Business Matters
February 16, 2023
On Feb. 6, the School Board had their biweekly meeting in the Kay Trap Board Room. The beginning of the meeting started with approving the past agenda. It was passed with no issues, so they moved on to the Liaison Committee update. The majority of the committee representatives had no updates. Janice Malchow, Lake Central Education Foundation representative, had an update on the Lake Central Education Foundation.
“The Lake Central Education Foundation is working diligently to make the grant-writing process a little bit more user-friendly and a little more consistent with all the teachers and users in the school district. That’s a big project for them,” Malchow said.
The only other update was from the Dollars for Scholars committee representative Cindy Sues. She wanted to let everyone know the deadline to apply for a scholarship through Dollars for Scholars was coming up on Feb. 28. The meeting then moved on to official School Board business topics. There was an approval of the meeting minutes from the executive session, special board meeting and regular board meeting on Jan. 23 along with the approval of claims, payroll and extracurricular expenditures. Dr. Larry Veracco, Superintendent, then spoke about donating extra physical education equipment to the Lake County Juvenile Center.
“Some of the items included used basketballs, some hula hoops, a few wiffle balls and bats and things in that nature that haven’t been used by our physical education teachers in quite some time,” Dr. Veracco said.
Dr. Veracco then continued his updates with a reschedule of the next meeting to Feb. 20 due to an overlap with the Indiana School Board Association Lobby Day and speaking on the possible membership of the Indiana Coalition of Growing and Suburban Schools. Next up was Terry Mucha, Director of Human Resources/Personnel, with a small update. She wished to gain approval for a few items and to bring attention to Maureen Yeager who has had 31 years of service in the corporation. Yolanda Bracey, Director of Primary Education, Sarah Castaneda, Director of Secondary Education, and Becky Gromala, Director of Student Services, all gave updates on what their respective areas would be doing over the summer to help education. The elementary summer school will be held at Peifer, middle school at Clark and extended school year services at Homan and Clark. Bill Ledyard, Director of Facilities, then gave an update on the 2023 Maintenance and Service Agreements.
“As you know, inflationary costs are hitting everything and everyone throughout the nation, and that’s no different from our vendors who service us here at Lake Central. On the good news side of things, everyone on this page really considers themselves a partner with LC, and they try very hard to keep our costs down knowing that we’re a school. …If you take out our waste and recycling removal, we had just barely over a two percent increase from 2022 to 2023,” Ledyard said.
Following that, Rob James, Director of Business Services, wished for approval for the donations. Approval was granted, so he moved on to funding. He spoke about how the school gets different amounts of money for each child depending on factors such as poverty levels in the area. He was happy to share that the corporation had made it off the last page when listing schools with the most funding in the state. With no public comments, it was time to wrap up the meeting. The next meeting will be on Feb. 20. The meeting was adjourned, but not without one last congratulation from Malchow.
“There’s so much going on at Lake Central; I’m just amazed. Whenever you go by this school, the parking lot is packed. It’s amazing how it’s used. I’m just so impressed with it. They had swim and dive competition over the weekend, and they had girl’s sectionals that our athletic directors were hosting,” Malchow said.
Link to the recorded meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKIUT97W8d0&t=1104s
