001[Music] do [Music] do [Music] on the ancestral land of the nisqually squawkson island and she hateless people i thank these caretakers of the land who have lived on and continue to live on the lance's time in memorial please rise as casey leads us in the flakes i pledge states allegiance america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right uh before we begin uh i went out and reminded everyone to sign up before six o'clock if you wanted to make public comments um you needed to have emailed becky before six um today to get on the list when we reach the public comment portion of the agenda becky will read off your name um if you're in zoom land make you a panelist
002or if you're here you're going to step to the podium um not podium lectern uh someone corrected me on that before the initial speaker on a topic will be provided five minutes additional speakers on the same topic will be allowed three minutes for a total of 20 minutes on any one topic becky will serve as timekeeper she also has added something to a repertoire thank you casey taylor i will show you how much time you have because usually the three minutes or the five minutes goes a lot faster than you think it does so she will have that showing on um on an ipad thank you so you can know how much time you have left and she'll let you know when your time is up and then you'll you'll have to stop speaking if
003you do not sign up in time and are not able to address the board you're welcome to email your comments to the board and or superintendent and everyone has the same email set up which is our first name dot last name at timewater.k12 all right superintendent dotson have there been any changes or additions to the agenda since it was published um no there has not all right so now we'll move on to meeting minutes review has everyone had a chance to review the minutes from the july 8th meeting yes are there any changes casey would you like to make a motion to approve the minutes i would like to approve the minutes from the previous meeting laurie would you like to second i will second that all those in favor say aye hi motion passes
004now we're on to the consent agenda um has everyone had an opportunity to uh review the consent agenda um i just want to say i see that zachary uh cinnamon is back in our district yay yes ah where is it tomorrow high school yes uh previous teacher who went to be a principal in yelm who is now back um great uh great addition to the district so uh darby i'll entertain a will we motion the consent agenda i will second all those in favor say aye aye aye motion passes so now we're on to superintendent dachshun yes i'm gonna go ahead and get my power line back up [Music] so um just a couple of slides tonight at this point in the meeting we have a by the numbers a brief one here that i'll
005just share with you and and i won't make you guess because it would be a little difficult to guess but the the number i'm going to present you is 86 million and what that is it is our projected state and federal revenues for the 2021-22 school year it's about 82 of our total revenues in our budget that is the funding that comes to us from ospi through ospi either funded straight from state or through federal that's passed through at ospi and um as you may know we got a letter from superintendent reichdahl recently sharing that if we don't follow department of health guidelines they will immediately stop that funding to us and so just important to kind of reiterate that that's that's where we are at this stage when it comes to uh to state
006funding for this school year so i want to take you to uh just an update i i was hoping we wouldn't have to look at this slide this year kidding i really wanted to be done with this and retire this slide at the end of last year unfortunately we aren't able to do so where we are right now as of today a rate of 270 case 272 cases per 100 000 people over two weeks which is uh right now and you see the the incomplete line which is is imperfect that data tends to change as they validate it but it gives you a general sense that where we're headed right now is on a trajectory that takes us to the highest point at any time in this pandemic in terms of transmission in the county
007which is uh unfortunately we were really hoping we would not see further waves but that is that is kind of where the data stands right now and something we'll be watching closely because i know this impacts for us we know when the rate is higher in the community we have more uh more [Music] times where we have have to address exposures potentially in school and so for our nurses they're watching that very closely when we were at a higher rate last year they were super busy with contact tracing and making sure we keep students safe that's something that they're going to have to be prepared to be very busy with again as we get started until this wave passes so important information for us to continue to keep a watch on as we move forward
008so those are the two slides i have at this point we didn't have any public comment at our last meeting so i don't have any follow-up there and i would love to bring you a celebration but during the summer we're generally letting people have that time away and we'll come back to some of those great celebrations as we start back up in september all right any questions all right now we're to public comment um so before we begin with public comment so becky powell will call on each of the person who submitted their name and topic via email allowing them the opportunity to read or say their statement the first submission gets five minutes every submission after gets three minutes for a total of 20 becky is the time keeper and will inform the speaker
009when their time is up the board does not discuss personnel matters or matters involving student discipline in an open meeting such matters are only addressed in an executive session concerns about such matters should first be addressed with the superintendent or designee who will when appropriate informed and involve the board the board will likely not respond at this time as it is time for us to hear your issue please know that all submissions will be shared with the board and superintendent that's if like email submissions upon hearing your comment the board will take it under advisement and will as needed ask the appropriate staff member to follow up with you basically what that says is this is not a time for dialogue it's a time for you to make comment to us and for us to
010consider it and then i added a bullet becky uh final reminder reminder i want to recognize that we are all here because we care about kids and so we know that you are coming in because you care about kids and i hope that you give us that same assumption that you have that same assumption about us and that we can learn from each other so with that becky did you receive any submissions yes [Music] you're okay my name is jenny my husband and i are both tomorrow alumni our kids attend black lake and tomorrow middle school first off i would like to say that i totally understand you are all in a tough position here and are feel fearful of losing funding if you go against ospi and the governor the governor as well as
011superintendent of public con instruction cannot make a law that is written throughout our constitution ospi cannot withhold funding for not following a mandate as a mandate is not a law in fact he will be breaking the law and doing so those funds are constitutionally protected i'm sure you all know that you took an oath to uphold the us constitution the washington state constitution and the laws of washington state the washington state constitution says in article 1 section 1 that the purpose of state government is to protect and maintain individual rights by not allowing parents to make the decision of wearing a mask a personal choice you're violating our constitutional rights as a parent in this district you're making it look like you have no power when school boards have fast power according to rcw 28a
012320.015 school boards of directors powers notice of adoption policy the board of directors of each school district may exercise the following the broad discretionary power to determine and adopt written policies not in conflict with other law that provide for the development and implementation programs activity services etc etc it also states before adopting a policy under subsection 1a of this section the school board of directors shall comply with notice requirements of open public meetings act chapter 4230 rcw and shall in addition include in that notice a statement that sets forth or reasonably describes the proposed policy the board of directors provide a reasonable opportunity for public written or oral comment and consideration of the comment by the board of directors adopting this mat mass mandate across the board is illegal without proper public input the board
013has broken this law not allowing public input and blindly adopting this policy there are districts in washington talking and even writing resolutions to make masking optional in their local districts there are a lot of parents in this district who do not want their children to be mastic in for the school year in fact a lot of parents are considering pulling their children from the district and choosing other options it is well known that literacy is crucial to the future success of a child mask interrupt learning speech and language development and else it can also further isolate students who are already struggling my son has an iep for dyslexia he needs to see the mouths of teachers and peers to understand what is being said masking is not allowing that he's struggling masks also create a
014significant psychological risk they increase anxiety depression and learning disorders jama pediatrics published a study showing dangerous levels of co2 among kids after only a short time wearing a mask and you expect them to wear them all day at the last budget meeting we sat here for 30 minutes we had to stop counting after 30 minutes of how many times people are messing with their masks and you expect the kids to do this all day that's germs on mask germs and mouths the tsar's cov2 virus is not stopped by pores on a typical mask this is brought up by many credible doctors lastly cdc data for under the age of 20 which is our k-12 have a 99.997 survival rate to put this number in perspective a young child has a higher risk of dying from
015the seasonal flu yet we have never closed our schools or masked our children during flu season why are we masking them now these are our children it should be the parents choice to mask them not yours and definitely not the governments i urge you to reconsider mass mandate make it optional i saw the projected budget i know the district needs enrollment numbers to increase masking is not going to help those numbers take a stand be leaders show our kids show the parents you are fighting for us the fellow school district board is looking for other districts to take a stand with them stand up for what is right partner with other districts fight this we put you in these positions for a reason i'm asking you to fight this for our children if you want
016to sell a fellow school board's info i'd be happy to email out to you thank you [Applause] thank you and our next person is on zoom i believe tara can you hear me yes can you hear me see okay okay thank you okay there you go there we go now we can't hear the sound okay now we've lost the sound tara did you maybe you were muted when we moved i needed to unmute myself that would help okay always helps yeah okay is it my turn ready to go yes it is okay so when the pandemic began the lack of knowledge about covet justified incessant masculine and school closures but that excuse has since vanished it became clear long ago that this virus is less dangerous to children than the flu today i'll be sharing
017some information i've learned that helped me move from fear to frustration did you know that children on average smile about 400 times a day adults it's about 20. studies have shown that seeing a person's smile activates the area of the brain that is responsible for facial expression smiling can lead to more friends it makes us feel good it makes us happy it doesn't take us science to tell us that only 10 states in this country have mandated mass in schools k through 12. and a recent brown university study compared transmission rates in schools during the 2021 school year and found in florida massachusetts and new york and found no difference in transmission rates between schools that mandated mass and those who didn't children under the age of 12 are two and a half times more
018likely to die from drowning than covid the academy of pediatrics reports point zero one percent of all coded cases and children result in death children account for one point seven percent of total hospitalizations nationwide in the last 18 months we've had 371 cova destination wide in those 0-17 and 20 in the 2017-18 flu season there were 643 deaths in children under the age of 17 plus millions of symptomatic infections and this is in the span of one year no close schools no mass mandates and no required so why has it been decided that vaccinated adults who can still spread covet to unvaccinated people who are potentially more at risk for severe obesity disease because of their age can remove their masks when we know that children who are not at higher risk but will suffer
019developmentally from them must keep them on what is the difference well that's easy it's an approved vaccine the masks are being used for mask theater if we took away masks for our children without a vaccine what would be the incentive incentive to vaccinate especially for low-risk groups like children who may perform a risk benefit analysis and decide not to be vaccinated right now so with all that said my requests are the following first i would ask that the tumor school district assess the need for masking in 12k through 12. i guarantee educators have witnessed the detriment they impose on our children let parents make the choice that is best for their kids next absolutely no mandatory vaccines for covid19 if we do not mandate flu vaccines for disease that infects and kills more children annually
020then why would we do it for covid it should be the parents choice for obvious reasons next no mask shaming via vaccinated versus unvaccinated either all the masks come off or all the masks stay on and that that is if you decide you must follow the edicts of our governor the tactics being used in workplaces i have witnessed firsthand are disgusting shameful and toxic no one should be put in a position where they have to explain themselves feel discriminated against or receive less opportunities based on their personal medical decisions this is even more important for our youth and lastly please just let them be kids let them play let them learn you do what you know is best for them even if it goes against the narrative i know deep down in your hearts you
021know that masking distancing and forcing vaccination on our children is wrong the research shows it the statistics show it and the mental health and suicide trends show it you board members have been elected by us to exercise what our state law calls for discretionary power school district just one more second you have the legal and constitutional authority decide how to administer schools so i'm begging you to stand up for it fight for our kids please thank you nice job you are very very fast speaker yeah yeah yeah you got like four minutes worth of stuff in that three minutes um the next person is all right hi um [Music] greetings my name is shayna barahan hopefully you guys can all hear me um i'm a parent i have five kids in the tom water school
022district and i'm in favor of the mess we are all cur in my household we're currently fighting covid um i'm not so worried about my kids getting it but i'm worried about me getting it and their grandparents getting it we've already had two cousins die of cova this year we know that mass and vaccine do prevent the spread of covid and until everyone is vaccinated and we can eliminate covet like we did with the smallpox then we have to do all that we can to prevent the spread of this disease luckily we're all recovering here but my kids last year we were masked in the school they survived being masked in the school on the bus they did sports while they were being masked they ran cross country wearing their masks they played soccer wearing
023their mask all with no problem i'm glad to be living in the tum water school district and i'm glad that we live in a state where we have a government that cares about the safety of our citizens over the needs and the wants of the few thank you shanna [Music] [Applause] all right as they fix that it's huh that was three right yep we're all done um so now we're going to move on to reports the board shaun badstone you're up [Music] uh three policies for your review they're all first reads policy first read that we're taking a look at is 4311 school safety and security service programs so if you're looking in your pocket one of the things that happened when schools use resource officers is that now there are a set of conditions
024that you must have in place at the school district in order to make sure that your school resource officers and safety personnel are in a place to promote a safe and secure community and i will tell you the tumwater police department's relationship with the tumwater school district is already super strong and we began looking at this partnership last year so once a month we get together with our resource officers and campus security personnel along with the lieutenant of the tumwater police department and we created a tracking form as part of our work to help secure the relationship that we have so for example when a tumwater police department officer responds to an incident at the school they report out on that incident because what's required in the policy is that we have an opportunity to
025record the data and the incidents upon which they are part of so the policy you're looking at here defines the purpose of school resource officers to really be about community policing and this idea that we're in this work to promote a safe and secure environment for everybody remember there is always a law enforcement component to schools we must have access to our police officers in order to ensure the most secure campuses we can have in addition to that they put in some limitations that you can see there they don't want police officers responding to typical discipline that a principal or a other school personnel might respond to but they do want them to be available in case there's a real safety risk to students and families in a school setting on page two then they
026get to request for interventions law enforcement activities around immigration and remember this is not new we've never really gone out in any immigratory status and asked what is your status that is something the tumwater police department doesn't do and we don't ask them to do that what we do though is we sign an agreement with them and one of the things that you'll see that's brand new in this policy is the parameters upon which we have to have a safe and working agreement right now the newest condition is that all of your resource officers must go through a 13 module training session that the esd has put out for them to review so i met with jen today and we went through and said what would it look like for our officers to complete this
027training course between now and six months into the start of school so we worked on that training plan today jen has that going out to her officers the officers will record the training they complete inside the google document we've created for them to record their training on and we'll progress through that i just want to say i'm super grateful for the tumwater police department's role in creating a community policing organization in this school district that can support community safety so first read there an opportunity to really take a look at those things that are going to be important for us to promote school safety questions as you look at that first part questions i i know that there was a i was talking with the mayor we know that there's a concern when students or
028families see a police officer on the campus and that for some people have a different reaction in terms of how safe they feel um and so it at what point do we um talk with our students or our families about how they feel about this program that's actually a really great question if you were up to gone out to any of our school sites last year during the pandemic and it will be true again this year we'll see our resource officers working in collaboration with our school community so for example if you saw ross or tyler out there last year you would have seen them meeting and greeting families talking with families and getting to know them one of the things that we know is going to have to happen and it already is but
029we're going to extend it out a little bit more is to have our officers play a more integral role in the school environment what does that mean meeting and greeting kids at the door attending lunches and interacting with kids and building relationships with them and attending events that we put on to create that community ideal that we want them to have in all honesty that's one of the biggest things about this policy is that they want you to be in a place where it's about relationship building because believe it or not there's also a place where tyler will tell you kids will come to him and ask for support that's the kind of environment you want to create where kids feel comfortable going so i happened to be out there last year when i was
030watching a kid was locked out of the car he was able to go out and she came in and said can you help me he went in and did a variety of different things so in our sheet we want to capture those things that our police are doing to support the school community but that's an important role because when you build relationships with kids you start to create a sense of community that is unlike them just showing up the nice part about having a resource office here in your district unlike when you don't is that when you call the police say a thurston county police officer who would respond they don't have any contacts for the school so they may show up and kind of go whoa what what's happening here whereas our our officers
031have built relationships with our students and we redivided them to be on each side of the freeway to support black hills theatre schools and tongue water high school theater schools yeah so that our resource officers can now start building relationships with the elementary middle and high school kids as they transition up through our system so we're super excited about that but you're right that's part of the community the community side of policing which is to be able to support relationships i think what i appreciate about both tyler and ross is that they're there for the kids um and that they really love their job it's important for a district to find a school resource officer who's there for the kids and not to be necessarily a police officer i mean they help with coaching they
032have they they do all sorts of things with the kids so i appreciate that so one of the things that you'll find often is they you know they always say gosh what's a model of sro work that you would want to see and one of the models is called community policing you've heard me say that a lot right one of the one of the most supported ways you can incorporate officers into the school setting is through that model and when we reviewed that model in tumwater we have the largest component that checklist already done so the nice part for us is that we're well on our way yeah um excuse me yeah does that model include the ros going into classrooms and actually meeting the students and showing them who they are so the kids
033feel comfortable with them yeah they actually apologize they actually came up with the idea of maybe taking some things that are so one of the one of the things we plan to do with our data is to collect incident reports and to kind of see where's the largest what are the largest things happening so for example if we saw bullying and harassment intimidation over text then our officers plan to go into classrooms to do one kind of help people with that but also to be preventative so yes lori the answer is we do intend to have officers in classrooms supporting in either a homeroom setting or others opportunities for them to talk about topics and to also just meet and greet kids as we go so any opportunities that we have to do that we
034want to make sure we support them i think that's excellent i think the police should be a friendly face of comfort to children and i'm just glad that we still have our ros because i know that other districts in our area don't have them anymore and it's important that our kids have that so yeah it's all good news thank you yeah thank you anything else other questions i have a quick question sean so have you got any community feedback on this policy at all so one of the requirements of a piece of that legislate the agreement we have with our sros must be open for public review once it's completed so i have just been in contact with the police department and our legal representation to make sure that the agreement satisfies the requirements of
035the policy so when our legal reviews it then the tumwater police department has their legal reviewing and we come back together and we say does this meet the requirements of the law so there will be a public comment section casey on the agreement and one of the things we're looking at doing is almost through a google form type of idea as well that idea that you would put it out there and say here's the agreement do you have any questions about this because it incorporates things like officer evaluation officer training support for our sros and those kinds of things that you see there in the policy so yes there is a public policy requirement gives me a public feedback requirement on the agreement with our sros thank you sean yeah that's an exciting and once
036again once a month so if board members if you want to come and see those meetings or you want to be a part of kind of seeing how we review the data go through that let me know and we'll we'll get you in there ready to roll could you send out that information to us so just let us know so we can put on our radar maybe just have sean include it in the weekly emails that he sends us yeah yeah thank you really love to have you come in and take a look it's good work a lot of good work being done what you see in policy 3207 then is just kind of a what was the diversity equity inclusion group that came kind of back and said hey is our bullying harassment intimidation
037policy as current as it should be so when sean and i went back and reflected on and took a look at that there were a couple of additions and highlights that you see there um that had been added or updated that weren't inclusive of our policy so all of those are listed for you as editions uh in the policy itself to include kind of this recognition that they don't get together and so we wanted to make sure that that was in there and that when we get this out to our staff that they're familiar with that requirement you can also see there underneath training the specific training requirement actually asks that your title ix bullying harassment intimidation officer actually receive an annual training the good news is that's already been done for this particular person
038so we're in good shape there but they do want to make sure folks have the most current and updated information that comes from ospi so the office of civil rights at ospi has an annual training that they do where folks like myself who help oversee that take part in and are responsible for that work now at the district level we take that information and also make sure it gets the staff but the training requirement this is specific to the coordinator and then of course as you go through the rest of the pages there is a significant part about students with individual education plans or 504s you can see that there you have an obligation to pull those iep teams back together and really begin talking about what's leading to or what might be causing or
039impacting students that are experiencing bullying and harassment intimidation and then last but not least you see a lot of cross-references and citations for that work that we've updated so that when we do training our staff will have the most current information questions there i have a couple questions sean so your uh the category under behavior expressions that's highlighted yellow is that all change is that new i just wanted an edition so that is all brand new so where did that language come from was the model policy based on the legislation thank you and where did the section on students with individuals with ieps in section 504 okay the most current update from wasda model policy in 2019 because remember this is a 2013 policy so when your committee got together and said wait a second
040do we have the most updated policy on that sean and i cross referenced the most recent release and the most recent release was before we started and generally those updates are made as a result of either changes in law or new case law that comes out that wazda would say we better update policy to reflect that and make sure our districts and our policies reflect the most current law and understanding one last question sean so have we had any public feedback on this policy as well no this is do you have any plans do you have an equity advisory committee that's highly involved in taking a look at this particular topic so that makes me feel good i would like the public though and don't get me wrong i'm sure the public is much more
041interested in equity advisory group this month so yeah what i can what i'll be able to reference in the superintendent's report is we built a process for that on our website uh that just went live today um and and we'll have to figure out on communication about that engage laurie but i'll share some information about a new public uh comment process we have for policies that might help with that nice yeah thanks john and john yeah you're welcome i would say one of the things with that too is i think we we have to be sensitive to the fact that many of the rcws the revised code of washington are laws rules and regulations like sometimes what happens is even with our staff right they'll say oh no we don't want that but you have
042to have it right you can't you can't separate the law from kind of what's required here but what is nice about doing the public comment and asking is what questions would you have about this if it was to go out or what things do you see missing in this policy that you'd like to see added so those can all be good ways to go about it yeah thank you no taken there thank you and last but not least i would tell you this one is interesting just because we spent a significant amount of time on this student discipline policy and procedures in fact dr dawson's dissertation is mostly around student discipline so the nice part about having this revised policy here is we just wanted to make it reflective of the most current waz-da model
043policy for the same reason so i think becky you sent me a note that said wow this in the context of it being drastically different is a little more than we have so you what you see in your package 3241 is just the most current lot of model policy and this now is starting to move the needle back from punishment to restoration do you remember that whole conversation we were having that kind of said look we're not about exclusionary practices anymore i.e get out yeah you're not welcome back here okay that significantly changed the paradigm when we went to restorative which is more about it's not to say that crucial and critical behaviors aren't a part of the system and we don't deal with those what it does say though is it's going to give
044us a chance to talk with build relationships and understand where people are before applying the discipline to it and there are lots of key ideas in the new discipline policy that support them so for example when we do our tumwater university as we start to take a look at working with principals as we think about reopening our schools there is going to be a restorative practices professional development session that happens there and that's about how do you promote the conditions in your building where that happens and you know what's the truth about all the student discipline work relationships they start with relationships when staff build good relationships with kids they get to know them they're using restorative practices asking kids for example hey help me understand why you made that choice let's talk a little
045bit about that what could we do differently the next time along with good policies and practices and teaching kids how to manage behavior in the classroom we get a lot further than exclusionary one of the things we learned in exclusionary discipline is we can send kids out all day but they don't learn what to do differently when they come back and sometimes when they come back it can get worse so we want to make sure we're in a place where we're doing all we can to help kids stay connected in our discipline policies to be restorative in the sense that they build relationships and help kids learn new skills and you'll see that here reflected in this policy questions it's a lot of good stuff a lot of good stuff i do like this orientation
046it fits our mission right creating this caring creative care and creative environment it's gonna support those so thank you very much okay i have one i have one question only because i it's difficult to do so you're going to be talking about these policy changes that tell motor u like how do staff find out when these policies change so when you when you talk about like a discipline policy for the most part the implementation of this is led by the principal and so they do have to have conversations annually and regularly with their staff about how do we handle discipline in the building and so while we might not talk about that at tumwater u as a whole district as much i did a keynote on that a couple years ago the principles as they're
047laying out working with their staff on how they handle discipline at the building would have that type of conversation bullying intimidation harassment that is something we did have some training on at our april uh hack day that was taking them through that policy and these changes while important changes for us to make won't have a lot of impact on the say the teacher side or at that level it'll be more in the it'll be more for us sharing with the administrators so when they're implementing these policies that we make sure we protect rights and and address the things that need to be addressed right hopefully all right all right thank you jennifer kerr welcome to the po or the lectern it's your turn we are happy to have you here this is your first presentation
048thank you really excited to be with the tom water school district family i have new glasses and i have yet to figure out how to wear them with my mask without fogging up i'm going to be looking down at my slides but i will try to keep up on the clicker all right so i am following up on a presentation you had a couple weeks ago from jim britton as he was leaving the district he has worked on on preparing the budget for the next year over the last several months with district leadership and others and so when when he presented the budget a couple weeks ago he talked about where our financial condition was at that time so i'm going to be presenting you with similar slides from the last time just for sake
049of consistency and this being a presentation in preparation for the budget adoption hearing on the 26th um so i am also some new information is that we have worked over the past couple weeks very hard um hit the ground running with my first introduction to the district um on how we can uh balance the budget for this upcoming year we've had to make a lot of hard decisions and we know that we have a lot more work to do but i want to explain some of the ways that we are working towards being financially sound and maintaining our minimum fund balance policy as a as a fourth priority um so this slide is the same as the slide i made there's been no changes this is our enrollment projections or the upcoming school year and
050so you'll recall this from the previous and i think there was some other discussion about it some questions but um for sake of this um recorded hearing um our public meeting i wanted to just talk about where we're at and the numbers um as we as we transition you can see from this chart that we've had quite an enrollment decline since 1718. um and so in the 2021 school year you can see that we ended at my print is really small but we ended up 5 800 students um and we lost about 300 students from where we ended at 1920 in the 2021 school year so when we're looking at our average numbers that was the ending number but when you look at the average we lost to over 300 students so we did a
051lot of trend analysis and i know that sean did some of his own analysis because it's such a hard year and so many districts are battling and struggling with the same thing on how to predict the rebound and enrollment for the upcoming school year so we are projecting 61.22 which is about 20 students less than what we ended in 1920. so um we think that's a pretty good number there's so many unknown backers and so a lot of our budget decisions have have are based on that number and what we know now and of course when school starts we'll have a better indication of how many students and how much we can we're going to rebound so with that and jump in sean at any time because um yeah and that number i can say
052you know it's projecting some return uh we we had a lot of people who held kindergarten out last year so we expect a little larger than normal kindergarten with some people who held out last year who we'll bring in this year and it's also partially because as you see a lot of rooftops going up around our district and so we started to see this grow back and so you've got this combination of families that may be held out and decided to come are deciding to come back this year and the growth that we're seeing in our district so but it's it is really hard to predict exactly what that enrollment will be this year and we're going to have to be ready for a number that's higher or lower than that number [Music] thank you
053can i ask a quick question what does the kindergarten enrollment look like right now today is that up or down or what's that look like sure i know that's hard maybe to nail you on right well it is but it's okay i can't give you a number but what i can tell you is our elementary principles say they saw higher than normal enrollment activity in the spring in their kindergarten so their numbers as if they compare it to where they typically are right now they're seeing more kids than normal which tells us we're probably gonna see that bounce back in kindergarten that we were that we were expecting based on last year's numbers being down and then what about have we taken into consideration and we have to because people are saying it anybody leaving
054the district or we leave that's why we're leaving it at minus 20 or plus 20. well yeah and so if we were expecting all of everyone to re-enroll and the growth in the district we'd be expecting above our 1920 number but we're not we're we're looking at so you're looking at um so if you if you think about it we expect some bounce back based upon changing conditions and the pandemics and families that does that uh stayed out last year coming in and then growth in the district to provide some of that not a full bounce back because if we had gotten every kid back we had in 1920 plus the growth we expect in the district we'd be projecting a number higher than the 1920 number so what is the actual number between uh
055last year september and are projected this september last september well if you look at the 6 000. so we were expecting about 700 122 from that 59.99 you see in september of uh and then to 6122 so that'd be 122 student increase so i am not a finance person i leave that to melissa and the finance people but that looks awfully aggressive to me to project that much of an increase and that's just me just saying that on the slide here so fair that is that is looking at the fact that we what we lost uh if it is is more than that but um pre-pandemic right but we haven't pleased very many people either so i can't it's hard for me to project we're going to gain enrollment other than roofs in the county
056which that we're in our district which very well could it is an extremely hard year to predict enrollment and i get that that is i just want to understand a little bit of the logic into projecting up yeah so what you end up with it's a it's a catch-22 if you under-project your enrollment you get smaller apportionment from september through january because they give you your apportionment based upon that and you so you end up with smaller payments in the fall which which then in the i guess in in january february march you saw a little larger apportionment payments i get it now sean i just just when you i this over the back of me and i understand no it's okay but that's that flip it is super conservative yeah and i get that
057yeah it seems aggressive a little bit but i get where we're estimating that because we can put ourselves in a really bad situation yeah and so if we do see lower than normal enrollment we'll have to address that through and it would be any attrition that we have and through we have use basically get into our emergency backup plans which we can talk about here what that would look like thank you sean so i plan to have a very intensive review the first couple weeks of school on enrollment exactly where we stand because we want we don't want to move be moving kiddos later in the year we want to know what our members are stopping these are what do you mean by move kiddos if we don't know what our actual numbers are at
058the beginning of the year that we're staffed for so so explain that a little bit further yeah okay so can i take a second yeah if we expect lower than the lower numbers we maybe only have i'm making this up for kindergarten classes well then more show up so if you are too conservative take it from someone who did it if you're too conservative then you don't create enough classrooms and then you don't have enough teachers so but if you are not so concerned then you have too many teachers it's such it's it's hard so so then if you have to add another kindergarten classroom then you are moving kiddos into that fifth kindergarten classroom and that's what no one wants to do that's all i just want to clarify what move kiddos means yeah
059yeah that could be moving school to school you know water hill to michael t i just want to understand what move kiddos means that'll freak people out yeah and it's coming from i'm a parent who my second grader that happened to he was moved to the end of november and i've heard i would have i wish it would have happened earlier in the school year the natural tendency is when you want to be really conservative if you talk to principals their problem is they go i see the kids coming and i'm going to need another teacher here and if we don't staff that other teacher i'm going to have more kids show up and now i got to add a teacher after school starts and the pool of available teachers is much smaller and now
060i've got to move kids after the start of the school year into a classroom with a new teacher that we've hired at the last minute and so they're very you know so we have this push pull always with the principles about where do we land i like this approach and this theory let's hear it out and see what the numbers show in the end here why don't we continue through the slides and see where we're heading okay and so this is the new slide but not his last presentation so what i wanted to what i tried to do in this slide was just show some show where we left off two weeks ago right with where our budget situation was and then some decisions that we have made to balance our budget for the current
061year with some understanding that we still have a lot of work to do because we are using extra funds that are one-time funds those are not sustainable so let's just start with the number it was 3742 budget deficit two weeks ago um so we went through um our beth our hr director went out and met with all the principals um we had a lot of unfilled positions that were being posted we identified positions that either due to unknown enrollment or principles saying that if they absolutely had to do without some of these additional services they could do so temporarily so we have identified positions that will not be filled of 1.3 million and i can break that down with you if you would like but um and then we because of the esser funds we
062did not use a lot of our ester funds last year our ass for two and three funds we didn't use it all because we may i interrupt for one second sorry thank you yes would you mind explaining what esser funds are to everybody i think maybe people might not know what that is it might be beneficial to explain it yeah so after funds are the federal um stabilization or stimulus funds that that districts receive throughout the nation so we've received three different rounds so we call them s or one as or two and that's the three and so we knew that we were also receiving some additional state help this past year this current year with some enrollment stabilization that the legislature passed and some transportation stabilization so we had a plan to use our
063extra funds for supplemental services but when we realized the budget situation we were in we have decided to charge some of our current expenditures that were included in the budget to be paid out of basic ad using our answer funds um so one of the allowable uses of ester funds is continuity of services so we had created tba our virtual academy last year to accommodate those students that still wanted to do remote wanted to do remote learning and we did not charge any of those to our federal stimulus funds and those were created that program was created due to coping and so we are going to charge those expenditures this year to our extra clients um and then we identified some additional expenditures that we also didn't charge this year but for the upcoming year
064we have about seven hundred and eighteen thousand dollars in other staffing that we created we have to have a staff person in every school for a sick room for a public stick room basically so we have a person staffing that so we're going to charge all of those positions to our esser funds and we also have a full-time certificated nurse that we had to add due to coping so we are going to charge that person and then we have a half-time counselor at one of our elementary schools that we added for voted reasons so with all that using those essar funds which are one time funds again we are going to balance the budget with a little bit of a surplus of about 17 000. we still have some of our effort fund retained that
065we are going to save for supplemental services and we are hoping that our enrollment comes in either as expected or rebounds we're hoping that we can use some of that over the next two years because we know that billing loss can't be recovery can't all happen in one year so we're hoping we can save some of those funds for next year also and essentially because we know our fund balance remains fairly thin if our enrollment were to come in lower we could dip into additional lesser funds if needed to provide continuity of services without hurting the fund balance the challenge is that's once again one time money so once it's gone it's gone so we it it basically because we drew fund balance down last year in services adding tva adding the staff necessary for
066that and didn't charge them to it um we're really going to have to use esser this year as that as that stop gap as well as providing recovery services quick question so sr1 and 2 funds are gone so what is the total remaining balance of two and three it's about 6.2 million but after you take your indirects out it's around 5.7 million what are indirects yes oh those are those are expenditures that are taken out of all of our grants to use for district overhead so basically we administer the program and we provide overhead for that program thank you jennifer yes so um so is there any other questions on this slide i mean we know that we have a lot of work to do but this is just how we can balance our budget
067for the upcoming year to maintain our fund balance within the required level no questions but a thank you yes uh that it's not 3.7 million dollar negative yes okay so so this this again is a similar slide from last time if this is with the updated numbers before you saw the 3.7 million decrease so this just shows a four-year comparison of our actual projection of this year now projection is just a projection for this year we think we're going to end up with an ending fund balance of 5.5 but that could come out different it depends on payroll costs for august and other things that come into august so um that is just the most recent information now this is a new slide we are also required as part of the budget adoption process to
068adopt a four-year forecast um so i want to explain this because if you look at this four-year forecast it looks like we're going to end up in four years with a five billion dollar um negative fund balance and we know that can't happen right so the four-year forecast is just a depiction of if we continued our services our expenditures our staffing levels as they are right now this is where we would end up because in the first year you can see that we are including that we have ester funds there that we won't have in future years so that negative excess of revenues over expenditures in the next over the next three years is close to it's it's averages about that 3.7 million dollars that you saw before so we if we continued as we
069are we know we can't we know we have to make decisions we know that we are making a lot of assumptions with this with this forecast we're assuming that enrichment levy's been maintained at 250 per student we're we're um uh assuming that we're only going to increase enrollment by about 150 students per year and we're yeah i think we're also assuming that we're continuing basically all the covet staffing that we're keeping on right now as well if we continue with the current level of staffing we have right now other than the ones that we've had to balance the budget we did not include those moving forward because we're assuming that those are continued we're going to be continuing cuts can i ask a question on that real quick then why does the total expenditures drop
070in 2223 then if we're planning on that out the exact same positions i thought that was a drop off of those positions you have a little bit there that is in drop off of yeah what is it related to the the red reduced expenditures in 2223 so there is some accounting for some reduction in covet expenditures that appears that that's built that is built into there with the uh drop in in esser funds but i think it doesn't necessarily fully account for what we'll see what we should be able to drop off there but we're also the bottom line is we're going to have to make additional adjustments beyond that i mean you can't you can't solve this yeah if what you're asking is can we just do it with kova no we can't it's
071this is a structural adjustment we're going to have to look at you see maybe the revenue drops by 500 yeah i'm sorry you want to press that i don't think we're curious but then yes that doesn't seem like something that's just going to fix it so you're absolutely that was going to be my next comment is that i'm hearing the word assumptions a lot and that you know what they say about assume and i'm it's concerning to me that i'm hearing we're assuming this we're assuming that we're assuming this we're assuming that when we don't really know for sure what our enormous picture is going to look like and i don't even hear anybody even discuss about inner district transfers or any of the different variables that go into our enrollment so i i feel
072i don't feel confident right now i don't feel real stable a four-year forecast is all assumptions that's the hard part is there's no way for us to make a four-year forecast without it in the state when they passed this and they they asked us to do it i've heard from a lot of finance directors i'm just sharing from talking to finance directors they they find this really hard because we can project this year with some level of accuracy the following year especially in this dynamic environment with covid that it does require such big assumptions to look at that that what we see there is hard to say is it it's hard to say with any level of accuracy i think that's the challenge what is helpful is that the assumptions we're using is current because
073the decisions we have to make in the future are then like like jennifer hasn't made them because their their board level discussions do do we continue tva you know so those that's why they're the the assumptions are that we continue current service because the conversation that we'll have in january is the the big ones you know these bigger conversations that's right yeah as as in in my job i'm not going to make i'm not going to make assumptions on how to balance you know balance that without some sort of input from the board yeah and there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit the decisions that we'll be asked to make will be difficult decisions because uh they they all come with services i understand that i know that there's a moment where the rubber is
074gonna meet the road i get that um i just wanna feel a little bit more secure when i'm looking at things and um they're being explained to me in a way that's well you know we're going to have this and then we're going to have that and i just want to make sure that i'm clear so when i'm asked about it that i can be clear in my discussion or comments to um parents or community members that ask me i i think i think the comment is we're gonna have to make cuts yes we're gonna have to have tough conversations about making cuts i think that if we want to want to be straight up transparent we're going to have to make cuts and we're going to have some hard conversations about that yeah it's
075we're not in a sustainable position right so it has to be we have to make adjustments so i have a question about um tva so on the 1.7 is that the total cost overall or that's just the amount that you're charging to answer no that's the total cost overall so the majority of that is staffing but there is about a 250 000 in in um contractual services that would make the company for the curriculum and additional instruction that i think that was ultimately what i was heading towards was how much of that you know if because if that was instruction those teachers would be in the schools so that that cost is the same essentially yes if that enrollment was there in the schools they'd we'd still have that cost but it's that additional services
076piece that we have to pay for the curriculum well the teachers are still in the brick and mortar buildings if those kids and tva went back to the buildings it's not likely we would increase staff at the level that we're added our staff is higher at tba than it would be if they were in the brick and mortar buildings the hard part would be that and this is the discussion we'll have to have later is so how many kids remain in the tva program so if we have 125 kids right now in the program each of them are providing us dollars in revenue if we were to close that program would those students go back to our brick and mortar schools or would they leave our district and if they leave our district you lose
077enrollment which loses funding so it wouldn't be necessarily just like 1.7 million dollars back in our pocket it would be 1.7 million dollars minus the apportionment we get for all the kids that might decide i'm going to leave and go to another online program somewhere else so that's the the complexity of that discussion and the staffing would have to be adjusted too did do that a little bit this year because the enrollment is significantly less than when we started at 400 students we're only estimating what about 100 and 130 right right now about 130 enrolled but that could increase depending on decisions families make based upon new guidance no oh one of the things that's true about tva for jennifer is one of the things that happens with virtual academies is that there is the
078possibility of changing your application so right now we have a single district application that only allows 10 non-resident transfer into a virtual environment but you can change your application status to be something called multi-district in which case there isn't a limit as to how many people you can retain from other districts into your virtual academy we have found the power of tom water virtual academy though is to have tom water teachers in those seats to be able to connect kids to the work that has been extremely powerful in that program so she she being jodi holterman the new principal there just did a tva orientation and they had 25 new interested folks that are interested in participating in that so i think one of the things that's important is to do some outreach and in
079light of the work going on around the variants right now we're starting to get more inquiries about people maybe wanting to participate in that again so we see it as an offering for support for families that may not be comfortable going back into the in-person setting so i wanted to add that context there a little bit too because you can do some things in the virtual world and jennifer and i talk about that a lot that might that might be helpful to our work as we think about it in esser now and then transition to take a look at it closely in the next year to see what possibilities might exist right but until we see that enrollment yes we know that enrollment we're still holding on a few positions yeah okay so again this
080is just a visual this is just to show budget comparisons from year to year it's really not much different other than the balancing of the prior the prior presentation you had and then again a couple more visuals to show where our revenues come in from i mean you can see the majority of it is state general service revenues from the state and then we have our local levee collections and our um state funding our state special purpose funding um so and then we have this just a visual showing our expenditures and where our money goes out and the majority of its regular instruction and iran's next largest piece is our special ed program um and then we have our support services food service transportation facilities then again just for consistency from the prior presentation showing
081all of the object comparisons between the last three budgets this just shows salaries versus operating and there's no change to this slide this is a requirement that we provide information on our state funding that we receive for our material supplies and operating costs versus what we spend and this slide shows that we spend about 1.6 million dollars more than we received from the state for our operating costs okay and then there are no changes to the following other funds the debt service fund is just to collect our voter proof tax revenue and pay our principal interest on outstanding bonds and it shows you that our outstanding bond as of september 1 is 91 million and stop me if i'm going too fast if you have a question are capital projects fund this is for building
082improvements and new construction and equipment the revenues come again from levy collections and impact fees from developers for local development and we get some a small portion of state matching funds as we construct new buildings and then our asb and transportation funds get our asb that student generated revenue and that supports extracurricular recreational cultural and social activities and then our transportation we are purchasing three new buses this year and the revenue comes in from the state um based on depreciation of the current questions we have in our inventory oh any questions so the last one asp transportation folks this was this yearly what is this uh the time frame on these numbers yes this is our other 22 21 22 22. thanks for all the budgets for 21.22 for all the other fun questions comments
083if in the middle of the night you get any then email jennifer and sean because the next meeting will we we need to approve the budget it's required so sorry one one question so what is the process for the public to to see and comment on the budget prior to our adoption so that occurred please go ahead so um today there was a first notice published in the olympian that there will be a hearing on the 26th and we will publish another notice legal notice a week before and the the budget documents and all the information to review will be posted on our webpage so they can be reviewed for um and then anyone even if it'll be a public pairing formal public hearing so people can comment so prior to the meeting all that
084information will be on the website so if somebody wants to look at it like next week it would be there to see it before the meeting next week so we are still working on our hr file that has to be transferred back over because they are still in the process of onboarding positions and so in order to have that be accurate we need an hr file that that goes into the budget so that will be they plan on getting that to me late next week so by the beginning of the following week we should have everything posted so like five days before the meeting is that my calculating i have a question to add on to that what are we doing to directly reach out to the public to let them know about this budget
085issue we're having versus the legal requirements to meet passing it thank you casey you said it much better than me i'm sorry i don't want to talk that's good but it seemed like she was headed there so i'll say it okay so we're having these presentations for presentations and all the materials are posted on our website so can we reach out to the parents in some way and let them know that this is available is sean is that possible can we do a district email so putting out yeah have it go out through like like lori's friday message potentially saying no no i don't want it lori's private part lori's friday message that's a separate communication channel i think that's a great it's a great reminder but no i think this needs to be separate
086but that's just me talking here right now i'm gonna agree with that i think what you're what i hear you saying is you don't want it to be so passive a little bit more absolutely yes it seems like we're very passive on this and we need to let people know okay so a direct email communication about the public hearing on august 26th so um so the the thing that's uh so much fun that you'll get to do casey when you lead that meeting is that yeah if you're still um i won't i won't be at that meeting uh or i will be at the meeting via zoom so casey will be leading the meeting so we leave our board meeting to go into public hearing in which anyone gets to speak on the budget so
087um and everyone gets to and there's no time limit i don't think so that's what i wanted to draw excerpt extra extra attention to melissa yes in two weeks they will be wide open so please yeah maybe some people don't care about it that's okay yes and i think we need to let our parents know because i i'm not aware of any time we've projected a negative fund balance at the end of the year or a 17 000 play that's not i think we're in new territory here and the community needs to know sorry 17 000. well i just saw that yeah i can't remember where are 30 i can't remember where we're at i just know we're not looking good and we're not looking like we have been in the previous years and the
088community needs to know over the four-year forecast and this year too yeah this year yeah this year that needs a requirement yeah anybody can read everybody knows how to balance a checkbook here and they don't have four years where that is headed right yeah i'm worried about this year yeah yeah and this reporter this information will be posted what will be posted before the meeting is the 175-page document that most people don't want to read so they they might prefer looking at them yes and i agree with you i just want people to have a chance to come and talk and give feedback on this absolutely yeah i don't want to read it either oh it's good all right so i heard direction that there'd be a email sent out with some sort of connection
089to where the documents are yeah i think i think i'd like to make sure man maybe it's a couple i'm just thinking about making sure that people know when that information will be available and so they can review it and then absolutely not make it timely so they write something that is available and they have time to review it perfect yeah thank you excellent yes all right anything else on the budget okay so now it's a superintendent's report so uh shifting from budget to talking a little bit about going into this year one of the key things that we want to make sure that we share with our that we build with our staff this year is a sense of where we're going our we know our kids have been through an incredibly hard experience
090i mean we've heard people talk tonight about how hard this has been on kids going through this pandemic and i know certainly with my own children i've seen it and it's this has been a difficult experience and so as we bring students back from it part of us talking about recovery services is also that we want to help students get back on track and get back to where to feeling good about school and some of our kids thrived through this experience and others had a really hard time um the theme that we're going into this year with is this uh it is pulling together and it's really focused our focus with staff is going to be this is going to take everyone working together to do well we are asking our staff to collaborate in
091the most effective ways they can in support of helping our students recover we're asking all of our support staff to work together effectively to to to support our kids and um using this idea of a rowing crew because really what we all know and i love this african proverb if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together we need everyone working together to be effective this year and we're going to need that certainly as what as we tackle these budget challenges because we know that it's not like we can just throw more at it in order to improve we have to be more effective with what we have uh and that means really ramping up and increasing our teacher collaboration looking at our systems of support for students
092who are struggling and and so we've got a few areas we're going to be asking our staff really to pull together and that i just want to highlight a few of those first of them first of all a question that we want our staff to be asking constantly is who benefits and who does not benefit from our work um what we know you know if i go back to when i was in school i think there was a little more of that top line uh if you i like this graphic because it illustrates for me this this top line is um no matter what a person's individual needs are we give them the same thing and we see how it goes we give everyone an adult bicycle for some people that's going to be a
093perfect fit for others it's not right see the little boy up in the front there that bike doesn't fit and it's not going to meet his individual needs for someone in in a wheelchair that regular adult bike is not the right equipment to get them where they want to go what we're asking people to really do is think about what are the individual needs of each person and seek to find ways to meet their needs and and the lower the equity was we talk about our equity work that is really what we're illustrating here is it's not it's it's about giving people the support they need in order to access their education in order to be effective in order to succeed i know with my own four children it's not the same for all four
094of them what they need is a little bit different and if i took exactly the parenting approach with all four of them and did exactly the same thing it wouldn't meet each kid's needs i have to tailor a bit for what they need and that's what we're asking our staff to engage in that work together this spring we started training staff on this program speak up at school focused around how do we respond when people say insensitive bias racist or inappropriate things in the school settings when people treat each other poorly how do we react and it's teaching staff ways to do that that help change behavior in a positive way and we're going to be asking everyone to pull together there that is a case where we want to have everyone trained and they're
095asking everyone to commit to let's be consistent let's make sure that we address those matters when they come up sorry i keep pumping my mic today um and and do so across our entire district uh so we trained a lot of staff in the spring we'll be extending and and reinforcing that training this fall our new staff during their orientation are getting that training we're looking at how do we what we haven't gotten to yet as bus drivers we want to get to our bus drivers so that they've had that same training and then get to all the any staff who we've missed so uh so that we've all got the common foundation and continue to build on it we're asking staff to pull together around the idea of multi-tiered systems of support so if
096you're not familiar with that term essentially what it means is it goes back to that equity slide it's how do we give kids what they need we know most of our students and i'll point over here since here i'll look in my direction most of our students fall into this middle area of this diamond what we call tier one what we provide in the general classroom meets their needs there's a large group of students if that's right that's what they need we have some students who are really out in front of the rest who might need additional targeted enrichment and supports because they're so far ahead that the regular what we provide just isn't enough it doesn't engage them it doesn't challenge them and then we've got some students that are way out ahead where
097when by the time we get to high school some of them they're at they're taking college classes they're taking highly advanced classes we need to provide for them so we have to keep up with them and keep up with their learning we also on the other side have some students who need some additional support and intervention in order to stay on track with their peers and a smaller group that really needs more substantial intervention and support in order to make it our goal is make sure we're giving and so building intentional systems to meet the needs of kids in those different levels is something our schools have been working on and we are working on how do we now make sure that that system is more consistent across our schools and isn't uh that it's
098really systemic we're asking our staff staff to pull together around collecting and using data so how what uh information are we actually using to look at the performance of our students identify their needs and implement enter and use that to identify those interventions that are going to support kids in that previous slide through a multi-tiered system and support model um excuse me one second please when you say we're asking staff when does that occur most of the time the so when does which occur so when are you clear you're saying that you're asking them to do these things when is that happening usually that work occurs during app time our academic collaboration time is that is the time that we really have set aside for the most part for teachers to work together in collaborative
099groups to look at data review data together identify needs of students but sometimes people i mean when i was teaching some of that would happen during planning time some of that happened during but we provide professional development and support through tumwater u through on district collaboration days a variety of opportunities that we have throughout the year we can bring people together and give them that support and then we really ask them for the most part to engage in that that's the work they're engaging in during academic collaboration time what's that answer the question yeah so so this is this is the ongoing work that must be done together though i think one of the things that's happened often in our district in the past is that we've had everyone working hard on systems but those
100systems might be very different from one school to the next and it and that's um there's a strength to site based as i mean each school kind of figuring their own way there's also a strength to us identifying what are things we can do consistently across our entire district and support and ensure that our schools can learn from each other when there's consistency between staffs can collaborate school to school and we're seeing more of that all the time we've been seeing that last year it was really exciting to see between tumwater middle school and bush middle school the type of collaboration where schools were sharing ideas with each other and saying hey let's do this together and then refining it as a team and when we pull together i think we go farther rather than
101each group kind of ident trying to invent their own wheel and and build these systems on their own and we're going to be asking them to really work together in professional learning communities and so in this is this boy i could spend an hour here and i don't have an hour but let's talk further at another time about professional learning communities and what they do uh and how they actually help teachers engage in a process of constant reflection on student data identifying needs trying things coming back together talking about what they learned and engaging in this kind of inquiry process that where you have mutual accountability and grow as a team uh that's the very general concept of a plc that we're gonna that we're gonna be really working with staff on continuing to to
102to get more effective in so that when they're in that academic collaboration time we're gaining the most from that time so let's talk about the one that is going to be less fun here uh our department of health fall requirements well uh what i can tell you is um so what what department of health is there the document is called requirement so i've just named it with the with the requirements so uh it is they are requiring face coverings or masks indoors uh physical distancing in our classrooms uh they're saying three feet as much as possible in classrooms and in the lunchrooms six feet as much as possible because once you remove masks part of the challenge is if you have an exposure so if i have covid and um i find out i've got
103covered now and if you were sitting within six feet of me in the lunchroom through contact tracing they would then say you have to be quarantined for ten days so uh when masks are on this year for students and this is good news they're saying contact tracing will be students within three feet if we're if masked so uh that does allow if there's a student who has coveted uh that we're that we have fewer kids we'd have to quarantine hand washing continuing to teach kids good hand washing and respiratory etiquette some of the things we did last year t really emphasizing staying home when sick because if that's one of the best measures we can take to help produce this testing we continue to have a drive through testing site available for our students as
104needed there's some rapid tests that are available that we may be able to offer students who who need a test that might be a quicker option for students this year we continue to use enhanced ventilation cleaning and disinfecting contact tracing is going to be a daily activity we've talked about that we have to continue to report and work with public health and then what what we know is vaccination right now is the most uh effective intervention that we have and so continuing to communicate opportunities for people for uh to to be vaccinated those are the big general uh that is that is a very quick summary of doh's guidance and requirements i guess some of them are guiding some of them or what they'd say are requirements so um athletics to be clear that they
105just came out with that guidance the other day so during practice they're recommending cohorting and during practice and travel anytime we can in order to reduce the groups the kids are mingling in and close together to simplify contact tracing if there's a case same when students aren't playing it's a recommendation a six foot of distancing to the degree possible and i'd be on the bench sidelines and locker rooms for basketball and wrestling uh unvaccinated athletes will are required to engage in screening testing two times per week to participate outdoor sports masks aren't required that's good news that was something that we had last year uh indoor pe and weight rooms do require masks low contact and moderate contact indoor sports while students are competing it's not required so that is that is helpful during competition
106in your high contact indoor sports they're saying unvaccinated athletes have to either wear a mask or engage in that screening testing twice a week in order to be able to go maskless during games but it does give a pathway for students to unvaccinated students to participate without masking spectators coaches and trainers at outdoor events don't have to be masked indoor events they do have to be messed that's the so clarification on so basketball and wrestling are both high contact indoor sports yes so there's one bullet that says screening testing for unvaccinated twice a week is required but then it says mask or screening testing required so this is where i'm telling you from my first read on that you have the high contact indoor sports which is a wider lighter net there's more high contact
107indoor sports than basketball and wrestling i think there's cheer there's a few others water polo that's that yeah those fall under that but then basketball and wrestling they said a more strange requirement sean were these because they came out with an updated one today actually too yeah and so i don't know if this includes that and i think wrestling was a little bit arrested the indoor ones high risk indoors they change slightly but i don't know if this is i haven't had a chance to review today's yes slightly darby just saying i'm working guarantee it will change again before wrestling wrestling even starts maybe even three times fair thank you casey what this is the the august 10th guidance yeah today's i haven't had the thing out today and i don't expect it to be
108yeah so i do have another question on both athletics and then also for school and i i looked at the thing i don't remember if it was in there though so if it's not that level of detail but um in terms of quarantine and vaccination status what did it say anything about that is vaccinated you don't have to quarantine yeah so if you're vaccinated and you're exposed you do not have to quarantine unless you're symptomatic the new cdc guidance and the new guidance that i have is that you do have to if you have a confirmed exposure you do have to test three to five days afterwards but you can continue to attend school you don't have to quarantine unless symptomatic uh if you're if you're unvaccinated you do have to go into a quarantine
109so what's the status of the sports seasons right now because we're getting closer and my son's in football they're good yeah we're starting like normal so so there's there's what you'll see is that we have to work under a set of protocols but we get to have our sports seasons instead of like last year where it's pushed back we start sports as normal this year yes i'm not afraid to say that football is important to me you're in the right district i just gotta say you know my seniors last year had a very abbreviated season so do not want to see that again yes i'm happy to say we're we're starting so we'll speak let's go we're going gonna keep going with the meeting we can talk after the meeting okay do you understand that
110though very well yes sure so for performing arts um that the the requirements and and i'm i mean you can shoot the messenger but i mean i'm sharing with you this is the these are department of health w-i-a-a we won't be able to compete if we don't meet these it's just where we are so indoors while performing they are requiring masking and they've got what i've seen is this kind of merv 13 or three layer mask we're going to be investigating that we have to have distancing of three feet or more if possible during it and then they have some seating on indoor seating both for sports and performance and i didn't speak to that that just is trying to see audiences in the audience and family units with three feet between groups and then
111all all people who are all spectators are mask required at performances in athletic events indoors question that's come what are the consequences if we don't follow doh requirements i've been gathering information on this from multiple sources to say what is it so uh i'll tell you where each of these come from ospi sent the letter and it's been referenced that basically said we would immediately lose state and federal funding uh that 86 million of our 105 million dollar budget apportionment would stop which means we can't pay our employees which means we can't open our schools our attorney has warned us that violating the proclamation and the executive order is a gross misdemeanor our insurance company met with me today they said you need to understand that because violating that and vote and deciding not to
112following it follow it is a gross misdemeanor um our insurance policies have an exclusion for criminal acts they don't cover criminal acts so your liability coverage if you're sued by someone which can name both the district and individuals would be voided potentially in these cases and i say potentially because you can't say that until you get into court and fight it out but ultimately the insurance company would say if you're violating the law that excludes you from insurance coverage county health officials ask me a question please what law would be violating if we did this what what i it so it comes down to and i can give you the language from just the law it's well let's go to it it is i'll i can read it too if you'd like no i just
113need the rcw yeah i'd like to i'd like you to read it so this is from our attorney the basis of school board authority is statutory in nature school board jurisdiction is limited by state laws and generally subject to other government enactments crcw 28a 320 0151 a and here's what that says the broad discretionary power to determine and adopt written policies not in conflict with other law that provide for the development and implementation of programs activities services or practices that the board determines will promote the education and daily physical activity of kindergarten through 12th grade students in the public schools or promote the effective efficient or safe management and operation of the school district the governor's proclamation 2105.1 states i also hereby prohibit all public school districts in the state of washington from offering or
114continuing to offer a remote online instruction option without also offering an on-campus in-person instruction option option that is and this is this is italicized that is consistent with department of health guidance found here and the department of labor and industries requirements for employee safety as dictated by the school employer health and safety requirements found here and as further provided below according according to our attorney violation of this proclamation is a gross dis misdemeanor what l i laws would we be violating and what illinois laws have been put in place there the attorney hasn't referenced that but we could certainly try to get that information for you i mean it's essentially what it what it references is the department of health guidance labor and industry where we're back to guidance for requirements well the document is
115called what you saw on my screen back here i said requirements because while these words get interchanged the title of the document is requirements so sean i'm not going to i won't parse words here those are actually requirements that doa doesn't want to follow up legally they're not guidelines in any aspect at all whatsoever that's yeah that's yeah they say i just want to make sure that's clear in that it says we're being threatened legally yes essentially we are that is that i'm just i'm wanting to be clear with you that what what i'm getting is our attorney's saying you're violating the laws you do it our insurance companies so sean i have a question there are several states with republican governors that are enacting law and school districts are defying those as well i'm
116not asking you to answer for those but can you speculate as to how those school districts are proceeding forward because they're breaking law and defying don't no no i mean not not notice that but don't don't make shauna i'm not but you're asking him to speculate and i don't think it's fair to do what about what's going on in republican states and we need to so i'll get more directions yeah no no stop i'll get more direct yeah so make your statement casey don't ask him to speculate i want to speak directly with our attorney and our risk management company to present to this board as to how they're going to proceed and back this up that's what i want i don't want to hear words right now number one and number two don't mean
117anything to me number three and number four those are jokes though the county health officer is not going to shut down our district at all period i don't know how we're not going to be protected by insurance because we pay our premium if they're avoiding us that's fine we can find another insurance company that's not a problem but i do want to hear it directly from our attorney in our risk management insurance company and i don't know what that means but i would like a presentation it's i mean it's important i apologize for bringing this here but that's what i think it's like this doesn't sit well with me and i want to see them answer directly and if not we can go shop for another lawyer or another risk management company if they all
118say the same thing and if they all say the same thing then we'll be right back here to square zero but that's okay at least we explore the options i don't want to just take an attorney or one view of this i would want to explore options on it i would like them to come forward to this board in some manner i don't know how that looks like so i'm going to give you latitude as to what that may look like okay when would you like that to occur i am looking to melissa and the rest of her this is just me talking so [Music] um so we're getting my point is we're getting ultimatums here that we're being forced into by people we can't talk to or see or look at or ask questions
119i i'm i'm sharing with you the information no no no i i i i yeah i think you i i don't want he's not attacking you he's not he's he's he's trying no yeah he's i don't i don't see that we'll help you do that yeah yeah absolutely yeah so the question is does this need to happen before our next board meeting timing i'm asking the board because it means their availability i gotta check my account yeah yeah we need to check so uh next week no i think two weeks is fine i was looking for a little bit beyond two weeks in case the lawyers insurance companies are not responsible so so so that's so that's my question do we do we schedule it for our next board meeting uh you know hoping that
120they're available it has to be at the board meeting i am um if i talk to them i have no problem representing that view to these people and then accepting accountability for that they don't do they don't have to come here and get you know they feel intimidated they can talk to the board i just think well i'm open to what that looks like i think that i think if it's more than two people then then it has to be a board meeting in in public yeah it was more than two of you yeah so that that's what uh that's what i'm trying to gather and the time that we're all we're all scheduled to be together again is in two weeks i think that's fair why can't we have a presentation then i i
121can see if they can because i heard that we wanted it sooner so if not i think yeah and then it's based on their availability right exactly and if it's not if they're not available two weeks from now then we find another date right another board meeting absolutely yes yeah yes okay yes and so yeah and as far as the number one on there i can't i i can't speak to that other than providing well the only thing number one accomplishes is hurting our kids so if somebody wants to hurt you no no sean i don't i don't think anyone is asking you to answer no we're not and i'm not at all elsewhere no advocate let's get through this and let's get these people this is here yeah to answer this right yeah just
122saying i can't bring i can't bring superintendent right doll necessarily to our next board meeting and i mean unless he's available to be here but to speak to the laws of state and federal funding so yeah i know he used to sit in this exact seat right here so okay all right i just want to reiterate casey's point that if we go to another insurance company and if i understand you correctly and they come back with the same conclusion [Music] these stay on we tried for the kids i think we're on the same page scott okay thank you we'll get to that argument when we get there if we do i'd love to get to that point [Music] so uh wanted to shift gears a bit and this is uh in in response to what
123you're asking earlier casey about how do we help the public have some opportunity to give feedback on policies so what we've had lori look a little bit out at some other districts and what she found is some districts that had really uh a way that people could submit feedback on a policy that's up for review and consideration on their website that they would communicate here's policies that are up for review and here's the opportunity for you to do that so this is just a screenshot from what we've put on our website it's active as of today hasn't been communicated yet but active and the at the bottom here you see there's a button basically it takes you a feedback form so you can see the policies we have up for review right now school safety
124security and services the ones that sean presented to you tonight prohibition harassment intimidation bullying student discipline now anyone can go into that feedback form provide on any policy up for review here's they can review it then get in there and give us feedback on anything that they want to share or have concerns about or thoughts about related to that policy this is a process that's used i think olympia uses this we see tacoma uses a similar system uh and so we've built from that to provide an opportunity for that feedback uh it's the most efficient opportunity we have but it's a matter of then just communicating out here's the policies we have under review and and having an opportunity to collect that feedback and bring that into our discussion so we've had a first reading
125if we were to get feedback on those policies we can take that into consideration and uh and share back any substantial feedback we have and how that might impact outcome on the policy so this um oh does anyone have questions other than me uh is this so this is going to be on the on the website it is and then um like we were talking about with the with the budget stuff uh like sending out an email will the there will this be part of some sort of email communication so it can be here's the thing that i will i'll channel lori a little bit for you no one reads anything well lori would say we can send out an email on everything you'd like to send out the more emails we send out the
126fewer emails people will read because so which is why she tries to do that weekly friday message that says a lot of things in it because what we get is feedback when we send a lot that they go stop inundating with me with emails so if we email too little people say we don't communicate enough if we email too much people say my email's filling up and i'm sick of the all the emails so uh for for us it's that balance that we're trying to strike so as far as uh um there's another item here outreach to parents about the budget hearing we could also perhaps package uh communication around we have a tool for giving public feedback so i'm going to work with lori on how do we balance those two things and make
127sure that we're giving people opportunities for feedback communicating these things we want and also attending to what she knows about frequency of email and how our community reacts to that because she's the one who receives those those concerns i don't see my suggestions i had brought up an email to the board about opening up the public comment period from just four to six before meetings to like eight to four so the community has a longer time to actually add public comment so they don't feel that they're being discouraged by a very limited two-hour window um i don't see that there at all yeah this isn't this isn't part of that this is it's time to set aside for public comment so if we're talking about public comment i think it's appropriate to add so um
128this is something different and we can have that we can have that discussion now if you like um about opening up the public comment um sign up time well it's just a simple ad on the website it gives the community more time to say that they'd like to come to a meeting and it gives them more time to say that they'd like to make a public comment and it's not limited to four to six on the day of the meeting where people might be busy or forget they have a whole day actually to submit their name and their comment no yeah i'm just saying it's not part of this we can i actually want to open till six because someone may not even know that it's open at eight they show up here like like
129i went out everyone's standing there it's like hey sign up right because four o'clock would mean people who came here at 5 30 wouldn't have gotten to sign up that would be my only amendment to your suggestion i just think it's important to do that and it was not discussed after i sent out my email so i'd like to kind of put it out there now well in in public meeting to be the place to discuss that yeah so so is that possible becky for you to make that change for a public comment thank you so public open all day yes yeah and then you'll you'll check it at five to see who's yeah thank you lori we do have to be careful with emails if we all start discussing an email on it on
130a topic like that it becomes public notice so it's like i think that's why we tend to not respond but then hold response when we have witnessing an open public meeting all right so we just checked two things off the list here thank you um and i'm wondering if some sort of communication what i'm hearing is that we don't want it globbed into the email where people are learning about their students because i think there's some perhaps board communications and it's something that i've been interested in since i got on the board is how do people know how to engage with the board and maybe they you know that might get lost in just a general email about what's going on in schools and so maybe there is something you know where it's just specific
131to board you know board activities um you know with the appropriate subject line so because people will be really excited it's like oh board activities and they will be sure to read that particular email right um so maybe that's maybe that's the answer um so then people can decide to delete it or to read it right from the subject line um and but then it would all be in one place yeah so i'm not trying to do lori's job but i it's been something i've been interested in and just people knowing when the meetings are even you know so and she's done a lot put on facebook and you know she's done a lot to advertise what what we're doing here so yeah okay i'll work with her thank you [Music] is there anything else
132you have that is i believe the last slide i have yes that's it all right now we're to board discussion legislative update um i just want to say i need to look on my phone for some some stuff that i need for the equity update so i'm looking at my phone for my part so i'm not ignoring you okay [Music] all right so it's august but we're back to this um because the big thing coming up is the general assembly so it is about to be that time of positions and spreadsheets so there's three things as part of this i'm going to speak to the general assembly kind of process and talk you all through that remind you of that fund from last year and lori you weren't here last year so just giving you
133a heads up as to the process and what that's all about and how that works and then there were um there were two bills from the last session that i actually have asked if sean would speak to one of them and melissa would speak to one of them so we'll we'll go over a little bit about that because as part of the overall just kind of tracking process also just kind of checking in on implementation of different things that have come up in the last session so the general assembly this is actually going to be as of right now it's going to be held in spokane so in person september 24th and 25th and essentially what this is about each school district comes together and has the opportunity to vote on two primary things called
134positions one of them is classified as a permanent position and then the other is classified as the legislative position so the permanent positions are things that are more like general guiding principles and this is all run through wasp so the state school directors association so all school boards agree that this falls within our purview of part of how we operate these sorts of things you know as they're noted as permanent they tend to be long lasting there's less of them that come up as new things to be added at the general assembly as compared to the legislative positions and those are the second part and that's a much more extensive list and tends to flex a little bit more depending on what's been going on in the world so last year there were a lot
135of things that came up with respect to covid you know as an example so uh how this works is waza will put together a handbook and they will list out all of the new proposed positions that are coming up both the permanent and the legislative and they have that in a lot in an electronic format so what we'll do is and that's supposed to be available on august 23rd so i'll take the you know i'll convert that into an excel spreadsheet in google docs and then i'll just basically use the same and i i meant to bring it with me to kind of show you what it looks like but i forgot it i'm so used to not having paper anymore so i'll put that together and i'll have some instructions about what that looks
136like but essentially the deal is that so i you know i'm the delegate to go and actually do the voting um but this is a board decision you know each of these permanent positions in legislative positions so what i'll do as far as some instruction goes is i'll put the information in the spreadsheet i'll put a place for each of us to give that feedback in the spreadsheet i'll also provide some general ideas around what we would be looking for and this aligns with what we have established as our priorities so we have a couple of different ways that we can look at this um i'll have more to say on this and board comments but we have our legislative priorities from last year so you know again equity at the at the forefront you
137know looking for stable funding you know things like that so we have legislative priorities we do have our budget priorities that we've talked about several different times um you know any other you know strategic plan priorities or you know but that's what we need to kind of come together and make sure that we're talking about so we have something to use in order to say okay this is this is a framework for being able to go through and say you know yay or nay um so again there'll be um the majority of the of the positions will be adjustments to language or new things coming up and then that's ultimately what all of the delegates vote for when we get there so i will uh want the whole board to weigh in if possible go
138through and do the scoring if you will or kind of input and then at a later date at a later board meeting probably the first september meeting if we could we'll kind of collate all that together and just see if there's any further questions and i'll take that information and use that for the voting to go forward and then after all of that is finished what wazda does is they take everything that has been adopted and for the legislative priorities they allow us to go through not just the new ones but then all of them to say here's what we think are our top 15 priorities and then wasda uses that we certainly use that as well again for our legislative priorities coming up my experience watching through the session with this is they they
139really do use it as in fact if something pops up during the session that they don't have a position on they won't speak to it because it's only with the overall majority input of all of the lost members will they actually go and testify on behalf so i thought that was interesting but as i mentioned like even in my summary of the session from last spring [Music] it really just reiterates we can always testify you know as a school board you know we can we can you know i can go any one of us can go and speak to something on behalf of the board sean can go and testify on behalf of the district i would love to see parents community and students you know going and voicing their concerns because a lot of
140the things that have come up throughout new legislation or just you know passionate feelings about things really need to be directed at the state legislature and it is a short session um this upcoming year so i don't know how much policy will be going on but i am more than happy to shepherd anybody through that process that is interested in particular students legislators love students they listen to students they don't listen to staff they don't listen to support members they will listen to students happy to do that when i was working in the ohio senate and capitol hill for a congressman um we literally had legislative days where this this actual thing would happen and they would come so i don't know if we could do something like that or have a legitimacy ledge day
141or do we have there's a legislation we don't have like a group where we go that's it's usually part of because wasda will set up those appointments for us okay and then we can get on there and and all go together for board members yeah yeah because that's i don't know if people know about those things though you know they're we know about them if you're in government or you've done it but i don't know how much um students know or community members know so that's a good place to say your piece all right any questions on general assembly so it's more of a warning we have some work to do got it okay yeah it'll be interesting to see what comes up darby has a beautiful spreadsheet that she provides for us with all
142the information that we can go through and prioritize and she tallies everything for us it's a beautiful thing thank you and actually when i asked um marissa rathbone when the handbook would be available i said i have a process i use and she said oh would you like to tell us about it at our next ledge you know ledge lunch and learn yeah great okay um so the bill that i was going to give to sean is essb 5044 and this is about concerning professional learning equity cultural competency dismantling institutional racism in the public school system so this is the one that is looking at school board director school and district staff a couple of language changes from pesby professional educators standards board focusing on the cultural competency standards has some definitions in here for
143diversity equity and inclusion and so the one area because i was looking at you know timing so the one area that looks like it's coming up this year is the professional learning days to talk about one or more of the following cultural competency diversity equity or inclusion so yeah so we're going to start that work at tomwater u in the afternoon of our first day we have jamaat conley who works from a firm called potential unleashed which really does this work with a number of school districts and other organizations and and what i appreciate in our work with jamaad our focus is going to be on that building cultural competence of our staff but what he what he i like about jamaat is he has said this work cannot be about blame shame or guilt
144it has to be about building awareness and of how did we kind of get to this place where we have differential performance of different groups of students and then what do we do to untangle it and move forward and so we're working with him on doing in the past we've sometimes had where we train trainers and every building goes out and does a training on their own or maybe we give them a menu of things and different buildings might choose different things what we're seeking to do this time is really have a coherent everyone is doing this together so we're building a common foundation of knowledge in this area of cultural competency so we have common language we have a common understanding and so that first about two and a half hour session will happen
145on at tumwater u and then it'll be during the year during district act times that we would extend that and build on people's learning and so we're in the process of finalizing the agenda for that but we're on track to start providing that training at tomwater u meet that objective and also really start engaging our staff in that question that i came back to before who's benefiting from our work and who's not and what can we do about it so if we've got some stu if we've got student groups that aren't benefiting from our teaching as well as others that has to be the focus of our of our efforts and there's not an easy fix for that if there was we just plug in a formula and do it it really take its complicated
146work of people working together to solve those problems excellent thank you [Music] and then 1356 conversations with um our tribes yeah logos mascots uh so i spoke with bill calapa last week um about a number of things and one of them was about the uh thunderbird mascot and uh i believe not that i want us to break the law um but uh i believe that the spirit of the law says that we should build a relationship with the tribes and that's what i've told bill is i don't want to rush the tribe in the conversation about the thunderbird as our mascot but i really want to build a relationship and willie frank iii just took over as chairman and i don't know i don't think anyone was on the board but i'm sure scott and
147casey were in the audience when he came to speak to us um in may of 2018 19 19 19. um so so he knows our district he knows that we're committed to working with the tribe um and so i'm just waiting for him to get settled like i think it was just weeks ago that he got elected to be chairman um so i'm just um so i feel like we have a relationship with him and i want to explore what that means um the other thing that i heard from bill is that they are interested in working with us on how to make sure our students understand what the thunderbird means to native americans and the myth and and not have it um have it be based on where it came from um and that's
148that's what they're interested in doing with us which i'm really excited about it's really cool uh so i don't want to promise anything i don't want to paint them into a corner but i but that is what we talked about is what does that support from the tribe look like for us to communicate what it means to have a thunderbird as our mascot um i don't know so i'm on the high school tomorrow high school my association uh i love those guys the guys and gals that graduated back in the 60s so all of them were there to vote for the mascot um and so i asked them how did you guys choose that and if they just liked it better than whatever else they i know that the other one was what was the
149other one you gotta go read the book i read the book i forgot i didn't retain it i'm just trojans oh well for goodness sake of course they chose a thunderbird i didn't retain are you shaming me casey um so yes and um they chose the colors you know so um i think because they had a respect for you know for what that meant to the area as well and so i love that that we know the story of why they chose that and so i was able to communicate that to bill as well and jamishihara is always is always eager to help to help with communication but what happened when during during those times and and how it was not meant to be any anything other than respect so um that also was helpful
150um but i'm i'm encouraged i'm encouraged in terms of just having a relationship with the tribes to help them teach our students about um about the nisqually tribe the other thing i've been doing is talking with squawks and island because scottson island is also very interested in making sure that we know the history of squawks and island and i will say again i never even heard of squawks and island while i was going to school here and that's embarrassing to me as a tomwater graduate so i want to make sure that other graduates don't graduate from tumwater without knowing squawkson island and their history and so i've been talking with them about making sure that they are part of these conversations in terms of our students learning the history of squawks and island tribe so
151that's where we are on that okay thank you yeah can i clarify they're real quick oh no i was just saying that's really interesting to know because i i um one of the first things i learned when i actually came in to talk to you before i was appointed to the board i looked at the book and i couldn't believe how informational that book was it was such an interesting thing to to look at when you're you know learning about a district all districts should have that book it's incredible everyone just an amazing history piece for our district yeah incredible yeah no very exciting stuff melissa uh just so people know we were assigned as a district to a tribe by the states yes so we were assigned to the nisqually tribe that's why we're
152reaching out to them we had relations going with all the tribes in very infancy stages yeah but we were directed to them and swatson island's taking an interest in us as well too so we're going to extend that as well we started these tribal relations long before i even came around and melissa started these probably i'm going to guess some of this started up previously so it's unfortunate the state has forced a timeline for districts to reach out to tribes at this time it's it's really terrible because all you're doing is rushing you're trying to get signed off on a mascot which is just asinine not then so spirit the way to establish a relationship with native american tribes is not might edict from a tyrant [Music] um so and bill clapper was bill clapp
153was part of that bill and so he understands what the spirit is and he understands that's where we're coming from so you got to tell me though does everybody know who he is exactly so bill clapp is a parent in town water school district he's also the education director for the nisqually tribe he also belong and i'm oh gosh this is horrible i don't remember exactly which tribe he belongs to but he's also married to a tomato graduate because everyone is connected to tum water in some way he did not grow up here but he married a tomato high school graduate and now has a black hills high school student but he is also appointed to the state board of education so he has a lot of influence and so the fact that um yeah
154thanks casey the fact that he knows that we're committed to this work is um is very cute yeah yeah exactly anything else all right uh what i furiously had to go find was the email about what i should be doing during this update so um part of it is because originally during the equity update i was going to talk about um the equity advisory committee meeting that happened a couple weeks ago in which our diversity equity and inclusion director addressed the committee and and since then has resigned and so the work of the equity advisory committee is going to be led by someone else the work is going to continue because what i was encouraged to read is in every email that had concerns about that particular director they identified the need to focus on
155equity but just not with that particular director and so that was very exciting to me and so we're going to figure out what that means for the district but what i was reminded of was that at our retreat we talked about having a statement uh about what our what our belief and focus you know why we are focusing on educational equity um and so i encourage all of us to think about what should be included in that statement from the board and why we are focusing on educational equity and what it is that we believe in sean batstone has given us a lot of words to think about as it relates to educational equity and so um and i want to check with the board is it fair to have staff put together a draft
156that then we would react to at a future board meeting kind of like a policy where they give it to us for first reading and then we'd give input you know casey's thinking you want staff to sprung produce a statement on educational equity what the board the the boards focus you know what's our workshop session topic next in two weeks well we we don't have a workshop in two weeks because we've purchased that as a board meeting i mean the budget that's the budget adoption public hearing in two weeks i was hoping what i was hoping is that we could go back to those note we could go back to those notes we had from our retreat and then and then those are good notes i think i would hate to put the staff in
157a position to represent the boys i think if we could try to work take those points and maybe not but i guess i wanted them just to type it up and give it to us right and that we would do the work together right so i'm okay with that we do that offline and then if we're way off we come together and if we're close we can finish it up through email is that where your thoughts your email uh no not through email in a public meeting oh yeah no no that's fine yeah yeah that's fine so what what words are staff typing up are they from from our notes from our notes from our retreat now oh okay yeah gotcha right sean we had some stuff that we talked about right yeah we had
158some stuff we talked about in the retreat the question is whether i captured your thinking in notes that you could use for the sake of building that to build it yeah we can look back and we could have we um i know you and i when we meet we can discuss and look at what we have and and prep something to bring back to the board first yeah this is what i don't want to do is like start right now and start thinking about what it is i want us to react to a piece of paper that's always easier and more efficient that's that's what i'm asking if the board is okay yeah we've already done this one so yes yes is that is that fair enough okay thank you that's what i'm asking permission
159to do um and not not you know sending out over email having people have thoughts about it but we would actually discuss it in a public meeting yes okay so i think that was it that i wanted to get direction on all right so now it's time for board commons are we still having an equity advisory committee meeting on the 18th there is one on the 18th yes okay six to seven okay and so we'll be sending out agenda on that i would have loved to have done that today that was not possible today with all the new guidance and information i was trying to encapsulate what i could for you tonight uh but we'll send that out tomorrow quick question sean melissa it's possible then for multiple board members to attend that committee and
160we're not in any type of quorum danger quorum issue uh darby darby and scott are assigned to that committee and that would be that would be uh and that would be a violation of open public meetings that's right yeah yes i love how specific you are thank you unless we announce it or speak unless we announce it as a board meeting yeah i think can we announce that as a board meeting and people can attend no no keep it to that i'm fine with that i was just curious as to what we could or could not do and i'm fine with that you guys can represent that and we can look at it again in september if we want to do it or are we monthly is that the plan sean at this stage so
161this was our last planned meeting right for the year and then what what our intent was to do was to i've been talking with the planning team we've i've had becky building basically if we just were to continue on with this pattern of meetings what it would look like um but it is time as we get through the end of that first year for us to start saying does this structure still suit the work we're doing and we might need to revisit that that's fine i'm sorry i'm ignorant i'm i'm still you know feeling my way through the board and all the rules and regulations so so basically there's no way that i can be on the d the equity committee there's no way i can i know i can't be on the committee but
162there's no way i can actually participate or listen at least or [Music] on the 18th i'm understanding it is no but we can open that up to each time they meet if like darby said we can call it a public meeting or we were being or however or darby and scott can darby or scott one of us steps down in the position yeah and then we re we um look in december at the committee assignments and i bet there'll be an opportunity for you to serve on that committee well it's important to me um i'm not asking anybody to step down at all i mean that's yeah i know it's important to all of us on the board so i'll go ahead and throw that out there um so given all of the stuff with
163the general assembly and the ledge wrap position is very very time consuming so i was actually thinking of finishing up this summer you know i'll go to the meeting next week and then like i'm gonna be i'm gonna be swamped um with everything and once school starts and all of that so if we could preemptively yeah of course switch you know committee assignments if that's something that you're interested in and everyone's so good with that i might be okay considering i know my way around a state legislature so she she not not just might be she will be yeah that means so i'm in the stay as the rep but i'm going to i'm going to step back from the equity oh yes yes i would be interested in that yeah okay for sure definitely
164yeah oh oh okay so you're good are we talking about the same thing yeah that's what i just realized you might not clarify okay you're on the equity advisory committee starting september okay all right i'm glad thank you nice and i'll be on the same page here uh definitely because that took a left turn according to me like not ledger okay um all right so we'll get lori added to that list of of uh uh mailings um all right now we're uh board member comments so i'd like to go first if i could two minutes two minutes oh goodness okay i will talk really fast two minutes i could get off the ipad yeah uh two minutes we all could take lessons from tara so that's all i've got to say she talked really fast
165all right ready set go okay number one we have got to do a better job with documenting our work sessions the number of times that we have made we've had rich discussions discussions we go through exercises we make decisions we write things down and then because they're we don't it's not a business meeting so we don't have any minutes that keeps getting lost so again when i was looking at this for the legislative stuff i'm like i know we've talked about budget priorities several times but i don't know where they are i don't know where they're written down i could go back and review the video but we just we have to we absolutely have to do that and now we're looking at you know the same thing for equity um in terms of what
166is it that we're thinking about looking at with our um our board focus on equity so that was the other thing that i just wanted to to say is last year i we started from scratch and so we've made a lot of gains but we're still battling in a lot of different ways one of them is around data so sean you mentioned this in your presentation i'm going to keep saying this over and over again i know i got obnoxious last year with it but looking at data and looking at the gaps between student groups is an equity strategy it's the case making that has to happen it makes it obvious why we need diversity equity and inclusion strategies we have data on the website now it's in a rough format we talked about it
167at a board meeting but it is out there and you know one example is one of things that we said we wanted to look at as leading indicator grade 9 students on track if we said the goal was 100 we want everyone every single kid should be hitting that mark we have gaps of some students at 91 and some students at 63 percent and that's across all of the demographic areas that we look at it goes across gender it goes across race it goes across socioeconomic status low-income students 55 not low-income students 90 so when we talk about resources and we talk about equity what we mean is policy and opportunity that's an opportunity gap there and that is absolutely critical if we are going to make any gains in closing this thank you that
168was all the money who's next i'll go next okay um one thing again being new but i would like to see some more reports from our district team leaders um i hear from sean all the time i get to hear from you a little bit sean bathstone but i don't hear from mel murray i don't get to hear from our special ed person i would like to hear more about what's going on in our district from the people who are actually running that part of our district i'm not getting enough information um and therefore if i'm not getting it then our community is not getting it um i just want to say thank you to jennifer did she leave our new oh there she is hiding in the corner over there um just want to
169say thank you for stepping into the role that was recently vacated by jim britton um i appreciate your very informational proposal tonight so thank you job well done appreciate your work look forward to hearing more from you um next i would like to quickly thank our board members for all their hard work because it's not easy to do what we're doing and i appreciate all their thought all of their processes and all of their hard work behind the scenes so thank you all for that and certainly last but not least i would like to thank the community for being here tonight it's wonderful to see so many parents and community members involved please know that we see you hear you and definitely want your input it's very important to me as a board member i
170wouldn't have signed up to do this if i wasn't interested in community input that's why i'm here i'm here to help and to make sure our kids have the best education possible so thank you all for being here in person and on zoom if anybody's still listening because we don't know and then also finally just i would like to add if you have any questions about what went on tonight at the board meeting you want to talk about anything please feel free to reach out to me uh my web my email address is on the website i can't remember what i'll have my head against lori dot sale at tomwater.you know you know the drill um so please feel free to reach out to me if you want to just go talk or have a
171discussion about anything i'm more than willing to have that okay thank you look at you two minutes wow good job yes like it's like you've been doing this for a long time who's next so casey you need 20 minutes i'm gonna take your two i'm four i don't know if scott wants to yield his time i know it's a long time okay so my head has been swirling all week um i've had some pretty serious anxiety about tonight and i i want to thank you all for being civil i want to thank you our community for being civil i hope i truly hope down deep inside that we can remain civil going forward because we've got some pretty heavy heavy topics and issues to face and only through civility are we going to be able
172to face them and face them through educating ourselves there are things i literally have heard for the first time in march of this year heard for the first time and i've been education for 30 years i heard it for the first time in march i'm not going to say what it is because i don't want to open up that can of worms but i had to educate myself on it i had to take some time and be humble and say i don't know what this is but i spent afternoons researching and we just need to have that mindset that we need to educate ourselves and then come to meetings with the data the evidence the research and be and be citing our research not just simply come with opinions i'm a former science teacher that's
173kind of my my jam got to have evidence but you got to cite your work but i just really want to thank everyone uh i had a talk with my wife because again i just been spiraling every day counting the hours towards tonight and she said just remember the couple you talked to last last time just keep that couple in mind mr mr fanage it helps that we are their former students i'm sure there's a relationship there but she said just keep that conversation in mind it will help ground you and it will help you focus on the positive and not the potential negative and so um i'm gonna try and stay there thank you okay we have a new winner casey's not gonna i'll take that time in bank yeah it's 16 seconds i'll
174take it make my point here first of all thank you everyone for staying i really appreciate it often we don't get to this point people stay so really thank you for staying in giving your voice and being heard as god said thank you for being civil we're not one of those districts that's on the internet that's crazy thank goodness not yet um ford engagement if you want to contact this board contact these people email them directly this is scott kellough he's been in education forever and he's insanely smart darby she knows policy and procedures through the bank melissa is a finance expert in budget she does it laurie sales worked in government and lobbying if you have to email me i am so sorry there are four great people you can be emailing about board
175input i want to say i'm a little embarrassed and shame on july 8th this i personally voted to approve a position that was a complete air and i want to apologize for that for the director the director of diversity equity and uh inclusion we failed on that and i do apologize to everyone for that i am proud of the response of the community on my failure to do that and fortunately we were able to make that right and now we repair the damage going forward um as i mentioned previously this seat right here district tube was occupied by chris reichdall um i'm proud of that in a way but also highly concerned that someone can occupy a just this type of position and then go on and make the type of decisions that are being
176made ospi and the government the governor specifically have cited local control local control to them is it's a farce it's a lie that is not true it can be controlled manipulated threatened with lawsuits emergency orders and everything local control is a bit of a lie so i am going to represent local control i'm here to represent you you voted me in and i represent your local control melissa may want to start a timer but i am going to do this right now because local control is this now yes [Applause] and he was under two minutes ladies and gentlemen so proud of you i'll take my two minutes it was a minute 59 nice jump [Music] i'm not sure [Music] how to fall um i think what i apprec i also appreciate that you stay most
177people will get up and leave right after public comment um and uh and i say only because you have lives to lead also and you have families to take care of and we don't ever take offense to that but i do want to acknowledge that thank you i should start the time for myself uh so i just acknowledge that you are taking time out yeah of your lives to sit here with us so yes thank you i'm a big believer in civic participation um and so i love when people are here listening to what's going on um these people that are sitting up here i appreciate all of them dearly because they all represent a part of our community that is important to be represented and if we all thought the same then we would
178not be where we are um in terms of having a diversity of thought and so i appreciate that because that's also civic participation is that everyone gets a voice and i believe that that there's a lot of the community represented by the people that are sitting here so thank you for not being afraid to say it or display it as the case may be um and uh i i trust i trust each one of you to be thoughtful and kind and um [Music] and i'm bold in in what what it is that we're doing here it is it is bold casey casey is being bold right now and i appreciate that and that's where we have that's where we have to be if we want to make a difference for kids so um i can
179i can appreciate that casey taylor so um i am leaving on uh august 20th to drive my daughter down to school so i will not be here in person um for the meeting uh at the end of the month but i'll zoom in casey will be leading that meeting [Music] we'll work with becky on the script for that public hearing part [Laughter] [Music] what are you trying to say um [Laughter] so um and this is all in this is all in preparation for when casey become you know becomes president in december so we bel we this has not always been the case in tomorrow where we rotate the leadership of board president but it's important to do because all of us have the have the capabilities and the strengths to be the board president and
180that's what the fair thing to do is so um this is a practice run for casey [Laughter] he can't take it back um so look forward to supporting you in that role casey so is there anything else all right meeting adjourned 8 25. look at that [Music] you