To get its building projects completed by the tentative date of January 2017, Warsaw Community School Corp. Chief Financial Officer Kevin Scott Tuesday told the school board about action it will need to take at its regular meeting Monday.
The projects include building a new Lincoln Elementary School and renovating/expanding Washington STEM Academy and Edgewood Middle School.
On Monday, the board will be asked to approve “resolutions that adopts preliminary plans, form of the lease for the financing part of it and also authorization to publish a notice that we’re going to have a lease hearing at the meeting in September. And finally, there’s another resolution that relates to the building corporation that is able to do the bond on this project,” Scott said.
He said the board members should get copies of the resolutions this week. If they have questions about them, he said they can contact him.
Scott said the board will have to approve the resolutions separately.
He then presented the board with the timeline for the school corporation’s 2016 budget.
At the Sept. 21 meeting, Scott will request permission from the board to advertise publication of the Notice to Taxpayers for the 2016 budget, with the legal notice being published Sept. 22. A public hearing on the 2016 budget will be at 4 p.m. Oct. 2 and the official adoption Oct. 19 at the regular board meeting.
During the board’s review of claims and contracts, board member Jay Baumgartner asked about the expense for the school corporation’s Pride magazine. The cost for composition, printing and postage of the magazine is $13,800.
“Is that just printing costs or what exactly is that? Do we get much benefit of putting that together? It seems like a large (expense),” Baumgartner asked.
Scott referred him to Chief Accountability Officer Dani Barkey, who he said leads that effort.
“The largest portion of the amount is printing charges. That is the bulk of our costs,” she said. “We lowered our costs by about $5,000 this year by doing all the pictures in-house. We used to have a professional photographer do that so we lowered our costs. But we also decided this year to expand our borders to where Pride was going to, so we expanded into the Whitko district and the Manchester district. We took away some of the copies internally. We sent a digital version of Pride to most of our internal district except for businesses and some families on the outer outskirts got the paper copy as well. So we kind of changed the way we did that a little bit, but it is a large price tag.”
Barkey said they’ve discussed doing a different kind of delivery for next year, making it a digital delivery so it can have embedded video.
“We still have to have someone put that together for us so that it’s professional, but we anticipate the cost going down because printing is such a large component of that price tag,” she said.
Asked how often the magazine came out, Barkey said the school district used to publish it quarterly, but changed that to once every semester this year. If it goes to a digital delivery, it would become a “live” document, meaning they could send one out as often as the school corporation put it together.
“So that’s something we’re considering this year,” she said.
Scott said, “Because with a wider distribution, this particular one, the dollar amount may go up.”
(Story By The Times Union)
