Hay, good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome
hoo. We're a little early on our community connection today. It's because we've
got to two for the price of what today. But first of all,
we want to talk with Superintendent Chuck McCauley. Just kind of a bigger week
than usual here at the old High School and at school in general. Hi,
how are things going. It's going great, having a lot of fun
here this last week. As we get a little bit closer that last day
of school on Friday, and hopefully we'll end up with our graduation ceremony on
Friday night at eight o'clock on Custer Stadium. Yea, that's our plan.
Just as a reminder, I'll kind of start there. Yeah, let's do
that. That's an outdoor event, and obviously this time of year, we've
got to be weather aware. We may at just the time of that depending
on the weather forecast. For example, last year, we moved up the
ceremony an hour. We did that on Friday because that looked like it give
us the best window. So but we're planning on Friday at eight, so
we could move it up a little bit. We have a little bit later.
We want to do everything we can to have it on Friday night.
However, if the weather is just not going to allow it, we will
move it to Saturday so that we can have an outdoor event. And most
likely that if we had to move it to Saturday, that would probably be
an afternoon, probably like a three o'clock if we did move it to Saturday.
But we're not ready to make that decision yet. Obviously a lot of
things can change between now and Friday night, but there is a chance we're
in on Friday, but Saturday looks like a beautiful day as well. But
we're going to have that graduation. We have learned that we like to have
that it's best to have it outdoors, just we don't have to limit the
number of people that attend. Then everyone can come and just really make it
a special event. And it is going to be a special event. Yeah,
we're going to carry that on k one TV dot com. So if
you're like you have relatives far far away you just can't make it, tell
them to tune in they get it on Roku and Apple TV. We can.
We can sure do that for you as well. I appreciate that Tom
and our project Graduation, which is for our graduates. Kind of a fun,
safe event for ours that's going to happen either way, even if we
don't have the let's kind it on Friday night either way. So that's kind
of that kind of plays in to our decision if we do move it to
Saturday, what time to do it. So we think that if we can
on a Friday night, we'll move it to Saturday afternoon and we'll have that
ceremony in and put a bow on the year. But yeah, this year,
this week has been it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of
different activities going on. You know, yesterday we had our elementary all school
track meet over at thet High School football field of our customer stadium on the
track and it's it's a wonderful event. It's good to see all the kids
running around. We had a great time over there. So yeah, it's
been a lot of fun getting in all those end of the year activities.
And this year, you know, as we've talked about before, has been
you know, it's been it's been the first year that we haven't had some
disruptions in several and so because of that, we've been doing all the things.
So I think I think this is the way we used to do it.
Yeah, I kind of remember now, yeah, we've kind of been
out of shape or doing all those different activities too. But yeah. But
so Monday night at our May School Board meeting, collect the start off with
our spotlight the Rvest Foundation, they came and they donated fifteen thousand dollars to
the Public School Foundation. Really appreciate their support. The majority of those funds
are going to be used for teacher daycare. We you know, I think
we've talked about that before, but you know, childcare is a big challenge
here in Bartlesville, and our teachers also struggle with that as well. But
we've worked with Tri County Tech in particular Joelene Bryant over there. They have
a great program and they have they're going to give a discount to our teachers,
and then in the public school we're also going to give our teachers a
discount for that program, and they're going to raise their priority level of getting
our staff into that program. I think we already have thirteen teachers signed up
with to have their kids in next year. And you know that makes a
difference on whether you know, our parents, society and our teachers if they
want to come back to work or stay home with their little ones, and
so we're very appreciative of that. So that our best foundation, that check
is going to help cover that discount for the districts. The district won't be
out any funds there that for year. And also we're gonna use a portion
of those funds for our Ruins on the Run program. So really thankful to
our vest Kim Moyer, the CEO there. She's a big proponent of of
bartles of public school. So appreciate everything that they do. Uh, they
do for us. It's always a fun way to start the meeting. You
know. We spent about half of our meeting recognizing students, which is fun.
Really, it really is a lot of fun, of course, and
seems like Joyce Shang comes to every meeting. She keeps somebody wrote a book
it's called Everywhere. Yeah. Uh, she she is wonderful and so we
just found out last week that she's a Presidential scholar Um, which there's I
think Principal Harp reported there's one of one hundred and sixty two I think in
the country. But basically there comes a boy and a girl from each state.
We had known that she wasn't win the final five, and so we
found out last week that she won the award. So that's really a big
deal Barbles. And we haven't had a winner of that award since nineteen eighty
six, so it's been a bit. Joyce announced at the meeting that she's
going to go to Princeton. She was accepted to I think all of the
Ivy League schools and and you know, not only is she an excellent student,
but she's a musician. Uh, she's president of the student body.
She's a sweet kid, and she's going to do wonderful things. So it's
fun to recognize her one last time. It's your brother. Yes, that's
right Stone, Yeah, that's right, right, good memory, Tom,
Yes, Stone is that's Stones at Princeton as well. And Joyce will be
matter of fact, she she let us know that she'll be giving a speech
of graduation whenever we have that ceremony. She's she's going to be given us
a speech. So that'll that'll be fun. Uh. You know. We
also had our principal, Tammy Krous from Richard Kane Elementary. She bought five
of her fifth grade leadership students came and they led us in the pledge and
talked about some of the things they've been doing with Miss Carolston. Those kids
are going to do great things. They are they are. It was really
a lot of fun to uh far aboard to get to see them. I
know, I've been, I'm over there quite a bit. I get to
see a lot of the different things that they do, so it's fun to
recognize them. UH. And then we've had a spring. Sports had a
very wildly successful, wildly successful season from soccer to golf and tennis, and
UH, you know, we won not only had a lot of kids qualify
for state meets and state tournaments, but we won two academic state championships.
You know, our boys tennis team UH and girls golf they're both academic state
champions as well as qualifying for the state TOURNAMENTUM and our boys mentioned our soccer
program, our boys soccer coach Brandon Willis. This is a second year with
US and he does a great job for US, has a great accent as
well. But he had our boys come. They qualified for the playoffs for
a second year in a row. They lost in overtime. They lost in
overtime the last two years in the first round they lost Edmund North. This
year's got a real strong program, but they're doing a great job and it
was really a lot of fun having those kids. I know it takes some
time. I appreciate our board giving up their time to do that because it
doesn't make the meeting a little longer, but I think it's you know,
it's meaningful for our kids and meaningful for our parents for those folks to be
recognized. You know, in one group, we didn't recognize our in terms
of spring sports as our baseball team. They didn't. They didn't qualified for
the state tournament. They got beat to go, but you know they've won.
I think this group of seniors won seventy six games over the last three
years. Pretty darn good and pretty darn good. And you know, our
our district saw the state championship game was bixbyon Enid who are both in our
district, and so we play everybody and they've done a great job. Coach
Price has been an amazing That program is going to continue to thrive. So
anyways, we had a large spotlight which was a lot of fun to recognize
all those folks, and then kind of the rest of the meeting. We
did announce on our personnel report. We had our last leadership position that we
feel to have. An assistant principal, Damon Harold is going to be an
assistant principal at the high school. He's replacing Matt Hancock who's moving over to
Central to be the principal there. And then also it proved some other things
that our concentage into, including kind of that final step. We're going to
replace all the lighting in the district with LED more efficient lighting, so we
approved kind of the final step in that process. As well. We had
some miscellaneous pay rates that we approved. Then probably the biggest piece of that.
Those are some pay rates that aren't included in our bargaining room with our
teachers. The biggest one change was in our speech language pathologists we have.
We needed to increase our pay to be more competitive. We were gonna have
to do some contract services, and we think it's better to have those folks
work for us so that they're more available to work with our kids. We've
had, you know, I've seen it's COVID related, but in terms of
there's more kids that are qualifying to need those services, and so we need
to make sure we have competitive salaries to keep our ones that we have and
also to expand we need to add some speech language pass in our district as
well. And then moving on a couple of action items, but probably the
one big thing was over at you know, Wayside, we have we're getting
construction started next week and so we approved the first the first phase of that
guaranteed maximum price with Manhattan, and so what that's going to do is basically
get them coming out of the ground. And so because they need to get
started next week, we've got a lot of things we get really, I
know some folks think that there's not much going on at school. In school
in forts and kids go home it's straight, but it's really the race is
on to get some work done. So they proved phase one, so we're
gonna get started next week. They're at Wayside next month they're going to prove
the second part of phase one for that edition. We'll prove that in June.
So a lot of work to be done this summer. We will be
um. We've we've acquired some additional land so that we have additional parking so
that we'll be ready when school starts in August. So we'll get that project
going. Really appreciative of the community support so that we can do that at
Wayside and then we'll be oh, about a year from now, we'll be
doing the same thing over at Ranch Heights Elementary and then yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah. Wayside is a little bit trickier just because that's why
we had to purchase some land. We shouldn't have that much real estate around
there too, But been fortunate we've been able to come to close with some
of those properties, so let be loss of activities folks. People, we'll
be able to monitor going on over at Wayside. And then lastly, construction
wise, on our agg facility. We did our groundbreaking here a couple of
weeks go. I guess I was last week and that that continues to go.
Well. Those guys are getting up out of the ground and they are
scheduled to be opened in March of next year. Wow, that's great.
Yeah, busy week, It has been a lot going on. Oh and
by the way, the Special Olympics team got the police s court. Now
that's right. I had the big Yeah, I had the big send off.
Today they're on their way to still Water that we did u this morning
at seven o'clock, so that's always a great way to a great way to
celebrate. It was a great event. Oh super and mister macauley, thank
you very much for being with us today. Stay tuned, folks, we're
gonna have Marylynn Men from Okam and she's got the big grand lineup of the
festival coming up for us in a moment