Joshua Heyer, Superintendent, Ogden Community School District, March 31,2026

Today I'm visiting with Joshua Heyer, a superintendent from the Ogden School District who's had a few things going on. Thanks for taking time to come and visit. Yeah, appreciate being here this morning. Here we are.

We've made it through, well, a busy, busy month of March for you guys. I'm going back to the meeting. Got bids, sold bonds, construction project going on. Let's talk a little bit about it. How'd things come together for you? Well, absolutely.

If you looked at our March meeting, the amount of business and things that we did in our district, it's pretty overwhelming. But I just think it goes to show the momentum and the movement and some of the things that we're doing.

So yeah, I mean, you mentioned a number of things there. We had- Let's go first with the parking lot project because that's been one that people have gone to pretty regularly. Yeah, yeah, we've mentioned that probably for the last year, Jim, on the radio here.

And it's finally good to see that it's full speed ahead. We've received the bids. The board and the March meeting actually accepted the low bid and they accepted. We had a base bid, an alt one and an alt two. They ultimately went with the base and alt one.

And we're gonna break ground here April 20th or so. So we're really excited about that. It's gonna be probably about a four month project, April through August.

But we're really excited about what that's gonna do as far as improving parking, improved traffic flow on our campus, more handicap accessibility. So overall, I think it's something that's been long overdue.

And I'm glad that we've been talking about it, but now we're actually gonna be seeing dirt moving and pavement in the near future. I remember when it was, we need to get that drainage fixed through there. And that was just the first part.

But yeah, the parking in, just not you, but the entire community has always been, we gotta do something about the parking. Absolutely. You know, and this is a big investment for our school and our community, but ultimately this is something we're gonna have for 30 years.

And as our patrons show up, as well as our guests show up to our campus, this is gonna be a really shiny moment to really kind of highlight the great things that are going on. And I think that front entrance, your first impression is an important first impression. Oh yeah.

Well, we know, by the way, the alternate for those of you that don't know, would be just doing resurfacing on some existing of the parking, right? They're actually gonna be tearing that portion up.

It is the existing parking lot, but they're tearing that up and doing concrete on everything. Okay. Yeah, so we're excited. Get all of that done. And again, starting soon and done before school starts. Fingers crossed, weather permitting.

Weather permitting, gotta throw that in there for it. All right, so obviously Ryan's gonna wanna know where baseball, softball, track, staging, things like that, I'm guessing the contractor, you've obviously been working with him and talking about this.

So we're gonna have a pre-construction meeting to talk about those very things, but I've already had Mr. Smith, he's our athletic director, kind of be thinking about maps and what that's gonna look like.

And it is gonna, this summer, naturally we are gonna disrupt some of our parking. We're really looking at possibly how do we maximize the back portion of our campus. But I think a lot of that information will be determined after our pre-construction meeting on April 6th.

And then at that time, we'll send out maps and information to our community as well as the guests so that they know appropriately where to park while construction is taking place. Once you get together with the contractor, they might have ideas too. Absolutely.

All right, so the other big part is we started to get some initial schematics, if you will, or ideas, thoughts about the elementary because that's the other, that's a pretty big part. That's a big project, yeah. It's a very big project.

So at that board meeting, and we've been discussing this, we ultimately took out a peplenote. That peplenote is in the tune of about $4.8 million. And that is to start to address some things that were needed in the facility audit.

And we've been discussing this with FRK for, boy, about a year and a half. And one of those aspects was the parking lot that we just previously mentioned. And then a good chunk of that is really on how are we enhancing our elementary learning spaces?

And FRK has some concept designs that they presented to our board at March. And the board ultimately approved and said, I like the concept, and we're gonna go ahead and put a stamp on that. Go ahead and start to move forward with more of the detailed designs.

Get your engineers in here, making sure that what they think they can do, they can actually do. And then start to put some numbers to all of the design aspects. So we're excited about where we're at.

And it's hard to imagine, Jim, but if things go as well as I think they could, we might be actually doing some demolition in August before school starts this year. So, okay, that would be interesting.

Well, again, a lot of it, it's, doing the work inside, the existing structure, obviously, does create additional cost, and it is much harder to do. And you do have, part of it is a much older structure. It is an older structure.

Really what we're talking about for our listeners here is underneath the current gymnasium, and redesigning, reimagining what that might look like.

Some of the initial ideas are bringing some career and technical education or exploratory classes, as well as our media center, underneath the gymnasium. And then ultimately what that does is it frees up other brick and mortar that we could reimagine what that could be.

We're underserving some of our special education, special populations, and we're also thinking about some flex classrooms in those spaces. And rather than moving outward, we're actually just more effectively using the space inside. Using what you've got, yeah.

So that will be really nice. By moving and vacating spaces, we'll be able to add some additional programming. Well, we keep going forward.

I mean, really, the two primary things that we've talked about, really, those are the ones that are really have stuck out as far as the facilities, the needs, and the immediate ones.

I guess we'd call them the red flag ones, where we really need to get doing this here and do it soon before we start running into other issues. Absolutely.

So we had that facility assessment audit, and we have a number of things that we've talked about at the middle school campus, high school campus, as well as our elementary. And we're just trying to going through now and starting to check off those items.

And hopefully we can narrow that list down to really where our next area of need would be that middle school, high school campus, which hopefully would be in the near future. So one of the other things, obviously, voters and really strong support for the pebble.

And that's one of the things that really helped make all this possible. The district has said, we're gonna use that physical plant equipment levy for this.

You're having enough resources coming in available for this to be able to pay that off or do it aggressively, or how is that gonna be handled? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. And again, if we go back to in November, we had it on the ballot for them to extend.

It's not a new tax, it was just an extension of our pebble. And that allows us to get a $1.34 additional dollars. And with that, it extends it out 10 more years in where we were. We're able to use those dollars.

And we did a very conservative, because we are using that pebble for standard operating, some rough replacements, maybe the track repair, improving our fleet.

And we didn't wanna maximize that out, and then all of a sudden, our day-to-day operations and the things that we are also using pebble for, all of a sudden, those come to the wayside.

So we actually went to Piper Sandler, and we said, this is where we feel comfortable with our annual amount. And that's ultimately what ended up being about that $4.8 million. And that's what we're actually using then to do some of these projects.

And again, yeah, people think, yeah, pebble, that's buses, and you got a fleet. Technology. Technology's in there. There's a number of aspects that are in there. So we didn't want it to be an either-or, we wanted it to be a yes and. And that's how we approach this project.

The district, the board also went ahead with the budget guarantee. I think just what all districts did, we're all seeing the declining enrollment is the challenge, the big challenge. Yeah, a huge driver with our budget would be, we get paid for the number of kids that we have.

And with declining enrollment, the legislation allows you to have a 1% increase based off of where you were last year. With declining enrollment, we would not hit that 1% threshold. So the budget guarantee is a resolution that allows you to have that 1% increase.

Normally that would be a property tax. But this legislative session, it's one-time money, the legislation is actually gonna cover budget guarantee for all schools. So that 1% would not be realized on the property taxes for at least this year.

And who knows what decisions they'll make in the future. Yeah, well, they're not done yet. We'll see what they come up with too. Ogden, like many of the school districts, got together and started this risk pool, again, for insurance purposes.

If your homeowners insurance was going skyrocketing, imagine what was happening to larger structures like a school building. They were going way up, big time.

And one of the things that the districts did was kind of got together and created a risk pool where you put some dollars towards that and in hopes of buying your premiums down, really. Yeah, and you can do that for some wind hail, which you're mentioning.

Specifically in our March meeting, it was more for our natural gas prices. So it's a risk pool that helps you mitigate and the highs and the lows.

If you have a really rough winter and your natural gas prices are going up and or your usage is going up, that's a huge risk for a district when you're trying to say, I want certain guarantees.

And what we have been able to do is, invest in that natural gas risk pool and that allows us to establish what those rates are. And we can use that with our management fund rather than actually paying for that service out of our general budget.

Yeah, for people, yes, it comes out of the general fund. That's the one where we have all kinds of different issues and things happening there. You did have your maximum levy rate hearing that was held. Here, this was at the end of the month.

And again, you had a few people show up, couple people show up, but not too many. You were looking for at that time maximum rate, just a minor increase. But I know you had your special meeting right after that where you really crunched down on the budget. Yeah, absolutely.

So on March 23rd, you're mentioning, we did have our public hearing to establish for our patrons to come and ask clarifying questions about what is this document that I received in the mail and what is your max tax rate and what does that actually look like?

I believe that we actually mentioned that our max tax rate was 1345 per thousand. Immediately after that public hearing, Melissa is our SBO, she went into actually establishing what do we have for our fiscal year 27? And we think that that tax rate is actually gonna be 1340.

It might be actually a little bit lower than what we actually have right now. So even though- The rate can come down, but it couldn't have gone up. It cannot go up.

So when we actually send that information to the assessor, or excuse me, to the auditor, it is really with some unknowns. We don't know exactly what SSA is gonna be. So we are trying to say, we think this is what our tax rate is gonna be, but it could possibly go down.

And in that exact situation for this upcoming school year, we will be having on April 13th, at a regular meeting, we'll have a public hearing to approve the official budget for, and we believe that is gonna be at that lower rate. Certified, yep, the certified budget.

We'll be there, yep. And we're getting, it's gotta be end of the state by the end of April. April 30th is when everything is due. So we're just meeting a lot of those check marks and meeting those dates. Have to do all those hearings. Oh well.

Folks, if you ever have questions, just show up and ask, because Melissa would love to explain it to you. Absolutely. I mean, we had probably a 30 minute presentation. It's very informative.

It really gets into more of the nuances and details on school finance and why are we doing what we're doing. We appreciate when people show up and ask questions. It's usually not argumentative or combative. It's a lot of clarity.

It's a lot of, hey, help me understand this document or help me understand why you're doing what you're doing. Why can't you use this money to pay this? Yep, buckets of money.

So I just think that conversation and dialogue and whether you're coming to a public hearing or if you have questions, pick up the phone, email, give us a call. We'd be glad to sit down and chat with you.

Couple of things, wanted to ask, let's see, since we had last visited, did we, we were waiting for the alumni, the booster. Bulldog. Yeah, we had the Bulldog Ball. Which was huge. It was a great event. Honestly, it just goes to show that when you ask our community, they show up.

Specifically, we were trying to raise money for our therapy dogs. We're gonna be purchasing and having four new therapy dogs in our district. And that's gonna come at a price tag of around $20,000. And we well exceeded that amount.

I believe it was probably in the $40,000 to $45,000 range that they raised in a short amount of time. So very thankful for the Ogden Alumni Association and specifically those that showed up for that night.

It's a great testimony of the things that they're supporting in our school district. And it's always one of those where, when they know where the dollars are going, it always seems that there's the support is there. Absolutely. Yep.

Well, we do have a few other things by the time we, well, by the time your board meets again, actually, you're gonna have prom. We're gonna have prom. Yeah, it's hard to imagine. This is the school you're coming to.

The month of April, May, it just seems like you blink and it's gone. But yeah, we got so many things going on between spring activities, finalizing some things that have been going on for the early, like late winter. But yeah, we have NHS induction. We have.

We have a trip to Washington. Washington, DC. We got the senior trip. We got ISAS testing, prom. You just imagine all the things. And it's really hard to even fully understand all of the things that are going on and keep track of it. Well, let's not have any weather things.

We'll do that. Thank you, Scroggs, for us. Other things? Are there some others coming up that you wanted to point out? I think that's really the critical aspects that we've kind of mentioned. We're busy in hiring season.

We're doing a great job of hiring and getting some of the new teachers for the upcoming school year. So we've been seeing some of our candidate pools and it's been pretty good so far. So we're busy doing those things.

But other than that, we'll be communicating more information, regarding the traffic flow as we're doing that project at the parking lot. And we're just excited about the work that's moving forward. I was gonna ask about like for the pool of applicants for teachers.

Are we seeing some good numbers? Because that's one of the challenges, especially in special ed. Special ed is gonna be hard. And we don't have any special ed, but just knowing and talking to other schools, a lot of times it would be if you get an applicant, that's a good day.

But we've had a few openings. And I'd like to think that we'd be getting the 10 to 15 applicants. But some of our harder to fill positions, we've been at least getting four or five. And that's been better than what we've seen in the past and some of those hard to fill positions.

So I am excited about that. Well, we know because some are out there and again, different districts for other reasons, we're having staff reductions and things like that. Not everybody is retiring.

We have some staff that are looking for positions in good districts where they'll feel comfortable. Bring their game. I would think Ogden is one of those good districts. So absolutely, if they are being reduced or looking for a position, certainly consider.

We post all of our positions on Teach Iowa. Okay, and they should check your website. You got all kinds of things going there too. A lot of information on our website as well. All right, your first of the month meetings, still holding those at the Litter Good Center?

I had a conflict in March, but then we will return those. And the next one will be actually, well, good Friday. So it'll be this coming Friday here. Okay, so they'll be able to stop in, have donuts, coffee, come and visit.

And chat about all the great things that are going on in the district. Everything that's happening. How good is it? Cross country or all the golf teams gonna be out there? Yeah. Golf's going on right now. I know, I was gonna say. We got a track going on.

I believe that we have some students that are in our soccer program sharing with Boone. So there's just so many different things that are going on. And I was gonna, I saw something else too. Oh, I know what I was gonna ask you about FFA.

Cause they've got some things that are going on there as well too. And Ogden's FFA, you got that going too. Yep, there's so many things like I said, that it's just so hard to keep track of all the things that are going on. Joshua, hi, our guest on our program today.

Thanks for coming in. Thanks, Jim.