by Garrick A Moritz, Gazette
The Garretson School Board met in regular session on July 13, 2021. This was the last meeting of the 2020-21 year and the first meeting of the 2021-22 year, and the school board appointed two new members to its roster.
The board first approved the agenda and finance reports. One item of note is the school will now be using YouTube to livestream their sporting events, and broadcasting meetings and sporting events on the local Alliance channel. This due to the folding of the company they were contracted with to do the livestreaming and uploading. This ended service to our district and several others locally.
Next was a resolution to the grievance filed by Garretson Elementary school teacher Jodi Neugebauer. The board entered an executive session for personnel and staff negotiation reasons. When they came out of executive session, they first passed a Memorandum of Understanding between the Garretson Teachers Association and themselves for the 2021-22 collective bargaining agreement. Then, the board voted whether or not to amend Neugebauer’s contract for the 2021-22 school year. This vote passed with board member Tony Martens casting a dissenting vote.
Through deductive reasoning, we can conclude that Neugebauer was unsatisfied with some portion of her contract of employment for this coming school year and thusly filed a grievance, and that now the matter has been resolved.
This was the final act of the 2020-21 school board and Martens made the motion to adjourn. He and board member Ruth Sarar thus concluded their duties as school board members.
Superintendent Guy Johnson then began the first meeting of the 2021-22 school year, which started with the oath of office for new school board members Ryan Longhenry and Jodi Linneweber. The board elected its officers, with Shannon Nordstrom re-elected as the Board President and Kari Flanagan re-elected as board Vice President.
The board then held their official budget hearing for the 2021-22 school year. Business Manager Jacob Schweitzer reviewed the budget as proposed. (The proposed budget was published twice in this newspaper, first as an initial budget and then a revised budget.)
Supt. Johnson noted the influx of monies due to COVID relief funds. The school has formulated plans to update building infrastructure, something the school would not normally be planning to do. However, it is very welcome, especially with the chaos COVID caused in the regular fiscal operation of the school, and due to the $39,000 gas bill that resulted from the infrastructure failures in Texas that lead to such awful price gouging in the Garretson area in February.
There were no comments and no proposed changes for the budget at this time. The budget proposal will remain on the "old business" section of the meetings for the next two meetings until final approval, in order to give new members and the public time to make any budgetary wishes or proposed changes known.
The board then began the process of annual resolutions that make regular operation of the district possible, such as designating officers and trustees in the school’s hierarchy and joining organizations like the South Dakota High School Activities Association and the Association of School Boards. The Gazette was designated as the district’s official newspaper and pay was set for board members, substitute teachers, and prices for activities and activity tickets. These prices stayed the same.
The only real change they made was to set monthly tuition for preschool students to $170 per month from last year’s $165 per month.
Supt. Johnson then made his report to the board. First was an update on medical marijuana. Though the fate of recreational cannabis in SD has yet to be determined, it has been approved for medical use, though laws and regulations about it have not been universally established in state law.
“Whether or not a student may use medical marijuana is a factor beyond our control, and is a decision between them and their doctor,” he said. “We can limit how it’s distributed. It can’t be in smokable form, it must be either in pill form or otherwise digestible. Dosages can be limited to either being stored in a locked cabinet where other medical supplies are kept or a parent or caregiver would bring dosages to the school to administer directly. Over the next few months we’ll need to decide what’s the best policy for our school overall.”
New board member Longhenry talked about morphine shots or EpiPens, noting that both of those are strong drugs and narcotics for emergency medical use and are kept locked away for safety, but kept for necessity as a well. He said he had no problem treating medical cannabis the same way.
Next Supt. Johnson talked about the upcoming ASBSD/SASD joint conference. He ran over the schedule of events and recommended the board take advantage of the training seminars. He also proposed a separate seminar for August 18th on general boardsmanship offered by the ASBSD. The board agreed.
Next, Supt. Johnson updated the board on the new homeschool laws in South Dakota. In short, in his opinion it’s a rotten piece of legislation that he feels people will take advantage of statewide as a way to take kids out of school while still letting them participate in school activities such as sports. Per Supt. Johnson, there are parents who do an excellent job of teaching their children, but he noted that some parents do not.
His chief problem with the new law is a lack of oversight and standards. Students in school have to maintain certain academic standards to be eligible to play sports and participate in extra curricular activities.
With this new law as written, there is very little oversight, other than the parents of said student letting the school know that the student is or is not eligible, with no documentation or test scores required to prove it. Under these provisions, a student could literally do no classwork and still play sports.
One further thing that should be noted is that the school lunch program will again be free to all students. This is good in that everyone gets a free lunch. This is bad because applications for the free & reduced meal programs for coming years will be made more difficult without accurate data. Supt. Johnson said that as of now, they’re being told to go with whatever numbers were active pre-pandemic.
The board then went into executive session, citing a personnel matter. The next meeting of the school board will be held on Monday, August 9 at 5:45 p.m. at the school library.
