Sugarbeeter Board Meeting Notes

 

July 28, 2021



Greetings Sugarbeeter Nation! So, a few noteworthy items to pass along from this past week at Chinook Public Schools.

While we have made significant strides in filling many of our vacancies at Chinook Public Schools over the past two weeks, we still have a number of teaching openings in the elementary and a couple of vital special education paraprofessional openings in both buildings. This will place added stress on both our students and our staff to start the year. This staff shortfall, together with a large number of new staff, including four Filipino teachers, will necessarily require us to stretch our existing staff a little thin.

Teacher burnout and fatigue is a very real concern, particularly after this past Covid-corrupted school year. Many schools in Montana, Chinook included, have seen a number of teachers hit the pause button on teaching, or just flat out retire. Our students cannot afford to have any more leave. We owe it to them to do whatever it takes and the board has, in many respects, taken that approach for our kids.

To help alleviate some of this added burden on our teachers, the school board and teachers agreed to continue, for at least one more year, the added planning and preparation time on Fridays. Chinook will have early release days again on Fridays this upcoming school year. The board fully understands how difficult this can be for some parents, particularly those with younger children. Thus, we wanted to make sure parents had as much notice as possible in order to prepare.

At their July board meeting, the board increased the starting base pay for special education paraprofessionals to $13.25 per hour. Typically, paraprofessionals have two years of successful college experience or have passed a basic skills test.

The board further approved a temporary hourly stipend of $5.00 per hour for some paraprofessionals working with our 7-12 students and an additional $2.00 for paraprofessionals with a college degree. This will likely be reviewed annually. We are in need of one or two more special education paraprofessionals in each building.

The board has been examining every avenue in their efforts to improve both recruiting new teachers and staff and to retaining existing staff. The board wants to do what is best for our students and our community as a whole.

That’s is not always an easy task when you realize the funds needed to do much of this are local tax dollars. There are only so many of those to go around and during all of these discussions, we are always mindful of that. I do not know a single board member that doesn’t struggle with that part of the delicate balancing act.

One new benefit they created for teachers at their July meeting was an incentive to opt-out of our health insurance plan if they have insurance available elsewhere (parent/spouse). Doing so now will allow the teacher to claim 70% of the premium the district would have paid. This adds around $7,669 to their salary, which is antihistamine money: it’s not to be sneezed at!

The insurance opt-out is not an option most teachers will use but it is one that some will use. It’s just another tool to help create options for our teachers and a great tool when recruiting new young teachers who might be on their parents insurance right out of college: $39,800 in salary is much better than $32,203.

This particular benefit is one that really shouldn’t cost the district anything and has the potential to actually save us a little money once it’s fully implemented. This might then allow us to offer staff other benefits and be more efficient with the money we invest in staff benefits. This is something the board will consider passing along to our classified staff in some form in August.

The board is also moving away from Zoom meetings and we encourage parents and community members to attend meetings in person.

Our next two board meetings will be on Monday August 9th and Tuesday August 10th. The meeting Monday, August 9th will focus on our ESSR’s (Covid-19) return to school plan, which is required to receive our ESSRs funding. Our August 10th meeting is our regular August board meeting and will also be our annual budget adoption meeting.

Lastly, if anyone wants to know who that bum is staying in a camper over at Meadowlark Elementary School, that would be Mr. Hofman.

- Fred Hofman,

Superintendent

 
 

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