Board OKs contracts

By KREMENA TODOROVA

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- In a weather-abbreviated session Thursday night, the District 88 Board of Education ratified new two-year contracts with clerical and custodial employees.

Both agreements provide for 30 cents a year raises across the board, and increase the district's health insurance contribution depending on the type of plan employees subscribe to. Employees will continue to pay part of the insurance premiums.

The agreements also include a number of language changes, "not so much in meaning as in clarifying and eliminating unclear language," according to a district negotiator, board member Susan Nierengarten.

In addition, the contract with clerical employees reinstates pay for five days a year, which 12-month employees have been required to take off without pay to accommodate budget cuts.

"With all the time spent on negotiations, it sounds like not a lot of change," Nierengarten joked. "But those things take a lot of time."

The two employee groups are represented by the same union.

In Thursday's meeting, the board also:

* Approved a calendar for next school year. The calendar provides for a two-week Christmas break and several long weekends in the second semester. There is no spring break.

According to school officials, who considered several possible calendars at their Feb. 28 meeting, this version best reflects the wishes of the majority of teachers, students and parents who answered district surveys.

Discarded options included a shorter Christmas vacation, a spring break and a mid-year break, in various combinations.

* Approved a $15,525 appropriation for Healthy Communities/Healthy Youth, a group that sponsors projects fostering youth leadership such as Students Performing on Tough Situations, the New Ulm Area Youth Council, youth leadership training, Washington School after-school programs and Prairie Fire Children's Theater.

The appropriation comes from the district's community education budget and can only be spent on programs of this kind, which means the district is not dipping into classroom funds, said district officials.

Justifying the spending item, Superintendent Harold Remme said that the group, which gets the bulk of its funding from other sources, over the past few years has moved away from spending 63 percent of the appropriation on wages, to spending just 34 percent.

"It speaks well for the program that it's gotten more student-use oriented and less top-heavy," he said.

* Discussed several issues related to a forthcoming decision on whether or not to continue sponsorship of charter schools in Lafayette and Hanska.

School board chair Sue Ullery stressed the district may have no interest in being a "rubberstamp sponsor."

"The question is, can we afford (a closer) oversight; can we afford to tax District 88 that way?" she asked, voicing many officials' shared concerns.