The always on-time President Arnold rang the bell to start the meeting at exactly 12:00! David Hartman led the club in the invocation. He was followed by Stacie Cook who was called upon to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. She then shared with the club that our song of the day was chosen by random draw. Susan opened the song book to the classic tragedy of the miner 49er and his daughter “Clementine”. After singing the first verse, we sang a verse of Rotary and greeted our friends.
We were fortunate enough to have a couple of visitors join us at meeting. David Hartman introduced his guest, Catherine Early from MSU. Then, Rod Tieken said that his guest needed no introduction as he was joined by Glen Spadin. I forced my son, Jax Munholland, to join us for lunch, and Josh Phillips introduced his guest, Kenny McCollum, the GM for Bruckner in Wichita Falls.
For the Sunshine report, Benay Ayers shared that John Deason is doing well and was on his way to the 5th of his 6 chemotherapy treatments. She also shared that Walter Coppage has been released to drive after his hip surgery and is doing therapy at OSTC. Please remember to keep them in your thoughts and prayers.
President Arnold took to the podium to make a couple of announcements. First, he reminded everyone that the deadline to RSVP for the Annual Party is June 15th. The event will be Thursday night June 29th from 6-8pm at the Kemp Center. Please join us in celebrating President Arnold! His second announcement was to remind everyone that our next flag day will be on Wednesday June 14th in observance of Flag Day. Steve Priester reminded everyone to print out a new list, as the new flag system keeps tabs on new flag subscriptions. As usual, we will have military support at the Forum and Tanglewood at 6:30 am to put out flags.
Stacie Cook brought out the brag bucket and the only brag of the day was from Andy Kocher. His 9-year-old grandson won the baseball championship and hit a double in the game. Andy said that he was impressed with the team and thinks they may have even turned a double play!
President Arnold called on Carol Murray to do one our favorite things as Rotarians, induct a new member! Carol brought up Pam Leonardi, who was accompanied by her husband Stephen. Pam is a realtor with Paramount and specializes in military relocation. President Arnold swore her into the club and Carol presented her with her red badge and Rotary packet.
After the induction, Norris Martin took the opportunity to share with the club that we were challenged by the district to participate in a membership drive that runs until the end of June. His hope is that we can get 5-6 new membership applications in that time. He concluded by giving a membership information package to our guest speaker, Dr. Donnie Lee, Superintendent of WFISD.
Following Norris, Dave Hartman was called on to introduce Dr. Lee as our guest speaker. He previously spoke with our club at the beginning of the school year and felt that it would be nice to come full circle and visit with us again after the end of the school year. Dr. Lee’s technology failed him, and he couldn’t use the presentation that he had prepared, so he decided to just share with the group the information from his presentation. He started off by talking about the status of the 2 new schools. Both Memorial and Legacy are on time, on budget, and on schedule. He shared that Memorial is a little bit ahead of Legacy because there was a little less foundation dirt work that needed to be done at the site for Memorial. He said that the current estimated completion time for Memorial is February 2024 and for Legacy is April 2024. He said that this time frame will allow plenty of time to get the buildings ready for students by August 2024. He followed up the good news about the status of the schools, with the bad news about the status of the athletic facilities that were approved under proposition B. He said that the original request was for $13.5 million from taxpayers and the district would pitch in an additional $4 million to cover the total cost of $17.5 million. However, he said that the budget was blown out of the water almost at the same time the proposal was approved. The final bids they received to complete the project after approval were double what the initial request was. The current estimated cost for the project is $27 million. The funds from the approved proposition will be enough to cover all the expenses for the items that are at ground level, such as the practice fields, however, it is not enough to cover any of the expenses for the above ground items, such as bleachers, rest rooms, and concession stands. He said that they are working with donors to cover some of the additional costs, but they do not currently have a plan in place to fund all the items that were originally in the request.
He then shifted his focus to the budget for the 2023-2024 school year. He said that it was no secret that the budget for previous year had a $7 million deficit that was the result of the district missing the projection on the number of students by around 600 students. However, he said that the proposed budget for the upcoming school year is balanced. He said that it was not an easy task and required saying no to a lot of principals. He said that the state has established recommendations for districts on how many staff members they are allowed to have for many of the support positions based on the number of students at a facility. This helped guide the budget discussions and helped support Dr. Lee as he was denying requests for additional support staff as staffing is about 85% of the budget for school districts annually. The next piece of the budget cuts, which has become a hot button item, is the closing of some of the schools. Dr. Lee shared that at the start of last year WFISD had the highest number of buildings used by any school district in the state. He stated that the 26 facilities maintained by WFISD were the by far the most for any similar district, with most other school districts being under 20 facilities. Just the utilities and maintenance on the upkeep of the facilities is a significant portion of the district’s expenses. He stated that they have begun the process of closing some of the elementary schools and have plans in place to close some of the others. The focus is in getting the students to the best buildings for them, not necessarily the closest building to them.
The next item that Dr. Lee touched on was status of Kirby since it received a warning due to its performance on the previous year’s STAAR test. He stated that it is too early to know how it performed on this year’s test, but the early indication is that it is going to be very close. He is not sure how the state is going to handle the situation, but there could be very serious measures taken.
Dr. Lee stated that his focus is in making sure the students of our district have the great teachers at all schools in the district and not just at the preferred school with the preferred principal. The principals for the Memorial and Legacy have been announced, but they were only allowed to bring 2 of their existing assistant principals. All the other teachers will be assigned to the schools to make sure both schools have great teachers! When asked about the staffing levels, Dr. Lee stated that they only have 38 openings for teachers or principals at this time, which is down significantly from this time last year.
After Dr. Lee answered a couple of questions, President Arnold presented him with the speaker’s gift, which will be sent to Rider High School.
The meeting ended with the Four Way Test and ringing of the bell at 12:47.