Discovery is applying for the 21st Century Grant this year. It's for afterschool programming with up to $500,000 per year. Recommendation to approve the School's decision to submit the proposal.

In 2019 and 2020, the Board approved increasing teacher salaries from $39,000 to $45,800, and subsequently to $48,500 and later to $49,000. This initiative included higher annual increases, increases for experience outside of Global schools, and supplemental pay for specific grades and subjects. These increases were made possible through both the Millage referendum Funds and the state’s Salary Increase Allocation (SIA). Also, Millage Funds have allowed the Discovery campus to successfully hire and retain more certified teachers and an Athletic Director.
While the district and other charter schools chose to categorize salary increases by specific funding source, the GLA Board elected to implement a unified increase. To satisfy the district's reporting requirements, we used the existing state's SIA reports that captured the total cost of these increases. Any costs not covered by the SIA were funded by the Millage funds.
Please find the attached summary report regarding the expenditure of Millage referendum funds for the 2023-2026 school years.

Three years ago GLA signed a 5 year contract with the Florida Speech Therapy to provide services to all of GLA schools. Due to inflationary pressure over the last three years, the vendor found itself in the difficult position to provide high level of services and asked for rate increase for the remaining two years. Initially the vendor asked for 5% increase in rates for 26-28 school years. After reviewing prior years CPI increases and projected budgets, the maximum GLA will be able to afford is 2.5% increase. Recommendation to approve 2.5% rate increase.

The current "Micro-Purchase" limits are set in Financial Control Policy is $10,000. With the cost of doing business and growth of the organization we ask the board to increase the limit to $15,000 to streamline the operations but still make sure tight controls are in place. There are also couple of inconsistencies that need to be fixed in the Financial Control Policy. See attached. Recommendation to approve the amended Financial Control Policy .

Recommendation to renew Food Service Management Company Contract for 2026-2027.