2025-08-12

August 12, 2025

The August general meeting was held on August 12, 2025.  This was our first meeting utilizing more of the Effective School Boards structure: we moved most items to the consent agenda so that we could focus the actual time of the meeting student outcomes.  We still don't have official (or even temporary) goals for the superintendent, but once we wrap that up (hopefully this month), we'll be able to better focus the meetings on student outcomes.

Patton, Troncoso, and Baqir didn't show today, so it was a conflict-free meeting.  All motions carried unanimously, 4-0.

I was remote, dialing in from Legislative Hall in Dover.  Our CFO (Bob Vacca) and I were down there in case the legislature had any questions about finance (and they did, and Vacca crushed it).  I've written a couple of times recently about the major structural problems that we encountered after the first reassessment in over 40 years.  We (Christina, Colonial, Red Clay, Brandywine, and Appoquinimink) have been working together analyzing the data after reassessment, working with state legislators on what changes could be made to unfuck the property tax catastrophe that our residential homeowners experienced (basically: corporations got huge tax savings at the expense of homeowners).  While the board meeting wrapped up at 8pm, we didn't get out of Legislative Hall until after 10pm, but the legislation that was passed should fix things for our residential homeowners long enough for the legislature to seriously take up school funding reform in January during their regular session.

Agenda Item 4: Approval of Agenda

There were a few items that needed to be removed.  In particular, Troncoso had a few items that she requested that we move until next month's meeting, since she couldn't be present tonight.

Agenda Item 9.01: Modification of Superintendent Contract

When we drafted the superintendent contract, we incorporated Effective School Boards terminology and requirements, which was great.  However, we oopsed on a couple of small details.  In particular, we implied that the board would draft "interim goals", but the intent was that the superintendent would draft those interim goals based on the longer-term actual goals that the board set.  This corrected the wording.

Agenda Item 9.02: Schedule Special Workshop

We anticipated the legislature passing some series of bills that would allow us to tweak our tax rate, hopefully using a separate non-residential rate, similar to what the county did this year after reassessment.  Even though the legislature was still in session at the time of this item, we scheduled a special meeting to approve a new tax warrant next week on August 21.

We'll use next week's CBOC meeting (on August 20) to discuss the new tax warrant, and we'll present it to the board the next day for a vote.

A couple hours after the board meeting ended, the legislature passed HB242, which will allow us to issue the separate non-commercial rate 👍