Voting Results: As the Budget Vote results poured in on Tuesday evening, my heart swelled with pride and an overwhelming sense of thankfulness for the support that our community showed for our vision, our employees, and most importantly, our students. I never take a positive vote outcome for granted. Support and trust are EARNED and there is never time to "rest" when it comes to keeping that relationship healthy. Thank you; and our positive work continues.
Aside from the school bus proposition, which is a usual piece of our Budget Vote, the community passed, by a 90% margin, the first phase of our security upgrades. This is also very much appreciated and necessary, as we read about another school shooting in Texas last week. I am afraid these incidents are not going away anytime soon, so working to be as prepared as possible continues to be a top priority.
In the coming weeks I will be able to give you a schedule for what will be upgraded and when. With the positive vote outcome, we can now file our New York State paperwork and get the project moving. My first guess would be for New York State approval by late June/early July, bidding for materials and equipment by the middle of August, and work to begin very late August/early September, with the completion of our first phase at this point next year; hopefully sooner.
In the meantime, we are piecing together a larger project for voter consideration to take place in the fall/early winter so we can keep workers mobilized here and save on startup and tear down costs. Again, I will know more in the next week or so and will give an exact layout.
Board of Education Update: On the Board of Education side, we want to welcome new Board member Dr. Barbara Wells, and congratulate incumbent Board members Kim Coyne, Vladimiro Hart-Zavoli, and Joe Simon. Also as a special note, the Board of Education meeting scheduled for June 6 is canceled and the next meeting will be June 20. The official new "terms" of these Board members will begin on July 2, the evening of our reorganizational meeting.
Special Olympics: Last week were the annual Special Olympics held at Cicero-North Syracuse High School. Under a picture-perfect sky, over 900 champions from around the area competed in a variety of events and showed all of us in attendance that there still is greatness and positivity in this world. I am very proud of our athletes! They were sent off to the games and welcomed back by their classmates, with many of them also attending the games to cheer the athletes on in person. Good stuff!
Transportation Receives High Marks: Congratulations to our school bus mechanics. Once again they far exceeded the safety standards for school bus repair given to them by New York State. They provide an exceptional level of care because they know just how important their cargo is! They again achieved the goal of a 90% or greater pass rate on their annual NYS Department of Transportation Bus Inspection with an out-of-service rate of .9%, while the NYS average is 4.8% and the tolerance is 10%.
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New Requirement: On the business side of things, I wanted to get you familiar with the words "990 hours" because you are going to be hearing about the "990 hour requirement" in the coming months. Children in New York State must attend school for 180 days per year. For next year, the New York State Education Department has indicated that in addition to the 180 days, children must be in attendance for a total of 990 hours, not including passing time, recess, and other traditionally non-instructional times.
The state gave each school district a handy spreadsheet to help them calculate their 990 hours, using their schedules from this current year. We are going to be fine, with some minor tweaking, as long as we stay within our scheduled allotment of snow days. If we exceed them (they vary between 5 and 6 per year depending on the calendar, leap year, etc.) we may need to make some adjustments, but we will cross that bridge when we need to.
Happening this Week: Speaking of snow days, because we used enough of them this year, school WILL BE in session this Friday. This week is very busy as we start to wind things down, and I hope to see many of you at
Kaleidoscope which is Thursday night at the Civic Center. Thanks again and have a wonderful week!
Chris
