School Board Meeting Monday 6/4/07

Construction Manager Selection

We started the meeting at 5:30 instead of the usual 7:00 start time in order to interview candidates for the construction manager position for the High School renovation project.

We interviewed representatives from three candidate companies:

Eckman Construction
Hutter Construction Corporation
Turnstone Corporation

All three companies made solid presentations, and I thought that any of them would be able to do a good job for us on this project. We ended up choosing Turnstone Corporation for the job. The principle of the company are Stacy Clark, President; Billy Clark, Vice President; Deborah Clark, Office Manager; Phil Cote, Estimator/Project Manager; and Rick Smock, Project Superintendent.

Superintendent's Report

• There will be an Orientation night on 6/5/07 for parents of Fifth graders moving up to the sixth grade next year.
• The High School scholarship night is 6/5/07, with a reception at 6:30 in WOWS for board members.
• Some parents of very young students were invited to a reception at Jacques on 6/7/07 to learn about summer school activities, and kindergarten and first grade issues.
  
• Graduation is 10:00 on Saturday 6/9/07 at the High School Football field.
• The eighth grade graduation is Wed 6/20/07.
• The Superintendent passed out the list of graduating seniors that are continuing their education next year. 75% of the graduating class is moving on, with 52% planning on attending a 4 year program and 23% choosing a 2 year or certificate program.
• A photo of Jacques School Principal John Foss dressed up as the world famous "Book Fairy" was passed around. John had promised the students that if they read 2007 books or chapters during the year, he would be a Book Fairy for a day. He lived up to his word, but he might not ever live this one down...
• Bert Becker volunteered to be on the RSCC committee.

Milford Athletics Fundraising Committee

Lori Pitsas gave an update of the Family Fun Day fundrainsing event that was held at the Hampshiredome. The event was well attended, and seemed to be a great success. Although final numbers were not available, the event raised something in the neighborhood of $5K for the High School Track project. More fundraisers are planned, with the next one being the golf tournament in August. More information can be found at www.milfordtrackandfield.org.

Bales Committee Charge

The charge to the proposed Bales Study Committee was reviewed and approved for a first reading. The charge to the committee is: "To describe options available to the School Board for the future use of the Bales building, inclusive of the gymnasium and the annex. Such options will detail the educational and economical advantages and disadvantages associated with each option."

The list includes seven items that are specifically mentioned to be included in the review. We discussed item 6 at some length. This item is: "Consideration of the use of the annex to house state-mandated kindergarten." No decision was made as to whether this line item would remain as part of the charge to the committee.

Kindergarten Committee Charge

After a lot of discussion, we decided to not have a Kindergarten Implementation Study Committee. The rationale for the decision is that the main purpose of the committee was to identify the costs associated with implementing a Kindergarten program if mandated by State law, and the administration has the background and capability of obtaining this information without the overhead of a committee.

School Board Chair (and State Senator) Peter Bragdon mentioned that the State Senate had recently modified the adequacy definition that had been established by the House of Representatives. The House version included "half-day Kindergarten" as part of an adequate education. The Senate removed the half-day phrase and just included the word Kindergarten without any modifiers.

With the prospect of perhaps needing to offer full-day Kindergarten instead of the half-day program that we had been envisioning, Bob Willette moved that we add research into full-day Kindergarten to the overall project.

The Administration agreed to provide this information in time for inclusion on a warrant article if deemed necessary.

After some reflection and some research after the meeting, it is my opinion that the current wording of the adequate education definition does not require that we offer full-day Kindergarten. A half-day program should suffice. I expect that there will be some sort of a legal opinion generated when the bill is passed that will clarify this point. This is a critical point, because for Milford, a full-day program will cost a lot more than a half-day program. I expect that we will be able to fit a half-day program into the Jacques/Bales Annex buildings. A full-day program will not fit there and will require the use of a different facility. This changes the start-up costs from perhaps $1.5M for a Bales Annex renovation, to something like $7-8M for construction of a new 10-12 room school.

Policy Proposals

All the personnel policy updates were moved to a first reading.