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so that would cover the thousand dollars and then move the 750 to a thousand so that that two thousand dollars would would um refill cover that it's it's significant i guarantee it's not going to prevent everybody from wanting to get out of their contract but we're asking to increase just because of the thousand dollar return to worksite there is a list of employees and do that any questions just so the return to work is more of an incentive to ensure that we're able to retain the teachers yes we want them to we want them to sign their contracts and come back so it's almost like a retention vote yes and it's gonna that's gonna come most of that will come out of the class classroom site fund which is a 301 money so it's not it's a smallish uh mno okay i will expense the approval of the 2021-22 certified contractor specified staff and therapists no this is an error on me it's 22-23 oh it is yeah forgive me that's that's that's on me okay i'll change it and then add and then increase the liquidated damages to two thousand dollars [Music] thank you for the approval of the 2022-2023 certified contract removal for certified staffing therapists and the increase the liquidated damages to 2000 dollars did i say right the 2223 classified hourly rate increases so as i mentioned earlier we you approved increasing the hourly classified staff salary scheduled by a dollar that was really meant to be a minimum wage increase on top of that so so the proposals to give every heat every hourly classified staff and a dollar an hour increase and then those that have been here since january prior to january 1st would get an additional one and a half what that does is ensure that people coming into the district with similar experience and education don't make more than those that are already here that's really what that is meant for so the cost of that is 200 and about 250 thousand dollars in mno in grants uh the thing about this is the average this this makes the average increase for classified staff 7.3 but they are they tend to be our lowest paid employees so that dollar an hour really increases that makes that percentage jump significance these are the people making 14 15 and 16 dollars questions or comments and you've built that 200 000 in the mmo in your projected budget that is in the budget that we talked about this amount is in there all right are you on a roll item 9j is the 2223 employee benefits so i had mentioned earlier that we were anticipating an 8 increase for the district it's going to be an average of 6.
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the next one is uh oh my goodness i believe that's hiring oh no that's the we're behind other i got it we're behind other districts and we surveyed the dlc kelly kuhn and i called about 100 schools we reached about 20 and we we talked to him and they were all from all over the state from southern california northern california we wanted to know what other schools were doing and we found that they had all adopted these standards and these course models a while ago and we were quite behind so that dilemma is we're behind other school districts including oroville yuba and some of our writing districts as well so the next the next dilemma is hiring high quality oh non-college rep courses yeah i'm not college prep courses so one of our challenges right now is that we have we're the only department at the high schools that have non-college prep courses so these are courses that if a student takes them they don't get the ability to to apply to a university so we're deciding right now in middle school some students are put in non-college prep courses as soon as they take that they have even if they take all the english and math and history college prep courses they don't have the age of 83 a to g requirements that allow them to apply to a university so we need to part of the proposal is to move to an all college prep science course model so that everybody has an opportunity and we're not deciding in eighth grade whether a child will have an opportunity to go to a university mr kessler now's a good time for me to interrupt this as any can you back up we're on number eight now i guess is that right yeah and i don't have that sheet unfortunately but this is an eye test for me it's going really well you were talking about um the the all standards for all students and in in i was trying to wrap my head around it as i was trying to read it there and um is that this one here that was number i think we need to go four or five maybe there it is number four this right here i tried it didn't it didn't want to do it it's blocked or something like that okay i'll just here it is um all standards all students can you expand on that a little bit um because my recollection is they were um when i went through chico high there were some students that were taking like you know ap physics and history and stuff like that and you know they were totally awesome at it and i was more in the the earth science category surprise surprise right um anyway um are you saying that that all the standards that they were looking at i mean clearly you're not saying that everything they were learning and in ap physics and history and and and chemistry i'm going to need to know those too if i'm if i'm more the earth science right so so that is uh correct we still have and you know when we get to the course models will make more sense we put that slide up but there there still is uh after the the idea is that we get students to take the three main courses which are biology in the living earth chemistry and the earth system and physics of the universe so they take basically bio biology chemistry and physics all integrated with earth so they get all four subjects in science all four disciplines at that point that can be done by your sophomore year at that point a student can be done and they fulfill their d requirements they can apply to a university at that point if you want to go further if you want to take ap chemistry or ap biology or anatomy or ap environmental science then you can do that your junior and senior year and the idea is to make sure that we're not leaving first of all we left the earth out for about 60 of our students so that's that's something you know we need to make sure everybody's getting earth science and the other is we've left chemistry and physics out for the most part we've left those out for about 40 of our students so the idea is that everybody gets gets all the standards in their first two or three years and then from there you can expand upon that when you say they get all the standards is that a little bit misleading it's kind of like you're making rather than having some people go this direction and some people go this direction you're keeping them together so they're all going the same direction is it not accurate to say mr kessler that they're not going to go as far in this direction at a younger grade they're gonna go further they're gonna go further everybody's gonna go further everyone's gonna go first so the physics and the chemistry brainiacs who i went to school with they're gonna go further in that direction and and i'm going to go with them no no that you could if you bet you know if you choose to but you don't have to we only have a two-year science requirement and the idea is to get as much coverage of this of the standards the next generation science standards for as many students as possible as soon as possible when they get to high school and at that point then there's all kinds of options and the neat thing about it i think is we're going to find that there's some students that were put in a track that was for all intents and purposes a dead end for science and we're going to find that some of those are going to go oh i really like this this is really cool i'm going to take more and we're going to have open up opportunities for more students to go further and we can't do that if they're not exposed to it i think when we get to a couple slides down it's very clear that you're going to have kids be able to go into ap but yeah not all kids will a graphic will help on this for sure uh so and just to continue with these we're almost done attracting highly qualified science teachers our universities now are all the college program all the teacher preparation programs are for science include next generation science standards so they're going to come to our district expecting to do this and if they come to our district and we're not doing it we're going to have trouble getting those highly qualified teachers they're going to say gee they're a little behind on this i'm i'm going to go somewhere else where they're doing it and with science is already difficult to staff with all our different credentials and we're in a teacher shortage right now so it's really incumbent on us to make sure that we can attract the high most highly qualified teachers we can by making sure that when they apply to our district they know that we're on the leading edge and innovative in our programs the last two have to do with special education students and one of the downfalls of the program we have now is that our our our non-college prep classes have about special education students so they're being put all together instead of spread out into more broadly in general education classes where they can have an opportunity and a least restrictive environment to to have the benefit that all the all the other students have and so this model would do a better job of distributing those students and also it's a challenge for a teacher to manage 10 or 12 ieps in one class and this would lower that to more like three or four ieps in a class which would make it much easier to give those students the attention they deserve from the teacher and give them the individualized attention that they're supposed to get last one is students of color and we have some graphs coming well those graphs we have bigger ones those coming and we have a situation where 69 percent of our students of color graduate from chico high school without having taken a college prep physical science class which means 69 of our students of color don't have the they have haven't attained the a3g requirements to apply to a university and of course not everyone applies to a university and not everyone needs to go to a university but it sure would be good as everybody when i graduated from high school had the opportunity if they chose to i often tell my freshman i'm like you don't know what your senior you is going to want and your senior you might be really mad at you if your freshman you if you get to the end of your high school career and you don't have the opportunities that everyone else has so the goal is to make sure as many students from all groups have the same opportunities when they graduate from high school i just need some clarity on you know we talk about students of color not getting to take a college prep science class how does this how do these next generation science standards gonna grant greater access to students of color to college prep courses than what we have right now well because there wouldn't be any non-college prep courses they would all be college prep courses so then it completely takes away the possibility not completely because it's not completely because you still need to get a c or better instead of a college prep class you still need to get a c or better to get the get the a3g requirements so to get the d requirement you still need to do well in the class well enough to get a c and that's the job of the student and the teacher to work together to ensure that they meet those goals and they get get the marks that they need to get there why are we not doing that now you know with this the the systems that are in place now are they somehow discriminatory against students of color well we we put these in place the the old standards were put in place in 1998.
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we received these renewal notices the cost of the district is about 98 000 of that approximately 85 is paid out of mno the other there's amounts that are paid by employees because they may have benefits dependent benefits you know spouses and kids that are part of that pool and also grants so the impact m knows about 84 000 impact to grants about 15 000 we are proposing to keep all the plans the same so we have three plans we have a buy plan which is a co-pay plan we have an hdhp high deductible health plan hchv 2500 and hdhp 5 000.
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that's before the human genome was sequenced it's uh 10 years before the first iphone was released is before the internet was really a thing this is uh we have an old model and that's why we're here we're here to bring a new model a reform model one that brings us up to date and takes away some of these dilemmas that we've had in science education and so we just we're just working on a model that's you know it's i was just reading that the california drought is 24 years we've had the driest weather in uh in 1200 years well these old standards were from 24 years ago so it's it's just a long time coming and it's a lot of work change is hard change i think it's just human nature that we change means risk change means we get out of our comfort zone i guess what's throwing me off is the is that the treatment of students of color i don't see the connection i feel like you're not really taking me there in terms of why what we have right now is bad for students of color versus this which is going to be i would look at it this way is we have we're taking middle school data and then putting students in classes in their freshman year where they have less opportunities and so the idea is that we put them all in a class that gives them the opportunities in their freshman year we get the data from their freshman year we're using i think probably everyone can agree that middle school years are probably not the best data on a human being i'd like to make an interjection [Music] this past i think it was monday or it was the year of women scientists and there were 3-d modeling of all the women scientists that were put in d.c and one of the women who was a woman of color couldn't even talk to the interviewer without starting to cry saying if you never see someone who looks like you who's doing this kind of work you don't realize that you can do it and i think many students don't have exposure at home or perhaps even from their teachers that they might be a scientist i helped build this idea when i was a trustee for the csu with the uc and the idea is it's basically hands-on learning about things that people can see in the real world around them instead of memorization and so i think it's way more intrinsically both the ability to understand it but also to conquer it so tom and then eileen i just wanted to speak to math questions just to make sure that we're on the same page right now after eighth grade uh some people registrars students parents decide that you're going to go into either earth science or biology and that effectively seals the science courses you're going to be into the rest of your high school career so if there's any kind of bias i mean you know and any kind of advice at all on anybody part and a student who might really be good at science gets put into the earth science course that's it they're going to be in the non-college prep set of science courses that gets them a high school diploma but it doesn't prepare them for entrance into college so we're saying that at that one moment we can eliminate that potential for bias to have any access by saying everybody's going to take the exact same course in ninth grade which is a college prep course and then we'll see if they have interest they can go beyond those three courses they have to have and if they don't have interest they take the three courses they've got a solid foundation in all of the domains of science you don't have to drill down super deep and they've met the requirements for college thank you for that explanation and would you like to add to it well yeah eileen and then i'll come to caitlin but but also we're in presentation still so i kind of want to see the presentation move forward if we are at a point i mean unless it's important to bring it up now we can have the rest of this discussion during debate or ask questions for clarification from from the presenters eileen um yeah i i had a fascinating time reading through all of this um right now i'm on a page that is describing a new course proposal outline and it says chemistry in the earth system now is is that the second or the third of the yeah can you um scroll to the the one that's so that's our old system that's our old model with a new model on the left so this shows it's hot and it's highlighted in color so you can see that the earth's earth and space science is in blue and the the amount of blue doesn't mean how much you're getting and the biology is is eighty percent biology and twenty percent of science so it's it doesn't indicate that but it indicates that it's a integrated course so on the right side is our old 1998 model which we're currently using it shows the non-college prep classes on in the left column of the peach color there and then it shows our current alignment with biology chemistry and physics since college prep classes on the left we have the three course model which then integrates earth science so now everybody's getting earth science it also gives our advanced track students the opportunity to take both chemistry and physics in the same year so that they can take their ap classes in their 11th and 12th grades and 11th grade is really as far as universities go that's when you want to take your ap classes because it's your junior year they look at so this is a benefit to all groups because it gives more opportunities the next slide shows the the pathways so this is the one on the left is the junior college um chico state pathway and and that one shows that you can take biology the living earth your freshman year and everybody would take that so everybody's in the same class they get a good introduction to science we get some good data on their learning we have we have everybody together and then from there they can start to differentiate into other classes and you can see how the we also have the csuc pathway and then the last one is the honors and science pathway so my um my point of bringing this to my attention when i read the course outline standards instructions methods and assessments and the topics the skill to be developed and the ngss standards to be addressed fascinating stuff you look at you know the description of of what the students are being not only introduced to but how they're working with it and how they're developing the the process of thinking through what to do about how the mechanisms of heat flow relate to the macroscopic heat transport to atomic scale interactions and particles it was interest i mean it was fascinating i'm thinking oh my gosh if i was a little kid what 14 at this age 10th grade this stuff is exactly what would just oh my gosh and now that we have block schedules in science and we can get to um having the kids explore things like atomic scale and interactions of particles and things in in these types of of lessons i just like i wanted to cheer um am i right in that that what we're developing and how we're going to be able to introduce it and teach it in connection with our block schedules that these are the levels that everybody takes right what i'm looking at that that we do have the possibility of really flipping a switch for some of our kids who are going to really enjoy this kind of scientific exploration am i did i get it i mean is that what the whole intent is your excitement is exactly what we're after thank you caitlin i have a question about um about the pathways um i did notice when i opened the um the course descriptions that um there's no prerequisites for biology and living earth so we can assume that all freshmen will will be taking that class if this is approved and that chemistry has the caveat of prerequisites being and enrolled in or past im2 so i am curious about how that affects sophomores who might still be in i am one yeah and that was an area of discussion between our dlc and there was some concern both ways but your concern was expressed and there was also a concern that maybe some wouldn't be ready without have been having the im2 and so in the end we came up with a compromise which is there's some language in there that says i believe a teacher discretion but what if a teacher doesn't want to allow that student for whatever reason to take the class i'm just wondering on this sequence here 9th 10th 11th if there's a sophomore and they're in im1 what's their option take a gap year as a sophomore because that doesn't make sense especially if they're interested it doesn't apply to chemistry just physics right um it so chemistry says and enrolled in or past im2 physics is has passed im2 yeah so that yeah you're right that would create a gap but they could still get the three years of science they could still get through they can still get through the pathway it might be that gap year for them to take that math class again to be sure they are prepared for that for that science class that would be that if i were a counselor that would be the tact i would take to make sure that student is prepared mathematically for the science course how and how does that affect their uh i'm just okay i'll just leave it at that all right matt where are we right now in the well we are uh i think you've pretty much covered the concept i will note that over 90 percent of all the high schools in california have already done this and as you note it has been a long time so i believe unless somebody has a very specific question we're at the point of looking at whether we would move forward with this adoption of the three-course model did we want to ask for a public comment first we could ask for that is there a public comment on this i would like to call in some a staff person who's in the audience too so i don't know where that would fall relative to public comment ruth i believe ruth right thank you john well i was involved a lot with the i think called the parent collaborative at the la unified school district and once again it's the reality of the total life of of children and where it's going um we had we had a lot of kids that were in these um mobile containers that were actually for storage and so they had a uh an air conditioning system in it just to maintain products and children by the thousands in la unified school district attended in that it was a question of poverty uh of uh only a few kids making having any advantage to to do anything that was important and um so um i remember uh one of the ways that i uh was very i was very active in trying to shut down a lot of the oil industry and oil oil wells and stuff and they were all over bunker hill and l.a unified had a um a property that was oil wells including one big tall one and also had a big um uh pit with uh was it like a tar pit in the tar pit uh was the gate was not was not locked and kids could go in and fall in any kid that would fall in that carpet would just be gone because it was tar and they would just sink in it would be like getting into what are they what's the other word for it but it was that kind of thing it was it was an immigrant community they were in had little those little oil wells within 10-15 feet of where they were living and they were sick and i asked them do you know about an egg smell up here and it was unfolded from that and i had a lot of experience with the separation of of people by by class by color by whatever uh distinction like you know whatever it is and in the long run it's not going to work and what needs to be done now is things like these these okay i'm sorry ruth that's the end of your time thank you okay good that's all right he'll help you back all right good thank you yes are you going to speak about the science integrated science all right so as a sped mom i always need to know a little bit more information about the program so right now my twins are freshmen at pv and they're in a modified science class their english level is not quite up there to be in a gen ed science course so i'm a little confused about how this is going to look for those kids that aren't in i am one or any of that i mean we are we are in modified science we are in resource english we are in modified math those boys probably won't ever get to and i am too so i just um i guess i want clarification i mean he said we would have all the kids together but then you have a teacher that has maybe five kids on an iep all teaching five different things with a class of gen ed kids sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so what is the escape pause for my kids i'm going to invite erica sheridan she's been having a conversation with special ed um just to clarify some of the the expectations for students and also for the staff that will be in there as well i appreciate the question we just had our special ed collaboration at chico high this morning and they're on deck but they're also a lot of trepidation about what the model is going to look like and i think again we're launching something totally new but we do understand that there are students that will need a modified version of the biology of the living earth we also want to employ some of the co-teaching options where we'll send a credentialed special ed teacher in with a credentialed science teacher and they will co-teach again there's some kinks to work out but we definitely are aware that this is a leap but we believe it's a leap in the right direction for all kids so hopefully that it's still it's still in the works i would say but we definitely are aware like i said my special ed team this morning spoke about how to best support the special of students especially the ones that need a different probably modification of the course and again i want to note that this model is only going to start with one class in the first year uh yes department chair of what of science thank you and so um just to give you a little uh foundation the ndss started with a four course model that each student proposal would be take biology chemistry physics and earth science because of most schools having only a two-year requirement students didn't did not fulfill that four-course model at any time at any time most high schools do not require four years of science in high school so then um a three core month three course model was proposed and so many school districts have gone to having a graduation requirement of three science courses you still don't quite fulfill the four course model of having all the subjects um for every kid most kids that are college prep do biology chemistry and physics do not do the earth science non-college prep kids can do a variety usually life science and physical science the three-course model is weaving the earth science in with the biology the chemistry and the physics so trying to satisfy trying to fit all four years into a three year requirement we're still at chico unified a two-course graduation requirement so at no time some of our kids will choose not to take three years or even four years so they're still not going to get all four of the requirements for the state test so your name is barbara bertipelli right do you support this change we're contemplating tonight so i support the three-course model as a as we approach and hopefully at some point that chica unified does require three years my school district or my school at pleasant valley does not are not fully behind doing all kids take biology chemistry physics college prep and i i'm we have non-college prep classes life science and earth science um we are even willing to to suggest that we do have a non-college prep biology with living earth chemistry more of a conceptual chemistry alongside with the earth science and a physics non-um non-math a conceptual based physics class we're still trying to work out those ideas our teachers that teach the non-college prep are concerned about the kids being successful in a college prep class um speaking as a parent now my daughter had graduated she went to pv she has was in special ed from kindergarten all the way through um she was in some college prep classes um but also in sheltered like non-non-college prep classes also i don't if i'm thinking as a science teacher and as a parent there's no way she would have been able to do biology chemistry physics there's just absolutely no way she was she got through algebra one by the time she was a senior but i'm just being practical i've been in teaching for over 30 years and i think a three-course model is good i just think there needs to be some bugs worked out and i think everybody needs to be brought to the table at the same time and have some frank conversations i think you should be really clear we we actually got an email yesterday from um janelle ball who actually was a chemistry teacher when i went to chico high i think right and i'm feeling in my bones like there's a lot of movement toward passing this thing tonight so if you want to represent you know your fellow teachers and saying that you don't think we ought to do this right now but instead we ought to cool our jets and take a few more months and talk about it i think you should make that message really really clear i think i think more needs to be discussed and not just because of what janelle wrote um we've been having frank conversations um i think we do need to move to a three-course model i just don't think all the bugs have worked out and i think we need to have some friend conversations from both schools and maybe we have different you know john and i talked about this too about maybe at pb we don't do everything that chico high is doing with regards to having only non-college prep or having only college prep classes um if that's what we want to do and then kind of work it together see how it's going to we have two different models going on we're fine with that i just think that there needs to be some more i think everybody that has skin in the game needs to be involved and that's not that hasn't been happy i want to read one statement that she made to me can i hold on um because we're actually still in public comment i just wanted to do a point i just i just wanted to do a point of order yeah and make sure that we're okay speaking as a parent and i have a child in this still in chico unified he's a senior now he took biology he's taking college physical science right now and can would he have done chemistry and physics no so you're saying he would have got like a bad grades in in in these classes that we're contemplating switching to um my daughter definitely my son he struggles and that's that science teacher that's your concern is that this is actually getting harder that our our programs are going to get harder um i don't think the necessarily that i think with having the earth science in there will make it so it's it's not you guys it's still a point of order like i made a point like we're not in yeah okay so what i mean but this is public comment i understand like that was just my two cents speaking as a parent all right so so uh at this point i want to go back to the presentation i appreciate your uh honesty thank you uh diana were you gonna before i asked diane oh okay i do want to make sure that we keep in mind the differences in these courses so when we're talking about success or lack of success in a course we're not talking about the biology that students are taking would be the same one they take in the future i think that's a critical component of this however barbara is accurate in our conversation we were talking about has been said multiple times by multiple people including our administrators at chico high there are going to be some bugs to work out we're going to need to work some of these things out it's going to take time it's not going to be the first year of implementation i'm thinking back to the implementation of integrated math and the struggles we faced with students jumping into math a and their fourth and fifth grade teachers were still trying to scramble to be sure they were prepared for math a it took a long time i would say we're still trying to work out some of those details so i would encourage the board to to understand that these are different courses it's going to take some time to work many of these things out as barbara has described i'm sorry diane is longer winded than i thought it would be but i wanted to just make sure we keep those perspectives in mind all right thank you diana thank you as the director of student support and special education i usually like to take a backseat at most of these meetings i usually like to let decisions be made and then make sure that through the iep process that that's kept fully intact and that we support students in accessing every type of class that is available they are general ed students first and they have a right to be in every single class i honor what john's saying about the king said agreement worked out because if you look at this just on the surface as soon as you say that students have to have im2 thank you for pointing that out to move beyond the 9th grade science you're saying that 90 of my students with disabilities will not make it to the second course in this science however that also being said we've had very good conversations about how to include students with disabilities in these classes because that is the directive of the state and federal government under ida that all students be allowed to access the curriculum at all levels we do that through the iep we do that through accommodations we do that through modifications and yes there was a time 20 years ago 15 years ago sometimes even today when students are excluded because they're told they're not going to be able to pass a class and that is just not true these students going in those classes with accommodations and modifications that take that class out of the college prep realm with the same students that are taking the college prep can pass those and on the transcript it is denoted that it is either that code that course code that denotes as a college prep class or a course code that notes it as not a college prep class by continuing to offer segregated classes that don't meet the standards we are developing a group of students and in chico unified the totals that we have right now are between 16.5 and 18.5 percent of our students are special ed the highest number we have ever been we have grown 200 students over the last two years because of fires because of co-wood because of dam because of people moving here i have 2 000 students that i want to make sure graduate with a diploma as many as possible with a college prep diploma but if they don't get that college prep diploma that they've had the opportunity to be part of the curriculum the discussions the rich environment and they may not be able to write a 15 page dissertation of what it is but they can tell you some of the discussions that went on when i listened to some of my special education students and the things that their parents come to me and say they came home and they told me about this they would not have gotten that in that segregated class and so while this is a really hard decision to do it and sometimes i'm really torn on it because i don't always being a special ed person having worked with so many parents i also don't always trust general ed or general ed teachers to be able to make those accommodations and modifications but i think in doing this and i love that they had the special ed slide on i love that they had the people of color slide in because these are groups that do not always have access that means that these people have thought about that they don't have all the answers yet i don't have all the answers yet but this is something that needs to be done and at the same time continue with our lcap model of mtss udl and access for all students to every single class i'm sorry i really try to stay in the background on this step no but i felt the student is really important to speak on yeah thank you i appreciate it diane thank you [Applause] i go back to the quote if they see it then they know they can do it if they never get to see it then it's not an area where they're going to have any confidence or experience yes are we in continuing discussion about approving the three-course i believe we are we're not in discussion um i mean i have as you know i have experienced as well with the special ed kiddos and i i believe that what i heard tonight in the presentation about how the integration of supports for our special ed kids to give them access of diane said to what's in the these courses and we we start with just one uh in 2223 and then i am so in favor of doing this and giving all of our kids i mean that's what that's what our our focus says in our our what's that official thing we go by um it says all of our students all of our students huh every student every day and and that's that's what i want to offer them and i think we're all smart enough to know we don't have all the answers yet and as barbara pointed out we've we've got things to fix um but that's what we do we fix stuff and if we're this far behind with the rest of the state in getting our next generation science standards begun shame on us i'm definitely in favor so we should probably let mr kessler finish his presentation and then get a motion and you may be done i think we're done the board has the proposals in front of them i think they see the sequencing living earth would be the first year chemistry the second year and physics of the universe the third year all right okay a quick question of clarification given what we've heard is there a plan in place to communicate with the groups who are skeptical as to fix these bugs as we go forward i think we have to the next step if if adopted would be the curriculum conversation and everyone needs to be involved in that kelly coombe she led the k-8 curriculum conversation when we adopted the k-8 curriculum and she's willing to join us and walk us through that as well mark started that with our group a while ago so people need to be involved in that as i said before we recognize that that in the last 18 months we needed to have more and more participation these conversations and the curriculum conversation would be critical because it covers all of the student groups we've been talking about what they have access to the sequence of the pacing we need to be sure people are involved in that so i guess my question is actually for barbara and diane you guys feel confident you've got to see at the table okay thank you all right um just to clarify one thing you can answer it probably ms ball wrote to me that she's been told by her principal i guess that would be doug williams that the three-course structure will mean eliminating our current courses of life science biology chemistry physics and physical science is that correct so the courses that would be adopted tonight would replace those those courses right the conversations we are still having are conversations about modification of courses how we can have students have the most access how we can spread you heard mr kessler talk about spreading those ieps out amongst multiple classes so to do that you have to have similar course titles right so you have for example in a master schedule you need to have eight sections of living earth biology living earth to be able to spread those courses out okay one more time um so earlier was mentioned a three-year phase in what does year one look like year one would be to offer biology to living earth with an understanding that the curriculum for this upcoming year would be a collaboration both on-site and between departments um that's you know that that would be as i said the next conversation we would also need to we we've allocated a million dollars just a rough number to the purchase of curriculum we've been waiting for that for a couple of years we started this conversation like we said in 2020 and that money's been sitting there so year one would be offering it now and having teachers collaborate on the curriculum and then spending the next year working our way towards the adoption of a curriculum which we bring to the board so if we okay this now that in two years every freshman will be taking biology at living earth next year forgive me okay thank you um can you tell me more and i'm sorry i'm drinking out of the fire hose here i'm i don't have a lot of background on this but um i understand from my communications with ms ball that there's also a four course option four course model in the next generation science standards so the four four course model and i'm going to rely on mark probably a little bit on this but my understanding of the four course model is earth is at the very end so in our in my humble opinion sorry there you go okay then these students who they're virtually guaranteed of never taking earth all they do is take two years of science earth is at the very earth and space i think is the very last course in the four course model mark am so a i'm model is uh not a whole lot different from what we're doing now and it was since we only require two years of science our best chance of getting there is to have a three-course model four course makes it nearly impossible uh maybe at some point we'll work we'll require three years but at this point we only require two years so the three course model gets us there in the most efficient way the main reason um i believe we have consensus about the three courses that earth science is is woven spiraled through those three years with the four course model it's a dm so students may never get the earth yeah a very small minority of students take four years of science that means they're choosing two years of elective science and so that becomes a pretty specific group of students and leaves a lot of other students out so uh caitlin i'm going to get you i just want to interject so when i was working with the uc the greatest area of concern and the least amount of experience they had was with earth sciences so i think your comment about weaving it in was right on caitlyn um when when do we have our students take the cast that's the um california assessments for science science california i can't even remember the acronym sorry number 11th grade this year it's both because of the last year yeah so some this year's more students are taking it normally in a normal year 11th grade in a normal year and then like in the spring okay thank you and the casca covers all all standards all right so are we uh i'm sorry i don't know who you are but i'm sarah pacillus one of the assistant principals at chico high school and i just wanted to speak about that if in the four course model it would make it more difficult for students to advance into ap classes in their junior senior years and so the three-course model would allow them to accelerate into those more advanced classes and speaking to the cast having the earth science incorporated into into the the three course model would give students more access to the information that they're actually going to be tested on in their junior year so on on that note isn't it not just the access but also the context i mean the cast test is it's not standard by standard it's it's integrated standards too yes that is correct thank you all right so uh are we ready for a motion caitlyn should i should somebody else do it no um i'd like to move approval of the three-course model with um the um modification that we remove the im2 prerequisites what with what we'll move the i the integrated math two prerequisites for physics and chemistry waiting to see if we get a second okay so that motion is failing for lack of a second really not even for discussion yeah for the sake of discussion because i'm curious about about some some things here all right thank you um so i want to start off by justifying my modification um of my recommendation and that's uh um not to speak about myself or you know talk about my background which everybody knows a fair amount of but i was an ap teacher um at the high school level and something that really struck me as interesting um when i was going through the ap training is is the emphasis that all students should be able to take an ap class if they want to not if they've passed a certain level of math yes if they've passed a maybe a introductory science to get into that advanced science but but really the the um at the heart of of that philosophy with ap was if a student wants to challenge themselves to take a class they should have the the option the choice to do that and if they struggle then they're going to take themselves out or they're going to get extra help to be successful and so when it comes to math and science they are very closely related in some ways my favorite saying is that science makes math matter and all you math teachers out there don't get mad at me for saying that but it's very punny in my opinion that the science the integrated science specifically really conceptualizes math concepts that was redundant but but by telling a student that they can't choose to take a class or saying you have to get special permission to take a class really creates a barrier for especially the students that we're talking about lifting up and and giving them access to those classes and so i would just encourage us to really consider what what is what is what's best for students in this situation and i think what's best for students and the reason why i want to eliminate the im2 requirement for the um the physics integrated in the chemistry integrated class is that some students just might not have had a good math experience so far but they could possibly do the the work that's required in that science class within context the word recommended work instead of required i would be happy with it to say recommended sure but i don't i don't want us to to create more barriers for students to have access to these classes so are you amending your motion formally to say recommended um sure we could we could definitely i can amend amend my motion to say recommended instead of having it be required and the second will all right so it's been uh amended to move the math class to be recommended not required and with that we have a motion any further discussion of this um i do i am concerned that this is the the only meeting i'm aware of that we've ever had on this topic is that correct yeah and it's a big change um ms ball told me in her email today she said uh i've been told that um this decision would mean eliminating our current courses of life science biology chemistry physics and physical science she said in my opinion that's a big change i don't think that i mean if there's even a hint that classroom teachers don't like this decision then i'm not prepared to support it right now and it sounds like there's some reservations on the part of our classroom teachers no disrespect to mr kessler and the dlc but i'd like to hear from more classroom teachers before we pass this so i will be voting no on this motion even though 90 of the high schools in the state are doing this um i'm concerned about our high schools you know and our teachers and how they feel about it and this is the only meeting we've ever had on it so so clearly we don't have adequate background listen i'm very actually persuaded by by the statements that you made to me about the idea of i mean i'll just be honest my gut tells me that i would have done better under this format that we're talking about then than than um than what i had for all the reasons that that you said and the reasons that you said too um you know i wasn't an iep i was not a special ed student but um i mean i had i was a daydreamer and i won't go into it all but the bottom line is yeah i mean hanging out with the kids that were the really smart brainiacs in my in my ninth grade and sophomore years you know and being alongside them while they learned physics and chemistry i think that could have enriched me but if there's reservation on the part of ms ball who i have every reason to believe is a good teacher and um the person with that long name that i've never heard in my life barbara bartibelli has reservations and says that her colleagues at pv have reservations about this and this is the only meeting we're having about it and we're going to make a decision that's going to eliminate four classes from now on yes no i'm voting no i i would like another you know another meeting or two to hear from those people with those reservations for my purposes so just to be clear this is the process that we utilize it does come through our dlc it comes to the board one time and one time only we don't bring them i mean when the recommendation comes forward it isn't on multiple board meeting agendas that doesn't mean we can't do that but that is the process i mean i just think this is obviously a really big decision and and and we ought to take more time to hear from our teachers i can i can definitely tell you firsthand that this conversation started actually as early as 2019 in dlc because i was on dlc in and so it this conversation has been being had over and over and over and over and over for eight years actually at both the middle school and the high school levels in this district well i would just say congratulations to fortress chico unified for having that conversation completely out of the view of you know public and me i mean it was just it's just staff that's how our process works as dlc did you want to add to that so it's a curricular decision yes okay so we have a motion we have a second and um yes eileen i i just was going to comment and especially especially to barbara who i worked with four years um i've been attending school board meetings since 1974 and i've been watching the sausage be made in this district since then this is how the sausage gets made there's a lot of work behind the scenes with a lot of our our organizational structure with the dlc and department meetings and and other things and that's the process and now it's here and the sausage not perfect but the sausage has been made and i i've i've seen it work out really well in the end not perfect going in but i'm definitely going to support this version of our science sausage okay all right i'm going to call for a vote you want to start matt tennis nay dalby aye kaiser i landed robinson i okay passes four to one what i would like to say to all of the teachers that have come and offered their opinions and diane i especially appreciate your emotional concerns is this is a process it's not over everybody recognizes that but it is a design so what has to be worked on with curriculum is actually to include all of your partners nobody gets left out in this discussion and i trust you to do that i really do so thank you okay so we're on to business services and we have julie kessel good evening thank you for your time every year we bring to the board the demographic analysis this year and for many years it is being produced by king consulting we have jamie eisman and rob murray here tonight to go over a presentation you've all been provided the draft report for your review i understand it is a tremendous amount of information so rob is going to give you a presentation that summarizes the information in the report and it's open discussion is currently a draft and it can be made a permanent report upon your adoption this evening but we can also make changes and answer questions if if the board desires i just wanted to mention that this document is heavily utilized by the facilities department it is primarily to look at the future to plan for the future for how many students we may have and provide the facilities that are needed so with that i'm going to hand it over here with to rob thank you yes all right thank you julie and good evening superintendent and board i know it's been a while since you've seen me for this annual update so like introduce myself so i'm rob murray the director of demographics and planning with king consulting uh but uh unlike the uh many other times that you've seen me recently this time we are going to specifically be really drilling into more of these student demographics and the community demographics that affect how we are prognosticating about the students that you're going to have a few years down the road and what that means for the adequacy of these school facilities that you have and the planning framework that you have in place so as julie said the full report has a whole lot more information than what we're going to be getting into tonight i am happy to field questions or discuss anything that's in the report that i don't happen to mention tonight but i'm just going to focus on the elements that i think are the most pertinent and the most interesting so first things first just an overview when i was here last year to talk about things in the middle of that now infamous 2020-21 school year the big question that we had was you had been growing for a few years running at that point and you like many many other districts regardless of whether they were in a growth or a decreasing enrollment pattern saw a substantial uh drop in enrollment in 2020 and that question was is this the start of a new trend or is this just a one year blip and you'll get back to that growth pattern that you had been exhibiting and what we're seeing based on this year and i'll get into a number of those reasons is that those students that you lost last year for the most part are gone and have left and that kind of reset your baseline at this lower level but all those other factors that were causing you to grow before the pandemic are still in place and you are still growing in enrollment and expected to continue to do so a big part of that especially in the short term is residential development and a big part of that particularly coming up right now with this concentration in the next year or two is affordable housing that uh kind of the silver lining of what's happened with all of these states of emergency between both the campfire and now the pandemic is there was a lot of state and federal money for affordable housing that has gotten it loosened up and flowed into the system here and a lot of projects are already under construction or will be soon and we'll show you some details on that in just a little bit but that is a big significant reason for the growth another big one in the short term and i'll again be going into some more detail on this but universal transitional kindergarten it is not common for the state of california to add a grade level and you're getting students enrolled in your district that just weren't eligible to enroll previous to this happening and then you have just the demographic trends that kind of form the baseline that we're looking at big picture and overall uh particularly at the elementary school level enrollment is going to be increasing to the point where your previous facilities master plan target capacity for your elementaries uh you will actually exceed during this projection period now that we're factoring in this much more aggressive residential development pattern and the addition of all those tk students rob yeah my family alone is kicking out babies like crazy and i call it the coveted litter so isn't the birth rate jumping nope it's been actually a lot of people and i because i'm doing this for districts up and down the state and i'll show you your particular areas local birth trends some people anticipated we might see that we're actually tending to see that 2020 was a particularly down birth year and the 2021 in a lot of places is not as low as 2020 but hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels in chico it's uh you 2020 was that down year again but you are back up i'll show you a nice chart that uh just kind of demonstrates that but got a spoiler for some of the material coming up that it's kind of unique here in that even other districts that i see with enrollment increases uh this is one of the only districts that i can think of where that birth rate has been actually steady over most of the last decade and so if well that you know it may not be a boom it's at least not a decrease and i think that's really the significant takeaway i just want my family to get credit okay there we go four babies i mean come on you want me to put that we can talk about it okay so here then uh but your enrollment trends so uh so you see starting from that uh period around 2014 2015 uh the last recent relative low point then up to 2019 had been seeing steady increasing enrollments uh definitely again we were standing here last year looking at that big drop that kind of in one year had kind of reversed about four years worth of enrollment gains and what was this going to mean and now we're back to that steady growth and i uh you know i'll just go ahead and jump ahead you all might have already looked ahead anyway uh we're seeing uh actually more robust growth coming and again that's largely on the backs of those two big external factors uh but we'll get into that so here kindergarten and transitional kindergarten enrollment again this is the tk as it has been for the last decade uh which covers uh when the kindergarten enrollment date was rolled back from december 2nd to september 2nd the students who used to be eligible for kindergarten but no longer were was the original target for tk and that's been what tk has been up through this year and i'll give you some details in just a few slides on how that's changing and expanding now over the next four years but what you see here is again the biggest driver for enrollment change for a school district is when you start getting a pattern of the number of students that you have coming in at kindergarten is substantially different from the students who are older cohorts who are in the district who are either moving out of elementary into junior high or just moving out of the district entirely because when you have uh and as is common for a lot of districts right now a small number of students coming in and a larger older group of students coming out it's really hard not to go down an enrollment for you as you can see again last year was a little bit lower but your kindergarten cohort sizes you had a kind of a boost up several years ago and you've stayed at that level you've had this consistent uh cohort size coming in and so then that combined with some other factors is what's kind of leading to that steady moderate growth that you had been seeing because you didn't have anything really built in uh with just kind of automatic district-wide uh kind of ticks up and down in enrollment just based on the difference in size and cohorts here is another very big one if we're only going to focus on one thing from the census and i know you've all seen quite a bit of census data over the last little bit but this time we're looking at that total population but we want to do again we don't have detailed ages from 2020 yet but we do have uh that population over and under 18.
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actually probably three quarters of our employees use the five thousand uh that gives them a little bit of benefit because we paid the district pays for the amount on the 2500 when they when the employee goes down to the 5000 that increase either or that difference either goes into a health savings account or goes to help pay those those dependent methods so that dependent coverage so our dental and vision insurance employees paid for we found out yesterday those increases are zero our dental increase is zero so no increase to dental vision or dental vision or that's what they're going to have to say no art vision i guess that's it oh yeah okay dental vision and and so those are all that's that's nice and then uh so that just talks about what the summary of what i just talked about um would happen the other thing that um we're going to also offer which is nice is a dependent coverage health care coverage that's outside of kairos so those employees that may have one child can pick instead of paying the kairos amount which is typically prohibitedly expensive they could go into this plan it was like 250 and 180 or something like that per month charges for a separate plan separate from kairos to cover their one or two children beyond that beyond one or two it's really affordable to scale that may be more affordable and we may get more families on that the only kicker is you need five families to switch over yeah five employees to switch over this plan to offer but it would be a separate plan that they could go into payroll deduction for reference uh what was last year's increase there is in here they talked about they have what the increase has been over the past several years and i need to find it the [Music] 1890 let's see 1920 was five percent 2021 was 10 21 22 is eight last and then this year they say five that's the average but for us it's really a six percent increase because we kick extra money in for that patient and when we were talking about the 20 that was when we had um when we were with asby okay this is an action item as long as there's no other questions um all in favor [Music] all right while we're on the floor i'm going to apologize to heritage middle school because if we had thought about it we could have put them at the beginning of the agenda instead of at the end um so i apologize for that so there is a supplement so make sure you uh take a look at the supplement as well we have six new certified which is a good thing because we're hiring those teachers our principals are working their tails off trying to get their staff in one new classified one-day classified sub 10 resignations three retirements eight certified changes seven classified changes and 126 sheets [Music] and all these new teachers will be getting that thousand dollars no it's a return to work stipend so they haven't they haven't come to work yet they a lot of these a lot of these staff members um especially if they're in i need special ed some of the high school middle school subjects they get a two thousand dollar signing bonus that they get when they come back so um it's actually just for our existing teachers to reward them for coming for staying with us all right a motion to approve tonight's personality um we've been good evening madam president members of the lord we are here representing heritage middle school and i have fun people i want to introduce to you so when i call your name introduce you to please stand i have laura hunter um 2223 assistant principal leanne weller she's currently instructional coach and i have brian parnell who teaches seventh grade math i have annika van orton she's girls p.e jones is teaching eighth grade eighth and seventh century on science i have joy efference she's teaching sixth grade and in grade english i have sarah vitus who teaches who teaches sixth grade math no rachel's over here like did you forget about me i have rachel davis who teaches seven and eight social studies and way in the back i want to introduce our lovely parent who's been sitting here through this meeting um owens and so we're happy to have her here with us as well so this is what we call our coalition leadership team and they help make almost all the decisions for heritage middle school okay so all right thanks so we're going to go through a slideshow here so as many of you know um seven years ago laura and i were becoming a team over heritage middle school and we wanted to bring an initiative onto our campus the professional learning community we both strongly believed in it and we knew that it would be the best thing for our teachers and our students so over the past six years we have been taking our staff to training to prepare them to make this transition and this what we're doing now and i mean we're doing it then but we're doing it more we're trying to we're taking on the focus from teaching and focusing on learning we're collaborating we're looking at data to help make our decisions for our instruction we are um the learning by doing you may have heard that before that comes from the divorce if you know the divorce i know mike does um so it is a commitment it's a commitment we're making we started this six years ago to have continuous improvement okay so i'm gonna go ahead and the next thing i think it's important for you to understand is that as you adjust from going from teaching to learning to focus and but not being on the teacher but on the student and with those collaborative efforts when the teachers get together and talk about what their kids have learned because they're using data and they're learning from each other like if somebody did better than somebody else and they can learn from one another so they're constantly looking at data and trying to figure out how to improve their practice so that the focus can only be on the kids and what they're learning and doing it also helps the students focus on their their data as well we train the students to keep track of their data and have those conversations on how can they improve what needs to happen what do they need to do what does teaching we do to improve that data so the training we've had over the last six years so we've gone to training down in phoenix we've been to leadership training in vegas we went to a response intervention training down there to start our intervention program and then now we have our math department because we consider them experts and standard-based rating our math department and leanne instructional coach they have been leading training right there in on on campus for our teachers helping them prepare for that and let me also state that that actually the having the math department take over that training actually came from one of the experts that we had on campus erin hampton said our math team is far far ahead of any school that they have worked with in the country and solution tree is a huge huge global education training um company so they looked at our math team and said they've got it you need to use them so congratulations to our math department which actually uh included leanne back because she used to teach math anyway so she got that ball rolling and then was able to help facilitate it with the math department so it came to a time to where we decided we needed to start bringing the experts to our campus and we've been very very blessed um to be able to bring three experts over the years to our campus i'm bob stew we had tim brown and aaron hansen and i'll tell you each one of them were experts as you can see bob he was that he's an expert in deconstructing standards helping teachers learn how to choose their essential standards and pull out their targets learning targets and tim brown he is just there's a picture of him later when you see the picture you'll know he is um you know the colors he is orange all the way so of course i love him he is a lot of fun and he just really truly believes in building those relationships and helping us have that positive culture and climate on our campus and we're very blessed that we do that's called we we have a wonderful climate and culture on our campus aaron hanson the story with aaron hansen he's really very serious about his job we were at the rti training and there were six of us and we were sitting around the table and you have to realize there are steps in this plc process that are hard because of change and it's hard to change it's really hard and we we were what we would consider the singleton school i had every teacher on their own island and we needed to come together but we just didn't think we could do it and aaron hanson sat down at her table and he says that what you have to do is you've got to get away from these singleton schools and you've got to give your teachers more than one prep more than one grade level and then you're not a singleton you'll have you know three teachers teaching eighth grade social studies even though and um we all looked at him and uh no we can't do that we we cannot do that and he says okay so he grabs his thumb hits back in his chair and totally ignores us he was done because he says if that's the attitude you're gonna have you're right you'll never never do it and so we knew laura and i knew that's where we needed to go but we didn't want to tell our teachers that's what they had to do because they wouldn't have the value so we waited and that's crucial um for teachers to buy in is one of the biggest things if you talk about climate culture any administrator can come in and say this is what you're going to do and the teachers will do it and or they'll close the door and act like they did it or whatever you want to do there that doesn't happen very often especially on a nice campus but but it can happen and we never pushed we pushed the initiative and we stayed steady but we never shoved it down our throat so we waited for it to authentically occur within our staff and that's what's happened that's why we are on our next step now and kudos to our teachers because when we were ready to make that transition in our schedule you give teachers three preps three grade levels covet hit and they came to us and they said please can we go back the way we were please and we said you guys we can't we've come so far if we go backwards it's going to take another two three years to go forward you guys can do it and kudos to our staff they did it through covet with the new curriculum new grade levels and they did it and so they did it with a lot of grace ours really did all throughout the pandemic our staff always have high morale they work together and we always kept telling them how very appreciative we were that we didn't have problems on our campus that the kid that the teachers continued to try to implement best practices and take on new things during a time when they were forced to take on more new things so it was very overwhelming but they did it with a lot of patience and grace and we are forever appreciative so yes and there are steps that we do in plc so in the next slide there's tim brown that we had our picture taken with and we just love them we had to um in order to get go from teaching to learning we needed to structure a professional learning time and we had to cut an hour out of our schedule somewhere in the week to meet with teachers and at first they started we were when we were going to school you saw you remember we went to school till four o'clock so we had a late start wednesday and so from um seven to eight the teachers would meet for an hour in the morning before students arrived on campus and then our hours went down to three so now um when every wednesday from 3 30 to 4 30 is plc time and we really guard that time we don't schedule any meetings i ask on teachers to please not schedule doctor's appointments because this is a very very important time to get together with your peers to discuss instruction to discuss data to work on those common assessments this is the time to talk about what is your instruction going to look like the next week next month very important time so we guard that and nicole knows that she hears it every year regardless you can't we can't do anything during that time okay the next thing is the reteach so what we did is we had to find 30 minutes in our daily schedule to provide reteach and enrich we call it cat cougar academic time and those 30 minutes our students are either in intervention for english and math or they are in an enrichment okay and every teacher on campus has either intervention class and enrichment and the intervention classes they're working on those skills for that week and the teachers are have been given assess assessments so they know exactly where those students need to be and so we invite students to those interventions that need those that extra help okay and the next thing we did is we needed to have collaborative teams we really needed to go from and again this was something we created we didn't tell them they they knew this was the next move um we needed to get our teams together where they were talking about instruction we had to get our conversations away from discussing things that were out of our control and we needed to talk about things that we had control over and we have control over instruction and we have control over assessments and so what we did is once two summers ago i moved my entire campus around every teacher but seven my elective teachers were able to stay switched to another classroom different classroom and now our pods instead of having six great pods seventh grade pod i have a math grade pod i mean a math pod an english pod i have a science pod social studies pod and so in that pod we have our three gen ed teachers we have our title math teacher and we have the special ed teacher we felt it was important to get special ed moved over there and start integrating them in with our genet to have those conversations um and with that do you want to i have one thing okay um we're at this point we're going to be letting our guiding coalition to walk you through it but i wanted to say because i'm not going to be a part of this next year i am retiring next year um and i've been in the district for 23 years i i have would love to say that i've enjoyed every single moment of it not quite true but i have loved my career and i am very thankful for uh chino valley's fighting school district um but one of the highlights of my career 28 years in education has been the last couple of years and watching these teachers come together and in all of the time i've been here and i think you can attest to this too when was the last time you saw a group of teachers come to you and say hey this is going to be hard work on it for us but it is something that is this is what's best for kids and we want to do it so to have a team of teachers come and say and they really are speaking on behalf of the entire staff because the entire staff has bought into this and um i my one regret is that i am leaving before i feel like the process is done so although julie and i have built a really good climate and culture and a staff that i know can do that can implement this and implement as well i am sad that i'm not going to be here to say it but i really hope that you guys get to watch them and heritage middle school grow over the next couple years because it's going to be outstanding what they're doing here very good flora the next slide we are going to bring up sarah jones and joy efren hi everybody again i'm joy i'm sarah so a lot of the stuff i have to share is kind of just like supporting what julie and laura just shared but really to have a successful plc school collaboration is everything um when i started we were still singletons and i was just the eighth grade english teacher and really seeing the um process in my early career it's been amazing i've learned so much from my coworkers my peers and really focusing on what can we do best for our students we are teachers we want every student to learn and be successful and that is what all of our teams are doing um we have our weekly meetings we look at our um standards we have been working on breaking them down into our specific targets to get us ready for this next step we are i'm going to take and um having rubrics so students are really clear on what they're learning what is the purpose what is the goal um every student should be in class knowing why are we doing this and again all of our teams are working together to have this information and to have this on set for students and being able to um share ideas and really like if something didn't work quite right really having those open conversations i feel like at our school no matter what teacher it's an open door policy i can go in and talk with a social studies teacher my english peers just um it really is always open conversations and being able to learn from one another as teachers we are constant learners and i know that's why i love teaching i love learning new things and this process has just allowed me to grow so much and um it's really really exciting okay and then i wanted to talk a bit more on the deconstructed standards and targets so when i came on to the staff three years ago i was like you said just this eighth grade science teacher and that was my first year teaching i was taking the state standards the way they were written and like figuring out how to teach them all on my own right and that's tough right but when i was able to finally work as a team during our peak plc times during the last school year we got a chance to break down the science standards to a degree where it's like okay we've got the standards we have all the targets that the kids have to achieve in order to prove that they master it we've got all the vocab we've got characteristics of mastery and when you put all that together it wasn't an immense amount of work but what's really useful coming from this is this year when we had a new teacher on in our team a new science teacher join us she didn't have to have the same experience as i did where she was like well these are the state standards i don't really know what i'm doing here we were able to give her these deconstructed standards that we had gone through and spent all this time on and she was able to be like oh so i have to teach this these are the parts of it this is the associated vocabulary and it really clarified for us like and helped us pare down what we need to be teaching instead of being like in this direction or in that direction but it's like no these are the specific things that work for that standard according to the state so taking that time to work on those deconstructed standards helped us to move along in this process but we're not done yet so i want to pass it on to the next person maybe you want to go back to school thank you ladies hello i'm sarah vitus and i teach sixth grade math over heritage been there five years and i love it um let's see that next slide so sixth grade is full of change for so many reasons um of course that's a long time ago for us but fifth grade becoming sixth grade is about change being a math teacher i'm going to give them a heavy load i want them to find it as a reachable load i want them to find them as reachable targets we use standard-based reporting we're not just saying an average doubt grade and averaged out whatever what are we supposed to teach what are they what are they getting taught we put it in a student-friendly language so that the parents don't have an emotion about the report card but have information about the report card okay so that there's transparency in what we're doing what the students should be learning that they're not just filling in a box and saying hey we're here but that they're really learning something the way that we write it the way that we teach it transparency communication we want to bring all of that together not just any good good ideas and you know lots of meetings we want to make it something where they don't have to pick up the phone to figure out what's going on in their school or in their kids classroom we can look at the report and we can see where are you successful where do you need help what are you doing about that and the ownership goes to the student as well as the teacher the responsibility is with the relationship that we've built that they know that they can reach these goals we've set out paths for them to go and be successful i want to be a part of that team i want to have that kind of communication with my parents so that they know everything i want their kids to know i also want my kids to know how to get there and here's our esteemed liam well do you want the next slide yes please our next big step that you've heard about all of the work that we've done so far our next big step that we're taking next year is to bring standards-based reporting to the community and to bring it into on the into the homes of our families in china valley so um standards-based reporting is the way that we would convey all the good stuff that you you're here you hear happening and that makes you want to go back to school we can bring a piece of that to you um so we have standard space reporting as our way to communicate with families next year there is a full sample of a standard space report card in your board packet it is this paper but what you see on the screen here is just a snippet of a standards-based report card standard space report card looks significantly different than a traditional report card there are two major differences first um instead of just one overall averaged grade per per class proficiency scores are given for each standard or skill taught in a subject area so for example on this math report card up here you can see on the standard space side there is you can see a list of all of the topics that were studied in in this case mathematics for quarter one the proficiency scores that you see listed next to each standard indicate that this student has mastered the content that has received a score of three next to it so there are several topics in quarter one that this student is proficient in has gained grade level mastery of and those are all the ones that have the three listed next to it those scores that or the content that has a score of two listed next to it means that this student has not quite yet mastered at grade level proficiency in that content area yeah of course one to four one being good one being bad one being not proficient or being exceeding highly proficient beyond grade level and great um so on the standards-based report card side you can see that this is much more informative than on the traditional side where there's just one overall averaged score for an entire quarter gives almost no information about what actually what was studied in the classroom for nine weeks on the standard space side there is clear information clear communication about what the student learned and still needs more additional practice and time on for teachers students and parents to be able to see the second major difference that is not on this side but is on the sample of the flips at the back is that work habits and classroom behavior are reported separately from proficiency meaning that it is that the way a student is in class is not an effect on their grade that is reporting their what they learned so i have questions sure so um as a parent when i look at this i'm not gonna lie it's a little overwhelming sure like i wanna look and go okay you're not doing good here you're not doing you are doing good here so when i look at this is there will you give like an average so we're looking at mathematics sure i can see what they're good and what they're you know struggling but is there an average there would not be an overall one overall grade for the class instead what we're looking to do is change the conversation of about it's not that you're good at math or bad at math there are parts of math that you are great at and parts that you still need help on we're changing the conversation about learning to recognize that everybody learned has strengths and weaknesses and that's what standards-based learning and assessing and reporting is all about and so as a parent myself when i look at the one on the right i can see oh i know that my child is going to need some more help in defining a number sentence and that's something i can have a conversation with my child about with the teacher about and i know exactly how to help instead of just to say well you need to do better in math right let me follow up on that if i could so you're saying at the end of the quarter or the end of the school year there is no single numeric grade given to the student i cannot you know what you're showing there excellent you know that's not exactly what you're saying but at no point will a student you know for their gpa get a single numeric grade for that class so so in middle school their middle school doesn't have a transcript so there is no gpa in middle school and so no because the gpa isn't a item that's needed at middle school it's not part of the process so basically they'll get four of these a year of parents will get four of these a year correct like that correct in including an ongoing record on the computer i understand you'll be keeping that on a regular basis at the end of the quarter they will get a grade numeric number for each of those categories um correct [Music] no question sure in our example it shows that the behavior only is showing up like in t3 or yes yeah so we wouldn't know it in advance if our child is not showing you respect or whatever this is this is just a sample very same so they just didn't put it in yeah i just wanted t1 t2 they just were giving it an example no it's no that is communicating okay thank how do you feel the transition is going to be from middle school to high school with this grading system now we answer we anticipate this creating independent strong learners these students are going to develop ownership over their learning so much so that they can advocate for themselves when they get to high school and change the conversation not from how do i get a good grade but how do i learn and learning in itself takes care of any kind of numerical grade that they can approach a teacher and say what is it that i need to do to improve to you know hit whatever goal it is that they have in their in any class whether no matter how it's graded or how it's assessed um so we anticipate sending extremely independent learners onto high school in whichever menu they choose and i want to make it clear that there is no intent and you know heidi's shaking her head as well there is no intent of of having ever doing this at the high school it's just not possible because of the the number of things that are dependent on a gpa and those letter grades um at the high school level but it's appropriate at the middle school but not appropriate at the high school can i ask the senate question uh i'm hearing what you're saying as far as the students taking this information with them to the next year in in high school i can unders i can see the average and above average student being very happy to have that i can see that below average a non-performing student never wanted to talk about this ever ever again because that then has put a black mark on him how do you deal with that i can't ask i'd like to answer that question okay i mean genuinely like if a kid's not doing well they're getting d's and f's what does that do to their to their self-esteem that's over and over and over again with this that like for this child here they can say okay i'm i'm not good at defining a number sentence or solving other sentences that have brackets but i can solve number sentences that have brown so it's it it alleviates like i don't have to do all of math is not bad it's these few areas that aren't bad and i can speak to that specifically if my daughter gets a lot of my i get a lot of mileage out of my daughter but she she got a c in math um all throughout her middle school years and it was all because of retakes by the time she was done she really knew nothing and it was i mean she or i didn't know what she knew and what she didn't know so i couldn't help her specifically it's like okay we're going to do math where do you start if you you know that she's not functioning well in math where do i start do i start back at addition well she may know addition do i know started multiplicate long division all of that this tells me exactly as a teacher as a parent and as a student that all of it is not bad there's some things that i'm really good at and that will bolster their confidence but just getting an f over and over and over again that's it's demoralizing and we don't want that for our students we want to build their confidence and with that they need to recognize that everybody has strengths and this program allows that now do you have one-on-one reviews with particularly those students that's a good question so let me talk about advising yeah we have several times throughout our day not only during class time but we have an advisory about advisory time built into our day right at the beginning of the day um where t where a teacher can go over grades and proficiency scores with our students um and have exactly the conversation that mrs hunter just said all of math is not bad all of reading is not bad there you have this area that you've already mastered focus your time here and then as mrs bryce talked about before we have our cat time cougar academic time which is our intervention time so the time when students are invited to that time the a skill a specific skill is picked and a group of students that are struggling with that skill that's what they come and work on how quickly does that occur every day what i hear back from my own daughter she loves the camp time because she can go and get the help that she needs from wherever she's struggling so i really appreciate the cat time i think it works really great is cat time by invitation only has it limited the number of students that can be in there or well it changes i mean we change the list all the time um we it's lim it's by invitation of skill so it's today this skill with this teacher this teacher is doing this skill this teacher is doing this skill so we can reach a tremendous amount of students on any given day but we focus it by skill not necessarily by number of students right and i think it's important too you know sometimes as students learn may not be able to learn the concept from leanne by the way she's teaching it but and during that collaboration time throughout the week when they're sharing that data she'll see that my kids are doing quite well on it and hers are not so she would say her question to me is what are you doing because i need to do that to help my kids can i send my kids to you during cat time because how i'm teaching it they may get it so i i when i look at this i really like it but i do wish that i could look at like an average like the more that i look at this i kind of wish that i knew i could look at it okay here's where you need to work on here's where you're excelling but what i kind of feel like as a parent i'm like all right well where where are they sitting like well i think that'll be answered oh yeah yeah yeah okay i'm ready i believe that the next portion of what we're what we're going to show will be very informative and how you're questioning are there any other questions about how the what the report card looks like because our next portion is more in-depth about how we get to like what a two means what a three means what and how we get there okay hello i'm brian parnell i've taught uh middle school math for 12 years now hms i'm super excited for these changes because especially math um kids really do make up their minds in middle school if it's for me or if it's not for me and a lot of it comes because of that average the average number i'm a c student i'm a d student i'm a b and really any letter there's anxiety to it um and so i'm really excited to have that spectrum of knowledge being able to be a little more itemized and so every kid can see their strengths and their weaknesses and so this is the video that i was in charge of making um this is for um the stakeholders for um it's already on our facebook page it can be on our school websites on our google classrooms this is for students and parents and everybody else to see what we're doing and why we do it so it's about five or six minutes long and so i hope that answers a lot of those existing questions but we would love your feedback great yes just for our learners let me explain a bit about why our grading will look different in the upcoming year at all grade levels we are dedicated to standards-based instruction we want to ensure that students parents and guardians receive standards-based reporting to better reflect this data one large part of this evolution will be replacing the traditional letter grades the teachers of hms share a commitment to provide valuable feedback of our instruction for our students and our parents and guardians like any other type of assessment we believe more specific and relevant feedback is the most effective way of reporting information for every child and now in every subject a few examples of how standards-based reporting will provide better feedback for teachers and instruction include more specific data for each student in each class students current and future instructors and interventionists will know where each child has demonstrated proficiency or areas that need some extra help this reporting will also drive instruction for reteaching and enrichment opportunities in the classroom our new standards-based reporting will also be providing students with more quality information feedback will be much more detailed their learning targets separated and individually assessed a unified and consistent messaging of tracking progress and proficiency helps students take ownership of learning and drives deeper conversations standards-based reporting better displays each student's spectrum of learning highlighting strengths and aptitudes with multiple attempts to demonstrate growth and grade level proficiencies students develop the habit of a growth mindset the standards-based reporting coming home to parents and guardians will also provide much more information about their child's progress in school each class will provide an easy-to-understand list of learning targets with essential standards being assessed individually detailed reports will have current levels of proficiency shown on a four point scale so parents and guardians know exactly what skills their child has mastered and which are still being developed the standards-based reporting format will be consistent across campus including progress and mastery of skills in elective classes parents and guardians can see a more transparent rubric scoring of state standards-based reporting is not simply replacing letters with numbers it involves many other behind the scenes enhancement in traditional grading practices students were often scored on compliance of completion many students would see lower than expected overall grades as low grades earned during learning created negative impacts on overall averaging with standards-based reporting a student's learning pace does not negatively impact the semester scores students learning activities are used as feedback and direction for learning as well as teaching multiple attempts are given to demonstrate proficiency student growth trends and maintenance of learning targets are more clearly communicated for each learning target students will earn score from one to four as seen here criteria is assessed by rubrics that are utilized with the curriculums used in classrooms students first attempts at demonstrating grade level proficiencies may initially fall on the left side of the scale with each class typically focusing on three to eight essential standards per semester classes will provide many adaptations and re-teach opportunities in the teach learn assess cycle along with this new reporting system we acknowledge that this format is new to many on all standards-based reports that come home we will be attaching a key such as this one here to help define each child's present levels of proficiency for each learning target in each class let's take a look at an example of a difference between the old and new in the past a letter grade did little to explain a student's true learning the right side shows all targets assessed and exactly where on the four-point scale they currently are in this way students teachers parents and guardians alike can see what has been demonstrated and what areas may need attention here at hms we've been working hard to ensure we all are ready to change the conversations about student learning middle school is such a valuable time for students to understand how learning happens and to develop patterns of perseverance and success as your partners in learning we are here for any and all questions along the way always feel free to reach out to us for any clarification details or additional resources we look forward to working together to create a more comprehensive grading system that continues to benefit our students today and in the future so that's what we have what we like to post uh the colors do show up better when it's not on the projector there's some dark spots there is um so we hope that provides a little more clarity um to what we're doing and what we're trying to show our kids is they are learning how to learn you know before they hit high school and you know it's about the gpas and some of those unavoidable um cumulative scores um in middle school we really want them to be focused on learning the tasks at hand um i would like to introduce mrs davis and three other ones up here um testimonies here so thank you hello i'm rachel davis um i teach seventh and eighth grade social studies and it is a pleasure to be up here to offer the teacher perspective i have been at heritage middle school for 17 years and i've seen a lot of change and this is the best one i have experienced in the 17 years that i've been here so i am fully in support of it and i just want to give an example of something that was an eye-opener to me in january all of the teachers were to present to the coalition team essential standards broken into targets and then with that we create rubrics and then with these rubrics we create an assessment and a lesson and so i wanted some data to present with my essential standards to the coalition board so i presented this lesson to my students a few days before and in grading these essays using the rubric that i created i noticed that there weren't one of the things that was asked the target was for there to be some kind of information from the author written in there and so it wasn't there was no any kind of argumentative feedback um in the writings and so i asked the students you know why why was this not put in any kind of work any sighted information and they said that they really didn't know how to include that in the writing but it was in my rubric and so what i do now is when i write a rubric i present it to my students and we go over the rubric first in case there's any questions that they can ask at that time and also i've used this since then on a brochure that we created or they created and they were able to use to look at the rubric and create their brochure by looking at the rubric and they knew before they even turned in the brochure what their grade would be by looking at what was expected and so just this way this change that we are making at heritage i think really provides an opportunity for teachers to really focus on learning instead of teaching and that is a huge change that i have experienced my 17 years here at heritage so it's a privilege to be a part of this team so i just wanted to share that with you [Music] bear with me i don't do public speaking so the first thing and julie mentioned it earlier is change it's not fun but i feel like it's necessary um as a parent i'm active in my kids education but i also believe they are responsible for their education i struggled with my daughter last year she's not at heritage yet she is finishing out at del rio this year but last year we had a really rough year and i've never had problems with her she's always been you know an achieving student a student last year we struggled and i could not figure out why um and trying to communicate with teachers trying to figure out where the disconnect is and everything it was a little harder i really like this because i can look at it and i can see okay this is why she's struggling like she's coming home with a grade that's not her it's not her characteristic to have that grade but with this i can actually look and see like okay this is where you're struggling this is where you need help i can then try and help her i can talk to her teachers and see what we can do um i also like that they give them the rubric because then they know what's expected of them they have it all laid out for them they know exactly what's expected so then you know they can't use that excuse well i didn't know well you did you were given it you were given it and so you can't use that excuse my child's number one excuse well i didn't know i didn't know you do don't you can't tell me that um i like that this gives account it holds everyone accountable involved it holds the teachers accountable it holds the students accountable and it holds the parents accountable because we can no longer say well we don't understand why our children are struggling because they're giving us that information they're telling us exactly what they're learning where they're struggling where they're excelling um and it's total transparency like it really is and i'm really a big fan of communication i love communication i feel like that's you know the way to make everything work and so this is just huge that we're able to open that line of communication um i do struggle with like annie was saying the seeing all of the the numbers next to the um tasks that they're supposed to be learning versus that grade because my daughter brings home a report card and if it says a or c you know i'm like whoa you have a c what's going on i can't necessarily do that when i'm looking at all those numbers but i can i can understand more this is where she's struggling this is okay so this is something we need to work on if there's a one on there i know she really if she's getting two's you know i know she needs a little more attention if she's getting threes and fours i know she's doing great and so that's it's it's retraining our minds to look at more information being given than just seeing hey they came home with an a grade i don't have to worry about it i still would like to know i had a progress report come home last quarter and she had a a in science and then she brings home a report card and she has a c and she has no clue why and i have no clue why and so with this new system she's going to bring that report card home and i'm going to see exactly where she struggled i'm going to see what caused that grade to go from an a to a c but it won't be gray letter grades anymore but i'll see where she's at with that progress report and then where she's ending um i think that there's going to be a lot of learning curves on the community's part i think that we all just kind of need to you know push through because in order to change in order to improve the children's education and make sure that they're actually retaining and you know learning these things we need to do something different because honestly there's a there's a disconnect arizona is one of the lowest states in education and there's a reason for it and i don't think that it's anyone's fault but i think that what heritage is trying to do is a great step in that direction and i know we can't do it at the high school i completely intercept i would love to see this at the other schools my twins are going into del rio in two years i would love to see it there i think would be so beneficial because even then you get into fifth grade and you're starting to move classes so then i i have a hard time now trying to keep track who my daughter has for what class so i don't know necessarily who to reach out to all the time but with this stuff obviously you have more information so you kind of know and then if you need to reach out you can so i i don't i don't know if i have anything else but i i'm a fan and i think that's why they asked me to come but i think the biggest thing is it's opening that line of communication and it's i think it's going to be really great like i said there's going to be some learning curves but i think that overall this is an awesome step towards the future in education especially for our district hello my name is anna cavanaugh and i'm speaking to you as the athletic director at heritage and one of the things that came up was you know how is switching from a traditional grading to a standards-based reporting gonna affect eligibility for our athletes and it's kind of um uncharted water because the the districts around us are either you know switching kind of at the same time there's not a lot to base it off of um but we talked about as a group kind of what would be most fair to the students and i think the consensus was that by doing eligibility the way that i'm going to talk to you about it would actually make more kids eligible than are currently eligible because of the growth mindset they can still participate in sports even if they're not proficient or exceeding proficiency but they're approaching proficiency or maybe minimally proficient but just in some areas and so the way that we decided to phrase it was students are eligible for sports as long as they have one or fewer minimally proficient scores per class and so john talked about there's seven classes and if they have a one in math maybe that standard was just introduced so they're gonna be minimally proficient because it's new so can we really say if that kid has one one in one class that they can't do sports that wouldn't be fair um so we said if they had a one they can have one one in all seven classes and still play sports because they're going to have to get there they're going to have to start somewhere um some of the teachers are going to be in content areas are going to be introducing standards at semester where others will introduce them at the beginning of the year and so it just it depends on the season the seasons don't always correlate with the quarters and so we felt this would be the most fair um a student can still start or try out for a sport with minimally proficient scores but they must meet eligibility requirements by the first eligibility check or they may be dismissed from the team the thought process here was that every season has several weeks of practice before the games start so they have a good chunk of time to become proficient or work on those areas where maybe they were struggling before the competitions start and it's it's really miss weller talked about during advisory we would have advisory teachers checking grades and we've talked about a process for next year where those kids are really holding themselves accountable and learning how to monitor their own grades with their advisory teachers support and health and guidance and so um that's where we're at with that like i said before all of the seasons have different start pages and it goes through three quarters volleyball is just the first quarter and so the dates for the eligibility checks will be included on those respective sports schedules so they're not we have a little bit of flexibility here to make sure that it's fair for the kids especially in our first year of implementing okay do you have questions for me you answered my question [Music] literally have it written down thank you all right i'd like to thank the teachers and the parents for joining us tonight and in closing i just want to say that going through all that training for the past six seven years i kept hearing your transformation and it really didn't click what transformation are we going to see and i have to tell you a couple weeks ago laura and i we were in a coalition meeting and um i've been sitting there listening to these educators had this conversation that i've never heard educators have before and i i sat there and i thought this is the transformation they were talking about is your our educators are transforming from just focusing on their instruction but focusing on the learning of the child what does that child need to be successful and it's very um i mean i wanted to cry and look over at laura and i think she did wipe a tear off we were both thinking the same thing it's amazing it is amazing what this group of teachers and i'm including all my teachers all 30. what the work they put into this their dedication to it and their goal to grow independent learners you know when we started this years ago i remember telling my staff when i was introducing it that the our goal is to when a child walks steps foot on our campus that they know why they're there their purpose is to learn and that's our goal and another goal is to that our teachers know and that our students know that all students are capable of learning and they just aren't ours i'm not a special ed teacher i only worry about my special ed kids i'm not a math teacher i only worry about my math kids those students belong to every one of us on that campus every one of us we're all responsible for them and they're learning and that's the goal of this and i mentioned richard before so i'm gonna you know he he mentioned this and then this really talks about my staff he says the improvement of any school depends on the commitment and persistence of the educators within it and that is still true and that's what we're witnessing at heritage middle school so i'm here to ask we are here to ask for your vote to give us this opportunity to go take the next step in our plc journey because we're ready we're ready to do it it will be hard next year it's one reason i decided to stay and not retire is i want to help them take this next step i want to be there for this next tough year it's going to be hard but we are and this is something that we have not mentioned we have been inviting parents to our science council meetings and that's how savaya got involved um we're inviting 15 to 20 parents at every every month and we're averaging um six to seven first paying last site a month we only had about three that came but um march 29th is our next site council meeting and i invite you to join us it's march 29th at 3 30 and we will be personally inviting more parents because we want our parents to be prepared for this because it is going to be different they grew up when we grew up they're used to seeing those letter grades they're not used to seeing that report card that you have in front of you so we want to prepare them for it but i i am here to stand and tell you that i'm surrounded by experts and i couldn't ask for a better group they're dedicated to this and they will do a phenomenal job with it i question um are you i mean as a kindergarten um are you guys prepared to i mean there's going to be some backlash oh yeah you know i just want to make sure that every you know that we're prepared we're used to backlash so you know comments no i i really love it yeah i'm excited to see yeah be implemented i had questions but they were all answered thank you however i do have some comments they're all positive i promise you i'm going to date myself here real quick when my older children were in another district in another town 25ish years ago when standard-based grading first came out when ames first came out our wonderful aims i was the president of rpto and i was completely adamantly against it um at that time it was just simply they were either meeting exceeding or what was the other one approaching or right you didn't know what they were doing and i like annie was saying you want to know where you're where your kids are with this i would know where they were and i would support this um like mrs hunter i use my child a lot in examples my junior in high school like liam said information over emotion every report card is an emotional time in our household an incredibly emotional time in our household he has struggled since grade school he is not a good learner he does not want to learn he's a good kid just not a good learner had this been in process or had this been part of his middle school year i'm pretty certain we would not have emotion every report card and i'm a little disappointed for me personally um and if i can if i can alleviate that emotion from other high school parents coming into high school then that's what my duty is to do so that's those are my comments thank you anyone else you do have some papers in front of you um we have the pamphlet of what a plc professional learning candidate is um our parent guide if you read this this is a draft so if you're reading through this and you don't understand something or you think we can say clear or do you think we need to add something else to it please let us know because that's what we're we're at our site counselor meetings we pass this out and ask our parents to please give us their um advice on it and let us know if there's anything we can improve on okay then this is a sample so there are and this is all we're able to edit this whole thing so we will edit it to make it um what that follows what we're doing it so we do have a timeline in front of you and we are working on that timeline i'll tell you we're very busy um the coalition team we at least once a week every day after school and they have put a lot of work into this next we realize we're going to hire teachers that do not have the experience with standard-based reporting so we are making a pamphlet a booklet um and providing gonna work through the training that they will need to be successful okay so we do realize that we do have some hurdles in front of us but i think um we're ready for we're ready and i think that we can do it and it is going to be a tough year one more question so i realized you're inviting parents to site council meetings will you be having any sort of community-wide meeting for those parents that have not been invited yes we do and we'll do those we thought we would do those more at the end of july and august when school starts so all this would freshen their mind once school starts one of the things that um mrs price worked on is we had a regulation which is not a policy it's a regulation in the book in our policy book that described how the middle school should be grading with the abcd and the depth so part of the change would require it came to the regulation which is the the yellow the the what the yellows chose and regulations do not need to readings unlike a policy so this can this should be part of the motion is to um change the regulation ik a dashboard okay which is it it's in the yeah i just wanted to make sure you understood where that where that kind of fit and it's just changing degrees yeah yeah i'm going to say one more time i truly believe they're going to learn so much more thank you all right looks like i'll make some approval of heritage middle school standard-based report card including regulations all in paper thank you so much we appreciate your time
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and the big difference uh you see the total population that lives in the district has been going up but if you just look between 2000 and you essentially stayed at the same population under 18. what you know the population that you're really interested in serving this time between 2010 and 2020 you had more total population growth but this time you saw that population growth also translate to the year under 18 population which means again that you actually have younger families with school-age children moving here or those families having children once they're here and so that is the big difference and this is again not very few districts in the state are showing this usually it's the gold bar getting smaller and smaller for you you're actually seeing more uh children living in your district than you were 10 years ago and then just one more quick look uh we do also just look at what's going on not just with cusd enrollments but also your local charter schools and private schools so the charter school data we this only goes up to 2020 but what this really shows here is that when you did have that enrollment decrease in 2020 that was not a situation where cusd enrollment went down but the charters went up in the same year everyone lost enrollment in that year that was released so that shows it's indicative of there were just a lot of families who those circumstances moved them out of chico out of view county perhaps out of california entirely and as i said those students kind of reset your baseline as it did for a lot of the charters and private schools and now we're back to based on what we're seeing with the charters and cusb enrollment outside the private and cusd enrollment we're growing again we'll have that charter data in around april when cde publishes everything and i expect we'll see something similar there too but it's just handy to have that benchmark of looking at all enrollment of the schools who are you know physically exist in your district just to see what those trends look like so the first big external factor that we talked about your student generation rates and residential development so the student generation rates are important because this is how we look at that development that's in the pipeline and we can tell you how many students we think you're going to get out of it because we look at what's recently been built and we see how many students that you have this year live in new developments and on a per unit basis then give you an average and we look at that broken down by grade and broken down by different kinds of housing and that's important because particularly i mentioned there's a lot of affordable housing being built and you see that affordable housing is also what gives you far and away the most students so if we look at something that says 0.783 i mean it's you know technically for every unit you would get on average 0.78 students i like to think of it more for every 100 units that are built you can expect about 78 students to come out of that and you know that again you're looking at about a student out of every four units for single-family detached housing uh a little bit less for the single-family attached you know kind of condos which is very typical uh attempt your sharing walls you may not have a yard of any kind it's less attractive if you're buying out right for families with young kids in some situations and then the multi-family rentals that are market rate obviously much lower generation than what you get from the affordable that said across the board compared to last year all of these student generation rates were higher when we looked at it this year so that's just good information to keep in mind but that's then how we get on to the next slide this is just more illustrating uh just the number of projects that are going on and particularly when you look at that type and you look at all the ones that are the affordable multi-family projects not only are there quite a few of them they are a couple of them are under construction right now the ones that are not under construction are expected to be within the next year or so and they are pretty much all located in the same elementary school boundary uh somewhere along the bruce road corridor in the little chico creek boundary so that's the most significant thing there but uh what you're really getting at here is the map and again a lot of what we're looking at is in that southeast part of the district uh you also already have uh the uh miriam park you have a stone gate getting going there uh valley's edge is going to the city later this year uh yeah just to begin what would be a long-term process there but there's just a lot in that corner of the district your previous heavy growth sector was in the northwest up near the kind of shasta and emma wilson boundaries we had that boundary change there a few years ago to keep shasta from having more residents than its facility capacity was designed for and so kind of the next area of focus is really going to be on that southeast part of the district and then again lots of numbers we're not going to go through them all but this is just then showing you based on those student generation rates how many students we expect to be generated who would live in each school boundary again that doesn't mean that's where they're going to school but it's important to know again just where you're going to have more students living and you can just really see again little chico creek is far and away due to multiple affordable housing projects that are either definitely being built maybe not at this time of night but being built as we speak in the more general sense and uh that the city is very confident will be under construction within the next year or so so spatial analysis i'm not going to show you too many maps here but again this is uh numbers that we have referenced quite a bit uh in some of our discussion on the trustee areas and so this is just an example of that chart this is the one for the elementary schools and what you have is every column is where the students live and then every row across is where they go to school you can see the bold numbers kind of on the diagonal tends to be the majority of students do still attend the elementary school whose boundary they live in you also at the elementaries have hooker oak and rosedale that only receive students because they don't have boundaries and that's also why the out migration numbers are higher than in migration kind of across the board because out migration does include the two purely choice schools but that just gives you a look at what those and migration and outmigration numbers are the net migration at the bottom just for those curious that sums up to zero and that is just among your ten schools with boundaries uh which ones have net students in or out and a lot of that is driven by the special programs that you have at parkview and sierra view because you'll see the very highly positive net migrations at those two sites and so there's a whole lot more maps and analysis of all kinds of things in the study but i want to kind of get into your enrollment projections now and here's as promised the slide talking about births that you really see you actually did have between 2011 and an increase in your local births which i mean anything that wasn't a noticeable decrease is already bucking state trends and then you had as was very common a drop in 2020 and now uh full year 2021 births are in you know have been released by cdph so we can confirm that you are back up very close to previous levels and given that 2021 was still a down year uh due to some hesitancy around the pandemic in a lot of places uh the california department of finance and i agree that births in view county and in chico usd are likely to i think still go up a little bit from where they were now but that's one of the key things to check in on year in and year out yes um what's considered local birth so in this case that's a great question so cdph releases this data by the zip code of residence for the mother so regardless of where the birth occurred it's based on the address of the mother that was collected at the time of birth and so we have the three zip codes the nine five six two six two eight and seven three i believe there should be more than that because it also includes forest ranch for example so i live in forest ranch and that's a different zip code than those three so wouldn't that also be considered so let me double check on that because i know part of it is the zip codes don't always align very well with the school district boundary and if the majority of the population in a zip code is not in the school boundary but let me ours is for sure okay then they'd let me double check on that i just then my kid's not counted on there so yeah just know that then i definitely want to make sure that i am not it didn't happen she doesn't exist i guess i can just not not have to go home tonight no so that i was actually curious because i i gave birth to her in yolo county and so i just didn't know if that counted here or yeah it's tracked both ways by place of birth and by but we always track them by residents but now that we've brought up that let me absolutely just make sure that we're accounting for yeah what are all the zip codes that fall in a majority and cusd boundaries i mean that's a question for the universe i'm not asking for an answer right now yeah but well well certainly uh we'll get back through staff on that and if we you know definitely want to if we can show something that's a little bit more accurate then we'll definitely do that and then another key part though is we don't just look at the raw birth numbers we also then want to see what that means for how that translates into consistent kindergarten enrollment for you and as i already mentioned your kindergarten has been pretty stable and steady for a few years and as have your birth so it shouldn't be a surprise that the after that initial increase that you had a few years ago uh you know you can call it a capture rate you can call it a birth to kindergarten ratio but what we're really kind of looking at is when you look at the births from five years previously how many kindergarten students do you get the next year and for your chico usd it's just uh lately a little under 80 it was a little lower last year especially since kindergarten is not compulsory uh certainly we've already talked about that last year that a lot of families might have opted to set out kindergarten and still come back this year for first grade and that's exactly what seems to have happened in some cases uh but that pretty much between we already showed you the chart you know you have some of those students who are going the charters or to private schools and pretty consistently you're getting somewhere in the high 70s uh percent of those students enrolling with you as kindergartners uh transitional kindergarten has been also fairly steady uh but you know getting close to about 15 there but the big thing is transitional kindergarten as i alluded to is about to look completely different in a few years so we are expanding uh that eligible birth dates for the last decade or so it has been kids born between september 2nd and december 2nd so essentially your september october november birthdays we're adding december and january as of this upcoming fall and then adding on two more months each of the next two years then all those summer birthdays by 25 26 at which point every four-year-old they could not turn five until september 1st of the next year but they are eligible for tk if their families want them to at that time and effectively this is now year one of a two-year kindergarten program and this is i and something i've been telling people that i believe will happen is by 2526 the word and the awareness will kind of be out that uh you go see chico unified you're enrolling school at four years old that's when public school starts it's not the perception now of tk's only a special thing that's only for some people and it's only at you know it's not at every site uh but in general uh what that is one of our assumptions that uh outside of a couple of sites where there are some uh you know particular reasons with facilities uh why but we're our projections on the school by school level are assuming that we're adding tkn to the couple of sites that don't have them this year but they would in a couple of years and then district wide again it's not going to be quite as many tk's kindergarten there will always be some families who just for whatever reason don't put their four-year-olds in and i think especially some of those very youngest ones but again that's what will be very important over the next couple of years before we're fully implemented to track how that's going as the program rolls out so that's how we get to how many kindergartners you think we'll have and as i said that's kind of the biggest engine that can drive that enrollment decrease or increase but in your case we've established you are going to actually have fairly consistently sized cohorts so the next part is what happens it takes 13 years for these cohorts to move all the way through grades k to 12 it'll be 14 years of tk to 12 soon and if you were living in that magic bubble where nobody once they got in school nobody left nobody came in that would be very easy you would just track those kids as they moved through but in reality you have a lot of people moving in and out every year but on net what we see is aside from 2020 that's going to be a very common thing you'll hear in this report for the next few years but aside from 2020 you see you have pretty consistent net growth which means on the whole more kids are moving in than moving out so you expect once that cohort comes in as kindergarteners by the time they graduate out as seniors there's going to be more kids than there were when they started and so we factor that in when we project your enrollment and so what that actually means with everything we're looking at so you see that again that one-year drop uh aberrational event with the copen 19 pandemic all of the economic uncertainty that followed that and a lot of people with that big push factor entirely moving out of the area and out of the state that said we've already have our year of growth in and now on the back of adding in these new tk students and the substantial amount of i think what we have with just general multi-family housing that's been built in the last year is already higher than what it was but i think between what's under construction now and what's approved basically and you're going to be happening soon is you're around 900 something units just of the multifamily including those affordable units i mean the city's average had been about 300 a year of the multifamily uh over the last several years so again we're just seeing especially with just kind of the stars aligning with the funding that enables these affordable projects to happen quite a bit of that and just housing scarcity housing need is a thing and we fully anticipate that those units will be filled up a lot of them with families with school-age kids so that's what's going to really drive that growth at a sharper angle than what you've been seeing those two factors in combination for the next few years and then you kind of level out back to that baseline growth and then towards the end of the projection period which by that point i mean that's just really a uh that you know we're talking about kids that haven't been born yet enrolling in kindergarten so uh yeah but you know kind of step kind of leveling out assuming nothing else uh you know would change demographically or with development patterns between now and then but that's why we'll definitely be updating uh this look in the meantime i think what you really want to focus on is that growth that we see happening uh pretty realistically and pretty dependably for the next few years and then just the full numbers that you have there again we don't need to go through all of them i think the big ones that you have here is really looking across that very top row just seeing how the tk enrollment is going to grow and then just looking at those subtotals at the bottom of what that really does for your tk5 populations because then we compare that to your capacities that were identified in your facilities master plan you have kind of target and maximum capacities that were identified in that study and when we look at the elementary schools that is the one level where again utk was not even something that was considered at the time that those capacities uh were developed and that master plan was done quite a few years ago now so at this point now we are showing a projection where again you're within your maximum capacity but the target capacity for those sites you're going to have more kids than that in your elementary schools within the next few years so those key recommendations again just continue to update this study this is especially with the early rollout of utk with continuing development uh you know everyone's updating their housing cycles for those county and city general plans yes i'm sorry on the last slide that you had up here it's different than the powerpoint slide that was linked in my presentation what's the the difference is that those the maximum capacity and target capacity on your slides are showing like no change um relative to each other but on the one i'm looking at it's showing um like for elementary schools that the target capacity is being overtaken by the most likely enrolled capacity at the elementary school level in 2024 oh is it okay i don't have bars on mine i only have a line graph yeah sorry i i was interpreting the line graph a lot better than i can interpret the bar graph i'm not a fan of bar graphs unless like they're absolutely necessary so okay well i will keep that in mind keep the bar graphs please if it helps matt keep the keep the paragraphs yeah yeah so in this case yeah sorry so just yeah so in the case the bar graphs uh like we've been showing other enrollment bar graphs is the projected enrollment and then we have those steady lines of where that capacity level is and you can see the year when the enrollment goes up to and exceeds that capacity level okay and then uh and then one uh specific recommendation we have from this one then is again in light of there being a new grade level essentially that is being served now uh kind of probably a good time to reapproach that facility's master plan uh in just light of uh just kind of new conditions on the ground since that one was developed uh and then of course to continue working uh closely with the city of chico particularly with a lot of just what developments are in the pipeline what's being approved what's under construction uh just so that again one thing you know when things get moving again if there is some uh movement with valley's edge where anything gets formalized with that and we have a build out uh you know that can certainly also begin and that's it and again it gets all in that's that same part of the city in the same elementary school boundary and so as we did a few years ago uh you know at least start with that conversation start with that consideration of uh how those boundaries and those uh where you have the classroom space is lining up with where your students are going to be so that is what i have prepared from the study and again i'm happy to talk about any and all of it we've certainly no shortage of things in there but i think that covers the big things that we wanted to make sure that you i just had presented to you i think i'm interested to hear what julie has to say about recommendations for timeline changes and and such more specific than before 2025.
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great question we have been meeting um with the district leadership regarding the transitional kindergarten universal transitional kindergarten so conversations have been ongoing at this point we think we have a good plan for the first year for next fall but obviously it's something that we need to all put our heads together and you know develop maybe changes to our facilities master plan adding a whole new grade level to our to you know every school in the state of california is going to make big changes obviously the facilities needed for utk are very much different than a regular you know 960 square foot math classroom so there is going to need to be a lot of careful thought put forward for that dealing with the residential growth in the city i think we have proven to be very nimble with changing the the roll out of our master plan when necessary to make sure that we are providing capacity in those growth areas and that is also something that's going to need to be discussed we do have a facilities committee meeting scheduled for next week dr kaiser and trustee robinson are board represented representation for that committee so we are digging in immediately you're welcome i think uh probably the best we can do is to i don't know if it's a rocket yet but it's definitely a ship taking off and looking as far as we can is you know the best we can do i still like the term covet litter because that's how i am experiencing my family okay so anything else any other yes thank you dr kaiser i um you know i know where our henshaw property is can we move it i'm actually glad you brought that up because the valley's edge development that is east of bruce road i sweat it's east of bruce road in the general vicinity of little chico creek and we have property reserved there for a future elementary school so that would have to be something that we look at possibly for you know a down the road need if it's needed we do have room to grow there one of those good news bad news situations where we've got good news that we are on a projection for continuing to increase because i know what it's like when it goes the other way um but yeah it means you know when you've got only five years basically to make a decision [Music] put the shovels in the ground and put the walls up it's you have to be on top of it well it's great news and it's what we do so we're we're excited to accept that challenge so thank you for your patience tonight and going through this information with us i was asking for an adoption of this uh study this evening do i have a motion so moved all right i have a motion second did we have public comment did we have public comment oh um is there any public comment thank you okay so we have are you seconding yes to the microphone i'm sorry okay so we have a motion by uh matt tennis in a second by tom lando and um any further discussion by the board all right i'll call for a vote matt i'll start with you aye dolby aye kaiser aye lando i robinson i 5 0.
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thank you okay rob you're so persuasive thanks again everybody thanks rob all right okay we have the budget jacqueline yes good evening board so before you this evening we have the fiscal team here to present our second interim budget presentation so these are changes that have happened to our current year budget um since we presented at the december regular board meeting so i'm going to have excuse me bless you my marie kick it off and then sharice will take over and then i'll wrap it up okay so major themes of the budget tonight um average daily attendance hold harmless provision for 2122 the effect of coven 19 on attendance percentage and projected enrollment covid relief funding and pers and stirs annual pension costs first major factor is ada projections this slide should look familiar to you you saw it at first interim um we you know we're funded on average daily attendance which is kids actually attending school and historically um average daily attendance is about 95.5 of enrolled kids on the highlighted line you can see that we are nowhere close to that 95.5 due to covid coveted illnesses copic quarantines so we're projecting quite the loss in ada this year on this slide you can see that even though we did dip an ada 2122 projected our funded ada is still at that 11 830 number that we earned back in 1920.
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that's the whole harmless provision that we're talking about so we won't feel the effects of that until next year but there is also a proposal on the table to allow three-year averaging which would really help us out jacqueline is going to talk about that later in the presentation this slide shows the covid relief funding that we were allocated it was a lot of money it came in many forms lots of different um lots of different requirements and one overarching message though that we should use it to prepare for respond to and mitigate the effects of coven 19. we're actively spending these dollars down some of the things we've used it for additional counseling elementary reading teachers high school block schedule class size reduction summer academies school buses and furniture to accommodate social distancing there's a lot more that we've used it for but those are highlights alrighty good evening um so some major assumptions a couple of these have stayed the same as they were when we brought the budget to you at first interim in december so those first two bullet points the local control funding formula the cost of living adjustments still that 5.07 that was a part of the state adopted budget hasn't changed and then as marie mentioned we were funded this year on that 11 000 830 average daily attendance unduplicated students went up just a tiny bit so it's 53.12 right now and then the salaries and benefits that we used to do our projections were as of february 15th this slide shows our income statement so that unrestricted funds the majority of that is our local control funding formula as you can see we're still having we still have a change in fund balance that is positive of 1.5 million um and then the restricted dollars even though it looks we discussed this at first syndrome as well even though it looks like we're deficit spending those are grants so it's coveted funds uh federal grants like title 1 cte funding and more grants that we have those are self-balancing so a lot of that is carryover dollars that we're spending where we probably received the revenue last year and we're spending it this year this pie chart shows our expenses for the general fund for unrestricted and restricted as you can see we're still in the people business so most of our spending comes from people it's that certificated salaries the classified and employee benefits those three total out to 84 percent of our total budget um and that's all those green sections right there the larger sections this pie chart shows under unrestricted expenses as well as our special ed contribution so when we add the special ed contribution in there the total between the certificated salaries classified salaries employee benefits along with the special ed contribution we jump up to 87 percent of our total unrestricted uh expenditures alrighty um this slide shows our other funding sources um uses and contributions um so as we discussed at first interim those two numbers up the top haven't really changed they're the same as they were when we came back in or in december uh transfers out we're at zero still because our transfers out were for fun 13 our cafeteria dollars we still have free meals for all the contributions to restricted programs so those have changed just a little bit our special ed contribution went down just a tiny bit 90 000 that usually happens along the course of the year because we try to budget conservatively at the beginning of the year and then we have more information as we get closer to the end of the year sorry retrain restricted maintenance that's our required three percent so that's uh three percent of our total expenditures in the general fund and then this is just a budget comparison so you can see the difference in each section between we came to you in december with first interim and our second interim budget so the biggest differences is we received a bus grant so that local revenue increased quite a bit but then the expenditures show as well so the expenditures went up about 641 and some of that's also tied to sick pay so as marie mentioned we had a lot of sick time uh in the last few months since we came to you in december so a lot of that sick time as well but as you can see down at the bottom the change in front balance has actually increased a little bit so that means that we did a good job at first interim and guessing or not guessing but estimating and projecting our revenue and expenditures that we expected to get throughout the course of the year and now i'm going to hand it over to jaclyn thank you so the other piece of the budget is not only looking at current year but looking at future years as well and really i would say at this point in the year we need to start looking at the next school year and even the next two school years so tonight we'll have our multi-year projection or nyp for the out years we have increased ada in 2223 of only 46 and then we have a small decrease in 23.24 and that's largely driven um by the attendance percentages as i alluded to earlier we normally kind of have this 95.5 attendance rate this year we're looking at just over 91 and so in the future years that percentage will increase ideally getting back up to the 95.5 but conversely we did have a decrease in enrollment and so we do have four certificated fte related to declining enrollment in the two out years we do take into account that we have very seasoned staff and they have step and column we have changes in person stirs rate guidance from the state and inflation for utility expenses and insurance so as we build more buildings our insurance costs go up clearly fuel is a big one right now i actually heard from bob ontoberos and our diesel per gallon is up about a dollar 27 over the last couple weeks um so those are real costs we do take into account though that we have retirements and that there are certificated savings related to that so we are estimating 20 in 2223 as well as an additional 23 20 and 23 24.
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cola for next year at this point is 5.33 we are getting some inkling that might actually be closer to 6 percent um so we'll know more as the spring goes on and then 3.61 for 23.24 so as the big topic we talked about tonight is tk right so um we do have in the multi-year projection to add two tk classes in 2223 and an additional two classes in 23 24. um so the big the big issue with tk is the staffing requirement is 24 to 2 versus right now it's 24 to 1.
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so it would require one teacher and one classroom made for the duration of the of the class jacqueline um yes so on what basis are we estimating that it would just be two classes i mean this is a new mandate or a new i don't know about mandate but a new offering so i just wondered what framework of reference we're using to say so what we've done is we've said we have eight classes currently yeah um for the december second um cutoff and we're going we're adding two months and so we're extrapolating that out as of right now we will be adding a tk class at rosedale and then we will be doing a tk blended class for part gen ed part special ed and we still have 50 to 60 openings with our current existing classes right now so in the event that enrollment spikes over the summer obviously we'll have to add a class while tk isn't required it is required for the district to offer it so students may be eligible but they may not participate depending on their familial situation okay so this is the unrestricted side of the multi-year projection um so you can see in the first year here as as charisse had spoken about we're looking at a surplus of about 1.5 million that's that fourth line down the big thing i want to point out is in 2223 right now we are projecting a 3.8 million dollar deficit and that's that funding cliff that we've talked about multiple times but this is based on what is currently in statute which is the greater part of your cur your ada and so that's where um you know the several 7 800 kid difference between 1920 is really going to impact us but i am i am pleasantly happy to say that we do still have um undesignated fund balance so we can weather that storm because you can see in 2324 then we surplus about a million dollars which on a budget this size is about breakeven so what i do want to provide is this informational only for you related to the three-year averaging the only change between this slide here that's on the current year unrestricted and the informational only is the revenue in 2223 goes from 122 million and change about 20 122.5 million up to 128 million so by changing the district's ability to be funded on our ada at the state level it's a over a 5 million dollar impact for us so that 3.8 million deficit becomes a surplus of 1.5 million so it is a proposal it's going through the budget legislative committees at the state as we speak it is gaining momentum the state legislature from what we've seen from polling is not willing to do hold harmless which is what we have this year which is just pay us on 1920 but they do seem to be optimistic about the three-year averaging what we don't know at this point is if it's a one-year deal so in 2223 you can do that through your averaging or if it's going to be put in statute for perpetuity purposes so the other piece that we always talk about is the impact of person stirs and the rates we are you can see these are prior years it's been um definitely a financial burden for the district to pick this up next year will be an exceptionally large hit um the stirs rate's going up 2.18 percent and the pers rates going up 2.49 or almost 2.5 percent at this point the stirs right then will stay flat for 23.24 and right now a very small increase on the pers so for the district it's about 30 000 which is basically flat so we are optimistic that these are starting to level off but it really does depend on the investments of the person personsters agencies so cash flow is always the important one we need to have money in the bank to issue checks very similar pattern year over year over year and that's how our state and federal dollars come in as well as you can see in december and april that we get property taxes from the local counties so that also elevates it quite a bit we do have a substantial amount of covert relief dollars that we've received that were that we're actively spending down but that has helped our cash position so you can see the dotted line here is for the current year and we're projecting to end just over 40 million and our healthy reserves certainly help with our cash position as well so about its budget certification the district self-certifies um positive qualified or negative as you can see on the screen in front of you um we are self-certified and positive we have the ability to meet all of our obligations in the current year plus the two out years so pending board approval tonight we'll submit the documentation to butte county office of education by march 15th they will review and send a letter based on our assumptions and our budget so then going forward it says begin conversation in reality we've already started the conversation for 22 23 actively working with the ed services team um to talk about that program we've started the lcap meetings we had our first one last night we'll get feedback from that um continue to adjust our staffing according to enrollment and students registering at all levels kindergarten all the way up and then come may we'll get the the may revise or the budget the governor's revised budget he'll have property taxes from april so he's able to give better estimates at that point in time and then we'll be back a month later at june in conjunction with the lcap to give you an update on an estimated for the current year as well as our proposed budget for the following year in 2223 any questions this evening so the context for the action is for us to approve this as a positively certified approve the budget with the self-certification by administration that it's positive okay so we can send it off all right so any comments from the audience just thank you to the team for all the work you do to you know first of all nothing's a surprise you guys have been telling us where we were headed and there we go i love it when there aren't surprises all right discussion motions from the board i'll move to approve the second interim budget for 21-22 okay so katelyn's moved i'll second that and tom seconded okay any further discussion all right let's have a vote uh i'll start with eileen robinson i lando i kaiser ai dolby tennessee all right 5-0 i think that's pretty good math right jacqueline well done dr kaiser okay all right and so number three um is the resolution 1575-22 enter fund borrowing between funds charisse all right you're back me again alrighty this should be quite pretty quick guys um so the resolution before you tonight allows chico unified the capability to borrow between funds we have two programs our nutrition services program as well as our state-funded preschool program both of those are reimbursement based so edcode states that as of the fourth monday in april all funds have to stay cash positive and those two funds operate outside of our general operating fund so we come to you every year to make sure that we get approval to move money temporarily between our general fund and these two funds just to remain cash positive all right any comments from the public no any comments from the board all right can i have a motion i move approval of resolution 1575-22 okay eileen second i'll second okay katelyn all right so any further discussion all right so let's start with matt tennis eye dolby i kaiser i and i robinson i okay you're a perfect number again all right any items from the floor yes come on up to the mic introduce yourself elaine ward um so something that came to mind when the discussion of the three-course science model was going on and obviously jessica brought up concerns for sped and it was mentioned that they were contemplating co-teach i am all in favor of a co-teach program mr lando mrs robinson mr merchant and mrs olsen receive my email regarding co-teach programs in our district if some of you are unaware we do have a co-teach program that exists at parkview i wonder how many of you have actually been to parkview to observe the classrooms that participate in the co-teach program because they are amazing dr kaiser i know you mentioned that you have visited visited excuse me the cte classes if you have not had the chance to observe a co-teach classroom i strongly encourage you to do that i feel co-teach is something that really needs to be expanded throughout our whole district but i also know that it was original when it was originally discussed it was not received with open arms there was discussions of budget there were teachers against it because they didn't want a second teacher in the classroom and my fear is though they mention co-teach to help with this new science expansion that it will not be something that will be easily welcomed or something that will easily fall in place for these students where those educational concerns are i just kind of want to put it on your radar to do some research i have begun with the help of erica because some of the past minutes seemed very incomplete um seeing what those original arguments were against the the co-teach programs because i've seen the success for my son i have seen success for peers of his that we have known through the years since loma vista [Music] data or data whatever which whatever you say i feel it needs to be collected and from what i have been told nothing has been collected and nothing has been presented to the district to demonstrate the success the co-teach program has been you can't really make a decision on something if you haven't seen how successful it is diane encouraged me to also mention this at the lcap meeting which of course i will an additional in addition to other items that i have um concerns and strong opinions about as well but again just wanted to put it on your radar now when it will probably most likely eventually come up co-teach works and you need to start looking into it now thank you all right thank you okay do we have any board members who would like to agendize an item yes i don't know if it warrants an agenda item but i would like some follow-up either an open session or close whatever you think is appropriate madam superintendent about the issue raised by miss penny this uh at the beginning of our meeting she got up and described the scenario and where a student was uncomfortable oh and so i would like more information on that whether to make it an agenda item i don't know but kelly was that nod that that doesn't okay it does doesn't need to be a motion okay okay um i have i have one um i would like to move to direct staff to draft a resolution to write a letter to our legislators legislatures too sorry my brain approve the use of the three-year average of ada as a third option in perpetuity with the budget update and seeing that that third option would really give us a boost i think it would be i should probably stop discussing but that's that's what i would like to move to do directly asking the legislators to what asking the legislators to approve the use of the three-year average of ada as a third option for um uh for our funding to double as a like to determine our funding so right now there's two sort two ways to determine our funding and that right now what was presented with the budget was is that there's a third a third way being proposed right now so you would either go with straight aid ada last year or hold harmless whichever is higher or you would look at three years and average it out okay thank you okay so just for clarification the three are averaging as a proposal in the governor's january budget and so it's going in front of the legislature over these next couple months through the budget subcommittees to determine if that would be a viable option moving forward so your suggestion is for us to draft a letter or to have staff draft a letter for us to approve to send to them in support of that three-year ada average as a third option in perpetuity okay second note and i'll bring that back all right okay i uh anybody else okay i would like to yes okay i would like to suggest that we no longer have oh i'm sorry okay we need to vote for agendizing the letter okay so the motion was to draft half staff draft a letter approving the use of a three-year average ada as an option for funding okay i think what our int i'm going to borrow your intent was currently it's a one-year three-year we want it to be an ongoing so that this three-year averaging slides forward the three is the three-year averaging even approved yet no no it's not even approved yet so we got a presentation of how much money it would actually help us save with if they approve that three-year average but that's not even approved yet no i'm saying that so it's right now that three-year average is being proposed as a one-year thing and i'm saying but it hasn't happened yeah but i'm but i'm saying that i want we we want to i would like us to draft a letter to ask for it not just for the one year but in perpetuity not three years but for forever okay are we in discussion on that yes what if it was like working again against us you know what if you would have made it it's an option it's an option so so it gives so right now there's two options for funding and it gives us a third option and we go with whatever is the best for us the district will always be funded on the maximum dollars of options available to us so right now there's two options available we will always be funded on the greater of the two if there's three options then whichever of the three options gives us the most money for funding purposes that's what would be funded and the two options that are available to us now are basic ada versus the current year apa or last year's aba whichever is greater and is that a covid thing or is that it's always been that's one statute that's been in in statute for a long time and so this would add the three-year average to your list of options so it's especially advantageous for districts that are declining in enrollment or at least had one or two years even if there's a v because it kind of softens that decrease so you can react better to making budget changes on the expenditure side if you have less revenue but we're gaining an enrollment so in theory it'd be i mean like right at this moment yeah for gaining an ada we would we would fund on the current year because that would be the greatest number [Music] and statewide though it would this policy would benefit districts that are declining it would benefit most districts because most districts in the state of california are declining yeah i would say probably the most um uh at-risk districts like especially rural areas where you know there's a lot of reasons that you know there might be struggling with their enrollment um well urban metropolitan districts are struggling with their enrollment right i mean they're shutting down schools in places like oakland and stuff like that yeah yeah so most districts it would help a lot on most districts okay so is everybody clear on the motion all right uh so uh i'll start with eileen robinson i landed high kaiser i dolby aye um tennis abstain and the reason is i just don't know how i feel about this from a standpoint of statewide policies we wouldn't have to approve the letter we don't i mean it's just a they will be bringing the letter to us and and then we vote on it this is just a vote to ask them to write the letter i'm just saying once i'm ambivalent about something i'm ambivalent about it for all all time past present or future it's a four two uh one one and it's an abstain okay so um what i'd like to request is that we no longer include the warrant payouts as part of the agenda we are required to bring those forth to the board we are per egg code yes i don't think we used to get them but they've been on the agenda since i've worked at chica unified yeah it was added i think two years three years ago something like that so i have another one yeah um i would also like to move to direct staff to present an update on the co-teach program including what is needed to expand it so i don't know because i wasn't at that but i'll ask jay is that part of the special ed presentation that's coming forward yeah it was very much it was one of the things yeah including the what it's gonna what it could take to expand it i just want to make sure that that gets hit as well yeah it was a lot is included but we want to add one more thing that's right in line with lots of the other stuff that is coming forward we just started developing the the presentation um and diane was going over to it with us today and it did include the co-teaching model so we'll have data on that for you and if there's more direction from that from that workshop then we can provide that i just want to slap some numbers on that program with jacqueline's assistance thanks so um did we get a second on that just for clarification from staff is that going to happen in the in the capacity that i asked for already so we don't need to vote for it or do we need to vote on my it's already part of the special ed workshop that is that's the first week of april as a significant part okay you feel good about that okay we'll keep following up yeah thank you so it's it's already going to be included then i i um withdraw my motion okay any other agendized items by the board all right [Music] we are adjourned god you
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welcome to the thursday march 10 2022 meeting of the ann arbor historic district commission this meeting is being held in person for members of the commission and for applicants who have elected to also come in person it is also being broadcast electronically for applicants who are not in person and members of the public who would like to participate uh public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call 888.788.0099 or 213-338-8477 and enter or you can do it in person oh yeah sorry that's implied but you said yes telephoto oh yes well public comment um this information is also available on the public published agenda in the public notes section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org forward slash watch ctn miss thatcher will you please call the role commissioner ross president commissioner willis president commissioner white here commissioner rocklin here commissioner fortner here commissioner epperson here commissioner quijano here we've got a quorum nice to see everybody yes welcome everyone all right on to adam c approval of agenda are there any additions deletions or changes to tonight's agenda i believe we received an updated one just recently yeah item four uh f4 was removed from the agenda because that petition was withdrawn by the applicant so we have three hearings tonight tearing and seeing no objections to the agenda it is proved as presented onto item d public comment this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about an issue that is not listed as a public hearing on this agenda to comment on such other preservation preservation matters please call 877 853 city staff will select callers that have raised their hand by using the left one by one by using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand please press star 9 on your phone or they can come up to the podium or come up to the podium if you are in the auditorium kristen do we have any callers no callers have indicated you can see no one in the chambers i will now close the public comment portion for tonight onto item e unfinished business there is no unfinished business so we'll move into the hearings item f1 524 first street this two-story gable fronter features gable corner returns wood lap siding with shingles in the front gable wood corner board trim a cut stone foundation one over one windows and a brick half width wrap around front porch with a pedimented gable half height round columns and brick wing walls along the wood front stairs it first appears in city directories in 1904 as the home of george and matilda viewerly and it's located on the west side of south first street south of west jefferson and north of west madison in the old west side historic district the applicant is seeking htc approval to construct a 195 square foot addition and a 15 by approximately 12 foot wood deck on the rear of the home this is the house from the street we'll just take a walk around it in photos it's a combination of photos from the review committee and that were submitted by the applicant this is the north side of the house now we've we've flipped around you can see back here there are a couple of additions on the back of the house these are both modern these one-story parts and it'll make sense on this slide it's this one it's a little bit higher and then this this rear edition so currently two small additions this one and a half story wing on the back is pre-dates in 1945.
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um it's seven o'clock we'll call the meeting i'll start with the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all just want to remind everybody again that we are live streaming the school board meeting tonight so i'm sure there are lots of people that are joining us uh on the web and then they can also catch that on the replay so just know that you're being recorded um when the green light is on so um we'll start with a motion to accept consent agenda items and second by travis is there any discussion yes i have two that need to be either altered or removed jessica amos her last and then the other one is abigail mckean she does not need to request an unpaid day for tomorrow now she wants that removed that request any additional questions or discussions okay um since we don't have to call the roll um all those in favor say aye raise your hand and um so now um i'll ask if there's anyone from the community that would like to speak on something that is not on the agenda and i'm seeing a head nod nope there's no one that's signed up okay great um the next on the agenda is our stronger together recognition teresa yes we have several tonight that we're gonna uh recognize and first i'd like to start off with two of our um our local heroes that help us out in all of our buildings and in so many ways and we've leaned on them even as a school board over the past two years once things have been turned upside down we greatly appreciate the service that we've had from officer matt staples from the north vernon police department we want to get him a stronger [Applause] thank you thanks matt we appreciate it and then our other school resource officer officer sean minton we greatly appreciate officers in the morning greatly appreciate what both of those gentlemen have done in our buildings and just helping in so many ways so many situations that happen on a daily basis and there are people that we go to that make us all feel safe and secure and take care of our kids and staff so thank you for that i just want to thank you guys i've been at six years and three months now and the favorite thing i've ever done in law enforcement so just thank you guys thank you i agree with matt it's a it's quite the turn around from being from coming from the street to working in a school and it's it's kind of rewarding actually i know you're police officers but we definitely consider you one of us and so we appreciate what you've done to do that for us i know there were several people who were videoing do you want a picture do you want them to stand up and come up and take a picture yes amy you want to get in the board president all right thank you so the next group of heroes we'd like to to celebrate tonight um are people who have just done a tremendous job for the last couple of years in particular feeding kids during a pandemic which was incredibly challenging so we are so grateful they were able to come tonight so that we could celebrate them it's our kitchen managers so uh when i call your name please come forward we are so pleased to have you here tonight in recognizing you for everything you've done our kids and our staff and our community you made sure people were fed and our new kitchen manager new food service directors here too stacy greens we appreciate her coming as well so patty van osdol you can go shake their hands [Applause] too if you'll just wait over here we'll take your pictures as a group too when you're done thank you belinda the guns [Applause] and from nve we have ann walters who could not make it tonight so we'll save hers and send it to nbe she's babysitting grandchildren ginger reitman [Applause] doris [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you kim eaton [Applause] thank you donna bellick [Applause] congratulations thank you thank you jan heilman [Applause] thank you [Music] and ladies if you want to come up here we'll take your picture with our board president i'm sure they want you up here got to figure this out [Laughter] again thank you ladies we greatly appreciate what you've done for our kids in our community thank you guys thank you very much you going to buy in the morning you're up there when i get there i'll buy yours one time [Laughter] probably right at seven all right nothing like celebrating our sros and the people who fix our food right i mean what a great thing right now no but we don't get to stop instead we get to hear about northern elementary my alma mater so there you go so first of all before we begin um thank you guys for having us our our staff has worked incredibly hard over the last few years and it's really neat to be able to kind of highlight their work and the stuff we've been able to do so thank you for having us and giving us this time um so we have just a quick presentation for you but let me start before we kind of get into what we're doing i just kind of want to preface the message we've been talking about as a staff last year was an incredibly difficult time going through covent and but our mantra to keep us going through it was that code was not going to define us it was our job to continue to provide a solid and quality education to our kids no matter what the pandemic through our way and so that was kind of our mantra our the drug the beat of our drum throughout the entire year but this year we've switched that and we've moved to the fact that we need to grow through this pandemic to continue to service our kids and so the analogy we use this year is that we are the roots for our kids we provide that strong foundation that will make our kids successful later on in life and give them a very healthy support system so the other theme to this year too kind of along that line of growing is engaging our kids differently and this is right in line with where our corporation is going to but we've talked a lot about how we need to engage our kids in different ways and so to to pull all this together and all the work that we've been doing together we've created a visual for our staff and it kind of just shows where we are so the bottom you have all the strategies all of our different ways of engaging our kids differently and then the top the tree part is our vision for where we want our kids to be when they leave us this is the type of student that we want to leave our doors when they move to the middle school so this is very representative and symbolic of the work we're doing and and where we want our kids to be this is kind of our unifying vision for the building that we're using to define the work that we do so talking about engagement and how we engage our kids differently these are just a few instances of the the non-traditional paper-based work that we're getting our kids to do the stem kits that we have going the the thinking getting our kids to to think um and do and actively participate in their own learning is a big theme and a big part of what we're doing this year and our kids are really getting into it as you can see by by some of our pictures so some of the nitty-gritty stuff we do have two academic goals that we've been focusing on building the first being that we want 90 percent of our students to be able to read on grade level within the next two years where we are right now with that we took a dip after the pandemic our numbers are set back a little bit we are at 47.5 percent of our kids right now or on grade level that is an increase of 12 percent from last year though so the pandemic again has hit us hard in reading as you've seen as a district we're very similar but we do have the 55.2 percent of our kids are showing significant growth meaning they're closing the gap of where they were and so we have a large portion of kids who are making up from the pandemic loss too and really showing that growth math our goal is 80 of our students are on grade level and right now we're where 56.8 of them are meeting that goal um that is a small decrease from the end of last year to this year but we do have a large port about half of them also showing significant growth meaning they're closing that gap um from where they were okay so as we think about supporting our individual students um and basically helping each of those students meet these goals we really have tried to buckle down as a team leadership team and figure out what can we do do we need to do things differently to help our individual learners i'm going to kind of illustrate that a little bit so this basically it's kind of just a general illustration of basically the process of how we meet those individual needs and so i just kind of want to share this with you i know you've heard some of this from other schools talking about tier one tier two tier three i like to think of tier one is for everyone so along this continuum are our students at nbe some of them fall in the tier one range we have tier two tier three we spend a lot of time there and that may be through behavioral needs that they need um or their academics so and we'll talk a little bit more about that but that's where we spend a lot of time and then when we have kiddos that you know we're really working with on meeting either their behavioral or academic needs and they're still beginning to struggle after putting some different different plans in place monitoring their progress they may get to the point where we're looking at special education support so some of our kiddos that are in a special education and most of in this box over there uh represents those kiddos that are within the general education classroom getting special education support and then the far end of the spectrum there are the kiddos that we have really is a little bit beyond that too but the kiddos that are in our self-contained programs and that's not only kiddos at mbe but the students around the district in elementary school that need that intensive level of support so we have them at that point the other thing i want to illustrate is that kids move in and out of that as they need and that's something that we are really very deliberate about and how we progress them through so they might be in tier two and move to tier three however as we monitor them and put interventions in place they may move back to tier two and then we continue to watch them or further along even with our self-contained programs we are so proud of this because we have so many kids that yes they may go into our self-contained programs but we're very deliberate in how we um integrate them back into the classroom slowly we'll put them back into the classroom and maybe they'll be there with one subject area that they feel successful with so it might be in math and they would have an assistant come in with them and so then they may slowly move back to just in the special education area so i wanted to illustrate that because we really are about focusing on helping every single kiddo at nve so that takes us to the next slide here so as you look at the pie chart those are the kids at nbe right now so could change a little bit as we move you know through in and out of tears but i just kind of want to show this to you just to illustrate just under about 650 students so if you look at our think about our tier one tier ones for everyone what we provide in our core instruction what we provide for our core and like um discipline within the classroom or more like classroom management expectations whatever student would normally respond well to in that core one this that is that no additional services so they are responding as we would expect them to be and they are at their need we are providing what we think that we need to really help them grow then so that's about that represents 20 important 40 percent of our school right now then we have another sliver our high ability 5.3 percent of our school and with the high ability and those kiddos you know they may be responding to our core instruction but we know those students individually they need more they need more than what they would just be getting so those are the kids that we're looking at also in the high ability i'm also going to give you numbers so like the 28.4 that's 180 kids just so you can have an idea of what that would be high abilities 34 our english language learners they need some additional support that's at 3.9 or 25 students and then if you look at i'm going to jump over to the red our tier 2 kiddos that's our tier 2 both academic and behavioral students and tier 2 that represents 150 students that are on tier 2.
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another photo of the rear and where the deck is but not that large is where in addition a one story edition is proposed to infill this rear corner of the house there are two windows you can see in these photos that would be enveloped by the addition this one is um proposed to remain on the interior as a pass-through window but this one would come out because the wall would be taken down now we're on the let's see this must be the south side of the house alongside the driveway and here's on the left is a drawing of the lot a site plan showing the existing house 1906 the 1960s editions here that wrap around the corner and where the proposed edition would go here you can see it well on the the basement plan this is set in a good uh let's see two feet from the corner which is much appreciated and it's bumped out a little bit to distinguish it from that other addition on the back on this corner this is the existing wall where the dashed lines are so this would essentially push the kitchen out give them a lot more room to work with and also here's the deck on the back of the house it's a wood deck with appropriate styles of railings and some steps going down to the backyard there is a section drawing that's helpful in the application attachments here's what the rear elevation would look like with the addition this this uh gabled rear facing addition would uh would imitate the front of the house where there is a front facing uh more of a pedimented gable on top of the front porch but it's it's it's designed to imitate that and be complementary to that which we already know works well with the house and here we have the north elevation and the south elevation this is the side that's the most visible where that deck is now and we've just got a very simple uh wood deck extending off the back and this is the existing addition that this would uh jut out just a little bit from and the rufus is taller of course so going through the secretary of interior standards and guidelines that most apply secretary interior standard number one says a property will be used as it was historically or be given a new use that requires minimal change to its distinctive materials features spaces and spatial relationships number two says the historic character of a property will be retained and preserved the removal of distinctive materials or alteration of features spaces and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided number five says distinctive materials features finishes and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved number nine says new additions exterior alterations or related new construction shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property the new work shall be differentiated from the old and shall be compatible with the massing size scale and architectural features to protect the historic integrity of the property and its environment number 10 says new additions and adjacent or related new construction will be undertaken in such a manner that if removed in the future the essential form and integrity of the historic property will be unimpaired from the secretary of the interior's guidelines for additions recommended is constructing a new addition so there's the least possible loss of historic materials and so that character-defining features are not obscured damaged or destroyed also recommended is considering the attached exterior addition both in terms of the new use and the appearance of other buildings in the historic district or neighborhood design for the work may be contemporary or may reference design motifs from the historic building and from the ann arbor historic district design guidelines for all additions it's appropriate to place a new addition on a non-character defining or inconspicuous elevation and limit the size and scale in relationship to the historic property also designing a new addition in a manner that makes clear what is historic and what is new it's also appropriate to place new walls in a different plane from the historic structure in a subordinate position to the historic fabric and to limit the size and scale of the addition in relationship to the historic building so it does not diminish or visually overpower the building or the district the addition's footprint shall not exceed one half of the original building's footprint or one half of the original building's total floor area all right let me run back up to some of my notes so in terms of the footprint and floor area this addition is all falls well within the 50 guideline for the maximum amount of additions the footprint with this edition would be a 45.5 percent and the floor area would be at 22.8 percent windows on the proposed edition are pella wood casements that are clad in aluminum they're proportioned to be complementary in size and shape to the historic windows the new door is also a pella full light aluminum that i'm sorry full light aluminum clad wood cladding on the addition is woodlab to match the house with shingle gable trim to match the front gable i'm really not concerned about this matching too much because of the window configuration the the locations of the windows the foundation materials it's it's going to look like an addition um and it's not i don't i don't believe it's going to be confused as something old by anyone even if it has wood siding on it uh staff believes that the work does not have a detrimental effect on historic materials features or spaces and that the application should be approved thank you thank you mr thatcher commissioner quijano and myself we're on the review committee do you want to start commissioner kiana uh sure i can i don't have too much more to add the the photographs and the staff report were very thorough i guess the one one thing that i did take note of as we were walking towards the driveway from the i guess that's the south side um you know you do get kind of a clear view along that that elevation of the property that side of the property and the proposed addition is set back as ms thatcher said two feet from that back corner so it would be further back than that railing that we see right now so kind of tidies that up i think not not that that's currently an issue but that would be a visual change other than that not much more to add yeah i also agree with staffs report i think this this house is very well maintained it's um has a lot of its original character defining features i think the the proposed edition is pretty straightforward um as you this photo you would you would see the addition you know from the street but i think it there is you'd see like the back of it it's much lower than the rest of the house um and there's a nice view shed even to the back you know carriage house that's back there as well so i don't think it draws too much away from from the house overall um i don't really have anything else to add i think this one is pretty straightforward um all right and the applicant i believe is here and in person with us so if you would like to step up to the podium is there a list to write their name um there's not okay just ask them okay if you could uh state your name for the record and if you have anything you'd like to add to the staff report or review committee report uh you have up to three minutes to speak ramsey and i've always admired the old west side association and living there and earlier i lived in a small house and it was further up by the high school and my kids went to the ba school and loved it and when we started looking for a house we went all over town and we ended up coming back to the old west side and we were fortunate that this house was available and so we made an offer on it and uh we've been there let's see how many years 21 yeah and so it was since 20 since uh when was 2000 2001 and um it's been a pleasure to live there i walked to work uh at the university and never drove and at this point i have a 23 year old volkswagen with 70 000 miles on it so it paid to walk and we've been delighted to go uh just get like we walked over here tonight and we'd walk over downtown to downtown we'd go to the banks we do a little shopping and it's been a delightful place to live the street is great the neighbors are fantastic and we can try i do want to say that what we did we spent a lot of time looking at the house with the architects and we made suggestions on keeping roof lines and window sizes and everything to be compatible with the original house and as an artist i thought it was incredibly important that we not change the architectural aesthetic of it and so we we stayed as close as we could and still get a kitchen that we could work in i'm marcia pollenberg married to ted and the necessity for enlarging the kitchen is that our kitchen is minuscule and that two people can't stand in there and work at the same time plus we have a ventilation problem and it actually is a violation our stove doesn't raise a gas stove it doesn't vent to the outside and so you get with fuels and smoke and you know sometimes enough is enough and um we love the historic nature of not only our house but the neighborhood i'm very much a neighborhood person and i walk my dog and i know a lot of people and i i prize the architecture as it is and actually we were looking at windows yesterday stained glass windows to go add to materials unlimited and i found three that are the top top picks so we're keeping that window i love the architecture so um and then from the rear we're going to use the the old window and have it face on the inside so we're using the old materials we preserve whatever we can it's beautiful it is beautiful that's why we're happy yeah commissioners do you have any other questions for the applicant better question sure hi on the drawings it says skylight question mark on i think one of the interior elevations so i'm curious are you adding a skylight to the roof anywhere or has that been scratched or that was maybe in error i'm not 100 sure that we'll need it we're thinking of that about it okay it's not drawn but can you tell us where it might be if you plan to install it and we're just not sure um i'm not an architect yeah you know but i want light where where would the skylight be if you choose to install the skylight um on the driveway side on the driveway since it's not drawn on here commissioners that would be a really easy staff approval yeah yeah if you decide you want to install it later discussion and we didn't come to a decision marcia and ted if if you decide that you want to install it later oh it's okay it's okay if you decide later that you want to install it it's a very easy staff approval you would just fill out a new application it's a 35 dollar fee because this is in the back out of sight on a new wing i can staff approve that for you thank you sure any additional questions it is so hard to hear people with masks and you can't see you guys are great you're used to it okay uh we can now move on to the public hearing portion for this application uh this is for an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about the application at 524 south first street um if you would like to speak please indicate by pressing star 9 on your phone you guys can go ahead and sit down thank you thanks do we have any callers indicating to speak no callers have indicated okay i believe there were also some communications sent correct regarding this edition there were there were two support letters uh that were emailed to you that were emailed just neighbors on this block in support of the project all right i will now close the public hearing portion for the application is there a commissioner that would like to make a motion commissioner quijano anywhere i move that the commission issue a certificate of appropriateness for the application at 524 south 1st street the contributing property in the old west side historic district 2 construct a 195 square foot addition and a 15 foot by approximately 12 foot wood deck on the rear of the home as proposed the home is or the work is compatible in exterior design arrangement materials and relationship to the building and the surrounding area and meets the city of ann arbor historic district design guidelines for additions and the secretary of interior standards for rehabilitation and guidelines for rehabilitating historic buildings in particular standards 1 2 5 9 and 10 and the guidelines for additions and building site support moved by commissioner quijano seconded by commissioner white is there a discussion on the motion commissioner well i i think this project uh like i agree with what i've heard so far i think it meets the standards and i appreciate the high quality materials that are being used on the project and clearly it was designed with a lot of respect for the historic structure so i appreciate that as well thank you for your comment any other discussion ready to vote all of those in favor please say yes yes yes yes all of those opposed please say no all right the motion carries your application has been approved please note that you must apply for any required permits from the city before beginning your project thank you all right and we'll now move on to item f2 at 220 south 7th street commissioners do any of you need a um a paper copy of this staff report you've got electronic copies but i wanted to make sure that commissioner white had one looks like he does yes okay all right we're good uh 220 south 7th is in the old west side historic district it's a single story home that first appears in city directories in 1896 as number 16 south seventh street the home of louis schneierly members of the schneiderli family lived at this address until at least 1940 it features a front-facing gable sculpted block foundation and nearly full width concrete block front porch with wing walls and square wood half columns house is located on the west side of south 7th south of west washington and north of murray court and it's in the flood plain of an allen creek tributary the applicant is seeking htc approval to construct a second floor of rear edition on top of existing modern rear editions and replace a modern garage with a taller garage in the same footprint all right this is the front of 220 south seventh the complicating factor is that by virtue of being in the flood plain the house may not be expanded the footprint for the stormwater code so it's up or nowhere also proposed in this application is to replace the garage same deal they can reuse the footprint of the existing garage but that could also could not get larger so this single story house has a succession of editions let me walk you around the front you can tell the applicant's photos taken in the snow versus my photos taken in the mud um the front the house was built in a couple of phases this uh like 16 foot deep front section uh was probably moved on to this site because it predates uh the the method of construction predates the date of the house when it first appeared on this lot it's a much older method of construction most likely at the time that it was moved here part of this back part of the house was added on so maybe back to about here there's a good diagram i'll get to in the middle in a minute and this this is a kitchen this wing was also added at that time i believe this is the kitchen and then there's a little screen room back here these two editions this one with a a shed roof and this one with the gabled roof were added on later those are the modern editions plus the screen room when i'm talking about the modern editions those are the ones that i mean and that's where a second floor addition is proposed to be added moving around the driveway side the north side of the house you can kind of see here i think where the last of the additions was put on and the 1960s garage has a kind of a unique sculpted block foundation that's more more sculpted than usual has a little more relief and just a couple of photos of the existing garage this is the north side along the property line okay house this is the proposed site plan on the left you can see where the additions stack up on the back and where the second floor edition would be placed and here's the footprint of the garage this is a very good drawing showing the earliest section of the house the first addition onto the back with this this kitchen little wing off to the side and then the new additions behind house is currently 1295 square feet the pre-1945 footprint or during the period of significance was 932 square feet and with uh and and there's no proposed uh change to the footprint of course so um the total footprint uh area of the additions is 39 of the pre-1945 footprint for the floor area the pre-1945 floor area was the same 932 square feet and the additions right now add 363 square feet and the proposed editions add 296 square feet for a total increase of 659 which is 70.7 of the pre-1945 structure and unfortunately that does significantly exceed the local historic district design guideline that says the addition should not exceed 50 percent of the original building's total floor area let's go through the floor plans are in the packet they're always helpful to understand what's going on this is the front elevation you can see that there's not a lot of room in this attic so we briefly discussed but it's just not not useful as a finished space because there's just not enough of it and it's not tall enough you can see the kitchen wing going off to the side here all of the existing doors and windows on the existing house are proposed to stay back here you can see the kitchen wing and this must be one of the additions and this is the the shed roof edition this is the farther one this is one in the center and the screen room it's got a couple it's got a little deck here on the side that would remain and on the back and here's the driveway side as it exists today there's a severe drop off here the flood the base flood elevation is at about six feet of the garage which i believe sits lower down here so it is uh it is a substantial uh base flood elevation um revised floor plan this is uh let's see back here is where the screen porch is now that would be converted into a stairwell and a little mudroom addition on the back of the kitchen or maybe this is a table i'm not sure which and here you can see a roof plan showing where the new edition fault sits on top of those rare editions has a bedroom a bath a closet and here's the stairwell tucked into the corner from the front you can see that the the new roof they the the architect drew this up with both a front-facing gable and side facing cables like you see here and the front-facing gable just looked much more massive than this drawing um and i think they wisely went with the side facing gables there are you can see it's a sort of a series of steps down here that is uh to accommodate the stair going up and you can also see the new garage here in the background unfortunately our screens that we are looking at up here make everything squished and a little taller and pointier looking than necessary so keep that in mind when you're looking at these and the paper copies and the electronic copies are a better version than these little screens but here we have the south side elevation two new gables three new gables and a little bit of infill roof here to tie everything together this this goes from a shed to a hip over the kitchen this is the back of the house we see the garage on the left there's a new person door down here and or maybe that's an existing i'm not sure but there's a new person door here on the side where this guy is going in cloud one over one windows are proposed there's that new door and that's the that was the driveway side the garage is unique and it's a it's a i think a great solution to a problem of trying to put a new building up in a floodway so in the past we've had a few garages come through where they have to have flood gates they usually take up the bottom like two feet here and and they open when water passes through and let the the water flow through the flow freely through the building and in this case they proposed to use um one by eight vertical boards with with three three and a quarter three and a half inches in between so it's it's essentially more like uh open like a fence would be but it's to allow the water to pass through and you don't have to deal with the the flood gates that open and close and it also keeps critters out which is probably a big advantage on the front elevation the whole thing is clad in board and batten and the second floor is born in baton it which is also very compatible with the very vertical looking first floor and these are breakaway flood doors so if a flood did rush through here these doors are designed to get out of the way all right there's a person door here on the back of the garage with a half staircase going up and then there must be another half staircase inside to get up to a finished room on the second floor from the secretary of interior standards i think i read all these to you already i read you one and two and nine and ten from the guidelines for building site not recommended as removing or radically changing buildings and their features or site features which are important in defining the overall historic character of the building from the ann arbor historic district design guidelines for all additions it's appropriate to place a new addition on a non-character defining or inconspicuous elevation and limiting the size and scale in relationship to the historic property also placing new walls in a different plane from the historic structure in a subordinate position to the historic fabric it's also appropriate to limit the size and scale of the addition in relationship to the historic building so it does not diminish or visually overpower the building or the district the additions footprint should exceed neither half of the original building's footprint nor half of the original building's total floor area and it's not appropriate to design an addition that overpowers or dramatically alters the original building through size height or materials all right let me get you back up to the drawings um so staff does have concerns about the total floor area increase and the necessary height of the addition i do appreciate that the architect tried valiantly to get this as low as possible but i do believe that the height and the floor area are contrary to several of the guidelines that i've read to you and others that are in the staff report i have i have suggested two different motions if you want to use them one is for the addition and one is for the garage in case you want to consider them separately and one at a time that's it thank you thank you miss patrick commissioner chicano and myself were on the review committee i can start this one off um can you go back up to the photos mr yeah um so i think the photos are pretty clear and depicting maybe is there one from the the front towards the street the house is stated it's in the flood plain so it actually this is it sits relatively low especially being a single story home there is another house that's adjacent that's one and a half to two stories that's slightly taller and then there's a apartment building immediately on the north of this that is much more modern in character it's definitely not historic in nature um it is pretty visible as you drive either way on 7th or walking through you do see the extents of the house all the way back up to the garage and some of the additions that that are back there um i think the photos from the rear are pretty clear to show how it you know the it's it's a little bit mismatched in the back so it but the lot is actually really really deep and low so i think there's some it's an interesting feature and i think concept to work with we did kind of look to see you know where that exact um distinction was between existing and new on the driveway side where they're showing the addition to move to the two-story portion that is not the original so they they've stayed out of the original footprint of the house so that that's appreciated um i i am also mixed on this one i do have concerns about the increase in floor area and the but i also understand the constraints for the footprint i think it's an interesting concept and i do think the addition is pushed extremely far back but there is a lot of visibility because the house and the roof line are so low um i don't know if they have anything else not a whole lot more to add just maybe more about the the context um so it is interesting that you know this was moved from another location so the most historic portion of this home you know it's in a different context it's not like it's neighbors um so the district that it's in you know in a sense um and beyond its north and south immediate neighbors all the other homes are even if they were all on level ground plane they'd be signifi significantly taller than this home its rear yard neighbors are also quite taller so you know even even with the proposed editions uh it would still be shorter than its neighbors but yeah i agree with all the other comments that were made thank you commissioner uh would the applicant please step forward and state your name for the record uh you have up to five minutes to speak if you have anything you'd like to add to the staff report or review committee report okay i i am carl hueter and i have been coming in front of this commission since 1978.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and so those students might be getting additional supports from our counselor through becky sometimes and but they might be pulled back in their regular classrooms maybe in a math group or in a reading group they might be going to title one get ready at the younger levels getting some small group reading so that would be tier two if we have those plans in place and we notice that they are not moving forward they're not meeting their goals we need more that could be math goals or academic reading math or it could be behavioral then they may bump up to tier three which represents 12.2 percent of our school and that's 79 students and then as you saw along that continuum some we've got the kiddos and special ed that represents speech all of our resource special education k-6 and that also represents our self-contained programs we have 174 kids so that's 462 kids are getting individual plans at an e um so that's a lot of work and um we are very proud of that we're seeing a lot of growth um it takes a strong team every week to work together and we're going to talk a little bit more about that later and how we are really working to monitor the needs of every kind of envy and if we start seeing those kids that need you know they're in the no additional services that they need additional services they're getting it we meet weekly to talk about that we'll share that later so um just the around the top and the size i just wanted to share so that mtss if you think about that that multi-tiered systems of support that's really supporting everything except our no additional services at that time so those are those kids that are getting an extra 30 to 60 minutes a day it could be ell support um title title one so they're tier two tier three esl support and then win groups is for the entire and everybody everybody gets what i need um and so and that's in reading right now that's our focus so i can jump in really quick absolutely we introduced wing groups this year that's new for us again the same for what i need groups and it's in response to the pandemic knowing that our kids have learning loss we take 30 minutes a day and break into small groups and every kid gets very targeted support on the skills that they're deficient in so we use screeners we use our assessments every six weeks to screen their needs and then we group them based upon those needs and every kid in that grade level then gets individual very specific support on those reading needs win groups are generally only reading and then our mtss time would be math as well so we're working very hard to really target in on every kid's um individual needs and what they need to make progress too that's fine um so the other piece to this is too you know i talked about what our leadership team is speaking every week but the very very important pieces how are we involving those teachers in this how how are we collaborating and keeping going with them and actually um thank you so we were talking about our data talks and we're meeting quarterly with our teachers to do this this is just one example we use patterson and so if you look at this our teachers are the ones actively putting these dots on they're looking at their data right now we are using our star reading data that's what this is this is from so if you look at let's look at minnie mouse for example minnie mouse was in the intervention group so that was the yellow that's where her name was written there because that's where she started the very beginning of the year and so if we look along minnie mouse and just to show you the colors so the inner um the red is the urgent intervention then the yellow is the intervention needing a little bit more support on watches the blue and then green is at or above so minnie mouse um started intervention through levels of support the next time we did the star reading test we were able to show that she got a blue so she was able to she might have stayed around the same um level there but she you know but she's still she's moving up in the the tears if that makes sense but then the next one you can see that the next time we moved over she actually jumped up above so she you've stayed in that same level she stayed in the on watch level so she's gone from intervention on watch kind of hovering on watch she's moved up and again they're looking down further at like what the numbers are so when the teachers have it they're looking at what areas did they score that and as we look at this as a whole it kind of gives us an idea who's moving and who's not so someone started you know daisy duck we're concerned daisy duck started urgent intervention and daisy ducks going down so what else do we need to do for daisy duck to give her um yeah to give her some um you know extra intervention and support so that's about it for that uh okay okay and so then um one of the things that we like to do this is our lovely picture of us a meeting that we have our weekly meeting um is when we are having these meetings with parents or when we have basically plans in place we feel it's extremely important to partner and partner with their parents whether that is bringing them in for tier three meetings and having them there they are such a critical piece of our kids being successful and we tell them that we can't do this without you we need you we want and too we want our parents to feel um that we value them and that we value what input that they have to offer to us because a lot of times there we think we know all the pieces but we don't know it we we're missing a really key piece to what they bring to the table and so that's what's really important for us and we invite them in sometimes recently we found that parents are so busy with coming off of the pandemic and having to lose a lot of work so we've tried to really work with them whether we've done we've done google meets we did that today with some conferences parents love that now now that they're used to it so they're used to bringing in dialing in on their phones um and that's wonderful we'll do phone calls with them we really try to accommodate them but we definitely want them to be part of our team and so something that we've worked really hard to do too is create a really strong leadership team that has is very focused in the work we do i meet twice a week with the leadership team the first is we coordinate to communicate on just logistical things within the building and make sure we're all on the same page and how we operate the second the second meeting we have each week though is really special and it's all about kids so we sit down usually for about two hours and go through every kid in the building and look at where they are their current plans they're on what supports they need and how we can surround the teachers to better support the kids too we spend a lot of time collectively as a team and we can't we have enough kids where we couldn't do this if we weren't all on the same page able to communicate with each other and have a very systematic way of how we look at kids how we talk about kids and then go out and respond to their needs and support our teachers with that seth can you click on the one stop shop so something that and i'm going to let shelly share this because she's kind of the architect of a lot of this but this is an example and i know it looks uh actually seth if you can click on the third grade tab down at the bottom it's a little bit cleaner we have it's called our one-stop shop and this is where we record so that we can all communicate very clearly as to what's going on with kids but we record their data points uh normally their their names would be here we took them out just for anonymity um but we record their data and then notes about where the how they're moving through our tiers and so one of the huge strengths is shelly said of our building and something we do very very well is our mtss process and kids are moving from tier one to tier two when they start to show progress we move them back to tier one and we're able to do this because we communicate so clearly through the sheets we have all the data here to discuss that and we bring all the players to the table so that we're able to surround that kid seth if you could do me one more favor and click on that student the last piece to this is every kid that is in our um our tier process and then click on the supporting documents folder um has we call it our e-file and i'll let shelley kind of share she's again the architect of what we do with our e5s so we started this a few years ago and tried to think of a way that we could make it easier for us to communicate and we found this has been very very effective because you know there's a big team of us and we need to know what's going on with the student where's the plan what have we done um in the past where are we along the process and sometimes it's hard to touch each other um so we started this or to go grab the physical file so we started the e-file system a few years ago and we're refining it um but this is a great tool um for us so this isn't just be an example of minnie mouse for example um i don't know just click on one it's okay we've got where they have their tier one plan their this like their request for assistance form back out of that and show another one just to show you some examples of what they might have up there part of their behavior plan um back out of that one basically all of their all of the documents that would be relevant to this kid and and whoever touches them behavior they're all shared with everybody that you got that one yeah so um and then show me yeah that's fine yeah so you can kind of see we just have some sample like they they would have their behavior charts there and then if you go out completely of the folder of miss minnie mouse um okay click on the student information log so this is also something that we've started this year and we're trying to do i know it says mr duck so oh no that's the teacher um so anyone now we're trying to train them that touches this folder they are writing what's going on so for example you know we had a tier three conference we're gonna write it in here um so that that information log is there and we can see you know maybe this has happened that you know mom called in it won't show everything but it's a great place for us quickly as a team to go in and see our special ed teachers can go into they have access to those files to their files they can go in and they can see to what any new information or those or things that pertain to their student so it's been a great way for us to communicate and also sometimes you don't it's a place for us to write down those little notes um that might get lost otherwise and for us to keep them year after year so we keep those in a confidential file with timing on it so it at the end of the year kind of times out for those teachers so that oh and then okay we'll move on to the behavioral support specialist which i go right ahead so the last part of our team is our behavior support specialist and we brought becky to kind of share a little bit of what she does but we want to thank you guys for for giving us this position too we would not be able to do half of what we do with our behavior tears without becky she's been and heaven said this year to to allow us to really work with those kids and teach them and and make progress with them so and i can just say we're just i mean honestly it allows us to be proactive because like you know as administrators we do our very best to be proactive with those kiddos when they come in our offices and maybe they you know are in trouble for something you're trying to teach them you might even set up some things for them or some interventions you're trying to work with them but to be able to have becky to do that she's been able to truly proactively work with them and teach them you know if they don't know how to walk down the hallway they need someone to teach them this is how we walk down the hallway or this is how we um this is how we interact in the lunchroom this is how we open our milk carton without dumping it all over and she's been able to help seriously i mean tremendously and also to be there at those moments those key moments when you know maybe we're tied up in something and she can go and sit with a student that's really struggling at that moment in time so i feel really good about what we do with it and i'd like to thank you as well i've genuinely enjoyed working for nve and being included in the team it's been wonderful um my role really allows me to be proactive in behavior management um i have more of a flexible schedule where they have things they have to address so if i had can sit in a classroom with a kid um and teach while the teacher teaches so i teach them if they're having struggles um with behavior issues or talking out the teacher doesn't have to constantly redirect them i'm there to help redirect them and teach them and then we practice model practice model practice model practice um and then eventually obviously practice makes perfect hopefully and they can kind of sit in the classroom and have less interventions um so it does help us with behavior management and addressing each child's needs individually and each individual plan is tailored to their needs specifically we do that with a lot of different things um the first way we do this is observation form sorry um so the observation form is done by a teacher or a principal or anyone really um counselors if they feel like there's a issue with the student um it comes to me and then i would sit in the classroom if i i usually said about 30 minutes or so if i don't see an issue per se then i'll come back a few times just to see like i get a whole picture um and then once that's completed i meet the teacher and discuss um interventions that we that they had already done in the classroom or i could suggest the counselor and then we meet as a team during kid talks and discuss the best way to um help with that child um to go back um and then oh sorry one minute sorry these are sample behavior plans that we do we have lots of different ones and like i said they individualize all the time um and so it just kind of helps not one plan works for every student um and so we do a lot of different ones um and do what works for them you go back to that for just a minute it might just the the one the chart so it's kind of neat can i jump in for a second so if you look at you know the middle is their chart like that may be what's going on throughout their students day and they're okay i was able to get my hands to myself but what we have found effective is this is the kids charting it themselves and they know where their goal line is and they're graphing it okay i didn't quite need it today what do i need to do tomorrow and i think that's what's been really effective with our kids the more they know what their target is the more they can meet reach their goal and also it just feels so good for them whenever they meet it so i just wanted to share that because i thought it might not be clear when we show this picture with the scribbles like not a color yet these are examples of interventions that i use all the time um like i said i talked about push-ins within the classroom lunch pals was something we found that kindergarten students in particular really struggled in the beginning of the year for whatever reason it was too much noise it was too much chaos it was too overwhelming for them so we took about five students and they sat in my classroom they came a little bit early before the other students came into the cafeteria so it was really quiet and it wasn't chaotic and they weren't pushing or you know having to do lines and we learned how to grab your tray and get hand sanitizer and go through the line put your number in and then we walk through the hallways and learn to walk in a line share with one another and then we did a lot of um like social stories and like this is how we sit in our seat this is how we go on a playground um and they did get time to then interact with each other and they had a little bit of a free time a reward time if they were following directions and doing what they were supposed to do um visuals like i said the charts you've seen we do visuals a lot i do a lot of desk visuals for the kids it just helps them with schedules and knowing when when when things going on what's going to come next what's going to come next what's going on actually individual timers on their desks have worked really well so they can see especially a really um kid who has a lot of movement issues and just wants to move they can see i only had 10 more minutes if i sit for 10 more minutes then i can get up and move so it kind of helps them understand and can can practice that sit still longer and then i do a lot of check-ins and check out so students and then have rewards time with them as well so we wanted to highlight a few of these stories we've been telling you kind of the theoretics and how it works operational but we wanted to share some of our stories really quick about these kids have all we've made significant gains with them or they've made significant progress because of these systems that we've done so this the student sitting here i got the back of his head um but he is this is our charis classroom he's a kid that came to us from seymour because his mom passed away um in a really tragic and sudden car accident he came to us uh he diagnosed with autism and he was kind of a mess i mean he was wedding himself he just was in trauma having a really hard time and within working through her system and surrounding him with support that was about two months ago and he has come a 180 degrees turn around we actually have him working out into our gen ed classrooms now and he's joining a third grade classroom because he's to that point where he's able to start you know getting support within the cares class but then also going into so again working through that continuing with him i think parents were kind of excited to hear that their channels were going to be featured too so um in the i'll show this one these two are actually a fifth grade students and then we have a second grade student and this is one of those situations where our second grade student um actually she's in our special education program so she's getting a lot of that extra support already but what we have found partnering with those parents we are they're just not not making the progress that we would hoped she had not made the progress and there were some areas that we felt like we could work on and so one of the things that i think we try to do really well is think outside the box okay we only have so many hours in the day what else could we do what are the deficits for this child and so we started really looking at this child's really needing i had some struggles with just some basic um like rhyming and hearing the sounds and just read just having time to read and being able to develop confidence as a reader so we took an older student who's also struggling um but developing confidence she's got characteristics of dyslexia and remember some of those struggles early on and we've a lot talked to the parent we've got a situation or a circumstance i guess situation in the classroom and not where she is allowed to come stay after school for just a little bit um instead of having her picking up right at best time she's picked up like 20 minutes later both of them are able to work and we have seen in five five weeks we have this little girl's almost gone up three levels now there's other things going on there but she has we've very specifically given her given her things to do so she it's amazing and this is just an older student with a younger student given very specific materials at that time so and again there's other things factors and the teachers are working with the student too but her confidence level is amazing i mean she's gone from kind of just kind of quiet meek to she's excited about reading so i really wanted to highlight that and the older student has also got that confidence she's like i remember that and she's able to talk through it and also be able to practice her reading skills reading to her so just wanted to highlight that one and i'll let you highlight a couple of our behavioral um the one in the bottom he was a student who the teacher had said he was he did not sit still he did not he got up constantly was constantly having to be redirected um i went and ended up an observation and um put him on a the grid the first um yellow sheet on one of those examples and anytime he did something he it was marked down um if he got four then he missed a re uh reward time if he received three or less then he was able to come with me at the end of the day check out see how well things went if it didn't go so well let's try to do better tomorrow and how can we do it better tomorrow and since then this was in october and he has had one day of not being able to get reward time um so it went and switched he has a visual timer where he sits and he knows exactly how long he has to do before he can sit or get up and move um so he added a lot of movement in his day and he's really come a long way and it's what and he didn't have to go through a tear he's only on a watch he never did have to go to the tear process because we were able to intervene and be really proactive in that so the last piece of this to kind of wrap it up just to give you some more data about how we've changed the culture and not just academics but we're also trying to build students build the whole child and really work with them so i put our attendance rates for the last three years um we're back to kind of pre-pandemic norms for our attendance rates but our discipline has declined significantly i did compare it to 2019-20 school year because last year was just very different we didn't have a whole lot of discipline because we had so many students we were missing about 50 to 60 kids from where we are now so there's just a very different environment but we've had a 22 decrease in total number of disciplines we've reduced suspension rate by 19 and the total number of days suspended out by students by seven percent so we've been able to really dig into the culture uh using our pbs positive behavior interventions and support systems to create kind of a fun place for kids to be that where they want to be um and declining those behaviors along the way as well through our intervention systems and then uh last just really quick i'm gonna share this presentation with you these there's links to some pictures of things we've done but the last thing we've really tried to do is create a culture of literacy um and just anytime we get a chance to run reading competitions we just got finished dr seuss week and had a school-wide goal where everyone was working towards a common goal um they got ice cream sandwiches and extra recess uh we're involving parents through we involved like i did a reverse parade outside where parents were able to drive down our front sidewalk and we called the story book parade teachers dressed up we gave out books made it a big literacy event really well attended our parents loved it we've done school-wide reads where we bought a book for the entire school every every classroom gets their own book and they do read alouds throughout that week we go into classrooms and try to get in and read and be guest readers or sit down and read to a class and do a read-aloud too so just creating that culture of literacy is something that we've been working towards over the last few years and really you know building that within our kids and then the last piece just kind of where we're going at nve to give you a kind of projection for the future something that we're looking at for next year is how to get clubs back with pandemic clubs have kind of disappeared and we've lost a lot of sponsors so we're looking at how to break down the barriers of transportation and costs bringing community partners and actually look at exploring doing clubs during the school day building a time in once a month to get our kids interacting and doing some of those clubs things that they wouldn't be able to do if they couldn't stay after school and then working through engaging with stem engaging our kids through stem and pbl activities and then also refining our udl skills those are overall corporation pushes and things they're working on but it's something that we are really going to focus on heavily to continue our how we engage our kids differently so that wraps it up do you guys have any questions for us i can belch on the ice cream [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] i'm thinking to myself if you ever need school board um members to be guest readers i know seven that are right here and i bet we can talk some of them keep us in mind absolutely i was very impressed with the way you're integrating your behavior special behavioral specialist it seems like she's being a really having a diamond dynamic impact on your school very that was we wanted to make her very strategic from the start and i feel like we've done that thank you well thank you guys very much for your time tonight sorry to talk your ears off but we appreciate you the opportunity thanks very individualized approach to a very large um all right so if we go um on down the agenda under new business um neola theresa yes we have some policies for first reading so just let me know if you have any questions under professional staff we have recommendations yes lacie cockrell jennings county high school science teacher okay and so we'll need um emotion okay i've got pat tony as the second any discussion all those in favor raise your hand 7-0 um next under um high-ability coordinators asking for approval of the annual high ability coordinator um building contact stipend this comes from our high ability grant so a 550 stipend to amy jones at the hawk coordinator paige lorem from brush creek theresa ragsdale graham creek cody robbins hayden rachel neal north vernon abby cape sand creek emily ponzer ponzler scipio charlie wolf for the high school tara kelly jcms and sabrina nicholson jcns a motion by travis a second second by pat is there any discussion all those in favor raise your hand next we go down under support staff under recommendations we have jan heilman she's moving from the high school assistant head cook to be the head cook at brush creek elementary sandra jacobs is going to be a high school custodian caleb jones will be an nbe special ed parapro brenda little will be a high school cook wayne piatt is going to be a heist all right i'm sorry a sped bus driver and julia robertson will be a sand creek s or parapro okay do i have a motion i think chelsea tagged one second yes uh so i have a motion and a second any discussion no all those in favor raise your hand 7-0 under finances donations teresa yeah i'm asking the board to accept donations uh tonight joy of giving seven thousand sixty three dollars and twenty two cents to the high school for a convocation bill ludwig 2500 for the high school track and field programs ray wagster 100 for the high school panther pantry rose acre farms two cases of eggs to the high school culinary arts class nvic 250 the high school touch a classroom fire another 250 high school behavior support specialist skill group and then the third in the ic donation of to ms wagner's first grade class at brush creek for stem also amvets post number seven 240 and folding tables to our adult ed for classes at the jennings county jail so asking the board to accept those donations do i have a motion to accept those donations my gosh spent his whole life there and still giving that man that's something really any additional discussion from the group okay all of those in favor raise your hand 7-0 um next we go uh down to resolution yeah be five weeks before our next meeting so the resolution authorizing treasurer or deputy treasurer of the school corporation to make payments of claims without board prior action to april 4th 14th and allow treasurer deputizer to make transfers of appropriations within education debt service and operation in order to balance major classifications okay so just to clarify um it is through april the 14th of 2022 yes yep um do i have a motion tony second travis any discussion no all those in favor raise your hand 7-0 um copier update that's also you filming yes we have done an extensive look at our copiers uh for the last two years we bought about three per year that have just been on their last leg approached our copy supplier gordon flush which we've been using for years and asked we could do something to reduce our cost you know along with service better plus reduced costs so we've got uh just a long and short of it is we've got about 24 units that are only about five years old those are going to be able to make it we've got another 23 units that are older than six years so we're going we're looking at replacing 18 of those we're going to mothball a couple that don't have much use and then three more of them are going to be able to sustain it just because they're not uh heavy users and we're going to enter a program what i'd like to do is under a program he sort of engineered it how i've asked him to and i was surprised they agreed to it because right now we've got 50 48 copiers and they all have limitations and we could be ten thousand under on one and ten thousand over another we're paying we're paying an overage charge on the one even though we're ten thousand on a different one so for these 18 they're going to do a collective 3.6 million dollar usage so if one's over one's under we don't have to pay extra we just see how the whole year shakes out based on our prior usage and we would pay one time a year at the end of the year if we exceed our usage so if any one school happens to be higher we don't have to pay extra for it is the key to it another thing we've done with this is we're using three basic copiers we've got probably out of the 48 copiers we've probably got 30 different ones we've got three models that'll suffice all the needs of every school so it's going to reduce the amount of parts they have to carry so they're going to save there that's part of that savings coming on to us and it's going to make it easier to work on because there's basically three basic models they'll be working on now in the end when you boil everything down we spend roughly eighty to ninety thousand dollars a year on copier repairs and copier toner and things like that within this program i spent an additional based on the appropriation 35 000 trying to buy three copies three copiers a year which is what i bought last year with this we're going to be getting all this summer and we're actually going to be paying about at minimum 10 less possibly 25 000 less every year for the next five years so we've got the potential to save at a minimum 40 000 up to possibly 120 000 if we do this so when it when the dust settles we're getting about 68 000 on the usage and basically the purchase of the 18 and our old ones our 24 old units are about 25 000 a year for about a 96 000 year spend and i've got 125 currently in the allocation so it's it's a really good deal and it's going to benefit both parties they're not going to spend send as many people out and we got people in the room that can testify how often they come out with some of these older ones they come out quite a bit so it's going to be it's it's going to be a good thing for us so we had it down as an inform and planning to bring it back for a vote um in april uh was our intention because it was kind of a lot um which we can still do that however phillips been informed i think just today yeah that the cost went up about seven percent but they locked us in so we don't know that we really have another five weeks to wait to enter into that agreement we don't want it to go up another seven percent so that being said we want to be totally transparent and see if the board is ready to actually take a vote on that so that he can enter into that contract so here's the question yep saying these copies are in in each building yeah what what's going to happen we're going to shuffle some copiers around and we're going to be basically putting 18 new copiers throughout the corporation getting rid of what 20 copiers because two of them were just not being used we're just basically getting rid of those so there's gonna be a little bit of inner shuffling but we we went to every school talk with the principals to try to make sure we're meeting the needs because every school is a little bit different like the middle school has a bigger issue with doing lots of copies so they need the side tray to make sure they can have six seven hundred copies that are coming out at one time because they do things by department down there elementaries don't need that much excitement to make sure that we were taken away from any of the schools or changes significantly so that one school is going to suffer because they don't have access to no school should suffer we are taking one copier out of the east conference room which is a room that made five copies last year so i figured that's not a big deal that one goes and uh some other ones were combining like there's two copiers right now in the high school one of the student print copier and then this is a this is one that everybody else can use we're going to combine that get rid of one and have one unit for both of those so no nobody's really losing anything is the take away from it because we'll make sure they have access yeah you know and they want to run something yep we're not we're not moving locations of where they're at within each building those are all staying the same and no one should lose i think it's a good idea to go ahead and vote my sons over office depot and they raised theirs gordon flash told me today was tuesday they raised them seven but we are we're still locked because i was worried about that and so this right now is an inform item does anyone else have any questions for phillip we can but first i want to get questions answered to make sure that we're yeah yeah so does anybody else have any questions about this sounds like you sound like a very good move and a lot of good work phil yes yes so now um i'll ask if anyone does want to make a motion that we um actually um vote to approve this time okay so i have a motion from second from travis is there any additional discussion that we haven't already had okay then um i have a motion from pat second from travis all those in favor just raise your hand so 7-0 thank you um next under property um roy we have some um information about roofie yes um i would like to ask for board approval of the bids for the 2022 grouping and related work at scipio elementary school the base bit r1 is for total roof replacement on areas three and five and alternate r1a is for total roof replacement for area 7.
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and i don't come here very often because i usually work with jill and try and get things done without him needing your good help and i'd like to say you know in the 40-some years i've been practicing this is probably one of my more difficult ones to do as as we understand uh in 1972 when the oversight historic district was created uh floodplains and floodways were not significant features in the development of ann arbor now they're a paramount and uh this project there's different floodplain levels i read one of them had us at seven foot nine you know the tip of my fingers the whole that's the entire property underwater to a depth of seven foot nine inches um and i and because of that a lot of times like the previous submission we would seek to add on to the rear of the property and and hide the new structure but that's uh not not an opportunity that's available to us because of the fema regulations um the it for me my structural background it was a fun house to go through because there's so many it's like a history of framing from timber framing to sawn and timber frame before wire nails were and then later on those little odd little additions on the back um the the first practical difficulty and hardship that we have that's not self-imposed is is the floodplain issue and the second one is the the house is the contributing structure is very small and that 70 years ago you know some 10 years after the cut-off date i came was it 1940 or 1945 i didn't 44 was the last year what 44 was the last year so you know six or seven years after uh 1944 50 51 those editions started to pop on and those are from 70 years ago and they're contributing to uh diminishing that that 50 area that were allowed uh and as i i looked at the history of the house you know every 50 or 60 years or so someone would expand the house by one time 165 percent then 40 percent and now 70 years later we want to add another 30 36 39 to the house because every time it was down it was done for the current property owner to meet the demands of the existing at that time contemporary times that they needed i really tried to work very hard at making that addition as small as possible uh five foot six plate height tucking the rest of the all the rooms under the roof having the roof sloped back from the street which is a typical ploy to eliminate the massing and wherever i could i i cut down the ridgeline again to mitigate that massing the garage is in very poor condition the foundation is heaving and breaking it apart and it needs replaced and we would like to get some space in the attic of the garage in order to have a studio office area and that space has to be above the floodplain height so it's a little bit taller but as you drive around the old west side there are any number of carriage and carriage barns in the backs of the buildings that are one and a half two stories high and because of the new structure we're proposing it was a little taller it seemed to fit well with that that height is negotiable i appreciate the comments from jessica who's last name and i can't say about the fact that as you go through the neighborhood most of the old westside homes developed are one and a half two-story houses some with a third-story attic space and this is a small house created at a different period of time than those homes around it the houses behind this one sit on a hillside so they have a three-story face towards this house that's only one story high and uh it it's just uh you know it's the requirements of the historic standards of oneness are you know the rules and regulations that are forged that fit but generally most cases yet there are unique conditions in practical good each other's hardships and i as i look at this this just it has that criteria that i know that you're all going to set your good minds to and help us find a solution where this couple newly moved from ghana to come in ann arbor and starting their new family and live here hopes to be able to expand it a little bit more so they and their expanding family have a place to live in ann arbor for the next 15-20 years thank you i'm here to answer questions commissioners do you have any questions for mr heater no questions actually i do have one um if you could i mean i think you touched on a little bit but can you just um maybe talk about the the height in relation to the floor area increase and and the need and how that that's playing in if is that playing into the height overall height of the the addition right so the the plate height is five foot six it's about at the peak of the contributing structure ridge it's a very flat roof i think it's less than 312.
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uh we received two bids for the project south central roofing was low bidder for the base and the alternate work asking for the board to approve the bid from south central roofing for the base and the culture so roy's asking for [Music] approval for the base and the alternate so both include do i have a motion for that motion from tony i have a second second chelsea is there any discussion is it does that finish up the opening there's uh two smaller areas left uh that was addition when we did the gym so no it does not but it's getting close get a lot closer okay any other discussion get all of those in favor raise your hand 7-0 thank you um under relations we have parents right rights jcse policies crosswalk okay and that's listed as an approval but it's actually an inform so uh we have created a parent's right policy crosswalk and seth if you'll click on that tab for me oh wait my mouse is working um so we've created a parent's right policy crosswalk uh you know an active conversation point around the nation and state has been parents rights and access to their child's education and so in an effort to have increased transparency with our parents and make sure that they have the uh the ultimate level of engagement with their child that they'd like to have in their education we've created a crossword policy with i'm sorry crosswalk document with all of those um areas of keywords that are topics of conversation and then how that crosswalks with our policy that we actually have already in jennings county so we have all of our policies online on our website already this though narrows that down and makes it much quicker for parents to navigate so instead of going through those 10 000 policies they can quickly get to some key word topics and get more information so i'd like to share that and um shannon do you mind for people who are here if they and seth it's too far away for me to see i'm sorry can you click from your view to make it bigger thank you so the keyword topics are listed on the left and on the right you'll see the current policy indiana code or document that we have in place so i'd like to kind of briefly walk through and highlight what those will cover and then this will be posted on our website for parents on our main page if they have interest in getting detailed information on any of these topics so first up is student information and family information privacy so the question the topic being parents wanting to know how is any information about their student or their family being stored and who is that information shared with so our policy is listed for parents to be able to click and how this document works is they should just be able to click and immediately go to that part of our policy and our board documentation to read that in detail so if that's a question that someone has they should be able to get to that answer very easily and quickly and you can see when you click on that you find out that we have uh multiple different safeguards for privacy of information for our students from the types of servers that we have to making sure information from kids are de-identified before it's stored asking parent permission prior to pulling any information for a survey that would be something that they may want to have information on also listed is ferpa which is the federal law on privacy and family education rights and what that has to do with their students data next are mental health services what type of mental health services are offered through the schools and what our policies and parameters are on that through the schools we have guidance counseling positions our guidance counselors k through 12 work with our kids with academic planning in the elementary ages they work a lot with students in addition to the behavior support specialist on helping student if they're struggling with trying to acclimate to the school environment and they want some additional support if a counselor works with a student on any type of activity more than one time if they're going to see that child repeatedly we do have a informed consent form that is sent home for the parents and then they have to provide the permission for that counseling to occur so if parents are curious what that looks like they can click and see that document as well as what policies we follow in terms of crisis intervention and day-to-day working with our kids and i will mention that outside service providers such as center stone and bowen counseling those are things that have to be parent engagement to begin services the schools can provide parents a list of resources they can choose from but parents have to reach out to those type of services and engage we do not do that through the school system the next section has to do with curriculum selection and review and implementation so we have a robust set of policies that surround curriculum selection and review and you can see that they are extensively listed here and you can go in and see everything from how do we adopt our textbooks and get parent input for that to how do we cover controversial topics and i have on here a flow chart that visually summarizes the policies so of all those policies above this line this is a flow chart that our staff uses my mouse is freezing seth i'm trying to click on it to summarize those policies so there's a four point test that we look at we first start and say is it aborted off to textbook and if that's so then you know staff are approved to use those materials within the classroom without following through an additional process if they'd like to use a supplemental material that they're pulling for a course then they take it through a three-part series quest question series which is is the material necessary and relevant to the state standards and course content is it appropriate for the age and maturity and developmental level of the student and then finally is the curriculum content of a controversial nature and what i mean by that is it's something that could create some controversy on moral or ethical grounds for some students parents or community groups after the teacher reviews this process if they have a question about material that they would like to use and it does not fall under the approved status falling through the flow chart then they go meet with their principal and they move on to another curriculum review form and they and their principal answer those same questions together in addition to that the principal also has the resource of reaching out to a curriculum committee that works from around the district sorry the delay on the mouse uh i'd also like to point out for parents who may watch this after or watching now there's a couple other important things included on here if you have a question about a material that's used or you'd like to see it in person there is a form you can see right here form two you can click on form two and it's a form you fill out and you bring in and say i'd like to see a copy of that material and review it for myself and we can set up a review process for someone to do that or if you have a material that you have a concern about particularly there is forum the last form on this list and you can fill that out to ask for someone to have a review of that again then the next section reviews to parent communications and community relations it talks about some of the special parameters that we follow and fall under as a title one um school corporation our high school is not listed as title one but all of our other buildings are it involves parent-teacher conferences parents right to know and then visiting school being a part of organizations pto how we communicate with parents and special interest groups and then also if they have a if you're public or you're a parent and you have a complaint or a concern that you would like addressed there is a forum you can click on and fill out to address that of course also always reaching out to a school principal to a teacher to the superintendent is also a choice and then finally i mentioned and listed the due process rights for certified employees it mentions those rights that teachers have that fall under due process both from the state perspective and what our local policy is as well so those are all policies that are already available online but hopeful that this crosswalk makes it really easy and quick and transparent for any of our parents or community members who are interested in the information it'll be right on our main website and they'll be able to go in check this out click and explore any of those policies they'd like to see um so for those who are watching if they want to find this document you say right on the main website so that's the not the s the schools not the lower but the jcsc and will it be on the home page or will they need to click on it there will be a button on the first home page a red button and it'll say parent rights crosswalk so after tonight i'll request it to be posted usually takes about 24 hours for that process to happen yeah i want to brag on nikki we've always had parents rights is that right that's right but she has spent several days months organizing where it's easier to find and understand and uh we'll also be sending this document out through skyward to our families so in addition to the website i think i think earlier you make a great point um it's important to note that all of these policies existed before and i i do agree that they're difficult to find on our website at times because we have so many um and that happens with a lot of organizations but i appreciate this the ease of being able to just click on it takes you a link right to it and then just the time that you've put in to organize this for us and our community members thank you any other questions for nikki okay well then we're down i believe to other do you have anything else i do not right nothing else well um if there's nothing else to discuss in tonight's meeting then i will entertain a motion to adjourn second path all those in favor raise your hand 7-0 meeting adjourned
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um and so i i i wanted that wall to be there for the old structure to butt into and then immediately at that point the roof is going up and away from the existing contributing structure and i think that new roof is about 40 feet back from the front of the house and and then we have uh a modest 10 by 12 bedroom a very small 6x6 closet and a little tiny 8x8 bathroom tucked in under those roof planes so everything's under the roof the kitchen i want to point out is only six foot eight inches tall you know it's and it's not uh a code habitable space and we want to pull that roof up um to get more space in there the rest of the rooms in the existing house are seven foot four seven foot six and i also and and then in doing all the work we we want to get rid of that cement asbestos siding and once that's undertaken we can discover what the exis the original siding was on the house and as you looked at that rear elevation there's there's like four distinct different sided different addition on it and i wanted to knit that all together to make it a whole structure that that would fit in with the character of the old west side did i answer your questions okay thank you any additional questions from commissioners i had one but it was just answered by carl i was wondering how far back that uh the eve of the addition is that that butts the rear of the uh the existing you said 40 feet is that correct i'm sorry excuse me i'm story that's why i was repeating you that's okay yeah it's a from the front of the porch it's what i was just 42 feet back okay thank you i'll now open for this for public hearing um yeah go ahead come on if you can just state your name for the record i'm kelvin hughes hey and uh i'm from up north but i just wanted to say i i was living in ann arbor for my undergrad and my medical training here since uh 2004 and left for a few years and met kelvin in ghana and we actually i returned during the pandemic and um we were apart for quite a few months and i was here doing some work and we actually lived on 7th street when he came after we were allowed to kind of come back together after the pandemic and um this opportunity kind of came up shortly after we were really excited um to be able to live on seventh street and enjoy everything else i think had been quite modest in that she came back because of the call for doctors during the pandemic and we were separated from six months and she left the honeymoon to come back because you know arnold means a lot to her and and and you know and we fell in love with that with seventh street and when because we were just you know a block and a half up we were you know walking in west park and and trying to run as well but that didn't happen as much and but i think the other thing to say is that the garage is really important for us as you can tell from my funny accent i'm not from around here our family lives all around the world and having the opportunity for them to come and visit and have a base to explore michigan and stay with us and my parents are very keen to come and get their nine-month-old grandson much better and having a place that we can have them is really really important for us and and i think the other thing to say is that i grew up in london and the architecture is part of the fabric and the culture that we have there the school i went to was founded in 1573 and the building i was in school for seven years uh 1691 so the reason we've chosen carl and also amos and david our builders is because you know we wanted to be respectful to the historic district commission we wanted to contribute to that um the house is a little bit janky and uh needs some tlc and i think that the reason we we you know won the bid actually was because no one else wanted it the only people that wanted it were investors they were going to turn it into a rental and the other sort of families were interested and said it was too much work and that's why we got it but we do want to restore it to what we hope was its former glory and contribute positively to the old west side thank you very much like this couple this time thank you thank you so much for having us guys i will now open this to the public hearing if this is an opportunity for persons to speak up to three minutes about the application at 220 south seventh street uh kristen do we have any callers there are no callers so we'll close the public hearing is there a commissioner that would like to make a motion on the application we have commissioner rocklin shall i do the garage first maybe is it which would you like for sure i'll do them separately but do you i don't have a preference if you have a preference well okay i'm looking for it let me see it what they i'll do the garage first okay um i move that the commission approve with conditions and issue why does it say approve with conditions are there conditions for the garage no conditions oh just that um maybe there's something about just that i needed more information on the door okay the person door the person yeah i will keep that in there then i move that the commission approve with conditions and issue a certificate of appropriateness for the application at 220 south 7th street a contributing property in the old west side historic district to replace a modern garage with the taller garage in the same footprint on the condition that the door details are reviewed by staff in a separate application as conditioned the work is compatible in exterior design arrangement materials and relationship to the building and the surrounding area and meets the city of ann arbor historic district design guidelines for additions and the secretary of the interior standards for rehabilitation and guidelines for rehabilitating historic buildings in particular standards one two nine and ten and the guidelines for additions and building site support move back commissioner rockled seconded by commissioner white is there a discussion on the motion elevation it doesn't really give you the feel that you'll have there right right so the garage is is pretty far back in the overall scheme of the house it sits back from it yeah it's going to say it doesn't quite clear all the additions go ahead it's ten feet when we take the garage down the building code says we can't rebuild it and exactly where it is so we have to push it back a little bit to be 10 feet away from the existing house is it so inspect being 10 foot back on the um on the site plan i i show that 10 foot dimension on the proposed site plan yeah it looks like there's a diagonal dimension yeah yes that's correct okay so it's actually even a little further from the in the rear of the yeah it's back behind the hole yes i'm just looking at some of the guidelines that are referenced i think and i can state i guess a couple the garages is quite a ways back from from the street and they're it being set back from the house i think is helpful i think we've talked a little bit about you know the site itself um being pretty low and depressed from the road and it actually dips in elevation as you as you go further back i think the only concern i have is is the height and relation then to the rest of the the project depending on you know what happens with that motion is is there an issue with the height okay are you recommending we i i think i'm questioning do we need to discuss the the first the edition first let's let's can we hold and and postpone this until we i i didn't uh i didn't think that through just hold off on this and and you can now make the motion for the addition we can come back to the garage that's fine great let's do it um one moment please there it is i move that the commission issue a certificate of appropriateness for the application at 220 south seventh street a contributing property in the old west side historic district to construct a second floor rear edition on top of existing modern rear additions on the following conditions that the clabbered siding is wood or cementitious with this exposure similar to the lap siding in the house's front gable and that the additions windows and doors are reviewed by staff in a separate application as conditioned the work is compatible in exterior design arrangement materials and relationship to the building and the surrounding area and meets the city of ann arbor historic district design guidelines for additions and the secretary of the interior standards for rehabilitation and guidelines for rehabilitating historic buildings in particular standards 1 2 9 and 10 and the guidelines for additions and building site support moves by commissioner rocklin seconded by commissioner white is there a discussion on the motion anyone that wants to jump first i'm a just a general i mean just my opinion pardon me i can't hear you oh sorry let me microphone calls um yeah so just my general opinion not having been to the site um i just think that the project as a whole like when you combine this higher garage and this high edition the cumulative impact it's it's gonna end up having a kind of a drastic change to the look and feel of this site um so i understand the idea of like approving the garage first um to me just the project as a total would have have a really kind of drastic impact on the site as a whole um so i don't know if i can support both the garage and the addition perhaps i can support just a garage at this point but certainly not both so that's kind of where i'm coming from commissioner white did you well one of the things that that structure is the lost part of the neighborhood and everything surrounding that neighborhood is larger there's an apartment building that's out there it's taller than that building it's uh on the back it goes up a hill so whatever is there they're looking down on the on the property it's there and going the other way they're the lowest so whatever they're building there that no one in the neighborhood is going to be looking up they're all going to be looking down so i guess uh there's you know i'm definitely struggling here because we all seem to be um the project is very well thought out and detailed uh the design is um you know just so thorough and obviously uh you know very intelligent and thoughtful and then there's there's the standards that say that you know 50 is the maximum and that you shouldn't overpower the historic portion of the house then you have the fact like what commissioner white just brought up where this is a particular situation in a flood plain you cannot do the the rear addition that we've seen other uh let's say short statured homes accomplished with a very large backyard and maybe a very large well a fifty percent one-story addition or maybe a one story edition or something like that that's not available here so that's what i'm struggling with anyone else i i agree it's um it's a head scratcher because you know there's there's the letter of the the guidelines and uh standards and then you know there's how best can they meet the intent and and the goals of it um with such a unique case right it's interesting to hear the applicant mention that when they were bidding on the home that you know all other viable options or bidders were or rental you know to be rental properties and is that what we want to promote versus a homeowner who's going to invest in the property and and care for it in a way that their neighbors presumably are um so that that adds for me an interesting layer as well you know that that other factor um yeah on paper you know it seems yeah there are certain guidelines that it doesn't meet but i think there's there's value there to be considered and in the other aspects that the applicant has presented i generally i agree with that assessment i think this is a it's a tricky case and i think that um i appreciate the applicant stating there you know providing the information regarding the intent to to restore a historic home that has a very particular challenge a very tricky challenge um i think you know as i was trying to pull up the guidelines and just look through the first you know several one two nine and ten um you know the one i think it definitely meets the property will be used as it was historically or be given in new use requires minimal change to distinctive materials features spatial relationships i think for the most part that's met the spatial relationships maybe you know a little bit in question but i think for the most part it's staying within the same footprint the height is really i think the one thing in question but i think the lot lends itself to a little bit of a flexible i'd say really spatial relationship the historic character of the property will be retained the entire front main portion of the property is going to be completely visible and almost untouched with the exception of the wing to the south of the property i think for me it becomes a question about you know as we maybe move down into um number nine where are we gonna to the new york new work will be differentiated i think it definitely will be but the massing scot size and scale that the roof height is it we get into the question of is it going to be so overpowering and looming in the back as we can move to the back of the house and things really start to to get higher and i think that that's the questionable piece for me and that's where the additional floor area also becomes questionable for me because if we didn't have the additional floor area up there we might not have the height issue that would be bringing this as an additional issue so i think that that's the one piece that is is my struggle i was just going to look to see it number 10 since i'm going through should be undertaken in such a manner that if removed in the future the essential form integrity of the property will would remain i believe we we meet that one so for the most part i think we're meeting the majority of the guidelines um i'm just again looking at ann arbor and i think most of those are similar say additional say something similar than the ones that were just read well so in not recommended editions designing a new addition so that it's size scale in relation to the historic building are out of proportion thus diminishing the historic character so that's a question to ask yourself is does this proposed edition diminish the historic character of the property or not one of the questions is in the neighborhood they mentioned that they had other buildings around them they're already taller than that building and so since they're the lowest it's not going to be taller than the ones that are already existing in the neighborhood it's because you're still going to be looking down at that from uh if i'm in one neighbor in that house looking at their house i agree i think uh the the neighborhood context will not be uh diminished or changed in any way by the edition i'm i'm more thinking about the historic structure on the property itself um you know will that be diminished and so that's that's to me the question now that's a tough one i'm almost leaning toward it it won't be because of how much of the historic building is is still prevalent and un untouched and it's pretty far back it was 40 feet from the porch and that's another i don't know 10 feet or so from the front walk it's hard to it's hard to visualize though you know what it's a little bit different once it's in place but and i do think the design is is pretty well considered as far as how that that new roof would interact with the existing roof it creates even though we don't have the step back like we would normally like to see on in addition it gives a distinct change and plane from the original roof and i think the foundation is different in that portion let's vote is everybody ready for vote okay all of those in favor of the motion please say yes yes all of those opposed please say no no the motion carries we move on to the garage motion do you have something that you'd like no no i okay i i i came up too quickly but i have a bad back so i have to walk around we'll finish the second motion the the garage motion uh do we need to re-read it or what's the second yeah you're good as long as dave and bob are not reading it okay so i guess the the question is is the addition of the garage and the the additional height going to be an issue with the in comparison with the the house itself there can be an added component it's i gotta say this is the an application that really would have uh benefited i think from a perspective drawing because the the elevation don't put that up if unless you don't want to do the project any favors because it just looks tall but in perspective you know it's not going to look tall i don't think it's going to it's going to disappear half of it behind the house and then it's going to be lower than then the new roof and it sounds like it's going to be lower than than neighboring houses so it's it's a tough one to uh to visualize without a drawing i agree what do you guys think i agree having that like a perspective view just from the side you know public right away would have helped perceive the how far back it is the depths before you even get to the the new roof which is then sloping away from you so that making that gesture of rotating the the roof form certainly helped but i agree that type of a drawing or image would have would have been helpful but regarding the garage even in the elevation that we see from the front elevation can we look at a photo of the existing garage from the sidewalk and we can oh yeah ask how much taller it is then we can squint there it is right there let's see you can see how far far back so the existing garage is way back it's down a foot or so and the plate height is is i i don't even think it's an eight foot plate height and then it has this 312 morph pitch on it which is uncharacteristic to most of the structures in the west side so we're we're gonna have an eight foot plate and then a four foot sidewall which which will probably be about the height of the existing garage roof and then the peaked roof on top of that it's a 20-foot width 12-12 pitch so it'll be 10 more feet so it's 14 and 8 that's 22 feet uh 14 and 8.
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yeah 22 feet high whereas the garage that you're looking at right now is probably 11 or 12 feet high and and i'm sorry david you're correct you can't have the big garage on next to the little house and the garage can be taller i felt because if the house could be taller and of course the apartment building right next door is up about five feet and the great elevation and much taller and it seemed to fit back there and then the trees down the north side of the property line are 40 50 feet tall and they all you have to recognize that the landscaping too affects the massing and the look and the volumes and whatnot right thank you any additional comments he is ready for a vote i think so all right all of those in favor please say yes yes yes all of those opposed please say no the motion carries uh please note that you must sorry i'm going to find my language here thank you very much this is a difficult one and i appreciate it and we have to recognize that variance you come before boards for variances because you have practical difficulties and hardships that are in unique conditions and i and i appreciate all the effort and your energy put into this thank you of course thank you hey carl and calvin and heidi um as a condition of these motions i do need more information on the new person doors and the new windows on the edition it won't be long thank you and you know i'll give it to you all right uh we actually need to take a five minute recess the zoom is not working so we need to take care of the technical difficulties take five [Music] order from our recess uh we are on hearing f3 530 north division dispatcher when you're ready will you please give the staff report okay all right one second well thank you everyone so back in the magical month of april 2020 there was an application to approve a replacement building a redo of an existing building with a big addition in the old fourth ward historic district on this building um the applicant came into a working session or two and i'm thinking it may have even gone to a meeting once but then kovid hit and the application was live and we realized after missing both the march and april htc meetings which were cancelled we had two or three outstanding applications and those um we dealt with by seeing if anybody had any issues with them and then letting them be approved after the end of the 60-day period by taking no action because no serious issues were raised at that time so uh this application does have a certificate of appropriateness it was earlier than that deemed to be a non-contributing structure anyway it's two structures that were glommed together a long time ago and made into you know this just one mega building here and so we've got an approved plan for modifying this building putting an addition on the back making it the greenest building in a large radius and doug can tell you a little more about that if he wants to but after that certificate of appropriateness was issued uh the team working on this took some of the comments that they heard from the commission to heart and made some modifications and those are what are here tonight to be discussed and in a nutshell i borrowed some of the doug's application slides here this is the front of the existing building on a much nicer summer day and here's what it looks like today and the back today this on the top the red and yellow buildings are what was approved in march of 2020 and you can see the addition here in the back you can see that the the roof line is modified there's tons of solar panels up here there are shed dormers on both sides and the windows haven't changed again this is not a contributing building so this was all good and the thing that the hcc commented on specifically one of them was this stairwell going down here because having this big guard rail in the front yard wasn't ideal so it was redesigned by sinking part of this front corner of the yard and putting up a low retaining wall and a bunch of landscaping here in order to make this guard rail system go away so the way it works now and this is the money slide with the the site plan and the the rendering of what it would look like here this is what it was what it used to look like here on the left but you would walk to the toward the front door two steps down to this slightly sunken patio and then a few more steps down underneath the front porch so guard rail's handrails are hidden underneath the porch this surface doug can tell you a little bit more about but there is a stone wall akin to the stonewall that is outside of the church down the street saint andrews um this gives them patio space for the tenants to use it's not typical to have a sunken front yard there i can think of two in the old west side that have been approved in the last five or six years one's on the corner of mosley and second and one is at the corner of 7th and west jefferson that was a big new house with the whole side yard was sunk and that was the most recent one so here's a view from the street of what it would look like you can see the wall here it's at its uh let's see this is this is two feet here so the the wall itself above grade looks like it's even less than two feet tall though it does step around and the the entry would be right over here here's a drawing uh showing uh sort of a section a side view of here would be the wall from the inside this is this would be at its tallest point um and the sidewalk is here the um the the site slopes downhill uh going to the north quite substantially there are a couple of other things that are included in this application the top was what was approved and the bottom is what is proposed some window changes both on the existing part and on the new edition none of these even give me pause because again it's a non-contributing building and it's it's very close to what was proved the first time around here's the the south sorry the north side elevation same thing some window changes um maybe doug can come and it does look like the the rear edition is shallower than it used to be but when we get to you doug you can talk about that because there used to be uh like three four windows across and now there's one in the center of just the new addition on the back from the north um let's see and here's another view of what the the front looks like okay that's it for my presentation i'm going to turn it back to the chair i did i did comment briefly that i think that this work is appropriate i i do prefer it to having this big stairwell going down in the front i don't think that that's a good or an appropriate look and well i wouldn't if this were a contributing structure i probably would not be very much in favor at all of a sunken patio in a front yard but given its location kind of at the end of the row the district sort of peters out behind it and uh i'm really okay with with this this rework as proposed and i do appreciate the team's try attempt to to get rid of that big guard rail in the front yard thank you that's it for me thank you mr thatcher commissioner quijano and myself are on the review committee i can go ahead and start on this one so i generally agree with staff i think the one of the most i think i'm we were looking mostly at the you know this front entrance modification right because that's that's really the the house i think from one of the images in the packet that we'll probably get to in the presentation um by the applicant shows the footprint believe it is it is slightly forward a little bit oh yeah i'm sorry that's it i didn't mention that the house is shifting a little bit right on its foundation to be more parallel to the street and to fit on the lot better but that should have been in there too i think it's on page 37 in the pdf but there there's a footprint of the old and like a and a crosshash with a heavy dash line that's showing the new so the plane of the front wall is shifting forward slightly not i think almost an insignificant difference for for this conversation that like miss thatcher said the big change is really that that front yard space um the the slope that is existing does the uh sidewalk and and street you know start to really slope toward the north quite significantly across the property i don't have an issue with the retaining wall i think that's proposed it looks like it's at a decent height there were other houses around in the same area that also have retaining walls we've seen these on a few properties just in the front yard it looks like there is going to be a little bit of a buffer in between the retaining wall and the sidewalk so a planting buffer i think one of the only kind of questions or comments we were discussed was what is the surface of that patio because it does seem to take up quite a bit of the front yard space and that was really the i think the main concern from our point of view so figuring finding out what that surface is and how that you know works with the overall net zero and if there's any other additional greenery planned for that space in particular commissioner i really don't have much more to add to the comments made by uh our chair and the information presented by staff it's really just understanding the impact of um in my mind the impact of that change to the front yard portion um as a non-contributing uh building in the district thank you okay so i will now turn it over to uh mr selby do you have access to share your presentation or uh yes i believe i do um shoot i for some reason it's not falling in though uh give me one second okay can you see that sort of you may need to zoom in on very distinct areas if you're when you're talking about them because the monitors we see are on the opposite side of the room anybody wants to if anybody wants to get up and stand under the monitors there's no reason you can't do that oh man i just lost it too um okay uh sorry i i probably should have just come in i kind of thought that uh it was not really happening down down at the city hall yet so um go ahead we can we can see and if we need to get up and go over there we can okay well obviously uh i i believe jill showed this this slide here which is uh you know um what had passed and what it is now versus what passed in march of 2020.
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um yeah i would say that uh that we we really did um uh when the suggestion was made to you know get rid of the guardrail well the only reason it was there is because you know we we thought we had to enter from the um from the driveway which the driveway goes up kind of uh the the the terrain is falling in two directions here so it's falling down as you go down the sidewalk and it's falling as you come down the driveway um so i i think in some ways this drawing light and the on the right might be a little deceiving is that it it looks deeper than it probably would be but that's mostly because we were coming from the driveway side um and uh and you know we just we had to abide with the code um the requirements that we have a guardrail over 30 over 30 inches tall but nonetheless when we came back uh shannon gibrandall and kathy keeneth uh sadashiv and myself got together and said you know what can we do and it really came down to how do we get to the point of being able to traverse around down to this um to the um to the underground part the uh the commissioners had asked for us to remove the stairs or move the stairs to no further south uh than the corner of the building which is you know sort of where you see that handrail on uh return on the left um and then also to get rid of the handrail um so we were kind of excited about it because we not only moved the stairs all the way uh we actually were able to move them all the way to the to the porch wall and so they're completely hidden and there is no handrail now um it also solved some other issues in terms of uh you know just allowing more daylight into that area and sort of having the garden apartment be um something that's um you know just so it's got a little bit of outdoor space that helps with the living building challenge aspect of the project because you know you're supposed to give people access to outdoors and and uh and sort of spaces like that to to hang out and to to enjoy the natural areas around um one of the things that you know shannon had uh had done in her part of the design is to incorporate quite a bit of landscaping around um which a lot of which is required by the program details but kind of being sensitive to the fact that we needed to kind of shield that area and make it uh make it work um uh the the north part you know going north from the porch is is all extensively landscaped actually the south part there is too it's it's got a buffer pretty much all the way around it except for the actual walkway um i also would say that this is a total of nine feet from the front of the porch to the start of the landscaping so it's it's a pretty small area to begin with um one of our sort of ideals and and that was to borrow from the church up the street um we're going to have some cut stone uh from the actual project the foundation is 100 sunk into the ground right now but there is an area in the rear that has some cut stones so we thought well gosh it'd be really nice to reuse that on the site and then um and do a nice masonry wall like you see it uh at san andreas church and and the other thing was is you know just kind of these little areas to pause off of the sidewalk kind of a transition zone between public and private spheres um and also you know um being that uh that uh that particular location has some terrain changes too so how they dealt with you know with sort of the lower areas going down into um you know sort of the lower areas versus going kind of up into the the church itself um those were the kind of the um the things that we we used to to call on to to help this design um i think jill showed you this slide um so um yeah we are it is two risers down to uh to the uh the sunken area there um that is a total of nine feet from the house uh to the uh to the front so um again not a not a huge area but um a little bit more generous than if you just had to make a pathway there was really no way to get to the point of not needing a handrail somewhere unless we at least brought this down so we brought brought it down to the minimum amount we could to be able to lose the handrail entirely i had designed this surface below to be a exposed aggregate concrete i typically have used that for sort of outdoor areas where stone or patio pavers aren't used the reason i like it and especially in this context is the aggregate we use in it is a granite keystone these fine pea stone pebbles and once you wash the the cream concrete cream off and oil those pebbles they look a lot like they they're the same material as the granite of the block so you get that kind of a nice colorful surface very earthy in tone and texture which i thought would go really great with with the stone which is a multicolored stone so you'll kind of get that multi-color effect in the keystone itself i'm not married to that but that's just kind of what we came up with as the design team and thought that would look nice there there is uh this area does not perk on the site there is a park part in the back that does um so we are required to have a drain in this um in this area that uh that goes out to uh the driveway um with the the the drain that comes down there so there's this and a small area of the driveway go into the storm sewer which is right at the edge of the property there and then but about 90 to 95 percent of the water that falls on the site actually will be infiltrated in the back so this area is just a little too low for that but it's a very small amount by the volume on the total lot um yeah i made this slide just to kind of i think the pictures can be a little deceiving it's really not that far above the the sidewalk and in fact um the north side of the sidewalk um is is uh even a foot lower than than what the um the lowest part or the the lower part of the entry is uh it's uh in total um at the highest point of the sidewalk to the uh entry area the sunken entry area is just under two feet um and so from the outside you'll see uh walking down the sidewalk you'll see a low wall on the inside it's probably something that somebody could kind of lean on or sit on and it would be about the right height for uh for you know people to um to kind of congregate and consider lean on the wall um what i also thought was just you know that the height difference from even walking down the sidewalk to somebody in there is not great so i don't think it will be very jarring from a standpoint of being like you know several feet down or anything like that you know this was really just a slide was to say that you know there's so much um the neighborhood in general is pretty flat and so but there this is an area with some terrain and those areas with terrain there's a variety of different ways that those are kind of dealt with this is directly across the street the flatiron building they kind of had the same condition they had a an area where they needed to uh they had a you know the parking is about six feet lower this is just a concrete wall um to uh protect people from falling over the edge to the parking area below um that is paved there's also right off of the um off of the sidewalk it goes down a few steps into a lower entry area there too um so uh not out of context uh in the uh in the immediate area for another non-contributing structure um and uh the only difference being is that this one kind of enlivens the street scene a little bit so it's not so much like here's a wall to protect the property from the sidewalk and vice versa but um in our case it's more like here's natural materials that match other things in the neighborhood and create uh create their own environment of enjoyment for the people who live there um uh yeah we we uh we did uh make some um changes to the property one of the ones i think worked out better uh is that the we were able to we thickened up the um the sections between the floors and have a little bit of a ceiling that's raised inside there the changes uh were partially required by fire code but in the end i think it looked real real similar to what we had originally passed the windows changed because the layout and the inside had to change as a result of moving those the structure that moving it uh the the entry down uh we changed the inside and made the the social space the common areas of the house all towards the front and so what you see there in the middle um in the bump out and above that that's the kitchen and all those units um so what you're seeing is the windows that are over the sink which is i find common uh in you know sort of the older houses is that the windows over the sink have to be a little shorter um in order to have a counter height there but the rest of them are meant to be kind of taller and skinnier uh and less window to wall ratio like you would see commonly in in older homes um the um uh the north elevation doesn't get really seen very much because you're kind of heading up the hill and it's the opposite direction of the street um one of the things that happened uh as a result of covid was that uh when it first hit nobody knew what was going to happen and the bank said hey guess what we're not going to be financing any student rentals for a while nobody even knows people were going to be going to school anymore for a little while um and so that took about a year to resolve that and be able to get this finance again but in the meantime as we all know uh construction costs have gone through the roof um and so one of the ways i've kind of dealt with that and been able to do that without sacrificing a lot of the deep green perspectives of a net positive energy house and all of the extensive rebuilding of infrastructure that i have to do not only on this property but also in the street out in the street um was to uh to go modular when i was working with meadowlark we designed and built the nation the nation's first uh leed platinum modular home east of california anyway and um so uh i work closely with a company uh or i have on several projects uh and kind of know how to design in this fashion um it's a great quality building and they are able to alter their construction methods to allow this to be built in that fashion and due to the time savings and some of the money savings on this i was able to bring the project i wouldn't say back to where it was but somewhere in alignment where i could still actually get it financed but as a result um they're one of the the sections in the back had to grow to the to the rear a little bit in order to be able to fit in with how those items are built um some minor changes to the front uh do also again due to the um due to the uh change in layout the three windows in the front no longer worked in that layout so but we actually again thought that might be a little bit of an advantage just because it it wasn't so matchy-matchy and uh provided a little bit of context between the homes a little bit of distinction anyway we also had the roof lines go from 10 and 12 to 12 and 12 which better match the buildings on the street that are being compared to i think i have a slide coming up for that actually i'll just go to that slide here so the proposed slide uh down on the bottom this is what it is in the front and this is what it is below i always kind of thought you know the low slung nature of this house and how it really doesn't match the patterns of the other house it kind of reminded me of a broken front tooth um and um so what we tried to do with the new one was to match the the dormer pitches and the uh 12 and 12 pitches you see commonly on the block and then also um uh you know just sort of the heights of the homes so um something that would make it match a little better than what it does currently uh we did go through the htc principles for building new structures in a historic district and these are them um so maintaining the existing spacing for front and side yard setbacks along the block as seen from the street and this slide was referred to this yellow line here all of these houses match up pretty well and then you get to this house and it's it was kind of untwisted on the lot and i think you know probably the original home that was there was probably a a little bit turned and then when they moved the other house on just kind of crammed them together or whatever it's got a significant twist to it and if you there are a few orientation points where you're like oh that house doesn't kind of line up so we did turn it to match uh the building all the buildings to the south uh in terms of its alignment to the street and then also squared it up to the street um and then going to the north is the cornwall mansion where it changes considerably and kind of as jill said it kind of the historic district kind of peters out there or at least changes form um so we thought this was actually an improvement um to to it because it brings it more in line with the with the other uh with the other homes on the block not only in terms of the massing in the building height and the roof lines and things like that but also how it's aligned to the street the next item was orienting the front of the house towards the street and clearly identifying the front door so we have a traditional porch on the front uh it clearly identifies the front door and a porch to the to the street i think probably better than it does now which is almost kind of like a deck like appearance on the front with some kind of um strange little gables over the over the uh each door that were actually a porch column that was cut off at a 45 degree angle i can kind of tell that building was put together in 1929 because it looked like they just grabbed whatever they could find and and and uh and kind of built it on that and on the building but uh it doesn't have a lot of rhyme or reason and this the materials are less than less than uh less than desirable in some regards i did want to make a note of down here on the front of the properties across the street which are set back a little bit um but they have some paved areas and some areas that are just you know cars pulling up and parking uh on several of the houses across the street um and that comes into play in a little bit here um the third point for appropriate was designing a new front facade that's similar in scale and proportion to the other contributing buildings and you know again that's kind of this slide here i think it's much more in scale and uh and more uh in context with the neighborhood as you go down the street and certainly around generally in the old fourth ward uh placement scaling spacing orientation of windows and doors um we tried real hard to give this uh building a historical context in that regard with our window placement and um i i don't i don't think that's out of alignment there in any way probably a little better than what it is again than what it is right now for sure um selecting materials and finishes that are compatible with historic materials and finishes found in surrounding contributing buildings uh uh we went down here um uh you know this will uh be uh lap siding that is of us of a character that you would find commonly in the area uh uh we're gonna be setting the windows into into the uh into the window openings a little bit to give them a little bit more texture there will be all the all the trim that you would see normally on an old house so so you know a nice big beefy trim and a well made sort of exterior that that has contacts with the other homes in the neighborhood or a home that was built of this era using a wood-based trim i have tried really really hard to find antique um clabbered siding i've looked all over indiana ohio and michigan nobody seems to have it i've talked to all the salvaged people for old houses it's just not something that people salvage i'm pretty certain that what i'll find on the house when we pull the three layers of siding off is that underlying all that the um uh the existing collaborates are going to have a lot of nails in them i've worked with old siding quite a quite a lot in my career and it splits very easily when nails are driven through it and we've got two layers of asphalt and then vinyl over that so there's going to be quite a lot of nails that got that were driven through it but nonetheless even if i could save a good share of it it's a small amount of what i would need maybe enough to do one side maybe even one half of another side but um there is no way that i'll find a material uh to replace the rest of it i just can't find it and i would love to use an antique material there i love old siding i even like working with it but it just does not seem to be able to be had last one was placing utility connections at the rear or other location that minimized visibility from the street all of that is going underground the only thing that will be visible from the street is required by the fire code to have a fire what do you call it the thing that they tap into on the front of the house in a strobe um so that that will go off in the event of a fire this doesn't need to be sprinklered um so there was one area that said not appropriate and that's paving a high percentage of the front yard or otherwise disrupting the landscape patterns within front yards so um i just did want to say that while uh you know the front area to the south like i said is nine feet um and that will be paved i could skinny that up in some ways and make it more of like a walkway um that would still retain uh or you know keep the the handrail out of there but um this just does so many nice things for it i i really i in my heart of hearts i'm like this isn't really that much lower than the sidewalk so i i think that that um that cut stone wall on the outside is going to look amazing and it will be pretty well in context with uh with the neighborhood um at least up the street but if you look here we've just got landscaping all through here and the north side is completely landscaped um so there's just going to be this nice green buffer around everywhere and the materials will be natural looking materials when i look at the immediate context of the area again you know i'm seeing a lot of parking out in front and things like that and i know that's not you know what the htc would like to see but it is what's there um the uh other non-contributing structure across the street the uh the uh the flatiron building has a similar context and that it is um almost 100 percent paved with that same concrete wall out front the only difference being is that that's made for cars not for people uh so we we've done our best to to soften this up and to minimize it while still getting all the advantages of losing the handrail in front entirely and giving the occupants of the building something that they can really enjoy so i think that in terms of the context of the neighborhood i i felt like it does fit um there is some uh things that are rhyming with saint andrews church up the block we are doing an extensive landscaping job to try and and make this uh something that we uh looks looks as good as it's gonna function and it will certainly be better for the people who live there so that's kind of where we're at i um i'd like to i'd like to build this at this point i'm going to be looking at starting in june of 2023 i have to build it on the academic calendar but i um i just i hope for the opportunity to be able to uh to build this uh this building i'm i'm kind of at the the point of of whether this is going to go forward or not but um you know i bought this building my wife and i bought this building 22 years ago i bought it knowing that at some point in the future it was going to need an extensive project it's it's structurally very deficient and i would like to do something significant with it that has a a much better um sort of uh goal in the project than just to put up a building that people can live in so you know this will be net positive energy it's all an all-electric solar powered home uh we've designed it to have ultra low water use it is designed to fit the neighborhood context we made that hyphen in the back even because the original red the original home had the footprint of that red home you see there and probably wasn't really all that different in appearance at least in some regard in terms of the roof lines and things like that we believe it vastly beautifies the the streetscape on division street this has a strong support of the old fourth ward neighborhood association it'll be a well-built building for many lifetimes provides a better living space for tenants it's also going to be a really a kind of a shining star of the city's 2030 goals for what they're looking for housing and student rental housing is by far and away the worst class of uh worst performing class of buildings when it comes to sustainability in the city you know by a long shot and uh you know if we're i'm actually have a meeting with the city tomorrow to talk about how can we green our student rental stock and um you know what this part of the goal of this is to is to show people is that you can invest oh you know some would say over invest in a property on the front end but um i believe that if if we can do this right uh that uh that it'll it'll return dividends for a long time it may take a lot longer to pay off but in the end it's going to be something that's ready for the next 100 years and not something that's going to need to be retrofit in the future and something that is much more comfortable much healthier using sustainable materials it just really uh is something that i strongly believe is an important example for what can happen when you take the long-term view in building you know especially things like income properties i will be replacing city infrastructure out on the street at no cost to taxpayers and the tax man is going to be making a lot more on us from from this building than what we're currently paying on on the existing structure so i i think in all of those contexts this is a much more appropriate building for the neighborhood both in looks and in function and i hope that the historic district commissioners will see it the same and grant a certificate of appropriateness thanks thank you doug thank you for your thorough presentation and giving us all a refresher on the project the materials the composition and the uh the modifications um it's good to see it again just as a reminder the commissioners the project does have a certificate of appropriateness so we're really just looking at some of the major modifications and if there are any issues with with changes in materials or window placement i don't i don't think there's any issues with any of those but mostly the front yard is the majority of where the change occurs in terms of that that front sunken yard and the guardrail um do any of the commissioners have questions for the applicant uh i have a question sure uh doug when when you spoke earlier about the um the proposed concrete treatment and the aesthetics of it that was really the message that i heard that you were proposing this solid concrete paved surface in the in that front portion of the yard that sunk in but i i apologize if i missed it but i didn't hear that there was like a performance or some sort of water issue reason for the solid concrete that's going in it was more of an aesthetic decision is that correct yes i have to put a drain in this area regardless um even if i was to do any type of pavement materials because it doesn't work here um so even pavers uh even pervious pavers and things like that still aren't going to infiltrate water to the city standards um uh or really what i would want they're seeing is you know the last thing you want is a pond in that area um so uh the materials were not selected from a water management perspective but more from an aesthetic perspective that is correct um that the water will be managed through a drain in the in that in that area okay thank you commissioner rocklin um okay so i i need i'd like to hear some uh some more uh i guess a reiteration of the benefits of um of the cut stone wall that you're proposing and i'm asking that because like we had the guard rail which seemed out of place um but the the yard was sort of going to be left as is i mean we didn't see maybe a landscape plan but the yard was not going to be sunken and we said can you move the guard rail uh north of the the south uh elevation of the wall and and then so the guardrail went away but now we've got a sunken yard and a very long cut stone wall so um i guess it's i just um want to hear again like tell me again like what are the benefits to the project of having like okay so i we we have to get down to the the area below and there's a couple ways to do it so in in the way you're proposing now what is the benefit of going to the sunken yard with the wall to the overall project because like i kind of see it like six and one half dozen the other where we had a guardrail now we have a wall and we can still get down to underneath the porch but are there other benefits that that wall is providing the project um and can you explain those again please sure um we always were going to need a wall alongside the driveway and that's just for egress on the side um that's going to be a code requirement okay honestly honestly the cut stone wall was purely aesthetic because we thought you know there's precedent in the neighborhood for it and we thought it would look beautiful um the regardless of what we needed to do in order to get rid of the handrail entirely what we needed to do is to come down two steps off of the walkway to the porch um and that was uh so that was really what allowed us to get by without having anywhere where we we don't need any railing at all in order to get down to the lower part without you know and still being able to meet code we tried to keep that as minimal as possible because um because we didn't want to create something that looked you know out of place or considerably lower for instance when across the street when you're walking by you can kind of peer over that wall and look down six feet you know i there's no other way for them to do it i understand why that's there but in our case we're like how can we turn that into a benefit for the occupants and something that uh activates the streetscape and that's something the city has has been real in favor of is is bringing bringing people out into the you know on the porches and things like that so it was meeting city goals it was meeting goals of uh of the lower garden apartment having an area to be able to enjoy the outside like the every other floor of the building does and these are flat so each each level is its own apartment and so we thought gosh this is a really nice area for them to be able to enjoy a sunny day maybe even do a barbecue something like that and uh it's it's so you know the two choices we really had were to come off of the driveway or to come off of the front and coming off of the front uh as we are in the in the in the revised plan allows it so that we really only have to come down two steps off of off of that and because the terrain is falling there i mean if the terrain was flat in that area you would barely even notice it at all it's only because the sidewalk is going up that it becomes evident that that area is a little bit lower but it's like you know maybe up to your knee um in terms of the total height difference from the from the sidewalk so we just felt like it was a minimal change we tried to we used the cut stone wall to provide precedent because you know we liked the way that they kind of did it in the church up the street and um and because we had to deal with that train in some way if we wanted to get rid of the handwriting thank you did that answer your question yeah i'm not sure yeah no that was that was what i wanted to hear okay i have a question actually so you've stated nine feet from the front of the house to the to the cut stone wall is that that's correct yeah well it's uh nine feet to uh let me see hold on one second i think that might be to the porch yeah and that i guess that's my point of clarification i think on page 37 and i think it's on that slide where you had the um the yellow line indicating the the shift yes so yeah i see eleven and three quarter porch setback and then eighteen yeah so i'll say it's 16 16 huh um let me blow that up a little bit um oh crap um okay so this this drawing is a little bit an area of error because the wall is all the way out to the sidewalk in this case um uh and we brought it in board so that we could have some plantings there okay um and we're able to uh to lose a step going up to the porch um so it's nine feet from the front of the porch to the to the um to the outside of the wall let's say the streetscape side of the wall um and then it is uh there there is a the porch is six and a half feet i believe so it would be let's see nine feet plus six and a half feet i'm not great at math on the spot about 16.
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