The Crookston School Board met on Monday evening where Superintendent Jeremy Olson announced they were going to cancel school for Tuesday and Wednesday because of the dangerously cold temperatures in the forecast. “We work with area superintendents and we have great partnerships with them and I value their advice and expertise and I looked a lot at the weather forecast and what we use in Crookston is we really look at a windchill chart that the National Weather Service puts out,” said Superintendent Olson. “Basically anything that falls within a 10-minute window where skin freezes after 10 minutes of exposure and that will take place the next two days so we decided to cancel school.”
Superintendent Olson presented the school board with three options as part of the preschool configuration plan.
Option 1 – To keep the preschool option the same as they are offering this year (all half-day sessions).
Option 2 – All Day/Every Day for everybody
Option 3 – A mix of All Day/Every Day and half day depending on what the family wants.
The options were for the four-year-old preschool students only. School Board member Dave Davidson made a motion to go with option 3 and Tim Dufault seconded, and the board gave unanimous approval to move forward with option three. “The specifics are still to be decided, but the decision was made based on survey results we received. Families were self-reporting that said they wanted half day and other families said they want a full day option,” said Superintendent Olson. “We are thankful we have a good team in preschool, and we will put together some specifics for the option.” To see the preschool survey results scroll down to the first document at the bottom of the page.
The Crookston School District Bus Garage committee asked if the school would need an architect to design a new bus garage and the City of Crookston Building Inspector and the school districts legal team both said they would need one to move forward.
Superintendent Olson brought forward an Architect RFP for a bus garage and the board unanimously approved moving forward with an RFP. “We are looking at a fixed cost fee. We don’t want to have any incentive to drive up costs. When you have a percentage fee, obviously as the project scope increases the dollars increase and so does the fee to the architect and we don’t want to incentivize a growing cost,” said Superintendent Olson. “We would like to incentivize lowering cost so we want to be very diligent with dollars and as we look at the feasibility of this project we want to use every means to lower cost.” To see the RFP, go to the second document at the bottom of the page.
The school board approved the consent agenda including approval of the January 14 meeting minutes and approval of current bills in the amount of $126,832.49. The board accepted the retirement letter from Belinda Fjeld – Music/Choir Teacher at Crookston High School and Washington Elementary School, and they approved salary lane advance requests for Erin Down, Rachel Hurner, Sarah Pester and Josh Hardy.
Superintendent Olson and School Board members Dave Davidson, Frank Fee, Adrianne Winger, and Tim Dufault all thanked Belinda Fjeld for her many years of service to the Crookston School District. “I think I am going to miss her smile, she has a contagious smile,” said Olson. “We are going to miss her and she has done some great things.”
The Bus Garage committee is planning on meeting Wednesday, January 30.
The next school board meeting is scheduled for Monday, February 11.
[embeddoc url=”https://kroxam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/preschoolsurvey.pdf” download=”all”]
[embeddoc url=”https://kroxam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/RFP_for_Architecht.pdf” download=”all”]
