Meeting gaveled by Lewallen as update given on middle school salad bar petition, student civics euort

“Put it this way,” school board member Lanse Carlson said Monday. “If the tornado had taken the whole school out and we had to rebuild, we wouldn’t do it like this.” Carlson spoke to the hodgepodge nature of the current building, with the middle school, elementary, library, band, and pool all additions to the original, rather than planned beforehand.

The occasion of Carlson’s observation, meanwhile, was the regular monthly board conversation, held at the high school library each month a week before the regular board meeting, inspired in part by citizen feedback. No action is taken at the regular monthly board conversations as such.

Getting underway Monday night in the high school library at 6:30 p.m., the board conversation covered many things. Chief among the topics covered was a recent meeting between the superintendent Jeff Koenig, Lanse Carlson, CESA 10, and LHB architects of Superior.

CESA 10 is helping administering the building plans as they move forward, while LHB is tasked with drawing them up. Among the takeaways from the board conversation was that the school board was doing things backwards compared with others that the firm had worked with.

More specifically, it was putting classroom remodel before a gym, which had both pros and cons. Among the cons, was that the remodel would result in lost space and take from nine to ten months, the question of where to hold class in the meantime factoring in.

“I think if—and I stress the word if—if we go to referendum we should do it the way they say,” board member Chad Verbeten said of LHB and the unthought of lost space issue while a remodel would take place. Carlson also had feedback for the group.

“They said you can bring in temporary classrooms, but you don’t want to do that unless you have to,” he said of the remodel timeline. Talk around building also covered the idea that it was more efficient to build up than out and that placing an addition on the southeast corner would help protect the playground area.

In the meantime, there was middle CONVERSATION

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school petition and student civics to discuss: the seventh graders had petitioned for a change of grievance: they wanted salad bar back from before the pandemic.

Superintendent Jeff Koenig shared that he had gone and talked to the middle school in response to the email request that swept the middle school, with the matter easier in that the school wanted the same thing, but was having supply chain issues.

Some took Koenig’s answer and others didn’t, while it was shared that the salad bar would eventually be back, with locally grown hydroponic lettuce “not going that far when you’re feeding 1,000 people.” Also brought up was the feeling that it wasn’t fair for seventh graders to get the same allotted portion as third graders in terms of food.

“I agree with you,” Koenig said he told the students, while federal law stipulated that this in fact was the standard. The district was subject to various outside expectations as to how it fed students and did other things, being audited regularly on the matter. Verbeten, meanwhile, had his own take on the value of the middle schooler’s salad bar petition and its ultimate outcome.

“We take for granted that we understand civics work in this country, but that because it’s basically what we’ve been doing,’ he said, the caveat being that a country with less experience in making independent choices and self-government may not do as well.