Tonight the Collierville Municipal School Board met in a special called meeting for the purpose of approving the Superintendent engaging the district into agreements for various communications services. Below are my notes from the meeting. As expected, the board chair made some comments about the progress of an interlocal agreement with Germantown. Please note this is from my notes and observations, and I will be sure to indicate when I am inserting my own opinion.
Not a big crowd in attendance for today’s meeting, but yet again the full board was in attendance.
There were no comments from the public.
The business part of the meeting had Mr Aitken describe the communication services contracts for the school’s internet services, the internal network, telecom services (land lines) and wireless services (for select employees). Through a group purchasing coop (erates) the district will spend $18,018 on phone lines (discounted from $42,900) and $116,000 for internet and network services. As part of the RFP process, the district is going to get increased bandwidth from what is currently available to the schools. This will help ensure that online testing will run with appropriate network capacity.
The board approved Mr A to enter into the appropriate agreements. Legal review of the contracts is under way, and upon completion of that process, the agreements will be signed in time for the Friday 3/21 deadline that is in place due to telecommunications regulations.
Before adjourning the meeting, Mr Hansen provided a brief update on the interlocal agreement with Germantown. He stated that the Germantown board is expected to vote on the proposed agreement in a special called meeting Thursday evening (3/20), and because he wants to put this urgent issue to rest, has called a special called meeting for Friday at 6pm for a vote on the same agreement by the board.
I expect this agreement to cover what was discussed in the previous meeting: currently enrolled Collierville resident students at the Houston Middle and High Schools, as well as the Collierville resident elementary school students (Farmington and Dogwood) will be able to remain at those schools until their exit grade. Transportation will be made available for those students.
This should alleviate the concern currently expressed by parents of those students, as their kids won’t be required to register at their zoned Collierville school if they are going to attend in Germantown.
An observation: it seems to me the Collierville school board has acted with appropriate urgency and due diligence in his matter. The base principle has always been to get all Collierville resident students in Collierville schools, but this has been paired with the desire to allow students to finish out at their current schools if those families wanted to. This will also allow the CMSD a little more time to plan for the increasing attendance.