A brief meeting for the NCOE Unit 3 School Board Wednesday night mainly centered around updates and preparations for the school year. Superintendent Matt Vollman filled in board members on projects and delays, delays School Board President Matt McArthy says wouldn’t be a problem had the bond measure not been taken out of the board’s hands and delayed by forcing it onto the ballot.
Vollman: It started out like gang busters. They were knocking stuff out; getting stuff out and now that the baton has been passed to the subcontractors, things have slowed down a bunch with getting them here. They were supposed to start laying the floor I think Friday last week, then it was Monday, then yesterday, then today, and now it’s supposed to be tomorrow. Same with the mason. Just to let you know, the door frames are going to be in soon. So they’re going to start setting the door frames. I said, well what about the door slabs. Well the door slabs got back ordered. They’re supposed to be shipped August 9th and arriving in Evansville August 11th which is a Monday, the first day staff is here. Then it’s like a 5 day install and I said wait a minute, I had a meeting with the general contractor, I will not put students in classrooms behind open doors. Not going to happen. So we came up with a gameplan where they’re going to put all the frames in and remove the existing slab doors and temporarily reset the old doors if school is going on so they’ll have a locked door. Then, they’ll just come in one at a time. There won’t be an extra cost…I tried to get them to put in overtime, extra hours and they said no.
McArthy: If we’d ordered these in February, we wouldn’t have this problem.
Vollman: That is true.
Vollman also discussed potentially working with Ikonic Studios, the outfit that does school photos somewhere down the line to digitize the class composites that line the hallways. They date back to 1937 and while they’re preserved well now, in the event of a disaster like a tornado, there’s no backup of everything before around a decade ago. He says there are 137 in total…88 from NCOE and an additional 49 from Enfield. It won’t be cheap. Estimated cost is anywhere from $17,000 to $24,000. There could be a 30% discount if the district serves as a guinea pig.
I would love to have a digital kiosk as you come into the building as well where it’s basically on a tv or some platform where you could go up and touchscreen it and search a particular year and it’ll pull up a class composite of that year. And they said they think they can do that. So I said I’ll be your guinea pig if you want to try it. They’re willing to give us a 30% discount on this whole process if we’re willing to work with them on their first media project on some digital platform.
The board approved student handbooks and minor alterations, updated the cost of adult lunch and break prices ($3.15 to $3.65 on lunches and $1.25 to $1.94 on breakfast), and approved a la carte milk prices (up from 30 cents to 35 cents).
The board recessed into executive session at 7:25pm.