by Garrick A Moritz, Gazette
The Garretson School Board met in regular session on Dec. 14. The big topics of the meeting were the sports complex field renovations, COVID mitigation and the upcoming legislative session.
The board convened with a quorum, though board member Rachel Hanisch was not in attendance. After some initial technology wrangling, Jodi Linneweber was able to join the meeting via audio/video chat.
The board passed the regular and consent agendas with no changes, additions or deletions. They approved the consent agenda and went on to new business.
The first item of new business was to declare a conflict of interest. Under the new law, any potential conflict of interest between a board member and business of the district must be declared and a report filed with the state. This declaration was for board member Rachel Hanisch, as her husband Chad Hanisch, and his firm Infrastructure Design, was being considered as the engineering consultant for the sports complex repair and renovation project.
“We will state clearly that this is a fair and reasonable use of school resources,” said Superintendent Guy Johnson. “Chad and his firm are being hired because Chad was the main lead on the original project back in 2006, so he has a lot of foundational knowledge of what the original project was like and of what the district’s needs with the project will be this time around. He did this long before his wife became a school board member.”
“Rachel could not be here tonight, but she had planned to recuse herself from the vote as to whether or not to hire her husband’s firm,” said Board President Shannon Nordstrom.
“Knowing her character, as we do, I’m certain we can reasonably expect that she will recuse herself from any and all votes having to do with the project because of her husband’s involvement,” said Supt. Johnson. “That’s just the nature of her ethics, and it’s commendable.”
The board passed the declaration and then spoke with Chad Hanisch, who was present at the meeting, about the details of the contract under consideration.
The board had plenty of questions for Mr. Hanisch, one of which involved the scoreboard.
“I guess I was just surprised to see it there,” said board member Ryan Longhenry. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.”
Supt. Johnson responded that it is still functional, but it has required several fixes and the technology it uses is not aging well. He noted the possibility that several local philanthropists might be willing to pay for part or all of the cost of a complete replacement.
Hanisch said that the bids to replace it could be completely optional, and not part of the main bid. Other items suggested would be a sidewalk on the east end of the field, something that was part of the original plan, but dropped to save costs. Hanisch proposed putting it back on the to-do list. He also suggested making it longer and extending the seating on the east end. These items, however, are all secondary.
“Our main goal will be finding the cause of the issues on the field and provide you guys with the best information we can and present solutions to fix the problems, and to give you options to work with to fix the problems we find,” said Hanisch.
The board voted to hire Infrastructure Design as their consultant engineer for the project.
Next the board discussed raising the school’s credit card debt limit. The school has two cards, one for the Superintendent and one for the Business Manager. Business Manager Jacob Schweitzer said the cards currently have a limit of $2,500. With the dollar simply not going as far as it used to, and more vendors no longer accepting checks or wanting online payment, it just makes sense to raise this debt limit.
The board voted to raise the limit to $5,000 per card.
The board then reviewed their COVID mitigation plan. This will be a twice-annual review until COVID-19 is no longer a threat to students and staff.
Supt. Johnson recently sent out a survey to parents. He got 192 responses, or approximately half of the district families.
Of those who took the survey, about 70.5 percent of students were unvaccinated. Eighty-four percent thought the school was doing the correct amount of COVID mitigation. A smaller percentage thought the school should be doing more, and a single digit percentage thought the school was doing too much.
This survey went out before vaccines were authorized for elementary-aged children. Now that they are, Supt. Johnson hopes that families will vaccinate.
A change to the COVID Mitigation plan was to change the language of Head-Start employees' vaccination requirements. Instead of simply requiring vaccine to be employed, it was changed to “comply with federal directives,” as that policy may be changing soon. This keeps the school safe and the federal funding for the Head-Start program ($40-50K per year), secure. He also wanted to make it worth noting that the school is not currently, and does not plan, to do contact tracing of COVID-19.
Then the board talked policy items. Coming up for review is the expense reimbursement policy, which is cash given to students for meal expenses on trips.
Supt. Johnson wanted to clear up that for whatever sport or activity they are traveling for, each student is each given a small stipend to help mitigate the expenses.
“A common misconception is that one team gets more money than another or that, say, the football team gets more cash than the volleyball team or the marching band students,” he said. “This is, simply not true. All students get a flat-rate stipend for meals. This money is in no way meant to cover the expenses for meals on the road, but instead it to supplement what parents are supposed to provide for their student. Their family is still responsible for feeding their child, the school is just helping to mitigate that expense.”
Schweitzer confirmed this, and that rather than reimbursement, the school’s practice is to give out envelopes with cash to students traveling to events.
This is one of the policies that they will look at for review, with the argument that maybe it’s time to increase these amounts for students.
The other item is to revise Alternative Instructional participation. The practice of the district has been to allow homeschooled students to participate in band, choir or sports as long as they enroll the student in a few other classes at the district. State law now has banned that practice, meaning that homeschool students can participate in whatever activity they want without meeting requirements from the district. The school policy will need to be revised to reflect that. It is likely this will be at issue in the legislature again this year.
The next three policy items that were discussed and had a first reading were on student dismissal, student attendance and exemptions from attendance. Most of these were pretty standard, needing no revision. If parents are going to take their student home after an activity, they need to clear it with the school beforehand. Something that came up this past year is that if a student is in a registered GED program, they are in fact exempt from attending school under SD law.
The board passed their revised professional guidelines and evaluation policy revision without debate.
The board moved onto administrative reports, and the first big item was that the SD High School Activities Association has moved forward with implementing softball as a sanctioned sport in the spring. The first season is proposed for 2023. Supt. Johnson said that talking with other Superintendents and athletic directors has had mixed results. The larger districts are all for it, but some of the smaller ones are concerned that it will interfere with track & field. He said that he plans to send out a student survey to gauge interest in softball, and go from there. When he has those results he’ll bring them to the board.
Supt. Johnson talked about the upcoming legislative session. The news there was that there isn’t very much news. He’s aware that there are legislators who have an axe to grind about transgender issues and the so-called critical race theory. He confessed to being unaware as to what critical race theory was supposed to be. He said that the educational standards that Garretson adheres to are fact-based teaching and learning.
“Students are taught the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “I know our history teachers teach about the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee. We teach facts to our students. We have a good process already on the standards that we teach, and we don’t want the legislature to dictate those standards to us.”
Principal Chris Long added that Native American history is taught as part of South Dakota History and U.S. history. That education isn’t just limited to history classes, as components come up in literature as well. Teachers include works by local and regional authors in the curriculum.
Board member Jodi Linneweber said she felt it would be an advantage for the students to be taught from and by people with an indigenous people’s perspective. President Nordstrom said something like that would be worth a school assembly.
There was no update on the Prairie Lakes Cooperative.
Kari Flanagan gave an update on the Associated School Boards of South Dakota delegate assembly. It was very small conference this year with only about 30 delegates. There was very little debate and just two items on the agenda.
Although the ASBSD wanted to continue to support a state website for legal notices, they also discussed wanting to continue to publish legal notices in local newspapers because they realized that people without internet service would never see those notices, and doing so would especially alienate senior citizens.
The second issue was that of taxation of legalized marijuana. Some members were uncomfortable taking profits from taxation of marijuana to educate children.
With that, the board went into executive session to discuss a personnel issue.
Editor’s Commentary: I want to thank Board Member Flanagan for going to bat for me and the free press on the issue of public notices. While I still don’t agree with what the ASBSD’s overall stance on this issue fell out as, it’s at least a step in the right direction. Having legal notices in an online-only format is a recipe for disaster, leaving the door wide open for cyber-attacks to either destroy data and/or maliciously manipulate crucial information important to the public good. That’s why a printed record is and will always be necessary. She’s right that the online-only option would alienate voting members of the public. However, it’s not fair or accurate to label just senior citizens as the only people who read newspapers. Let me recall some of the points I made in my open letter back in November.
Our readership survey tells us that 83 percent of South Dakota adults read their local newspaper either in print or digital form. Seventy percent are under the age of 65! Seventy-seven percent read public notices in their print or digital newspapers and 72 percent believe that public notices in newspapers should be required. Eighty-six percent name their local newspaper as their most trusted source of information for public notices! Eight out of 10 of those readers are also regular and registered voters.
So, when the legislature meets this year, it might be best to call or write your representative and remind them that they serve you, the taxpayer, and not the other way around. Being elected to office does not mean you “get the power.” It means that the public has given you its trust to do a job. An elected offical is not a king, lord or potentate. We in America decided long ago that we were done with that sort of thing. An elected official should strive to be a servant of the people, and they would do well to remember that.
