NEW ULM — No members of the public showed up for the District 88 Truth in Taxation meeting Thursday at the New Ulm Middle School.

Business Manager Myrna Meunier went through the district’s proposed tax levy during the session.

The proposed levy increases by .94 percent over last year, a total of $73,718. The open house is required by state law.

The district must mail a notice to each affected property owner. Then it must have the open house before the levy can be approved by the school board.

The board will decide on  the levy at its next regular meeting, Thursday Dec. 22 at 6 p.m. in the District Boardroom at the middle school.

Previous to the open house Independent School District (ISD) 88 held its December study session which focused on the behavior and grades of students.

Principals of the four buildings updated the school board on what interventions were being done.

Starting with the Washington Learning Center (WLC) the interventions focused primarily on behavioral corrections. As the presentations moved into the older grades they shifted academic interventions.

WLC’s update focused on intervention incidents that required sending the child to the principal’s office. Only three students made up most of these interventions.

The district had no previous experience with these students who had not been marked as having behavioral or emotional troubles, WLC Principal Dawn Brown said.

Jefferson Elementary updated the board on the effectiveness of its Behavioral Interventionist, Casey McMullen.

McMullen specializes in helping correct and prevent bad behavior. She has had 722 incidents of direct student contact.

A little over half of those were classified as a crisis, one-third were checking in with students and staff. Less than 1 percent included law enforcement intervention.

Before McMullen signed on with the district, those incidents had to be handled by teachers and staff who were not always the best equipped for it.

“It was always other people trying to figure it out,” Superintendent Jeff Bertrang said. “It was grasping straws and frustrating lots of people.”

Middle School Principal Michelle Miller explained her building’s Positive Intervention and Enrichment (PIE) program from a conference via Google Chat.

PIE implements 38 minute periods of individualized instruction at the end of the day for helping students academically. Including groups to help with math or science as well as enrichment classes such as public speaking and writing computer code.

Two ideas coming out of the high school update were guided study classes and the innovation grant program from last year, Writing Across the Curriculum.

Guided study classes are for students who have a history of being on a deficiency list. The class teaches students tactics for taking tests, studying and getting homework done, High School Principal Mark Bergmann said.

Bergmann started moving on the Writing Across the Curriculum program by setting a goal to have all teachers work with a writing specialist to add a writing lesson and rubric in their class by May of 2017.

His reasoning was that one of his biggest mistakes when he was a science teacher was not grading student papers on grammar, because it did not prepare them properly for college.