Despite the fact that all eyes are focused on this weekend as the drop dead date for RCS@60 approaches, we do have a Board meeting on Tuesday that is important for a couple of reasons. This quick and abnormally brief note is meant to help prepare you for that meeting at 7:30.

NON -AGENDA ITEMS:

1.0  RCS@60 is keeping us all hopping. The museum committee has been in all week setting up a wonderful display in the media center. The schoolhouse group has just about all the details attended to there. The caterer is due in at 9:30 this morning to scout out the kitchen facilities, and the Senator has confirmed his presence for 4 PM. Even Baggie the Clown was here this morning! The event will probably have a couple of glitches to it( what doesn’t?), but I do not have the unrealistic expectation that one might bring together 1400 people and have everyone be entirely happy, even if it’s just that the coffee wasn’t strong enough. I will have a brief chance for us to discuss this on the agenda.

2.0  EPC money is being held up at the lender for phase two, and we have forwarded the necessary materials to our attorney for review. No big deal, but August will be here before we know it and we do have motion detectors to install sometime.

3.0  End of Year Financial is proving to be a still bigger challenge than we anticipated. We did have Scott from Jack Little’s office come up and spend a day with Gloria last week. As a result of that visit, I have contacted Manpower and we have a temp in helping to bring together some of our balances. Scott was encouraging but recognized the sense of paying $12 per hour to a temp firm rather than $71 per hour to the auditors for work not done come audit time. Sandy Steele has also been in clearing up the extracurricular books. Losing both Pat Conover and Kay Huntone at the same time and then losing a month with Liz was a bigger problem than I had anticipated. I am confident, though, that we will make it through this by September.

4.0  Hiring and interviewing has also been taking up a fair amount of time around here the past fortnight, as you will see on the agenda. Barb Mike and I have been busy, as well as several teachers whom we have included as is our practice in the screening.

5.0  I have been out two afternoons with a class at Cornell which was supposed to meet for ten mornings and was thankfully changed to three session and some independent work which can occur after RCS@60. This just FYI, course is on Demographics and Education.

6.0  South Seneca is down to five finalists, two of whom are internal. If Gary Alger continues in the hunt for that job, we may find some added interest in shared services including the potential for the CBO. Larry Driscoll called me yesterday to let me know he had heard from Waterloo that they continue to have an interest in pursuing the project at the Board level. I have a meeting this afternoon with the Sheriff and the other three superintendents and I’ll try to get a read from Jerry Macaluso about Seneca Falls. Anyway, the idea isn’t dead yet!

AGENDA ITEMS:

1.0  We do have some fiscal matters to attend to including the first payment of bills for the new school year. Many of the PO’s covered were processed electronically, using the system Tracy Lindsay set up for us. We still are the only school doing this distributed purchasing- on the cutting edge again... It is important that we try to pay some of these bills, like our insurance, to get the new year off well, rather than wait until August for another meeting and keeping our creditors waiting.

2.0  RCS@60 Update: By Tuesday it will all be over except the shouting and hopefully there won’t be a lot of that either.

3.0  Capital Project Update: I received a FAX from Roy McMaster which I thought you needed to see before we go any further with trimming our plans back. Basically the premise is that we can only afford about $900,000 worth of work for the $140,000 we’ll have on hand. AND the cost of borrowing is such that we could do a great deal more work, if we were willing to risk it, for a low cost per taxpayer with additional tax. Please take a few minutes to review the enclosed material and let’s talk about the wisdom of only doing what we can afford without borrowing versus adding a little to taxes for a lot more work accomplished. This is the advice of our fiscal planners - maybe we should listen to them... I will plan to review both the architect’s proposed costs and the fiscal planner’s projections with you at the meeting before we decided how to proceed.

4.0  The single most important reason for us to meet this Tuesday is to culminate the hiring that we need to fill our classroom openings for September. As of this writing we have four out of six slots ready to fill - .5 math, long-term sub for Nancy Munn’s maternity leave, one elementary transfer, and an elementary special ed. Barb and her committee just finished screening kindergarten and Ann Kaminski’s sub’s slots yesterday and I am contacting six people for final interviews, which will probably not occur until Monday. Friday is devoted to RCS@60 stuff. Therefore there will be two slots on the agenda without names, for us to fill in Tuesday night ( we hope).

5.0  Mike and Barb have almost all of the extracurricular slots filled for the year as well. We did intentionally hold on band for a report to you on the competition issue. I expect to ask Pete Goloski to come to a meeting this summer and discuss this issue and the survey he had kids and parents complete in June.

6.0  Executive Session if you desire on Superintendent Evals or you may turn these over to either me or the evaluation committee to tabulate. Either way, please complete these and bring them with you to the meeting.

There, that’s the shortest Board Memo you’ve gotten in a while! See some of you this weekend, and hopefully all of you on Tuesday night!

CM/CM

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7/22/98   CONFIDENTIAL   1

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