At its meeting yesterday, the Board of the Perpich Center for Arts Education voted for Susan Mau Larson to take over as chair. Susan, a former Crosswinds parent and organizer of EMID Families, will serve out the remainder of the term vacated by former board chair Pierce McNally last month. Perpich is in the midst of both a financial and a program audit by the legislative auditor, so Susan has her work cut out for her.

Audio of the full board meeting is available below.

After adopting the concept agenda, the board considered nominations for Board Chair. Susan Mau Larson was nominated by the Nominations Committee and acting chair Ben Vader Kooi was nominated by Julie Workman. The vote was 6-4 for Susan.

Susan reported on the East Metro Integration District (now referred to as Equity Alliance Minnesota) and invited other board members to join her at meetings there.

Luayn Ruch-Hammond reported on the work of the task force that grew from the Crosswinds visit earlier this summer. That group has had an interview with director Sue Mackert, but was not ready to make major recommendations. However, the task force was asking for work to start in building a more robust presence for the board on the Perpich web site. There was a lot of hand-wringing over the request that email addresses for board members be added to the site and the impact of open meeting law on the use of email to communicate amongst the board and with constituents of the board.

Ben Vander Kooi reviewed various legal liability issues with the board, sharing a Handbook of Legal Issues and describing the insurance coverage extended to board members.

Ben also described the expected timeline of the Legislative Auditor’s work. The auditor expects to share financial audit results in November and program audit results in January. The director and board chair will likely see a non-public draft of the program audit in December, but public release will await the meeting of the legislative committee to whom the report is addressed.

Sue gave updates on both the Perpich Arts High School and Crosswinds.

The board discussed their budget review plans with an eye toward being able to speak on behalf of the agency at legislative hearings in the coming year.

The board added a meeting on Thursday, 15 December 2016.

[Not mentioned at the meeting, but presumably the next regular meeting of the board is on Thursday, 10 November 2016.]