Speaker 1: 0:05

I'm David Haug, superintendent of the Jeff Starr 7th School District, and I wanted to kind of send out an end-of-year message as we close out our budget year here at the end of June. We've really had a great year with our student success across the district. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second, but really just kind of the mindset that we approach everything with For the past two years our theme has been the same as far as how we want to approach things, that's commitment to the growth of others and creating opportunities for our kids and then also being great stewards of your money as a taxpayer. We want to be the best investment that you're making, as we possibly can do that and we really center that and start on what we can do for our students possibly can do that and we really center that and start on what we can do for our students and that is, we are continually creating opportunities for our kids, either expanding or really have honed in on those programs that we see a great benefit. I think number one is they get into high school and these are kind of twofold discussions is the college credit opportunities, when you start looking at kids leaving the district as they graduate and they're able to shave time off in amounts they're spending at four-year universities or even two-year universities because they've taken credit here on the third, third, third program. It's a great investment for our kids and families. The second thing is next year we will have the highest number of students going to the ATS program. That's the area technical school. They do a tremendous job and create a lot of opportunities over there. But students can also shave a lot of that time off and get certified into a career quicker by going to that program.

Speaker 1: 1:37

We also focus heavily on the ACT here. We believe that's still a meaningful test and creates opportunities for kids down the road. Traditionally in the past probably seven or eight years we've been in the top three to five and sometimes two number two as far as our ACT score in all public schools 220 to 380. We take a lot of pride in that. It's something we continue to really focus our professional development around to make sure our students are moving forward with that. What does that mean? I think you really, as your students get into the middle school and when they become aware of what's called an ICAP, really delving into what opportunities we have for your student. And we really believe in content, whether it be curriculum in the classroom and or content through opportunities. When you're creating opportunities for students and creating that path, they're more likely to have a successful future. That's just our belief and then you kind of follow that up with.

Speaker 1: 2:37

For individual needs, we've done a great job with our mental health program. Here Intervention specialists started with Mr Horn, that's now Mr Daniel Rothweiler. We now have counselors in every building. But we've also had great partners in Compass and Chestnut to help individual families with those needs as well. So we've really tried to build a comprehensive program to support our families here at Jefferson R7. I think that showed up last year with our APR school score. We were very strong, not only in Jefferson County. I believe we had the top score last year in Jefferson County and one of the top ones in St Louis, a little over 92%. That will come down a little bit. The mean on that's in the high 80s. It used to be in the low 90s. But I believe that sort of encompasses everything we're doing here and trying to prepare our kids for the future and create those opportunities for them.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Now for the, the budgeting aspect of it. I do want to thank Ameren Corporation. Yes, it is not fun losing the plant that we've had down there for many years. However, we believe there's a bright future and there should be value in that property. We hope to be working with Ameren on what the future may hold with them. But they have answered every phone call, email text, even if it wasn't great news or they couldn't say anything at the time. But they have kind of entrusted us as we've worked through that budgeting process so we can move forward with our staff. We've gotten a lot done the last couple of years ahead of this, so we've been able to kind of get our budgets where we can take care of our staff, take care of those academic needs over the next couple years as we kind of bridge that gap and there's still a lot of uncertainty for us in the sense of how it exactly looks, but I believe long term this future has a very bright future. There's a lot of great things heading this way. It's just right now we're in that time period of kind of bridging that.

Speaker 1: 4:21

So what are the four guiding principles this year as far as getting ready for next year's budget? Obviously the Ameren closure, that's, a projected $1 to $1.2 million loss for next year. Ironically, the timing of Bootsy. Unisim's Chapter 100 actually came off. It ended in December of 2024. So there's been 50% abatement on their personal property for the past 15 years. That actually comes off this year. So we're going to see how that impacts the budget.

Speaker 1: 4:50

I did use some numbers to try to factor that in so our AV would not take a total collapse or total loss on the plant Ameren plant. It won't be 100% balanced for sure, but there'll be some balancing there as one plant's coming down, the other one is growing and plus we get the Chapter 100 monies back on that as well. I can tell you the next thing we did we looked at what can we do without and line by line budgeting, and so about a half a million dollars we've reduced in our budgets to get ready for next year. That can't be sustainable over a period of time but we can do that for a few years as we get ready. But also too, it's not just like we've reduced by a half a million, there's also some bonding things we need to pay for. But long story short, we've had the budget increase. We took care of staff salaries and benefits moving into next year. That'll be recommended here this week at the board meeting.

Speaker 1: 5:41

I had kind of announced that back in I believe it was March that we still felt comfortable even with the plant closure. We've done our prep work. We're moving some monies into next year from this year to go ahead and do the 1,000 on the base, continue with our wellness stipend and take care of all the insurance costs for next year. So we are committed to taking care of our staff. There's also other increases in there, like insurance and other things of our staff. There's also other increases in there, like insurance and other things. Really, we are in great financial shape given everything we're going to be going through with the Ameren closure. However, I just see a bright future with lots of activity in this area. As far as housing, the three lanes change a lot of things which kind of spurs us into that long-term planning we're doing as well. But as far as some other things we've done internally, you know, control what you can control and that is line-by-line budgeting and creating opportunities for ourselves and being the best possible stewards of your tax dollars we can be.

Speaker 1: 6:36

This was a little bit out of necessity. Our transportation department went through. There has been a driver shortage, that's no secret. So if you're interested, please contact us. We can train and we do help with those costs to train drivers to get you ready, but right now we seem to be in good shape as far as that goes. We did reduce our load by two routes, so we did see savings in gas and maintenance over the past year. Mrs Mayans and her crew down there do an amazing job of keeping our kids safe from point A to point D, but, more importantly, everything they're doing to help maximize the expenditures and maximize our investment down there. They're doing a great job of that.

Speaker 1: 7:17

We are working with Amron right now as far as their EV bus program, so we are looking at a couple of battery-powered buses. It's a very fascinating field. I've learned a lot. We've not made an official decision on that yet. I think it's tough to pass up, though, when the program allows for us to be out no dollars and to also get possibly a couple vehicles in there here. That could save us approximately $5,000 a year on gas because you no longer have maintenance costs associated with that. I think that's something we have to look at, no matter what your financial situation is, to be really great stewards with our tax dollars. So we're investigating that.

Speaker 1: 7:59

I have to give a lot of credit to Mr Schaefer, our technology department Also. Kind of through necessity, we decided to not hire last spring a person to come back in and manage our techs. We outsourced it. At the time we felt like it was going to be a $10,000 savings. That's actually pushed closer to $30,000 over the year. And we're also not including the hardware. We had prepped enough to purchase hardware to get ready for the Ameren situation that we don't need to purchase hardware in bulk as far as Chromebooks for the next two years at least two years. So I'm not really factoring that in because that's a cost that will have to come up again. But as far as our day-to-day year-to-year expenses related to that, we're seeing some real savings there. We've become more streamlined what we do internally, and that also centers around the E-rate category situations where we've restructured our Internet contracts through E-rate. It was time to do that and by doing that we've actually saved on the Internet expenses per year and also we will continue to get reimbursed for that. The district has been doing that for a long time.

Speaker 1: 9:04

The second one, when we made the transition last year that we were not taking advantage of the district had not been using before I believe will be a great benefit to our district and that is E-rate Category 2. That is related to the equipment that you're managing in your district. Mr Schaefer's done a great job of organizing that. We conservatively we were approved for that program and had those contracts in place for the next five years and conservatively we're estimating that we will be reimbursed $40,000 for our tech equipment annually over the next five years. Hopefully that number would be a little bit more where you can conservatively say $40,000. So I appreciate what Mr Schaefer has done there.

Speaker 1: 9:42

Switch over to the internet provider has been a huge success for us as far as our school finances are concerned. The trickle-down effect from that is that really we don't do any maintenance on our program now in the summer. So what we've done is we've streamlined our summer help. We've gone from nine employees to five. As far as outside people coming in to help, we hire four students this year. One is taking care of the lawns, working with our maintenance on lawn care. Then we also have three more that are targeted and managed by an individual, taking them place to place and being as efficient as we can. We're having a great summer, but we're also going to see at minimum $12,000 in savings there from our summer help. I believe that number will be a lot stronger when we're all finished, but that's the projected number in how we've managed our summer help and that's also trickled down from the technology department as well. But they're doing a great job.

Speaker 1: 10:40

In closing here with my final message, I wanted to focus just on the one campus for just a couple seconds. Here I truly believe to get a great product you've got to engage the appropriate stakeholders early and have a lot of eyes on it to get a great product. That's why we rolled things out in January. We didn't necessarily have all the answers to all the questions, but I believe that when you bring a group of people in to really look at a project, you get a great result. I cannot thank Mike Tessie enough.

Speaker 1: 11:08

At Stonebridge. He's attended our meetings and also met with me in a one-on-one because of the 110-acre purchase from 2007,. How the Stonebridge interaction there? And he said you might want to look at those original purchase documents. I hadn't seen those before. I don't know how much that has been referenced, but it's been an absolute, opened tons of doors to at least understand what our property is about over there and then, on the heels of that, to bring in Lynn Jackson and Drew Knoll, who were on the Board of Education at the time.

Speaker 1: 11:40

I know that was a tough time in our district's history as far as starting a high school, but when you look at the original purchase contracts and the fact the first row was supposed to go out to River Cement and there was another purchase of property that Blue Jay Way aligns now it's created a great opportunity for us, particularly in our road planning for the future. There were a lot of great decisions made at that time and we want to make sure we're doing the same thing. We've been working with MoDOT to share what their thoughts were. They provided data for us of what you know great road planning looks like and what the safest options are. Our own internal team there's many great people to thank along the way here and we're not done yet.

Speaker 1: 12:18

What we're doing right now this summer is taking all that information and centered around a couple things. Number one I think phase one is turning into a great opportunity to prep this district for the future, get the road planning right, get the parking lots right and then also prep a spot or two, which we're looking at. Two to have a new school building or two put on, because there's actually two buildings. You know Platten I think we all know know needs to be replaced. But when you look at Danby, it was only built through. The core of it was built three years later. So we have to be thinking in terms of that 30 to 40 year plan what that looks like for the district and there's opportunities to do some site leveling now. That would also benefit the creation of a road and some other opportunities parking lots. We're gonna make sure we're as efficient with our tax dollars and our efforts as we possibly can be. So right now we're analyzing everything related to the site leveling process.

Speaker 1: 13:14

On the new road, we're really looking at the traffic flow and we make sure to have the best investment there. We're also doing a deep review of all the district properties to see what can we take advantage of currently that would save the district money for the long haul and to be as smart as we can with it and then also spending a lot of time on our road and parking system. I know I've kind of been redundant with that, but sometimes schools and this isn't just my opinion, this is just watching several presentations and everything else over the past year. Schools will put a building up, but they really don't think about the road planning around it and they try to solve that problem later. We're really trying to look at it as if we can solve the road issue and create a plot or two to really have a great future as far as school planning here, as far as building planning and we're not talking about bang bang this is all gonna happen right away. This is really some deep, long-term planning, but also creating a safe, safer pattern of traffic in the short term. It's really what we're looking at. It's not glamorous, to be honest. It's not like you're putting up fancy buildings and stuff like that. It's, it's truly getting the campus aligned. That's what I see the value here.

Speaker 1: 14:24

So this project hasn't stopped by any means. In fact, we're going really hard at making sure we create all those opportunities Come the fall. When we kind of get back through July, we're going to be quiet. Come August we're going to start re-releasing kind of our updated version. We'll have to make a decision come December whether we want to run the bond issue in April or not. But I don't believe in waiting until December to say, hey, here's what we're going to do or what the district maybe should do or what the potential is. I want to vet all that through as much as possible so that we really have a great plan for this district long term.

Speaker 1: 14:57

Jefferson R7 is a great place. We have a lot of great people, great kids. I think education in Missouri is kind of at a crossroads that's another discussion for another day but I assure you've got a lot of great people here watching for the interest of our kids on a day-to-day basis. I think a little bit further too, as we really try to watch out for our community as well. Hope you have a great summer with your family and friends. Thanks for listening.