the flooring in the HS other than the black and white tiles.
Hands out McKinstry report to board regarding the districts energy savings since the district took out the SLEP loan in 2011.
The energy savings have been $55,675 annually. Randy explains the project cost was about $600,000 (A loan not a grant). We will see the return over 12 years. Note that loan money’s were intentionally not spent on the MS building because he knew in 2011 he wanted that building torn down and replaced.
Develop plans for Safety and Transportation during the school day
Safety upgrades we’ve done this year are safety fencing around campus. We completed the bus turn around, that increases safety. We’ve made one run at installing school signs down at springdale, we were rejected by the state. Mrs Luna is going through that process again. The installation of an electronic entry system is about 3/4 of the way done. Hopefully it will be done next week. (I haven’t seen this in use yet as of 5 weeks later.)
Operate the district in a fiscally responsible manner – Each meeting Kristy reviews the budget with you. This is the 5th year in a row we have completed the budget on time. The most critical piece of the financials is that we added students to Corbett schools, the charter students, to the district this year. It’s far more responsible for us to have the students here than through the charter school.
Build trust and distirct communications among the Corbett districts’ communities – This will sound really familiar, because it’s almost the same stuff I said last year. Most of the communications the district has put out has been about the facilities. All of that information I had reviewed by the Secretary of State (whom do not verify truth or research/confirm any information given therein, but only ensure your not actively campaigning through your mailers put out by the school district.) We continue our principle chats every month and they are well attended. Board meetings are announced on the reader board. There’s more opportunities to speak at meetings now, thanks to you, Charlie. Finally, over the last several years we’ve had more than 3 dozen opportunities for people to come in and learn about our facilities needs.
And that’s the end of my self evaluation.
Charlie – Ok so the process on this is at the February meeting we will do the superintendent’s evaluation by the board, so read this carefully. If you have questions call Dr Trani and he can explain. This is the main job a school board has, is to hire our chief executive, the superintendent, and to evaluate him every year. Cause we’re hiring the person who is gonna run our district so that’s our most important job as a board. So I hope everybody puts a lot of effort into this.
Division 22 assurances
Randy
In the past there’d be one box for each standard, and you’d go through and check the boxes. ODE decided this year to focus on a certain set, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing all the items but they named five this year to fine tune.
I mentioned those at the last board meeting and they provided us with a new form to fill out which focused in on items. One is the complaint policy. ODE is asking specifics about our policy, they never used to ask us these things, and they’re trying to get us to look more closely at the standards. It worked because when I got to number 18 “does the process clearly establish a time frame the district will complete each step of the process?” And I looked at our current policy and I realized “oh our complaint policy doesn’t say anything about timelines”. So it’s on consent to approve. The problem is I had to report we are out of compliance with ODE on this.
Report from facilities task force
(Randy making report today)
He discusses the matching dollars for bonds program by the state. The committee feels like we need to wait on this to see before continuing with bond attempts. If the legislature passes this we can advertise to the voters the state will match your funding. There’s also a hardship possibility if you’ve tried to pass bonds that have failed. There’s also rural impact considerations. This is a really important piece of legislation.
(Realistically though even if passed, money would go out at smaller increments each election cycle and would be considered for 197 districts. Also where the money will come from is still unknown as the state would take money’s from other areas, if that is even possible. This prospect although possible is unlikely to come to pass any time in the immediate future. This is not a slam dunk and probably not wise for Corbett to sit around and wait on this slim possibility. After all our buildings are dangerous and so unsafe we’re considering closing them. Or is it really not so urgent after all?)
Randy
Before the committee can really move on they need to know some parameters. We don’t want to waste the time of the volunteers. So it’s coming up, the square footage per students, what should we be planning for?
Resolution to direct the continuing of task force for facility planning. Language change to state “directing superintendent to lead the task force and report to the board.”
Anette
So is this task force going to do public meetings or are you changing it so that they don’t have to?
Randy
Yeah. Well there was some confusion over what the intent of the task force was so I’m gonna do the reporting. It doesn’t mean I won’t invite other people in but yeah this is a task force lead me. It’s not a sub committee of the board.
Annette
Wouldn’t it be better to have it in public so that community can come?
Charlie
The reason we are doing it this way is so people can talk freely. Also it’s a limited scope of people that are included that are educators and I think it’d be hard to get volunteers on there if it was open. The other reason is so they can meet at any time, like after school or during school. Bottom line is it doesn’t have to be open at this time, this is just the educators making recommendations.
Todd
Yeah it does get reported to us in a public meeting so I don’t see any hidden agendas or anything. It’s just a tool.
David
I don’t think either that this task force precludes any future facilities committees to help us with the planning process.
Approved continuing of superintendent lead task force.
Motion to determine minimum square footage per student. Board discussion….
Graphs handed out, see below.
Randy
We need to know what the standard will be for Corbett. Recommendations shown vary and come from primarily east coast states. Oregon doesn’t have any so I took the averages of 9 different standards I found. NCEF standards come from Soderstrom architects that they gave us. I did this off of number kids we have now but I don’t remember what that was 1300 something. Gross sq footage doesn’t include maintenance closets, staff space or athletic space.
Annette
So oregon doesn’t have standards, Washington doesn’t have standards and as far as I can tell it’s only these few that you found? So there is no state or national standard? So we can say most of the states haven’t adopted any sq foot per student standards correct?
Randy
Sure. But you can also say that most states build to a certain size.
Charlie
We’re not trying to advocate state standards we’re just trying to set a standard for Corbett.
Board discussion continues, graphs are gone over, including Corbett’s historic sq ft to student population. Numbers are debated. Whether setting standards, without knowing the project cost of the resulting space needed, is actually a realistic plan, is considered as well.
The board passes the resolution 4 to 1, that establishes minimum per student square footage of gross building space as follows;
GS 120 sq ft per student
MS 135 sq ft per student
HS 180 sq ft per student
For planning purposes.
Resolution approved for additional space of a minimum of 3,000-4,000 sq feet of administrative, non educational, space. Includes space for 5 staff members, storage, and conference rooms. For planning purposes.
