Good morning, good morning, good morning, welcome, welcome, welcome you to this time now for community connection. Right here on K one, the one you dressed him. We're talking with Bartlesville Public School Superintendent Chuck McCauley and a happy break. Yeah, thanks, yeah, thanks Tom. It is a happy spring break to you as well. Yeah. Yeah, I'm seeing more and more my child, like I've not seen her really since about Christmas. A lot of activity. You got a lot of fun stuff at school.
That's all I got is Yeah, that's exactly right. It's you know, now that we are in spring break, it truly is you we're into the fourth quarter of the school year. I think we have seven weeks of school after the break. Yeah, you know, good Fridays a little bit early this year, which is a Friday after spring break, and then we'll be all those spring kind of fun activities. We'll be finishing up the year,
you know, prom and graduation. I think our last day of school is May sixteenth, which is a Thursday, and then we'll have graduation on the seventeenth, weather permitting. Always. That's exactly right too, But a lot a lot of fun stuff, you know. Switching over to our spring
spring activities are over on the foundation side. They'll have a couple of other events in April, the Teacher Hall of Fame event it's coming up, and then a little bit later in April we'll have the Bruins of the Year, which is our Teacher of the Air program and support Person of the Air Program, which is the end of April. That's that's housed out at Dungeon Stadium.
So those are always a lot of fun. And of course you know prom probably coming up here next month as well, and then all the different spring activities. But yeah, a lot, there's a lot, a lot going on, but it's a fun time. Uh. I did want to mention to kind of start with I think we've know if I've talked about it on the on air, but I know you guys have shared some information related to our discount for our teachers in terms of daycare. You know, daycare.
Childcare is a challenge, it's a challenge for workforce overall, and we've been working with Tri County Tech and our Best Foundation has helped us uh so that we could have a discount for one to prioritize our teachers to get into the Tri County Tech childcare program. They've got a great childcare program that they use to train kids and adults to work in childcares, and so they have
set our teachers up as a higher priority to get into the program. And then secondly, we started off this past year, they had a twenty percent discount. This upcoming school year, the twenty four to twenty five school year, with some help from the Our Best Foundation, our teachers will get a
fifty percent discount, So which is significant. You know, that's in terms of I know that from just walking the halls from we made that announcement the last couple of weeks before spring break, and I had three different teachers stop me and share with me, you know, just that's that's enabling them to stay in the classroom. You know, that's those are real dollars. So
one, I'm thankful for Tri County on working with us for that. They've adjusted their program a little bit as well, where for example, like our teachers, that program is basically from August through May. So you know, the words were previously a lot of daycares they would have to pay like in June and July even when they didn't necessarily need daycare every day. So a
ten month program and then plus at fifty percent discount. So that's really really helpful to our teachers and so that really helps us from a recruiting standpoint and also retention, you know, because teachers, if you think about it, just a high cost of daycare, if they had one or you start looking more than one kid in daycare, it doesn't there goes their check and so a lot of them choose to stay home and then they choose up doing other
options. So thankful for Trey County the RvEs Foundation. We'll be announcing that's probably at our next board meeting, but they've they donated fifteen thousand dollars to us last year and they're doing that again this year to help offset that cost. There's still going to be some additional cost to the district if we don't have additional private funds. The district will cover that, but real thankful for that that opportunity for our teachers, and we think that's going to help us
keep teachers in the classroom. We had our job fair right before spring break the other day. I know we had some people come from surrounding areas because of that. Because of that reason, so that we've we've been able to able to amount support for our teacher, so it's thankful for that. So also mentioned just a couple of things that's going on. Our last board meeting. On our student spotlight, we highlighted our two We had two academic All
State kids. There's only one hundred of those in the state of Oklahoma, and we had two, Lauren Lee and Jonathan Ortiz. We have several kids that meet the qualifications for that, but they were selected and so real thanks. We'll pretty proud of them to continue that. I mean, there's only you think about it, there's only one hundred in the state of Oklahoma, and there's over five hundred districts, so it's pretty it's very very competitive.
And then also wanted to mention just kind of an update I think I talked about last time that in terms of student opportunities. I talked about us adding a carpentry class or construction class at Bartlesville High School. So our kids have gone through the enrollment process to pay classes for next year, and we had one hundred and nineteen kids select construction class. So and this is something just
wanted to remind folks we're not competing with Tri County. We have kids that want to go to Try County and get into their carpentry program or construction program, they're going to go. But there's more of a demand for that than could get into that program. So we're going to start teaching that at Bartlesville High School. Doug Boudreau I was going to teach the course. Doug's a Arshon Native Varshon and he has a teacher at Ranch Heights this past year,
but he's also has a mechanical engineer background. He worked with Vasus Group before too, so he's going to be the teacher for the program. It's going to be housed at the high school. We're going to focus on carpentry because it kind of touches all the trades, but really glad our kids are going to have that opportunity to get that started. So that's kind of our newest thing that we've added, and I wanted just to share that with folks too.
That progress and that kind of our long term goal. We'd love to be in a position where we could build a house every year. It's been years and years since I was done in Bardsley, it was done in Bartlesville. We'd like to get back to that. But we're kind of we got to get started somewhere, and so we're excited about getting started with that as well. And then I just want to remind people this year we've had a
really successful years on some national recognitions. First of all, our project lead the Way our STEM program has been a Distinguished District one of seventeen districts in the country. We've submitted our application again for that this year we meet those qualifications, so we're hopeful, well we'll meet that again. So from our STEM STEM program, it continues to expand with our aviation is tied into our
STEM program and those those enrollment numbers continue to grow. Also mentioned over on the Advanced Placement or College Board side, we've been recognized by them nationally. There's only a handful of schools in Oklahoma. I received that number one for our performance last year. We had two hundred and eight kids past the Advanced Placement test, two hundred and eight. Also, they recognized us for access to the program because our kids that are actually enrolled in AP continues to grow.
And then lastly, from from a diversity side, we receive the Female Diversity Award for Computer Science because of our strong female enrollment in computer science and so that's really where we think we can make a difference in our kids, especially our girls are underrepresented in STEM fields and there's no reason for that. We think we can getting them, have them have success in school when they're young, will help them want to continue to choose that. And then lastly,
you know the national recognition received for our AG program. You know, they won the award for the Emerging Leaders Program at the National FFA Conference. And so those are three things that we want to make sure we talk about that we share about, I think our whole community because none of those things would happen without our strong, strong community support. And then I'll mention a couple other things too. As we're finishing up some big facility projects. I
know I could ask about the AGG facility a lot. Yeah, it's great. I encourage people to drive by. They're putting landscaping in and planting trees. I mean they're getting the substantial completion of schedule for April fifth. April fifth is soon, yeah, so we'll be into that program by the end of the school year too, So really really excited about that. You know, there's an indoor arena, there are there's gonna be a kitchen. There
are a couple of barns. There are a couple of greenhouses. Thankful for our Lion Foundation made a large donation to help us with some construction inflation, we could get those greenhouses done. But that's gonna be finished up on April fifth. Another larger project force is over at Wayside Elementary. We're expanding and renovating and we're going to be in that new facility on August one. We're gonna have five right now, they have our largest enrollment. They need some
more space and so we're making that happen. So we're going to be that's they're going to have a brand new early childhood wing for pre k in kindergarten. Also there art and music rooms will be brand new, and then we'll have some renovated spaces for additional for a larger cafeteria, library, office space. All those areas will be new and we're going to be in August first.
And then at Ranch Heights Elementary, we'll be opening bids the end of April or first of May to do a similar expansion over there, So that will get started this summer with an opening date of August of twenty twenty five, so one to share those things. And there's a couple of other quick things as well. Our school resource officer program continues to go real well. It's wildly successful. We'll continue to invest in that. We have nine resource
officers. We've briefly had ten. We had two at the high school as our goal that we want to have. We had one of our officers had to leave from so we had to cover for that. So we have nine resource officers and we're planning to have ten there once we're fully fully staffed there
too. But that's going really well. And then lastly, just wanted to wanted to mention our just in terms of student enrollment we have from this time from spring break this year compared to spring bank break last year, we've got about ninety more students than we did a year ago. So that's the kind of growth that's nice because it's not too fast, because sometimes you can grow too fast. So we're at a nice pace with that. We'll just continue
to add add staff as needed. And we really think some of these programs that we have and opportunities for kids because are really helping draw folks. And also the flexibility that we've offered we continue to offer virtual options where some folks, some families choose to maybe they're coming in from a homeschool environment and still want to have that oversight and be around their over kids a lot, but maybe they want them to experience the high quality electives that we have to offer.
So we offer those all the way from the elementary level, which is hous that Caine Elementary, all the way up through high school. So if folks are interested in rolling with us next year, that process starts online. They can go to our website. We have help at our Education Service Center if people needs help that need some devices to do that as well. So anyway, so Tom a lot of information, but we've got a lot going on. Indeed, you do, and I want to thank you very much
for coming in and talking to us today. Ja. We're calling you Superintendent of Schools, Barlatill Public Schools