School Board Meeting Highlights
3-21-17
Agenda:
For a complete agenda, please visit us at:http://www.boarddocs.com/pa/parkland/Board.nsf/Public
All motions were approved.
Workshop Meeting
Presentation of Lehigh Carbon Community College Banner
Mrs. Roberta M. Marcus, LCCC Trustee, presented a 50th Anniversary commemorative banner that marks the District's long partnership with LCCC. She shared a chart that includes the number of students who have enrolled at LCCC over the last 11 years here.
She also gave an LCCC report that can be viewed here.
2017-2018 Budget Presentations
John Vignone, Director of Business Administration, presented summaries of the entity budgets that Parkland supports each year as follows:
• Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit #21 Proposed Budget
• Lehigh Carbon Community College Proposed Budget
• Lehigh Career & Technical Institute Proposed Budget
To view his summary, click here.
John also gave a Parkland School District Budget update which can be viewed here. The area that he focused on is noted in yellow and outlined with a red box. He explained that there is a lot of uncertainty at the state level with regards to the Basic Education Funding formula and a reduced transportation subsidy that was proposed by the Governor in February.
2017-2018 Staffing Report
Dr. Rodney Troutman, Assistant Superintendent, gave a presentation about new staff recommendations for the 2017-18 school year. You can view it here.
Business Meeting
PESPA Contract Approved
The School Board approved a 5-year agreement with the Parkland Education Support Professionals Association for the period of July 1, 2017 - June 30, 2022. Read about it here.
Top Workplace
Sandi Gackenbach made a special presentation to recognize Parkland for winning the Top Workplace Award from the Morning Call. Parkland also received a "Moving in the Right Direction" Award. All results stemmed from an employee survey that was done by a 3rd party in the fall. David Kennedy thanked all of the employees for the award and thanked Sandi for attending the meeting to make the presentation.
CAC
It was reported that CAC enjoyed a great meeting on full-day kindergarten progress to date as this is the first year that full-day kindergarten is being offered in Parkland. The next meeting is at PHS at 6 PM on April 6th. The topic is Drug and Alcohol Awareness.
Legislative Update
Bob Bold discussed concerns with eliminating the property tax in PA via a tax shift proposal that would raise Personal Income and Sales taxes to make up the deficit and fund public schools. He expressed concern about a projected shortfall without an idea on how to make that shortfall up. He noted that Charter School reform is still in the budget spotlight.
Roundtable
Rich made note of Marianne Reinhard and Linda Orcutt who are retiring as they have been long-time employees and he wished them well. He also thanked Lauren Will for being the advisor of National Honor Society and Ryan Nunnamaker for coaching wrestling for many years as both have submitted resignations for those stipended positions.
Everyone wished the team a Happy Spring and thanked John for making the budget easy to digest and understand.
As in past meetings, when approving accounts payables, Board members Rob Cohen and Lisa Roth declined approval for payments to the cyber charter schools in an effort to emphasize her disgust in paying mandated reimbursements to underachieving cyber schools.