Board Members:
Today we come to the end of a very productive week! Does it count at all that we got in four regular days of instruction? While we had a cancellation on Monday, the remainder of the week we were on time and on schedule. I'll call that a win! In case you are wondering, the cushion we have built in is now at 11.7 hours. I suppose the million dollar question is: Is that enough? I don't know, but today is March 1st!
You may have heard last week a roof at a school in Waterloo collapsed under the weight of the snow. Because of that, I hired Service Roofing to come out early in the week and complete an assessment. Following that assessment, we had them remove some of the snow in the more troublesome areas. They did want to point out to me that our roof structure is very different than the one was in Waterloo. This news gave me quite a bit of reassurance!
We started some of the pre-construction meetings this week, beginning first with a walk-through with the city building inspector/fire marshal. I felt really good about this meeting and am excited to get started. Yesterday we had a meeting regarding the underground fuel tank that needs to be removed, and that I am not all that excited about, primarily because we have no real good feel for what that will cost. Just know that it needs to be done.
Of course last night we settled with the teacher association on matters of wages and working conditions for next year. I felt good about where we ended and believe the teachers do as well. The conversations we had were useful and productive. It was very nice that we were on the same page!
Today we had our NICL superintendent meeting, and one of the topics was conference alignment. One of our schools has elected to leave the conference and that causes some heartburn when we have to figure out as a conference how to proceed. The last time this happened, it didn't go well. Following that meeting we gave clear guidance and direction to the ADs and principals about how we would like them to proceed, what they are required to do, and what they are prohibited from doing. They will report back to us at the end of the month. I'll keep you posted; ultimately it will come to the board for a vote.
During the legislative session we spend as much time advocating for bills we would like to see passed into law about as much as we spend time on trying to prevent bad ideas from becoming law. All things were going pretty good until this week! As a start, you may have heard some press about SSB 1190. It is very interesting how changing a word in a law from 'shall' to 'may' can have such a profound impact! That was what happened when they proposed a change in the employment of school librarians and school nurses to 'shall' employ to 'may' employ. For the record, this was BAD idea #1 for the week. Bad idea #2 came about when voucher legislation was introduced this week. Frankly, I shouldn't be too surprised this surfaced because it does every year. In fact, the bill is practically identical to the one they proposed last year. That bill has passed out of subcommittee and is scheduled for a full committee vote on Monday. I suspect it will pass out of committee, making it funnel proof and eligible for debate on the Senate floor. Ironically there is no fiscal note attached, which I would think makes it difficult to support something where they have no idea what it costs. Last year's fiscal note was right around $260 million, so that makes this bills future very uncertain.
Ah, the snow! My picture this week is from Route 16-1, which is in the northwest quadrant of our school district. You'll notice the snow piles are almost as high as the roof of the bus. That 'thing' sticking out of the top of the snow pile is a stop sign! Have an awesome weekend!
Dr. Tony Voss, Superintendent
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