Opening Items

In August of 2016, Veritas Prep submitted a request to amend our charter and expand our current charter to serve an additional 540 students. We proposed to add 108 seats to our current school to ensure our viability and continued success to open a second school that would serve 432 students at a different location in a future year. The commissioner did not make a decision on this request last cycle and instead pushed the decision to the next cycle which begins on August 1. Based on the needs of our community, the vote to not lift the charter school cap we have decided to expand our impact by serving more students in the district turnaround space instead of opening a second commonwealth charter middle school. Thus, it is proposed that the board vote to withdraw the pending request and resubmit a request for just 108 seats to expand and ensure the viability of our existing school. 

We propose to resubmit a new request for 108 seats which will be added to our existing school in FY19. Adding these seats is a critical step to ensuring our long term viability. 

Finance

In order to create an opportunity to bring a two-day intensive workshop called Undoing Racism to our entire staff, something we think is essential to help us better serve our scholars, we needed to adjust the calendar to create two back-to-back days for the workshop. We are not adding any PD days, just shifting one from January to November. We have worked with the transportation department at SPS to ensure there would be no difficulties with transportation and we will distribute the revised annual calendars to our families upon approval by the board. We do not anticipate it will be an issue for families and think they will appreciate the reason for the change.