School Board Meeting Monday 4/16/07

I've read several of the blogs in town for the past few months, and I've decided that I'd like to make some occasional postings on my own rather than just reply to the postings of others.

I expect that I will post on a variety of topics, but I plan to focus on school issues.

My first posting will be a summary of the school board meeting held on Monday 4/16/07:

Attendees

School had been canceled on Monday due to the floods in town, so the meeting was cut back somewhat. Some of the regular attendees did not make it to the meeting for various reasons and some of the scheduled topics were postponed.

The regular meeting attendees were Bob Suprenant (Superintendent), Peter Bragdon, Bob Willette, Len Mannino, and Paul Dargie. Bert Becker was sick and did not make the meeting. Tim Finan (our new Selectman) was the only member of the public in attendance.

High School Graduation Date

At the first April meeting, the board had decided that the High School graduation would be held on June 9th. It is standard practice to wait until the beginning of April to set the graduation date to ensure that the snow days were behind us. However, this year was different, with three no-school days since then. The Superintendent reported at the meeting that he is planning to petition the state to allow us to keep the graduation date on the 9th, despite the extra no-school days. He said that he was hopeful that the petition would be approved, since having no-school days at this time of year is rare. The main issue is that a graduation is a big deal, and people make plans around it. It is common for some relatives to have to travel a long distance to attend, and they have already started making arrangements. It is a major inconvenience to change the date once it has been established. So the net result is that the graduation is still scheduled for June 9th at this time.

High School Art Exhibit

The Superintendent reported that the annual High School Art Exhibit would be held on Thursday April 19th. There will be displays set up in the lobby to showcase a variety of art presentations.

Summer School Plans

An effort is being made to coordinate the district summer school plans with the Library. Meetings have been held with Michelle Sampson at the Library to try to improve the reading activities that are offered during the summer. The main focus is on helping students that are struggling with reading to try to minimize the loss that normally occurs over the summer months.

Student Management System

The current computerized student management system that is used by the district is having support problems, and the District is looking to switch to a different system. We are looking to switch to Powerschool, which has 32 users in New Hampshire and seems to be on more solid footing. It looks like most of the cost for switching over will be supported by entitlement grants.

One interesting feature that the new system would offer is the ability for parents to log into a password-protected area and view what their children are eating for lunch.

Full Time Career Development Specialist Request, Perkins Fund

Rosie Deloge, Director of Technical Studies, was scheduled to make a presentation on her request to fund a Career Development Specialist position using Perkins grant money. This presentation was postponed due to the bad weather.

Several members of the board made the comment that even though the position would be grant funded and would be at no charge to the taxpayers, that the position would need to be justified as if it were a new permanent position. The reason for this is that the Perkins funding will only last a few years, and it is likely that once a position is integrated into the system, it is hard to eliminate the position when the funding runs out.

Hearing to Receive and Expend Unanticipated Revenue

This is a standard procedure that is done at this time each year. When the budget for a school year is put together during the fall of the preceding year, an estimate is made of the revenues and expenses that will occur in areas that do not relate to property taxes. The two main areas are Food Service and Grant spending. There are always variations to the budget in these areas, and if money in excess of the budget is received, then we are not legally allowed to spend it without a hearing.

This year we received about $126,171 more than we had budgeted, so we needed to hold a hearing to allow us to spend the extra money. This money is grant money and can only be used for the specific purpose defined by the grant. If we do not spend the money as detailed in the grants, then we would just have to return it. Getting more grant money than expected is a very good thing for us, as it allows us to accomplish a variety of things that we would not normally be able to do.

Meeting Location

The Selectmen are upgrading the Selectman’s meeting room in town hall, and they informally offered to allow the School Board to hold their meetings there instead of the High School Library.

We discussed the pros and cons of this, and no decision was made. The biggest pro is that the room will soon have a very nice PEG access setup. The biggest negative is that the room is small and does not handle a large crowd.

Heron Pond Building Fund

No action was taken on this since Mike Trojano was not able to make it to the meeting. The basic idea is that 5th grade addition is mostly complete, and we want to wind up this fund.

Policy Proposals

Dispute procedure # 2409 was approved to a second reading with some minor modifications from the first reading. There was a lot of discussion surrounding the language describing the rights of individuals to contact the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights, with the net result being that the language was left in as drafted.

High school graduation requirements # 3531 was approved to a second reading with some minor modifications from the first reading.

High School Renovations - Architectural Services

Purchasing policy 2330 requires that there be three bids for purchases over $10,000, if feasible, unless waived by the School Board. Based on a number of factors, the board decided to waive this requirement for the hiring of the Architect for the High School renovation project. The main issue is that David Lauren has been working on the high school for years, and he has intimate knowledge of the issues surrounding the school. Since this is primarily a renovation project and not new construction, this specialized knowledge is very important in being able to cost effectively design the renovations that need to be done. The board authorized the Superintendent to negotiate with David Laurin to create a contract that is advantageous to the District.

The meeting only lasted for 1-½ hours due to some of the items on the agenda being postponed.

There was no need for a non-public meeting.