Photo by Wanda Hanson
The June 23 Rushford-Peterson School Board meeting had a certification of the proposed building referendum on the agenda. This certification needed to be sent to the state for review and approval. Last week a question concerning whether a daycare addition would qualify for the disaster relief funding from MDE came up.
R-P has an email from an MDE official stating that it would indeed qualify. At this time the school is waiting for confirmation from another official from MDE about whether the daycare portion of the porject also qualifies for disaster relief funding. Only two school districts in the state qualified for the disaster relief, Moose Lake and Rushford-Peterson. As a result, MDE needs to interpret some language before proceeding with the funding. The language says the school receiving the funding must be “primarily K-12.” The new debt issue has been confirmed with the MDE as qualifying; only the daycare portion is in question at this time.
Sarah Fox from ATS&R (the school architectural firm) and Aaron Bushberger from Ehler’s, Inc.(the school finance firm) appeared virtually at the board meeting to answer questions from the board. The two experts disagreed on how the board should proceed. Fox felt that the board should decide on the questions for the referendum before it is submitted to the state; Bushberger commented that they could include the daycare for now and remove it later if it was not to be included in the disaster relief funding.
Fox opined that the information should be as complete as possible before submitting the project to the state. Bushberger agreed that they were trying to address everything before submitting to the state for approval in order to prevent issues.
If the project were to receive an unfavorable review from MDE, the school could still proceed with a referendum vote, but it would need a higher 60% vote in favor of the referendum to pass.
School board member Nancy Snyder shared that she felt it would be cleaner to wait for an answer to the daycare question from MDE before proceeding with the certification. The board decided to table the item and hold a special meeting when the complete information is received. At that time they will most likely decide on the wording of the question(s) for the referendum as well.
Bushberger informed the board that the submission would need to be completed by July 9 in order to have the time needed for community informational meetings before the referendum goes to a vote. In order to use the disaster relief funding, the referendum should be done this year. After the project comes back from the MDE review and comment, the school plans to have multiple informational meetings for the citizens.
2025-2026 Budget
Business manager Toni Oian presented the budget for 2025-2026. The budget shows total revenue of $9,584,456 with a projected change of funding of -$30,000. Oian shared that she ultimately expects a break even budget.
Vocational education was shown to have a higher cost. Some classes that qualified were moved from regular education to vocational education since more funding is available for vocational classes.
$108,000 of building expense will go to pay R-P’s share of the HVED building project. As usual, the school will transfer $80,000 from general funds to the community education fund to support the preschool programs.
Food service is projected to have a $6,000 deficit. According to Oian this is what needs to happen. The food service has an excess of funding; the goal is to break even on the food service so the funds need to be spent down.
Staffing has changed which affected the budget. The athletic director will also be dean of students and not the community education director. Superintendent Bernard will supervise community education with Lakyn Rasmussen taking on more community education duties.
Other Business
In other regular business, the board:
•Approved the Literacy Report to be sent to the state; remediation and acceleration is expected to make some good changes at R-P;
•Chose suppliers for gasoline, milk and bread for next year; gasoline will be from Pam’s Corner, milk will be from Kemps and bread will be from both Pan-O-Gold and St. Charles Bakery, which will give the food service more flexibility on menus;
•Approved the annual QComp report to the state;
•Designated Superintendent Bernard as the identified official with the authority to give staff access to reports and information they need to do their jobs (EDIAM);
•Accepted donations totalling $5,668;
•Hired Erin Thompson as MS/HS counselor; Brenda Bergen as asst. senior class advisor; Jaimie Knutson as MS student council advisor; and Landon Lee and Cambria Bauer as student custodians.
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