School staff, students, and parents met with elected officials including Senator Robach in Albany during Charter School Advocacy Day. It was a great learning opportunity for the students.
RACS students won 4th place in Science Olympiad competition. 
RACS students won the 2nd place in the cheerleading competition.
Board members are recommended to follow the school's social media accounts.

Student Enrollment:

Based on STAR test results 12% of the 7th grade and 16% of the 8th-grade students are proficient in math.
 
 

In both the Middle School and High School, suspensions are down across the board from a December high.
Attendance and chronic attendance problems are being vigorously pursued.
There is a lot of interest among the board members in trying to find a more creative and effective way to deal with students who have chronic problems with behavior and/or attendance. We need to find a way to reduce suspensions overall and reduce the reliance on out of school suspensions. Academic Excellence committee will take the lead on this.

We need to conduct a comprehensive review of our emergency plan and policies regarding bullying, social media harassment, and so on. Perhaps we can get a law enforcement officer to give a presentation to students. We also need to have an independent assessment of how effective our plans are. Governance committee will take the lead on this.

Meaningful parent engagement activities continue.

Students in 6-8 are continuing to make progress on test scores. High school students are making progress on Regents exams.

Revenues are at 3.7M out of 5.8M and expenses are at 3M out of 5.8M.

Assets:
2.5 M building
600K Equipment
890K Circulating cash
Liabilities:
1.9M Mortgage on Building
180K Retirement

The lease is still under discussion.

Architect Review:
Three quotes for architectural firms to do an analysis of what our options are for facilities to undertake the expansion.

Edge Architect          31.5K
TY Lin Int. Group     15.83K
Mazurek Architect    15.25K

TY Lin has experience in building schools and will complete the analysis within about two months. The recommendation is for the T.Y. Lin International Group.

Board, Administrators, and Teachers have been looking for a way to make RACS salaries are competitive with local school districts by using some of the bonus money in the school budget to give all students annual raises.

The first strategic planning meeting was held at the end of January--a basic get to know you sort of meeting where RACS members discussed what is important to the school and the Strategic planning people discussed their process. One of the more exciting outcomes is that at the end of the process they will give us a set of strategic goals, action items, and steps. That should match very well with the Board On Track OKR system of mapping progress on goals.

Committee of two board members reviewed 10 out of 200 applicants. Each board member selected three out of the 10 applicants. Five finalists matched, and the top three of the five will be interviewed.
 

Mehmet and Jen put together the new policy with feedback from the governance committee:
The committee has reviewed the new policy and recommends its adoption. Governance committee will begin working on a protocol for having sensitive conversations with students or parents.

Governance committee reviewed the IT department's inventory and has found it to be satisfactory. The inventory was presented to the board. The board has requested that the inventory is maintained up to date.

We have a new contact person at the board on track. Joann has been getting trained and has identified some issues with the software and is working on them to be addressed. Several other charter schools have expressed interest in seeing how we use the board on track.
The soon-to-be-hired administrative assistant will also be trained on the system.

Three resignations: study hall monitor, hallway monitor, and literacy specialist.
Replacements for the resignations are being sought.
 

Ten candidates for the founding elementary school principal have been identified and are being interviewed by school administrators
Once the final three candidates have been identified, interviews will include a board member and a parent.