Minutes
Sleepy Eye ISD #84
Board of Education
June 13, 2024, 5:30PM
Call to order: Attendance: Sandy Gonzalez, Joleen Dittbenner, Brian Nelson, Darla Remus, Casey
Coulson, Adam Barka, Sheila Wurtzberger
Good News Items: The golf teams and trapshooting teams are doing well in state competitions. Track
team did well in state.
Recognition of visitors: Staff and press
Approve Agenda M Casey Coulson 2nd Joleen Dittbenner M/C
Approve minutes of May 8, 2024 M Casey Coulson 2nd Sandy Gonzalez M/C
Approve financial transactions and reports M Brian Nelson 2nd Casey Coulson M/C
Presentation: A: 2024-25 budget presentation: Amanda Boomgarden (virtual) we have a deficit and am
using some of our fund balance and John is making some simple cuts, but is not cutting programs
because it will hurt the students. Brian says it is a bigger problem because we need to look at the
businesses that bring in the people and the students and then we need the housing and such.
B: LTFM review – Tim Harbo: LTFM Expenditures and Revenue FY 2025-FY2034
Reports
Board: BCPH met and vaccinations are at an all time low and they are looking at ways to combat that
with herd immunity becoming an issue. Staff development met and looked at the budget and teachers
are attending conferences and curriculum training. Negotiations met with the office staff and came up
with a contract. Policy met and went through red line policies mainly about the bullying and went with
what MSBA had in the books.
Principal: Commencement completed on May 17th. We graduated 42. Hired a special
education teacher. Summer School starts next Monday, June 17th. We have 36 students.
About half junior high level and half high school level. Summer school will conclude on July
18th.
Superintendent: Met with Kristina Marti to provide mentoring to the new music department. Trying to
finalize staff hiring. Staff is completing CORE training this summer (paid by grant)
Mascot transition postponed until September 1 st of 2026 (see later in legislative update)
Summer school starts next week. 90 students are enrolled. 6 of us are attending the Hormel Gifted and
Talented Symposium June 11-13 funded by the MDE gifted and Talented program, Sam and team did an
excellent job presenting. Legislative update.
Action items:
Approve LTFM School Board Resolution M Adam Barka 2nd Joleen Dittbenner
Roll call all for none against Motion passed.
Approve termination of Kayla Jacobsen as of May 17 2024
Approve 2024-25 budget
Approve School Nursing Service Agreement between Brown County Public Health and Sleepy Eye Public
School for the 2024-25 school year
Approve Family Facilitator contract with Brown County Human Services for the 2024-2025 school year
Approve Matthew Sellner as 3rd grade instructor for the 2024-25 school year @$49,000
Approve Matthew Sellner as JH boy’s basketball coach at $2,498 for the 2024-25 school year
Approve Memorandum of Understanding between Minnesota Valley Action Council, Inc.’s Head Start
Program and Sleepy Eye Public School/ECSE
Approve FY 2025 Membership to the Minnesota School Board Association
Approve resignation of Amaya Ochs as Tier 1 Special Education instructor effective immediately
Approve hiring Alyssa Stevensen as an Art Instructor for the 2024-25 school year @ $39,527.10 plus
Senior Class Asst. Advisor at $50 for a total of $39,577.10.
Approve Idalia Martinez as School Food Service Authority for the 2024-25 school year
Approve the following donations: $487.17 to the Sleepy Eye School Patrol Group for the Twins game
bussing cost by the Sleepy Eye American Legion Post #7 Thank you for your donation, they are greatly
appreciated.
Approve updated Dashir contract.
Approve Brea Sittig’s resignation from JH Volleyball coach
Approve Brea Sittig as JV Volleyball coach at $3,185 for the 2024-25 school year
Approve SECE Contract as presented.
M Joleen Dittbenner 2nd Casey Coulson M/C
Next meetings: Next board meeting tentative dates: July 18 at 5:30PM; Board retreat will be on July 15,
2024 at 5:30 pm at Mark Thomas.
Columnists rummage around in the closets of our lives looking for things we share. Those become leaping off points to write about. I didn’t have to look hard this time: water. If you’re reading this, you’ve had too much rain.
For a few weeks, friends from further away asked if we had too much rain. One week, north of us got three or four or more inches. The next week south of us had four or five or more inches. Meanwhile, we were getting less.
My response became officially obsolete last Saturday when four inches in two days gave us more than eight in a week. We were in Mankato that afternoon when the tenth of an inch that was forecasted turned into another inch. We came home to a soggier basement than we left, and more cropland submerged.
We had our “big rain.”
Big rain means a lot of our crops are under water. We live among lakes, only without the benefit of appreciated lake-front property values. Those are expensive corn and soybean seeds under water out there. A couple of weeks ago I replanted about ten acres of drowned soybeans. Those acres and more are shimmery blue as I write.
There is water in the old part of our basement. A valiant sump pump works round the clock in the new basement. A bunch of farm tasks were delayed while I spent three days squeegeeing and sucking water with our Shop Vac. It is all annoying.
Then you see the heart-wrenching pictures of whole towns with water covering them, houses sticking out of sudden inland seas. My “annoying” is small in comparison to lives upended. We look at the pictures and try to imagine the work and expense. We can’t.
We offer prayers, even if we don’t know the people so affected. Prayer is like that sometimes. It’s more an intersession to creation and the Creator than a specific request. “Help them, Lord.”
If you follow global news, there are natural disasters somewhere on our planet every day. We give to Catholic Relief Services, so get email reports on horrible situations where people are struggling to survive. I admit most cross in front of my eyes with little attention. Even if you try to care, a fatigue can set in.
Then you see towns and homes that look just like your own, and suddenly emotions heighten.
After living 68 years with some of them rainier than others, I know things that will show up in my head. They are as predictable as rain you’d say. “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” a 1970 song by Creedence Clearwater Revival will begin playing in my mind as I listen to drops against the window:
“Good men through the ages
Tryin’ to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder
Who’ll stop the rain?”
It’s one of those songs I love without really knowing what it’s about. I looked it up, and it’s a little bit Vietnam and a little bit Woodstock. Whatever, it works on a rainy June day on a southern Minnesota farm.
I also know this Bible verse will appear in my consciousness. Matthew 5:45: “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. The rain falls on the patterned tiled fields and the poorly drained.”
OK, I made that last part up. Speaking of recurring themes, I once again am covetous of pattern tiled fields. Likely, they will yield more bushels. Beyond that, they will make life easier for the farmer who will be able to get in and out of them with less chance of getting stuck.
All farmers dread getting stuck. No one is having a good time when your tractor is getting hooked to chains or tow straps.
Interestingly, in the New Ulm Journal’s page of 100-year ago news last week, right next to “Moonshiners at Sleepy Eye are Arrested,” was this headline: “Heaviest Storm in Past Ten Years Strikes New Ulm.” The story described a city baling water from basements of homes and businesses. Few roads were paved then, and many were unpassable. Phone lines were blown down in storms.
The writer reports that “almost two inches of rain fell during the storm.” You don’t have to be a weather geek like me to know that a two-inch rain now is barely noteworthy. A farmer with good drainage and big equipment will be in the field a couple of days after.
When I was a younger farmer, I remember a five-inch rain that was considered a “hundred-year event.” Last May, ten-plus inches fell in spots around here. This June, same thing. I’m in the house I grew up in, and don’t remember water in the basement when I was young. Now, we’ve had that two years in a row.
What’s going on?
Something is. At least, scientists and I think so. The notion of debating climate change at this point feels like standing in a burning house arguing whether those flames are a problem. But we all know people who “saw a video” explaining that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
A meteorologist I read was discussing chaotic weather systems causing record heat east and west of us and flooding across the upper Midwest. He said we have an “unusually amplified weather pattern for June.” Which is exactly what would happen if the planet were warming.
Can one 68-year-old farmer living one life in one place in one time tell you the climate is changing?
No. But if you add my experience to evidence gathered everywhere else, it means something.
As crazy as things are on land, here in the middle of a continent, the better evidence is found in the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is water. More than 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse effects goes into the oceans. If you magically lived in the ocean, the change in our lifetimes would be more dramatic. The deniers who “saw a video” wouldn’t get much attention in that magic world.
The good news is that lots of people younger and smarter than me are working to lessen the harm, which is all we can do at this point. It might mean I can’t do whatever I want whenever I want. That’s OK.
Isn’t that what Christians are supposed to do?
On June 3rd, 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev came to Minnesota. At the time, he had begun to reform the failing Communist system. He was one of the most significant figures of the Twentieth Century. His visit to Minnesota received international attention. It was an unseasonably cold, blustery day.
I wrote this then. Earl Kruger has since passed away. Earl was a real person. The Kretschmers occasionally show up in my column. They are real to me. Paul and Julia have since grown. Bart quit farrowing and put up a finishing barn for Schwartz Farms. Katherine battled with her novel for a few years and switched to writing poetry.
The old Mustang that his advance team had purchased for $300 was a treat to drive after riding in big honking limos all week. The muffler was rusting out, but that steady rumbling felt oddly liberating.
Gorbachev had surreptitiously flown to Minneapolis on a commercial flight from Washington early Sunday, disguised as a regular guy. It was about 11 a.m. when the president of the Soviet Union rolled into a quiet Sleepy Eye. A dreadful northwest wind had evacuated the streets except for church traffic. He really didn’t know how big this “Sleepy Eye” was when the dart he’d tossed hit square on the “E.”
That was the funny part of it. All those analysts were trying to figure out “Why Minnesota?” Gorbachev just wanted to see something on his trip to America besides large halls and offices. So, his staff got a map of the United States, ripped off the coasts, and blacked out the big cities. He threw the dart. “E.” Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.
He was nervous every time they used the Gorbachev double. But it was necessary for his sanity sometimes. Government and business leaders never listened anyway, never really heard a word he said. So why not use a stand-in? The double was up in the Cities that Sunday with reporters chasing him around.
Especially Fidel Castro. Gorbachev could have recited soccer scores to him, and Castro would have just kept talking. He always sent the double to meet him now. Castro would go nuts if he knew he was lecturing a welder from Leningrad. The welder was having a ball though. A little makeup, and he got to be president for a few hours.
Gorbachev’s first stop was at Hardee’s for a coffee. The Mustang’s heater was about as good as its muffler; some coffee might warm him.
The Russian embassy had given him a Trojan seed cap that he wore along with a plaid jacket and work pants. A three-month crash course in English left him with an accent, but he could get by. In Washington, he had spoken Russian. That gave him time to think during the translation. Now he was anxious to try his English.
He sat down next to Earl Kruger. Earl was looking out at a robin struggling in the wind. “Good morning,” said Gorbachev.
Earl turned away from the window. “Good morning. Say, do you suppose robins look for worms in a wind like this, or do they just wait till it dies down?”
It was a good question, and the two talked it over.
“So what brings you to town?” asked Earl. Gorbachev had prepared a story about going to see relatives in South Dakota.
“So you’re from east of here?”
The Soviet president grinned. “Yes, east of here.”
“I hear it’s so wet by Rochester some of the corn’s not in,” said Earl.
And so the conversation went: birds, weather, crops. After a while Earl told Gorbachev about his idea to plant apple trees all through the region. How 4-H clubs could plant and care for them. How they could use the parks and empty lots in town. How Sleepy Eye could be “The Apple Town.” Make it Buttered Corn and Apple Pie Day.
Gorbachev loved apples. He remembered an idea like that from when he was a young agriculture official. Sadly, it got buried by some bureaucrat. The two men talked apple trees for half an hour.
When it was close to noon, Earl had to go home for dinner with Delores. Gorbachev walked to the rusty Mustang. When he got in, he made a note to mention Earl the next time he met George Bush. Suggest him for the Interior Department or something. Somewhere they could use good ideas.
Next, he drove west on Highway 14, into the wind, under the low, gray sky. He turned south on a gravel road wanting to see farms. He had liked the plan for him and Governor Perpich to visit a dairy farm outside of the Cities. But his double could wade through the cameras and rabid reporters.
As he got near the Cottonwood River, he drove past the Kretschmer place. It looked as good as any, and he pulled the Mustang over to the side. He got out and walked up the curvy driveway, holding his seed cap in the gusts, past the cottonwood tree with blown off sticks beneath it, up to the brick home.
He knocked on the wood screen door. Six-year-old Julia came to the door, “Hi!”
“Hello, how are you little girl?”
“I’m painting see all those newspapers on the wall and the table I’m painting everyone I know and we’ll put it up on the wall if it fits I know a lot of people.” Julia spoke in torrents.
Julia talked faster than anyone could listen. Gorbachev thought, “Now here’s American vitality!” His English instructor hadn’t quite prepared him for Julia.
“Is your mother or father home? I need some gas.”
“Mom’s writing and I can’t bug her for 36 more minutes Dad’s in a pig pen Paul’s watching basketball he always watches sports it’s so dumb.”
After hearing about Julia’s kittens and her last day of kindergarten, Gorbachev found himself going down to an old shed to find Julia’s dad. Bart Kretschmer was kneeling in straw in a make-shift pen, wet and pig-dirty. He was trying to nail a board up despite the affections of about twenty young gilts.
“Hello,” announced the visitor. “Can I help?”
“Oh hello. No. I deserve this,” muttered Bart, half talking to himself. “‘Breed extra gilts,’ I told myself. ‘I’ll just put them in my workshop and open the south door and fence in a lot for them,’ I said. I should have known it would rain for the first time in four years and turn it into a mudhole. I should have known they would find my tools so darned interesting that they’d break the fence down on a weekly basis. No, I deserve this.”
Gorbachev ended up holding boards for Bart and even came up with a different corner scheme to strengthen it. As they worked, they talked about pigs.
“What’s crazy, is these are $60 market hogs I’ve kept back. Probably just to farrow 200 pigs that I’ll sell into a $40 market.”
This was almost as good as apple trees. Gorbachev was giddy thinking about the faces of glazed over politicians and businessmen he was missing. “So why’d you keep them?” he asked.
Bart grew sober for a minute. “I need extra pigs for November’s land payment. I had some bad farrowing last fall, some ungodly virus. Then a tractor overhaul, and Paul’s braces. If hog prices don’t stay up, we’ll come up short. By the way, how do you know so much about pigs, Mr. Gorbachev?”
The president’s jaw dropped.
“Your English isn’t that good. Besides, there ain’t been a Trojan company for years. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. You helped me with the fence. It’s the least I can do.”
Gorbachev smiled. “I’m not really out of gas. I just wanted to see something that wasn’t so planned.”
“Well, those pigs getting out sure wasn’t planned. Come up to the house and clean up.”
Later they sat down to muffins that Bart made after church. He cooked on weekends to let Katherine work on her writing. She was a nurse at the clinic in town. Weekends, she was a writer with pages of a novel spread out over half the basement.
Katherine wasn’t surprised to see Mikhail Gorbachev in their kitchen. She saw everything in life as parts of a novel. This was just a strange Kurt Vonnegut-sort of chapter.
They visited into the afternoon about the farm, the Kremlin, corn, old cars. Julia painted the Soviet president into her mural and told him about her Cabbage Patch doll. They even watched Gorbachev’s double on the TV news.
That early evening as Gorbachev rumbled in his mustang back to the airport, he felt relaxed for the first time in weeks. He smelled a little like pigs, but that was okay.
