ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The USD 480 school board kept things simple at its most recent meeting Monday evening.
Among the items of new business on the agenda was discussion of an agreement with Edustaff for the 2024-25 school year.
“As the board knows, we currently use Edustaff to provide substitutes to the schools. The reason I brought this to the board is because we would like to renew the contract to the full-service model, which would increase the administrative fee by 3 percent,” Director of Business Services Nila Newton said. “As it says in your agenda information, under the full-service agreement, Edustaff will actively recruit, screen, employ and assign qualified individuals to perform sub services. Recruiting activities will include online job postings, social media marketing, and local recruiting at a minimum of two on-site visits per year. Edustaff will also ensure criminal history and criminal record checks (Kansas and FBI), as well as fingerprint cards, in accordance with Kansas law and regulations, are conducted and they will verify all supplied staff have the minimum education, degrees, qualifications and certifications required under the Kansas statutes. Edustaff also provides any non-positional necessary training, including, but not limited to, training in laws related to the performance of their duties (child protection law reporting requirements, etc.), training in bloodborne pathogen and hazardous communication, and any other necessary non positional training. Edustaff is also responsible for any claims for workers' compensation benefits or personal injury claims for job-related bodily injury or death. Edustaff will conduct substitute orientations monthly and will furnish client-specific and school-specific information to its substitutes when provided to Edustaff. During the 2023-24 year, we paid Edustaff $196,250, with $41,212 in administrative fees. The additional 3 percent would cost approximately $5,900 on a similar gross wage base. This agreement may be terminated with 60 days’ notice if we end up not being satisfied with this arrangement.”
The board members then voiced their thoughts.
“I’m somewhat confused because if we already have a contract with them, why are we looking at this one?” board member Sarah Thompson asked.
“The contract we currently have does not actively recruit, and that’s something we need help with right now,” Newton said. “The buildings are coming up with workarounds, but we need to build our own substitute base, which this updated contract would help us do. All I wanted to do is bring back the full-service model. From what I’ve been told, we did work with the full-service model, but during the pandemic and after the pandemic, we didn’t see a lot of success, so that’s why the contract was changed. I think things around the district are changing, and I believe if they were more active, maybe we could build up a bigger substitute base. The next step would then be to look at what we’re paying our substitute teachers and make sure we’re paying a competitive rate, because that is definitely a factor.”
Discussion continued for several minutes, with many questions asked.
“If we’re hearing there wasn’t very much success with this in the past, and if the teachers are saying they don’t like it, why would we go back to this?” Thompson asked.
“I have not worked with this myself before, but I would like the opportunity to work with them and see what is going on and find out if there’s just one factor that can be improved, or if it’s a combination of factors,” Newton said. “I’ve wanted to try this and see if we could make it work better than before, and I can’t do it with the model we currently have since it’s more restricting. We HAVE to get more substitute teachers, because we do not have enough of them right now. This is an area where we’re really hurting, and this is the only thing I can do currently to try and help the situation. We have to make that effort, because the workarounds the buildings have been doing can only work for so long.”
“I’m all in favor of doing what we can to expand our substitute base, but this contract really ties our hands in multiple ways I just don’t like,” USD 480 Board President Alan Brown said.
After several more minutes of discussion, the matter ultimately died due to the lack of a motion.
Later in the meeting, the board revisited discussion of streaming USD 480 board meetings in the future after the matter had been tabled back in 2021.
“There are several factors to consider with this. We need to decide whether or not to go through with this and if we do, we need to figure out where we’d want to stream, what kind of equipment is needed, how much money that equipment would cost, and the other logistics,” Brown said. “We also have to decide whether to also stream regular meetings AND special meetings to help with the transparency factor and if we do that, we need to figure out where to have meetings and make sure the equipment is either mobile or set up in a more permanent setup. I thought we would actually have a special meeting or a work session to answer some of those questions and get some more information, but here we are.”
“As you all might recall, we ended up at our current meeting place because in 2021, when we were coming out of the pandemic, we tried multiple locations, including Maskus Auditorium on the main campus, a couple of the elementary schools, and The Forum at Eisenhower Middle School, among others,” Director of Technology Rusty Tuman said. “There were a couple of those locations we particularly liked, but we kept running into scheduling conflicts or not enough space, so permanence was not possible. There’s not really anywhere in USD 480 that’s not utilized, so it was tough, and we didn’t really want to go out and buy a full building just for meetings because that’s just not practical. There are just a lot of factors to consider with something like this.”
“And Rusty and I talked a lot about this. We did talk about a mobile system because we do think a mobile system is a good idea in case it needs to be used for something else,” Superintendent Stephen Linkous said. “We want this to be used by the district, and we also want to be able to be out and about in the public and be transparent. At this point, we’re just talking about board meetings, but if there’s a special event or something that would need to be streamed, a mobile system would be a good idea since there’s just so much that could be done.”
“I remember with Maskus Auditorium, it was a good space, but it was used by students a lot, and we never want to disrupt the educational process,” Brown said. “There also wasn’t really anywhere for executive session. I like the idea of having somewhere with a more permanent setup so we know everything functions and is ready to go in case Rusty isn’t available, so all we’d have to do is push a button or two to turn everything on.”
Other board members also shared their thoughts.
“If we’re going to start streaming the meetings and doing all of that, we need to have the right equipment and make sure everything functions properly as far as sound and picture,” Thompson said. “There is nothing more irritating to me when I’m watching something online than hearing a bunch of static or some other background noise(s) that interfere with my understanding of what’s being discussed.”
“And I think it would also be a good idea to do a video on Fridays after pre-board to let people know what will be on the agenda, because I think there’s almost too much reaction – i.e., if there’s something on the agenda you’re interested in but didn’t know about it, you don’t go to the meting and then you miss all the discussion,” Brown said. “I think that would also help as far as the transparency and being more open to the public.”
After several more minutes and questions, the discussion was concluded.
