School Board thanks school staff after school year

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough School Board sent off the 2020-2021 school year with appreciation as each board member spent time during their final comments to thank school staff who have helped the school district safely navigate the entire school year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Continuing thank you to Dr. Trani and your administrative team and all the teachers and staff in our district for getting us through a very tough year. We were a very unique district in doing what was done to keep schools open keep kids in school as well as developing alternative deliveries for those children that did in home schooling so thank you,” said Board Member Dwight Probasco.

Over the last two weeks, the Mat-Su Borough School District high schools conducted graduation ceremonies for seniors.

“One of our main points is to get them graduated and then get them moving on and so we had 1,050 graduates and they earned about $17.5 million in reported scholarships. It may be more than that but that’s the report that we have from students who graduated so that’s a very good thing and kind of the whole point of why we’re doing this,” said MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani. “Everyone needs to be really proud that they did something that very few people if any big districts in the country did. It’s remarkable.”

During Trani’s Superintendent report, he noted that $17,522,201 in scholarships were received by seniors.

“It has been an amazing year, it’s been a great year, but I also think it’s been an extraordinary year with all the accomplishments that have been done in this year alone,” said Board Member Ryan Ponder.

The Board unanimously approved the acceptance of two separate grants. Action Item G was a pass through grant from the Federal Government through the Department of Health and Social Services for $2,517,710 for screening and testing for COVID-19 in the fall.

“We’re accepting the funds with this, it’s around $2.6 million. We don’t actually anticipate spending anywhere near that amount but if something were to dramatically change with covid in the fall of next year and we had to do a lot of testing for some crazy reason we would already have the money so this is largely preemptive and an insurance policy more than anything,” said Trani.

The Board also unanimously approved the acceptance of $35,565,364 from the Department of Education and Early Development for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding round three.

“There’s a very clear timeline once you accept it. We have to reach out to stakeholders, we give them a tentative plan, we reach out to stakeholders so we can begin spending some of the money however they’re not even releasing all of the money to us up front. We have to have our plan completely approved before they release all the funds. They’re giving us, I guess some seed money to get started and so there will be stakeholders involved in developing that and then it will result into a fall revision along with your general budget,” said Federal Programs Director Katherine Ellsworth. “What you’re seeing now is just a proposal in order for you to see what possibly could be used and what finally will be used will be determined after needs assessment and input from stakeholders.”

The $35.5 million is set aside to provide support for other Federal program, coordinate responses to covid and other purposes.

“One of the requirements is to survey our families and to have a mitigation plan and our mitigation plan we know has worked very well and we expect that it will continue hopefully to be less and less. The yellow next year will look different than what yellow looked like this year,” said Ellsworth. “We’re going to ask them what worked well for them this last school year, what they would anticipate seeing for next year what are their expectations what would they like to see happen because their input has to be part of our mitigation plan.”

Member Probasco asked about the public process of approving the grants as an action item on Wednesday after the ESSER III funds had been a non-action item on the previous agenda. Ellsworth clarified that accepting funds would not yet result in spending funds and was still pending approval.

“It is us managing our own mitigation plan and it’s one that our community supports,” said Ellsworth. “I know that they are expecting for our doors to be open in August and they want a plan that can reflect that and reflect our current situation and that’s why it’s designed to be written this summer.”