CHAMOIS — Chamois R-1 Superintendent Lyle Best announced at the board’s July 8 meeting that the school has received a grant worth more than $200,000 to create a before- and after-school program for students up to age 12.

“The School Age Community Grant (SACG) is a very competitive grant,” said Best, giving most of the credit to fourth-grade teacher Candice Shockley, noting that she had worked to get everything submitted and completed for the grant application. “This is a big one for us. We will start working on that and getting things going sometime next month.”

Best is hoping that the program will start by the second week of school.

Before-school care will begin at 7 a.m. and run until 8, and the after-school care will be open for two hours following the end of the school day.

“This is a highly sought-after grant, and I know it will help us,” Best said.

He said that the program will be an extension of the school day with well-rounded social interaction and academic components. “I’m really excited about this,” Best said. “I’ve been wanting to see us get something like this for a long time. It will be a big addition to the district over the next several years.”

Best noted that several teachers have expressed interest in participating in the program, and the biggest part of the grant money will be used to pay salaries.

In other business, board members voted to join the Missouri School Boards’ Association (MSBA) for $2,000 per year.

Best noted that while some of the services that MSBA offered may not be useful to the district, he believes the district would utilize board training services, financial services, a legal hotline, leadership development, and Medicare claim services.

“You may not know it, but with the Medicare claim services, this may pay for itself,” Best said.

Currently, the district receives $10,000 to $13,000 in revenue from Medicare per year, and Best takes care of the claims.

“They have services that may increase that revenue and take the burden off of the district,” Best explained. “It opens the door to us generating more revenue.”

• Facility Solutions Group (FSG) provided the school district with two options for a new Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. The first option to provide each room with a thermostat would easily go over the $1.5 million budget. The second option is to have one unit to control several rooms.

“That will keep us under the $1.5 million and is not uncommon at all,” Best explained.

The estimate includes the elementary and high school buildings. Equipping the gym with a new HVAC system would cost an additional $200,000.

“We wouldn’t have the funding available if we included the gym,” Best said. “However, with what we have in the Capital Projects fund, I would think that is a good use of those funds, and we can go ahead and tackle everything at the same time.”

FSG does not believe any electrical upgrades need to be made to install a new HVAC system.

The firm will begin design work in late summer and early fall, and then the district will look at the plans in-depth and see if they are comfortable with everything.

“Then, we will put it out in late fall for the bid process and by December of 2026 have a contract awarded, and the project can start once school is out in 2027,” Best explained. “That’s the timeline we are looking at right now.”

The district will use a lease-purchase option to pay for the new system.

“Next month, we will set the tax rate and recoup the rollback,” Best said. “It seems like everything is falling in line.”

• Integrated Facility Services Inc (IFS) of Columbia looked at the elementary boiler to determine if there was a way to make a different repair than what has already been tried.

“We know we have to make it through one more winter with it,” Best said. “There probably isn’t a good solution that anyone is going to be happy with, but it is probably going to have to be repaired.”

IFS considered other ways that repairs could be made and possible reasons as to why the same parts continue to break.

“There are not a lot of good solutions,” Best reiterated. “We just need to know what to do to get through one more year.”

• Best proposed changes to the district’s policies on fundraising for the new school year. The proposed changes were outlined in Policy #3370 and Policy #3610.

“We need to improve our guidance on fundraisers and what our purpose is, what and when our clubs are doing fundraising,” Best explained. “We need better communication, better scheduling, and a better procedure. What we have now is not well-defined. It’s not well done on our part, to say the least.’

Best proposed that money collected for fundraisers should be turned into the office daily. This only applies to organizations whose money runs through the district. Organizations that have their own governing bodies and checkbooks would not be subject to this part of the proposal. Best would like these self-governing organizations to coordinate their fundraisers with the district as well.

“We want money to be turned in on a daily basis to the office,” Best explained. “We want to get it out of being in a lot of different places where things can happen. There is no reason for a sponsor or teacher to have it any longer than necessary. It needs to be in the office.”

The new policy would only allow an organization to have one outside fundraiser and one fundraiser in-school per year.

“We basically would have one fundraiser per group per year that would require community support, where you are asking the community for something, and one in which it is done internally, like selling carnations in school on Valentine’s Day,” Best explained. “We don’t have a lot of organizations, but many times we are going into the community and asking them to buy things, and it does add up. It is not what we are supposed to be doing.”

Exceptions will be made for junior and senior class fundraisers.

Fundraisers will need to be pre-approved, with first semester efforts approved before Sept. 1, second semester fundraisers approved before Dec. 1, and summer fundraisers approved before May 1.

“This says that you have a plan and that you have thought things out ahead of time,” Best continued. “We want to make sure we are not overlapping fundraisers and time. We want to make sure things are of good quality and that the organization is getting a good amount of money back.”

Principal Jeremy McKague said that currently, the main problem with fundraisers is a lack of communication.

“We don’t want to be beating up on the community too much either,” McKague said. “We want to have a clearer flow of how everything is going to happen.”

“You can’t just peddle anything you want in the name of fundraising,” Best said.

He explained that it is a real issue for him and takes up 70% of his time talking to people about fundraising.

“That’s not what we are here for,” Best said. “Fundraising is crazy time-consuming, and it dominates the conversation. I’m not trying to limit it. It’s important, but if we are going to do it, we need to have guidelines in place. We need to do better. Asking people to plan things and have things together in a timely manner is not asking too much.”

The new proposals would also restrict most fundraising planning to after school hours.

“The idea is that we shouldn’t be spending a lot of time during the day on fundraising,” Best said. “Classroom time is not the time to be working on fundraising. We need to prioritize instructional time as much as we can.”

School board members will vote on the proposed changes next month.

• The board tabled a proposal to provide childcare for teachers who are losing their daycare providers.

“Some of the childcare providers that our staff use may not be doing it anymore, and it is putting our staff members in a bind,” Best explained. “That leads us to the discussion: is that something the school district wants to provide for staff members?”

Best proposed that the district could provide childcare to staff members and utilize one of the trailers on campus and hire an additional employee.

At maximum, the district would be looking at five children with current district employees.

“A couple of years from now, it could be a bunch of kids,” Best said.

The superintendent explained that the district was exempt from a lot of regulations that would be part of a licensed daycare, and while the staff would expect to pay some amount for the service, it would be unrealistic to think that the program would be self-sustaining.

Best was not sure if it would be possible to have a program up and running by the time the school year started, or if the district could find employees for the district-run daycare.

“Payments should offset the cost, and we could look at it as a benefit of employment,” Best said.

Board members were cautiously enthusiastic about the idea.

“I think it is definitely worth pursuing,” VP Rebecca Mehmert said. “I understand the position that someone might be in, but I don’t feel comfortable making a decision about this tonight.”

• The board voted to approve Regulation #2750, which updated current milk and milk substitute requirements as set forth by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Approval of the policy was required.

Board members also approved policy updates to Regulation #3165, which updated federal contract requirements.

While approval of Policy #3165 was not required, it was suggested.

Best noted that he believed it was good to have in place.

• The board approved outstanding bills totaling $61,029.11.

• Chamois R-1 had the following ending account balances: general ($2,585,410) and capital projects ($982,183).

SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT

Best reported that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) released its version of the A-F Report card rating system as requested by Gov. Mike Kehoe.

Best explained that the school would be evaluated based on standardized test scores, growth proficiency, value-added growth in literacy and math, and success-ready measures.

“I would anticipate that if this does go through, a lot of the same measurements we are already looking at will just be transferred to a report card,” Best explained. “They estimate this will cost over one million dollars for the first year. None of that is in the budget for the state. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Best noted that with the new budget, there has been some funding taken away for literacy and other important programs.

“We are just trying to figure out what the impact will be,” Best said.

The district was chosen to be a part of a pilot program for success-ready assessments for fourth and fifth-graders for the 2026-27 school year.

“That program was axed,” Best said. “There is no program for that, and it is kind of disappointing because we had the opportunity to be a part of that.”

Best also reported that routine maintenance and repairs are continuing throughout the summer months.

There was some clean-up required after the recent storm affected electricity to the school.

“The frozen food was fine,” Best said. “We did lose a few things in the refrigerator.”

Best noted the biggest problem was cleaning up after the mini-fridges throughout the building.

“They created a mess in a lot of places when the electricity was out,” Best said.

In addition, an electrical entry to the cafeteria seems to have been damaged from the outage as well.

Best reviewed a new tool for the teaching staff. The district has created a dashboard for all the staff to utilize forms and documents.

“It is sometimes overwhelming to find everything, and this is a convenient place where everything is in one place,” Best explained.

The district will continue to add to and build the site throughout the year.

“It contains a lot of information, but we hope it makes it easier for everyone to find what they need,” Best said.

• The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 12, at 7 p.m.