Called for public comment

Kim introduced that we are going back to consent agenda. And reviewed what consent agenda means. Opened up for question, asked for clarifying. Today we will be reviewing the SY25 Audit and SY25 June Board Minutes. If anyone wants to take anything off the consent agenda, trustees can request that.

Governance committee reviewed that we will be onboarding new one team trustees and a family trustees. They will be reviewed in the next board meeting and voted on. We solidified the process for future years of how to onboard new trustees. We will be following guidance from the bylaws to make official in December meeting.

The governance committee is creating subcommittees to complete the board tasks that need to be completed this year. We will be rolling out a ED Evaluation/Succession subcommittee. This committee will oversee the process of evaluating the ED. This will be combined will be combined with succession planning because they will work to come up with a process for succession of board leaders and ED. Additionally, we will be creating a Manual & protocols subcommittee to finish a  Board manual and fine tune the protocols of the board.

The Board discussed the overall board for trustees by each committee work. They opened it for discussion. The board suggested including a metric and goal around training new trustees on how school finances work. Additionally, discussed going back to governance to discuss specific goals around trustee recruitment & Development. 

One of the key goals of the governance committee is to evaluate the executive director. Overall this year's evaluation reflects both progress and urgency. We've made meaningful strides in strategy, systems, and fundraising, and my direct team reports feeling supported and aligned. At the same time, the Board and I agree that accelerating student outcomes and strengthening adult culture are critical lever for Boston Prep's next stage of growth. Meekerley and the team have really focused in on leading with data driven instruction, which is helping move the team in the right direction. There has also been a lot of work done around codifying procedures. There is a lot of thought of done towards supporting adult culture. The team will also be very focused on strengthening storytelling and strategic consultation with a broader trustee base. The evaluation does not include MCAS data, but that will be included in the coming weeks not that the data has been released.

Meekerley and Board Chair emphasized that Meekerley is always open for the board to meet with, along with the school based team.

Board Chair quickly overviewed what MA Charter school is facing. Currently there are over 46,000 students allowed to be in charter school. There are certain laws that say there are certain caps for charter schools. Currently, there are bills going to the state house stating that these cap percentage will be reduced. We want the board to be informed on these and how it impacts Boston Prep directly. Please reach out if you have questions or would like to learn more about this and what is ahead.

BP leadership attended hearings this week. There will be more hearings in November. These hearings are live streamed as well. The team will be sending this out. 

Finance Chair provided quick overview of terms of original BP building loan details, findings of SY25 financial audit and also the high-level overview of BP response to under-enrollment for SY26. The general update is that the finance health is in a good place and turned over to school team. 

Finance team emphasized to dive in the Audit. The audit was a clean audit, no journal recommendations, and no manager suggestions. 

Turned over to the refinancing, and gave a quick overview for those who were not involved when we bought the building. We originally got a 10 year term tax-exempt bond  which expires now in the end of October 2025. The plan is to refinance another 10 years, which is the banks max term, and then 20 years of payments remain. Citizens bank, our lender, has given us a commitment letter. Key updates include that the taxable rate rises 72% to 79%. Credit spread reduced 2.65% to 2.35 % to offset.  

Boston Prep has been facing an enrollment challenge from the end of last year into this year. Lat year we finished the year 679, lost 100 due to graduating seniors, and we added 171 students through the lottery. But we have lost 104 students due to withdrawals. These numbers are forever changing. The issue is students are withdrawing at a higher rate than years past. We were  around 20 students short where we would like to be this time of year. The financial impact is that we are about ~$600,000, 20 students are $30k per students. This is a sizeable hit to the budget. We are going through exercises to decide how we want to address this budget concern. On the school side we are still working to increase enrollment. Our ops team directly works every day to encourage parents to enroll. We are also looking at department budgets to see if there are easier places we can cut. The big question is how much should we use reserves from the foundation and how much should we cut from this budget. Regardless, we will need to decide how many students to budget moving forward. We are hoping this is a temporary gap that we can work with to close. We are hoping this will not impact the overall experience of students, alumni, staff, and families. The core student experience we don't want to impact. Development Chair emphasized the importance of fundraising from the board and school dev team. 

Opened it up for questions or for feedback. Emphasized the concerns continue ahead and being strategic with enrollment conversations and budgeting. Question was posed about a further back story about large number of withdrawals. Was is specific grades, were there high numbers of students concerns to further understand why this happens. One understanding we have noticed was that we had to retain students in a grade, because they did not meet requirements to progress to next grade. This high bar we could guess that this led some withdrawals. But in this regard we are also focusing in on Multi tier support system to help avoid this concern earlier. There is also whole Boston trends we saw due to BPS grading system. We saw higher numbers of student withdrawing in 7th grade and 9th grade to go to other BPS schools. Other charter schools are feeling this impact as well. The overall driver of students being retained actually we found that families are moving out of the Boston school district. We are considering as subcommittee for this enrollment concerns. We are going to have strategic questions around what impacts do the grade span have on our enrollment numbers?

Also opened the question, of studying and understanding what is healthy amount of cash funds is good and relying on title funds. What is the guidance from Charter Association.

Development team discussed the ways we would like trustees to support the school in reaching their fundraising goal. We ask that all trustee give a financially meaningful gift, and all trustees attend the Toast, and are ambassadors of Boston Prep in their everyday life.

Reviewed what new initiatives and events are happening Boston Prep this year:

- Young Professionals Council

- Toast Committee

- Career Pathways trip opportunities

- Expanding our listservs

We encouraged trustees to save the dates and RSVP to the events. and send us referrals for individuals to join Toast committee, Young Professionals Council, and Career Pathway trip opportunities for our high school students

- Ethical Speaker series, October 30th, Trident Bookstore, 6-8 PM

- Day of Ethical Debate, November 14, Boston Prep, 8:30- 11:30 AM

- Toast, April 4, Museum of Science, 7- 11 PM

We will be reviewing the board dashboard, overview of MCAS data. We sent out prework about the long term impact of Covid. We are wondering about the landscape at Boston Prep.

Overall 5 year post COVID, ELA scores continue to decline while math shows modest recovery. We are in a unique phase on education where different grades have different needs. 

At Boston Prep, there has been a lot of change and we discussed how this impact students and families as we move through. 

School Health Overview: 

- Student Enrollment continues to be our biggest financial battle

- School culture is off to a strong start, no big outlier data, early to tell

- We currently have 4.8 current vacancies

- Last year we had 96% of seniors graduate, which was our highest goal of senior graduating

- Academic outcomes: we had the highest percent (37%) of students take one AP course, we continue to push to better serve high performing students. We saw strong growth in upper grades on assessment, and improved reading levels in in percentage of students reading on grade level

- Academic challenges in ML students and addresses their needs

- MCAS scores became available: high level we are growing, but we need to continue improving but at a higher rate. We are going to continue focusing on student growth which will translate in achievement gains. We will dive into this more in the upcoming board meeting

Reminder, the board dashboard, has further data and we encourage trustees to dive into all the data here. Reviewed the focus of Fundraising, Persistence data, etc.

Opened it up to questions: Clarified if we are outperforming Boston, State, and charter peers. Will continue to dive into this data