2025-01-14

January 14, 2025

The January general meeting was held on January 14, 2025.  The meeting was pretty mundane with the exception of the discussion around Infinite Campus.

Agenda Item 11.01: Administrative recommendations

Motion 1: Yes (carried: yes)

The first motion was to fill 2 positions; there was nothing strange about either of them, and both people where perfectly qualified for the job.

Motion 2: Yes (carried: yes)

The second motion anticipated the long road ahead of rebuilding the district after the board canned Superintendent Shelton last year.  Understanding that we're going to need at least a year or two to find a replacement and get her up to speed, the district has begun to identify key positions that should be kept throughout the transition.  The first of these was the CFO (Bob Vacca), whose contract was extended to 3 years.

Agenda Item 11.02: Cancel the referendum

Motion: Yes (carried: yes)

As discussed at the workshop last week, we will not need to go out for referendum in 2025.  We cancelled our reserved dates.

Agenda Item 11.03: Infinite Campus

We're going to talk about this more at the next workshop, but here are the key points:

1. The state, through the Department of Education, provides each district the software backbone needed to operate.  Currently, it's a product called eSchool that handles everything about our students (who they are, their grades, their schedules, their IEPs, etc.).

2. The districts have been using this tool for 20 years, and it is baked into just about every process that you can imagine.

3. The state has decided to replace the whole thing with a different tool called Infinite Campus, which does not have feature parity and is in no way ready for production.

4. The state is planning to shut down eSchool on June 30.

5. Christina School District has not even gotten a chance to see the new tool, let alone start working on testing, building training programs, around it, etc.

6. A rough cost analysis suggests that it will be more expensive for us to power through the migration and start using Infinite Campus than to buy our own eSchoool license and continue running the system that we've been running.

7. We will hold a workshop soon to craft a letter to the Department of Education explaining our concerns and our demands.

Agenda Item 11.04: Policy review: 2.31 (Protection of undocumented students’ rights to a public education)

Motion: Yes (carried: no)

Monica made a motion to have the board affirm our support of policy 2.31, which basically tells ICE to fuck off and empowers our staff to tell them that to their face.  However, due to some (deliberate?) misunderstandings, the vote failed 3-3 (in favor: Manley, Moriak, Smith-Tucker; abstaining: Lou, Patton, Trauth).

The takeaway was that the policy is kinda okay but worded really poorly in its main body, so the policy committee will tweak the words a bit and then send it off to the lawyer to review, and sometime soon it can come back to the board for a vote to incorporate those changes.

Note that the policy is still the policy, and it's still in effect, so ICE can fuck off.