Board Members:
It has certainly been an interesting week! I've been out of the district since Tuesday evening, attending the ISFLC conference in West Des Moines. IASB and UNI asked me to co-teach a course on employment law, so that has taken up the majority of my time this week. It is always tough making weather related school calls, but even more so when trying to do so from 100 miles away! Today I am still in Des Moines, this time for our monthly BoEE meeting. With all that, the biggest accomplishment for the week was selecting the final four candidates for our elementary principal position. In between meetings and workshops, I have been busy checking references and returning phone calls. I am excited about this final slate! Interviews are next week, so it will be good to have that key position filled. Speaking of filling positions, we were also able to move forward on two other big hires this week. We have a junior high/high school science and computer science teaching position filled and Mrs. McNeal has agreed to teach high school art, increasing her from .5FTE to 1.0FTE (pending final board approval in March).
In the legislature this week, the governor signed the law that corrected a prior legislative error with the assessed valuation calculations. Our county assessor has subsequently completed their work so we should be ready for our budget hearing at the March board meeting. You will recall I proposed a tax rate of 15.74726, this law changed the rate to 15.88269 for an increase of .13543. If you have any questions about this, please let me know ASAP. I'll need to make final preparations for the publication of the budget by Friday, March 3.
During the BoEE meeting today, we discussed the pace of the legislative session thus far. It has been unusually heavy with education related bills. It was reported that, to date, some 70 plus bills have been assigned to (or originated with) the House Education Committee. It would be a fool's errand to try and provide a synopsis of what each one does. Instead, today I am going to share with you a bill tracker that is cultivated by the Department of Education which tracks all the education related proposals. I'll share a couple bits of positive news, HSB 169 is on the move. This bill restores the operational sharing incentive weightings that were scaled back last year and increases the maximum cap to 25 (up from 21). While this wasn't a priority for us, the utility of shared functions has proven beneficial to us and the change from a year ago was unwelcomed. Another piece of good news this week was the introduction of HF 297, which would increase preschool funding to a full 1.0 for students at or below 200% of the poverty level. This was and has been identified as a legislative priority for us.
That is all for now. Have a great weekend!
Dr. Tony Voss
Superintendent
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