The doors of Callaway Public School opened the morning of Thursday, Aug. 15, to welcome returning students back and new students in for the 2024-25 school year.

Along with the new class of incoming students, seven new staff members and a new superintendent joined the ranks of CPS this year.

“We are up and going and have a lot of young staff, and boy – young staff brings a lot of energy to the building,” said Superintendent JD Furrow.

Furrow began his role as superintendent in July, and presided over his second board of education meeting on Monday, Aug. 12. The lengthy agenda took nearly two and a half hours to get through.

There were several items of discussion before the board moved into action items, including a discussion on bus routes for this year. The bus route conversation revolved around the best method of communication to use between the school and the parents.

“When the bus routes were set we told parents they could just go on our Facebook page to get that information. However, someone expressed a concern about that information being out there to the world, which we hadn’t even really thought about, so we tried to come up with a safer way of letting parents know when we will be picking up and dropping off kids,” said Furrow.

Furrow also presented an update to the board regarding transparency with information. “We need to be able to post on our website then circulate into the community a report that has some assessment data, valuation and tax data, demographics, teachers' years of service, and so on,” Furrow explained. “We haven’t done that for a while so I am just looking at getting one that we can just put out as soon as we can. The state department is going to come out and check us on our Rule 10 compliance, and then help us with any

cont. PAGE 3 - New Year areas that we aren’t following the accreditation standards on.”

Another item of discussion was the district’s budget authority. Furrow explained, “With the state budget requirements now, you are allowed to raise your taxes two percent, and if you go above two percent you have to send out cards and have a public hearing. Aside from that your revenue is capped at only three percent that you can go up. That cap also takes into account what you get for special ed funding from the federal government, and what you get for state aid and things like that. If you want to go over the three percent, you have to have a vote of the board to go up to seven percent. And that has to be a super majority vote.

“We’re in a really unique situation with that seven percent of revenue growth. Because we are getting extra SPED funding and extra foundation aid from the state, we will actually drop our taxes $90,000 from what we asked last year,” Furrow continued. “But, because of those funds, we are going to have about $145,000 more to operate the school next year. So that discussion item was on there and we had it in the action items, if we would choose to go over that seven percent. But after the discussion we decided to stick at that three percent growth rate and give a little bit of tax break to our community. That will not be official, though, until our budget hearing coming up in September.”

The board discussed the potential purchase of lots beside the bus barn which has gone into conservatorship and is available for purchase by the school. They adjourned into closed session prior to adjourning the meeting to discuss the details of the real estate acquisition.

At the July meeting the board adjusted wages for the district’s para-professionals by adding an insurance benefit for those positions. At the August meeting that same adjustment was made for custodians, kitchen staff, and office staff.

The next meeting of the Callaway board of education will be Sept. 9, with special hearings for the budget and tax hearing at 7:45 p.m. and the regular meeting to follow. The meetings are held in the library at the school and are always open to the public.