Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz
Among the items discussed at Thursday’s Del Norte Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting:
Facilities master plan: Trustees approved a $177,000 contract with Studio W, a Sacramento-based architect firm, to develop a five-year facilities master plan.
DNUSD sent a request for qualification to six different architectural firms, receiving responses from three of them, Facilities and Maintenance Director Josh McCubbin told trustees. Of the three, a committee consisting of McCubbin, Jeff Napier and Greg Bowen, the former and current assistant superintendents of business, decided that Studio W best fits DNUSD’s needs.
“They work with schools in Humboldt County and are familiar with our area demographics,” he said. “We felt they were going to be the best supportive company for our plan moving forward.”
The district’s previous master plan, completed in 2020 by PBK Architects, covered about $180 million worth of work. McCubbin called it unrealistic and said that DNUSD completed what it could.
While the current plan will look at the district’s high-level needs, McCubbin said he plans to make a more targeted approach to the facilities master plan in the next five years, narrowing the scope to about $60 million.
“That way if we did go out for a bond and we were successful, we would already have that foundation laid out for us,” he said.
Del Norte County voters rejected a $59 million school facilities bond in 2024. While McCubbin said an updated facilities plan doesn’t necessarily tie in with another attempt at a bond for the 2026 election, it takes about five months to complete. The process includes campus visits as well as small focus groups to get community feedback, he said.
Salary increases: Though the employees he represents are set to get a 2% salary increase, Shawn Schubert noted the disparity between classified staff and other employee classes within the district.
Schubert, president of the California School Employees Association’s Great Northern 178 chapter, spoke to trustees before they approved CSEA’s 2025-26 contract. Trustees also approved resolutions establishing 2% salary increases for confidential classified employees, classified management and certificated management.
“The 2% is great, but classified management, certificated management and classified confidential, they all get a better vacation package,” Schubert told trustees. “They start with 17 days. That’s what they start with until they finish their fifth year and then they go straight to 22 days of vacation. We have to work here 15 years before we get 22 days. Our start is at 10 (days of vacation). It moves up to 15 and then 17 and then 22, and it’s quite a bit of difference right there.”
According to DNUSD Human Resources Director Alyssa Yeager, the agreement period for the collective bargaining agreement between the school district and CSEA ends on June 30.
The DNUSD Board approved resolutions for the salary increases for confidential classified, classified management and certificated management employees since they’re not represented by a collective bargaining unit, Yeager said. Since the CSEA contract includes a salary increase, district administration felt it was best practice to offer management and confidential employees the same pay increase.
Fancier bells & whistles: With the license for its internet-connected paging system up for renewal, Ryan Bahten proposed an upgrade that would allow for notifications to be sent to itinerant staff and others via their mobile phone.
DNUSD currently uses the InformaCast Advanced system, which allows Bahten, the Del Norte County Office of Education’s director of information network services, to run it from the data center at the district office. From there, he and his staff can make sure that bells are being run and pagers are working if a campus lockdown is called, for instance, he said.
However, “it doesn’t allow us to do a lot from a mobile device,” he said, and it’s not able to get messages to people via their cell phones.
“Consider one of my staff members or one of, maybe, Mr. McCubbin’s staff members who are traveling site to site, itinerant staff, a psychologist, a music teacher, there’s no way of using InformaCast Advanced to let them know that maybe their site had a shelter-in-place,” Bahten told trustees. “With InformaCast Fusion, it’s not an exclusively on-premise solution. When we make, say, a lockdown notice — and that’s kind of an extreme case — we will be able to use Fusion to notify people on a mobile device as well.”
Trustees unanimously approved the system upgrade, which will cost about $66,070.99, which includes roughly $8,000 in professional services costs. According to Bahten, the license with the new system is for five years. He said DNUSD had been paying $22,000 every three years for the previous InformaCast Advanced system.
