TSD School Board Meeting 11-10-2021

001[Music] so [Music] so in order to be picked up on the camera we do have to make sure we have microphones on so if you make sure those are on and thank you for joining us at five for a school improvement conversation with tumwater middle school happy to have uh principal kathy mcnamara and assistant principal david pariscan here to speak with you and uh thanks uh to those who are able to join us this morning for walk throughs at tomwater middle school it was fantastic to get a chance to visit classrooms and you know we usually do these around a table in kind of a more informal manner because we're set up for a regular board meeting it feels a little bit more formal but i think we want to keep that same discussion format

002where we have the chance to to hear from tim watermetal and ask questions along the way so thanks for being here tonight and we'll turn the floor over to you all right uh good evening thank you superintendent dotson and members of the board we're happy to be here to present you with some information about what we've been doing so far at tomorrow middle school this year it's been fairly busy fall i will say so far go ahead so we just wanted to review that we are adopting the same building goals as as we have as a district so we have our equity goal our mtss goal and our staff collaboration rebooting our plc work so around the equity we just are kind of letting you know what direction we're going in each of these goal

003areas so we did the district equity kickoff in august we are in year two of our equity team that we um started last year so we have a good team of teachers who are on that committee that equity team is actually delivering our training on the 19th so we have divvied up part of the presentations so it's it's not just like david and i or a staff member it's several of us that are presenting the information so we're excited about that collaboration with our staff we had some student survey data from last year that we looked at like how comfortable do you feel at school what are some of your challenges things like that it was more open-ended so we're going to continue with that another survey this fall our committee is going to be

004looking at that after the training on the 19th and then we are part of that district equity cadre work there's representatives that jeff broom leads so we're part of that group too under mtss this is a pretty challenging i think area that what we have seen is student behaviors that are pretty intense and behaviors that i think were maybe not equipped as well to deal with some some of the social emotional challenges that kids have at school we're working really hard with our tier one and two kiddos with our through our pbis our support systems trying to you know push those behaviors that are really the behaviors we want to continue to see we've seen some kids settle into the lunches where we have some of the most challenging behavior in the unstructured time but

005we're seeing behaviors that are kind of a couple years social emotional years below what we're what we typically see in the middle level um so through our homeroom we do our pbis and character strong lessons we did that the first week of school to kick off of the first few weeks of school actually we had homeroom every day where we were presenting information we have a wellness rotation just like bush middle school does where we have pe health and character strong where kids roll through all of those classes we did have a tier 1 and 2 esd intervention specialist she did she was only with us for a very short time but then took another position so we will get another specialist that might help with some of those tier 1 and tier 2 students

006i would just ask are you all familiar with the the tier 1 tier 2 language for that perfect just making sure we we just had a district-wide mtss you know training that all of our staff are engaging in and then just looking at our um our safe schools panorama data we have homeroom questionnaires that we that we will talk about later in this presentation so so this just talks a little bit about part of our pbis our acronym is pride ownership warmth encouragement and respect our power so we have power tickets that we give out to students when we see them doing the the right thing and the things that we want them to do we had a pbas reward activity recently where kids were engaged in some game activities in different classrooms and they

007had to earn that they had a really great time with that we have a active student support team that meets every other week and of course we're we're engaged in restorative practices we're working on restorative circles getting to that takes a long time to get all of the parties on board and to really engage in in some positive movement forward there so we're working on that and then our staff collaboration plc plus framework training i would say at tomwater middle school we have some really strong plcs they've been doing it for quite a while so they we have some high functioning plc's but we do have some activator leaders our site team and department leads are also part of even though they're not the activators they act as activators because they've been doing it for

008a long time in our departments not all of our activators cover all departments so we have engaged them in that work as well so they're engaged in the plc training module work um and like i said they're they're pretty high functioning already so we're pretty excited about that because they also then work with their bush middle school colleagues so some of them do it for example of the math department they just continue to do it cross cross buildings which is which is great and we we are encouraging other departments to do that as well so so we wanted to kind of talk a little bit about some strengths and challenges at tomwater middle school again grade level plcs that are just really strong they come up with some really creative ideas and and solutions to

009some of the challenges that we have they are great at creating things and then sharing those with other teams you know throughout the school so if 8th grade team develops something they'll share it with 7th and 6th grade and we everybody kind of shares and and collaborates really well for the benefit of all the teachers and the kids so um just the flexibility of everybody this year i just see them working above and beyond their typical job responsibilities and that's just just everybody covering for one another and helping out i think we have a really strong pbis structure we have a great activities team they come up with some wonderful ideas the leadership team just did a virtual veterans day assembly presentation last thursday we had the choir the band and the orchestra in the

010gym and our leadership kids and they streamed it live through all the classrooms and they had music and then they had some shows and it was just it it was beautiful i mean it went like clockwork i mean and that was something challenging i think to pull off and we've never done that before so that was great we're in our third year of implementation of restorative justice practices um and our pairs are working together on fridays to come up to speed on how do we respond to as a student support call for example to a classroom you probably heard that today on our radios this week as we were going around the school another strength i would say staff who put students first and demonstrate care and support for those who may be at a

011disadvantage for accessing school and resources we have just a really caring staff i'm just i'm excited to be back at tomorrow middle school since i know quite a few of the of the teachers from when i was there previously and just excited to work with them because they're they're pretty amazing people um use of iready and sba data to inform and improve instruction and then david's going to talk a little bit about that later in our slides some more strengths and celebrations we're going to talk about today we've already we've already always had exploratories at tomwater middle school i think we have some really great options this year we added three different exploratories movement for life jen hire teaches that two periods a day and it's really like more about beyond pe so beyond what

012you typically do in pe so she's teaching them life skill types of activities so for example some of the some of the slides you'll see of kids setting up tents and and how to order tents how to you know the the survival techniques when you're hiking and um so outdoors you know kinds of things she had a um i was it's not a zip line what was it called slackline set up in the gym the other day where kids were walking across the slack line and doing some yoga on the slack line i don't know how they did that but um and then we have a nasa class dj brahmer teaches the nasa class connecting with scientists and astronauts and building things and and a very hands-on class and then allison joyce teaches magic of

013electrons which is really a cool hands-on activity class as well here's just a couple slides the kids out in the woods behind tum water middle school setting up tents and and building shelters and here's a student who was i'm not sure exactly what the activity was but it looks like an electronic board of some sort yeah and then i'm going to turn it over to david microphone so some other strengths and celebrations that we're able to talk about our so our cross country team uh there's a picture there uh it was fun to see that group out there getting back to sports and including sixth graders in that uh we had a huge turnout um when we had our meets this is a meet of like five different middle school teams and it's all red

014because we have like 50 kids and other schools have anywhere between five and ten so it's fun to see high turnout there we had our first band concert in person so families immediate families got to come in and see that i know mr harper put a lot of time and effort into organizing that and the kids did an awesome job it's fun to see a live concert again and then our leadership class that that picture there with the door they wanted to do this thing called i think it's a tick tock a positive tick tock challenge a heart attack where they learn a little bit about a person and they put positive heart notes on the on the door so they asked for us to help organize that uh distract the teacher a little bit

015so they could heart attack their door so it's fun to see and it was um it's really good to see when the teacher came back and saw the heart attack just how it made that teacher's day and the teacher was like this my day it was such a hard day like that my fifth period class was so hard but now like this really made my day and my week because of the time and effort that the leadership kids put in toward making a positive difference so it's fun to see kids take that ownership on so kind of get kind of going and transitioning into some of the challenges that we're looking at some of the challenges are you know we're starting school with with less staff than we had kind of pre-covered with similar enrollment

016numbers so we have a lot of needs a lot of safety needs that we have set up a lot of more student academic needs student social emotional needs and just not having that kind of same staffing has has been challenging for us not having the lack of astral dollars to really use towards supporting supporting some of those needs has been a challenge for us at the school level the lack of available substitute teachers is definitely something that impacts us every single day where we're asking teachers to cover for an unfilled substitute position so we have some teachers that maybe get one or two prep periods a week are covering for teachers the other days which you know is challenging and i'm on teacher we ask them we're like can you please cover today and they're

017like i i just can't i haven't had to prep for like four days straight and i've got to plan something so that's a challenge and so we're working to support teachers and not getting to that that burnout level and trying to find other ways to be creative about sharing the load um the continuing of just a social distancing restrictions when you were at school today you saw our outside lunch area so um you know it's the safest option and it's we're making it work right now but it's a challenge and requires additional para supervision to have two separate lunch locations so we can make sure that kids are spread six feet inside and then outside spreading out as much as possible kathy mentioned the idea of you know we see students mimicking uh younger age

018level behaviors so eighth graders often times uh exhibiting sixth grade behaviors and seventh graders exhibiting fifth grade behavior is just that kind of two-year delay um due to the school closure that we had the social emotional needs a lot more intense levels of support that right now we're challenged to find ways to provide those supports for students we talked about the workload talked about some of the building budget cuts that were making so looking at how we can still meet the needs of running our school with fewer resources and then we'll get into the academic data in a bit here but just the academic data that's demonstrating that we have a significant population of our students that are two or more years below grade level um at rates that are more than we've ever seen

019so this is my this is my jam this is digging into some data here if you know me at all former math teacher in mathtosa for the district so we have our math sba and our ela sba and our math i ready in our ela i ready and at first glance you know digging into the data noticing that we have our advanced percentages our proficient and the light blue are below and then our well below so this is our our sixth grade fall data so noticing the about 70 percent on the math are below or well below um ela which is traditionally we have more students that are proficient in ela than math um in years past so this is similar but just looking at the data that shows advanced proficient below and well below

020so that's our sixth grade data questionnaire so what is the normal year below and well below percentage so um i don't i don't have the the normal data uh but what we um what i gathered was the a little bit deeper analysis into the well below data i don't have the previous years fall data last year's fall data was during the school closure so we have some data from that but um well so about how far up off i would say probably by typically we run for math numbers about anywhere from 55 to 60 of students are proficient and this is showing that we're at about 30. so we're about 20 off so then for seventh grade kind of the same information on the sba seventh graders had a little bit more proficient with math

021on the sba but then their i ready was a little bit different so a little bit of a difference there but again similar ela is a little bit stronger than math for seventh grade class as well and then this is our eighth grade data as well so again similar trend where math is a little bit um more struggling than the ela but again we only we have about 40 of our students that are proficient or advanced in math the thing that caught my eye just knowing the um the history of the assessment data was the the well below percentage that typically we don't have that high of a well below percentage so that's what i was gonna it caught my eye so i dug a little deeper so this is kind of tracking the the

022cohort of the six our sixth graders so when our sixth graders were in third grade when they were in fourth when they were in fifth and then now that we have them in sixth grade so similarly for seventh grade how they do as fourth graders how they do as fifth graders so kind of tracking them for the last four years so you'll notice and this is why i kind of caught my eye was typically are well below and well below is meaning that there are two or more grade levels below so our current sixth graders are showing fourth or lower um assessment scores and our seventh graders would be showing fifth or below so there are two grid levels below what their proficient proficiency should be at so typically you can see that the trend

023of almost doubling or more than doubling for all the of our grade levels in terms of um and this is this was math this was the math assessment data so numbers-wise with our sixth grade class we have 50 students that are two or more grade levels below standard in seventh grade we've got almost 70 students that are two or more grade levels below and then eighth grade we have over 50 that are two markers that was below so this is this is the challenge and then this is kind of now that we have this data what do we do with it and how do we respond to meet the needs of students so that kind of brings up this idea of our next steps we have we have some data we have some information that

024we need to act on so this is where we dig into our plc i mean this is the the time and the resources that we've invested into teacher collaboration and staff collaboration so now using this data to ascen to target those essential learnings that we know that students need to have in order to be successful in their progression of learning and then recollaborating on how to support students and meeting those needs so that's really where we we lean in our plc's to have those conversations and adjust their instruction and look at ways for how they can really get students to meet those essential learning standards in addition to this i'm working with both the tamar middle school and the bush math teachers in collaboration we're meeting once monthly to really look at student data unit

025by unit to see who's meeting standard who's not meeting standard what are the essential standards that we want students to be mastering and then looking at how we have to adjust our instruction based on those needs so because we have a large percentage of students that are more than uh two or more grade levels below there's a lot of um kind of just-in-time teaching that we're having to provide for for students so um some really good conversations on how we can support them and then um using some targeted homeroom instruction and some student voice at supporting how we can make tms a positive play so kind of adjusting that scl need as well and then there's a there's a slide on there that we use in our homeroom class we gave a survey to students

026asking kind of they just look kind of to assess the climate and culture of the middle school where they felt safe where are some places where they didn't feel as safe so we had some data that showed hey our hallways courtyard and bathrooms are the places where students feel most unsafe so as as a homeroom teachers were able to have a conversation with students and facilitate that on how can you take some ownership and help make a positive change in these areas teachers so they had some great conversations with kids around how we can make a positive difference and kind of own your energy that you bring into the space so those are some some next steps that we are working on with kids and then brings us to some question time thank you yeah

027questions i have a couple um when you were referring to the two-year delay in the behavior for the students um what is your um i guess kind of forecast what you think you might see a catch-up with that behavior do you think that will happen maybe in the spring or do you think there will be a catch-up of their social emotional behavior and and kind of coupled on with that do you think it is related also with with their grade performance and that will kind of all come together maybe or you're best educated maybe yeah i definitely think that you're right that when students are you know they if they're behind and they they know they're behind or they're struggling academically that we're going to see more of those behaviors we've seen students already start

028to settle in into making some more positive choices and kind of getting back into the rhythm of how we do school and some of the expectations and really um so we've seen that change i'm optimistic that by you know as we get into springtime that we'll have have more of our systems in place and students kind of understand those systems and then we can really target the small group that are more of our tier three students that need a lot more targeted support okay good thank you i think the social interactions too are starting to improve they were in isolation and now they're back in school and they're starting to understand how to interact with one another in a more positive way particularly through some of the character strong lessons and things that are done

029in the classroom so we have seen some improvement you know in that as well good thank you so much and thank you again for our great walk about the school this morning it was really great so i'm curious about the restorative justice and completely understand if it's um too early to tell really particularly with kind of losing of last year but um do you i mean do you think it's making any differences having an impact to be doing discipline differently in that way i would say yes just trying to get our staff some of our staff who have been trained are are no longer with us and so we're trying to get some of our paris staff trained as well so that they can respond i think our teachers are pretty equipped to handle some

030of that in the classroom where we're struggling is having we had a conversation with sean battstown about this too about the time that it takes to get to the restorative circles you have to get parents on board you have to get kids on board um to really have those you know be able to have those circles with kids and and get them to you know move forward in how they interact with one another in a positive way and and [Music] and restore their their relationships with kids um so i think just just as time moves forward you know as we go through the year we'll have more opportunities to engage in some of those practices that will help you know set a level of um expectation and a level of routine of where kids understand

031how to how to go through that process and so i would say that just like the earlier question about their maturity um i think that will come as well for and one of the things i've noticed just in bringing in the restorative practices is this idea of like in order to to restore a relationship there has to be a relationship to restore and helping students and staff understand and very like emphasizing like that's the relational currency is how we change behavior and i think we all we all know that and this just kind of comes alongside that and helps us facilitate those conversations better with both staff and with students that's a good point i like that it has to be a relationship to restore to them that's definitely true i think that's a really

032great observation how are the parents how do parents um feel about about this because this is quite different for some parents i think it's parent by parents oh i did have another question um would it be possible to email the powerpoint presentation to uh becky or um so we can all take a look at it separately as well yeah yeah perfect thank you both my question was answered no questions okay yeah thank you for this morning thank you for this yeah thank you wonderful thank you very much well we'll go ahead then if there's nothing else and we'll take a break until our six o'clock meeting time thank you for being here and have a wonderful day [Music] so [Music] i would like to call the meeting to order she came with us and acknowledged

033that the tom water school district sits on the ancestral land of the nisqually squawkson island and shahila's people i thank these caretakers of the land who have lived on and continue to live on this land since time immemorial please rise as brian leads us in the flag's loop to the yeah on the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Applause] thank you becky did we have anyone sign up for a public comment okay so um if you wish if you had wished to um address the board you have already needed to sign up if you wish to speak at a future meeting then you would email becky parsons at becky.parsons tomorrow.k12.wa.u.s uh you got to do that before six

034o'clock and since there's just one person you know that person will get five minutes i won't go through the rest of this uh superintendent dotson have there been any changes or additions to the agenda since it was published not since the last public publish published agenda because there were so many changes from the first time to the last published so uh now we'll go on to the minutes review we have the minutes from october 7th and october 14th meetings has the board had the opportunity to review these minutes yes yes are there any changes darby would you like to make a motion to approve the minutes i move we approve the meeting minutes from october 7th and october 14th a second okay okay sorry uh it's been moved in second and uh all those in

035favor say aye aye motion passes so now we'll move to the consent agenda so um i i realized i didn't tell lori how this works um so usually it goes from one side to the other so when casey moves then you would second thank you yeah and then i'll call on you next you know then we'll just take turns doing all this so everyone has an opportunity so casey uh or um now we're onto the consent agenda this is my last meeting i'm gonna have to do so if i mess up a lot it doesn't matter it'll be casey's turn to mess everything up yeah so have we all had the opportunity to review the items on the consent agenda yes yes and casey would you like to make a motion to approve the consent

036agenda yeah i'd like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda now lori it's your turn to second i will second that all right all those in favor say aye motion passes all right now we're on to the student representative reports so we have missed our student reps this will be their first meeting we have talia from black hills we have alexander from cascadia we have amia from tomato high school the superintendent i met with them last week and real and what i told them i spoke on behalf of the board that we really want their input we've had great success in the past with students giving input and it has really helped us make decisions and what i told them was that they'll be providing reports that now and they talk a lot

037now but we also expect them to talk during other times of the meeting if they have something to say but i know that some of them are nervous and that's okay just take a deep breath and you can uh we'll we'll wait for you to start so talia would you would you mind starting is this is this good yes okay so the main question we got um was how are students adjusting to being back in person full time after months of remote learning um i really try to ask many different grade levels about this um and i found that mainly seniors felt some struggle with schedule specifically like getting back to all six classes every day especially balancing school with college applications and life around that i also had some people saying that they had

038struggles with gaps of knowledge from last year as in like last year obviously was much harder to learn for some students so some students coming back to this year feel like they aren't where they need to be um yes and then i had some students that actually are doing much much better which is really really was really good to hear um students enjoy the social life and the social aspect helps their education in general um i heard from some student athletes that life right now going back in person is very hard um i think getting back to that flow of athletics and education is hard to handle but um overall i had a very mixed half of the people i asked said it was a struggle and it's hard to get back and have really

039enjoyed it and are very very glad to be back um overall that was what i got and there is a big complaint about um buses so and i'm sure this has been talked about before many times um i had my own coach come to me and say you need to say this at this meeting tonight and i was like we'll do coach i will do that so i'm doing that now um but overall i think students are getting back into the flow some are struggling and some are getting better than others i think it also counts on who is introverted and who is extroverted um so i think that's enough for me i think yeah cool there we go real quick leah what grade are you i am senior thank you all right so hopefully

040i just move on and piggyback off of this subject um as far as i know cascadia is one of the first places to open back up uh to the public so i've had a nice amount of time to go over this question but uh to get to the point about it um i've had a variety of students from both tom water and black hills trying to transitioning over to cascadia so i've had a great number of inputs put in for how they've been doing and how they've been dealing with it and overall i'd say well even with their own challenges at both school and at home that they have been performing wonderfully sorry um yeah my answer is that i have a confident confirmation that they have been performing wonderfully over with i'm so sorry

041when it comes to their grades and our damage those social skills from over the long break um the only issues uh that i've ever had been spoken up from across um any of the students has just been trying to schedule between getting their work done and their jobs that they have been getting um comfortable with and but even then after checking back with those students they've been able to hold their own and be able to get all their work done so no problem there but um yeah that's all i have to say about the matter thank you thank you hi um so i i did a classroom survey um and some positive things that like students have said is that i can improve their mental health and like they have like better instructions compared to

042online uh there's also like some people that are really glad to be back because of um they're like able to be like social can you guys hear me now i'm sorry oh should we say the stuff did you keep going you're fine okay um there's also like a feel like comments that's like it's easier to be motivated because last year they can just go on their phone and not really pay attention in class so they're more motivated this year there's also like a few comments i said that it was hard but it's like slowly getting better so that's good there was a few concerning ones that said that since they've been back there's two students that was physically assaulted and they were called slurs and they get bullied there's also another concern that non-gendered restrooms

043aren't being opened they're closed and if they if a student wants to access that they have to go to the teacher and they have to get a key to use the bathroom another thing is that it's like um like the transition is too soon so it's not helping the mental health that's like the you know berries on each student so um another one is that like because of covid and like teeper time and like clubs on fridays and stuff like that the halls are like pretty crowded so some students don't like that and the last one is that students who receive like special education aren't being accommodated enough in class so that's what i got from things am i allowed to add something to yourself time okay um one thing i wanted to say was

044i many students said that they missed having wednesdays off from school yeah um and yes um a lot of students said it was nice to recharge just mentally um and to a lot of students also said they liked being able to catch up on work but i don't know if that's fully true um and then i think i i had it in my head where is it oh um yeah many of the older grades so 12th and 11th grade were complaining about how underclassmen i don't this might just be a general thing don't have a certain kind of respect around school and i don't know if that's because they haven't been in school for a while um but yeah and stuff with like slurs and personal attacks for the younger the younger group is something

045that has been apparent through my question asking yeah thank you i saw dr dawson taking many notes that i assume he's going to share with our principals some of them are brian's here but um for our other two uh i'm concerned about the bathrooms i'm concerned about um i'm concerned about all of it but the bathroom seems like an easy question for jeff to be able to answer questions for our student reps just good job on your first time thank you well done i had a quick question uh talia when you met the transferred the bus issue you meant just the routes being cancelled and running behind sometimes is that what you expand on that a little bit um i think mainly i'm i am not sure about transportation for like after school kids getting

046home but i know for sports like our this is only this isn't just for black hills tom water as well um like our swim and dive team doesn't have a bus to state this friday um tennis teams have been like just left waiting for a bus and then figuring out it's been canceled because there is no buses yeah it's mainly just athletics i believe is the is that does that i totally understand yeah i just wanted to get your perspective but yeah the we have a transportation issue with the district with getting kids to school and then that directly impacts athletics because they're still trying to get kids coming back to school so that's yes but i wanted so i wanted to make sure we're clear on that yes no other issues thank you very

047much awesome amia you look like you had something else you wanted to share is there something else yeah i just wanted to make clear that like um it's not like the school doesn't know anything about the bathroom or anything like that i told my counselor and they said that there's a reason because like vandalism and stuff like that so it's not like they're like not doing anything about it so i just want to make it clear no one's getting in trouble it's just problem solving that allows you to solve it thank you all right um okay so so you guys did your report so you so now you've got that got all the nerves out and um so if there's any as we're going through this other stuff if you if you want to like

048i need to keep make you know making sure but if you want to speak just like race you know just signal to me all right i keep i try to keep a lookout all right so now uh public comment follow up dr dobson yes so we had quite an active public comment at our last meeting with quite a few people that joined us particularly as you may recall around port of olympia work and i've reached back out to each of them that contacted on that to offer a follow-up conversation also let them know that we are continuing to watch that work closely because and i know mel murray here has a does a lot of work with them and and is continuing to keep an eye on it to make sure that we're advocating for

049tom water school district's needs throughout the process of this that we don't i know you know as a board it will be the port of olympian city of tomwater that make most of the decisions on that but we can offer that offer our comment and our perspectives and our our the board can take a position on it if you see things that that would impact our students impact our our schools and so uh have reached back out on that as well as to the um have been in communication with any of the others that have everyone else that's been in public comment we've had some email dialogue and we'll continue to continue to appreciate everyone bringing their their perspectives on all of the measures that we're experiencing right now i think as i as i

050would say i know on behalf of all of you that you value that feedback i value that feedback and it helps us figure out how to advocate for the needs of our students so so did anyone else watch the um work session last night no one uh so what so i did um and what i learned is november 30th is going to be an opportunity for public comment i also learned a lot about what this whole thing is um and i'm not going to talk about it tonight but um so they'll they'll have a public comment period and so as if you want to say something that would be the time to they've not had public comment on this topic did they record it by chance i would yes they did they did yeah so

051you could probably go to the website and watch it was it's rather it's rather long it felt like a tomorrow school board meeting so you know for a long time um but i would i would encourage you if you're really interested in this topic to go and listen because they talked about we were frustrated because we didn't know specifics that's by design they don't know specifics and there are there are reasons for that and and they also mentioned that they've been working with the district which i assume means mel uh on this and that mill you've had some um input on it oh okay yes right yeah great all right awesome so i know that some people are really interested i encourage you to go watch it and then and so you understand what you're

052making comment on if you want to make comment uh in november and if you feel like you want the board to take a position then feel free to draft something up for us to consider right so now we'll go to public comment is it is the person here or is it timboy oh okay oh you know how this works i don't need to say anything go ahead yeah five minutes i'll do my best okay it's great to see students here you guys did a great job and it gets easier i promise you okay thank you all for allowing me to address the board tonight first of all the ta was glad to finish the latest rounds of negotiations with the district that being said there were many people who weren't excited about the outcome as

053the ratification vote wasn't near the almost unanimous numbers we've had in the past we met in early october it finally became clear that the district wasn't going to be able to reach our compensation proposals so the ta made the decision to settle for the state provided two percent ipd with the belief that district resources as in re human resources could be better spent on work at the d.o if we had known that the district was experiencing such financial difficulties earlier this bargain would have been finished much earlier this part so we reached a tentative agreement which was ratified within the next couple of weeks although the two sides were still far apart the negotiations remained respectful and civil and we appreciate that ta members are extremely troubled about the financial situation the district has found

054itself in i've had calls for members to demand an outside audit of district finances they are asking me how did the district blow through millions of in esser funds in a matter of months what they're asking for is transparency from the do and i think they deserve that when teachers acquire resources for their students or classrooms they have to account for those resources to the penny they're wondering why this isn't happening at the district office those are good questions we've heard all the reasons about the pandemic causing these problems and legislative decisions causing these problems however all districts were affected by the pandemic and all district received and not all districts received legislative dollars when they doled out mixed factor and regionalization funds several years back but as far as i'm aware no other in

055our dis no other district in this area in the chinook region are in similar financial straits and it just isn't the pipe the pandemic or legislature that have been blamed for this financial mess a former tomorrow finance director and i believe you're all aware of this lays much of the blame on the teachers union for this crisis this is the same finance director who for years in negotiations stated that the district couldn't afford to increase teacher pay by more than a half of a percent or in those red letter years maybe a full percentage point because of the need to keep a healthy fund balance so we would accept a half or one percent after a full year of negotiations and then watches the district fund balance inevitably ended the year with yet another surplus

056it happened year after year after year we were told and this is a quote there's value added in being a tum water teacher meaning you should be happy to work for lower salaries because this is tum water meanwhile surrounding districts and locals were agreeing to steady and significant compensation increases this led to olympia northursten widening the compensation gap between tumwater between them and tumwater teachers that more than anything led to the job action in 2018. so as much as the former tsd finance director would like to blame the teachers union for this financial mess he actually played a significant role that led to the 16-day strike in 2018. so i'm asking you is is don't let people blame the teachers for this with the financial challenge the tea will still head to next year's bargaining

057table asking for an increase in compensation i foresee those proposals being denied because now the district really is in financial straits meanwhile our neighboring districts that have managed to remain fiscally sound will be able to rate to grant raises for a teacher and we'll see the gap between us and neighbors start to widen once again and let's remember what led to led us to after visiting with many of our tumor teachers those who've been told again and again what a great job you're doing i'm being told by them yeah but not they're not seeing our inner bandages they're telling me that people at the d.o or our board members have no appreciation for what they're dealing with in their classrooms i think one of you might have an idea they want the do folks that

058take a turn in their classrooms come out and sub for a day walk a day in our shoes i'm witnessing crying and sobbing teachers as they talk about how they feel they're not able to adequately serve their students and families i'm hearing despair and exhaustion in their voices i'm seeing defeat in their eyes in last month's rep council meeting building reps reported that teachers are feeling burnt out and overstretched and exhausted and were only a quarter of the way through the school year this wasn't from just one two or two buildings this was from across the district students are showing up late due to busing issues all right mr boy you know what i'm gonna finish five minutes that was five minutes i'm gonna i'm gonna finish because these people demanded that i they speak

059for him tim i i need you to stick it's difficult teaching the kids or trickling into the first hour of the school day i'm gonna have to recess the meeting if you don't stop please stop teachers are losing their planning periods because they are having to stop or because specialists who are oftentimes losing their entire day of classes have to cancel their classes so they can sub and then gen ed teachers lose their planning period in that way planning has to happen sometime and that means staying late or taking work home these both involve taking time away from their families i'm hearing of teachers foregoing legitimate doctor visits because they fear they won't be able to procruit and they don't want to put pressure on their colleagues to have to pick up the slack this

060is not a healthy or sustainable practice [Music] i really wish dj could have just taken over for you we we do know how to do this right folks is five minutes and then each person can talk for three minutes after that and then talk for 20 minutes total on any one topic i i know you feel so strongly and i really you and you know me i hate i hate trying to enforce that rule because i really want dj needs to sign up all right this is how this works i'm really sorry i felt icky to do that okay thank you um did you just say kinda timboy i just i i you we all know uh a couple a few years ago i was advocating for us to break the 20-minute rule i was

061advocating for all that stuff right but we have these rules in place for a reason normally i'm a rule follower but these are very difficult uh absolutely yeah all right so um so now we're on to reports to the board um policy 5011 sexual harassment of staff prohibited that schooler she has as long as she wants no just kidding no she actually has a time limit herself um so remember the reports the board so for their first readings if you have questions um or if you have suggestions and we can give them the best and she'll have time to incorporate them for second reading but we're not taking any action on any of these first readings well tim thanks for letting me follow that right so um we currently have sexual harassment of district staff

062prohibited policy and we have it numbered 513 so part of the change in in this policy is to renumber it correctly to 5 11. that's the simplest of all of them as you read through there's very very few changes however on the second bullet instead of just saying unwelcome sexual or gender directed conduct we've added gender identity directed conduct to um include our students who or actually this is for staff to include our staff who may be gender binary or other and then in our former policy both retaliation and false allegations on page two were one paragraph those are really very very separate talks aren't they very and so i'm proposing this evening on behalf of the district that we separate those two there is no change in the language other than they will each

063stand alone and then um added to the policy is an area that addresses where where to find the option for a formal complaint filed on behalf of a student it directs people who are interested in that to the correct policy in the 30 in the 3000 series and there's no other changes proposed and if you have any questions i'm happy to hear from you and i'll make adjustments for a second reading any questions for beth right now any questions do you have a question tyler i was just wondering can we find this in our in this should be under tab three tab three oh okay i get it yep got it oh there we go okay that's it thank you yep and and two more policies there's one about um for students prohibited so um

064that's that's coming up uh any other any questions all right any suggestions uh to language changes get them to bath before the next meeting thanks beth and you now have workforce secondary traumatic stress yes and i i just to the students i did want to say my email is i'm the hr director here so my email is beth.schooler and then all the others so if you have ideas or questions please don't hesitate to reach out and like tim said it's your awesome to have kids back with us so welcome all right the second policy presented tonight for first reading is brand new for our district and it's workforce secondary trauma traumatic stress it is referred to as an essential policy and that that's why we're really taking a look at adding it one of the

065best things i think about this policy is it involves district-wide collaboration so it creates a committee a mental health committee here in tumwater school district that as you read through draws from a number of different places in our community the policy provides support for those employees who would be experiencing secondary traumatic stress and that support is by establishing a district-wide workforce mental health committee that researches and shares available resources including a self-assessment tool for employees to take one of the things about secondary traumatic stress is that our staff work with students who experience this and many of them work with students who experience stress every day secondary traumatic stress of course is for the adults who aren't necessarily in the stress but they're supporting nurturing instructing the students who are and that can be just

066as real for the person experiencing the secondary trauma as those experiencing it we find it causes burnout exhaustion fatigue leaving the profession and so we want to provide support for staff who are working so closely with our kids so do we have a do we have eap we have education or no employee assistance program here in the district also yeah okay all right yep and that would be what's different about that is that is for an individual employee if that's what you're asking i'm sorry darby what i see different about the employee assistance program is that serves a number of issues it could be legal it could be marital it could be work but it's anything that impacts your work where this is really designated to serve tumwater staff for this particular topic with those

067of us from our community thank you so i had a question about the work workforce mental health committee so who would be on this committee um i'm looking here it says in oh that would be in our procedures i believe sorry that i did not bring and wait a minute sorry darby so i'm trying to remember because i have the procedures on a different sheet but it involved teachers district office and it would need to provide someone from the district office who has spending authority so that there would be a budget that followed this or the ability to um provide monetary support for it paraprofessionals so it would be certificated classified employees and i counselors and i want to say community members i can get you that though the specific because there's an actual designated

068group of people who would be need to be serving on this committee yeah the the main reason i ask is because it's for all of those people that you just mentioned all of those you know teachers and peer educators and everybody that's experiencing the compassion fatigue so i was thinking that the committee would be somebody who is there to support them um so are there external resources or yeah the committee is actually in charge of finding the resources and making them available to the staff as opposed to actually working one-on-one with the staff any other questions you had a question then the budget was mentioned we're not assigning a budget to this is this something that would be reviewed annually then how much we would invest in this or what is there is there anything

069in the procedures about funding this i think the point of having someone with funding capability on the committee is so that if there is a cost associated with an idea or um connecting with a resource that someone at the table knows how to pursue that not necessarily that there would be a funded pot of money for it but someone who has access to conversations around district funding any other questions all right okay thank you ms thank you so now we have sean batstone to talk about sexual harassment of students being prohibited 3205. uh a good link to best policy as well but this is an update to the sexual harassment of students prohibited policy 3205 as you mentioned and you can see highlighted in red really just the biggest addition being paying close attention to

070those that may have engaged or be employees or others that may have had direct result of sexual misconduct and the fact that that needs to be something obviously that is considered as we move forward with any employment hire but the policy itself hasn't changed dramatically from the original policy we have and has procedures training and otherwise to let folks know in our system that sexual harassment of course isn't isn't okay in it so hopefully those highlights are the biggest ones that you can see there that will be helpful to you again just matching federal and state law to make sure that they're as up-to-date as we can any questions from mr that stone all right now we'll move on to policy 2336 required observances discussion can you show me a picture sean that might be

071on your screen about yeah oh right here [Applause] i wanted to start here because you had a very timely request to take a look at policy 2336 which is required civic observances and i can only tell you that the required civic observances you see in your policy are being implemented here in tumwater school district and i happen to be at michael t today and i want to let you know that of the veterans that were there in the audience and of the students that participated and the teachers that made that happen this is an example of why it's important for us to have civic observances and i will only tell you as the father of a son who is currently serving in our military right now i wasn't necessarily as prepared for the emotion that

072would come after being a part of that and i can say to you that for the veterans that were in the audience and for the kids that participated and for the way that assembly went on it's an important part of what we do here in our schools so one of the questions that sean had was and one of the questions i think you had is tell me a little more about the required observances so in policy 2336 you can see that it's really the principles in the buildings that are responsible for implementing the rcw civic observances that are a part of this policy so you can see constitution day temperance and good citizenship day and then more recently disability history month and that was one that was really focused on a little more recently there

073was a community that came forward and kind of said wow you know this is an important rcw kind of what are you doing with this so one of the things that we like to make sure boards know is that our principals do know about the civic observances and they know about them in a couple of ways but primarily through lori's communication i would say about compliance checklists so in that compliance checklist it says hey here are the civic observances that we want you to pay attention to and make sure that you have and also i'll make sure you get a copy of this too ospi actually has a civic observances sheet as well that kind of says hey here are some links to some resources that might be important if you are choosing to engage

074in any of these so constitutional citizenship day disability history month veterans day those kinds of things can be found on there as well oftentimes we get asked the question about martin luther king jr day so that's one that you would see that is not necessarily on your policy and that's because it's really not an rcw so one of the things that they put in there is you know there is no state law or specific regulation that requires school districts to observe this day in any particular way but because of its relationship to citizenship temperance good citizenship days those kinds of things we take the time to honor diversity and equity through martin luther king jr day so that would be the one biggest change no just pull one second song so we locate the mr

075bojangles over here [Music] [Laughter] they might never come back for that phone so we're just speaking to the martin luther king jr not a legislative law but something that's observed in tumwater school district in addition to the things you see in the policy and the best part is if you ever want to know what's happening it's a great thing lori often does stories around these civic observances but i just thought it'd be kind of fun to see like the real the work that's kind of happening in the buildings around this time so thank you what do they do for temperance and good citizenship day yeah and what i would say to you is it's really important to kind of visit the schools or to have schools kind of share with us and that's something that

076we could certainly add to it because sometimes citizenship and good temperance day can be connected to character strong it can be connected to positive outreach or kindness you heard tms talk a little bit today about hope and kind of caring so some view temperance and good citizenship day in light of the law itself others will create experiences for their kids to just engage in good things about being a citizen you tend to see secondary little do a little bit more with kind of the law and the work around it but you'll see younger ages go down and just say what does it mean to be a good citizen in our school and to practice those guys okay that makes sense any questions do you guys have students or do you guys have whatever yeah i'm

077looking right at him okay i was just wondering if land recognitions are fully being done within oliver elementary and not because i i don't know it would that count as a civic i don't know duty in a way i'm i mean i know that i've been to maybe like one assembly because i'm an spscc student so i'm not there a lot but i don't know if that's been done fully enough throughout i don't know our district i just i don't know if i haven't been there um i think i just wanted to add that too and it's just and i know that there is also i think a land dispute between a few tribes around black hills i just wanted to add that i think that that would be super cool to implement within our

078elementary kids just to grow up being you know being exposed to that i just wanted to add that yeah okay thank you um yes i i think we're going to be working on that more ms kalapa um the the last topic that you just brought up um and he i i i didn't know about the i kind of know about the 10 person good citizenship i was just curious about how did i don't remember an assembly about that um the veterans day uh yeah those are powerful it's good timing today yeah just going around and taking a look and see and what i would say too is you know there's always opportunities to celebrate a lot of things around our system so good stuff and i'm kind of hanging tight too because the second reading

079policy 3122 excused in unexcused absences all right in case you do remember there was a time when you had said wait a second there's some coveted language in that one that kind of speaks to does that need to be there and so sean and i reached out to lance andre about taking a look at policy 3122 in light of the fact that that whack has actually been updated since we first looked at it so casey asked the question do we need to have covid written explicitly in the policy about what excuses a student for an absence and remember that came under that kind of communicable disease category so we had our attorney go back and just take a look at the whack update in general and unfortunately it wasn't in preparation for today's second reading

080but i wanted it on here and in your packet you have a memo i think that becky included that said hey we're still in the process of getting some feedback and as that whack has been updated we'll bring that to you at the next at the december meeting okay nothing's more frustrating than a policy and then having to do it again so think i think it's fine let's just let's hold on until we can get all the most recent updates so that you can have those in front of you all right so um we're under tab four now we've moved on to tab four so the next thing is beth on the tea tentative agreement it's the sean and beth show so far given them a chance to find it all right so as um

081tim said the tea has ratified the tentative agreement that the district and the association reached i'm talking slowly because i see pages turning you're on okay and um so i prepared a summary for the board of the proposed changes and our tentative agreements uh the article and title of the section where they are as well as any notes about um the significance of the proposal or the bargain and happy to answer any questions about that but before we get started there's a couple things i want to say uh bargaining is never easy for either side of the table and i want to acknowledge dj i believe you led the bargain this year thank you very much nice job and tim is our tea president there always and in addition to compensation which is always in

082my experience a very important topic at the table this year tea really really had hoped to address class sizes as well as mental health support for our students so what often comes forward at the end of bargaining is how much percentage of compensation increase we were able to bargain together there's always very important and shared uh heartfelt topics that come up in bargaining and i would not want that to ever go unnoticed and that is just as often brought by our associations to the table as it is by the district so thank you both nice job with your teams so uh-huh are there any specific questions about any of the proposals or do you would you prefer i read through them briefly there there are quite a few here no no does anyone have questions

083for beth about the the tentative agreement no where is the um where's the two percent uh two percent is article twenty-three no um hang on article 23. yeah article it's the middle of the second page article 23 payments and war and warrants and there where it says salary two percent state funded increase to salary does that have to be bargained yes yeah any changes to wages uh or working conditions need to be bargained with an association is that a legally mandated stipulation that two percent is that an illegal um it's bargain but it's not legally mandated at all it's it's bargained the two percent i think what you're asking is did we legally have to pass our ipd through at the two percent level to our teachers i think so yeah yeah um no i

084it is not legally binding that we pass any amount of state-funded money through it's in there it's in all our contracts that we will pass state-funded monies through um so it's bargained i think i'm answering your question lori you have to forgive me i'm still new no no forgiveness needed to ask any other questions then if you don't mind i'd i would like to point out a couple of things that were super awesome um and i noted them in the in the table so we used to have a 10-year limit of experience that we could give people who aren't necessarily classroom teachers such as psychologists or nurses or counselors we could only award them 10 years of credit and that was in our agreement with tea and one of the shared things we've wanted to

085do both as a district and as an association is start making steady improvements in our areas of specialists and special education experiences both for our staff and our students and this year even though it was a very tough bargain financially there were one two three four five six areas where we were able to make very substantial improvements in the contract language regarding experiences for our specialists our special education teachers and therefore the instruction and care that our special education students will get and i just want to acknowledge that that takes both sides um to really say yes we are going to advocate for these group of employees and therefore this population of students so i wanted to thank you all again thank you thank you beth thank you man thank you for your time oh

086wait i think you have to take action yes yeah if you wanted to step away you could i'll step away so need me so uh i'll entertain a motion to approve the tea tentative agreement as presented darby i move that we approve the tea agreement as presented and i'm going to have to break the rule casey would you like to second uh bible second uh all those in favor say aye aye motion passes um so i i did that scott you're supposed to not be part of the you you have to recuse yourself from that particular vote so that's why i didn't have you second i do yes because you have a family member oh that is okay your conflict of interest just keeping you safe so okay um okay what was that i missed

087that um so if you have a family member if you're on the board and you have a family member who would benefit from a bargain um then you recuse yourself from the vote so you don't so you don't have a conflict of interest i yeah so let's show that scott abstained in the minutes please just to keep him okay all right so now we got mel and jennifer so i will start i'm mel for the students i'm mel murray i'm the director of facilities for the district so if you have any questions comments concerns ideas about buildings and how we have how we build and keep them up my email is mel dot murray and the rest and feel free to contact me so this is a capital levy different than a epno levy so

088this is for improvements to the capital facilities which are our buildings and also technology the name of the levy is actually a replacement to capital levy for facility safety and instructional technology improvements it's a four-year 24.1 million dollars total collected over a at a flat at a projected flat 75 cents per 1 000 of assessed value and assumes that there's a three percent growth and assessed value over the next four years which we have been growing at an average of well over six percent for the last six years so it's likely gonna turn out to be less than six than seventy five cents but we use a conservative approach when we're dealing with finances it is a four year levy the first year of collection would be 2023 the levy election if the resolution is

089approved would be february 8th 2022 so the first tax year would be 2023. some example projects so there's a technology portion there's a lot of student chromebooks that need to be dad right our technology director calls it refreshed it's really replaced also there's staff chromebooks several you know a lot of our staff are also using chromebooks now to kind of mesh with their students and those are in a refreshed schedule we have some some of our um i guess hardware in our buildings and that namely network switches and wireless access points are near or at the end of their useful life we also want have to start a refreshment cycle of our security cameras the oldest ones are over seven years old now and they are slowly dying so dan is testing several different vendors

090at various sites to see what we like and then finally classroom projectors we have almost all of them now the older ones are used bulbs and the bulbs are very very expensive super expensive a projector is about three thousand dollars and two thousand of that is the bulb so we're starting to start replacing them with laser projectors so that's the technology portion some of the capital improvements would be at black hills high school putting fall restraint on the roof so our maintenance workers can get up in the rainstorms to fix roof leaks as they occur instead of waiting to try to now what we have to do is wait for good weather and get up there with a hose to try to figure out where the leak is coming from we also have a seismic

091mitigation project at tim water middle school for the cafeteria which is made of brick and needs to be have needs to be strengthened for a seismic event or aka an earthquake little rock the gym at little rock wasn't really upgraded in the in the um edition it has battery-powered fluorescent lights for its emergency lights we'd like to replace all those fluorescents with leds and then put them on the generator since that is going to be is a de facto emergency shelter for the little rock area and then one thing that we don't have a really good scope on yet but just kind of came up in the last month or so is right now we have our isolation rooms for covid in separate parts of the buildings from the health rooms which leads to additional

092staffing and also a lot of buildings use an empty classroom that likely they're going to have to put a class in very shortly so we need to at least study what it's going to take to add i can call it for better lack of a better word a sick bay to our health rooms which the ideas keep sick kiddos separated from kiddos coming for their daily medicine or just so so the title of the as i've mentioned the title and the resolution if if you pass it would put it on the ballot for february 8th there's a series of steps that have to happen now in december 10th to get to the auditor's office to be placed on the ballot any questions questions students do you have any questions nope all right so this is

093a roll call vote i think someone starts to put the motion um though make a motion right okay so lori would you like to make a motion um to pass resolution zero four 21-22 um i'll make a motion to pass resolution um i'm sorry was it the first one um four four 21 222 the capital levy a second all right so i'll take a roll uh roll call so casey taylor hi darby kykenan hi laurie sale hi scott killo hi and myself hi all right motion passes thank you nice job okay so just for robert's rules why did that one require a roll call someone tell me that comes from our bond council who recommends it on a resolution of this nature that the vote occurs by roll call vote uh so that that really

094that came directly from our bond council uh as a step that just supports ensuring the the if i suppose if there were questions as opposed to everyone saying together that you have each person on record i don't care about them so specifically who said what or who voted what yeah okay i think they wanted it because it's 30 million dollars all right so now we have resolution 05 2122 the epno certification yes do you have that on your side sean yeah so actually oh next one you're going to see a few more quick pictures of our student assembly quickly okay always good to see our students oh that's cool yeah at michael t and then a transition slide to yours there we are all right so i asked mel if he was doing a powerpoint

095he said no and i said oh well i am i kind of threw one together today i thought it would be easier um because we didn't have a workshop on this topic two weeks ago like we did with the other one so i created some some powerpoint slides just to kind of walk through that what we're asking for in the resolution um so i oh and for the students i'm the executive director of financial services and i also oversee operations of transportation not on a daily basis more of at a high level um but with all the issues that we're having i'm working with them much more closely than i normally would be so and so my email is jennifer.carower and you know the rest and email me anytime if you have questions so um

096i can't wear my glasses so i'm going to look at my slides here with my mask on or they just fog up and i can't see so um the the resolution that we're presenting is to certify our excess levy um amounts for collection in 2022. so every year the board adopts a resolution indicating the amounts that we're going to certify for collection in 2022 there are three rates that we're searching for we have our bond levy we have our edu educational program and operation in other words a p o levy and we also have our capital and tech levy um so the certification is due to the auditors or the county assessor's office by 11 30 of 21 so november 30th um and then one of our main goals in in doing the planning that

097we do when we're when we're looking at different tax rates is to maintain a level tax rate for the taxpayers so the bond i'll just talk about each one of the three really briefly so the bond levy collection for 2022 so so this collection pays for our outstanding bonds that we have currently and in our adopted budget we certified an amount of 12 million dollars and we're proposing to lower that amount to 11 million 123 and which will it will decrease our estimated tax rate by 25 cents from a dollar 74 to 1.49 so i think our taxpayers will be very happy about that um and um there's a couple reasons for that um i had um asked our bond council to do an analysis of our debt service fund cash flow and we he

098indicated that we had a very fruitful he used her fruitful fund balance um and that um that we could reduce our collection for this year from the 12 million to the 11.1 um and also because of our unprecedented increase in our assessed values at six i think it was 16.89 this year um that also caused the rate to drop quite a bit and jennifer for clarity because i think when you hear fruitful fund balance and debt service fund i just want to make sure that we clarify that for how that differs from our other okay fun balance if you don't mind for our oh oh and in comparison to our general fund so so our debt service fund is only there to pay for our current outstanding debt we have outstanding bonds and we collect

099money that goes into that fund and that is the fund balance that is fruitful not our general fund balance we know that so we have five different funds so this is our debt service is one of our funds that we collect levy money for okay so any questions about that one nope okay and then we have our epno levy which i talked about our it's educational program and operations levy and i created this chart there were other numbers in there i tried to just simplify it so i could i just wanted there to be a couple takeaways um i wanted to to show the um the amount of the increase of our sus property value over the past four years um and like you can see there was a significant increase from 21 to 22.

100um and then i just wanted to show the difference between our voter approved levy and our amount that we are collecting um you can see that typically the amount is lesser than the amount that the voters approved because we have a levy lid we have a maximum amount we can collect and it's the lower of two dollars and fifty cents per thousand of assessed value or twenty five hundred dollars per student which is increased it's a little more now because it's increased for inflation every year um and so our our amounts we have typically been on the 250 per thousand of assessed value but because we're we're starting to collect more per pupil with our assessed values going up um and the amount per pupil we are actually going to be switching over from the

101tax rate to the per pupil amount and so you'll see that we haven't collected the amount that's been authorized in the past three years but for next year we will be collecting the full amount even though we're collecting the full amount the tax rate will be going down by seven cents we can collect a lesser of 250 or 2500 per student so we will be collecting at 243 um and that is based on our preliminary says property values because we receive preliminary now we don't get the final until after we have to certify our our taxes for next year and then the lea the bottom line there lea is is levy equalization and what that is is um the state provides additional funding for districts that are um are um property poor more property poor

102than other districts and they don't generate as much per student and so they provide this levy equalization to um bring them up to a certain level um and so we have been receiving that over the past few years and we will not be receiving that anymore um so i just kind of wanted to show that how it's decreased over the past four years so when our levy collections go up the state provided subsidy goes down does anyone have questions about that that was really good i know it's a lot of information that was really good explanation thank you thank you okay and then um oh did i miss i may have put that you you'd asked me to add that slide and i don't know if i edited it oh that's okay so you mentioned

103no there's a capital there's a capital tech levy um there was another slide capital tech levy but um it may be at the very end after this one yes it is okay there it is okay so we are collecting on a two-year 10 million dollar capital levy which is different than the one we're going out for on the ballot for four years replacing that one um and so we will um be collecting five million which is what was certified in our budget um and then um the the estimated rate for that is also dropping by by 13 cents from 221 to 22. so that's another 13 drop in our because of our increase in assessed property values so this slide is really exciting because it's hot off the press like d.a davidson just sent it

104to me like at five o'clock tonight our bond council so i had them i had them update they provide this to us um periodically and i had them update with 2122 just to show what our total tax collections and how much it will be going down for taxpayers from 21 to 22 if we adopt this resolution for our collections for 22. so i don't know if you want to go through the resolution um does anyone have questions about the resolution it's exciting stuff it's basically in words what she just did in pictures oh there is one more thing i didn't talk about there is a refund levy so there is an additional amount that'll add and this is included in this amount already he added like a penny for a couple of the collections because

105we have refunds and what those are is we're collecting amounts this year that we weren't able to collect last year because of certain things like um discounts for retirees um that further property taxes and things so we um we do a refund and and just roll them into the current property tax collections in the following year all right anything else for jennifer great job thank you thank you thank you all right so now um i know i know i'm i was getting the word yeah yeah yeah this one does not is not by roll call so scott would you like to make a motion i move that we certify or i move that we accept the certification of 2022 excess property taxes resolution052122 oh second all those in favor say aye hi motion passes thank

106you mel and jennifer um and i need to go back and make a correction becky this is um this is for you on the ta um the tea vote uh lori said that she abstained from that vote okay can we put that in the minutes please sorry i missed that okay um now we're going to where's my agenda all right now we're going to go on to superintendent evaluation goals so in your packet you have a copy of the goals that the board has has set with me for my evaluation for this year and that includes goals in primarily two areas one in board staff and community relations a set of goals as well as then a set of goals in the area of fiscal stewardship and that that includes the 2021-22 goals and that

107the board set in the set of performance measures for um for looking at those goals and what does it mean to be successful toward those goals as well as a set of there's some action steps that i've identified in there and i'll just share those action steps are the best action steps at this stage that i would identify and of course as as we go through a year and things continue to evolve sometimes action steps evolve with what we see happening during the year that can help us uh help lead to other things but ideally but what um you're approving this evening what you would be asked to approve would be the goals identified in board staff and community relations as well as the goals in the area fiscal stewardship which really is primarily focused

108around restoring adequate fund balance of course um so i would invite i know darby and others were involved in and lori were involved in that as well so any uh anything else you would point out prior to the board making decision darby do you have anything to add um okay now this follows along with i think it was a work session that we had where we kind of came to general agreement about how to refocus everything so um these were sent out and be interested to hear what other members reactions are to them lori do you have anything to add um no i um read through darby's uh edits and i thought they look spot on all right so is laureen darby who got this together for us does anyone else have any questions or

109anything to add i like the fact that it's streamlined i think it's more clear what we're expecting yeah i really appreciate the addition of the action steps and the measures to then go by anything else before we take action all right oh do you have did someone want to say something no all right casey would you like to make a motion to approve yes i'll make a motion to approve the superintendent's evaluation goals i'll second all those in favor say aye aye motion passes all right now we'll go on to superintendent's report okay i'm going to move forward to okay so this evening in superintendence report uh we're going to in our last superintendent's report in october you heard from uh sean batstone and and from andrew kelly batstone particularly focused around our pillars of

110the plan in instructional excellence and systems of support tonight our focus will really be around the fiscal stewardship side of that and i i want to maybe before we get to that just uh begin by saying i know um this is an area where and from our from from a public comment tonight and everything where what we really want to do is go through a process to make sure that our community our staff all have trust that the decisions that we're making and the way we're using our finances is fiscally responsible and as efficient as possible and so based upon and and so we'll come and get to the next meeting with some further information to follow up on public comment from this evening which is always our goal to say what are we doing

111to establish that and how will we make sure that's the case but what you'd asked in the last board meeting was to come forward with some what and share what are the steps we're taking this year to address and then you'll hear from beth schooler who will talk a little bit about the beginning of our process for next year because we have both short-term decisions that we've been making about this year as well as long-term decisions that we have to make for future so i want to share with you just some of the measures that have been approved thus far to save funds this year at the district office and i hope these bullets come in the right order but they may not it will see if they don't we'll we'll move we've held the

112district diversity equity and inclusion director position we've held a data shop op position that was open and really remember we this is working with positions that we had available holding a net tech position in the it department an hr specialist position in hr reviewing and reducing contracted services wherever possible because that's one area that we can obtain some savings reducing supply budgets wherever possible oops that's and so those are so some of the ways that we're able to obtain savings at the district office as we've shared about 85 percent of our budget is staffing and when that's the case most of your savings has to be obtained through staffing going to i'm sorry why is the dei director position listed in there as part of that package because that was a position that we had

113in the budget this year that by not hiring it we are obtaining savings if we had if we go forward if we'd gone far forward and reposted and hired that that would be an additional uh additional substantial cost to the district and so right it just kind of circles back to my original point about what were we allowed to even offer a position at that level of salary when we knew our district was in such financial uh disarray but i'm still trying to figure that out but we'll come here i think what we'll come to the next meeting with a presentation particularly focused on some of that information so i'm going these bullets are all out of order so i'm going to just bring them all up and then we can talk about them so

114district wide here's a set of we've moving to essential spending where it's only what's absolutely essential we're reducing building budgets by 25 percent and we work with principals on that to say what's the percentage we could come to in order to obtain as much savings as possible in that area because it does that is not a a staffing cut but it does allow us to save in in that area we're restricting travel as much as possible now that is really um like when our students they're going to state we're taking them to state when there's when those types of things occur we're moving forward with it it's really saying what other travel can we limit to reduce as much as possible that budget reducing staff through attrition wherever possible when a position opens it's saying

115rather than okay let's post that position we first look at is there some way we can get by without it by shifting internally by either not filling the position so that we obtain savings and then transitioning middle school sports to intramural for 2021-22 that accomplishes both a savings financially and it's also been helpful in making sure our middle school kids have athletics and activities but without some of the transportation challenges that come with interscholastic right now especially at a time when our transportation when we when the current labor shortage is impacting our ability to transport students as tally was able to share earlier pre-approval process for credit card purchases it's strengthening those processes to make sure that we have strong pre-approval processes for extra hours over time credit card purchases there's some additional here and

116i'm so limiting professional development during school hours with the substitute shortage that's that's a challenge in the first place and and and we find ourselves short in that area we do have this is not so much a move but it is something we're tracking it's when we are unable to fill substitute positions there is sometimes we obtain some savings through that so there's some estimated savings that we think will will occur simply because of the labor shortage and the challenges we're running into there and we're going to keep tracking that to make sure that um that that's a part of our calculation so reducing supply budgets developing a pre-approved vendor list for common purchases to say are there ways we can save by making sure we're using the vendors that can get us the best

117deals on a variety of supplies that we purchase regularly well as funding our health room staff using we have we received some department of health grant funding and so being able to move some of the our staff who are engaging in contact tracing and testing uh to where they're funded partially from the from those funds achieved some savings for us so so those are the steps we've identified at this stage and we continue to look for additional ways we can obtain savings this year because anything we save this year reduces our challenge going into next year so do i don't know if it's coming up yeah do we have an estimation of how much that's going to save so we had about 1.3 million dollars in savings on top of the 1.3 million that we

118have calculated now there's certain lines there that are a little hard to say this is exactly what that one will save but in terms of things that we felt like we could estimate and calculate we had about 1.3 million in additional savings that we hope to obtain through those measures through the through the slides what you see there yeah can you elaborate a little bit on the pre-approval process for the credit cards i don't kind of understand can you go back to that slide real quickly do you want to go to a microphone jennifer so it really is just to try to limit essential spending limit our spending to essential spending because the credit card transactions we don't see until after the fact it's already done um a lot of times there isn't a pre-approval

119process meaning things are purchased that probably weren't exactly needed or essential um or some people might have thought they were but we're going to be reviewing that more closely and having a pre-authorization process so principles and directors see those before they happen thank you can i give you a concrete example because i did this myself so i wanted to purchase 30 microscopes that was denied but to have them refurbished was okayed gotcha thank you okay i get emotional and i apologize for that up front these are not fun topics that we're going to be going over but we all know that as we uh approach the coming school year we're going to be in a position both the district to recommend significant cuts and the board in our community to weigh in on where we

120want those where those cuts can be and where they cannot be so as we start talking about parameters where the board or our community would say please protect this at all cost and unfortunately perhaps we could let these go for a year or two i i thought a conversation about some of the important things to remember as we're doing this work might be helpful so we are already as sean and jennifer and the rest of us have talked about we are already working on reducing expenditures because they do exceed our revenues as as we've talked about quite a bit now so as we head into this work some important timelines will come to play and that's although sometimes it seems like we have months and months and months before it it's some of it is

121really truly right around the corner so as early as january through march uh hr and fiscal we start meeting with our schools to say your enrollment is projected at this number and at this number you will need these many teachers and these many classified employees such as office professionals paraprofessionals custodians those types of positions so if we're going to make adjustments in class size or how many paraprofessionals does an elementary school need we will be having those conversations as soon as two months from now they will start and those are tough conversations when you're starting to increase class sizes because you know exactly what that starts to do to teach your stress level and students abilities to learn so those conversations will be happening as soon as we get back from winter break february through

122march already again february three months from now our schools start hiring their coaches for fall sports for 2022 because many of those sports teams start practicing in august so if as a community we're going to make any changes to fall sports those conversations have to start happening sooner as opposed to later march 15th we have an agreement with our tea members that they will let us know if they plan to retire or resign and will not be returning the coming school year i would say normally by march 15th maybe we've heard from four or five tim maybe right um however often by june july and august those numbers have increased sometimes to 20 or 30. so although march is the formal date by when if you were to say how many teachers have announced their

123retirement i might say four most likely by the time the next school year comes around we're looking at more like 24. so that's just a good number to know but it's not a number that will give us very accurate information in the middle of march in april 2022 if we are going to do a reduction in force for our certificated employees the district will need to bring that recommendation to the board and the board will need to approve it because all reduction in force activities for certificated employees need to be completed by may 15th an employ a certificated employee later than may 15 has a legal right to a contract that is the same or greater than the year before that includes people like sean batstone and kelly and brian and tara and sean and

124i'm missing one other certificated employee amongst us omar our principals every one of our certificated employees teachers and that group that i just listed unless we tell them formally and it's a very formal process by may 15th that they're they're either don't have a contract or that their contract is going to be altered in any way they have a legal right to the same contract so in april if we if the district determines we will need to do a formal reduction in force which is a difficult uh process both to recommend and to approve and then to carry out you will hear about that in about five months so i just kind of wanted to put those dates out in front of you um because that's some of why these conversations are happening so soon

125and why some of them uh you know this summer it was a bit too late to get some of them in place i don't know or i can just shut it off there we go oh okay yeah i'm finished yeah so a second page just things again to keep in mind as we consider these reductions sean has shared and i know we've talked about it many times 85 percent of our budget is dedicated to our staff staffing costs and so when you have to make significant cuts like we believe we will have to it it isn't you you can't get to it without getting to staffing reductions they are i said rarely on my slide they are never easy or popular because school districts including tom water we're pretty careful with how we spend our

126money in the first place so it there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit that you're going to find most likely in any school district certainly not here in ours we always try to keep cuts as far apart as possible away from student instruction that becomes more and more difficult the more you look at a cut because everything that every one of us do here is about them right none of us have a job in a school district that isn't somehow either supporting the operations for students or the instruction for students these are tough decisions and almost every one of them will get community response and very rarely will it be yay that was a great cut that you proposed or that you approved and we have to be ready for that because people have passions

127they have things that they treasure as we all should and um you know mel might want to cut one thing and i might say that's the thing that got me through high school no right and and you will all know students with the same stories that needed that nugget in order to be successful in their education some of the topics that will be discussed that are precious and treasured to people include and i've just listed some off the top of my head because i've been through this before in other districts and this one extracurricular activities clubs field trips zero hour activities staffing reductions that impact class size normally that means increase class size reduce supervision reduce interventions and reduce the abilities for us to provide small group instruction what about grounds and facility care and

128maintenance that's something that people will say do we need a grounds team you know and i know a group of us here could tell you yes why we do and there will be another group that says and is that more important than student interventions right these are the kind of conversations that start happening staffing reductions that impact student social and emotional learning we've done a lot of work here in our district and we want to do more about ways to increase sel for our kids and those are um those are not essential positions for instruction however they're precious and treasured positions administrator administrative reductions i talked a little about that if we're going to do anything like that it needs to be recommended in april and carried out by may 15th and that could be

129you know do we reduce the days of administrators you know many of us are 260 day employees instead of 260 days do i work 240. there's all different kinds of ways to do those and we will be looking at all of them sports programs how many teams do we have you know do we have a ninth grade team a c team a jv team and a varsity team and do we actually need all those in a year of cuts how big are our teams we have coaches bless their hearts who's like i'm not cutting kid wants to play they get to play okay well that increases how many coaches we have great idea and is it an expense we can continue to carry and how far they travel we talked a little about that already

130and then just the last one i'll touch on um and it i'm not saying i hope you don't hear me saying i like any of these i'm just saying please put them in your toolbox and start thinking about them any instructional programs not required by law and examples of that are our preschool program our third fourth and fifth grade high cap programs college in the classroom ap classes right so there's all kinds of things that aren't required by law that we all know are outstanding opportunities for our students that we will be looking at in order to meet the cut that we know we need to implement in the coming school year so i believe at our next meeting we're going to be talking more about parameters and how we would prioritize those types of

131recommendations but i just really wanted to do a brief introduction about how that work might look for us and for you that was really helpful beth thank you thanks for anticipating our needs yeah uh questions for back anyone i have three but i'll start with one okay um so can you go back to your previous slide i had a clarification on the march 15 2022 date by which our certificated employees are requested to announce their plans so when you presented this earlier you said we had an agreement so is there an agreement or is it just a request and they can or they don't have to or can you describe more how that works yes so it's in the collective bargaining agreement with our teachers that the association and the district have agreed that march

13215th is the date that a certificated employee would let the district know i'm not coming back next year my plan is to retire or resign or whatever take a leave [Music] that gives us the ability to know how many vacancies we'll have and so when that works it's a very powerful tool that we can then anticipate how through attrition perhaps you know we're gonna enough teachers are leaving the profession or leaving our district or retiring that the reduction we would have to then take in april would be less the if we if we had to do a reduction in force however what ends up happening for many teachers as many of us is life happens between march and june and july and the start of the school year um spouses get new jobs children are

133born right there there's so many different people get sick um or they just say you know what i just got offered kind of a better teaching job in a community where my family is right there's just so many different reasons and to tell a teacher well you have to stay here in tumwater because you missed the deadline or because you've signed a contract then we have an employee who maybe doesn't really want to be here and we might have an opportunity to get a teacher who really does want to be here that this is the place that works for them now where the other teacher is you're you're keeping me in a position because of a date that doesn't line up with my job my life oh yeah no i i didn't imagine that you

134would force somebody to stick around i was just kidding you said 20 20 people more than what you oh like you said five people about in in march but then by august it's like 25. that just seemed like yeah the other i find this different um however i'm not at that point in my life quite yet but sometimes people are very very private about their plans to retire and so if they announce in march it goes on a board report right it becomes a very public document and so we'll even hear from t we we have one right now i'm going to retire but i i don't want you to tell anybody but i want you to know about it for staffing purposes right so a lot of those we also get you can tell

135people in june af the day after school ends all right anyone else have questions before darby asks her second one the reduction considerations the prioritization who's going to be involved with that process so that's a process that's going to um that we're laying out to really involve we're going to have to involve our principles our leadership team we're going to have to have discussions with with our associations to try to say to to get lots of voices involved in that our budget process one of the things that our hope is is to say how can we how do we get priorities from our community as well in a meaningful way and so that is the process we have to engage in the next couple of months so that we come out with as much clarity

136as possible around these really unfortunate decisions that no one really wants to have to prioritize to be honest so actually my second question was related to that in the superintendent evaluation goals and performance measures that we just approved one of the performance measures is an established budget committee that includes a community member so i assume that that budget committee will be directly involved with this process of going through and assessing feedback okay and um so in terms of community feedback around budget priorities so i remember i think it was just two years ago maybe we went through this exercise before because the district was facing financial challenges and there was a survey kind of like a matrix or something that went out and asked people to sort of value rank things like sports and and

137all of that and you know all of that information was put together to help with a very similar process that we're now facing again here so um will that same kind of survey data be made available to the budget committee i mean even dusting off the results from it even a couple years ago i can't imagine it would have changed very much or maybe sending that survey out to the community again is that part of the minimum we could bring the results that were brought before but it may serve us to update that certainly in terms of our community being able to give us a fresh perspective so we'll look at what that would process would look like it was a forced choice survey i i liked it actually i mean it does force you

138to make choices uh hence the name but it is helpful to understand because i think all of them are priorities and some people you know so it really forced you to choose between two things and then it all shaped out all right any other questions for beth all right thank you yeah thank you very much all right now we are on to legislative update darby kaiken in 10 minutes okay i should not need 10 minutes so uh the general assembly and i apologize all of my days are running together now so i want to say it was october 29th and 30th correct it was held virtually it didn't seem like there was as many positions legislative positions to go over as last time i don't know why i had that in my head i was

139thinking maybe that it wouldn't go the two full days but it did it did there was some very robust discussion in some of the legislative positions so um i had wanted to get kind of the summary and everything sent out to everybody before this meeting but i just ran out of time so um but what i was able to do is collect the feedback on the ranking for tom water school district for the legislative positions so we got a little bit of an extension on the deadline it was due last monday instead of the previous week and so i got that submitted so we have our our top 15 and i think pretty soon we will hear back from wazda when they take all the school districts input and put it together into what will

140become the advocacy platform i will also in that communication for transparency purposes i will share the method that i use to take everyone's feedback and do kind of a stratified ranking process i will also share some of the details about the legislative positions that we discussed in our board meeting and the outcome from the the assembly some of the concerns that we had and i spoke to those a few times i think all of them ended up actually going the other direction so um just just something to be aware of of what this platform might might look like going forward into the next legislative session so that's what i have thank you casey taylor good evening everyone this is the wiaa report which is the washington interscholastic activities association so i'll do this usually monthly

141and i meet with sean battstone and the athletic directors in the school so in the middle schools uh intramural as uh sean mentioned the intramurals is starting i believe next week on monday and we are already seeing high participation of those uh bush middle schools at 80 kids and tomorrow middle school is at 99 kids so glad to see those those are really good numbers um and then they're going to probably have more people signing up here as they come i imagine so so those will could push up to over 100 on each so and then just in the finalizing of the hiring for those uh supervisor type positions for those and then they'll be starting their seasons here shortly so at the high school level it's getting to be the fall uh playoff type

142seasons uh so girls volleyball the district tournament is i believe tomorrow yeah thursday and saturday and both black hills and tom water are in it first and second seeds so that is very good and then the state tournament is uh the next weekend in in yakima i'll touch back on that later here in a minute uh girl swimmer oh called darn it she left girl swimmers i heard there's one around here but from both black hills and tom water or the state tournament this weekend at the king county uh aquatic center that's friday and saturday so if you are interested in going though just remember this is in king county and to check the local guidelines and again i'll touch on this later on here in a minute as well uh girls at tumwater high

143school qualified for state soccer they are playing right now as we speak and it may even be over so hopefully things turned out great for them the talmud football is the number one seed they play this friday um and then we are following the uh the protocols for the wiaa um they the wia has you follow your local protocols essentially so we'd be doing the same thing there's going to be no enhanced restrictions or anything more or less than there has been all year so i wanted to make sure just because it's a playoff game everything is still exactly the same uh board members just remember your names are all on lists for all events all state events district events and it is true i went last year to the district wrestling match in shelton

144and sure enough there was my name on the list so it's it's it's real um a list to attend i'm like what kind of list no it's a list to attend a list of 10 to get in uh for free yeah the postseason so i wanted to talk to that again some of the areas like i mentioned they're going to yakima so they're going to be following the local guidelines if anyone wants to know they're doing a couple of good things on this they have the bound for state which is a wiaa guidelines for each sport and where it's at and the guidelines for that venue in the sport and what the spectators can expect there there's also a site called fan link which also gets specific to a location so like the aquatic center

145in king county you can find all the details about that as well too so i was glad to see that because you never know traveling just even the other side of the state or south or north it'll change very quickly this is the local guidelines and the enforcement uh just as a reminder that we do travel for these the transportation is a district expense but the other out of state requests that have happened those are fundraisers events that have been planned for years and so they've been working hard to raise the funds for those no district funds are used for those let's see the fall sports are getting ready to start wrestling and basketball starts next week they are have some protocols in place basically they're looking at those two sports are the same now

146as far as risk and they will need to test the same which i'll explain this and everyone's going to go huh basically they need to test twice a week in in those things they have to also test on event days so if you have no events for that week you have to find two days and test if you have two events that day then obviously you would test on those two event days and those are the rapid tests the 15 minute result tests if for some reason you have three events for a week which is possible you would then have to test three times as well so for every event and at least twice a week i hope that makes some sense lots of tests um let's see i got a couple more updates i'm

147sorry this went longer than i thought it would uh the birdcage update the birdcage is the building in the practice fields at del mar high school for the batting cage for baseball uh the roof is on and the siding is up the lights are starting to go in this week and the turf that goes on the inside is on its way now and looking like the end of november that will be available they are moving right along on that no supply chain delays there and lastly tom water and i'm going to read this and this is this is the cool part and i might be a little choked up on this too but that's all right i'll blame beth because she started it so tomorrow's we are currently working on a plan to support unified

148sports unified sports joins students with and without special needs together to promote inclusion through shared sports training and competition experiences it was inspired by a simple principle training together and playing together is a quick path to friendship and understanding i thought that was a pretty cool basic straightforward statement from unified sports so this is what unified sports looks like this was from i believe two years ago um this is a basketball game tomorrow in olympia and then there were other areas sports or districts that brought teams and so we are really looking at this to move it forward this year basketball seems to be the the key sport but we're looking to expand that i believe uh as well too so lots of opportunities and you look there in the crowd and see the tom

149water crowd there some familiar faces for sure in there but it was a great representation so we really are looking forward to this and trying to increase the opportunities and give these kids some experiences that may not cost you know a ton of money so i think this is one of those great opportunities for these kids so they're cool yeah really cool stuff and i hope to bring more about this uh later on i'll keep on mr matt stone back there and i know tim graham and don farler do great work on this too so that's great that's all i have to thank you or any questions i guess is that just high school so this is at olympia high school this is our tum water basketball team here so again these are students with

150and without disabilities um and my question was how do you get the students without disabilities how who are those kids and and the answer is they come out of everywhere and then there's a lot of kids that really want to get involved in this so yeah i was i was just well that's great that's easy then great so um yeah a really cool opportunity again i will definitely bring this back to uh to share everyone on how we're doing with it it's awesome very cool any questions questions for casey good luck talia this weekend yeah all right lori equity advisory committee update yeah okay um i pinch headed for scott um this past month our meeting was on october 20th and of course with zoom format um we had about i think it was around

151what 75 or so people sean um in the meeting and um sean led the meeting um and started out with our different pillars we were going to talk about and then that was a brief conversation and then we kind of got into the meet of the meeting which was our breakout rooms we all were able to choose different breakout rooms and i'm sorry i don't remember them all but my room was staff support and basically what that was about was talking with a few other um teachers and just um employees of the district here and we had one moderator and we talked about how um as staff support we can better further along the conversation and speak up when we may see or hear something that's not as closure as we would like our breakout

152rooms lasted about well it was a half hour and it felt like the time went by super fast the discussions are extremely robust and it's a place where folks feel that they can really share their feelings around eac and by the time we came back to our main room we shared we had the leader of our breakout room spoke and shared a bit about what we spoke about and everybody said the same thing that the time went by so fast they wish they had more time to discuss they felt that it was a great avenue and venue for them to really speak about how they felt around the whole topic and most of all i think people felt safe and that's that's really the goal when we're discussing these very volatile and highly charged subjects

153um basically uh we still i know sean's doing his best to lead these meetings that we still could use i believe an outside person to come in and really take this over because sean certainly doesn't have time to keep on doing this and i think we'd all benefit from somebody outside with that expertise the next meeting is november 17th and i as far as i know will be continuing in zoom format um for this foreseeable future and then um scott will take over this duty so that's my report unless anybody has any questions can i make a motion am i on what why do i feel like i know what this is going to be yeah right yeah i think i would like to move that lorry be the lead on this because i i

154will still attend but i won't be able to devote as much time as i have in the past i don't think we need to take action do you just want to accept it lori accept the nomination um that's fine i'll accept the nomination we don't have to go through robert's rules or anything that formal it's fine i'll happily accept thank you thank you scott and um well you'll see me again next month for my next report i guess all right so now we're on to board member comments and it's there's 10 minutes for board member comments and there's seven of us no eight of us up here and so one minute we're gonna do one minute all right can we do that try yeah let me get the timer out so um so we'll we'll

155let i'm looking at the students i'll have a couple of people here just demonstrate kind of what board member comment is about you get a minute to either share a reflection from the meeting or you know talk about something that you you didn't get to talk about yet in the meeting or or however whatever you want to do with your minute but i'll keep track of it on the phone all right so who would like to start and be a good role model for our students about how we treat this time i got it all right all right on uh early in october josiah price a science teacher at tomwater high school sent out an invitation to all willing staff to come help evaluate his i think it was 9th grade 10th grade computer science

156programming class i accepted i went there at noon i had four groups invite me over to see their app on their phones and they had to go through three things explaining the app's purpose what challenges they faced as they were creating this app and what solutions they came up with in in through the process and they were all very welcoming they were all very poised which kind of blew me away uh it helped fill my bucket as far as my need to be around kids still um and i was just extremely impressed by them all right thank you who would like to go next i can go all right okay yep go for it okay um so the main thought rolling around for me and this was actually all the way back to the sip

157discussion from our tumwater middle school colleagues is hearing all of the needs that are just going to continue to be there and get more and more for students i'm starting to think about legislative action advocacy to the state who says they support students they say they support everything and yet there's been a lot of policy and requirements and things that are causing downstream impacts that we are feeling um pretty pretty hard right now and so um that's probably something i'll start thinking about more over the next couple of months before the session gets started and see what everybody thinks about a platform for tom water school district so thank you all right thank you next i go next ah let's see i only made it to six schools the last two weeks but it was

158pretty cool um i got to see a squid being dissected in miss mcguire's class got to see kids doing interviews today interviewing each other at the middle school as well got to talk with a lot of principals and some teachers and administrators and there is some frustration out there for sure and you know it's i'll touch on what i think a lot of it has to do with and our the frustration is you know principles doing contract tracing which that's not their job and it's a lot of supervising and covering and and when one person calls in sick or you know is is quarantined out it causes these these impacts in school that just make it hard for them to get through the day um you know buses with you know we got to do

159double routes and you know there they are the principal's staying at 5 15 to get the last kid on the bus and that's just the kid getting on the bus at 5 15. so um a lot of this comes from the unfunded mandates and darby kind of touched on this that we need to we need to remove some of this policy and the unfunded mandates because it's really grinding our district down to a halt almost sorry for going over thank you casey okay i'll go next i'll try to be really quest um just a quick um congratulations to my fellow female board members for their election to the board so congratulations um i'd also like to just touch on that for one second as i was running for this this seat um i heard from

160a lot of people from tumwater a lot of voters a lot of parents a lot of guardians a lot of grandparents people who went to school don't go to the school anymore i just want to just make it very clear that we we have to really do our very best to discuss topics that may or may not be volatile but do the best we can to handle them in a way that's genteel and respectful of everybody in their opinion and then also i just want to say one quick thing to tim i recognize your passion for the teachers i recognize what you're doing my mom's a teacher i grew up with a red pen and all my papers i get it but i would just like to say going over that five minutes to me

161was really not a good example for our students here as we are all taught to follow the rules and we're trying to teach them to follow the rules and as adults we have to model that behavior for them and i would just appreciate the future if we all could strive to do that okay thank you all right and alexander i see you reaching forward would you like to start yeah all right earlier on uh within this meeting uh our more natural talia here uh brought up a good question about um uh school therapists and if we even have those within our schools and if not i really feel like that is a very big uh issue that we need to go over because it's just so important like i don't know what i would do

162if i didn't have one or if i couldn't pay for one and everyone's going through something and i just feel like that's something that we really need within our schools it's a great comment thank you talia or mia who'd like to go next okay okay yes so i think that the um having a therapist available is i mean not necessarily a therapist but something like that will not only help our students but will help our teachers as well um with the secondary traumatic stress because i i mean personal okay i don't have enough time for this do i okay never keep going keep going 40 seconds well okay i just i personally had like a problem this week and i didn't know what to do and i was just like i don't i can't be

163in class right now i'm not focusing and i didn't know who to go to and i didn't want to go to a teacher because i didn't want to bring them down i went to my counselor and he tried his best but he wasn't necessarily prepared and i understand that because that's not necessarily his job and i also wanted to say thank you for tim i don't know you but i know that teachers are very important to us and that their health um affects our health as well so i want to say thank you for that um yeah that's it no that was great that was great amia would you like to say something you're not obligated to so um yeah great [Music] i just wanted to say that uh a lot of the students that

164i go to school with they complain that like their back hurts because of like not having lockers and stuff like that i understand why and i just wanted to bring that up because my back hurts too a lot because i have to carry all these books so i was just like sort of wondering like if you can like change that anytime soon or like this year something like that that's what i was gonna say perfect thank you that's great we don't want people's backs to hurt all right um i always forget to turn the timer on for myself all right so uh our soccer team won three to two they play archbishop murphy on saturday but where do we know where it's gonna be i'm gonna guess at archbishop murphy because and they are ranked

165number one we're probably going to their points okay so all right um and then i um [Music] uh hmm what was i gonna say i know what i wanted to say is i really appreciate the students being here um i got to meet with them last week and really tried to impress upon them our our wishes to hear from them and i think they represented their student bodies well and if there's anything that we can do to support you to um to say even more then let us know if if we need to do do something different so thank you very much for your time with us um now we are i'm going to recess the regular meeting to go to executive session to meet with district legal counsel per rcw 4230 110 1 i

166triple i um we will reconvene the regular board meeting after um executive session but it will only be to adjourn the regular meeting we will not be making any decisions so thank you [Music] you