School Board Meeting Monday 6/18/07

Superintendent's Report

• The graduation on 6/9/07 went well despite the bad weather. The event was moved indoors to the gym, and went well even though we were in cramped quarters. There was a video feed into the cafeteria for the overflow crowd. The administration did their usual fine job with the event, and it went off without any major problems. All the student speakers gave excellent speeches, and Dr. Craven gave a nice speech of his own.
  
  
• The annual scholarships awards night was held, and $126,810 was distributed during the evening. [I'm proud to say that my daughter Jenna won several of the awards. I had never been to one of these events before this year, and I was very impressed with the generosity of the Milford community. I'd like to give a heartfelt thank-you to all that donated in any way to the scholarship programs.]
  
  
• The High School Destination Imagination team placed 4th out of 13 in their category at the Global finals in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Middle School team placed 35th out of 65 in their category. Attending the Global Finals was a rewarding but tiring experience for all that attended.
  
  
• There was an evening for parents of incoming first grade students that were identified by DIBELS testing as perhaps in need of special services. Parents for 58 students attended the event, and they received home packs for use over the summer.
  
  
• The Superintendent issued a press release on several topics including a summer reading program being put on in conjunction with the Wadleigh Library, an announcement that we will be restarting an adult education program this fall with classes in Conversational Spanish, We the People…the Citizen and the Constitution, Digital Scrap Booking with Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel, and an announcement that we will be offering night school for high school students that have failed or are struggling with Math and English.
  
  
• All schools are now approved by the state without any qualifications. The Jacques Memorial had a qualified approval last year since we did not have an approved homework policy in place. We instituted this policy during the past year, so the qualification was lifted.

ATC Annual Report

The ATC group presented their annual report. Presenting at the meeting were Rosie Deloge, Director of Technical Studies; John Leslie, Committee Chair; and Steve Martin, Computer Technology Chair.

They distributed a nice booklet that described the programs. While nothing is perfect, it seemed as if the program is doing well and is headed in a good direction. They reviewed the various pages in the booklet highlighting areas of interest, including listings of student achievement, awards, State Expo results, Business partnerships, Technical Honor Society inductees, and a review of each program. We had some discussion concerning the possibility of building houses on the two potential lots that may be split off from the Heron Pond School site.

John Leslie is stepping down as Committee Chair after six years in the position. He has done a great job in moving the ATC program forward. Steve Martin will be the Committee Chair this coming year.

Professional Development Master Plan

Chantal Alcox and Laurie Johnson presented the new Professional Development Master Plan that will be submitted to the state by the end of the month. This is the five-year update to the plan, and it contained some significant changes. Most of the changes that were incorporated were dictated by the recent changes in the State requirements. The Professional Development Committee has worked hard over the past year in developing the new plan.

The old method worked well, but the expectation is that the new methods will work even better. The old method was based on obtaining designated clock hours (CEU's, credit equivalency units) for professional development work during the year. This has the benefit of being easy to administer, but does not focus on outcomes and instead just focuses on the process.

There are several methods that can now be used, including the old clock hours (CEU's) approach. The primary method that will be used involves the development of three year goals for professional development, and the creation of portfolios that provide evidence of development. Since District professionals often have multiple certifications, they may decide to use a different approach for their various certifications depending on the suitability for each one.

High School Renovations Committee

We decided to appoint all ten applicants to the Committee rather than try to cull it down to a smaller list. The thought process was that each person provides a point of view and a strength that will add to the group, so having more people will add to the group. Some will be more interested in the track, and others will be more interested in the facility renovations. We also expect that not everyone will attend every meeting, so the meetings should not be too unwieldy despite the large committee size.

We modified the charge to the committee to match the larger size group. We changed the spending approval limits for the committee, set up the emergency approval procedures, and set up the quorum and voting parameters. I was appointed as the School Board representative to the committee.

Policy Proposals

Most were moved on to the next reading. The only one that wasn't was the Computer Software and Hardware policy. The proposed new first paragraph is very restrictive in that it basically bans the use of non-school district equipment from being used in the schools, except for personal printers. I expressed my thoughts that this was too restrictive and asked the administration to review the requirements again to see if it could be toned down. John Leslie had expressed similar thoughts at the beginning of the meeting.

We had a long discussion on this topic at the Technology Committee meeting the next day. The net result is that Matt Ballou will go back and develop a revised version that is somewhat less restrictive. One area in particular that will probably be loosened up is the restriction on PDA's. This will probably be rescinded since many administrators and faculty use PDA's to coordinate their home and work schedules.

Bales Study Committee

This committee will be set up in the fall.

I asked that the district change the sign on the front of the Bales School during the summer, so we will have a fresh start in the fall. Right now the sign says "Bales Elementary School" since that is what the building was used for when the sign was created years ago. The school is only used for the Sage program today, and this is for Middle and High School students. I hadn't thought about it before, but it just struck me a few weeks ago that it must be demoralizing for a Middle or High School student to enter a building identified as an elementary school each day.

The sign is in bad shape and needs to be redone in any event, so it makes sense to do it now before school starts. I think that it should be changed to "Bales Building" since that would allow it to be used as a multi-purpose building, but "Bales School" would be acceptable also since that is what it is right now.

Questions? Suggestions?

Is there anything that you want to know, but you don't know where to go to ask the question? Do you have an idea as to how the Milford School District can improve? If so, then please contact me and I'll try to help out.

You can contact me by email at pauldargie@aol.com, or you can post a question or comment on this blog. Blog postings can be anonymous.

In general I will try to get an answer for you, but there are some things that I won't be able to get into. The School Board is part of the dispute process for the School District, so I can't get involved in any complaints that may eventually require a review by the board. An example of this would be a complaint about a specific teacher. These types of issues need to be addressed through the chain of command to insure fairness to all parties.

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.

Milford School Board to Study Kindergarten Options

After years of not supporting public kindergarten, the School Board voted at the 5/21/07 meeting to study the options for implementing public kindergarten in town!!!!


One of the agenda items for the meeting was School Board Goals. We have a standard process each year to implement yearly goals, and this agenda item was a part of the normal process. A typical process flow is to set annual goals shortly after the election, set action items and schedules a month or two later, monitor the action items during the year, and then summarize the results at the end of the year. This agenda item was part of the step for setting action items and schedules.

We started the process this year by setting the goals shortly after the election. During that step in the process, I had proposed that the District study the implementation of public kindergarten in Milford. The purpose of the study was to identify the costs of the various options to see if there was a way to implement public kindergarten at a modest cost. This proposal was defeated by a vote of 2-2-1, with Bert Becker and I in favor of the study, Len Mannino and Bob Willette against the study, and Peter Bragdon abstaining due to his wife working at a private kindergarten. This lack of a three vote majority has been the norm for years on the Board.

I submitted a new proposal during this past meeting. The new proposal was very similar to the previous one, but there was a significant difference in the timing that led to it's passage. The key point was that after the previous motion was defeated, the state House of Representatives added half-day public kindergarten to the definition of an adequate education. The bill is now winding it's way through the legislative process and is currently undergoing review by the state Senate.

As of today, it seems reasonable to forecast that the bill that defines an adequate education will include half-day public kindergarten in the final language. There are two significant unknowns about this result: 1) if this will mean that half-day public kindergarten will be required to be offered by each school district, and 2) if the state will be required to pay for this requirement since it is an "unfunded new mandate."

Because there is a now a reasonable chance that the Milford School District will be required to offer half-day kindergarten to all students that want to attend, it makes sense for us to figure out how to accomplish this requirement. Len and Bob both changed their minds because of this potential looming requirement, and they voted in favor of the study.

The final language of the motion was "I move that the board adopt as a goal for the year that we investigate the costs, feasibility, advantages and disadvantages of potential public Kindergarten options. The purpose of this goal would be for the board to be able to have a proposal ready in the event that public Kindergarten in Milford is mandated by state law. The goal shall not make any recommendation for or against public Kindergarten."

The last sentence was added to my original motion to make it clear that the purpose of the investigation was to study the options, not to advocate for public Kindergarten. Both Len and Bob are philosophically against public Kindergarten, and they wanted it made clear that they were not voting in favor of public Kindergarten. They both voted in favor of the amended motion to show their support for being ready if we are required to move forward with offering public Kindergarten.

We will set up the action items and schedules for the goal at the next meeting. It is likely that this will take the form of appointing a committee to study the task with a report due by late October or so. This will give us the information needed to place a warrant article on next year's ballot.

There are three basic kindergarten options that will be reviewed:

1. Renovate the Bales Annex for use by First grade or Readiness classrooms, and put Kindergarten classes in the west end of the Jacques school. This needs to be done in this sequence since Kindergarten classrooms need to be slightly larger than First grade classrooms to qualify for building aid. This option would be the least expensive by far. The big negative for this one is that this will be a tight fit. There are only four classrooms in the Bales Annex, and for long term needs, five or six classrooms may be needed. The space issues need to be closely reviewed to determine if this option is viable, or if there is just not enough space to make it work.

2. Build a new Kindergarten building, probably on the Brox property somewhere near Heron Pond. This option will create the nicest facility, but would be the most expensive.

3. Find a facility somewhere in town that could be purchased and renovated into a Kindergarten facility. I have no idea if there is anything that is suitable that would be available, so this one might not even be a real option. We need to do a survey to determine if something is possible or not.

All in all, I was very pleased with the vote. I have been in favor of public Kindergarten for a very long time, and it now seems like we are on a path that will eventually lead to public Kindergarten in town.

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.

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.

Factoid from Milford's Past

This is from page 170 of the History of Milford N.H. 1738-1901 by George Ramsdell.

1805. Caleb Jones died April 16, aged seventy-nine years. He was one of the early settlers locating upon the Mile slip soon after he became of age, and was one of the most eccentric persons ever residing in town. He planted and cultivated a cherry tree for the purpose of furnishing boards for his own coffin. After it had grown to sufficient size, he cut the tree and had it sawed into boards, from which the coffin in which he was buried, was made. He was succeeded on his farm by his son, Zadoc Jones, who in turn was succeeded by his son William, who now occupies the ancestral acres.

I first read this passage a couple of years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. It's hard to imagine anyone doing something weird like this today.

I can just picture good ole Caleb looking out the window of his house and thinking to himself, Gee, I just had a great idea! I'm going to plant a cherry tree out there right now, and then cut it down in twenty years and make my own coffin!

I think that he took the old saw "If you want something done right, then do it yourself" to a new level.