Name: School Board 9-14-26
Uploaded: 2026-09-14T00:00:00Z
Duration: 56 min
Description: But if you look at the general fund in the budget number, we had budgeted to go $3.4 million, that was our revenue compared to our expenses.

[0:01] Call the meeting to order. Please rise for the pledge.

[0:11] To the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

[0:28] Okay. Good evening. We have a good news report. Diane is going to introduce us to the good news. Yes. We have a lot of good news this evening. We had an epic start to the 2627 school year.

[0:53] And this past weekend was a great community celebration that we call the Presidents Bowl, the largest annual Booster club fundraiser for student activities at our high schools, will be bringing in the organizers of the presidential for a report on the success of that sometime in the near future, so we'll look forward to that. You'll recall our theme for this year is Our Kids, Our Future.

[1:11] And the message behind that theme really is that our public schools are excellent, but due in part, largely, of course, because we have excellent staff, but also because we have so many community partners that stand alongside us and walk with us to make certain that our schools are strong.

[1:32] And we wanted to highlight some special partnerships and organizations that have consistently shown up for our students and staff through the years, and just give you a taste of some of the back to school kinds of donations that we have received.

[1:53] First and foremost, one of our huge shout outs goes to our partners at Architecture Incorporated, who for more than 20 years have allowed us to make this very large school district seem a bit smaller by helping us identify the theme every year by providing t shirts for every staff member. That's really a highlight for all of our staff, and after more than 20 years, we still get excited about that gift of Architecture Incorporated.

[2:18] They did then add a couple of other sponsors to the list as well. So we want to highlight Sayer Associates, Engineering Solutions, Structural Engineering Associates, and Associated Consulting Engineering Incorporated.

[2:39] They were added to the sponsor list a couple of years ago, and we're so grateful to them, not only for financing the t shirts so that tax dollars don't need to be used, but also then willingly showing up to distribute those on the days where we're trying to get those out to our staff members as well. And I know doctrine, old and other leaders in the district made some personal efforts to stop by those businesses and say thank you as well. And I understand that was very well received.

[3:01] In addition to that, further, at the beginning of this school year, there's the listing, I guess. Never knew there was so many words that could go into a title, but most of them are associated in some way and engineering in some way and such. So again, we're grateful to them.

[3:19] Shields has stepped up in so many different ways for us. This year. They provided 400 backpacks for title one schools, and they are also a major sponsor of President's Bowl. Not sure if you saw it on on social media, but they had each of our schools take a picture. Our staff at the high schools take a picture.

[3:40] And then people were to to vote. And they have $5,000 for the schools first, second and third and fourth place. So everybody's going to get a little generosity as well. But they do a great job of of sponsoring our back to school efforts as well. Project S.O.S. donated 500 backpacks specifically for our Office of Indian Education.

[4:07] Sign up for families down here. Plus they do, of course, a large backpack giveaway every year in the neighborhood of 7 to 8000 backpacks distributed citywide. And what a gift that is to our families who who do need help in that arena. Shoes for Shorty's is something that Ransom church does. They gave away 1350 pair.

[4:33] So 2700 shoes. Walking around our community that are brand new does a lot for the soul, if you will, to get a new pair of shoes. And then our our school supply drives.

[4:59] Augie access is a program for students, a two year program for students with special needs at Augustana College, and they put together a school supply drive. In addition, hand decorated those bags, and we're able to give those out to our families as well. Hungry hearts had an event before the school year started, and also Amazon has notified us that they'll be giving them another very large school supply donation to our our public schools as well.

[5:26] And then I've been in communication with two other local businesses that want to provide coat and winter gear drives, and so we're really grateful for that as well. Over the weekend, Gay Anderson stepped out of her weekend zone and went to the volleyball courts, where 605 painting painting hosted a volleyball tournament. They raised $2,450.

[5:58] The owners of 605 painting, Daniel and Kyle, said they've had personal experiences that have led them to feel called to give to the Angel fund this year and help out to support school lunches for families that are having difficulties.

[6:19] So this was a just, hey, what are you doing on Saturday? Would you come by and accept a check? And sure, we're grateful for for them for stepping up in in that way, shape and form. And then since we started this good news report, by talking about precedence, we have one final celebration from the weekend. It too was epic.

[6:41] It was opening weekend of football, but it was also opening weekend of our middle and high school girls flag football, thanks in part to the grant given by the Minnesota Vikings to our Community Learning centers. And if you take a look at those photos, it's safe to say the competition was tough. But the girls were a little tougher.

[7:09] They played their hearts out at the opening weekend and every weekend. Now during the month of September, they have jamboree type games. So since 2022, the Vikings have invested more than $2 million to expand girls flag football. And we're grateful to be a part of that generosity and to get that off the ground here in Sioux Falls as well.

[7:33] It's the nation's fastest emerging high school sport. So once again, we could not do any of this work alone. But it does bring us back to our theme and reminds us that our kids truly our our our future, and it takes all of us to ensure that our future is bright.

[7:53] So just a couple of snapshots of really great things that have happened since we stepped foot back into our schools.

[8:03] Any questions? For me, I should say over 100. I believe the number was about 110 girls participating in the flag football, so that's a great showing for a first attempt. What a great snapshot though the end of the generosity in our community, and just want to thank everybody who steps up and helps kids out.

[8:30] And that's just it's just emblematic of our city how giving and generous people are. So I want to thank everybody who helps us. Absolutely. Very good. That says it all for sure. Thank you. Can I please get an approval of the minutes of the meeting held on 824, 2026 and nine two 2026? So moved. Second.

[8:58] All in favor? I opposed that is proved. We do not have anybody wishing to address the board on agenda or non-agenda items. Can I please get an approval of the agenda? So second. All in favor I opposed. We have an approved agenda for this evening. Seeing no conflicts of interest.

[9:21] We will move on to the approval of the consent agenda items. Those would be items a through. Can I please get a motion to approve the consent agenda items. Items A through E. So moved. Second. All in favor? I opposed we have approved the consent agenda.

[9:42] We'll now move on to reports to the superintendent, with our first report being the youth by.

[9:48] Thank you. We do have our first report of this evening as part of the superintendent's reports with the Youth Live program, the University of Florida Literacy Institute. And you've heard some about this, of the progress we've made over the years of looking for that program that will help with literacy in the elementary setting.

[10:06] And so some of the data, information you'll see tonight, doctor Will will report out and show some of the girls we made through the youth program with our literacy and the elementary ages. So, doctor seven, all right. I'm here to provide an update from back in.

[10:23] Actually, if you look at the timeline, 2324 is when we began this journey with you fly and that was piloting it in five schools to see how that would go. Title non-title and a two way immersion school all the way up to the current year. This is the first year, 2627, that we have all kindergarten through second grade students participating in.

[10:47] You fly the second grade teachers that weren't part of the first pilot. They will be getting professional learning this year as they're implementing. And then on top of that, we have our Ela started Ela study beginning. So if you see that arrow. So as we look ahead to this year we're going to start that Ela study.

[11:09] But then also we have seven schools. It says five should be seven seven schools that are going to be piloting Word origins which is the next step from you fly. They partnered with Australia to develop to develop You Fly and Word Origins and that will be for third through fifth grade.

[11:29] So we're going to do the same exact model to begin with. But then hopefully as we begin that Ela study and get into next year, at the end of the year in implementation, then we would roll that into our Ela study to provide that for all third through fifth grade students.

[11:47] So if you look at map reading fluency of you fly. So this was from kindergarten. So 2024 all the way up until 2026. You can see in the blue and green still either meeting those expectations or exceeding expectations has held pretty strong like 80%. And we don't see those kinds of numbers in a lot of other programs.

[12:10] So we are committed to this work, and we feel like this is truly working for our kids, and that's why we're excited for that 3 to 5 word origins piece as well. All right.

[12:33] So anytime we have a new professional learning that we're offering, we definitely have to have them attending those sessions, the teachers so that they feel strong in that in their learning. And so you can't you won't be able to look at all of these deeply, but you can just see by just by looking at it that Abby and Sara have a lot of professional learning going on with those cohorts that were second grade implementing this year,

[12:51] and then also crossing over with that third grade pilot. And they've done some professional learning this summer, even before the school year started. That was optional. And we had almost all of the teachers from all seven buildings come. They were eager to learn about it, and then they had time to plan.

[13:10] It's very cost effective as you fly was, I think, a manual forward origins is about $275. So when you think of the cost of this, that's what it is. And probably looking at you fly manuals for intervention. So that would be a tier two program in three through five. Tier one program in K through two.

[13:36] All right. What questions do you have for me okay. Stand by one second. We're just going to get this on the table. Can I get a motion to acknowledge the informational update on you fly.

[13:51] Questions observations feedback.

[13:56] Well I just want to acknowledge, number one, the cost efficiency associated with the program. And then number two, some of the results that we're seeing. Would you want to speak just briefly? I know we don't have the totality of those, but just some of the positive notes that we have concerning the program.

[14:16] And I also just want to welcome you. Thank you. We're glad you're here. Thank you I appreciate that. Yeah. Just K-2, especially when we look at those kindergartners coming in with that phonics and phoneme awareness.

[14:37] I mean, both of those pieces, those foundational skills, when we're getting up to being above all of that, that was in the blue that you saw. And then even the green meets expectations. There's like 50% of kids that are going above, which is pretty phenomenal. And that stayed true from the implementation year 2324. And then if you look to 26, was the last set of data that we had. It's pretty consistent.

[14:54] So we feel like we're on the right track. Teachers are loving the program. They say that it's easy to use, but it's very we call it kind of like a perky pace because it does keep going. But it's consistent routines for kids. They know exactly what's coming next. So there's no, you know, wondering.

[15:11] And then they'll go and check, you know, when they're done with each section. And then when they go into our first grade and then second, I had one student of mine last year, the assistant asked him, like, how did you know how to spell that? And he goes, duh, I've been in you fly for three years.

[15:28] And so they definitely are very familiar with the program in the consistency of it and then carrying it over to first grade and then to second grade. And now having a space for those pilot schools in third grade, I can tell you there's way more than seven schools that wanted to be a part of it.

[15:42] But we have to start small and then, you know, figure out how that pilot goes and hopefully expand. And we're also very excited with literacy allies. And we're learning those of us that are volunteering are learning firsthand some of the strategies that you all are incorporating.

[16:03] And we want to thank the community members that have stepped forward to go into our schools to continue the great programing as a result of you fly. And I think our goal was 150 and we surpassed that with 200, correct? We're over 200 that have volunteered to be part of the literacy allies.

[16:19] And and a lot of it is with the youth programing pieces of that that we were able to utilize at the home sites. We'll do that at our school sites to make sure those kids receive that. But a lot of the same programing. Yeah. Excellent. I see the graph again. Can I see the graph again when we head up about that graph.

[16:41] The data one. That one. This one I just want to do. I didn't have time to take it in a little slow. And you see on that chart there, you know from the fall to the winter to the spring.

[16:55] So in succession for each one of those years where it continues to move and increase that that blue line or the green and the blue, the two critical areas there. And so each one of those tests as they go through for each of the years 2024, 2025, 2026 to continue throughout the year to increase those numbers, students that are in the blue and the green,

[17:14] can we just highlight that it says phonics at the bottom? For anybody that thinks our K-12 system isn't utilizing phonics, it's right here in our open board meeting for people to review. And we encourage utilizing phonics. We've never quit using phonics. It's just worded differently sometimes. So.

[17:40] So the left hand side is phonological awareness, and the other side is phonics and word recognition. So all of those components of foundational skills are implemented. Thank you Doctor Stephanie, can you explain the word origins to me again, what students that might be targeting, are we going to think if the pilot goes well, are we going to expand all of schools? Yes.

[18:01] So to answer the second question first, the hope would be that yes, we see the same results that we're seeing in you fly. And the intent would be to expand three five.

[18:18] It kind of aligns perfectly with our Ela study because it gives us time to pilot, but then really see if that's something that we want to build into that study. You know, as we're looking for curriculum word origins itself. So I kind of went through this one quickly. So it's a vocabulary expansion program that helps students master the building blocks of the English language.

[18:39] Really it's I was trying to condense it instead of saying like morphology or morphology, because a lot of people are like, well, what is that? And it's really the study of words. This is actually a tier one program for three through five, and they feel strongly that they need something more.

[18:54] And I can tell you our third grade teachers especially are like, well, why don't we have you fly? Well, you fly is not a tier one program for third grade. So when this was developed, we were like, this is something we definitely need to try because they are a partnership. So just a little history.

[19:13] So You Fly was actually created by the University of Florida and they shared that product with Australia. So then Australia came up with word origins for the three four, five. And then they partnered back with You Fly to make it for North American students. And so there is that partnership and they're there like a dyslexia university in Australia. So that's kind of the history of it of it.

[19:37] But in this program they'll learn the roots prefixes, suffixes of words and it will help with reading comprehension. All those pieces that come after the foundational pieces are developed.

[19:57] Or two. Yes. So tier one would be our our strong curriculum. Like we always say, you have to have a strong tier one that would be content that covers it should reach all students. But for sure 8,080% of the students would be a tier one.

[20:22] Then a tier two would be for those kids that maybe didn't quite get it yet. So when we think of you fly and we think of the like the 80% that you saw, well, there's still 24%. So those 20% of kids just haven't got it yet. They just need more time to practice. And so those kids then would be at a tier two.

[20:39] And so when we think of you fly tier one for K-2 word origins, you fly meaning all kids get it for three five. And then those intervention pieces would be they need more at bats or more practice.

[21:00] Okay. All in favor? Opposed? Excellent. We acknowledge your report. Thank you. Thank you. And again. Welcome. Thank you I appreciate it. Our second report that we have this evening is our initial enrollment report. And obviously, as you know, the end of September is a critical count for for student funding.

[21:24] And we do always present each year just to give that initial report to see where we're at at the beginning of the year, four days into the school year, and to make sure we kind of compare those numbers as we go through and project forward. So Mr. Morrison will give that report this evening. All right. Good evening.

[21:38] It is my honor to present our traditional day for enrollment report. And so that's the purpose of tonight. And so really in this report what we're looking for is trends. Something unusual we didn't expect. So we can react to it. And so we're just going to go to kind of the headlines.

[21:58] And what does it look like for our overall enrollment. And so we can just kind of walk through this. But overall you'll see that we're about down about 1.5% versus the same time last year versus the same day. Now school started a week later.

[22:20] That made that may play into some things and how we end up with final enrollment. But this year, September 1st was the fourth day. And last year, August 26th was the fourth day junior kindergarten, up about eight students comparing year over year K through fifth grade, down about 169 or 1.5%. Middle school holding steady. They're down only 42 students, about 0.8 percent.

[22:49] And then high school ninth through 12th down 153 students about 2%. And so you get overall you're 1.5% pre k still fluctuating a little bit as they have a little later start. So that's kind of the headlines we're working with. And we'll kind of go through some of the detail on that.

[23:15] So historically I think you know we have shown a very high growth trend through about 2020 20 to 21. We were growing at about an annual rate of 1.6%. And you can see that from the line. And then after that we've sort of leveled off. And last year we declined a little. This year we're going to probably decline again.

[23:35] And there are some reasons for that that we'll get into that. But that's sort of a longitudinal view over the last 25, 30 years or so.

[23:47] So what's what's going to happen is between now and the final cut off for enrollment, which is the last Friday in September, we have a lot of movement because we have kids that are in and out of school. We have kids that have changed schools. We're getting enrollment records for.

[24:08] And so what the blue line is showing is what the preliminary counts were at each day for all the way back to 21, 22. And the Green Line is where we actually ended up. So what this is saying is traditionally, we will end up lower than what our preliminary counts are. Now.

[24:28] To what extent? I think maybe the later start for us will help that, because other school districts started ahead of us, and so they probably requested enrollments and things. So we may have already processed a lot of enrollments at this point on day four that in prior years we had to wait on. So we'll see where that ends up.

[24:48] Right now, I can tell you that as far as no shows I have as of this morning, about 61 kids that have not been to school at all. And so we can't drop them until fifth, 15 days later. So we're trying to work those with all the school. What's happening? Do we know about them.

[25:08] And but we can't drop them until 15 days. But a lot of times we'll just get a transfer record or something like that. So we know that those are out there.

[25:26] I can tell you that after ten days and looking at it this morning versus where we were at on day four, were up about seven students last year, we were down 50 at this time. So like I said, the later start may try to minimize that. The magnitude of that drop, we'll see.

[25:37] When we look at budgeted. Just I just put that in there because just to make it known that we did budget for less kids this year, right. So we know by being able to predict flow rates and everything that our enrollment was going to be down a little bit.

[25:53] I think in kindergarten, we were hoping that that would bounce back a little bit. And so I think excluding kindergarten, which is probably the hardest cohort to predict, we are projecting to be down about 168 students. So right now we're sitting about 123 students below where we were at on the final count last year.

[26:16] So we'll continue to monitor that. This slides a lot of numbers, but this is essentially a lot of how we can predict enrollment. And so this is looking at cohorts as opposed to enrolled grades. And so if you look down the 2526 column those were the cohorts.

[26:37] You can see kindergarten first grade all the way through ending up at our final enrollment of 23 nine, 77 this year. Now we can put in 2627 and where we're out so far, and we can kind of match up cohorts. So if you were in kindergarten last year, we look at first grade this year and sort of how is that trending.

[26:55] And so you see the column over there called flow rate. That's the flow of whether we're growing or shrinking. And so you can see as you get down into high school, of course, you can start to see those decline a little bit because we have drop outs, even though we have a very high

[27:14] graduation rate of 90% or so, we know that 10% still aren't graduating in 10% on a cohort of 2000 is 200 kids. So we know we're taking some drop their overall, though, and then looking at the prior year flow flow rate and then using that to predict what we think our enrollment would have been.

[27:36] We're very close. Right. So and if you look at it overall, we lost about 1% of our kids just looking at cohort to cohort. And this year we're running at right on the same number.

[27:56] So very predictable I would say when you looked at the historical chart when it was growing, you would see those at over 100%. Right? Because we had kids moving to into our district. And so we were picking up kids around along the way. That trend isn't so much anymore because we're the our district is very mature and it's just but very predictable. The hardest part is trying to project project kindergarten.

[28:20] And so you can see what's happened with our kindergarten enrollment is we were running probably consistently a cohort of 2000 kindergartners. And that, as you can see, has just continued to drop. And I think you've seen, you know, we're our district is landlocked. We have some the most growth is happening outside of our district.

[28:42] I think you saw in the governor's budget address that the live birth rates are down in South Dakota. So that's playing into some of that, as well as other factors that we continue to look at. There is private school choices. There's home school which we know is grown. And so we continue to watch that trend.

[29:00] But you can see as those cohorts start to work through the district, we'll start to see the same pressure on enrollment. So this is probably the hardest one to predict is what the kindergarten cohort it's going to look like. But it's kind of settled into that 17 to 1800 range.

[29:22] So when we look at elementary school, kind of take these elementary, middle and high school what enrollments look like. So as I said before, elementary is down about 140 or 1.5%. And that's really what's happened is those kindergarten cohorts are coming in and the larger cohorts are moving out, and then we can look at it by school.

[29:45] And so I think the things to note on here, I would note two, two takeaways from this. You can see Marcel LeBeau starting to grow. And so we picked up 84 students there which is to be expected a combination of just, you know, the new kindergarten class classes being bigger.

[30:07] But we have students open enrolled from not only outside the district but inside the district. So it's taken some pressure off some of those other West Side schools, which is probably a good thing. So Hayward, things of that nature.

[30:24] And then of course, you'll see those kids will eventually most of those fooled into that that school and they'll continue to grow towards their war section capacity that Marcel LeBeau has. The other thing I would take away is that there's more been more pressure into central schools, right? So as Sioux Falls, kind of the the core of city, the core of the city and the population growth there is less, right?

[30:46] It's maturing neighborhoods and things of that nature, less younger kids. And so we we continue to see pressure on those centrally located schools, east side very stable and the specialty schools stable as well. So that's we continue to watch kind of the central part of town.

[31:12] They're middle school, very consistent because we just haven't seen those lower kindergarten classes that we've seen coming. They'll eventually get to middle school, but we haven't seen that yet. And so middle school has been very stable. And if you look at all the different schools there, you'll see not much change in, you know, just a few 20 students or so kind of flipping between schools or whatever.

[31:33] But overall nothing really that we see a pattern that we would be concerned about or something that we didn't expect. High school down about 153. I would say that probably the one to that's interesting. There is Jefferson.

[31:56] So that's one to watch and one that we'll kind of be analyzing here in the next weeks as we get closer to final enrollment. But their freshman and sophomore classes have been less than they have been probably over the last few years. So that's one thing driving that.

[32:21] So again, nothing probably completely unexpected here as far as when we can look at the high school enrollment compared to historical flow rates and then open enrollment, open enrollment at this point up by about 66 students. And you can see on the left hand chart there what schools are going to. And so you can see the ones that we've seen some growth in.

[32:45] And these again these are kids from outside of the Sioux Falls School District. So you can see which ones are picking up. Nothing really major so to speak. See a big pick and discovery about 16 students and but kind of scattered all throughout there. But the good news is we continued to attract students from outside our district into into our district.

[33:07] And then on the right hand side you can see where they come from. So of course, we know that Brandon and Harrisburg and then T and Valley and West Central are probably our biggest schools that we get open enrollment from. And so we've seen growth from te area, Tri Valley and Brandon. We saw pickup as well.

[33:31] So so that's a good news story good news trend that we hope to keep going just because of the offerings that we have in the in the district and that kids want to open and roll into our district. So the next steps for enrollment are, you know, we continue to watch every day what's trends, what's happening.

[33:51] But the cutoff for enrollment is the the last Friday in September, which will be September 25th. I will bring a final enrollment board report to you on October 26th. And then we do the sign off on funding with the department, the Doe on as of October 31st. That's kind of what to expect.

[34:14] So we'll see lights and say lots of lots of activity going on with enrollments and building clerical trying to process. You know, we get requests for records. We got kids showing up for school late. It's a lot of movement.

[34:38] I think last year between day four and the final count, we processed about 800 records, right, going one way or the other. So lots of fluid. But this day for report at least kind of gives us a view of, of kind of how things are going in a general trend. I would say really nothing surprising other than our kindergarten cohort continues to, to move down.

[35:01] So and with that, I would ask for acknowledgment of the 2627 initial enrollment report and standby for any questions. Thank you. Motion to approve to acknowledge the 2020 2627 Initial Enrollment Report. Second questions. Observations. Go ahead. Mr. Morrison, on the CTE numbers. Excuse me.

[35:35] So both on the enrollment chart and on the open enrollment chart, it's running about 33, 34% for the last two years. So my understanding is we're only counting the open enrolled kids in the enrollment report because the other two thirds come from our schools and they're counted in their home school. Is that how that works? At the CTE Academy? Yeah. Well, CTE we don't include.

[35:58] So these are these are our feet that we're including. We have some partnering districts that you write that come to CTE. They and they pass tuition to attend. So out district that are outside the district, those are not in our numbers. We don't get funded for those. The districts reimburse us for that tuition.

[36:19] And so those wouldn't, wouldn't be included in in their. But then I'm more confused about your chart for enrollment and open enrollment. You have 33 and 34% for the student counts.

[36:43] So that has to be the out of district kids that are showing up on those charts, because the other two thirds are Sioux Falls District kids, and they get counted in their home attendance schools. You're looking on on the chart, you're looking at right now,.34. There's one student that's out of district homeschooled that open road to support school district. Right. These are these are all students that we're getting funded for.

[37:01] Their residential district would be on the right hand side. So they are in the Brandon Valley School District, but they choose to go to the Sioux Falls School District. So the the funding follows the student. So the state's paying a per student funding basis, just like we have students that are open enrolling to other districts as well.

[37:23] So excellent. Very good. Absolutely. Enrollment has a financial impact. But you know what it's much harder to calculate is the long term value of a good quality education. I thought it was so fitting that we had the shirts that were shown on one of the first slides of the good news report.

[37:45] We took it in terms of our partners that make education happen, but what we also make happen is the kids that were educating go back out into the community. And that's something that's really hard to calculate the value of good quality education. So these numbers are, you know, absolutely important.

[38:05] And it's equally important that we continue to listen to our stakeholders in terms of what we're offering up for programing, our opportunities, our multiple pathways as kids go out into the world and so that we can continue to remain competitive in the changing dynamics. Go ahead. Curious.

[38:36] As far as watching trends, do you bring this down to a demographics level and if so, when? We know we have certain populations that are more likely to struggle with enrollment or chronic absenteeism, how does your department work with, like Miss Kennedy or Elizabeth Herbert to provide like in our school improvement plans? I know Laura B Anderson puts specifically in Native Americans chronic absenteeism.

[39:02] Do you guys work together to build their improvement plans to help support people we keep missing out on, or what does that look like? So I mean, obviously, listen, and we work very hard with them. We have created in my department many, many dashboards, and we'll bring in a work session in January, I think. But we have lots of data by by subgroups.

[39:23] In fact, we created one here last year for Anna Broken Leg that just looks at the native population and their performance. But we can look at any subgroup and then we can look at Sped kids.

[39:41] And then you're right, we can look at our all of our performance, whether it's state testing, map testing, graduation rate or whatever, because we're looking at a report card. But what subgroups may be lagging or trending the wrong way. And then that flows into the school improvement plans that all the schools do. And so yeah, that's essentially where they're trying to make that data available to them so that they can have that level of detail.

[40:03] So yeah, and we know that granularity. Is it really extremely important because that's where it makes it individualized student by student. We can talk about data at a high level all day long. But until we're impacting each student with what their individual need is it's hard to affect.

[40:27] And we'll have a workshop coming up on the school improvement plans where we bring them in and we help them analyze their data. So it's not always intuitive, but we we bring them in, we show them the tools. And we have really worked hard on the school improvement plans and trying to make them.

[40:46] So they do flow and they can get down to, like you said, the level of detail to move those student populations that that need to be moved. So something that we're very diligent on and continue to work on. Thank you. And we have it added in this year just to look at that, because Mr.

[41:02] Morrison and his department has put out a significant amount of access to data. Now that will break it down for the individual schools. So in January, I believe it is.

[41:19] We'll have a little bit of a run through of some of the different reports that that schools, teachers, administrators are able to run to look at those attendance being one of them, multiple different ones, warning reports to be able to look to see what kids are starting to struggle and catch them before they do. But we'll have a look at that a little more in-depth. Look at some of those things that they produced in January.

[41:36] Anxious to show that because, President Kelly, you remember our early days of the Covid dashboard. And so how we evolved from that. So it's been it's been fun but appreciate you are our original thought partner in that. So yeah we did that was feels like a long time ago.

[41:53] Glad that that is still being useful and used as a dashboard to affect these great changes per school with what's needed in the school improvement. So excellent.

[42:04] Okay. All in favor I opposed. We have approved the initial enrollment report. Thank you, Mr. Morrison. All right. We have our last item on the on the agenda for this evening. I'm just turning it over to make sure. And that's our budget wrap up report. Hi. Good evening.

[42:32] Yes, we will go through kind of a overview of wrap up of our fiscal year 26 budget. We have completed that for our annual report. And now we are ready to share kind of the results from the year. So we're going to talk about our tax supported funds throughout this. If you look at this first slide this is our revenues.

[42:54] So in the first row or in this we're going to talk about general fund capital outlay special education and bond redemption. In the first column there you have your budget compared to our actual. So for our revenues we budgeted 235 million. If you look in general fund we had about 236 million.

[43:13] So it was a little higher than expected capital outlay also higher than expected. Special education was a little bit down. And then bond redemption was just a little bit lower than expected. That could be taxes received. If we don't receive our taxes in the correct fiscal year, we have to receive them back for the next year. So that's very possible.

[43:31] But if you look, overall, we did receive more revenue than we had expected by about a 1% margin there. So that was a good sign. Next is expenditures for these same funds or same different areas. So general fund I think this is very important. We had budgeted $238 million or $238.6 million in expenses, and we actually only had $236 million in expenses.

[43:57] So a combination of being fiscally responsible efficiencies, working through those areas, we actually spent by about 1% in general, fund capital also under spent by 866,000. Special education we underspend and then bond. Redemption was about as right on as you could be. Or just $400, $400 over in that area.

[44:22] Again, if you look at the totals, about 1% off, that's kind of a theme throughout this. We've been very accurate and very close in our budgeting. I think this one is probably more important of the three. This is showing our what we budgeted for revenue compared to expenses compared to where we actually ended. So maybe a little bit confusing.

[44:42] But if you look at the general fund in the budget number, we had budgeted to go $3.4 million, that was our revenue compared to our expenses. We did expect to lose or go into the negative by about 3.4 million, and we actually ended up positive 55,000. So it a change of over $3.

[45:02] 4 million in the positive direction, which is again, a testament to that fiscal responsibility finding those efficiencies. We had a little extra revenue compared to what we thought, but a lot of it was the the less expenditures that we had capital outlay, we expected the be ahead about $2.7 million, and we ended up $6.

[45:20] 9 million ahead of capital outlay, special education. We did actually expect to lose 273,000 there also, but we ended up about 250,000 ahead and then bond redemption. We were expected to be about 131,000, and we ended around 1987. So a little bit lower there.

[45:40] But again, all of those funds actually came out very well from budget compared to actual. And it's honestly very positive for the district as a whole.

[45:49] This is our unaffiliated fund balances. So for the general fund state about even keynote here is we projected to have about an 11.6% fund balance. And we're at 11.5. We're right where we thought we'd be. We're right in that range capital outlay. We did expect to only be at 16 million at this point.

[46:09] We were at 20 for fund balance. But that's kind of in a in a plan. We know we have a bond election coming up and we know we have a lot of projects, any extra money that we have in capital outlay that can be used towards those projects just reduces how much we have to bond for.

[46:24] So that's a win for us as far as when we're looking at the bond special education, we did go up a little bit. In fund balance. The state allows you to have a 25% fund balance. We're sitting at 15 and I think it is important to have a fund balance.

[46:39] Their special education is one where you're not funded the year of. So this year will be funded on how many students in general fund based on September. But we are actually funded a year behind for special education based on the child count.

[46:55] So you want to have a little fun balance there in case our child count goes up and we're funded a year late so that you have some money there to cover any extra expenses. So that's also looking good. And then bond redemption. We're sitting at about 48%, but we do have a large bond payment right away in August.

[47:11] So that's 6 million that we have gets paid right into a bond payment right away. So we need that fund balance there to help make that first initial payment right away in August. This I think is kind of the highlight.

[47:29] I really think this is a cool slide and a very important one that shows what happened last year for teacher accountability. So as you know, the state has come up with teacher compensation accountability. And I know this chart is a lot there's a lot going on here. So I'm kind of going to start a little bit off here. The 1.25% that you see multiple times on the right hand column.

[47:47] That's what the state gave. So that's why all of those numbers are exactly 1.25. The teacher target salary went up by 1.25. The compensation went up by 1.25 for the state. So if you look at the first two rows, those are our numbers for the Sioux Falls School District. Our average teacher salary last year was 62,683.

[48:07] And it almost went up $1,000 to 63. 638, which is 1.52%. So we went up more than what the state gave. And that's also to be considering if a teacher retired at a higher salary and you hire a new teacher at a lower salary, that brings your salary down,

[48:24] we actually still went up more than what the state requires. Even with all of that happening, teacher compensation is what we're actually kept to. Is not the salary so much we are.

[48:44] We are required to do a total compensation package, our average compensation from last year to this or two years ago to this last year, we went from $84,352 to $86,064, an increase of a little over $1,700 per staff member or per teacher and total compensation. If you look the our the state's target teacher salary is 62,821 on row three there we're at 63. 638. So we're about 800 hours ahead of just the salary compared to what the state is going for.

[49:13] And then total compensation. The this is where it gets a little confusing. There's a number that we're required to be at and the number that they hope we're at, the required number is in the required teacher compensation toward the bottom there. We need to be at a minimum of 82,857.

[49:34] When they set the accountability they hope were around the 85,420. And if you look at 86 064 like we are, we're ahead of both now. And if you kind of look in column fiscal year 25, we were a tiny bit extra $18 below the goal one, not the required one last year.

[49:52] And now we're a half or three quarters of a percent above, we were 3% above what was required, and now we're almost 4% above what was required. So I think the key here is we did all of that. The extra increases.

[50:11] While if you go back to the other slides, cutting expenses and being ahead on all of those areas like we talked about, so we were able to get more compensation to our staff members while still maintaining a fiscally responsible budget. I know that's kind of a confusing slide there, but there's a lot on there.

[50:29] And all that is the the wrap up of those tax supported funds and teacher accountability. And I asked for administrative recommendation of the report on the district's fiscal year 28 budget wrap up. Okay. Very good. Can I get a motion to acknowledge the report on the district's 26 budget? Wrap up second questions? Observations.

[50:57] Well, I'm glad we're ahead on some things. I wish we could do more, but proud of the effort putting in. I think it just shows, you know, as we prepare for the legislative session, the work that we put in this last year, building relationships, I can only hope that we'll have a better outcome so we don't have to talk

[51:19] about cutting and providing for our staff and keeping up with inflation. And there's just it's just it's been really weird being a school board member. I'll be honest, because you're never not talking about budget. I know you're saying wrap up, but we're already thinking like five years ahead and it's a lot to juggle.

[51:41] But I've watched this team go very thoroughly into making sure that we do the best we absolutely can, even in worst case scenarios, state level, federal level. And I have a lot of friends around the country who are school board members, and they are not bearing out as well as we are.

[51:59] So I'm very grateful and that aspect. But I just know we have a lot of work to do and gosh dang it, don't we still need better toilet paper, guys? Better paper, you know, so there's room to grow. There's still stuff we can do better.

[52:18] But again, very fortunate that we have a team that's working hard to come alongside our partners on a state level to make sure we're doing the best we can.

[52:28] A couple of things just to highlight that, that really appreciative of, we've gone through with the teams of budget, prepares to make sure we could find efficiencies wherever we could and and at the same time always making sure that as we're doing that to balance, to give the utmost increases,

[52:47] we can in that 4% or 3.87% that was given of the teachers correlates across the board with other areas as well. The target amount they set is always for the teacher piece, but we do the negotiation so that it does impact all the other groups equally and appropriately.

[53:05] So to be able to do that, while we're making sure we found the efficiencies to make sure we're still almost 4% above what that targeted piece was and well above what we get allocated from the state, has been a great way to be able to make sure we're pouring back into the staff, and we greatly appreciate it.

[53:21] At the same time, preparing for what would be a bond to make sure that that bond is going to be at the lowest possible number we can to still get the projects done and be able to take it off of what we currently have and build that up

[53:34] and save with the efficiencies to make sure that our buildings are kept up to date. So a lot of very good things happening that way. This is almost a good news report in what's being paid and the increases and the way that we're making sure we find the revenues to be able to do that. Yeah.

[53:53] Well said, both of you. And I'm just always amazed at the number of people that put our budget together. And as Don Murray said, it's a year round process. We think that we're wrapping up now and we're going to rest for a while.

[54:10] But that's not how it works, and I'm so thankful that we have the people in the community, members that serve on these committees and that that work so hard on it and keep all those plates spinning at the same time.

[54:29] When you're working on fiscal 27 and you're thinking about fiscal 30 at the same time, and it shows, and we will continue to do the best we can to our staff, because you're what keeps our our buildings operating and our kids learning. And that's what we're about. So thank you for the work on the budget. And thank you to our staff for everything you need. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.

[54:46] And we really have folks last couple of years we reduce the budget by 5 million. We made sure to keep our eyes on no major cuts to our staff, at the same time giving them a raise. And then the lowest possible bond.

[55:09] So we consistently sit between this tension of where can we save and where should we invest, and when we can shift that conversation to where we can invest. We know we're good stewards of our dollars, but our greatest responsibility is how we're preparing our students to go out into the world. And it's really hard to quantify the value for society of a good public education. So congratulations all, and let's keep it going a step further.

[55:33] And that shifting the paradigm and the conversation to who we're investing in, why we're making those investments, and what that means to the community at large, to our society, to our state. Good quality public education is a frontrunner in that. Okay. All in favor I opposed. We have passed the or acknowledged the report on the wrap up.

[56:00] Thank you. Okay. Can I get a motion to adjourn? All in favor I opposed. We're adjourned.

School Board 9-14-26

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