The meeting tonight lasted only a half hour. Only three people were in the audience and they were all school employees. Board Member Samantha MacLean was not present. There wasn't much to this meeting, but here are the highlights from my point of view:
1) Superintendent's Report:
a) Outlined schedule for teacher prep week including an extra day added on Tuesday to accommodate training needs for new equipment and programs.
b) onPoint (the company installing short-throw, whiteboard, projection devices in classrooms) is donating a projection unit for the school board meeting room.
c) iPads for board members - The plan is to issue iPads to board members and for documents to be shared with board electronically instead of being printed out.
2) High School Principal: Talked about improving communication and asked the board if posting announcements on Facebook was an effective way of communicating from their point of view. The board seemed to like the idea.
3) Teeshirts - A total of 106 teeshirts with school logos have been ordered for the elementary and high school. (This turned out to be the longest discussion of the evening.) The main concerns were cost and the logos. First of all, the total cost for the order was $4100 minus 15% ($615) for a cost of about $33 per shirt. Some board members thought this was a little high and the explanation had to do with logos, which gets us to the second concern. Since the elementary mascot is a roadrunner and the high school mascot is a tornado, different logos were ordered for each site. This turned into a discussion about the history of mascots in TJUSD. Sandy Sprouse stated that the original mascot for the high school was a tiger, but at some point that got changed to a tornado. Also it was mentioned that the mascot for the elementary may have been a twister (small tornado) at some point, but for some reason it was changed to a roadrunner. No one was sure when any of this happened, but there was some uncertainty about the roadrunner logo and whether elementary staff would prefer a shirt with a tornado or a roadrunner.
4) Business items regarding the 2016-2017 budget and LCAP passed (4-0) without discussion.
5) Policies and Procedures item regarding revision of Board Policy 9250 (Remuneration, Reimbursement, and Other Benefits) was tabled without explanation.
NEXT REGULAR MEETING: September 08, 2016