Summer is here and the pace is supposed to be different. It is not. Somehow things just seem to keep on a-comin’ at a pace that’s nearly dizzying. RCS@60 may have something to do with that. Remind me, please, not to get us into anything quite so grandiose for the 75th! Anyway, time to get back to the business of running a school for a little while at least. We meet Tuesday Night at 7 for a guest and then on to regular business by 7:30.

NON-AGENDA ITEMS:

1.0  Summer School for elementary began on Monday. Project Success is one of Barb’s brainchildren whereby we offer those students most in need an extra dose of schooling using the grant moneys we receive for remediation. This allows us to do extra for these kids without pulling them out of class during the regular year as much - the pattern most Districts use. This is an excellent program and one many schools would love to offer. We are lucky to do so and to have a staff and administration which supports this sort of head start on the school year for these children. When others call for year-round schooling - we’ve taken the first steps for several years now...

2.0  Summer Rec is up and running, too. The Towns of Varick and Romulus combine to offer this program and we merely provide the site. Amy Persing, soon to be a teacher already in Brockport in the Fall, is directing this program once again this year. Amy does a fine job and we have lots of children who find this an excellent way to spend part of their summer.

3.0  Tom Cummings called this morning to confirm that we don’t owe him anything yet. We will anticipate receiving some extra money in the Fall from a claim adjustment to our 97-98 expenses. It appears that our 95-96 money will not be released to us until 2002! Talk about bottlenecking! That’s our great State for you. Tom’s cut is 20% of the extra he finds after you receive it - not when he does the paperwork.

4.0  Ernie Rookey called today and the leasing company is giving him a hassle about closing out our account for phase two. Not a big deal to us - it’s Ernie that’s out the money in the short term. We have requested payment even though the work is yet to be done to try to hasten the process and to close out some payments left over from phase one - like that BOCES bill for labor at union rates thanks to DOL, Tom’s firm.

5.0  I spoke with Roy McMaster - the distinguished greybread from Donnegan’s office about the financing of our proposed capital project for the Fall. Roy did seem to think that we would be able to double dip the Nozzolio grant in aid ( member item) for $25,000 so that we could count it as part of our local share toward the project. This plus our capital reserve ( with interest now at $118,500) would give us close to $145,000 to use as local funds upon which to generate 87.4% State Aid, allowing us to do a project of over one million dollars with no new tax impact. I have faxed him some figures he needs and expect to have a real financing plan sketched out next week. After RCS@60 we’ll need to get down to brass tacks with the architect on what we can afford. Roy suggested that we consider voting on our open house day or on our parent teacher conference day in November, rather than any old day. It’s sneaky but effective and we want to do everything we can to get a yes.... I like it. Every parent of an elementary child comes in for a conference and we hold them until 8 at night- perfect for capturing a share of the population that should support the school at voting hours, even!

6.0  RCS@60 dominates the preparatory work going on in this office. Lots of details to check and double check and still plenty of room for slippage. We have a planning committee meeting on Monday night at 7 for anyone interested in the latest details or in helping out. A reminder along these lines that there is a buffet luncheon on Sunday the 26th at 1 pm at Bona Vista in Willard for all current and former Board members and staff members. ( Morning golf a possibility, too) So far lots of retirees plan to attend, maybe we should, too. I haven’t heard from any of you on that one yet! Enclosed is a form to use to sign up. Please do. If you’d like we could even spring for your $9.00 out of the district coffers ( though I’m not sure I’d want to tell the others there that we did... Joe Luppino, Harold Serven, Dana Allen, Bob Hoagland, Jim Piscitelli...)

7.0  Warriors may be an endangered species according to WSFW this morning. Someone sued their local district over the use of an Indian Mascot and the Commissioner of Education got involved somehow. While he didn’t outlaw them yet, he did apparently indicate that SED should study those schools with Indian logos and mascots and make a recommendation about their political correctness. Last night’s papers carried a superficial story, but nothing from Albany to us yet. FYI.

8.0  Summer Driver Ed is up and running in Ovid with several RCS students in it again this year. We will share the after-aid cost on a per pupil basis as last year.

9.0  The CSEA Union President newly elected, Mary Lynn Faiola, has been in to see me twice already with issues. The drivers want to know why we’re not running a separate bus run to Ovid for one Romulus handicapped child who is attending the Ithaca BOCES program for her handicapping condition as a 12 month student. I explained that we were saving money and making sense by having the South Seneca bus pick the child up (by driving two miles out of its way) and sharing that service rather than to have to offer an $18 per hour driver two hours a day to transport this one child a total of four miles, and that I thought I’d be willing to explain that to an arbitrator if they really did want to grieve it. The other issue involved our practice of pre-deducting for planned emergency-use days. We dock everybody two day’s pay in advance, figuring that we’ll use two snow days anyway or give them back at Memorial Day. This arcane practice precedes me, but does make sense in a skin-flint sort of way.

10.0  Summer Curriculum projects with our Program Networks People begin on Tuesday when a dozen RCS staff will be in to discuss the Program Networks sessions they attended throughout the year and get a head start on everybody in the BOCES by posting a Curriculum at a Glance on Docushare so that our teachers can share their best practices and lessons in meeting the new standards with other teachers and eachother. Mike Midey’s techie nature has come through for us in spades on this one, and I’m very excited about the position we are establishing as a model for using the LakeNET available to us as a professional sharing tool. Are YOU ready yet to try it out as a Board? If you have email and internet access, we can look to getting you on...

11.0  Sunday finds me at the Rural Schools Association Board of Directors meeting in Cooperstown for the afternoon only - then back to RCS@60 stuff come Monday morning. None of you wanted to go to the conference and I couldn’t really afford the time. But I will represent you at that Board level with this good and influential group.

12.0  Oklahoma hits the RCS stage next week on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Don’t want to fight the crowd in Seneca Falls? Looking for a piece of Americana and an air conditioned auditorium? Try out our own Ann Morgan’s Wine Country Players’ version of the Broadway musical at 8:00, and hear fellow BOE member Cornelia Johnson uncharacteristically tooting her own horn! Ann is offering us her third summer musical at Romulus in as many years and it’s wonderful to have the building in use!

13.0  Friday Morning update says the sidewalk outside the Schoolhouse is being poured today! The grass is in and up, the flowers are in bloom and things look good!

AGENDA ITEMS:

0.0   Remember that we will meet as a committee of the whole at 7:00 to hear from guest Glenn Cooke, Director of Planning for Seneca County and advisor to the IDA. Glenn would like to bring us up to speed on what is happening with Depot reuse. You may particularly want to know about the North End, the Lakefront, water, and the prison potential. The other thing that might be in the rumor mill with the Indian Land Claim coming to court this summer is any speculation about the Depot area’s involvement.

Glenn needs to be at the County Supervisor’s meeting by 8:00 so we need to let him go by 7:30. Please try to remember to be here by 7:00 - we have company coming.

1.0  The first official item of business on our agenda has to be election of Board officers. Despite some people’s thinking to the contrary, I stay out of this stuff, so you’re on your own in picking president and vice president. I trust your judgment as a group.

Once this is done, I’d suggest you skip down to the Secondary Report as David Hubman will present to you some extremely pleasing Regents results form this June’s testing. (Mike is out of town.) David will not be available for our second July meeting, and so I’ve asked him to join us this time out. I think you’ll like what he’ll have to share with you as a precursor to the 1999 School Report Card.

Then, once David is done, we can return to the fun of appointments and committees and the like.

2.0  There should be nothing extraordinary about any of the appointments of in-house personnel, unless someone wants to pick on Mike’s mom again. Alice was doing some teacher aid work with a half-day Pre-K child this year, who will be going to full day this coming year. Alice works as a cashier in the kitchen and needs to fit any other assignments around that. The teacher aid job paid about $2600 and the tax collector pays $2500. This way she doesn’t lose anything to speak of in salary, we get a good local person whom people know and respect as our front desk agent at tax time, and someone who is familiar with handling money and our banking.

The other replacement piece from Pat Conover’s leaving is our extracurricular accounts which Sandy Steel has picked up nicely this year. Sandy is off the road at mid-day when kids have lunch and the timing of things has worked out very nicely. She would like less driving time and we’re working on that, but we will arrange it so she does both.

3.0  Moving the August Board meeting is requested NOT because of the Willie Nelson concert at NYCC on Tuesday night, but because of a vacancy on the BOCES Board and the need for them to hold a special election on the 12th - a Wednesday.

4.0  Tucked into the superintendent’s report you’ll find an approval for all of the activities associated with RCS@60 on the weekend of July 24-26. By the Board approving them, we are covered by NYSIR for lawsuits, etc., that might result from any perceived act of negligence or the like. Mike has some skydiver friends who might surprise us - weather permitting by landing on the football field, we have 1400 people, some of them older than the school in attendance on a July afternoon... who knows what could go wrong! Might as well take all the steps we can to protect ourselves.

By the way - speaking of NYSIR - their rates were at the $19,000 level for this year - $6,000 less than budgeted and a significant savings over what we used to pay.

5.0  Learnfare was written up in the papers not long ago and in your memo last time. We will be one of 16 counties eligible to try to get some extra funds into our region by promulgating the notion that welfare recipients ought to make sure their kids are in school. No big deal, but we are one of the first upstate areas to be eligible for this new mandate coming to everyone in 1999. We report attendance on selected kids and the county provides counseling to them to support increased attendance at school.

6.0  Learning Technology Coordinator is a certified administrative title we can use to avoid having to deal with civil service for Ray Fox. Elementary Computer Studies Instructor is a new title we can give to Liz Larzelere as well ( although she will remain a Teaching Assistant by certification). Creating these positions allows us to appoint people to them later in the meeting.

7.0  Budget Transfers - I told you there might be more. Gloria is running the warrant this afternoon and I’ll need to move some money for at least the cost of a folding door for the large group room in the Middle Level to complete the job we started last summer. I thought until this morning that we’d need to move some money to pay Tom Cummings as well, but not so.

8.0  Drivers on overnight trip clarification is something meant to put to rest an issue which crops up twice a year and a debate over how to pay people for their non-driving time when they take our seniors or our honor society kids to Boston, Philadelphia and the like. This attempts to clarify that the outside trip rate will be used for regular drivers and the substitute rate for substitute drivers ( they are no longer the same thing). Mary Lynn Faiola - Union President and most frequent out-of State driver- and Tina Turk have suggested this wording so it should be good by them.

9.0  My transfers in excess of $2500 will be ready for Tuesday as last time. One will cover the door discussed above, others are not known at this writing...  

10.0  Committees requiring work this year are likely to be shared services, facilities and maybe after South Seneca hires a Superintendent the ad hoc committee appointed last Spring. Negotiations are complete with both groups and should require no work this year. Long Range Planning should be all set for a while, too.

11.0  Ray Fox’s retirement resignation deserves special mention and regrets. Special mention because of the reappointment of Ray to a part-time job with the District effective in September, and with regrets because of the devotion Ray has given to the school over the last 32 years in the classroom.

The others clarify some leaves of absence which we had outstanding.

12.0  Ann Kaminski is requesting a leave of absence. Ann, of course, went to Australia last summer on the first half of a sabbatical, and was scheduled to do some work at BOCES this summer to finish that off. They liked her so much, however, that they wanted that work - as a staff developer on web-based learning- to continue after this summer and offered her a job. Ann would like to cancel the second half of her sabbatical and request a leave to try BOCES out for a year. Barb and I support this request and ask you to approve it. Ann is a very good teacher, will represent us well, and is ready to try something new. We did this with Sally Covert a couple of years ago with great success all around. This is a similar opportunity to promote the best interests of one of our long-time and valued personnel. It fits with our mission and our long range plan’s premise of stimulating our staff to achieve better things for themselves and for us.

13.0  I won’t let the next item get this number...

14.0  Ray Fox’s appointment to a part-time position to maintain our computer system is crucial and I ask that you support it based on our discussion in exec last time. With Ann and Cornelia at play practice, and at least one known dissenting vote, this may require some attention ahead of time. We’ll see... Our choice of title is meant to assure us that the Civil Service folks have no claim to the job or its posting as it is a certified title recognized by Albany and appearing on the BEDS forms.

Liz’s job title change should be less of an issue, and the substitute appointments even moreso.

15.0  CSE reorganizes each year as well and several appointments need to be made here.

Executive Session - I would ask that you consider an executive session for discussion of a personnel item affecting my office with Leanne and me only. No action- just a chat.

There - that should get us started on a new school year! This will my sixth opening of a school year here when September rolls around - one tenth of the time the District has been here, one quarter of my career in education to date. We have a big July ahead of us, and I hope that it goes well enough so that everybody and their brother will want to see the next big anniversary of the school celebrated as ceremoniously, whenever the Board decides that is - 75? 100? I’m not sure that RCS@60 caps off 1997-98 as much as it kicks off 98-99, and we want that to go well both on the weekend itself and as a precursor for this next school year. Please check your calendars for the Sunday brunch and the Saturday activities, and try to be part of the special events planned.

See you at 7:00 on Tuesday for Glenn Cook and a peek at the future of the Depot area- an area whose reuse determines much of our District’s future as well.

CM/CM

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7/9/98   CONFIDENTIAL   1

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