SKSD January 19, 2022 Board Meeting

001All right. Well, it's five o'clock. So welcome, everyone. I'd like to call the order a special meeting of the South Kitsap School Board of Directors. It's January 9th, 19th, sorry, 2022 at 5 p.m. Welcome, everyone. Let's see. It looks like the first item of business is the Pledge of Allegiance. Jeff, would you mind leading us this evening on the Pledge of Allegiance? Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, the United States of America, to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. All right. Let's see. I think the next item shows School Board recognition, but I think we probably need to do adopt agenda first for the meeting. So let's see that. I think that that's all right. I've

002got some comments about the agenda here. Go ahead, Jeff. Yeah, I think I think we've lost our original intent here. I realize we might have had to add a few things, but the agenda that I see in front of me now has changed three times. So the questions that I ask are not were not exactly apropos to the agenda to the district. The pool was going to be a discussion item. And I see now that's an action item. And there's no public input due to the way that we did this. Therefore, I move that we remove items 3.01 and 3.02 until the February meeting. We have an upcoming public forum in seven days that'll allow people to comment on the pool renovation. And since the bids were due in October and didn't get here until

003January, what's another two weeks? Anyone else interested in in that removal? Like if it's a proposal on the table? I have come in on it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The the question is, is not whether or not we want public comment. The question is whether or not we have had adequate public comment. The issue of the pool renovation has been a matter of discussion for months. And we have had public comment on the pool reconstruction project. And I don't believe that any additional public comment will serve any useful purpose. The purpose of public comment is to sway votes. You know, do we need more information? If we need more information, after we get to that point on the agenda, and we have discussed the contract, if we feel we need more information, at that time, we

004can postpone it to another meeting. But I think it would be premature to postpone it at this point, simply because we haven't allowed additional public comments specifically on that item. Therefore, I would oppose the pending motion. Okay. Yeah, I like to hear about what I like to go over the information we received and hear about the bids and so forth. So I like to proceed this plan. Anyone else? Yes. Just a clarifying question as far as process, given that this is is billed as a special meeting and a work study, can we take action? I don't I don't think we can I don't think we can do a final any final votes or anything like that. Yes, we can. Oh, we can. Oh, it's slated as a special meeting. And we can take final action

005on an item on the agenda on special meeting. And since this was duly posted on the agenda for this special meeting, it's perfectly acceptable for us to take final action at this meeting. Okay, I wasn't being critical. I just wanted to find out and I saw Tim shaking his head. Yes. Tim, thanks for the clarification. Tim was a little more brief. I know on the on the items that we're planning to discuss for the for the bulk of the meeting, we were planning to just discuss things and not take action. So, yeah, thank you. And I agree from the folks I know out there, they want this pool fixed so it can be used and to delay it, you know, even two weeks is just two weeks too long, obviously, when we're discussing it, if

006there's something that we need further, I totally understand that. But I say we go further, go on with the agenda that we have. Any other changes, proposals, questions about the agenda? Yes, Kai, you had something? This is not about the agenda, but Jessie is here and I just wanted to she wants to be promoted to panelist. So, oh, good idea. Okay, let her in, please. All right, Jeff, did you want me to take a vote? Are you okay with just moving on with the agenda as proposed? I guess. Did you did you want to get a vote to remove that item from the agenda? Yes, I think you should proceed if when the debate is finished, you should proceed to vote on the motion to remove those items from the agenda. OK, yeah. So let's

007see, those in favor of removing the pool related items per Jeff's suggestion or request, sorry. Please raise your hand now and say aye. Guy, those opposed, please raise your hand and say nay. No, the nays have it that the the amendment is defeated and the. So any other comments on the the agenda? Any other alterations? Are you ready for the question that on the agenda? So those in favor of adopting the agenda as written, please raise your hand now and say aye. Those opposed, please raise your hand, say nay. The eyes have it. The resolution is adopted. The sorry, the agenda is adopted as written. OK, next item of business is school board recognition. So, Tim, over to you and to talk about this. Thank you. So January is annually School Board Recognition Month, and

008it's an opportunity on the calendar each year to recognize the work of the five board members in the two hundred and ninety four districts in the state and the seven in the one district that has more than five. And so we do this in a variety of ways every year. It's become a little more challenging that we're when we're remote as far as getting people to to come in. But so this year, what I've done is just I'm going to speak on behalf of the district. And it's also a unique situation because we've got three board members who were in their fourth board meeting or third board meeting and two that have I think it's 40 something board meetings. But I want to just talk a little bit and then I'm going to read the

009governor's proclamation, which he puts out every year, which I think is just important to acknowledge. So I posed the question, what does it mean to be a board member? And and my answer was five community members who have been called to serve the district in the community. And I think that's an interesting thing. And we add to school student representatives to our board, who also, I think, feel called to serve the school district and serve the community. So by stepping out front, board members have been challenged to focus on the success of all students. And we've had conversations around that word all and how important that is to support the district and the staff, to represent the parents and the community, to provide guidance and monitoring of the superintendent, to adopt policies that guide the

010direction of the district, to engage with the community, to enhance the reputation, trust and perception of the district and to celebrate the success of the students, staff and the district as a whole. And and those are just some of the bulleted items that I think board members are called to do by by running, number one, participating in an election, which can be a little bit of a challenge at times. And you're putting your your name out there and your your reputation out there. But doing all this on a volunteer basis and now certainly with the current situation we're dealing with in our country, in our world, the job gets even that much tougher. So I just want to to this new board of of people who've come together now for a very short time, I

011want to say a huge thank you for just stepping out front and being part of this. But also thank you in advance on behalf of the district for all the work that you're going to do as we come out of the pandemic. And we really, I believe, are going to do some great things in this district with your support and with your guidance and your direction. So I just want to say again, speaking on behalf of the district, thank you. And then I'm going to read the governor's proclamation that is signed on the 15th of December, 2021. So whereas the mission of Washington's public school system is to assure that all students achieve at high levels and possess the knowledge and skills to be reasonable members of a democratic society who enjoy productive and satisfying

012lives. And whereas Washington's two hundred ninety five locally elected school boards and nine elected educational service district boards are the core of the public education governance system in our state. And whereas the districts and regions they lead serve more than one million students have a combined annual budget over 15 billion dollars and employ approximately one hundred twenty thousand people. And whereas school directors play a crucial role in promoting student learning and achievement by creating a vision, establishing policies and budgets and setting clear standards of accountability for all involved. And whereas school directors are directly accountable to the residents in their districts and regions serving as a vital link between members of the community and their schools. And whereas school directors and educational service districts provide a passionate voice of advocacy for public schools and the

013welfare of schoolchildren. And whereas it is appropriate to recognize school directors as outstanding volunteers and champions for public education. Now, therefore, I, Jay Inslee, governor of the state of Washington, do hereby proclaim the month of January 2022 as School Board Recognition Month in the state of Washington. And I encourage all people in our state to join me in this special observance. So, again, thank you to the five elected board members. Thank you to the two student representatives. And I certainly, for one, appreciate your partnership and your willingness to serve alongside me and the rest of the district to really make this district a gem of the community. So thank you. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. Appreciate that. I wish I knew about the 18 days ago. I missed the 18 days of enjoying it so far.

014So glad I caught up. OK, so I think that that's it for the opening matter. So we have one one item before our work session to deal with. And that's two items related to the pool. So, Tim, can you walk us through those as well? 301 and 302. Yes, I'll give a little opening and then have Jennifer Farmer talk more about the pool. We have been having this discussion for quite some time. And the the metrics have changed on this from time to time. This was part of the 2018 capital levy. And when I got here in 2019, started acquainting myself to where we were with the pool and what process. So there's been seven board meetings since I've been here where we've specifically addressed the pool, other than just just comments here and there.

015And through that time, we've talked about resolutions for architectural contract, resolutions for design, some updates on where we were with the cost analysis of the pool. And now we're ready to to bring a bid forward for approval by the board. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jennifer to give a little more background on where we are and what we're bringing to you tonight. Jennifer. Great. Thank you, Tim. Good evening, board of directors. Nice to be with you this evening to talk about this project. My intention here is to give a bit of background for a new board, as well as a bit of a history of where we were and where we are now. This is the largest project of our current capital levy. And this was approved by the voters

016in November of 2018. At the time that the levy was put together and was advertised to the public, there was a certain scope of work that had been identified for the pool. None of the folks who did that work are still in the district. So as we dove in, you know, I guess that is a pun intended to the pool. We found that there were a number of things that were unclear and that needed additional information. So in early 2000, we went through a process that's required by law to select an architect team. We interviewed various architects and the board awarded a contract to Bussetti to assist us with the design of the project. There were, as you can think about the time frame in early 2000, we hit COVID delays for having specialists look

017at our pool and assess conditions. But they have been continuing to work on what we call educational specifications. And that is the process you go through with any school building construction process to ensure that you are looking at the facility through the educational lens and designing the best project you can. Through this, we identified a number of issues that were not anticipated. As we understand it, when this was designed for the original levy. And some of those items include the roof replacement. The roof has failed. The nails of the roof are rusted through rotting off. It must be replaced that that wasn't envisioned originally. It is not negotiable. We have inadequate ventilation. We knew that from the conditions of the pool. But now we know a lot more about that and what is needed to

018remediate this inadequate ventilation and ensure that we have proper airflow in the building. The adjustable floor of our swimming pool is very cool. That was the cat's meow back when it was built. That company is no longer around to support that. We have had to Frankenstein parts together. Nod to previous facilities teams who had found people to fabricate parts to keep that floor going. We did not have in the original plan locker room remodels. So the locker rooms, if you've been in there, they are not ADA compliant. There's no family or public changing rooms. If members of the public are using the pool in the morning prior to students coming in, they they do cross paths, which is not ideal. We also did not have any plan to replace lockers, which are rusted. And in

019need of replacement. So again, outside in the in the pool building, the lighting was a concern, wasn't addressed originally. And we found electrical issues, which we'll discuss further. So we needed to reassess the scope of this project to make bid process that would bring us a building that was brought up to date and would no longer be a consistent drain on resources with with items that weren't included. This project that we have put together is not in any way, shape or form a Taj Mahal of a pool. We have put the infrastructure in place. A lot of the money that will be spent, you won't necessarily see, but you will see vastly improved pool conditions with this project. And we think that is really the best and adheres to what we had talked with our

020community about for the capital levy. So briefly, what's included will be removing the hydraulic floor and bulkhead that's no longer supported. There'll be a re-sloping of the pool floor and a new floating, movable center bulkhead installed. There will be new plaster coating, tile marking and refurbishment of the pool gutters. There will be new rails, diving boards, ladders, ADA lifts and ADA compliance features that were not included in our the original thought process. There will be a non-slip pool deck coating. We will do a complete roof replacement, seismic upgrades. All doors and windows will be replaced. We will have ADA compliant public restrooms. We will update the locker rooms. An office space will be updated. There will be all new paint and updated finishes. Replacement of air distribution and exhaust. And so we'll have greater air

021exchange, which is never more important than it is right now. There will be new mechanical system controls for the building in the pool. New pool pumps and filtration. We will importantly replace the existing chlorine gas chemical treatment with a new computer controlled managed system for pool chemicals. So that gives you an idea of the increased work we intend to do on the pool. After we finished designing all of these documents, we put together a package of plans and specifications and released it to the contractor community in an open public bid through the required bid process. We advertised in the newspaper. We did extend the bidding period due to permitting concerns, which were largely connected to the permitting entities having people out for covid. And as well as we had some questions we needed to respond

022to for them. So that got taken care of. We opened six bids in early January, which I was pleased to see that we had great competition and contractor interest in this project. Those bids have been reviewed. The lowest responsive bid has been provided by Christiansen. Amy, if you can scroll down a little bit on that document, thank you. You can see their base bid is seven point four four million dollars included in our bid process. We had listed some alternates, different types of lighting, other things that we could sort of pick and choose. If the bid came in perhaps higher than we had hoped, we would have been able to take some deductions there out of the gate. So those alternates are shown at three hundred and ten thousand five hundred for a total bid

023of seven million seven hundred fifty thousand five hundred dollars. This does not include Washington state sales tax, which will be charged at the current rate as the process goes through. So the tax rate changes in the year it takes to do the pool. We'll pay whatever the current tax is. As you'll have seen in board docs, our architecture team has reviewed the bid and made a recommendation regarding the contractor. District has worked with Christiansen successfully before, and we look forward to a good project together, assuming the board authorizes us to proceed tonight. So tonight before you is a request to award a contract for Christiansen for the seven point seven five zero million dollars plus tax. And that then will go forward into us getting the project launched and hopefully completed in approximately one year.

024I would entertain any questions you might have about the pool process and bid. Let's see, could you tell us about the over any overages or, you know, budgets and essence for like over budget? Sure. So let me just switch screens a minute here so I can speak to that. We had an August presentation to the then board of directors, and I understand you have you have many of you are newer to the board since then. During that presentation, we had shown some details about the funding for the pool and the original budget. So the original total pool budget was five million two hundred and forty four thousand, and we had detailed out a current pool budget of ten million four hundred and fifteen thousand four hundred. The information we provided the board at the time

025remains true. We have some capital levy projects that either there has been savings we can realize or these projects will no longer be recommended to move forward. So we had saved some money doing middle school roof replacements. Those projects are done. The residual funds from that would be allocated here. We will not be doing an HVAC or electrical system upgrade at the district office, moving those monies out to support an instructional environment. Instead, we had a line item for acquisition of property that will not happen. Hey, Jennifer, I'm sorry. I think I missed maybe I didn't state my question clearly. I'm sorry. I was asking about if this is a fixed price contract or if they're if they're if you expect overages and do we have that budget is a better way to. Sure. I'm

026sorry. I interpreted that incorrectly. So there there as with any construction project on an old facility, it would be anticipated when you open things up. There might be work that we have not seen or there may be additional costs that come forward. The current board policy allows the district to approve within 10 percent, I believe, and if not, we come to the board with what's called a change order. We've done that with the roofing projects in the past. We can simply not guarantee that there will be no additional costs to this. That would be really inadvisable for me to say that at this point in time. We have done a great deal of due diligence. We have we've sent a diver into the pool to do asbestos sampling. We have been under the pool to

027see the conditions. We have allowed all the contractors in to crawl through the the backspaces of the pool and understand the scope of their work. So we've done quite a lot to mitigate any potential additional costs, but it is possible there is a 15 percent contingency in the project, the current project budget to try and absorb any of those additional costs. Awesome. Thank you. Yep. Jennifer, do you have just off the top of your head an idea of how much money we've put into that pool to kind of bandaid it over the numerous years? I don't. I was trying to put some of that together and found in board docs three hundred thousand dollar expenditure that occurred in, I think, two thousand and three that went through the board. We would have had our facilities

028team putting pieces together and doing cleanup of the debris underneath the pool over time. I don't have a comprehensive look at the band aiding that has occurred on the pool beyond that. I know when my kids were there, there was constant fixing this, fixing that. So getting this completely fixed to last for numerous years, I think, is very important for our kids and our community. I see Director Berg's hand up. Yeah, two questions. One, are there sufficient funds on hand in the capital levy fund? And I'm assuming that we'll be anticipating the revenues in April and October of this year to cover the cost. Do we have sufficient revenue to cover the cost? The first question, the second question is, what is the timeline for when the pool will close, when it will be finished

029and how that will impact the high school, not only the public use of the pool, but but the high school, the classes and the swim team and whatever? I am going to answer part of that and throw to Tim for the other part. So we have been collecting and saving some of our capital levy proceeds for this project, knowing it would exceed our one year a collection. We do not have full funding for this through the capital levy. We are able to use S or dollars for HVAC projects for instructional facilities, which this is. There is a pool in our instructional building, but that is a classroom. And as our funds can be used to stop active roof roof leaks and to upgrade and improve airflow and HVAC conditions in instructional buildings. So at this

030point, between capital levy and use of S or funds, we do have enough funds in the cash flow to handle this during this current fiscal year and the next one when the pool will be finished. We do anticipate the year the supply chain is constrained. Things will happen. Delays may occur. We will keep the board apprised as we know things. As far as the timing of the pool, interestingly, Tim and I found out today that during the power failure recently, the boiler at the pool was rendered unusable. It is not fixable. The pool water has dropped below usable temperature. So the pool is now effectively closed. And Tim has some information as far as how we are going to carry forward with our pool events while it is closed. So when working with Lindsay Foster,

031our athletic director, she is right now working with the Peninsula School District and specifically the Peninsula High School pool. Right now we have slated a time slot from seven thirty to nine in the evenings at the Peninsula High School pool for our girls water polo season that starts this spring. But as Jennifer just mentioned, the pool has now have further difficulties. And so she Lindsay was working with the Peninsula School District today to see if we could schedule our last few swim meets and a couple of practices as we near the end of the season so we can use our pool. One of the problems that exists right now is the Olympic High School pool and the North Kitsap pool are both also closed. And so pools are at a premium in the Kitsap region

032right now. And so while we have the spring secured, we don't have necessarily next next sport season or next year sport seasons secured. But we're working on those things. Thank you. Jeff, go ahead. Yeah. So what is the total cost of the project so far? So the action before the board tonight is for the award of the contract. And I think if I understand you, Director Daley, you would like a comprehensive view of the architectural fees and what we anticipate the cost would be. Is that my understanding of your question? Just to be clear. Yeah, that's a number we can provide to the board. I don't have it handy at the moment. OK, I've got it. So it's eight point four is what you're asking for. It's at least one point three mil for design

033work plus tens of thousands of dollars in studies. So right now we're at ten million dollars. OK. So we started out with a project of five point four. OK, it's now ten. OK, and I understand everything that you and Mr. Winter inherited. OK, I got that. And that's why I feel that public comment is important in order to fully move forward. I've heard from one director say they've had public comment. I've had public comment on both sides. OK, and I just think that given that this the the magnitude of this project, that the public deserves an opportunity to weigh in on this. Weeks ago, I asked for a copy of the bid so I could go through them. And I have many concerns. Some of those were alluded to by Mr. Wilson, and those are

034the devil is in the details of, you know, who picks up all these mysterious things. What is the project that the Christianson has done for us before? They were the awarded contract for the STEM classroom improvements at the high school in 2020. And that STEM high school project required coming back to the board for a million dollar project required five hundred and fifty five thousand dollars. So that one went 50 percent over budget. OK, so that is another one of my concerns. And the fact that I did not know since when we discussed this last week that this was going to be more of a preliminary discussion versus approval. I'm disappointed that we're doing it at this meeting when the public doesn't have a chance. And I'm also disappointed that the items which I requested,

035I did not receive. So this makes it very difficult for me to do my due diligence, to review all the stuff that I need to do, especially since the project has grown in size and scope. So I think the public, you know, deserves an opportunity, whether they do or not, doesn't mean any difference. I doubt if one or two or three people would comment, because they're going to only hear about this when it goes into the newspaper, if it does tomorrow. But, you know, the project has doubled and we haven't even cracked open the pool yet. So that's my concern. So I'll I'll leave it there. Jeff, did you not get the pool bids? I don't have them. OK, I sent those from home last night, but I'm looking on my sent email right now

036and it's not showing up. So I'll have to figure out what happened with that. Jennifer, just really quickly. So these this this bid was serving the bids were thoroughly reviewed, right? Embedded for your discussion, right? By our consultant and they're good to go. Yes. And they've been reviewed by the architects, as well as by Brent Palmison, our capital coordinator, for prior to making a board recommendation. So it has been vetted and reviewed and the recommendation is attached in board docs, if anyone's interested to see it. So I know we're going to be able to tap into Essar. And I know that I don't want to go into the whole detail, but approximately what portion of the seven point seven five do you think we'll be able to get get get our money back through Essar?

037I think the original estimate was for the roof in the HVAC was between two and two point four million. Those are the only components which I feel are eligible for those funds. So that would be what we would limit ourselves to would be the roof in the HVAC. Thank you. And, Jennifer, if I I went through all this earlier, that stuff doesn't always stay very long in this brain of mine. But I think I remember reading that Christensen had been recommended by others besides doing work for us. Yes, that's true. They are a known contractor in the area and have done projects of multiple sizes and and and complexities. So, yes, the the common practices for our architects to call other entities that they've worked from to ensure that they had compliance with contracting requirements

038and that no one sued anyone and those types of things. Thank you, Ms. What about SCAP funds from OSPI? Yes, that is also thank you, Director Daley, for reminding me. So we have levy funds and we do have school construction assistance program funds. The board has been involved in processing through that all along. That is the next item on your agenda to keep that rolling. But we are anticipating having those funds as well as we go through this process. They are matching. They must we must spend the money to get the money back from the state through what's called a D process, the form process. Brian, I think you had your hand up. There you are. Thanks. I was I was just curious as far as the we used them. And I knew that from

039to to do the STEM science labs and things. Do you recall? I'm sure you don't have specifics, but do you recall what caused the why they why we went over budget on that? So that project was grant funded originally and had been built sort of internally. And then once we had received the grant funding, we needed to have an architect help us design all of that work that needed to occur because it involved electricity and plumbing and other things that aren't just replacing countertops or buying furniture. So we had designed that project and gone out to bid. And the contractor market for that told us that the cost for that project was much higher than was anticipated. So that was not a Christiansen issue. That was a district specification issue, not matching what the marketplace

040was at the time. We reformulated our bid, went back out to bid. And Christiansen was the lowest bid based on our what was then our specification and the district's commitment of additional funds so that that project could be completed as envisioned. Thank you. Any other questions or comments on this first half? Hey, Brian, go ahead. Just I'll keep it brief, but look, kind of a story. I like to tell stories, but I'll promise brief. When when I graduated from high school, I bought a car and I spent way too much on it. I think it was five hundred dollars. I drove it all the way through college and beyond a little bit. And nothing cost me an arm and a leg because it was it was a junker. Well, I think we have a pool

041that's now a junker. We know that. I think we all recognize that. And it's time that we we do it right. We quit trying to to bandaid it. And I think I think most people agree with that. It is expensive, but it's a it's an item that's that's used tremendously, I know, as far as with the high school, but also with our community. And I think it's time to do that. I'm I'm not opposed to that. But if this is the community poll, as we seem to advertise it, then in the past, I've asked, why is the city of Port Orchard not putting money in? Why is the county not putting in? They used a lot of their covid money for sewer repair and repairing roads in the tune of three to five million dollars.

042So I had asked previously why we couldn't get the city in the county if it's a community pool to be involved. At one time, there was the YMCA that expressed an interest. They have an interest in going out to the Gig Harbor area. And those were also additional sources, in addition to discussion on since we have the Kitsap football field stadium, then we also have other businesses in town. So why? Once again, my my questions arise of if this is a community pool and we have community support, then I would have thought that the community would have expressed an interest in the community pool. So that's just one of my other questions that I never had resolved. So if I can just respond to that quickly, that, you know, I don't know when the community

043pool name was put on that pool. But my guess is it was saying this is a pool for the use of the community, the taxpayers support, and it's the school district facility that's used by the community. So I think that's where the community goes. I still think we want really we want all of our buildings and schools to be community resources. We have talked. You're right. There's been some some questions about, well, what about someone from the community who could support it? But there's never really been a directive from the board to say, let's pursue some some community resources to help defray the costs. I have had conversation, many conversations with the Y. They do have or at least one time had a desire to have something in Port Orchard. But but if that's going

044to happen, it's going to be years from now. It's not going to be soon enough for it to impact the pool. So I think those are things just to keep in mind as we kind of work through this process and try to figure out what to do. The last the last piece I will say is I appreciate, Jeff, that you said that we didn't inherit this. And you're right. But I think now when you inherit something, it's your job to take it and fix it. And that's what we're trying to do. So there's no there's no looking back and saying what I should have, could have. It's now we got to fix it. And and it is a valuable asset for our community and for our school district. So I it's a challenge, but it's

045an important one. John, I don't think you had a chance to speak yet. Go ahead, John. I was just going to comment that the Seattle, Tacoma International Airport is owned and operated by the Port of Seattle. And Tacoma has nothing to do with it. They have their name on the airport at no cost to them. Cool. Brian, go ahead. And I was just and you know, I don't disagree with Jeff either. It would be nice if we could get those entities to help us out with a lot of different things or help out the community, really not us. But I know that another board that I currently sit on, we've we've tried multiple times as far as to get some support for the city, because we provide services and support for a whole lot of

046families and individuals and things. And that has not gone anywhere despite years of efforts. But that's not to say that we will stop in that one or that we should stop in this. And I think taking a cue from Tim that maybe that's something that should go on on a topic as far as different ways to outreach to whether it be the, you know, the county or the city with some of these projects and things, it's a good idea. So so briefly, just for me, just a bill on that, I think, I think we have kind of inherited the best, but I think it's we've got it in a pretty good state. And I think I'd like to see us move forward with this as well. I know that it would be great if we

047had other folks to chip in. But the the there is no taxing authority that lines up perfectly with the south kids at school district boundaries, except for the one that we're utilizing to fund this. So whether you pay for it through a city or a county tax or a school tax, it's all still tax dollars and it doesn't change the price of the pool. We did get about our voters behind it. They voted for it. They wanted to see it happen. We have had some delays since 2018, but I think it's a it's time to move forward. So with that, I guess, could we hear the second piece of this? We owe to the the SCAP piece. Certainly. All right. So assuming an award of contract this evening, there are then two other technical pieces

048that we are processing through. So these are required by OSPI for the use of state construction assistance program funds. Resolution 1351 certifies that this modernization of our pool will be used for no less than five years and extends the life of the pool for 30 years. We've, of course, designed this project to last for a very long time. This will be our one chance to fix this facility properly. So we are proposing and recommending that you would attest that this modernization has five year use for short and 30 year life. The other resolution 1352 also connected to the school funding assistance. Is simply a matter of the board authorizing that there's an intent to construct. One might think that would be inferred from awarding an eight million dollar contract. But like I said, this is

049a very prescriptive process through OSPI to access these funds. So we have a resolution for you acknowledging that you see a need to modernize this pool, that we have these capital levy funds to do the modernization, that we are eligible for this money and that we intend to complete this construction. Could you remind us what the total is for the S cap that we anticipate if it goes through? Three point something million. I would need to look that up. Okay, so we've got seven point seven five minus three minus what is it? One point two something for the answer. Due to two point four. Two point four, yeah, I'm gonna write it down. Okay, thank you. Any other any questions, discussions about this piece of it? Are we ready to vote to move forward? I

050see a nod, two nods, Brian, Jeff, okay. All right, so let's see, do we need to separate these or can we do them together? We could do the vingroze or we could do it separately. If we do it separately, obviously the pool contract would probably go first. Yeah, let's just put them together then. So let's see, let's see, so the statement is those in favor of three of three to one three to two, the first being contract award for the SK high school pool modernization project and the second is a resolution number one three five one and one three five two for SCAP pool modernization project. Those in favor of those two items, please raise your hand out and say aye. Aye. Those opposed, please raise your hand and say nay. District five is opposed

051to both. Thank you very much, the ayes have it and the three oh one and three oh two carry and we'll move forward with pool modernization. So yay. Thank you and I can clarify, SCAP is 3.4 estimated. Okay, awesome, thank you. All right, next item on the agenda is 4.01, so planning for our board and community forum, which I had sent out, I think it was yesterday, a proposal for that, kind of how that would work, trying to keep things simple, taking into consideration, rather, your comments and recommendations for how we ought to run this. Yeah, so if you want to maybe pull up that email and then let me know if I was close or what you'd want to change, basically what it says in the email is that we would have our virtual

052community town hall meeting on January 26th as planned, however, as we discussed in the last meeting, we do it via Zoom. I made it two hours long as we discussed and I did change the start time, I think, to six, I'm not sure if we said that before. I know a lot of community members said they'd like more time to get there, so I thought that was a good change. None of this is cast in stone, but anyway, the purpose was, as I stated here in the email, to engage with our valued South Kitsap community in a thoughtful question and answer session with your SKA school board. We want to hear from a broad range of community members and students and teachers to parents and voters. Our goal is to share ideas and insights with

053each other in our SKA community at large. And so then the guidelines that I suggested here are, number one, each community member can ask the board a question and get a response for up to two members for each question asked. And so just to explain why, I thought, you know, when getting to three, then we have a majority and you start fishing around for, you know, what are we going to support and would you go that in tomorrow, kind of a thing. I think limiting to two would help to move things along, one, and then two, prevent us from, you know, having a clear preference either way for any item. The second one, the total question answer time for each question would be limited to five minutes in total for the question and the answer

054so that we could get to maximize opportunities so people could participate. The third one I propose here is that attendees will signal that they have a question by virtually raising their hand, just as you guys have done tonight, in the Zoom tool and then be chosen at random by a moderator. So I'm not sure how many people want to ask questions, but I thought if, assuming Amy was moderating them, she just randomly chose one, you know, using a die or a random number generator or whatever works. I don't, it doesn't matter to me, but randomly chosen. The next one is participants should focus on questions and answers to the director, superintendent and the student reps. So the assumption here that I made is that the student reps would be there with us. I'd love to

055have them if you guys can do that, that's okay. And then lastly, the participants should treat each other with respect, be forthright in their questions and answer and not talk over one another. So that was, those were the guidelines. Thoughts about that as a proposed process, Brian? I had a couple that I wrote down and they kind of go along. I know that at one point then we talked about submitting questions, people would submit questions and then they would be randomly picked. Given the timeline that we have, that it's a week away, I'm not so sure how that would work, but that might be a way to do them random to literally draw from a hat or something along that lines. But you mentioned some other ways to randomly select speakers. So that was one.

056And the second one was that, and I think the selection of it is that what I don't want is anyone, any board member or any person from the community to dominate it. So in other words, that they just ask question after question after question, that it somehow gets through. And then if someone has a second question and we've gone through everybody's first question, that there's a process there. And it may be taken care of in what you described, but it was just something that went through my mind. The idea with the five-minute time limit per questioner was an attempt to get by that or not by that, but to accommodate that. And then also the answer by up to two board members. If the two board members finish answering the question, then we're done. If

057it's under five minutes, then we're either we're kind of done. But that was my attempt to put a little, some guardrails in there. So I had a question regarding your first guideline. Will the person asking the question direct it to two different board members or are they directing a question to one and then just another board member might also do their answer? I'm concerned that, and again, I'm a little concerned about people like Brian was saying where we don't want anybody dominating, whether it's the board or the community. Initially, I thought we were just one question to one board member. So how will we decide who answers these questions? So to my mind, it would be that the person asked the question to the member, if they have one or in mind, they could answer

058it. It's just the board in general. But I think we could ask who wants to take the question and we could look for volunteers. Again, back to your piece of not dominating, I thought we could just take turns. So if we could just literally just go down the line and go, the next person who hasn't answered one in a while is Brian, so he gets one. Then it's Jeff, then it's John, then it's me, whatever. It's totally fine. I think I was trying to make it low threshold so people didn't have to pre-register and ask and figure out questions at a time and do all that rigmarole. But they would keep it moving along and fair. I didn't want to put too many rules in place if we don't have to. Based on those comments,

059Brian, that you and Kate made, did you want to change anything specifically in that? I guess to answer your question or do you think you need to make some changes? Because I'm told this is just... No, I think you answered my questions or concerns. I think there's guardrails that have been put up there and things like that. I just want to give really community members an opportunity to speak and not have one person asking 25 questions. I don't think they asked that much. We don't have that much time. But that was my concern. I want to be able to spread this out and give all people that want to have an opportunity. Again, not that someone couldn't come back around and ask another question if there was time and opportunity and all that. But I

060want to give everybody a shot at their questions. So in my mind, when people are ready, they'll push the raise their hand button and then 10 hands will go up. Amy will pick one. Someone asked a question and then I'm guessing that either more hands will go up and there'll be 20 next time or half of them will go down because that was the question that the person had where you may got answered. So each time it's just sort of a random like who's going to popcorn so who's ready would be picked out of the litter and then they would get to ask questions for a few minutes. John and then Jesse. Jesse hasn't spoken yet. That's okay. I just had a quick clarifying question. Thank you, Mr. Berg. Are we planning on doing it

061like this setting where we're panelists and then people raise their hands and then they're joined or is it like a traditional zoom where we can see everyone's faces the whole time? I was just curious about that and I don't know if we already made that decision and you said it. We haven't. I know that they we usually do this way to avoid the zoom bombing with pornography and hand gestures and other things but I would I think would be great if we could see everybody but I don't know if that's if we can or not without risking that and then my assumption is that we would it would be sort of like public comment where we would promote and then and then they could share the video if they wanted. I don't know if anybody

062else any thoughts or any anybody? Right now we have it set up to be a zoom meeting not a webinar so that would mean that you would have everyone on the screen who could be seen and you're right it does open the door for some potential but it's really cumbersome to be promoting people back and forth and takes time in a webinar setting and probably difficult in especially in a forum type of atmosphere where we're this is in place of what we would envision being in our large room together so I that's the way we've set it up is that it would be more of a zoom meeting than a webinar but knowing that knowing how that plays out too. Yeah the the the promoting is promoting someone from a an attendee to a panelist

063is cumbersome and time-consuming so having everyone on there and the the host can still mute someone I'm not I'm assuming they can turn off their video too. Yeah yeah then yeah then I think that's fine I think that'd be great if you could see everybody I just wasn't sure thank you for telling me. My comment is I don't think the the up to two uh responses from the board is necessary or wise uh it would preclude a third board member from responding if they want to you know and we already have the the five minute time limit and if somebody wants to ask a question of all the board members none of the board members are obligated to respond if they don't feel they have the sufficient information to respond you know so I I

064would move to strike me up to two from uh item number one. Okay yeah Kai? Um just based on how people have asked questions like rhetorically in public comment I think just having one person answer the question um and you know if it's not directed to a specific person having it on like a rolling you know rolling like loop or whatever of who gets to answer or if somebody you know hasn't answered in a while and they want to but if it's directly um towards someone then I think they should answer that um and there's been a lot of questions that have been asked that way so I think that is more in line with the way the people um like to engage with us. Okay so if I can summarize I think what you've

065all said so first of all strike the the modification to the thing as written would be striking the up to two board members piece and then we would say uh community we would add something about community members can direct their question at a particular board member or the board in general the board will the board will take turns I guess answering whatever questions or something like that does that that adequately summarize the changes? I don't know that you need the additional verbiage I think just striking the up to two. Okay as long as we understand okay yeah so long as we keep the five-minute piece so that we're not stuck on all of us giving a 10-minute answer then I'm I'm fine with that I don't care how many people respond I mean I'm open

066to everybody. Okay any other proposed changes and then I'll think okay so those in favor of adopting the uh the motion that was sent out via emailing that I read here with the change that we would strike the portion that said that two up to two more board members would be able to answer thereby opening the door for as many as want to participate. Please raise your hand now and say aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed please raise your hand say nay. All right the ayes have it and we have a process for the 26th. We're looking forward to this I hope it goes well and we get we get uh good attendance and we need to get it we need to get it publicized it was pointed out at the physical facilities meeting last week

067nobody knew about it. Okay so um I don't know Amy or Tim you have any additional information on that I know you talked about? Well we we Amy and her team put together a flyer we just didn't have the particulars yet so that's the only reason we haven't advertised we didn't want to advertise a time that wasn't accurate or format so now we've got a flyer ready to go out and it will be out ASAP. Cool Brian? And and I would suggest that each one of us um reach out to you know maybe of our 20 or 25 closest friends um okay five in my account but um you know just and to get the word out and ask them to share that along so I'm sure that uh you know Amy and her uh

068expertise and great job that she does in getting the information out it'll come out to us as board members too but maybe take a look at our you know our contact list and sending that out to people and you know neighbors and that kind of stuff just to get the word out there um and also I think it's important we get as many people probably won't have as many as we want to but this is a start and I feel really really positive about it. Yeah uh Kai you had a comment let's say? Yeah um I was just I've been trying to like get in contact with sharing board stuff um at a school level um but obviously there was some conflict there because I had things scheduled and the school got cancelled so um

069I was I can definitely you know talk to the WTV people they are very understaffed at the moment unfortunately um but just general board stuff and then advertise this event um I was wondering if it's possible um Amy and Tim I guess to put it to put uh you know to update our front page or the website or do uh you know do I guess for for uh those with kids in school do one of those robo calls or something like that um and then how we get the wider community yeah Amy there you are. Hi yes all of the above we're ready to roll with our communication plan I just needed the details from you all tonight so now that you've got them I will hit send on all of that. Awesome and you

070got that little change about uh the rules yeah good awesome okay well cool um thank you very much oh so I think we're we're at the end of the um well we're actually already started the working session now the next next part is um we wanted to do that work you know this working session piece where we had where we would talk about different issues to get share information and so forth I know we had talked about doing that on the Saturday we didn't quite come to a to a determination on the process and I and I have not received from anyone any additional topics so I thought I kind of came up with a plan here that I think is simple and let's see if this works for you all and then we can

071move forward so as you know with working sessions that these are much more affordable we just discuss things we give each other's opinion I thought we could do is for for each board member and Tim and the reps together if they if the student reps have have a topic they want to do take 15 or 20 minutes each and that person sort of has the floor so you can you can present information you can share your point of view you can ask questions about the board members whatever you run the meeting for that 15 minutes and talk about whatever you want to talk about ask people questions give your opinion whatever and then when you're done it just goes the next person and that person runs the meeting for the next 15 or 20 minutes

072until we're out of time so at at 20 minutes a piece for the groups that would be two hours and 20 minutes at 15 it would be under two so that's just my proposal what do you guys think for the rest of the session how do you have to run it Jeff how about if we just each mention one of their one of your items and as you just suggested go around the room and just mention one of yours and then if we get all the way around then we go to item two and if we go around to item three I think that works totally fine and the same thing so long as we don't if we don't get stuck on one for more than 15 minutes I would suggest we move to the

073next item that's fine yeah it's the same it's the same thing effectively other thoughts yeah when you say the subject we're supposed to bring up is it something you know like in policy or is it just something we're concerned about or all the above literally anything under the sign okay anything to improve just district goals district priority plans you know you want to talk about you know school buildings you want to talk about curriculum you want to talk about whatever it's your it's really a chance for us to share what's on the top of our minds for priorities okay thanks so without exception I would like to move forward with the proposal by Mr. Daley that we all take a turn to discuss what we want with a maximum discussion per topic of 15 minutes

074and then we'll move to the next one I think I so who would like to go first I saw Kate's hand go up first you win the prize thank you thank you I'm only going first so mine is basically off the priority plan and wellness I am really really concerned regarding the wellness of our students of our parents our community and and I'm not basing that on the fact that kids haven't been at school at times because I think safety and their wellness is important but and I'm talking about social and emotional mental health and obviously physical this has put COVID has put a huge strain on these kids and their parents and then that has spread out to the community I was having a conversation with a mom when I was walking my dog

075and she was saying she has two kids and one has blossomed under being at home last year because he's not very sociable and he doesn't do well in groups where her other child another boy has not done well and she just mentioned because of course I'm the neighborhood nurse that they call you know when they're having a heart attack before they call 911 and she said yeah that happens John I have lots of stories that her child who's not doing well academically has been sick more and so you put that all together and I know we can't change the pandemic well we can but I won't get on that bandstand right now but whatever we can do as a board and as a community I think our community needs to be part of that to

076help our kids and you know with Kai and Jesse as part of this board they can help us as of what's going on with the kids at the high school but I also worry about our middle school kids and our elementary kids and our teachers because they're having to put up with all this just all the staff it's a huge issue that I don't want to get bigger but it's going to take a while even if COVID disappears we're still going to have some backlash from this I heard that test scores have gone down because of all this makes perfect sense so I'm just and I won't take the full 15 minutes because I don't have a solution but I want this when I saw that it was on our priority plan of course I

077have it up so I just think it's so important that we keep this in the front of our mind that our kids yes test scores are important doing well in school but it's a bigger bigger picture of keeping them emotionally healthy physically healthy and getting them to where they need to be for when they graduate this is a really tough time for kids I personally as a parent don't know how I would have done having my kids home and doing online learning one would have probably done fine the other one she had been pulling her hair out because she couldn't barely sit so I just this is this is my issue the wellness of of our schools and our kids in our community so Kate did you have any did you have any ideas or

078like how like how can we help I mean I agree I think it's huge I feel I was really feeling it actually the personally like that stress the week that last week when we ended up shutting down due to Omicron it just seemed like the world was collapsing and everything was kind of going to hell and my friends and family and co-workers in my day job were getting sick and everywhere I went people were sick right so it was really hitting home and and what a long slog it's been so I'm wondering you know I I'm a big fan of you know how you know how do we take it how we make it you know sort of a safe space have we talked about how do we support it I want to you know

079do more than just lip service so I'm wondering if there's something like more more if there's a program or something that we're looking into or I guess I don't know what's if anything for me has been done I know that teaching staff is is working you know through that every day but I don't know what we're doing yeah go ahead Kate you're on you're on mute and I think you I'll turn it over I'm not running this part you are so Tim do you do you guys have anything organized or specific I know you guys are working on it every day to help everybody yes and no I think one of the challenges right now is in order to be well you have to have time to be well and we don't have time to

080do anything but work and I was talking to a teacher today who was saying I'll cover for any class I need to cover for but we need to also realize that now I'm going home to do my grading and my planning so we've heard from our district and we've also heard from some national studies that just when we talk about wellness and self-care it's it feels a little bit like a slap in the face right now because there isn't time for people to do that and so we're really trying to be sensitive to that and careful with that I think that there are little things we can do that aren't huge but it's a start where we're just transparency and communication and connecting with people and having conversation but as far as a program we

081don't necessarily have one and I think we just have to really be aware and and be in communication with people to understand the situation that they're in and to see if there's some solutions for that and we've got pockets right now in the district that we're working with with small groups or individuals to try to do that right now yeah and I think acknowledging I you know when a student or a parent or a teacher you know is saying this is overwhelming we need to acknowledge it you know we're all in different areas and we may not see it the same way I know in my world my world really has not changed much because I still go into the hospital every day but for those whose lives have turned upside down as in students

082and and I think another issue is we think things are getting better and then we get slammed and things change and so we haven't had a chance to even get on a steady foot and and figure out what to do and I agree Tim there's not time right now to come up with anything official but I just think we need to start working on that and you know Kai and Jesse let us know if there's something you think we can do at the high school we'll check in with you know the middle schools but you know I emailed all the principals and schools with the vice principals I emailed all of them to just say hi and I said you know once this is over I'll come and meet you but right now I don't

083think it's appropriate because you're too busy and it's been amazing the responses I've gotten acknowledging that they're busy I didn't quite realize that that would be something so important so I think that's a big step is acknowledging listening being there and doing what we can when we hear something needs to be done yeah I had a I was I was going through the RCWs to see what the board has to approve or what it doesn't have to prove and I ran across something very interesting it's that RCW 20 day 330 100 subsection 12 and it says the board can appoint a practicing physician resident of the school district who shall be known as the school district medical inspector and whose duty it shall be to decide for the board of directors all questions of sanitation

084and health affecting the safety and welfare of the public schools of the district and I don't know right now that falls on Tim you know the the decision you know the health issues affecting the school and I guess my question is do we have one person whose primary function is social and emotional health of the students because we have we have a lot of people looking at the at the physical health but the real unseen cost of this pandemic has been the social and emotional health of the students and who do we have who is zeroing in on that one factor in the district so we have an executive director of wellness and student support who oversees the work with counselors and social workers but but it really it's going to take all of us

085to do it it one person in a district of 1400 employees and 8500 students is not enough so it it's that's on the legislative agenda at least from the governor's side right now it takes all of us and again nurses counselors social workers teachers paraeducators support staff it everybody is maxed right now and and that's that's so it's just a hard reality we realize it's important we realize we need to do it we will get out of this pandemic at some point and be able to address those more directly but that's going to be the I think that's going to be the key for our student success coming out of the pandemic hey I think you have a couple people with hands raised I think uh sorry Jeff and then Brian yeah I just wanted

086to comment uh there are at least 10 bills in the legislature dealing with social emotional issues in the uh in in the schools so the legislator is concerned about it legislature is concerned about it too so we'll just have to see what comes out in 60 days probably be unfunded mandates you know and I think that that's an important point that the legislature is considering things and we'll see what comes out of it but you know something as as like we talked about on Saturday making a decision to close schools Friday and Tuesday was really difficult but but there was an emotional factor for our staff that really needed to be strongly considered and was and so so those are the things when we say what are we doing sometimes we make really tough decisions

087that have a potential negative impact but but hopefully with the intent of a couple of days off to get us healthy physically and mentally so we can continue on to serve our students and so I hope that's what was able to happen over the last five days. Tim just really quickly I think um I saw you send a note right before the meeting that uh our attendance looks like both from teachers and students is a little bit improved from Thursday. Yeah so actually the COVID numbers in the county dropped a little bit not very much but a little bit so that's I guess encouraging we're looking for small wins but we had um we had about 50 staff members less absent than we had on Thursday we had our our absent rate with students was

08829% on Thursday it was 19% today so that's one day and and we've got tomorrow we've got Friday and then next week but working hard to just make sure we're aware and trying to get around to schools and talk to people to say hey how are you doing how's it feeling um what do we need to do next so yeah there was some positive signs today but it's too early to call it. Fingers crossed on that uh front so Kate you have about three minutes left if you'd like to use it or Brian has something. Brian has something. Just you know I I totally agree with with uh as as Tim said um you know it's got to be in everybody and everybody take it's just it's just you know I can't even imagine it's

089just daunting I mean I um anyway um one of the things too that I'm I'm I'm glad to hear that the legislature is considering these but it's it's you know our current I don't know that we've hired all the nurses that we've said that we could hire within our district because they're not there same with the hospitals so I'm being kind of a wet blanket on this but I my point is is that yes totally agree with what um Kate has said I'll say something more that ties into this a little bit when it's when it's my turn but uh completely agree that that the the mental health and and all for everybody on staff um community and the students is is you know if we don't have that nothing else gets done. Right and

090I just wanted to um Kate you said like of course Kai and I will keep you guys updated on like how students feel and or at least how we feel um and I think that's really the most important part is like of this position is just that communication um but and I know that like we're all um trying obviously looking for a solution because if we knew what the solution was we would have used it by now right um so I just wanted to say like kind of a student perspective as far as thinking about wellness is that even when we are going back to school like there's that that really that emotional and physical toll of like being sent online um and we're really conscious about that that impact on students mental health I

091think that like at least from my peers what I'm seeing is that it's also a really like a toll um for mental health wise to like go to school in a situation where some students don't feel safe they feel like you know that they aren't comfortable going to their after-school activities because um that like health risk um and then also just like I'm an anxious person so this may not be a universal feeling but but I think there's also like some anxiety surrounding like the the rules are always changing and I know that's not the school's decision that's at a county health and in a national a national thing um but I think that that also has kind of like a wellness and um and mental health impact so even though we're still in person

092um which I really really appreciate and I and I appreciate all the people that are making that happen I think that it's also like just something a factor for like the wellness that you brought so that's my input and I will always share more okay thanks jesse awesome and it looks like we're right at about 15 minutes okay but uh thank you that was a great topic I think a really important one for us to oh there's my timer sorry who would like to go next brian let's see your hand up go for it the floor is yours thank you I don't I don't I don't know how long I'll take on this probably not very long but but I was I the first one that I wrote down was really a focus on the

093top five because I you know I I was thinking that you know so our priority plan in other words and going into this this evening my my opinions change but is that all five topics that academics wellness safety stewardship and community are so inter combined intertwined and all of that and they need each other but looking at it and and reflecting on my own practice um when you know when I was a principal and a leader within the district that you know without really that wellness and and I'm going to throw in safety as well without those two things we're not going to get to the other things we're not you know there there were times that we were helping kids and families just to have a meal just to have a place to come

094in out of the cold those types of things you know it was secondary that you know the academic parts and those types of things so um I don't know if I can go on from that but I but I wanted to say our priority plan our top five plan we've got to spend time on that looking at that but again my my opinion has changed in that we really need to take a look at that wellness and safety piece um so I don't know if that's my one and I'm done or I get another one so so Brian to kind of add on to that piece I know we had talked about um the need to maybe align or align the uh top five with our our board vision so our policy one or whatever

095it is um I think that would be great to to do and make sure that just that we're all aligned that the you know we we see the future Tim and the in the administration and then you know teachers and students curriculum all that good stuff happens to to align that so I would love to be able to you know have one you know one thing that we're looking at it's all cohesive and ties together um I think that's that's great to do better summarize thank you heavy and I agree Brian the wellness and safety go hand in hand I was having a really hard time deciding which way I wanted to go um and I think because of my health care background I went with wellness but without the safety you're not going to

096have the wellness and without the wellness you're not going to have the safety okay any uh anything else on this one Brian or anybody okay cool who wants to go next I just want to note that mine took a lot less time in case yes you win the prize so far but we're having meaningful conversation so we're we're trying to have a good talk so not do it quickly but John over to you okay I had I had two topics one was the auditing committee which director Daley may want to handle so I wanted to follow up on the workshop that we had last Saturday and provide a little background the information on that the we didn't do any wordsmithing on the documents except substituting stakeholder for owner when we're talking about uh you know

097who the board is responsible to but if you I hope you all have access to WASDA's model policies you go on the WASDA website you should be able to find that and and that kind of the model policies we're not bound to follow them but that kind of gives a guideline as to what other districts are doing so you don't have to look at the hundreds of different school districts policies to see what is the what is the general trend you just look at WASDA's model policies and most of the districts are close to the to the WASDA policies the WASDA policies are grouped into different sections there's the 1000 series policies and then there's the 2000 to 6000 series policies and the 2000 to 6000 series we have those policies and those are basically

098district policies that are under the jurisdiction of the superintendent and that would be uh student attendance uh you know anything you can talk about it falls under under the 2000 to the 6000 policies but the 1000 series policies are typically the board documents in other words how the board functions now for the boards who are not using policy governance or coherent governance uh they use the 1000 series policies we were originally using what was known as policy governance which was originally developed by uh john carver and that was where we had some very interesting executive limitations that all said the superintendent shall not fail too and then it had been long list which is a little cumbersome to throw in those double negatives uh the aspen group basically took uh carver's uh policy governance and

099adapted it into coherent governance which is their trademark for their their model and so we were working with the aspen group under the old system we had ends which we now call results they're basically our goal our overall goals there was executive limitations and that was the stuff that had the superintendent shall not fail too uh those we re-adopted last july as executive limitations which is a little clearer word and that's what we have in place now which says this is what the superintendent should do and this is what the superintendent should not do so that's those are the policies so when we adopted the the operational expectations we basically adopted them in lieu of the executive limitations with one exception and that is we took the equity and we re-adopted that as an executive

100limitation we had it as 16 and now i think is 13 so that's basically what we have in place then in our october meeting we were working on the other two components which are board superintendent relations and then the other one is the governance culture now previous we had the governance policy and so when the the contract with aspen was to take all of these four sets of policies that we had under policy governance and convert them over to coherent governance however they did not take all of the the governance process policies and convert them over they said well they don't they don't belong in our governance culture documents and they said well that moves into bylaws a separate document and so we were faced with what to do after our october workshop and so

101rebecca deal and i were working on fine tuning that and taking the governance policies that were not included did not carry over to aspen's governance culture and re we work them into the bylaws so what we had for presentation at the november board meeting both board meetings in november was the bylaws which basically reflected what aspen didn't want to include in their documents plus they revised operational expectation no the revised governance culture documents and the revised board superintendent documents have i totally lost you okay so those documents were originally presented at the first board meeting in november and then they were postponed to the second board meeting in november and then they were dropped from the agenda basically leaving it up to the new board to sort out the the mess okay so you can

102find those documents on board docs for either the either the two regular meetings in november and let me just quickly review what it was that we were putting in the bylaws that aspen group said we didn't need in their policies the first one was the legal status and organization of the board or the district that basically gives the legal legal boundaries of the district of each about beginning at the corner of this and then going a little little little little around that was there the legal status of the district the other one which was the terms of office of the directors well that's pretty much set by law but the other one which was formally gp2 e3 talked about our annual organization meeting how we conduct our annual organization meeting the term you know and

103when we elect our president and basically it said that the officers were elected for a two-year term or no for a one-year term and the only change that i suggested to that was to add or until their successors are elected and what this does is this means that the board can change officers if they want to in june in other words if they if they want to replace the president in june they can do that you know without asking him to resign because if he's elected for a one-year term he has a one-year term and at the end of that one year his term is over so when i was elected as the interim president last fall that term expired the first meeting in december and if we had failed to achieve a majority to

104elect officers we would have been left without officers because the officers terms expired there was no provision for them to remain until their successors were elected so that was just a technical change uh the process of how we fill vacancies on the board uh that was in there uh redistricting the district director position what are the district directors how we redistrict them we're going to have to consider redistricting because we just got a census the 2020 census not only does the legislature have to redistrict the county commissioners have to redistrict the county commissioner districts but we need to look at the district director districts to see if we still have an equal number of people in each district that's covered in these in these documents um there the the meetings how we how we govern

105our meetings uh the distinction between executive sessions special meetings workshops emergency meetings public meetings agenda planning public comment all of that uh all of that was included in these documents that aspen did not want to deal with and so we're basically if in other words if we were to adopt aspen's policies without addressing these other issues we would be left without some very needed policies um uh quorum and attendance meeting conduct how we conduct our meetings uh minutes the process of the minutes uh and then there's another one on school board student representatives which i don't think which we had in our policy but i i don't believe i'm not sure if aspen included that in their documents or not uh and then another one for reimbursement of expenses for board members and uh yeah

106so those were basically the issues that were put in what were termed bylaws that if we're going to adopt the the documents that we reviewed at our meeting last saturday if we're going to adopt them in lieu of our previous dp policies then we also need to add add these documents in uh if you had a question yeah just quickly on the bylaws piece so if i'm if i understand my talking to yourself and aspirin that they were okay with those types of additional processes procedures things long to put them in bylaws right right they just didn't want them under the document yeah they just didn't want them under their their name i got you it's coherent governance and by the way they uh the when i spoke with um the consultant uh what's her

107name just gave him you know ginger uh ginger yeah she said well we don't even care i mean we don't care if you call them current governance or not we don't usually we just say we just encourage you to say these are our these are our policies these are our south kitat policies and don't even put a label on them so yeah well we if we adopt them we need to clarify what they are and i don't think we need to start adopting 1000 series policies because that would further complicate the matter so my my preference would be to put them in our governance culture policies is that missy described how the board operates that would be my preference but the aspen group didn't want that uh and so i said okay if if you

108insist we'll put it in in a separate document called bylaws so i didn't i didn't make any major modifications to those uh there was one uh suggestion that i uh modified the rules to my liking which i really didn't do i took what we had and just reworked them the the deep the former gp policies on how we conduct the meeting was a combination of about four different wasda policies so it was very difficult to follow through and to so i i basically reorganized kept the wording basically the same but reorganized it so it made it a little a little more sense so it clearly delineates you know what's the regular meeting what's the special meeting what's an executive session what's what's a work study meeting what's an exempt meeting so so they're both are

109clearly laid out uh in in a reasonable order so that so i would recommend that you take a look at those they're in board box under either of the two uh november meetings and uh when we when we get to adopting of the governance culture and the board superintendent relations documents we will also need to include those those bylaws any questions on that okay i'll yield the remaining of my five through the remaining five minutes 34 seconds thank you okay so good job uh let's see next who'd like to go next thank you for bringing it up john you may give us a background appreciate that who'd like to go next i'll go or see kai you and jesse want to go next go ahead uh yeah all right um i'm just going to talk

110about some stuff that i was i need to bring to the board uh that is what this for um i had a conversation with mr goodwin about being able to get the results to the healthy youth survey for south kitts at high school i think it also might have um our middle school data because i know they also do that in middle school but i'm unsure um we're still waiting for that data to come in but it is a lot of you know student culture data um how students like certain like home life stuff and you know school culture home culture um and you know how students feel about that and stuff so i've been i've been talking um about getting that information they still haven't gotten it yet and it should be in anytime

111now but it's it takes a while to get um so that's some data i can bring to you guys um when i get it i'll you know bring it as soon as i can but yeah i just wanted to bring that mr pickard yeah just to clarify in question because i i remember using those surveys and they were the the data and a more fantastic um when when did when was that last given to the students at the high school um it was given when we did our psat and s back makeup testing so it would have been um beginning of the year um so a couple months ago okay thank you yeah and kai i just want to say thank you and and let you know how much i appreciate you working with mr

112goodwin and other um staff at the high school because it is important information to get and um i i think it it feels like there's a partnership between you as a representative of the students and and the school district to try to get some information out that will help us move forward so i just wanted to acknowledge that yeah yeah hopefully it comes in sometime soon so do you have anything to say jesse um nothing major i think that that's also good um mr goodwin mentioned to me and also i know that you're working on your personal survey um so he mentioned to me kind of like the challenges with that um but i am excited to get more info about um you know the school and how we can improve that um i think

113that for me like what's on my mind specifically um is just more about um if you like i think it was a month ago when we were really dealing with that um that call out for like sexual assault awareness at school um so that's really been on my mind especially because of my like role as um like a student leader um in asb um so that's not so much um board um business but i think that it could be and i think that um it's very important so that's kind of what i'm focusing on and then just in general i think that um what all of the for me all of the issues that i see and that i hear from students is is really like something that i could i believe could be solved

114with communication um and i know you guys believe that um i know that everyone does um but just you know like this is the sexual assault awareness campaign um i think that a lot of students are frustrated simply because they don't um they don't really know the policies and then on the other hand of that um the district doesn't know that students are frustrated because there isn't that line of communication so i think that um you know with with that with the critical race theory you know and that was such a hot button issue and i feel like a lot of people's confusion and frustrations can be solved with communication um so i think that that's all i i really want to work on um and it's just make sure that that as a student

115rep um we're kind of delivering those messages to you guys so you can best serve the students um but yeah i mean that's my soap box i've had it since the beginning so i won't take any more of your time was was the survey that kai was discussing was that his survey or was that a different survey um so originally i had a plan for a personal survey but there was some issues with that so i the healthy youth survey is given by the district um and it has a lot of the same information and it's a lot more comprehensive so it was originally um a personal thing but then i kind of remembered and talked to mr goodwin about it and that will i'll get that data from the healthy youth survey and it'll

116be a lot more comprehensive because they spend a lot of time and it's a very long survey um super long um but um yeah and does that one include the middle school um i'm not sure if the data that i'll get from mr goodwin includes the middle school i can try and reach out to the middle school and let's see if i can get their data because i know that they do take that um i know that they do take that i remember taking that in middle school um i'm not sure if they they've had it administered yet because they administer at different times so if we if we do get that data i think it'd be awesome if we could get it for all of the schools i mean back to the mental health

117piece that you and kate you know brought up i think a great to give give us some insight on where you know where people's at right now you know and let's see if we can help them yeah yeah middle school could be more traumatic than high school many kids yeah i i can definitely um try and get the data from the middle schools um i know for sure that i'll be able to get data from the high school but i need to still reach out to the people at the middle school who have that information and kai we have some people at district level that could help get that that information for you as well district-wide so yeah at least middle school high school yeah mr picker just to tag along on that i know

118that that uh when i was principal we we gave that and i'm thinking that it was sixth grade which is now middle school and things i i know it's a it's it's not it's not it's not cheap but it gave us more data than we could almost utilize but it was great information there was both student and staff and it was absolutely i'm totally blanking on the on the agency or or group that conducts it but the the data in there you can just start digging and digging and digging and find out all kinds of information but yeah it would definitely support the wellness and safety among other things so yeah great idea to bring that up and and for us as a board to utilize some of that information yeah and as someone who

119somewhat recently took the survey um it definitely has a lot of that information that you guys are interested in mental health related um school safety related a whole bunch of those things it's a really big really comprehensive survey um and i believe i'm trying to remember i know i took it in 10th grade um i also took it i think in sixth grade i don't know exactly every time you do it i think it's like every other year um yeah every other year so sixth eighth tenth and then i don't know but yeah it's definitely very valuable information so i'm excited to get that and bring it to you guys awesome uh anything else for jesse kai nobody else on this no okay awesome well thanks for sharing that with us appreciate it uh okay

120so it looks like it's down to tim jeff and myself who about to go next i'll go next if you want okay since i don't want to volunteer so let's see um i mean okay so the thing that i wanted to talk about on my first round here would be an item that i that i call restoring capital expenditures credibility with our community uh and then in parentheses the capital levity spend pool remodel school upgrades etc etc so i think to that end we took a big step tonight um with moving forward on the pool so i'm really glad to see that and um what i what i what i want to do is is not stop the community engagement at this point but maybe double down on on it and to say i'd love

121to be able to to to show people what what we've done so far so you know kind of your tax dollars at work um be able to provide a summary i know they occasionally sent out flyers in the past but you know i think a website would be good to say about kind of what we've done so far from that 2018 capital levy and then what we have planned and and now that we have this big item it's something that we can all watch and sort of cheer for as hopefully knock on wood you know stays on budget and on schedule um you know but i'd love to to say you know how do we how do we share this with our community how do we keep them updated and i think you know a

122website would be great i don't know brian maybe if you know any like television people at the high school i could see television um uh high school reporters down there talking about the future of the pool what it's going to be and so forth what it might look like and stuff like that i don't know i i'd like to see us talk about what we're doing and so we can kind of show your tax dollars work kind of thing and and then you know that would kind of lead us into the the other you know the other list of projects that we need to get done through a capital business with school replacements and remodels and stuff like that to come so anyway that's kind of what i was thinking of what what do you

123guys think about something like that in terms of publicizing what we're doing what we've done and what we're doing with capital projects i just want to point out there on the website there is a tax dollars at work tab and it and it says thank you to the south kids have residents and business owners for nurturing growth inspiring achievement building community takes a village to support our students this page is updated with examples of projects funded by taxpayer dollars so amy and fletcher do a nice job of keeping this updated of the current thing it doesn't this because and partly because our website changed over it doesn't go back 10 years but but there's things that are current to this year that we've been able to complete based on the support from our taxpayers so

124that part is there cool brian and i i like the concept it's in fact it's one of mine you guys are keep stealing mine but it's just but what i had down was ongoing connections with the community you know parents non-parents business and really kind of building off of the 26th and and you know i know what's there on the website i know the mailers which are are that are sent out i think quarterly sorry amy i don't remember exactly but but they're sent out they're excellent information if we get people to read them but i also think that we need to you know along that same line have is is there's no one way to reach because there's some people that never look at the website there's some people that see that flyer i

125mean when i go to the the the post office to pick up my mail i have a p.o box you know i see those flyers whether it's from the school or from the city or the county or whatever those flyers are all over the counter people are are you know my point is is that we need to do it needs to be multiple ways and i know we're as a district are doing multiple ways but we need to search out additional ways and i think including not to make our board meetings longer but at the same time somehow if as we get more efficient that we include some of that in our board meetings that we include that and you know and continue to build off of you know whatever we learned from doing next

126next week the 26th building off of that and going you know and doing different things it's just we need it can't be one or two sources which it's not we just need to keep expanding and finding better ways to connect with everybody so the more ways the merrier yeah and i think i mean i think we have a good story to tell with the pool in that you know good news bad news bad news yes the the it's costing us a lot more money than we thought but we do have we get some relief from the state we get some relief from the feds and that helps to make the the bill go better either way it's an investment in our community it's something that the taxpayers you know wanted to do so i think

127you know i think we ought to we ought to celebrate that a little bit as we move forward um kind of related to that i'd like to see i know we have a long-range facilities committee and spent hard at work and i saw some presentations to the prior board before i was officially on and it sounds like you know they're at they're at a place where they have really solid good data about where the current state of our of our community but they don't necessarily have a recommendation i love to be able to you know i guess create a forum or create a data repository or create a way to share that so like it's one thing to say you know our our schools need work and you kind of drive up to pick up

128your kid or you drive by one and go it doesn't look that bad to me it's another one to take one of those special tours i think like that jennifer farmer was saying you know dig in the dig in the basement of that and see the burned out boiler and see the you know leaking roof and see how both if you drive down by the pool see the the roofing falling off of the sides and the top of it you go oh i guess it's a little at zero miles an hour it's a little more shabby than 55 when i drive by so um anyway i'd love to be able to start to share that just so that we can we can communicate with our our um community kind of what the situation is right

129in in detail like we probably need to replace a couple of schools we probably need to remodel a couple more money to build some more based on capacity or whatever and then and then you know i think to some comments that we made before around us creating a vision i think it would be great to talk about kind of what our vision might be i know if one of the things that the me i think for me i think is important you know is is around the high school and the and what i've heard you know for people around the with the two high school proposals it was really kind of divisive and they don't want to build it you know nobody wants to pay for somebody else's school so to sort of speak i

130think if we had one if you have one high school and one destination for every kid in the district it might help us to to get support from a larger group than by definition only getting support from the half that'll get the new school or whatever and we just made a big investment in that property tonight with the with the with the pool uh remodel so anyway i'd love to see us come up with our vision i'd love to see us um start to think seriously about getting something on the ballot a levy a bond capital levy combination with a package or a series of packages i know the old board kind of put it off until at least next fall before they even start to look at it i think that's too long i

131think that's bringing too long to engage so i'd love to see the data that we have shared come sooner and and uh and then get the community involved uh jeff you like to jump in here so i was going to let you let you complete your thoughts sir i'm completed my thought yes i i agree uh exactly what you're saying but i but i i would like to have uh the vision conversation sooner it's it's easy to say we need to replace a school but the harder thing is is education is changing and what the what what's in my mind what what the committee needs guidance on and i've and i've said stated it earlier is they need guidance on what we as the board feel is the future for education if we're all going

132to go back into little buildings for the next 50 years that's one thing if we're going to be in a hybrid mode or we're going to use schools within schools or we're going to use you know a computer campus and you know those type of things those are the hard things right now the committee is is going through a lot of those a lot of the mechanics but what they cannot do is there's no reason to build a uh a middle school if we don't envision middle school as it is today okay so we you know i've heard both sides so all i'm asking is i'd like to have the vision conversation sooner than later and i know that mr winter has put in his thoughts and that's some of the guidance that they used

133and i think we need to go with his comments because that's kind of what i've been following it was his comments to the uh to the board so sorry to take up your time there sorry i know it's it's it's right on point yeah i think i to your point i'd love to see the vision i know that you know it kind of goes blush i'm probably more on the conservative side with that i mean i think we're still going to have schools i think we need to make them we need to think about the future but i'm not i'm not i'm not for saying no schools we'll just have we'll just have you know one zoom instructor somewhere and we'll have 10,000 kids online and they'll do it by themselves i know i'm not

134up for a radical redo i don't think but um but i you know i i have heard lots of my constituents tell me they want something done and it's been a ridiculously long time without doing anything for this district and i really want to invest in it um and the community um and so i think we we ought to do it in a smart way and have a good vision um but you know but i would rather i want to do something and not nothing over anything over over anything else but nothing is not acceptable anymore uh john jesse john ben jesse yeah i i think uh tim had an excellent presentation to the facilities committee uh on the future of education and uh tim how long did that last it wasn't more than about

135five five ten minutes but i think i think the the entire board should see that yeah it's five to ten minutes and i'd be happy to share that yeah i would recommend that you that you show that in a board meeting okay great so that we're all on the same page because i think that that is i found that to be a very uh a real eye-opener about the various options that we have before us cool uh jesse yeah i just um when i was as mr or as director daily was talking about how um we have like a lot of options and like different different um opportunities for our like educational system um at the wasda conference i actually sat through um a specific um a specific meeting that was presented by peninsula school

136district who just um like who just rebuilt um a lot of their schools and they were kind of went under this process um so i have like a lot of notes from it and i'm sure that um we could contact them and maybe if we wanted to just to see what they did but it was a really interesting um presentation because they talked a lot i think they made like an academy for specific um specific subjects and then they also went through the long process of refurbishing and also totally creating new schools so i know that that's i don't know what our plan is but i feel like it could be like a good um a good basis or idea of what it looked like for them and they were very successful or at least

137that's how they presented it so um i was just thinking that could be a resource yeah yeah that's great thank you for saying that okay i think uh oh brian go ahead sorry i just want to put my two cents worth it i think what everybody said on this i completely agree you know we need to have that vision we need to to to look at you know where are we going and it's hard to look into the crystal ball and know what's going to go next week let alone five ten years from now but again that's what we are charged with to a certain certain degree and i think something that that i've said this before but i think covid a positive if we can call it that out of this is saying that

138that there are other alternatives for some not for all but there are some other alternatives and whatnot and so looking at those and there's there's probably a lot more if going back to the wellness thing if we had time to think about it you know and our staff has lots of ideas and whatnot but you know they're you know we all are so um totally agree that this is a topic that we need to you know discuss establish and then continue to discuss so but any everything that everybody said i totally support and agree with awesome well thanks everybody for sharing your hands with me appreciate that so we have two more folks to get through this first round but we've been at this for two hours and i know last time i uh i

139failed to give anyone a good bio break so i'm suggesting without uh without objection that we take a five-minute bio break and come back here at seven oh eight seven oh eight you'll see you back here all right welcome back everybody let's call back to order the special in the self kids app school board uh and we're off to the next uh couple folks so it's down to tim and jeff who'd like to go first why would you say briefly i one of the things that i'm listening and taking notes on is just as we talk about our abc's alignment belief and communication what really is the belief that we we have or hold collectively for our school district in our community and then how do we align and a line is not so much

140the same but a line coming out of the pandemic and and i i agree with both jeff and hefe that education is going to look different and and we need to respond to that but it's not wholesale changes it's it's tweaks to what we're doing and improvements to serve students that's what we need to work on so that's um those are my as we're having conversations around the district it's those kinds of things what do we do in in our education system we can't just keep doing the same old thing and that's um you know our one of the the comments on the presentation that was referenced that i gave to the facilities committee is that our system is perfectly designed to get the results we're getting and so we're not satisfied with the results

141we're getting so then we need to do something different and i think that's we've got really great people doing really great work but we need to improve our systems so they can um they can do what they need to do and our students can get what they need to get so those are just my comments cool well you've got it you've got a full 15 minutes here uh you're you only use one minute anything else on your mind i was trying to beat brian um the other thing the other thing that i'm uh just paying attention to and we talked about this saturday is that we have we have our priority plan but the board's results have changed so they don't necessarily match the priority plan anymore and that's that's a small problem not a

142big problem but i think more importantly as i look at the results the markers that we can measure our success against uh so we have we talk about social studies science math ela all those things but we need to start putting some some targets on there so we can start measuring our success and they similarly what we talked about on saturday some of these things are baseline but but they're the place where we start we're not going to show that turn this thing around in a year but we want to systematically and consistently show growth and i think that's really our goal but we need to have some of those targets based on what the board has um outlined as the desired outcomes for the district and then start working towards those and i think

143that will then also help us as we um envision what the future looks like here for our students and our staff and our community as far as the school district goes okay uh anything else good okay good all right uh jack looks like you're up over to you okay i'll be brief uh also uh obviously in the january 5th uh meeting i sent in all of my items my hope is that these items that we discussed tonight and those items eventually make it onto the agendas so that we can uh go through these things one at a time the only one that i wanted to discuss here was there's an article that says north thirst in public schools will host the first of three community forums wednesday to gather feedback on a proposal that would

144shorten summer breaks basically this is the state supported proposal that officially known as balanced calendar which aims to combat students summer learning loss with shorter summer breaks plan offers longer breaks during fall winter and spring so i have mentioned this those of you that have lived in other states know that california georgia several texas nebraska many of these places go on either a track system or they go for about 45 days they shut down for about a week a couple of weeks then they kick back up and summer ends up being about six to eight weeks long and uh this one here specifically talks about learning loss i have heard wellness here a number of times that everybody's tired fatigued and stuff i personally think that the school system is outmolded the only people that

145really get time off during the summer is educators okay i don't want to make a comment because i am a teacher but there uh no one else has six to eight weeks off per se everybody else that i know has a week or two for vacation and then they're back at work unless they work for the government or something and they have 30 days so i have long talked about considering this obviously ospi has a plan for it we now have north thirst and is not the only one this is just the one that i picked out because it was in the paper on the 17th and they're actually doing something about it they're having public meetings so i've heard public meetings i agree with mr wilson's comments wholeheartedly that public meetings to discuss our

146triumphs as far as our capital project item there and also to discuss our upcoming ones our ideal forums as long as well as well as our comments about wellness safety and the items that have all come up here this evening so uh colleges use a modified system of a quarter system where they go they use semesters where they take a break for many colleges take a break for a month it's been in the system for a long time and if now with the pandemic is an is a primary time to do this to meet with the community and see what everybody thinks okay if everybody doesn't like it that's fine at least we've tried to ask the community but i sincerely believe that given the covet situation what i'm hearing about tired wellness fatigue stress

147that it's time to go for 45 days take a couple of weeks off to recharge you don't have a big learning loss and then we kick back in and then during the summer you still get about six weeks for those long cruises for those that do that those vacations and stuff and then you're right back at school and this solves so many problems that we just addressed here versus throwing money and people which may or may not solve the problem if our teachers need time to just regroup then this this allows time now when i was teaching the teachers went the other way we used to have a break after each quarter we used to have a couple of days to turn around and nobody liked that because they wanted to race to the end

148of of summer but nowadays we have as many people that want to go skiing they want to go to other places they want to go to you know hawaii in october whatever it is and so it's no longer valid that you need to be off all summer long to enjoy the weather because we have so many people nobody wants to go to disneyland during the summer when it's lines you know everywhere nobody wants to join all those big crowds especially now in view of covid and vaccines and all that stuff so this gives folks an opportunity so i would just like us to you know approach this the reason it needs to be done soon is because a decision would have to be made with the teachers by may and i really think that this

149is a solution to many of our issues i've mentioned it before and i will mention it again so i'll yield the rest of my time so we can head on here huh okay all right well we did one round one round of this i thought it went pretty well yeah brian go ahead you had some to add on that yeah i just wanted to add on what uh to yeah yeah um that that i can i can completely agree um it's something that that i have talked about for years and years and that type of thing to take a look at it um and and i think that really to underscore i mean it you know a side benefit is allowing families or staff or all of the above to to have some different times

150for vacation but but more importantly is for that wellness piece that kate spoke of um and allowing i i talked to to several uh half a dozen staff members about this pause that we took friday and tuesday and most of them i talked to one or two of them on monday and then the rest of them tuesday but just saying how much better they felt that they just felt like they could take that breath and say okay yeah we're working hard we're doing all these things and trying to keep up with this so you know a more regular schedule i mean yeah we're going to need to include you know all the different um you know unions and staff and and community and and all of that as far as to come up because there's

151a lot of different ways jeff mentioned some of them and there's some other you know ones that are out there that need to be explored but i i i agree in that it would answer wouldn't answer it would address and help address uh some of the variety of topics so we've talked about tonight as well as as others but taking a look at that and how how best could we do that whether it's a week off uh for four day weekend i mean i don't i don't know but but primarily to you know for wellness of students and staff um but then when he said something at the beginning too the the the loss uh learning loss as an elementary principal you know some of the the losses that we saw in the fall you

152know here's these kids are cruising along there there was in some cases this is more of extreme but a full year and they caught up fairly fast but it still was a process um so being efficient with our teaching and learning um is is a huge benefit as well so anyway that's all yeah i had some comment on that too uh i i did some research and some thought on that i've got a uh extended article on my website that discusses a balanced school year what i found was like in england i have a daughter-in-law who's a school teacher there uh all the entire country with the exception of five counties have the same school year so the so the summer break is the same time and that puts an interesting demand on vacation facilities

153the in germany i have uh children in germany too they the each region has a staggered school year which spreads out the the demand on the vacation facilities the other effect that needs to be considered is the effect on employers if you've got a shortened summer break of course that's going to affect students who want summer jobs because it won't be as much time also the employers are going to be faced with more demands for vacation during that school period during that shortened break and so the employers are going to have to deal with that um and then there was one other yeah there there's another factor to that too i can't remember off the top of my head what it is but you know there's there's a number of things that need to be

154taken into consideration before we we jump into that you know when i was in school you know in a previous century previous millennium actually the school was out the first week of june now we're going into the third week of june you know so we have had this this gradual shift you know over the time frame but yeah it is it says something to look at you know the the advantages are the learning loss and the wellness issue and i think those are very important but we also need to consider the the ramifications throughout the entire oh the other thing was people who work in one district and and live in another so the the parents would be on work one work schedule and the children would be on another school schedule so that doesn't

155affect a lot of people but it it does affect a lot of our staff yeah so let's just kind of echo what you guys are all saying i would love to better understand the details of the ospi model that they're putting out there and i was wondering tim i know you mentioned this to me before and we were talking what's the time what's is there a proposed time frame so far with ospi piece on on that moving to that kind of calendar no so what they did is they had a grant process that would allow some some limited amount of money for some planning so they don't they're not necessarily pushing one specific what they're calling balanced calendar but i think what they're really pushing is what's the what are the best systems that we

156can put in place to serve our students and and so there's a there's a small and i think northeastern is one of those a small number of districts that are that took advantage of that grant opportunity as a planning tool to start looking at some possibilities of what a balanced calendar will look like so there is no timeline but but i think anytime you do something like this it takes time because as john just mentioned there is a ton of factors involved and we have to weigh all those out yeah and i really like jeff's idea of you know make getting the community involved and getting involved early and and i assume tim you're there's a you know for our activities and sports you know groupings right there you all kind of need to move

157as a block i'm assuming to something similar so you can you can interface with other groups with sports and activities too i'm assuming like that's a factor there's an awareness piece the thing i would say that we do every year in spring break and it's with the baseball softball track season we we sometimes we have different spring breaks and others and so sometimes we will play games over our spring break and sometimes other school districts will that's just one example but yeah it gets complex after a while so those are things we need to consider for sure cool so jeff do you have a couple minutes left i know you said you were done but i we had some more comments did you have anything else that you'd like to share regarding this no okay

158all right well we've done one round of this i think it's gone pretty well i'd love to hear how you guys think think that is and then we and then we can decide if we want to call it a night if we want to do an abbreviated another round or whatever but just how do you think this went so far i'd love to hear i thought it was really helpful for me to hear from all of you yes kate i think it's really important especially a brand new board member like myself and and brian and peppy being new too to just hear from everybody um i i think we're all here for the same reasons but we all have may have different priorities or what's important to us and i think it's really important that

159we all know what each other is thinking because and i can speak for myself that i'm gonna listen a little bit better when i see the passion somebody has for something even if i may not totally agree with it i'm gonna go wow this person's really this is important to them though i haven't really heard anything that i disagree with um so i think it's really important it gets us all on the same page and i think that's you know what we want to see out of this board we don't all have to agree on everything and we're not going to but we need to be on the same page and and be respectful of each other's ideas other folks brian john you have your hands up i i i think that was very productive

160tonight i don't know if we if we want to you know we've been going for two and a half hours i don't know if we need another round but i think we should schedule this again uh within two months have another board meeting devoted to informal discussion on various topics okay uh brian your hands up uh yeah um couple of things one um again green with with uh kate and and john your comments there um that i think was a good process i really liked it i think it's important that we get to some of these so that it's just not in two months we really haven't done anything um you know busy people as ourselves and and so many others and all that i mean it's it's really easy to come up with ideas

161and whatnot but what are we going to do about it what are we going to you know how do we get these on so i think that's kind of the next thought process how do we take these ideas and take them further and then my last comment is is that as far as i mean i think the process was really good people were able to speak their ideas and whatnot and and as kate pointed out really there wasn't anything that that anybody disagreed we were all kind of on the same page a little bit different takes different the process i believe for me really i mean there's been some pretty big disagreements on process and and different things here you know just when i've been on the board and even past that but i really

162felt good that we we kind of came together on this and the dialogue was was respectful and it was good and and everybody had good ideas and things to add to other people's ideas so to me i'm feeling really good that it brought brought us together in a really nice way and and i say we need to replicate that and be able to do that as much as we possibly can cool jeff tim how does it work for you i was just i was writing down some notes and so i've got four things that are as we come out of this meeting what's the next step or what's the result of this meeting and so facilities that we need to have a direction and start making some movement towards that direction we need to really

163have some discussion about school systems which include calendar delivery model those kind of things the support wellness piece for students and staff and then growth and improvement in progress academically so as we talked about in the last board meeting board agenda topics if if these are things that kind of and this is my notes but if these are things that categorize things we're interested in talking about i would love to see agendas focused on these areas so that we're not just talking about it that we're actually making progress towards and i think to brian's point it seems like we all have we there's a common belief about what we're talking about and we can all contribute to progress for lack of a better word on on these topics cool thanks jeff yeah just uh looking

164to see uh how we take uh this and turn it into action and progress very good and justine kai what'd you just think i think it worked really great and i think we were really productive um definitely got a lot of um things started um a lot of things addressed and we definitely need to do it again in the future and act on the stuff in this and then do it again in the future so it's kind of like a planning thing when you really think about on the big picture um so yeah i enjoyed it cool jesse yeah um i feel very similar um i think it was really productive and i and if anything it helped us understand each other better and i think that's really important to a team yeah i think

165uh i agree with what you said i really thought i really enjoyed hearing from all your points of view and i like how we built on each other's um ideas and i think we're probably a lot closer together than people would have thought in terms of like a month ago or two uh in terms of where where we want to go and so that's exciting to me and i think there's no substitute for you know building relationships like rolling up your sleeves and doing some work so um anyway appreciate the work tonight i think i'm if i'm looking at the time i think i would suggest that we that we leave it to one round but i do like the idea of doing it again soon and shooting through some of these topics because i

166think before we make decisions it's great to kind of roll them around on our tongues and ears first so yeah we only we only we typically only have one meeting in april so why don't we shoot for the second meeting in march to have another march okay yeah that's a good idea another one of these okay all right any last words from anyone all right well great meeting everyone thank you so much for your participation thanks to everyone listening at home and uh bring to close the january 19th meeting of the self-contest self-contest school board gavel gavel good night thanks everybody nice job everybody