Merino High School is seeking bids for a new press box on the football field/track. The school board gave permission to move forward on the project at a regular meeting Monday.

Superintendent Rob Sanders told the board the Buffalo Foundation’s annual mouse race fundraiser, held earlier this month drew approximately 350 people and raised roughly $39,000; it was the largest Calcutta they’ve had in the year’s they’ve being doing the fundraiser. He proposed that the funds be used to build a press box, which is “one of the last things we need to do on that facility.”

While it would only be a press box for now, not a concession stand, Sanders suggested they think ahead and have all of the plumbing that’s necessary put in so if they ever want to expand they can do that.

“The other piece of that is once we get the estimates, the board would then have to look at your reserves a little bit to then throw in the remainder of what that would be,” Sanders said.

Though he was reluctant to estimate how much, he guessed $20 to $25,000 out of the general fund potentially for a total project cost around $60,000.

Asked what the size of it would be, he said probably be double what the baseball field press box is, similar to what Wiggins High School has.

Jason Adamson asked if KCI will be running fiber, Sanders said they will.

“Part of the process is we put all of the conduit underneath the track right now, so all we have to do is locate the water, the electrical and the fiber and blow it through to the other side and hook it up. When we did the football field there was some foresight to putting in conduit so we did it,” the superintendent said.

Lisa Thorpe advised they will probably move forward with renting someone to do the timing system, rather than buy a system.

“I don’t foresee ever purchasing unless it’s something like or LPA league discuss and then somebody from each school gets trained and it gets to rotate,” said high school principal Lonnie Brungardt.

The board agreed to at least move forward with getting bids.

During his report, Brungardt shared the school will have a spring cleanup day on Monday, May 9. They haven’t been able to have one for two years due to COVID-19 “and it shows around our facilities.”

There are some major projects happening, including a new disc golf course. Brungardt thanked Kati Piel for her help with it and shared they are working with the same gentleman that worked on courses at Otis and Brush High School.

“It’s being basically paid for by whole sponsorships, it’s going to last for 25 years-plus,” he said.

First FarmBank is the premier sponsor and will have their name on all of the lacquered cards around the course. The cards will have a QR code that can be scanned with your phone, allowing you to see the whole course as you play. Brungardt said the course will start by the baseball field and continue around the field and behind the track.

“It should be an open playing field, you can walk the fit trail as your doing it and then we’re opening up that backside where we have all those dead trees, we’re going to clean up that,” he told the board.

Other cleanup day projects include decorating the front of the school with some vegetation that John Barber has figured out that won’t require constant watering, and cleanup in the back of the school by the track area where the construction was.

Brungardt also reported they are almost done with CMAS (Colorado Measures of Academic Success) testing and addressed students opting out of it, given an example of five juniors who were supposed to take the CMAS science test and all of them opted out.

“It’s one of those things that continuing in our district and we’re not the only district that does it, I deal with the CASE (Colorado Association of School Executives) Board and Cherry Creek High School has 975 juniors and they had 26 students take the test. Every school is in the same board right now, it’s a conversation that really talks to every district about is the assessments that are being taken right now really necessary? It’s a huge conversation right now,” Brungardt said.

Elementary Principal Courtney Rank reported that staff meetings this year have been focused on creating behavior success criteria for students and they have seen “some great progress and growth with them.” Recent criteria they’ve been working on include managing personnel space and “managing our personnel space in our environment.”

“I don’t think that I would say we need to lose a custodian to figure out how to manage our environment, but the lesson in that has been that the kids have really stepped up. Lots of comments from the kids about the work that goes into keeping our school clean, we’ve had a lot of kids helping out and doing trash in the art room, in the lunch room. So, I do think that’s been a great lesson, although I don’t recommend that we teach it very much more, because it’s tiring,” Rank said.

At Monday’s meeting the board did approve a new elementary custodian, Jerod Dewey.

“We’re kind of throwing all of the indicators we’ve created this year at the kids right now, so every Fun Friday is earned by meeting all of the success criteria for all of the behavior indicators and I would say last week we probably were down in single digits for kids in Friday Reflection, so that was pretty cool,” Rank said.

Next year, when the school year begins they will be focusing on managing emotions.

Under action items, the board unanimously approved teacher contracts for the 2022-23 school year; classified employee assignments for 2022-23, the list of seniors on track to graduate and Dan Sutter as volunteer secondary assistant track coach. They also accepted the resignation of Penny Whittaker, business teacher.