Dr. Julie Trepa, Superintendent, Boone Community School District, June 18, 2026

On our program today, we're visiting with Julie Treppa, Dr. Julie Treppa from the Boone School District in the midst of summer break. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah. For the kids. Yeah, for the kids it is. It's great. We do have, well, a number of different things. First of all, last regular meeting. God, I hope you don't have another special. I don't think so. Last regular meeting of this fiscal year. Yes. Good to be done. Last regular meeting for the fiscal year. So we got that part. The fiscal year ends June 30th. So yes. Yes. Yes. Everybody's, let's get started on this new year and see where we're going. Absolutely. For the Boone School Board, they did meet earlier this week, delayed it a week. But once again, a lot of different things on the agenda. First, I got to ask about, we started our summer food program this week. The Boone School District, one of those that does offer breakfast and lunch. And it's at Ledges in the high school. So that started this week and I think there were some posts that went out on our social media pages on Facebook and Instagram recently. So there are specific times that you have to arrive or we aren't allowed to serve. And we serve the students and they have to stay there to eat it. So other than that, yeah, all is welcome. No, it's not to go, unfortunately. So, but I think what, 7.30 to 9.30 for breakfast, both locations and then. 11 to 12. 11 to 12 for lunch. And once again, 18 and under, 8 for free. Yep. Absolutely. Again, if you have children that are, you know, need to have a lunch, hey, make it a day out. Yeah, absolutely. Have them go eat lunch at school. Well, we did have a lot of different things on the agenda for the board this week. I guess, surprisingly, a lot of things. Yeah. So, let's talk about insurance. Let's talk a little bit about that. Hans Bama on hand. I know districts like cities and homeowners don't like that property. The property insurance thing has just been a real challenge. Yeah, the increases just keep coming, don't they? They do. Now, the district has taken some steps to try to, what, buy down, basically some of the down payment or some of the extra costs that have come as a result of a lot of the wind and hail that Iowa has experienced across the state, a lot of us have some supplemental insurance that helps buy down some of that cost. You had a lot of districts kind of got together on that. We did get together, and Paulette was actually one of the founding members of that, so kudos to her for finding yet another way to help save us money. But that's something that those costs, the supplemental piece is not going up at all. And Hans was there just to share about the rest of the insurance costs. And I think what we're most proud of is the Workman's Comp that we have a very deep discount because of the lack of claims that we have now. I know that he had pointed out that for not all the board members had been on at the time, but he said at one time the Workman's Comp was 200, the premium was like $260,000. And now it's 43% less, I think is what he just said. Yeah, we get like a discount, yeah, because of the, yeah, we're so far below the average. So you said one of the big driving factors you think are basically your principals, your department heads, things like that. They are taking it seriously to prevent that. Yeah, they take the time to train staff to know how to do their job safely and to ensure that we're proactive instead of having to be reactive. And so that's something we've received some grants from that insurance company SFM because of some of those steps they've taken. So in addition to the deep discount on our insurance renewal, we've received grants to be able to purchase some equipment too. So it has been work that has had a great return on investment. So again, yeah, when you think back at one time, 40% reduction from 206, that's pretty good. Absolutely, something to celebrate. And yeah, you said at one time the, what the rate was like 1.65, you're down to like 0.5. Yeah, 0.5. Pretty impressive. And that's, again, not having those incidents to report. Exactly. We also did have a parking lot project. We did. And some more good news. Can you believe it? It's great. Well, I said it's not as, quite as extensive as what they're doing over in Ogden. But you got a, you had very competitive bids. Absolutely. You had seven bidders on this? Yes. Seven bidders come to this. And yeah, it was a full house at bid day and, and had a significantly lower bid than what we had originally planned for. You were thinking somewhere it was going to be around 900,000. We were thinking around 900 and it came in at what, 447. 447. Again, rise construction from Des Moines. And all of them are contractors that we've seen in the area before. So DLRs. This is what they do for a living. Yep. Yep. DLRs said, let's go this, now the big thing. And of course, board asked right away, will it be done in time? Exactly. That's the question. So it seems to be that they're well aware that second week in August needs to be, need to have everything taken care of. And so as DLR pointed out, it is also contingent on some weather. Yeah. Well, hopefully the weather will cooperate when we need it to and it can rain when we are fine with it raining. Yeah. When they're not, when, once it's all poured, we'll paint later and get that, the one thing people ask, of course, how are we paying for this again? This is one of those where we do have dollars available in this pot. The pot of sales tax. Yeah. It's sales tax. I think it's important to note that that's where that money is coming from is the sales tax that is meant for facilities improvements, maintenance, buses, things like that. And so that's what a parking lot is about. We're maintaining because our current parking lot is not sufficient, so we, we need to redo the parking lot. And so our sales tax dollars pay for that. So that's why those sales tax dollars are so important to school districts. This is one of those where, again, for folks that are wondering, this is the one on the west side. Yes. And you're going. The student lot. And it's not going to have, I mean, we're going to get rid of at least one of the entrances or I know there's different. Yeah. So right now, I think we have something like three. Yeah. And so it'll have an entrance to each road that it's contingent on. So it'll have one where people will go in and out that same entrance. And that's actually something that cities would prefer. Our city has been extremely cooperative and really we're okay with whatever we picked, but we wanted to make sure that we had better traffic patterns. We will increase the number of spots significantly. So that's a big help. It is a big help on graduation day, on class day, and on all of the days when we have so many people wanting to come and enjoy whatever festivities are happening, we'll have more parking spaces. So that, that is exciting. And I spent years getting letters from students about this parking lot. So now, now we can move on to the next thing that they feel they need. And there'll be something. There will be. Eric Barron, of course, with DLR, bringing in, and again, he really commented about all the number of bidders, all of them under the estimate. All of them were well under the estimate, but there was a decent range. Yeah. They range from 447 to 700. Yeah. So. It was in there. And another part of it will be a contract with Terracon and basically they do testing concrete, things like that, and making sure that it's done at the quality that they're looking for. So, and again, being covered costs, being covered with the sales tax is part of this project. Sales tax dollars pay for that as well. Yes. A couple other things that came up and we have a different way that we have to give money to AEA. Yeah, we do. I like that description. It goes, yes, we used to just go directly to them and now it's got to come to us and then it goes to them. Pretty much. Yeah. Just first. A little wrinkle in there by the state. Yeah. Well, and it used to be monthly, so really what we had to do when we had the agreement at the time, it was a monthly payment. So the agreement stated that. So we needed to change the agreement to represent what the legislature passed and that is quarterly payments instead. So we will pay them quarterly instead of monthly. District still getting a lot of services from AEA? We're still receiving services from AEA, yes. Yeah. I would like to be more. Much as we have maybe had in the past, but yeah, we're still receiving some. We would like to. Yes. Yes. We are going to do a sharing arrangement. I know this is one of those where there was actually quite a bit of discussion over this. Cindy Bassett is the, currently handles your special ed and so South Hamilton needs a little help. Yeah. And that's their program and she's going to give it a try like a day a week. So when we were going through our budget reductions, something that we had shared with the board is that there are operational sharing opportunities in the state that we thought we should explore. This was one of them and really it takes another district needing the services that maybe you have and our willingness to try it. And that's what we're doing is we're going to give it a try. We're going to share 20% of Cindy's time with South Hamilton. So that's equivalent to a day a week. And then that reduces our budget by 20% and also gives us sharing dollars. So we will see how it goes. We want to make sure that it works for South Hamilton and it works for Boone. If it does and it is in our agreement that we can continue it and if it doesn't work, there's a termination statement where we can say with 90 days notice either party can say, you know, this isn't working for us. So we're going to give it a try. Among the board's concerns were amount of work that each, that you're going to be having is that. I'm sure that Cindy would have 120% of instead of 100% and you know, making sure that she's not having to do everything she's done for us before plus another day. It really is meant to be that we're going to have to take some things off of Cindy's plate here and redistribute some of those duties to others in the district, myself included. And so that we can have space for her to do that. So that it makes it doable. The reimbursement you get from the state, did the state adjust that? How it's... It's for two students right now, the director of special education. Used to be a little more. Well, it should be four, but that in my opinion, the job itself is something that I think would warrant larger dollars, but right now it's worth two. And I think she's already somewhat familiar because you use the same like individual education plans, IPAs and things like that. And probably partly because they're superintendent shared with United already. So we have kind of that working arrangement going on. Yes. Well, and Cindy did talk about it. I think it is contingent upon our working relationship with one another and we're both very willing to work together and try and make this doable for Cindy, but also serving the students that both of us need to serve in our respective districts. Well we did get some fast information folks. We did. We're talking test results. And again, this is one of those where you can read a lot more into it than probably you should. But this is, I found a very interesting Jill James is a great presentation on how we're seeing improvement, but you know, if people are looking at just what your percentage is compared to what the state percentage is, not necessarily comparing apples to apples all. Not necessarily in this particular assessment. It's really meant to be a screener. So it's not a summative assessment. It's not something that tells you what you've mastered or not mastered. It's kind of what she described was when you go into the doctor's office for, you know, your yearly physical, you know, the numbers you get that particular year might not look the way you want it to, but the next year it bounces right back and it's not a pattern. And really, it's kind of a health check academically to see where students are. And that is the assessment that the state has us utilize to determine when students need individualized reading plans or individualized math plans, but that's after we see maybe a trend going down versus or not going up as much as we'd like to see. So it's not a, hey, you perform this way one time and it means something. So. And it is basically elementary through into the middle school into the middle school. We switch to another test at the high school that is more designed for that level. So it's called star, but it's similar. It's also a screener. I think one of the things I noticed in, I think it was maybe autumn who said it, we're, we saw great improvements like on the math side. And she said, one of the big things there was that we might not be in all the categories that they were testing, but the categories that we are in, they're good. We have really good results. Well, and I think drill share just since 2022 till now, the very steep increase that we've seen in student performance on, on these assessments. And that's what we want to see. We want to see it trending upward. And we were excited to see it trending upward in second and fifth grade for language arts because those are our transition times that we've worked so hard on. And we've been kind of stagnant in the language arts piece, not going down, but not going up as much as we'd like. But that's why we've adopted the new curriculum. We're hoping that the new curriculum will help us with that trend up just like our math curriculum did because that really has, we're now seeing the results of some of the curricular changes we've made. So it's exciting. Just one of the things I got out of that was when they read, they comprehend their, they read well. They just don't read fast. Right. And so that's automatic. Some people are going, they still read well and they, and they retain, but it's just not fast. It's just not fast. So that's the next thing, right? That's the fluency part. We're kind of more of that. The board did approve, again, an increase in lunch prices. Yeah. Well, we knew last year, and I remember, I remember last year it was where we have to have this increase. Basically, the state gives you a formula and you got to plug in the data and then you go, well, that's an awful big increase. Exactly. So you were looking at spreading it out over two years, did 50 cents last year. This next year it's going to be a 75 cent increase. Yeah. So we did see this coming and didn't want to make the very large increase in one year. So try to split it in the two years. Of course, we don't like having to increase anytime, but that is unfortunately what we're having to do. Just like all of us at home that are experiencing the food price increases, that is also happening for us as well, and that's part of their formula, is they want to make sure that we're self-sustaining. We have to be. We aren't in it to make a profit, it's truly about self-sustaining. So that's the reason for the increase, and so we're hopeful that by doing this and splitting it between the two years, if there's an increase next year, it's much smaller. Okay. This takes me back to the beginning when we're doing the registration of the free reduced meals, folks, sign up for it, whether you think you need it or not. Exactly. Sign up for it. It never hurts to try. And we'll see what happens with that. The new ones come out in July, so July one is when the state says they'll produce that for us. Sometimes around time. Yeah. So we're hopeful. As soon as we receive those though, those will go out to all of our families. The board had some concerns, is this going to create more basically debt? More lunch debt, because we're already dealing with that. And again, Boone District, not the only one going through this, so you're going to be sending out some notifications. People should be looking for those if you have fallen a little behind. If you've got students in the system and you owe any fee, whether it's from registration or it's a lunch fee, you'll just receive an invoice letting you know what it is that you owe. And we're wanting to inform our families just to make sure that they're aware and give them opportunities to get that paid down. And if they need a payment plan, we are willing to help them. Just need to contact our central office and we will walk them through that process. To help where we as much as we can. Absolutely. We will absolutely help where we can. Don't just ignore it. Make contact with those. Please do not. Yeah. Make contact because we will be doing this this month, next month, and then August. Just updating the invoices so people know where they stand and encouraging them to pay those dues. And those of you that had graduating seniors know that you really don't want to wait until they graduate to try and pay all that off. So it's better to do it now anyway. So again, just the district will work with you. Absolutely. We'll do whatever we can. I know the board keeps saying, well, people do donate, but we touched on this before. If they just donate to the program, you have to wait. I mean, you got to spread that over everybody. Right. When you donate just in general to the lunch program, then we follow our board policy that delineates it in a particular way. So if there is a particular family you're trying to help, then that's something you need to note on that donation. But we are working to make it even easier to make a donation so it can be on the website soon and give people the opportunity. If you're part of an organization that wants to contribute, you can do that too. Okay. Can you summarize in like less than a minute or so? Virtual Academy. A big presentation. We are kind of skating into this. Is that a good way to say we've got some? If we're dipping our toe into the virtual learning environment, all of us were plunged into the pool with that virtual learning environment and COVID and learned some valuable lessons from that, I think. So really what we're trying to do is ensure that there is a population of students that really can benefit from that particular modality. And so we have created what we call the Boone Virtual Academy. And it has several different avenues that you can enter into, but really it's about matching the best learning modality to our students. And this is yet another option for our students. We have many options in Boone. This is just another one that we have been kind of piloting and plan to expand slightly next year just to see if this is something that we want to continue pursuing to provide that for our students. We have had some students that have tried others with others, but you would like to keep them working through the district. We absolutely do. It's very important to us that our virtual programming is rigorous, that it also incorporates our portrait of a graduate because every student that goes to Boone, that's something that we've made a promise that we will prepare them for the future. And so that will be part of the requirement of that Boone Virtual Academy. And there's a lot of accountability for students that enter into this, check-ins with teachers, supports. So yeah, it's something that we are definitely dipping our toe in and have some success from this year and want to expand a little bit to see where that heads. There'll be more on this as it comes together. Maybe we'll meet in the fall again after we've done this for a couple more months and then report back to the board. And congratulations, Dr. Julie Treppa. Invited to be one of what, 50 superintendents? Well, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. But it is one of 50. Many superintendents across the nation were invited, I believe, and so it's an opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. and participate in a fall focus group where you meet with other superintendents in the nation to talk about common challenges that we experience and essentially try to brainstorm solutions or learn from each other. Some solutions have worked in other places and it's being provided free of charge. So there is no cost to the district at all because, as you know, we have a moratorium on admin out of district travel. So that's why I asked the board for this exception is because it is at no cost. And I think a great opportunity to learn from other school districts that maybe we wouldn't be able to otherwise. So this is like a superintendents association? A superintendents association and they take 50 a year that can do this. And then the information they get, how do they distribute it back out? It goes back out to all school districts, make it available to everybody? Or do they help build policy? Or what do they do? So really, I will find out when I get there because I do not remember seeing their results previously. So I will be able to report back after in October because that's the end of September that I'll be there. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, have a good trip. Yeah. In the meantime, what I'm looking for is just some solutions that others have found to some of the challenges we're experiencing. So yeah. See if others have been through the same thing. Absolutely. Well, next up, we have a new fiscal year starting in July. So next board meeting, there we go. That's right. We've got a lot going on. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.