From the Superintendent of Schools

On behalf of the Board of Education and all of us here at the Cleveland Hill Schools, we hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and New Year. We again want to thank you for your ongoing support. Cleveland Hill is a special place to live, work and learnbecause of the wonderful people that come together and create our school community. Our partnership, trust and mutual respect served as the cornerstone while we faced the challenges of the pandemic together. Continued efforts to strengthen this collaboration will be vital for our continued growth and future success.

To help support this effort, the district is excited to be initiating a complete overhaul of our website and communication systems. We are working with a vendor in developing a system that integrates our website, automated messaging system, email and social media accounts. This new system will include a mobile app that will greatly enhance two-way communication between you and the schools. We anticipate rolling this out to the community this summer, with a full implementation planned for the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year.

Last May, Cleveland Hill voters approved a referendum budget of $12,570,000 for a Capital Improvement Project. If you recall, this project largely focuses on protecting some of the investments we have previously made into district infrastructure. Using the NYS required Building Condition Survey, we focused on items identified as health and safety concerns, or beyond life expectancy. We are now well into the design phase of the project, and hope to begin construction in late Spring. The project is scheduled to becompleted by January 2025. Again, some of the more notable items to be completedduring this project include:

· Parking lot and sidewalk replacement
· Classroom renovations and millwork replacement
· Steam Boiler replacement
· HVAC air handler replacement
· Construction of an Athletic Storage Building
· Upgrades to our existing Morton Building

As directed by the Board of Education, this project will have no impact on our tax levy. We will be utilizing $2,790,000 from our capital reserve fund for our local share of this project. All other funds for this work will be covered by Building Aid that we receive from the State.

Lastly, I would like to thank you all for your support of our initiative to improve student attendance. As we have shared before, regardless of grade level, data clearly shows that a student’s attendance in school is directly correlated to success here in school and their lives after they leave us. Although we are seeing good improvements in this area, we still have work to do and appreciate your efforts and support in this initiative. We ask that you stay informed, have high expectations, ask us the challenging questions and attend our Board of Education meetings. We work for you, our community. The more dialog we have, the better we will be at providing you and our children the educational experience you expect. On behalf of our Board of Education, we again thank you for your support.