HURON — The Huron School Board of Education meeting Monday entailed informational reports regarding back to school preparation, as the district gears up for the first day of school on Tuesday, Sept. 4, for grades 1 through 12.  
An adoption of property tax request levys for taxes payable in 2019 was approved by the board, as the amount per property tax valuation is calculated by the county.
“Those numbers are all set by the State of South Dakota, the legislature sets those during the session in January,” said Business Manager Kelly Christopherson.
The Huron School District’s increased request of approximately $1M in the general fund compared to last year led to a very slight increase in property tax levy.
“The increase in the general fund is due to our growing enrollment, our cost of living increase for the employees and the increased cost of benefits,” Christopherson explained.  
Other funds come from State Aid, which is determined based on the amount of students on count day, which will be held Friday, Sept. 28 this year. The state allotment of how much is provided per student has yet to be determined.
“We don’t know exactly where we are at yet,” Christopherson explained. “We are budgeted for 2,724 students.”

Superintendent Terry Nebelsick offered congratulations to the early success of the Huron sports teams, plus thanks to those who worked on getting building and grounds and food service ready for the new year.
“Thank you to our administrative team for putting together today’s inservice program,” Nebelsick said. “It had a lot to do with compliance, and the entire staff that were there understand what we have to do with our initiatives on bullying prevention, discrimination and privacy.  All of those things need to be taught each year, and we need to verify that each employee receives the training.”
The training sessions were recorded and filed, so everyone is able to get that information and training, which is necessary.
A report was given by Carol Tompkins and Karla Sawvell regarding the Summer Feeding Program and the School Nutrition Program.
“Summer was excitingly different with our new summer mobile feeding program and the middle school lunch program,” Tompkins said.
The Nutrition Department was awarded two grants — $15,000 was provided for a new combination oven, which will allow food to be cooked and held for less time to produce a better quality product. Also awarded was the USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable grant this year, providing $79,616.
“We’re happy for the opportunity to provide this to our elementary students again daily,” Tompkins explained. “We received an extra $28,000 in March for fresh produce and were offered another $19,000 in extra commodity foods, which we used a lot over the summer.”
Tompkins explained the mobile program worked to a point and operated strongly while it ran during the summer; however, there were not enough students utilizing it. The truck averaged 88 meals a day, and while this is a a lot of students being fed, it still fell shy of what was needed to break even.
Many members of the community were served through the middle school feeding program, plus the summer mobile feeding program, which Sawvell highlighted during the report. Total meals served at the middle school were 13,844, while the total meals served from the summer mobile truck were 3,871.
“We seriously look at the total numbers of the programs each year, but really the rewarding result is that children were fed — 17,715 meals were eaten,” Sawvell said. “School Nutrition would like to publicly thank Dakota Provisions for a generous donation to our summer feeding program, and thanks to the Huron Board of Education for allowing us to operate the summer food service program again this year.”
“Something like this is one of those programs where it may take more than one summer for people to get accustomed to that idea,” Chairman David Wheeler added. “I think it would be a good idea for the Business Manager to send something out to the board about that so we can decide if it’s worth an investment next summer.”
In old business, the tiger head for the branding package was approved and is available to view online, while in new business Head Start notified the board of a grant received in order to make improvements on the playground.