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Friday Board Bulletin 3/22/2019


Posted Date: 03/22/2019

Friday Board Bulletin 3/22/2019

Board Members:

Greetings from Minneapolis! Ann and I headed out for a few days Thursday morning to take advantage of the remaining days of spring break. I know, we probably should have headed south! Since we just had our meeting on Monday evening I'll try to be brief. As a start, thanks for a great meeting! Getting the budget finished, approved, and filed is a big accomplishment and moves us one step closer to the end of the year. I also appreciated your guidance and direction on the remainder of salaries for next year. We'll work to get those contracts prepared after spring break and prepared for your final approval in April. On a related note, teacher contracts were issued on Tuesday. Even though it's spring break, we have already begun to receive signed commitments for next year!

The solitude of spring break affords us the opportunity to finish and work on multiple reports and projects in the central office. It is also a great opportunity for our maintenance staff to close multiple work orders that needed to wait until students were out of the building, and do a final deep cleaning for the remainder of the school year. A lot of time was spent this week removing sand that had been tracked into our buildings! Let's hope we are at the end of needing sand! 

This week the legislature was largely engaged in debate on the floor of each respective chamber. While there has been movement on some education related bills in the assembly, there doesn't seem to be anything that is too earth shattering in our world. Unfortunately we still haven't seen any movement in the Senate on the SAVE legislation. We do keep hearing this is going to get finished this session, but it has yet to materialize. I'll remind you this is the exact same position we found ourselves in last year. The bill passed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support only to stall in the Senate. Right now, that is exactly the same position we were in last year with two weeks to go until the second funnel. At that point bills must be through one chamber and a committee in the opposing chamber to stay alive for consideration. SAVE is funnel proof because it is an appropriation. However, I bring this up because it is a sign the legislative session will start to wind down. As a stated in a tweet to a colleague earlier in the week: we are running out of runway to get this thing off the ground. 

The promise of spring

The picture I am sharing this week is from the first day of spring and was taken on Shrock Road. I was headed to the office and looked in the rear view mirror and saw the sun coming up over the road. Since there was no traffic around, I stopped and took this quick shot To me, it shows the promise of warmer weather and the solitude of spring break!

Have an awesome weekend and enjoy these remaining days of spring break. And especially thank you for your support of me and my work. 

Dr. Tony Voss, Superintendent