July 11, 2014 at 4:00 PM - Superintendent's Weekly Update to the Board of Education

Description: 
The filing period for school board is July 29-August 12.  Affidavits of Candidacy are available in the district office.  The filing fee for this office is $2.  A candidate must be an eligible voter, must be 21 years of age or more on assuming office, must have been a resident of the school district from which the candidate seeks election for thirty days before the general election, and must have no other affidavit on file for any other office at the same primary or ensuing general election. There are three terms of four years and one term of two years open.

Description: 
Please see attached emails I sent to the three CM firms.  Tom Ollman was very helpful in determining what else we need to know about each one.

Description: 
First Email Today from Mike Schoenecker (Winkelman)

Attached is school referendum information.  We were not involved in the referendum for Kennedy other than to supply them with needed information.  For Annandale, we supplied them with information for their flyers, participated in community round-table discussions and attended and participated in all public meetings. One of their flyers is attached as well as a later mailer.  I also pieced together some of the materials for the Sartell referendum.  This is not everything, but a smattering of items for the District as well as some Vote Yes committee items.  If I give you everything, you won’t need me.  Unfortunately all You Tube videos and websites have expired and are no longer available. I tried to send you the Sartell information as part of this e-mail but it kicked back as being too large.  I will send it via another site.

Second Email Today from Mike Schoenecker (Winkelman)

Attached are some of our work products and below is the requested information regarding change orders. Also attached are our responses to your questions and Annandale Spec front-end items found in Div 00 Procurement and Contracting Requirements including items such as advertisement for bid, instruction to bidders, summary of work, bid scopes, pre-bid meeting information, bid form, tax-exempt information, insurance requirements, etc...

Annandale documents attached for examples: Bart's daily report and tool box talk, meeting minutes, change order example and schedule.

Annandale School:  36 owner Change orders: $555,237.30 under budget so added a lot of items out of excess money
from bond referendum.  Added ball fields, snow melt system at entry, upgraded design and finishes in Media Center and Commons areas.

45 Non-Owner Change orders: $330,583.10 - design changes, jurisdictional changes, code changes.

Kennedy Community School:  31 Owner change orders: $575,444.55 - under budget so added a lot of items out of excess money from bond referendum.  Complete low voltage, tennis court, sound systems in performance rooms, lighting systems at stage, acoustical deck in performance areas.

42 Non-owner change orders $322,245.59 - design changes, jurisdictional changes, code changes.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can provide you.

Description: 
Please see attached a line graph illustrating the interest rate trends for borrowing.  Stacy at Springsted sent it to Mary and me.

Description: 
Please see attached a bar graph illustrating the savings to tax payers in the Royalton School District.  The attachment was prepared by Deb and Brad at Schools for Equity in Education (SEE).

The big differences is there is now a third tier added and "supercharged."  Brad and Deb deserve many many thanks from all of us economically disadvantaged school districts.

Description: 
Tony Duevel will need to work on obtaining his 2nd Class Grade "C" boiler license.  Bill Sobania told me today the 3-step process is the following:

Step 1  Pass the test for the special boiler license (available 1x each month in St. Cloud)
Step 2  Work under someone's license like Bill (he is qualified to mentor) for 365 days
Step 3  Pass the test for 2nd Class Grade "C" license

Tony should have no problem completing the 3-step process in the next 14-16 months.  And until then we can package a plan with Bill for boiler license supervision and construction help.

Description: 
I went through and added up the amount of iPads that I needed to repair this last year. I repaired a total of 16 iPads. 1 iPad was not repaired because it cost too much to repair. One other iPad was repaired 2 times.  Just thought I would let you know the numbers.  

In case you are wondering, below are the numbers per building.
High School: 11
Elementary: 5

If anyone has any ideas what we could do to try to get this number lower or about the same I am open to ideas. Some of the iPads were broken because the students were removing the iPads from the cases.

I was thinking about putting stickers over the cases to try and get the students to not remove the case however another school that tried that said it didn't work for them.

Description: 
Please see attached an email Mr. Swenson sent out to our MS/HS teachers about the web traffic on teacher web pages.  Two important points he make are to have your web site ready prior to the next school year and those who update their pages regularly receive returning interested viewers.  People will not go back to web sites that have information one or two years old.

A board member questioned why Mr. Swenson and I haven't updated our web sites.  The truth is the two of us place more new and ongoing information on the school web sites than anyone else.  I do understand the difference between perception and reality.  People do not have a clue all of the materials on the MS, HS, and district (front page) web portals are uploaded and edited by us directly.  This is something I plan to delegate on to the district office secretary.

With all of that said Joel and I will update our corner space not only for perception, but also because now I have someone else to do the remainder of the district web portal.

A primary responsibility of David's new assistant will be to continuously monitor and support every district employee in keeping their web pages current and useful/beneficial to the families and public. 

Description: 
Please see attached information about three personnel items.

Description: 
Please see attached the weekly bills for your approval.