Superintendent's Message for February 2024

It is time to put January behind us and look forward to February! The weather has been a
challenge in January with six days of school being cancelled. Our first “virtual” day on January
23rd was very successful. We will continue to use “virtual” days for future inclement weather
days. Iowa law now allows school districts to deliver up to five (5) days of instruction virtually
each year when inclement weather makes an in-person learning day not possible. Let’s hope
for a calm rest of the winter!

The legislature is hard at work on the Governor’s AEA bill to restructure the services provided
by our AEA. The AEA serves a valuable purpose for our students. I believe there are ways the
legislature and Governor could collect data on what services school districts need and what
services are not utilized. From this data, they could consider restructuring the AEAs, but blindly
doing it is a tough sell.

The second part of the bill increases teacher pay to $50,000 for first-year teachers and $62,000
for teachers with twelve years of experience. I support raising teacher salaries, but it needs to
be sustainable over time and we need clearer verbiage to fully understand. Our current salary
schedule would become outdated and we would need our schedule to be equitable throughout
the teaching ranks. A new teacher with a salary of $50,000 sounds excellent, but a veteran
teacher with eight years of experience may only make $51,000 on our current salary schedule.
During negotiations we base our decisions on the amount of new money we receive from the
state, which has averaged around 2.5%. This funding is very low. Our revenue comes from
property tax, state aid, and federal aid. We receive roughly $7,800 per student and with these
revenues, we pay salaries, curriculum, supplies, transportation costs, and energy costs.
Currently, both districts are operating in good financial condition. However, both districts have
seen declining enrollment the last few years which decreases our funding. One of my
commitments to stakeholders is that we will maintain our property taxes rate levels. We have
had two bond referendums, one for each district, and your property tax levy will be lower or at
the same level as previous years. Next month, I will explain more about the other funding
streams we have available at the school district.

As we head into February, we continue to recruit and hire people for our districts. If you are
interested or have a friend, relative, or know of someone that is interested, let the district know
and we would love to meet to discuss our openings.

Have a great month!