Mineola Board of Ed Notebook: Nov. 17

The  held a meeting on Thursday, Nov. 17. Here are some of the things you may have missed.

Ongoing Projects

• Repaving of the  parking lot . The lot was recently torn up, repaved and restriped after  for drainage. The final piece to the project is adding electricity to the light stantions which have been installed. According to Superintendent Dr. Michael Nagler, LIPA is “past due on that.”
• Renovation of the softball field is “almost complete” with concrete poured for the pads and sodding scheduled to be put in place before the weather turns cold.
• The superintendent also reported that he “has not heard back from  “or the village” regarding  during sporting events. “We’re at a standstill right now,” he said.
• Dr. Nagler recently held a meeting with district architects regarding the renovations to the high school art room. “It probably won’t happen until June,” Dr. Nagler said of the work due to the removal of the concrete wall and “there’s really nowhere to put the kids if you try to do it over the break.”

Strategic Planning Committee

• The district strategic planning committee met on November 10 for group work about how different parts of the school system interrelate and their respective hierarchy.
• The group met again on November 22 and spoke about strategic objectives and measurement.
• Dr. Nagler said that he distributed an e-mail about the quality indicators the district currently has and collects and if members had any others that they wanted to include.
• “We started off with a little more abstract before we got into the actual document,” he said.

Annual Risk Assessment

• The board accepted the 2010-11 annual risk assessment update report which was prepared by the district’s internal auditors of Cullen & Danowski.
• The internal auditor conducts risk assessment, certifies that state controls are adhered to and makes recommendations.
• The board further authorized the auditing firm to conduct a procedure audit in the area of special education beginning on Dec. 12, 2011 at an estimated cost of $15,000.
• “Their job is to check what everybody else is doing,” Dr. Nagler explained, describing the audit as a “detailed” one for the special education program.
• The district conducted a similar audit on the extraclassroom fund, in 2009-10 payroll was audited.
• The corrective action plan for the extraclassroom activity fund was also approved to be filed with the state education department.
• “In a typically high-risk area for an organization, so it’s good practice to look at it very specifically, spend some detail on it and hear their recommendations about how we can improve, what we’re doing well, how can we improve, how we can maybe in this particular case gain some additional moneys from the state.”

Budgetary Transfers

• The board approved 12 budgetary transfers totaling $2,593,700 that were related to .
• “When we put the budget together for the ’11-12 year in March, while we knew pretty much the teachers we were going to have, the staffing we were going to have, we were not certain where the staff would be located,” assistant superintendent of finance Jack Waters said, explaining that some buildings had codes for grade levels which were no longer applicable.
• “Grades 7 and 8 as they were budgeted are now reflecting where people are,” Waters said. “These budget transfers take care of most, if not all of the negative balances or the high surplus balances that were in the codes as a result of how we budgeted last year and how the teacher are, where they are this year, being paid out of.”

Other Board News

• High school student Mathias Penaherrera reported that colleges held “on the spot” admissions on November 17 where various universities come to the school, meet with students and immediately tell them whether or not they are accepted and in some cases find out about financial aid packages available to them.