School Board Meeting Monday 5/7/07

Attendees

This was a fairly well attended meeting since there were several groups making appearances to ask for donations for trips to national contests.

Superintendent's Report

- The Milford Women's Club is disbanding, and they donated $150 for art supplies at Jacques.
- We received approval from the state to keep the last day of school for Seniors at 6/8, which allows the Graduation to stay on Saturday 6/9. We needed a waver since the recent no-school days due to flooding resulted in the Seniors being short by two days from the mandated amount.
- The last day of school for everyone else is Thursday 6/21.
- Rachel Arnold won the NH Letters About Women contest.
- The Southwest Music festival was held last Saturday at the Middle School, and was a big success.
- The Milford Christian Academy has had some financial difficulties in recent years, and as a result, they are changing their organizational structure to place an emphasis on home schooling. There are 21 Milford residents at the school spread out over many grades, so the impact would be low if the school closed and some students changed over to Milford Public Schools.
- Brittany Alperin won the Kaley speaking contest last year with a talk on Alzheimer research funding. After a series of events, she won a trip to Washington DC where she read her speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial to a large crowd.

Donation Requests

There are several groups that won state competitions that are moving on to national competitions. Some of them can to the board to ask for financial support for their trips.

1. There are three students that won History Club events. Judy Zaino (group advisor) gave an overview of the program.
A. Israel Piedra won first place Senior Individual Documentary for his 10 minute film "The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." He showed the film at the meeting, and it was extremely well done.
B. Mollie Staretorp won first place Senior Individual Paper for "Alfred Nobel: Explosive Tragedy to Humanitarian Triumph."
C. Adam LaGro won second place Senior Individual Documentary for his film “Bletchley Park: The Triumph of Allied Codebreakers.”

2. There are two teams going to the Destination Imagination Global Finals in Knoxville, TN. The Middle School team are performing in the CarDIology problem area, and the High School team is performing in the Extreme DI section. There are a total of 11 students going to the event. Cathy Chevalier (Elementary School Program Coordinator) gave an introduction to the group. Josh Clemons, Jillian Dargie, and Michael Dargie talked about their experiences on the Middle School team. Most of the other members were out fund-raising at the Fisher Cats concession stand and did not make the meeting.

3. There are two students going to the Skills USA championship in Kansas City. Ed Miller (Advisor) gave an overview of the program. A.J. Solon won for Machining, and Michael Jorgenson won for Extemporaneous Speaking. A.J. had received the highest score (937 out of 1,000) ever achieved by a Milford student. A.J. showed his Sterling engine model that he has been building from raw stock.

High School Renovation Project

David Lauren (Architect) reported on the status of the High School renovation project. It was decided that we will manage the program using a Construction Manager rather than by using a General Contractor. The driving force to this decision was that there is a possibility of receiving in-kind donations for the project, and this doesn't work very well with a GC approach. The other issue is that we might have to phase the project to work around school requirements, and this also does not work well with a GC approach.

We are going to have just one CM for all projects. This has several advantages - it lowers the overhead by eliminating duplication of various items such as bonding, and it minimizes the finger pointing when there are warranty issues after the jobs are complete.

We decided to postpone the appointments to the building committee until after the CM is chosen. Several of the people that have expressed interest in the committee work for CM companies, and they might have a conflict of interest.

David Lauren is going to develop a short list of CM candidates to present to the board. The board will choose the CM from the short list.

One of the critical path items is the site disturbance approvals needed from the state. The Football field/Track is the most complicated from an approvals standpoint. We will probably start work on the multipurpose field as the approvals process is much cleaner for that area.

It now appears that we will not be able to hold home football games this fall. The team should be able to practice on some area of the field, but it will not be suitable for an actual game. The administration is looking into alternate field availability for home games. The field should be done by the fall of 2008.

Lori Pitsas and Ron Carvell gave an update on the fundraising activities.

Perkins Funding - Career Development Specialist

Rosie Deloge gave a presentation on the need for bringing the current part-time Career Development Specialist to full-time status. The increase in the costs for this position will be covered by Perkins grant funding for at least three years.

Rosie made a convincing case for the justification of this position. After considerable discussion, the board voted to adopt her recommendation.

Heron Pond Building Fund

The fifth grade wing addition is complete, and there are only a few items that remain to be completed on the project. There is more money left in the fund than is needed to complete all the projects. The intent of the board is to return any excess funding to the taxpayers as soon as practical.

Steve Bancroft (Whitten Rd resident near the school) discussed his recent flooding problems from the pond next to the school. Steve has had water issues just about every year since Heron Pond was built, where he never had problems before then. Initially the problem was the beavers that were clogging the drainage culvert, and now it is just that the culvert is too small of a diameter to drain the swamp at times of high water.

When Heron Pond was first built, the culvert was designed with two larger sized pipes. The Army Corps of Engineers reviewed the plans, and required that the two larger pipes be replaced by one smaller pipe.

We have been discussing this problem every year, with the intent of finding a solution to the flooding problems. Money was allocated for the culvert fix in the budget for the fifth grade wing addition, but had not been spent for various reasons. It was decided to continue to allocate money for the culvert project, and the board encouraged the administration to try to fix the culvert this summer. This may not be feasible due to wetlands permitting time requirements, but they will try to get it done.

Up to $5k was also allocated to a study of the potential for a geothermal heat source project.

It was decided to not increase the height of the retaining wall on the slope at the rear of the school.

The administration was asked to find out if there was some way to add lighting to the Heron Pond road that would not be too expensive, and which could be used only on those few times each year when there are large functions at the school that require parking on the dark section of the road.

The administration was asked to get more details about the potential fixes for the windows that are difficult to open. We want to have a more definitive costing plan in place prior to deciding whether to fix the windows, and how many to fix (one per room or all of them).

Collective Bargaining

After the formal meeting was complete, the board held a "non-meeting" to discuss collective bargaining. Per the State RSA's, discussions of collective bargaining are non-meetings, and are not subject to Open meeting requirements.

The meeting lasted about three hours.