The Crookston School Board met on Monday evening in the Crookston High School Choir/Orchestra room. The feature program was a review of the district test scores, presented by Highland School Principal, Chris Trostad. KROX had a story on the test scores last week.
Personnel items approved were lane advancement requests, the employment of Amber Trostad as School Age Care at Highland School, and the employment of Dawn Brusoe as an instructional/Title Aide at Washington School.
The only item on the main agenda was the approval of Superintendent Jeremy Olson’s spending authority limit. The board agreed to a $10,000 limit. “What we didn’t have before was an official spending authority for the superintendent, which left me a quandary knowing whether or not I can sign contracts without bringing them to the school board,” said Olson. “We established tonight the $10,000 spending authority so any contract, and in a school district this size many contracts are over $10,000 so we looked at the smaller contracts that are $10,000 and under and giving the superintendent authority, whereas everything beyond $10,000 would be school board authority.” This decision would affect smaller contracts and now Olson wouldn’t have to ask the board for approval. “This would be for non-personnel contracts, so, for instance, the sidewalk contract would have been beyond the spending authority, so we would have brought that to the board for approval,” said Olson. “Where a $200 contract with Johnson Controls or a building contract would not need school board authority.”
Superintendent Olson gave a report to wrap up the meeting and said he was happy with the district’s test scores from K-12 and he said they have some work to do, but compare well with other are districts and are doing much better than the area districts they are losing students to open enrollment. “Overall, I am pretty proud of our test scores. We took a nice step forward, but with that being said we have some steps to take forward because we can perform better than we have been performing. A majority of our categories actually increased from a year ago, which is positive,” said Olson. “We also started looking at those districts that we lose students to open enrollment. I was happy to see we outperformed both of those districts quite substantially in every area.” The area school test scores are below-
| Math | Reading | Science |
| Fertile-Beltrami – 68% | Fertile-Beltrami – 71.5% | Fertile-Beltrami – 55.6% |
| Thief River Falls – 60.5% | Red Lake Falls – 60.9% | Crookston – 49.4% |
| Warren-Alvarado-Oslo – 59.1% | Crookston – 58.3% | Thief River Falls – 47.5% |
| Red Lake Falls – 56.5% | Thief River Falls – 58% | East Grand Forks – 42.5% |
| East Grand Forks – 52.4% | East Grand Forks – 52.8% | Fisher – 34.5% |
| Crookston – 52.2% | Warren-Alvarado-Oslo – 51.1% | Warren-Alvarado-Oslo – 34% |
| Climax-Shelly – 35.8% | Climax-Shelly – 48.7% | Red Lake Falls – 34% |
| Fisher – 34.1% | Fisher – 44.4% | Climax-Shelly – 33.3% |
