by Joseph Back School may be out, but that doesn’t mean that the district staff has been idle. As evidence to the contrary, S-B Schools maintenance head Tim Troyer gave an update to the Board of Education at its recent board meeting Monday, June 22. Several things were being done to update and/or spruce up the local school grounds.

“I’m going to start with spring projects and move into the summer,” Troyer said. First up were the doors: all steel doors were currently being painted black near Door 7 on the campus, he said, while 14 classrooms just had received or else would receive paint on account of teacher moves between grades.

Meanwhile, new bleachers had been installed in the high school, and the seats were sanded, just waiting now for a coating of polyurethane. “How long did the bleachers last?” Board member Jeff Boie asked. A while as it turned out, while District Superintendent Jeff Koenig shared that the previous bleachers had been donated to the Rodeo down at Chapman Park.

Moving on from the indoor maintenance report, it was made known to the school board that the parking lot at Boyd Elementary had been rebuilt by Haas as previously approved, and the school was just waiting for Monarch to pave it. As to the Stanley campus portion of SB Schools, the old sports garage had received a new roof and another garage would shortly, “weather permitting.” The timber walls and trusses were up or would soon be rising on the new garage foundation just down the lane. Meanwhile, there were still some issues with the new garage construction from the State.

Specifically, the new bus garage needed to have a firewall put down the center per recent State review of the building plans, unforeseen at the start of construction stage, due to the plans being fast tracked to local action and set aside when the State got backlogged with antiviral COVID-19 issues. Coming back to the garage plans later for review, the Madisonbased regents had marked them for amendment, with a wall to divide the building in two.” Meanwhile, Troyer’s update revealed that local concrete manufacturers and mixers need not worry.

“We do use a lot of concrete,” he said of district maintenance for Stanley-Boyd, both in relation to the concrete footings of the new bus garage, as well as various places around the outside of the school campus. Just this previous year, a patch of concrete had to be redone by the kid’s playground, lest trace fossil markings be left behind to set in stone after an indiscrete community resident and/or their pooch made them—in other words, not exactly the school’s fault. The incident from last year led to Superintendent Koenig seeking board approval for the expenditure above $10,000 after the fact, as there was no other conceivable way to get the outside playground ready for students in time for the start of school. At the time, the board made special note of the circumstances in a memorandum, due the move’s technical incongruity with a $10,000 spending approval limit imposed on the Superintendent. Meanwhile, there were some internal funds transfers to help the district save for a rainy day, as well as the Edmentum program to consider.

Reporting on the district’s embrace of the Edmentum program, Director of PLC & Instruction for Grade K-12 and S-B Middle School Principal David Ludy said that it allowed teachers to work with students at their exact level, without having to guess what was needed. If a fifth grader was at a fourth grade level, Edmentum allowed for the necessary adjustments to be made, just as it allowed adjustment to a sixth grader at an eighth grade level.

“Mr. Ludy was very passionate to find something to help students,” Koenig shared as Ludy said that the middle school (of which he is principal) also had Enrichment, Intervention, and Target time, with teachers making a special effort to meet the needs of special education students. Meanwhile, Chad Verbeten had a philosophical aside, saying that education was essentially wholistic in nature, a sentiment to which Ludy agreed.

“Have a disagreement, have a discussion, take your turn,” Ludy listed as some of the less academic and more socially geered aspects of instruction. Meanwhile, there was COVID-19 advice from Verbeten.

“Wash your hands. Don’t touch your eyes and nose if you’re here,” he said of the dos and don’ts related to the virus.

Edmentum later passed with a motion by Carlson, seconded by Jeff Boie. And with that, it was into the startup of Special Olympics in the district, passing with a motion by Verbeten seconded by Toni Seidl. The board also discussed two leadership books to read, The Essential School Board Book, or the School Board Fieldbook, this in response to the suggestion of a board members after several public comments had been made repeatedly