GF board keeps an eye toward future growth

Future growth for the Green Forest School District was the main topic of discussion at its July 17 regular school board meeting.

The board had an approximately 40-minute dialogue with Aliza Jones, leader of the district’s facilities consortium, regarding growth in the district and making sure the district stays on top of infrastructure needs, and the need to request state funding, according to superintendent Matt Summers.

“The context of the conversation was, are there needs in the district that we need to be looking at as far as new construction to handle growth?” Summers said. “Everyone knows our district is growing and the timeliness to qualify for state funding … you have to submit that by Feb. 1, 2024. Then you’ll know in the fall of 2024 whether that’s been accepted or awarded.

“In May 2025 you’ll then be told the amount you are due … all in a big giant formula. And if we have a project approved by the state, the state would fund 72 cents on the dollar, which is a lot of money. Obviously, you want to take advantage of that if you’re building facilities.”

Summers said any state-funded projects would have to be “educational facilities.”

“They will not fund a football stadium or a gymnasium or a baseball field or a track,” Summers said.

The board will meet with Jones again in September and decide whether the district will submit a plan to the state, the superintendent said.

“We need to be moving forward on that,” Summers said.

OTHER BOARD ACTION

In other action, the board voted to change the day of the month for its regular meetings because of the district’s transition moving to a four-day work week for staff and students.

Board meetings have typically been held on the third Monday of each month, but with the district not having classes on Monday starting this coming school year, the board moved those meetings to Tuesdays.

“We moved our August board meeting to Tuesday, Aug. 22, due to the first day of school being on Aug. 15.,” Summers said. “But normally, starting in September, we will have meetings on the third Tuesday of each month due to employees not being on site on Mondays.”

The board also voted to change the start time of meetings from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. because of the extended schedule students and teachers will be facing during the four-day week.

“Our school days are going to be longer and that may help some of our board members who have small children the ability to get them home, take care of childcare, that kind of thing,” Summers said.

The board also approved renewing a Certificate of Deposit with Anstaff Bank for another 12 months at a 5.5 percent interest rate, Summers said.

“We’ve worked very hard to be good stewards of taxpayers dollars,” he said. “We had months in years past where we’ve let money just sit in an account and draw very little interest, but we’ve added to our account two or three times on a 12-month CD. And so we shopped around and Anstaff had the best rate.

“So, we renewed that right at $1.6 million for another 12 months at the 5.5 percent interest. As you can see, that starts to build up and that’s going to be a big piece to any building project we have in the future.”

The board also approved an expenditure of $9,000 to purchase a piece of equipment that will improve radio capabilities and long-term costs for some district employees who use communication devices daily.

“We have radios for our maintenance, custodial, nursing staff, secretaries, admin and of course, bus drivers,” Summers said. “Right now we all run off cell phone towers and we can communicate anywhere there is cell service. The renewal fees for that system are quite expensive to do that so we’ve picked a better plan.”

The district will purchase the new equipment and move secretaries, nurses, maintenance and custodial workers to a new system that will allow them to communicate as long as they are within a two-mile radius of a campus.

District administrators and bus drivers will remain on the cell-based service, Summers said.

“They would stay on the service where they would have coast-to-coast service,” he said. “This year we will be spending about the same amount of money we normally would have, but next year we anticipate this change seeing an $8,000 to $10,000 decrease because we’re taking many of those radios off that coast-to-coast plan.”

Another approval for the board was using funds remaining in the district’s allotment of American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to purchase some new band instruments.

“We found some ESSER funds and checked for qualification,” Summers said. “They will be used to purchase mostly tubas, Frech horns and euphoniums.”

In recent years, students had to share instruments, the superintendent said.

“Being a smaller district, we have had three of each of those instruments and students have had to share, keeping their own mouthpiece. Now, we can buy numerous of those instruments so that no child in our district in the band room would have to share.”

The board also approved spending just more than $18,000 toward the district’s robotics program, which is growing in popularity, Summers said.

“Robotics has grown exponentially,” he said. “We started our the program with just a handful and I think next year our middle school and high school numbers will be well over 100 combined, and because of that, we needed to buy some kits because they do a lot of hands-on design and development. They build robots to complete different tasks.

“With that amount of students skilled in that program, we needed to make sure they were equipped.”

Other purchases approved were approximately $50,000 for a 2018 Dodge Ram 3500 diesel four-wheel drive truck to be used by the district’s transportation department and $2,500 in chemicals for district cafeterias.

The 2018 truck approved will replace a truck made in the mid-1980s that was recently auctioned.

In addition to being a daily work truck for the transportation department, the truck will also be used to help plow parking lots during winter weather.

In personnel approvals, the board OK’d the hiring of Rodrigo Lopez as head girls soccer coach and Emma Gilstrap as assistant softball coach. Other hires approved were Brian Fairchild as middle school literacy instructor, Patricia Dale as middle school math teacher, Emily Solis as middle school paraprofessional, Angela Broome as third-grade teacher, Trinity Dotts as middle school paraprofessional, Corbin Crewse as a custodian and Jerry Magee as a bus driver.

Resignations approved were from Ashley Massengale, Jacob Brown and Megan Underwood.