The Black & Redgister team sits down with Superintendent, Greg Dufoe, once a month for a press conference. Many of the key points are not only interesting, but could also be vital information for the community.

The administration chose to take the Monday after Easter off and celebrate with a long weekend. When asked why this was the decision Dufoe said “Between spring break and the end of the year it gets really long for our students and staff and we wanted to break it up a bit with a three day weekend. We considered having the Friday off because its Good Friday, we knew we would either have the Monday or Friday around Easter off. We chose Monday simply because ew didn’t feel like we could afford to not have the professional development and PLC time that happens on Fridays, so we simply went with Monday and I think that was a great thing for us to add.” Dufoe says that the Monday of Easter weekend will continue to be an off day in the future.

The last couple of master facilities planning meetings have been focused on what to do with the current ADM school buildings, but also the construction of a new building. “We had our fourth committee meeting on March 27th and the recommendation broadly describes building a new high school. Now that is the committees recommendation, now there is a lot to do before that becomes a reality. The board has to approve that recommendation and then choose to act upon that. Then the voters would need to approve a bond issue.”

New high schools are very expensive and as of now the estimated cost is $60 million at the least. If everything goes well we can occupy the new school Fall of 2027. A new building would shake thing up quite a bit. The older wing of the DeSoto building [the three story part] will be knocked down and the new wing will be kept and turned into a pre-school/daycare. The now Middle School will become 6th and 7th grade and the now Highschool will become 8th and 9th grade.

As we all know it is rough time for the education occupation. A significant amount of teachers are choosing others career paths, and not many students are choosing to go into the education field. Dufoe gave some insight on what the ADM school district is doing to attract newly graduated teachers. The teachers are represented by what’s called the ADM AEA. The higher up administrators, such as Dufoe himself are considered the management. These two teams meet every spring and negotiate. They negotiate the pay raise of teachers. “This process has always went really well and there’s a really positive relationship between the management side and the teachers union. We settled with our teachers union about two weeks ago, it went very quickly and the specifics on that sentiment are a 4% salary increase for teachers, an increased number of personal days from 2 to 3.” One of the reasons that they chose to settle on some of these specifics are because they want to give teachers more freedom. “Teachers desire more flexibility, a teachers life is very regimented by the school calendar. Aside from the summer months teachers are pretty restricted, even during the day they have to rush to use the bathroom.”

In the last few months we have had a few snow days, and as much fun as those are the big question is weather or not we will have to make those up at the end of the year. “As of right now we are on track to not have to make up the snow day from this year.” The school district has enough hours required by the state. Although we do not have to make up snow days, the DeSoto school will need to make up the days missed due to the fire.