By TOMMY REZAC
St. Joseph Post
The St. Joseph School District's Vision Forward Committee has held three community meetings this year that are open to the public. The intent of these meetings - to share data and information while also gathering input from the public.
Bob Miller, one of the co-chairs on the Vision Forward Committee, says the amount of community engagement and interest these meetings have gotten has been encouraging.
"This is probably the best attended community involvement experience that they've had," Miller told St. Joseph Post. "I think that's super positive, especially when you look at, just strictly kind of comparison to where things have been in the past."
The first Vision Forward meeting took place in January, with another happening in February and the most recent one being this past Tuesday - all at the Word of Life Church in the northeast part of town.
The first two meetings averaged between 150-160 attendees, with Tuesday's having about 100 or so.
While the hope is to increase attendance, Miller says Vision Forward has gotten input from a wide variety of people already.
"I think we've gotten a really good turnout of a lot of voices," Miller said. "Even just (Tuesday) night, we had between in-person and virtual about 15-17 different groups of people. You know, groups of 5-7 folks who were kind of reporting out from the work activity."
Two more Vision Forward community meetings are planned - one in April and another in May before the school year is over. The first meeting was more or less a 'state of the district' address by superintendent Doug Van Zyl.
The second meeting dealt with how to recruit and retain quality staff, and the third talked about academic achievement with pre-K and elementary students.
The April 26 meeting, set to take place at Lafayette High School, will talk about academic achievement for middle and high school students and the May 17 meeting, set to be at Benton, will talk about buildings.
Voters soundly rejected a $107 million bond issue last April, dashing hopes to convert the American Family Insurance regional headquarters into a second high school to go along with a refurbished Central High School.
Under that proposal, Benton and Lafayette High School would have been turned into middle schools.
Miller says middle school enrollment is still a big issue facing the district. Two middle schools educate sixth-eighth graders, while two others educate just seventh and eighth.
Humboldt and Lake Contrary Elementary both closed at the end of the 2018-19 school year, creating some difficulty for middle school enrollment.
"It's just not a very equitable system across the district," he said. "A lot of that is kind of shaped around facilities as we closed some elementary schools in certain parts of town. We've had to shift sixth graders to middle school buildings for space purposes."
After Vision Forward meets in May, the committee will then meet with consulting firm Community Entourage over the summer and present their data and input gathered.
Afterward, Vision Forward will have one more meeting this coming fall to present their findings to the public one more time before any action items are put before the school board.
"Before it gets handed off to the board, we want to bring it back to the community one more time and say, 'Hey, did we get this right?' Miller said. "We want to make sure it's your voice and not just ours."
While there's work to be done and issues still to be resolved, Miller says there's a fair amount of excitement surrounding Vision Forward, with change and thoughts on the future already abound.
Three new school board members were elected last April, and two more will be elected this April. Plus, there's likely going to be a change in superintendent with reports of Van Zyl being chosen as the new superintendent for the Lakeville Area School District in Minnesota.
"We're kind of at this crossroads, too where we're going to have a new superintendent," Miller pointed out. "We've got some new people coming onto the school board. So, there's a lot of new energy kind of coalescing with this process that kind of has everybody looking forward already any way, because there is change on the horizon."
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