December 4, 2015 at 4:00 PM - Superintendent's Weekly Update to the Board of Education

Description: 
Please see attached a St. Cloud Times article about the construction accident that very sadly ended in Vern Barthel losing his life.  Our prayers are with his family.  We also pray for Rodney Stanoch.  He is the driver who accidentally ran over Vern.

Description: 
Shari Bishop is organizing a elementary and middle school teams that'll participate in destination imagination competitions.  Cathy Hesch (Royalton Elementary Art Teacher) will be the elementary coach.  I do not recall who Joel said yesterday will be our middle school coach.

In addition to the competition fees we will pay each coach 20 hours of curriculum writing time ($22/hour).  This is money well spent to support gifted, talented, and enrichment opportunities for our students.  

Description: 
Royalton School District is part of the National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA) insurance pool for employee health coverage.  This year NJPA signed a three-year contract with Benovate to collect and analyze data for all of the pool groups as a whole and individually.  You will find pages 1-9 are data in regard to the entire NJPA pool and pages 10-19 are Royalton School District only.

The pages I'll direct your attention to most are 10, 16, 17, and 19.

Page 10:  Royalton's PMPM is far less dollars than the NJPA pool.  Royalton is $2,227 and the NJPA pool is $4,817.  The primary cause for the difference is our younger average age.  Royalton's average age is 34.02 years while NJPA pool is 44.46 years.

Page 16: This is the MOST important page of data in regard to our Royalton School District employee's health and costs spent for medical care.  Benovate individually breaks each individual person down into one of four categories.  We're all either healthy, at risk, chronic or acute/complex.  The top percentages in each category were described as regional (e.g., Midwest) numbers.  The percentages below those are the employees of Royalton School District.

The numbers for Royalton School District are really good!  22% of Royalton's health care costs are in the healthy category as compared to only 6% of the region.  This means that our employees are receiving preventative care and avoiding the much more costly care.  They're not moving into the at risk, chronic or acute/complex categories.

Just a few more points are we have no one in the acute/complex category and a minimal amount in the chronic.  The MOST important thing for Royalton is to prevent the at risk individuals from moving over to the chronic group.  Statistically on average every year 2% of individuals will move to the next category to the right.  We want our at risk employees moving to the left ideally and at worse scenario remaining at risk.  

Lots more can be said about the data on this page.  Hopefully you get the main idea we're a healthy group of employees right now, but a 1/3 are at risk and a step away from the much more costly chronic.

Page 17:  Our employees do a great job of utilizing generic medications (80.3%).  This helps keep costs down.

Page 19:  Neck and back problems account for 37% of our total costs.       

Description: 
There will be a motion at the December 14 board meeting to approve trap shooting as an extracurricular activity for students in grades 6-12.  The attached documents in today's Friday letter will also be in the board packet.  97 interested students is awesome! 

Description: 
There will be a motion at the December 14 board meeting to approve the high school band cruise in February 2017.  The attached document in today's Friday letter will also be in the board packet. 

Description: 
Please see attached the weekly bills for your approval.