All right, it’s 5:30. Let’s call the Mandan, uh, Public School District number 1 October 6, 2025, meeting new order. Uh, please join me with the Pledge of Allegiance. States of America. to the Republic for which it stands. a nation under God. visible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is approval of the agenda. Is there any changes? Seeing none from administration. Anybody else have any changes? What are the wishes of the board I’d move there. We approved the agenda. All right, we have, we have a motion in a second. Any discussion, seeing Nunitscaro Yes Yes, yes, yes. Yes. yes Yes. Next item is public communication. Anybody in the audience wish to address the board? Anybody wish to address the board? Seeing nobody stepping up to the plate will move on. Uh, we’ll go to the administrator’s report, Dr Bitz. Uh, yeah, first item is, uh, the North Dakota School Board Association fall Conference is Thursday and Friday of this week. I believe we have Mr. Peters registered for both Thursday and Friday. And Miss Shanando and Miss Furs just on Friday we have you registered, I think you actually you go Thursday afternoon to the keynote, and then all day Friday if you’d like, so. All right, thank you Any questions on that All right, thanks for those of you going. I could not make it this year. This doesn’t work very well for me. All right, uh, we’ll go on to the high school demo update. Yeah, we, we had a special meeting, um, end of last month, and we approved the asbestos abatement bid, um, that they is underway right now. The abatement process went over there today and, um, they’re working hard to get the asbestos out of the building. Um, the bid documents for the high school demo were finished up last week and they went out last week and bit opening is October 29th for that, um, anybody who’s watching, who’s interested in bidding on that should contact icon architects. Um, we do require, um, all bidders to walk through the building if they’re going to bid to tear it down. So we can anticipate on November 3rd, that’ll be up for us. That’s my hope, yeah, I hope it’s that clean. All right, I’m just asking them if we need a special meeting or not. We’re good with that. Not at this time, but we’ll see. Any other questions for Dr Bitz? on that one? Oh I’ll change that area quite a bit in relation to it when that happens. All right, we’ll move on to the consent agenda on the consent agenda. We have review and consider approval of previous board minutes from September 15, 2025. Review and consider approval of previous budget hearing minutes from September 15, 2025. Review and consider approval of previous special board meeting minutes from September 19, 2025, review and consider approval of August 25. Bills, re ve nu es and expenditures, um, Aep policy and personnel minutes from the September 22, 2025, and accept the wellness committee minutes from September 30th, 2025. Uh, what are the wishes of the board? I moved to accept the uh consent agenda. right? We have a motion. We have a 2nd. in a second. Please go roll Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. yes Yes. Uh, next item on the agenda is unfinished business, to review and consider the approval of the 2 fiscal year 26 budget, Mister Legacy. Yes, good evening. In your packet is our, our final budget for fiscal year 2026, uh, we have to have this approved tonight as it is due to our county auditor on October 10th, so we’ll have to submit that this week. Um, not gonna spend a lot of time on this. We have, uh, you’ve seen this multiple times over the last few months. Um, I think we’ve talked through it pretty good. Um, so just a reminder, um, our expenditures and our revenue budget for the year projecting about a $1.7 million deficit. It is significant We are working on ways to get that down next year. I’m confident that we can put a good plan in place going forward to make sure that we’re not that far, uh, in a deficit going forward in the in the future years. On our ill Levy’s page, um, the projected mill levies for, uh, fiscal year 26 on the top of that page. Um, you can see the total mill levy, um, for next year will be 129.64, which is a 1.5 mil increase over last year. This is about a 1.2% increase, um, if I remember right from legislature, we are capped at a 3% increase and I do want to make it clear to those watching that. even with caps in place of 3%, our tax is increasing by 1.2%. If your tax evaluation increased significantly more than that, you will see a larger increase than we project or present. I just want to make sure that that’s clear to the board and clear to those watching. Um, just a few changes on our mill levy, um, from, from last year, you can see the general fund mill levy. We’re gonna have 60 mills in it. Uh, the board discretionary mill levy, which is new, will be at 10 mills next year. Our tuition levy will be at 3.83%, which we have not used in the past. Again, that’s used to pay for education for students that we cannot educate, um, in our district, mainly for special ed purposes for those students at Boys and Girls ranch, Manchester House, uh, place s like that Our building fund will be 18 mills. That was voter approved in the 70s. Our special assessments will be 3.75 mLs. Again, that’s for street repairers, uh, storm sewer, um public improvements that we pay just like we pay for on our homes. And then our sinking and interest levy will be 34.06 mills, that is to pay off our voter approved debt, so we’re paying for the high school, Lakewood, and Red Trail still out of our sinking in interest, levy. So I’ll stand for any questions. I know you’ve seen this multiple times, so, uh, please ask away. any questions from Mr. Legacy? Any questions? All right, what are the wishes of the board on the approval of the fiscal year 26 budget for revenues, expenditures, and mill levy. I’d make the motion to approve the fiscal year 26 budget. second. All right, and that includes expenditures in the mill levy, correct? All right, because we wanna make sure we have it all. Any further discussion? Seeing none, please call roll Yes, yes, yes. Yes Yes Uh, next item is under new business review and consider approval of a first reading of the following policies. Um, we have ABAD virtual school, BCBA public participation at board meetings, IDCH Independent Studying correspondence courses, IHFR graduation requirements, GAB Human trafficking and exploitation, prevention and awareness Education GAN National Board certification GBB license Personnel. position, recruitment and hired and GBC recruitment, hiring and background checks for classified personnel. Uh, Dr Ridereth, you just wanna go through all those and if we can, uh, the board, if, if you could just handle all of them at the end with one. one, promotion, that would be great. I think that’s how we normally do it. That sounds good. So the first one was our virtual school, and you will see, um, these first few are a result of legislative change. So you’ll see in green, the red’s stricken out is what we are, um, pro po s ing that we take out and the green is what we are looking to add in. Basically, the gist of it, virtual schools are now used to be that they did not want us to allow open enrollment into virtual academies. um, this past legislative session. They passed a law saying that we must honor open enrollment into our virtual academies. Um, so that is what that green indicates it also has a provision in there for military families if they’re in our virtual academy and happened to move also for some medical situations of people move out of state that they can finish the remainder of the year and our virtual academy and then would obviously need to enroll wherever they’re at, but to allow some stability. So those changes are requirements by law that we did there. and then for the public participation at board meetings, you should have gotten a paper copy of this one, Mr. Wolfcott, uh, an error on our first one in the first line where we have in green the board must give individual members of the public the opportunity to provide comments at regular board meetings, and then we struck out that there was no legal requirement for public participation because that has changed now and the law that there is a legal requirement to do that. And then in the public participation, you’ll just see that we indicated that it is limited to an agenda topic of the current meeting or the previous meeting for any public comment, and I also want to note that this is any regular board meeting. This does not include special board meetings. Thank you for making that change. Yeah. OK Our next one has to do with in independent study. Again, this was a legislative change requiring us to cover some costs of North Dakota Center for Distance Ed courses. Uh, so if a student elects to enroll in one of those, we have some obligations to pay the course fee. Now we can set some parameters around that saying you have to still be here 5th period to take it. You can enroll it, but you’re going to be in our library. We can set some parameters around. If you’ve taken it and not successfully passed it, not paying for it a second time So we, we can set some parameters around it, but we are obligated to to pay for it if a child that’s interested and we’re also obligated to make sure parents are aware of the distance at offerings at least one time a year, and we do that by posting it on our website, and there’s a link in our registration guide for that. We are not responsible for covering these fees for homeschool students. We would accept them as credits coming in, but we’re not responsible for covering those fees. And then kind of rolling into the graduation requirements. Um, this was a little twofold. Some of it was updating from legislative change. Some of it was just us catching up. You’ll see an F we eliminated a section there cause we no longer require swimming. We made that move 2 years ago, I believe, with not having a pool at the new high school. It just was not a realistic requirement for us to keep. And then we also struck out the effect of of 2017 because now this will be relevant to all of our graduates and we didn’t need to have that extra piece in there. And then if you flip it over, uh, there is a section there credit for emergency circumstances. There was a situation in specific city here in North Dakota where, uh, individuals in a bad car accident ended up a credit short for graduation and wasn’t able to graduate. And so this basically just gives a provision with one credit in there. If we had an extreme circumstance for us to, uh, allow graduation or award credit if we needed to there. We’re required by law to do this. I like to say that we already do things like this when they’re needed and and work with students, but that is a law requirement now to actually have that in our policy. Dr Redderathth, just a question back to the swimming, we still offered over the summer, right? It’s still an offer. We do offer it over the summer along with lifeguard safety, and I think once we get a new pool, whenever that is, and depending on the location and what that looks like. I think we’re open to conversations on revisiting RPE credits and what that structure looks like. Any idea how many actually take it yet. And before it was 100% because it was required. I don’t, off the top of my head, I can get you that number for some reason. I’m still thinking we had between 40 and 50 kids take it this summer, so there was still a reasonable amount of interest in it, and we do still do a Liguard safety class as well. So 15 to 20% roughly close enough you don’t have to look that’s fine. And then our next one is a whole new policy for us again coming out of legislative, uh, law coming out of the changes with that. We have a human trafficking and exploitation prevention and awareness education. So there’s two groups in the state of North Dakota that basically have been contracted to provide this, so it’s not something that our teachers are having to provide or that we’re having to seek out, but it is something that we have to make available to our students and we’ll work with them, um, as that comes about. We have not been contacted yet about this, and then there is an opt-out option. You will see that on there for families if they don’t want their student to participate. And it is for grades 6, 10, and 12. Its staff required to attend that or they are not, no. Optional And then these next few are current policies of ours that we’re just up for revision and to look at. The first one’s the National Board certification. We had a minor grammatical change in there, but nothing major. We currently do not have a national board certified teacher in our district, but that is something that requires quite a bit of a work to go and do, and it’s something we want to continue to reward if we did have it. And then the next one, GBB is licensed personnel position, recruitment and hiring. Again, some r minor changes to it, but nothing substantiative. and then recruitment hiring background checks for classified personnel, probably the biggest change here is it designated the superintendent for a lot of things, and we changed it to the district. There’s just oftentimes our food service director might be doing some reproving. I might be a Mister Legacy might be we just felt like it depended the area and who’s appropriate for approving those things, so we changed that to the district, but again, no major substantive changes there, and then licensed personnel position recruitment and hiring the GB B C D was oh yeah, you probably want a motion to approve and then we’ll do this deleted one. Yeah, that’ll be the deleted one. Yep, um, I got a question here on, um, the background checks in here. It says each final applicants seeking a district position allows for unsupervised contact, give authorization and submit to state and federal. So that’s a requirement to be in the building, right? And but the next two are Mays, you know, sexual offender and driving records. Can you kind of give me some flavor of when we would and wouldn’t do that because it looks like it’s up to uh the district to determine if they are or are not going to do that? Is it going to be based on kind of what their job duties require. I think job duties and sometimes background checks aren’t super like we’ll see things on there, but if there’s something we have questions about, we’ll double check across some of those registries. It’s not a mandatory. It’s an optional based on where you’re at. We have some employees who have no contact with kids. Um, we work in our business office they’re in the Brave Center. We still require background checks for anybody who works in the school. We, that’s just something that we’ve decided to do. And then as far as if you’ve had a crime against a child that’ll, you’ll never work for us if we, if we know that, but sometimes they might have a, uh, a DUI that happened in 1995, and they, you know, nothing has happened since then, um. sometimes some of those that are. a, a felony that happened in the 90s, um, some of those things if you’ve had a clean record for 30 years and you’re a changed person, we, we might look at you. OK Just was asking a little bit how that was. All right, um, these are all of the uh first reading of the following policies with changes in them. Anybody else have any questions? Everybody feel pretty good about that. And, and, and just so the public knows in relation to it. Normally the way these work, they go through our policy and personnel committee for review, which is made up of um, constituents from the public. It’s made up of administrators and teachers and other individuals through it. So when these come to the board, they’ve been kind of hashed out and looked at really well in relation to it. So, you know, sometimes we don’t spend a lot of time looking at these because they’ve been hashed out through a lot of different sources in relation to it, so I just thought I would point that out and that’s a great point and a lot of these are HR related, so our, our HR director was Inco and reviewing them as well. Um, so yeah. I just wanted to point that out because, you know, some sometimes you watch some of the other uh school districts. They spend a lot of time on policies and we don’t so much because we handle them in a different committee with those things, so. All right, what are the wishes of the board on the first reading of the following policies. I would move that we approve the first reading of the listed policies under new business. All right, we have a motion. We have a second. and we have a second. Any further discussion? Any further discussion? Seeing none, please call roll. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, next item on the agenda, review and consider first reading to delete the following policy GBBCD licensed personnel positions, recruiting and hiring. Yes, when you look, it is identical to the GBB policy, somewhere along the line we just ended up with the same policy in our policy twice. And so I’m recommending deletion of just this one, and we will keep GBB. All right. Doesn’t pay to have to. What are the wishes of the board I would move that we Uh, uh, delete the that policy listed uh GBB CD. All right, we have a motion. We have a second. a motion a 2nd is the first reading of it. Yeah Any further discussions? Hearing and seeing none, please, Karl Yes Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes Uh, Next item on the on the agenda is future meeting dates, October 20th, her regular school board, 5:30 p.m. City Hall, October 27th, student achievement, 5 p.m. the Braves Center, October 27th, Policy and Personnel 5 p.m. at the Braves Center, October 27th. Facility and finance 5 p.m. at the Braveces Center. Hope you got a lot of rooms. That’s 3 of them at one time. Uh, November 3rd, regular school board meeting. Is there any other meetings that should be identified on here? It’s not listed. Not seeing any, any other things, seeing nothing, uh, thank you everybody. Meetings