School Board Meeting May 21, 2007

The big news for the School Board meeting on 5/21/07 was the discussion about public kindergarten in Milford. I am going to make a separate post about that topic. This post will cover the rest of the meeting.

Superintendent’s Report

There were two student groups that made presentations during the meeting.

FBLA – Future Business Leaders of America

Chris McBrien gave the introduction for the group. Five members of the FBLA entered the state competition, and two of them did well enough to move on the National finals.

Andrew Curtis was named Who’s Who in FBLA, Thomas Finan finished third in Accounting II, and Lauren Lambert finished second in Word Processing I.

Hilary Scott placed first in Computer Applications, and Kendall Maggelet placed second in Accounting II. Both of them are moving on to the National Leadership Conference in Chicago at the end of June.

Congratulations to all!

Peace Jam

Beth Powers introduced the Peace Jam group from the High School. This is a new group at the school that has grown to about 20 members. I didn’t get all the names of the students that attended, but some of them were Ryan Willette, Zoe Torres, Zake LaFontaine, and Haley McCormack. (I may have spelled their names incorrectly, and I apologize in advance if that is the case.)

The Peace Jam group seems to have been very active. These are some of the activities that they have done this year:

• Fundraising to support various activities.
• Sold fair trade coffee as a fundraiser
• Donated money to kiva.org. This is a group that makes microcredit loans to people around the world. They donated at least $500 to the group, and the money was loaned to about 8 different people around the world. All 8 are paying back their loans on schedule.
• Holding a meeting on Thursday night to highlight the problems in Darfur.
• Attended the national conference with several Nobel Laureates. Met the Dali Lama at the conference.

Wellness Committee

The goals and objectives of the Wellness Committee were presented. There are a relatively large number of people on the committee, and they have been meeting on a regular basis. Bob Willette discussed his views that the goals and objectives are too weak and lacked specifics. He mentioned that he had voted against the document, but that most of the rest of the committee supported the document.
RSEC Committee Membership

Superintendent Suprenant asked for volunteers from the board for membership on the Regional Services Educational Center committee. Bob Willette had been a member previously. Milford belongs to the group, but we do not use their services very much since we mostly handle our special education needs in-district. No member volunteered for the committee at this time.

Capital Plan Review

Peter Bragdon reviewed our mid-range capital plans. The town does a capital plan each year, and they ask for input from the school district. We have limited near term capital expenditures planned, with most of the larger items such as Bales renovations, more high school renovations, and the middle school roof replacement, scheduled for around 2012 or so when some of our existing bonds are retired.

Asbestos Removal

We awarded the contract for asbestos removal at the high school as part of the renovations project to the low bidder – MARCOR Remediation. They have done work for us in the past, and they are a good outfit.

Policy Proposals

The policy review committee is proposing a fairly large rewrite of many of the Personnel policies. There are a lot of changes being proposed, but in total it seems straight-forward and non-controversial.

School Board Goals

The school board goals for the year that had been previously adopted were reviewed. Peter Bragdon presented a basic timeline for each for us to review and approve. Some were approved as-is, and others were modified somewhat. The five goals were:

• Administrative Compensation Review – this will be done soon as we will be doing the Superintendent’s review soon, and we need this to set up his plan for the next year
• Contract Negotiations – We are negotiating with the new Milford Educational Support Staff Association bargaining unit. The goal is to have an agreement in place in time for the March ballot.
• Provide Oversight to Capital Projects – This is managing the high school renovation project
• Study Leftover Facilities Issues from Prior Year – this goal is to have something in place to be able to have a warrant article on the March ballot, if that is what we determine we want to do. One project is to create two building lots out of excess land near the Heron Pond school, and the other project is the potential purchase of the lot just north of the high school.
• Determine the future of the Bales building – We are going to have a committee work on this. The committee will be named in September or so, and be given about a year to review the options for Bales and to make a recommendation. Funding for renovations (if that is what is recommended) will probably not be available until 2012 or so.

At the conclusion of this discussion, I made a motion concerning Kindergarten, and there was a lot of discussion on the topic. I will cover this in a separate posting.

High School Renovations

The architect has met with Construction Manager candidates. He will make a presentation at the next board meeting, where we may select the CM.