The Channel

Please remember that you must submit applications 6-8 weeks prior to an expiration date (or prior to when a new license is needed) for license renewal. Background checks can take up to four to six weeks, in addition to the time the Board of Educational Examiners office needs to process the request. Educators cannot remain on the job, even if their materials have been submitted, if their license expires.

Do you have a project or event that you would like promoted via the agency communication channels? The communications team can provide support!  Please complete this short survey at least two weeks prior to your event. To request photos and/or video of student events, you must have signed release forms from parents/guardians prior to the event. Forms are available on the staff website. Questions should be directed to Beth Strike.

Cell phone reimbursement applications for the 2018-19 school year will be accepted beginning August 6th through September 7th. The request form can be found on the Staff Website > Communications > Cell Phone Reimbursement. Cell phone reimbursement requests are approved when the use of cell phones are appropriate and necessary in an employee’s role to provide effective and efficient operations for the agency. Payment will be made to employees on September 20.

Supporting schools in the areas of social-emotional learning, behavior, mental health and autism continues to be a high priority for our agency in 2018-2019.  The following are just some of the opportunities and changes you will see for the upcoming school year.

The Lead, Inspire, Innovate Series is presented by experts in education.  We are excited to have Dr. Shannon Suldo, author of Promoting Student Happiness: Positive Psychology Interventions in Schools, and Dr. Nick Yoder, consultant at American Institutes for Research, joining us this year.  Check out our growing list of workshops and courses around the topic of MTSS for Positive Well-Being.

Agency targeted and intensive supports in the areas of challenging behavior, mental health and autism are undergoing restructuring. This restructuring aims to honor the needs in each region, capitalize upon the strengths, knowledge and skills of more staff across a region, and support equitable time for each region to provide targeted and intensive supports.  Separate challenging behavior, mental health, and autism teams will no longer exist.  Instead, each region will identify appropriate staff and mechanisms to meet the needs of schools and students.  The agency MTSS for Positive Well-Being Team will ensure coherence across the agency and provide professional development for regional team members.  The knowledge and experience of our challenging behavior, mental health, and autism team members will be vital to implementing this structure.

If you have questions regarding the MTSS for Positive Well-Being work please feel free to contact:

     Dana Miller 

     Karen Aldrich 

     Jody Alberston 

As a service to staff, representatives from the Iowa Public Employee Retirement System (IPERS) will be stationed at the Cedar Falls office on Monday, Oct. 15 through Thursday, Oct. 18 for individual IPERS counseling sessions.

Monday, October 15 has been reserved for CRAEA employees only. If Monday does not work for you, you may schedule an appointment on another day but be aware, those appointments will fill up fast as they will be available to the public. Monday appointments start at 3 pm and run through 5:30 pm. Tuesday – Thursday appointments will be during the day.

If you are interested in making an appointment for Monday, Oct. 15, you may call the IPERS number anytime (1-800-622-3849) to schedule an appointment but you will need to identify yourself as a CRAEA employee. If you make an appointment for Oct. 16-18, you must wait until after July 19 to call the 800 number. Depending on interest level, individual counseling sessions may also be set up in the Clear Lake and Marshalltown AEA locations.

Please refer to the IPERS website for additional information. You can always schedule an appointment in Des Moines by calling 1-800-622-3849.

As you know, a committee comprised of staff and administration developed a proposal over the last several months to address concerns with our current mileage policy. While the proposal had merit in addressing some of the issues, continued conversations among administration, staff and board have caused the Business Office to rethink implementation for the 2018-19 year. Thus, the current mileage policy will remain in effect with no change.

Thank you to everyone who participated on the mileage committee, had one-on-one conversations with administrators about individual situations, or shared their thoughts and ideas for improvement in some way. We appreciate your input and participation in the process!

Expense reimbursements must be submitted by July 6 to be eligible for payment. If your travel for 2017-18 is complete, you do not need to wait until the end of the month to submit. Early submissions are strongly encouraged! These final reimbursement requests will be processed and paid each week as they are received.

Mark your calendars now! The all-staff meeting will be held on Tuesday, August 14 at the Cedar Falls Conference Center. A detailed agenda will be sent closer to the actual date.

Summer hours will begin on Monday, June 11 and run through Friday, August 10th. Official office hours will be 7:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. during that period. If you are going off contract for the summer, please ensure that your voicemail greeting and “out of office” email message indicate who is handling inquiries in your absence along with when you plan to return. Enjoy the sunshine!

The Iowa Hawkeyes and Bravo Sports Marketing  invite all employees from Iowa’s AEAs to enjoy the excitement of Iowa Hawkeye football this fall. Take advantage of discounted pricing for select Hawkeye football games. Tickets are available to employees in any AEA and this was offered at NO cost to the AEA system.  

The Central Rivers AEA Board of Directors held a joint meeting with the area community colleges on Monday, June 4, along with their regular monthly meeting. The board packet can be viewed online and the minutes will be available online after approval. July’s board meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 11 at 6 pm.

Educator Quality fund claims entered and approved before June 15 will be paid on June 30.  Final submission is due July 1 and will be paid on July 31. Questions? Please contact Shirley Horak.

We have received official notification from Dr. Tom Lane, Executive Director for Iowa’s AEAs, that language calling for an AEA reorganization will not move forward in any bill during the 2018 legislative session. We understand that some legislators heard from their constituents about the impact an AEA reorganization could have on services to Iowa’s students, families, schools, and communities, and they have stricken any language mandating a change in our system design this legislative session. Therefore, the AEA system will remain at nine entities and not move to the proposed seven.

We remain focused on what is best for Iowa’s students, families, and schools. The AEA chief administrators continue and strengthen our commitment to begin work on improving our collective service quality, parity and efficiencies and will continue to contract with Dr. Susan Leddick to facilitate discussions around this work when we convene in June.  

This announcement provides Iowa’s AEAs with an opportunity to study, reflect and determine an action plan to meet the changing needs of our districts while continuing to seek efficiencies and sharing opportunities across the AEA system.

A first reading of a proposed revised mileage policy (including regulations) was presented to the Central Rivers AEA Board of Directors at their May meeting. The policy will be considered for action in June. The rationale for adjusting the policy was to ensure compliance with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations as well as improve and maximize our use of limited agency resources.

The current board policy was somewhat unstructured and resulted in annual costs that were significantly higher than comparable AEAs. The agency needed to make changes but also wanted to ensure that any changes were reasonable and fair to our staff. To that end, the Business and Human Resources departments worked with a mileage committee comprised of various staff members to help improve upon our thoughts/proposal.

The amended policy is a more fiscally responsible policy that better addresses some of the issues that we had previously. However, we do know that the revised policy will have a negative impact on some of our staff who were able to correctly apply the previous policy to their benefit.

Here’s how the new policy is different from our previous policy: For most staff, the old policy asked you to designate a permanent starting point for all of your professional mileage (e.g. the Cedar Falls Office). You started your professional mileage from that point even if you did not actually start from that location each day. For those that live close to their “starting point”, this allowed them to claim professional mileage with nearly no commute miles deducted. It wasn’t truly an accurate picture of the day’s professional travel.

The new policy dictates that the first point you travel to for work (from your home) is your commute. If that point is under 30 miles, those miles will not be considered reimbursable. Anything over 30 miles will be. The policy is based on an expectation that your drive from home to work is your commute and should not be a reimbursable expense for the majority of staff. Having a daily commute of 30 miles to and from work is in line with national averages, and is regarded as a reasonable expectation. If your first starting point is over 30 miles, those miles beyond the first 30 will be reimbursed at an “excess commute” rate of $.45 per mile.

From the organizational standpoint, paying for commute miles is not a standard practice that you would find in the large majority of public or private entities, and it needed to be adjusted. In many cases, the closer you lived to an office the greater your reimbursement. This was deemed to be unreasonable. Therefore, this practice has been discontinued. While the main intention of the corrected policy was not merely to save funds, it is realistic that it will provide cost savings to the agency.  It is our intent that any savings will be applied to increasing FTEs and improving salaries and benefits for our staff.

The agency will continue to reimburse all intraday business mileage.

The above text is a brief introduction to the policy, additional information can be found below. Time will be devoted to the discipline meetings in May for further review of the new policy and procedures including time for questions. For those staff members not involved in discipline meetings, please see your supervisor for clarification.  If you have any questions, please contact Sbrown@centralriversaea.org in the Business Office.  We will be using your questions to create an FAQ.

Additional Resource: Mileage Policy PowerPoint Slides