Dr. Liesa briefly spoke on the happenings of TSAS. We have a few things taking place in the month of January.  Our Flex benefit audit, there is a mid-year snapshot for our personnel reports.  Faculty groups are still meeting and will share their results with the rest of the faculty at the professional development day that we will have on January 30th.  The vision casting group is asking questions about the history of TSAS, why we exist, who we serve, what have we learned and who have we become as we approach our 25th year anniversary and what those compass points will be moving forward. Teachers are volunteering their time to help with these efforts.  Another working group is examining questions about credits and graduation and we are hoping to create alignments between the academic vision of the middle school and high school. Stallings has been leading those meetings along with Dr. Liesa. The service provider group is asking questions about what is important to us in and around the services that will be changing like child nutrition and custodial. These groups will have a presentation on the professional development day. We have used one snow day.  Stallings built the calendar with 3 snow days. April break and parent conference day are the 2 additional days that we could voluntarily switch, so all in all we have 4 days that we could spare. Going on to February, we will have our Financial audit on February 11th, 2025 at 9am.

Dr. Dan- We have parent-teacher conferences on January 30th and 31st. I met with teachers that volunteered time over the break to talk about how we do those and offered some advice. We are pushing Team Conferences that we have been doing a couple of semesters now. Team Conferences consist of 4–5 teachers that conduct the conference in a group setting instead of meeting with the parents individually.  It is not mandatory, but highly encouraged.  I am still conducting classroom observations and the teachers' skill, bravery, creativity and ingenuity is on full display. We met with the representative at OSDE who oversees our comprehensive school improvement grant and things are going well. They are watching data on school attendance and student achievement and comparing that with statewide data to see if we are a school in need or not for more intervention. I’ve been going over data that Stallings has helped compile to look at the broad trend of student performance and attendance. We are actually identical to last year, middle school is at 90.03% and high school is 89.1%.  The data is looking good and appears to be heading towards the pre-covid numbers.  

Roiger reports no new concerns or items raised by the faculty. There are 11 members that often have difficulty meeting at the same time.  We are going on 3 months of no faculty coming to us with concerns. Our new goal is figuring out what that faculty counsel could look like for the next school year. We would like to do more hands-on collaboration with the board and administration team just to tackle projects like absenteeism, student progress and teacher support.   

Dr. Smith - We are still projecting a budget deficit as of now.  The state collects student numbers before releasing state aid.  We received the reallocation letter last week, and we are receiving an additional $93,000. Flex benefit went down $15,000 and the state text book went up slightly to $443.  Doing the math, that gives us an increase of about $78,000.00, making our deficit now $125,000.    We are looking for other avenues of income and have started Title 6. Title 6 is Indian Education. We will begin exploring this program in the spring of this year.  IAs we near the end of the year, we could choose to use some of our building funds to cover the general fund account. However, those funds are restricted, but can be used for rent, utilities and insurance.  Other funds to claim are transportation. Dr. Smith is not sure if we will receive those funds this year or next, but I have been given a rough estimate of $30,000 of transportation funds that we could receive.  We are looking to get grants for small consumables to help offset the projected budget deficit. 

Dr. Smith - We are looking ahead to all service providers that will change.  Child nutrition is one service that TPS is off-loading.  Steve Huff is putting together the 90-page application for child nutrition. Once approved, we can open an RFP for proposals.  By the end of April we will be able to see the proposals. It is a process we must follow.  Cathy Denton visited another charter school, and they use Oppa! for child nutrition.  We have invited them to come here on Thursday, January 16, 2025.  Teachers that are part of the working group have been asked to sample the meals provided. Cathy has pulled together the child nutrition receipts from last year for us to use as a guide. The second service we will be assuming next year is custodial, which is broken down into two components; personnel and consumables.  We are asking for clarity from TPS to determine how much of our current payment is for consumable items and how much is for custodians’ salaries.  I have emailed Mindy at TPS asking for assistance with this, and I am waiting to hear back from her. My preference is to hire all of our custodians as we love and need them.  There is a co-op being formed to help us purchase some of our consumables at a discounted rate.  We have also been told TPS has contracts that can be extended so that we will be able to ride on some of their discounts.  Groundskeeping is also part of the co-op the OPSRC is working on.   Electricians have been in the office repairing the fuse boxes as we are having issues with electricity.  Building maintenance TPS has provided us with a document that lists the responsibilities of TSAS and TPS.  Ongoing conversations are taking place to figure out the dividing line between the two.  We would like to have a protocol established for who is responsible as well as determining the list of vendors we can use.