Alpine CC Board Minutes
6:00 pm Wednesday, February 14th, 2018 at ACC
Present: Joyce Long, Dorothy Brinckerhoff, Dena Elliott, Rachelle Payne, Roger Irvin, John Scott, Char Opheim (by phone)
1. Discuss & approve minutes of the previous meeting
Approved.
2. Review board email votes since last meeting
None.
3. Prioritize Agenda
4. Financial Report
The board reviewed and accepted the financial reports for January.
Joyce met with a group of managers at Co-Energy Propane. They admitted to several mistakes in billing us, and are giving us credits to reverse their mistakes. She was encouraged by their responses.
5. Preschool Report
Background checks/registry enrollments for co-oping parents have still not been sent in.
Action Item: Joyce and Dorothy will work together to get these submitted.
The board reconfirmed to Char that we want to do the first aid training, even with parents of the “bigs” who may not be with us very long.
Action Item: Char will schedule first aid training for parents and staff, funded from the FFF grant.
Old Mill Ctr wants to site a relief nursery in a manufactured building at Monroe Grade School, and Cindy Bond has asked Char to write a letter in support of that plan. The board agrees that a relief nursery in South Benton would be valuable, and would not compete with our preschool. The board asked Dorothy and Char to work together on a letter on behalf of both the board and our preschool teacher in support of a Monroe relief nursery.
The preschool students have decided to hold a food and baby needs drive, to benefit the South Benton Food Bank.
Char will recruit parents around a plan to work on moving the playground fence this spring or summer.
6. FFF Grant for Staff Development and QRIS Plan
Char has no news on QRIS/SPARK requirements revision that was expected in late 2017.
The close date for the current FFF grant was March 2018, but we have received an extension through June 2018. We will close it out then, report what we’ve done toward FFF’s goal that we get licensed and form a plan for placement in the QRIS system, and return any unspent funds.
7. Grant applications for preschool wall removal
John led a discussion about prospects for grant funding for wall removal to unify the preschool space. OCF is a possible funder, with an application deadline of July.
8. Year-End Appeal Letter
Dorothy pointed out that this year’s appeal brought in $2200 with expenses of $718 (33% expense ratio). This is down from previous years. Dorothy believes that our appeal is growing stale, and that for next year we will probably want to reconsider how we do this, or freshen it up, such as with a color brochure about the Center. (Chart below created after the board meeting to illustrate Dorothy’s point.)
9. Recycling Center abuse
Joyce reported no progress on configuration of the video recorder to network.
10. 2012/2014 Trust Mgmt Grant Implementation
Dorothy reported no progress on the final report to Trust Mgmt.
11. Board mtg participation expectations for those with schedule conflicts
Discussion: In January the board members present discussed “What should we expect of each other when we can’t attend?” and agreed to the following.
We expect ourselves to notify each other in advance if we will be unable to attend a meeting, and that if we will be unable to attend, we will send written (email or print) notes to the meeting about any action items we have assigned and discussion items from the agenda that we have input on.
All board members and Char were present for this month’s discussion. All agreed that they understood these or similar expectations when they joined the board, even though it was not explicit in the bylaws or director job description. All agreed that these expectations are reasonable. We discussed adding verbiage like this explicitly to the director job description, or setting some standard relating to attendance into the bylaws.
This transitioned into a discussion about how our greater challenge is in recruiting new directors, rather than managing directors who aren’t taking the job seriously. We discussed things we could do to recruit new volunteers, and perhaps new board members. One possibility suggested would be to have a reception event, similar to the note payoff reception, to raise awareness of the need, raise community awareness about us, and seek input for new directions/programs/opportunities.
12. New Business
The board discussed a proposal from the City of Monroe to integrate ACC’s event calendar into the City’s events calendar. Dorothy and John will invite the representative of the City to come to our meeting in March to show us what it would look like.
13. Proposed agenda for March
Party/reception event plan
City of Monroe calendar merge proposal
14. Schedule
ACC Board 3/14