Dr. Julie Trepa, Superintendent, Boone Community School District, October 13, 2026

Guests on our program today, Dr. Julie Trappa Boone School Superintendent survived a very long meeting night. Man, I thought you guys were going to separate those a little. Well, we've got two meetings next month because of organizational meetings. So, you know, the old meeting and the new meeting, yeah. Well, we've had a couple of long range planning for the board and we knew they were going to have, it was going to take time because they need to prioritize, they need to try to put some things together. And then the hard part is how do we fund these things going down the road when we're not real sure about what's going to be happening. Yeah. And we've got projects happening right now that we have to know. Well, we don't know if that one's ever going to be done. I know, right? Yeah. In particular, I'm talking about that West parking lot. Yes. That's, well. We're demonstrating patience right now. Well, we have to because it's your engineer and architect and the contractor that are going back and forth. We'll let them deal with their business. That's right. And part of it is they're out there doing what they need to do. But the other part, again, we did have a DLR in to talk about the next one because you can't stop. No. Obviously. So, the next facility when really is get back to Franklin now. Yeah. We have HVAC that we need to do at Franklin. That's not the entire building. It's a portion of the building. But along with that, we're hoping to remedy some of our drainage issues that we have at Franklin in the playground area while we're already going to be working there. So, lots of conversation around that and how we want to go out for bed with alternates to see what we might be able to do since we're already going to be out there. We know that we knew at least the HVAC part is leading away and that's roughly 2.3 million. Mm-hmm. And that doesn't cover the whole building. So, yeah. This is really the oldest part of it, the oldest part of the HVAC system. Yes. Yes. And again, expand and improve that and get geothermal up there so more wells for it to help improve the efficiencies. Correct. These are just all of the... Just part of maintenance, honestly. We don't see it. Right. And so, this is why we budget for these things, right? We make sure that we've got a plan in place. That's why we had the facilities assessment a couple years ago and that's why we're doing a long-range plan so that we can make sure we continue with all of these things. I know that one of the things and people will say, well, how are you going to pay for it? And again, we go to Paul Atten who... But she knows like how much is coming in on the pearl, which moon happens to be one of the few that... We are one of the few, yes. That have a pearl levy. But that's automatically going back into your stuff. Your facilities used it for the playground at Ledges Elementary. It really goes to playgrounds because pearl is designated to be in areas where you share a space with community members. So, that's the best part about the pearl is that it not only benefits the school district, but it benefits our community around each of those buildings. And so, that will be a portion of it. But otherwise, it'll be the cash on hand that we have from Purple and Save that ultimately funds this. So, just keep working and keep tabs on it while it's going. Let's talk about other things. We've got a lot of facility things, but we've got a lot of other things that are going on. Just a lot of routine... I called them like routine business things last night. We got updates on some of the assessments that are being done. And Dr. Jaynes did point out that we kind of are having a bit of a transition at some upper level assessments. Going to what? Fast? A star? Yes. Yeah. And star is just better in line for secondary folks. It just seems to give them a little bit better information to work from. But similar system, just different assessment. Yeah. And it's a matter of getting all the data together so you can see what you got. Yeah. And make decisions and do what we need to do. It was exciting though to see so many of our students at several of the grade levels performing at the advanced level in those assessments that compared to what we had before. And it's also challenging, right? Because we want to make sure that we're continuing to have every student grow regardless of where they are. Middle school is talking about doing a junior achievement type of thing. And now, again, some will say, well, didn't we have that problem? Several years ago there was, but it's kind of gone away. But now bringing it back in financial information. Yeah. So what this junior achievement is about, it's another way to kind of have that work-based learning experience for elementary, middle, and high school where they learn about just how do you finance your personal life? How do you run a city? So what was presented is that our fifth graders will go to BizTown. And BizTown, our students will go there and they will elect a mayor and they will have business owners and they'll have people having to fix potholes because they're working for the city and just learning how those types of things operate because they're getting those experiences. And so they have lessons that happened before so that that's kind of the culminating activity, letting them apply this, the information that they learned in the classroom into kind of a mock situation. Kind of ties in with some of the edge stuff. It ties in completely with our edge and portrait of a graduate, which is why we're so excited, because it's just yet another extension of both of those pieces. Yeah. So will it be, it's middle school, but basically fifth grade? It's fifth grade, yeah. Yeah. So fifth graders will be the ones that'll be going through this. Yeah. We'll see. Well, and we're looking for more volunteers, so that's something that did go out to parents. So if you haven't checked your parents' where account, please check and see. And truly, if you do go and see that and experience that, it's just a fun experience. So we look forward to, again, parents, you be a participant. Here you go. This is what the board would like more engagement from parents. Absolutely. Absolutely. Here's one for the community. You would like people to participate in a survey that basically comes out of your association, I guess we'll call it. And not a lot seem to be doing or considering it at this point in time, but Boone is. Yeah. It's really kind of new to Iowa, but nationwide, the superintendent association, national superintendent association is doing a study on community perception on public schools. And that's something that we're going to participate in because you always want to know what your perception is in the community about what we do well and what we maybe could improve upon. So that's something in the next month or so that parents and students and community members will be seeing ways to help contribute. It's a very short online interview. And it's not even an interview per se, it's in writing, but they'll just ask a couple of questions. 10 minutes max. It's very, very short. So it's one of those where you don't have to take two hours to go through. No, it's not a bunch of questions. It's like two or three questions. And so it depends on how in depth you go and your answers as to how long it takes. Yeah. So the amount of participation, now we know board members will do it. I think staff and students, some students, the big part is the big part you want to let people know is community members. What community members to do? Absolutely. Even if you don't have children or grandchildren or any kind of connection to the school personally, we do want our community members to participate in the survey because we try very hard with the work that we're doing and with work-based learning to try and contribute positively to our community. And we want to know, is that coming through? Is that something that people are seeing? How our students are experiencing workplace learning opportunities in the community? And then hopefully staying after they leave the K-12 setting. So just really wanting to see what our community knows about us and what they think our strengths are and what they'd like to see us work on. So the thing is, again, it would be just us, but how would we tie this in for tying it in with other information from other districts if they don't participate? Yeah. So truly, again, I think Iowa is just getting started on this. So hopefully as more schools in the state of Iowa get involved with this particular project, we would receive not only information locally, but then in comparison to other schools in our state and other schools in the nation that are similar sized districts. So that's other information that we would find useful. So we're hoping to have that kind of data come back to us December at the earliest. May take a little longer if we want to have a comparison to the rest of the state. So we'll see how it comes out, but at least parents or just community members. Yeah. Just be on the lookout. We're going to try and have this out in many, many places for you to participate. One of the things that comes up this time of the year is the School Boards Association always asked for district priorities. And we got a whole bunch of them last night. You tried to limit it to the top ones, but most school districts do, but a short window to get them filled out. So they didn't have a lot of time to do review. A lot of the same thing. Student achievement, obviously, is always one of the top ones. Funding is always one of the top ones. The one that was different for us this year that we maybe hadn't had in the top four was the parent engagement piece. We really are trying very hard to continue to bolster the partnership between the school and parents. And so just wanting to see different ways to do that. So that was one that was maybe swapped out with one of our other typical ones. But it is one of those that, and Matt Elton said, you know, this is something that, you know, at one point we probably thought we were doing pretty good with it, but you should always step back and take a look. Could we do it better? Exactly. So that's going on. What other fun things did we have? I know there was a bunch of others. You talked a little bit about enrollment. We don't have numbers that are our exact numbers, but we will be down in enrollment about resident students, about 28 students. And overall certified enrollment will be down about 37 is what we're thinking. So this is what our enrollment projection told us. We just didn't want it to actually happen, right? But we definitely are looking at lower enrollment in October. Something different this year is they do have us doing a second enrollment date on January 15th. So the state used to just use the October date to determine our funding. Now they will take the average of the two dates to determine that. So we don't know the whole picture yet because we only have one part of the two that will play a part in the revenue. And then we'll see what the legislature does when we go back to it too. I did have a number of different things. Some of the basics that come up every year, regular agreements between both Trinity, Sacred Heart, and Boone on some of the programming that you do preschool. Yeah, they're part of our statewide preschool program. So we approve the contracts that we work with Sacred Heart and Trinity on. And yeah, lots of different contracts, right? Special education contracts, lots of different contracts. There were a whole mess of those too. The Thrive Academy is something that the district has used to participate in. It's only a couple of students, relatively small, but what is it? Manson Northwest Webster is correct where you work at it. So it is an opportunity for some students there. Yeah, sometimes students have needs that maybe we don't have the programming for. So there are some alternative locations that have that programming and that would be one of the partners that we engage with every year. Because I got to add because Ryan's so far ahead of the rest of the curve on radon testing. He is. That is something that's being required. Yeah. But he basically started doing this a couple years ago. He started doing this several years ago when they first stated in 2022 that school districts by 2027 would need to test our buildings for radon. Brian Green started that year. So we have several years of experience of actually testing for radon in our system. And they're always below. I think there is one time over the course of the last several years that maybe a closet tested just be just above the borderline. Another test it was well below. So and it was again in an area that no one's ever in. So yeah. One would wonder why the schools, those are such big buildings with a lot of a lot of air moving through there too. But it is a public. But also a lot of students and we want to make sure it's a safe environment. So we welcomed that and embraced it when it first came out. And so we just had to formally have the plan that we've been working on approved by the board this time for a desk audit that we have to provide some documentation for. We did get a contract for if you go over by the football practice field. Yes. Because a couple of the built one of them in particulars. The larger one. Yeah. Has had better days. So we're going to have a demolition kind of a demolition project. Elite the contractor they got the bid. But the big thing is they have to do asbestos abatement. All of that. Got to take any kind of hazardous materials. They'll take care of that. And so they'll demolish that. And then we have some extra dirt there that will help level out that space so that right now it's in a state where it maybe isn't the most safe to be upright. So we need to make sure that we get another derecho. It may not be upright. That would be correct. One of those there to upcoming meetings more more meetings for the board. So October 27th is our next long range facilities planning meeting. So as you can imagine when you're trying to plan for the next 20 years that is not a very short conversation. So we just continue to have these work sessions until we can create a rough draft to have even more community involvement. These meetings are open to the public. We've had people at the facilities work sessions. So just continuing to plug away to kind of have a plan in place for the next 20 years and move forward. And we have homecoming. We have homecoming this week. Yes. So pretty lots of fun. Yeah. Again a little different than what's been done in the past. I think what we just did coronation out on the football field. Yes. And they've done that before. But yeah timing. We had a little bit of a bump in the road with that. But we got it put together. And so they had coordination last night and ready to move forward. The students in all of the buildings have their dress up days. Parents in multiple buildings. I apologize now for all the different things you're trying to dress them in. But I hope I hope they're having a good time doing it. They'll have fun. Yes. And there's the usual folks you're going to see more toilet paper. Yes. But our students have done a nice job of remaining civil. Yes. Which we've seen other communities where it hasn't quite worked out that way. Correct. So proud of our students and looking forward to the homecoming game on Friday. We've got a lot of interesting things coming up here. Not only this homecoming but tennis and today is a very big day for us in tennis. Yes. Wish the girls well. And then swimming also season along there too. Yeah. Lots of great activities again. If you need something to do come out and watch our kids. You know. And there are various activities. And we haven't even told you about the musical yet. That's right. And that's coming up. So yeah. Be watching for that. Pretty sure Jed's going to make contact here. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll look forward to it. A lot of activities going on and we'll just keep going forward. And again look for this survey that's going to be out there again. Probably the end of October because when they'll first start seeing it and then it'll have a fairly short window so that they can put the data together. But yeah probably the end of October. It's basically the perception of your school. Yeah. And it's another organization that's doing it. So it's completely you know anonymous won't ever you know that's not something that we're putting together. It's a nationwide survey that's part of research. Alrighty. Thanks so much for coming in. Good luck on this. Have a good good homecoming week. That's right. Thanks.