Garrick A. Moritz, Gazette
The February 10th meeting of the Garretson School Board was packed, with the board covering multiple ideas, accolades, and legislative updates. One of those ideas was a digital touch screen that would contain a centralized Hall of Fame and digital archives, and one of the accolades was the band's invitation to the South Dakota Bandmasters Conference.
Board President Natasha Mendoza kept things moving right along, and the first item on the agenda was to remove a proposed policy revision to the school’s purchasing practices.
“This was on the agenda among first readings last month as you might recall,” said Superintendent Guy Johnson, “but the Associated School Boards have adopted relatively new guidelines as regards purchasing policy. We’ve got multiple policies that could probably get pulled together, all into one policy.”
“Yes, right now there are three or four policies regarding school purchases and they haven’t been updated since 2009,” said Business Manager Jacob Schwietzer, “so I decided that this is going to take a while to reconcile them all, and I asked Guy to pull it out of first readings so that we can work on it. It’ll just take a little more time.”
“We plan to go through it all and clean it up, and make sure our policies are mirroring ASBSD policies and compliant with all the current state bid laws before we propose a revision to the board.”
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The board then adopted three second readings on revisions on the complaint policies and acceptance of non-resident students, as well as deleting an outdated policy on open enrollment. Board Member Shannon Nordstrom had a question about student open enrollment from Minnesota.
“I don’t see this in the policy, doesn’t that require adjacency, if a student wanted to open enroll to us from Minnesota they have to be adjacent right?”
“Yes, that’s state law,” said Supt. Johnson. “The policy, as written does not specifically cite that law. Our state’s agreement with Minnesota requires that the school districts be touching.”
“It says on the bottom here that students from Hills-Beaver Creek and Pipestone Districts qualify, and those are the only ones that are touching our district so I suppose we’re covered there.”
“Yes, those are the only ones that qualify,” said Supt. Johnson. “In fact, we’ve had students and parents from the Luverne area who wanted to open enroll here, but they ordinarily do not qualify.”
Supt. Johnson went on to explain the differences in residency requirements between South Dakota and Minnesota.
“We have had the case, on many occasions, where students from another state will come here to live with their grandparents or aunts and uncles, and in those cases the board can and has authorized residency, and enrolled them,” said Supt. Johnson.
Nordstrom was satisfied with the explanation and language of the policy revisions and he and the rest of the board voted in favor of the policy revisions.
Board petitions available
Moving on to Administrative Reports, Business Manager Schweitzer reported on the potential upcoming election.
“As was published in our legal newspaper, election petitions are available now and will be available throughout February. The timeline is January 31st to February 28th, so the way the calendar falls this year it’s a full stretch of four weeks. We’ve got two board seats open, and the Election is always held on the second Tuesday of April, which is April 8th this year. So it’s as tight as I really can be from the filing of the petition to the actual election day. Depending on how many petitions we get signed, I will have more news at the March meeting if we have more than two petitions filed, we will have an election, and there will be several legal notices published in the paper about it if that’s the case.”
Board member Tana Clark asked Schweitzer when the final deadline for the petition would be, and he said Friday Feb. 28th at 5 p.m. Both Clark and Nordstrom’s seats are up for grabs this election season.
Centralized Hall of Fame
Supt. Guy Johnson began his report with a proposal from Tech Coordinator Matt Schrank, of which both he and Schrank were very enthusiastic about. The impetus of which started with wrestling hall of fame display.
“A few years ago we starting having conversation about creating some sort of electronic hall of fame for the entire district,” said Supt. Johnson. “All the records of the entire school, every sports program and including a digital archive of all the yearbooks we have to date. Every accolade of the school, along with an archive of school history all in one place.”
Supt. Johnson continued by saying that the creation of such an archive was wonderful in concept, but an awful lot to just dump on the tech-coordinator’s desk to do, all by himself. However, Schrank had found a company to assist him with that workload, and because of a company promotion, they were willing to give him an excellent deal on much of the labor of site creation and upload. It would start with around a $5,000-dollar cost, with an annual maintenance service fee of around $2,400. Johnson stressed that the cost would be locked in, and never increase down the road, and that it would be a living archive, regularly updated by the staff when new achievements happened or new records set.
Hardware in the school would be a 64-inch touch screen computer, with the archive computer to be placed in the entrance hall that anyone could use at any time to browse these records. This would mirror putting said archive on the school’s website as well for anyone in the world to browse at their leisure from their home computer to their cellphone.
Generally, the board received this proposal with enthusiasm.
“I’m very much in favor of this,” said Nordstrom. “When we had the whole debate on where to put the wrestling board, the idea of doing this was first mentioned, and I wanted our district to have something like this.”
Board member Wyatt Compton said that having the records all in one place, in a living digital archive would be an excellent idea, as some of the boards were out at the athletic complex and were only able to be viewed there. Having a central location for everything, as well as making it available online, would be a great asset for the community.
The only concern across the table was cost. Supt. Johnson said that they had applied for a grant from the Prairie Rose Foundation to help offset the initial cost of the project. Business Manager Schweitzer said that this is precisely the kind of community project they usually choose to support with their grant allocations, though of course he couldn’t promise the board anything. At worst, the district would be on the hook for the cost, but the board felt that the project was well worth the price and gave their blessing.
“Nothing will happen until the start of the next fiscal year, so we’ll be able to budget it properly in July in case we don’t get the grant,” said Supt. Johnson.
Supt. Johnson noted that the board had received a certificate in recognition of their service for National School Board Awareness week, and thanked the board members for their service to the district and community.
Legislative Updates
Next, Supt. Johnson gave the board a legislative update. In all, he said it’s been a very weird week and a very weird and outrageous year at the legislature. He noted that the ten-commandments in classrooms bill was narrowly defeated. He talked about Senator Phil Jensen’s bill to defund the Huron School District because he was upset about Huron’s transgender bathroom policy. He noted that there was another awful bill that would mandate school chaplains and allow them to act as councilors and another bill that would effectively not allow school counselors to do their jobs. Though most, if not all of those bills had been killed, he was simply aghast at the appalling waste of time.
“To me,” he said, “it’s really a poor use of the state’s resources and time, but I suppose that some folks out there have different ideas than mine about how education should be done in our state.”
One of three current bills to watch out against, he said, was Senate Bill 208. SB 208 would effectively make school opt-outs, like the ones they have passed, require a supermajority of 60% instead of a simple majority. Business Manager Schweitzer confirmed that neither of the two opt outs our district had done in recent history would have passed had this been the case. Supt. Johnson said that this was a blatant attempt to simply end the opt out process.
“I certainly hadn’t heard about this,” said Nordstrom, who’s Garretson district’s legislative liaison to the ASBSD. “The opt out process exists for a reason.”
“Yes,” said Johnson, “it’s being pushed by a couple of legislators that simply want to end the process, and when something like 42 to 44 percent of SD school districts use the process and actively have an opt out, this bill passing would have extreme and far reaching consequences. Many districts would close overnight.”
They left the other bit unsaid, that actually overhauling the state’s school funding formulas in a meaningful way for the 21st century would be entirely too much work for anybody in the legislature to actually do.
Supt. Johnson then elaborated on Senate Bill 71, which effectively makes it easier for 17- and 16-year-old students to drop out of school, and House Bill 1222, which broadens the scope of who can carry guns on school property to permit qualified concealed carry holders, both of which he thought were extremely bad ideas.
Nordstrom said he’d lost track of the student voucher bills, and Supt. Johnson said that they had been killed for now. However, like everything else in our legislature, bad bills have a habit of coming back with a vengeance, like zombies from an unquiet graveyard.
Accolades and 100 Days of School
Elementary Principal Katie Hoekman had more positive news with her report. She talked about the 100th day of school celebration at the elementary, with students in makeup as 100-year-old versions of themselves in the school hallways and classrooms.
Hoekman was pleased to tell the board about the achievements of Landon Snyder, who won the school spelling bee and will be going on to represent the school in the State competition in March.
She also reported to the board the extreme success of this year’s SOUP-er Bowl food drive, which totaled 2,238 food items for the Garretson Food pantry. They are waiting for a nicer day this week to deliver it downtown.
Middle School/High School principal Chris McGregor gave his report, and his first item of news was that Mr. Nick Sitting and the Garretson High School Band will be will be performing at the South Dakota Bandmasters conference in Brookings at SDSU on Saturday at 11 a.m.
“Every year, a group of the best bands in South Dakota are chosen and this year, Garretson’s band was invited up, and it’s quite an honor. I don’t know if Garretson has ever been chosen for this before, but I know it’s rare, meaning our band is simply one of the best in the state. Mr. Sitting told me that they have about 30 minutes’ worth of music prepared to play for this conference, and they will have multiple band masters and students from across the state performing all day.”
McGregor also reported that Eliza Potter had started her two-week session as a legislative page in Pierre this week.
“Maybe she can talk some sense to the legislature,” he quipped, “we can only hope.”
After the reports, the board then went into an executive session on a personnel matter until 8:44 p.m., but only made a resolution to adjourn at the end of the session.
