TSD School Board Meeting 06-17-2021

001[Music] do [Music] of the nespolis boston island and shahira's people we thank the caretakers of the land who have lived on and continue to live on the land since time immemorial please rise as coach mcgrath leads us in the flight suit i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you bye so before we begin i'd like to remind members of the public that if you wish to sign up for public comment the sign up sheet is out on the table if you're watching on zoom you can email becky powell at e-c-k-y-dot-p-o-w-e-l-l at tomwater.k12.wa.s your email has to be received no later than 6 10 and it'll be in the order in

002which it was received each member each first person on a topic gets five minutes each subsequent person gets three minutes and you're not allowed to speak on personnel or student related issues if you do then i get to use the gavel so i don't have my goal um so superintendent johnson are there any changes or additions to the agenda since it was published no changes all right now move on to meeting to meeting minutes review because everyone had an opportunity to review the minutes from the may 13th meeting yes yes would darby like to make a motion two or three minutes i moved that we approved that may 13 minutes second okay all those in favor say aye all right motion passes so now look at that how quickly we've moved on to special recognition

003yes so i'll just uh move forward we have a special recognition to see me well if this works of this gentleman here so if you have driven down capitol boulevard at some point during the pandemic and you saw someone out there trying to lift everyone's spirits in a in a t-bird outfit then you know who we're here to honor this evening so we have a group of parents here and students that are here to honor coach mcgrath and i want to turn it over to them so who's going to step up or if you want to be out here you can't just want whoever's speaking online so it could be great coach mcgrath has been a lot for everyone in this community and we're all beyond grateful for everything he's done especially during this pandemic

004for example a few months ago i think three or four months ago i was told i could no longer play football because i had a health issue and i called him right away and within minutes he was at my house comforting me making me feel better and giving me advice and that just shows the type of stuff he does around here and what he's about and it just meant a lot to me and i can never thank him enough for that and i will always be grateful thank you coach coach mcgrath has done a lot for me and uh he has impacted the community a lot as kobe has partaken and one thing he's done for me individually is when i was suffering from the the harsh reality of online school my grades weren't the

005best and i was in mentally in a bad state he came over to my house and he he worked me through it he set up a plan he took time out of his day multiple times to help me get to where i am today coach mcgrath has definitely done a lot for myself and others especially the tomorrow community and um during the pandemic he'd always be calling me texting me checking in seeing how i was doing mentally stuff like that because it was really hard on a lot of people uh he came to my birthday parade that i had a surprise parade i had at my house when i turned 16 last year and uh he showed up in this t-bird costume and it definitely made things pretty awesome i know i see him out

006on capitol boulevard trying to make everyone happy and uh he definitely put in a lot of time uh for everybody so oh oh thank you thank you coach well thank you thank you uh it's it's it's a it's honor and a privilege to be up here but again it's a community um that i'm blessed to be a part of um these young men standing before me did struggle but we asked i got it okay we asked them to fight and care and uh they all three did and the support that uh they have given me by the families that have been here by the community by the staff i could do this by myself mrs knox has been a huge part of this too as has the staff has too though our staff has fought

007i mean the one thing that i will tell you that this has been up a lot on these individuals but as much as they've impacted or i've impacted them they've impacted me and i think that's that's the one thing that i've i thought about this entire time being impacted by a young man goes a long ways and when our youth impact us um it's it's amazing of course i've dangled with me and having day with me going through this uh it's it's been great for seeing him how he's grown and the support that we get from the state with phyllis walker and of course back with mrs knox again and the rest of us but it's it's this community that's very special and i want to make sure everyone understands how special this community is

008and with kids like this coming through our community that i will tell you another thing too these young men have put a lot of community service found in and i want everyone to understand how much time these kids put during that time during the during the process we went through yeah i was out there and that god forsaken out been a long time but these kids are out there too and that's the one thing i want everyone to understand is that these young men are very special to me and i'm very privileged to be a part of their wives and i'm very honored to be standing in front of the board um it's a great place to coach it's a great place to teach it's a great place to live and i it just tomorrow's

009my family and i just can't speak enough about it i love these kids and i love the people that i'm with i can't speak highly enough about tomorrow and the people that are in it and once again thank you guys i appreciate it and thank everyone showing up i appreciate that too so thank you support and once again i'm honored and privileged to work in this community and work for this district and i just hope that people understand is that there's going to be a time where there's going to be people missing i hope we have people that will step up and hopefully the district and the board knows that we have young teachers that we need to get involved in this kind of stuff too because kids are going to get more and more

010and we're not teaching anymore we're raising so thank you once again thank you for showing up i appreciate everyone showing up today that means a lot to me and like i said thanks again staff members recognize you but i know for you it's even more special that these students came forward and asked to recognize you in this way and so i that speaks to what we're trying to do which is encourage students to advocate for themselves and this was i think a great honor to you and and what you stand for so thank you thank you anyone else i'd like to thank coach mcgrath uh actually dressed up in the two great outfit and came to my son's fifth year old birthday drive-thru last may as well yes i did and we certainly appreciate that

011and we could keep going on it so thank you thank you casey all right so for those of you who might have been here only for coach mcgrath um we're not gonna have our feelings started if you need to go and like get on with your life thank you very much um so now we'll move on to the consent agenda has everyone had an opportunity to review the items on the consent agenda casey would you like to make a motion yes i would like to make a motion to pass the consent agenda as presented laurie would you like to send it i will set up the quotient all those in favor say aye motion passes uh so now we'll move on to recognition and public comment follow-up by the numbers yes so i am looking

012to see is album let me turn that back so you have light there we'll just escape out of here [Laughter] all right so so what i'll do is well becky is doing that i'm gonna take uh i'll take us into a couple of other items so just a public comment we had one public comment at our last board meeting and that was kisha rangan who spoke to us a little bit about there was that worry at that time if you recall with the spiking coved numbers that we could end up asked by the health department to move back to hybrid fortunately in in what she really spoke to is where there's well there's a way is there a way we can keep things going with all of our students in unfortunately that did peak and

013started to drop off and i'll show you in a little in a few minutes here kind of the outcome of that where we stand now but we didn't have to take that step and so appreciated her public comment on that and certainly was something we were watching very closely but uh we were not put in the position of having to step back from our four day a week schedule happily so um we have some by the numbers but what we want to do here first is actually shift to a recognition so we have uh okay we are into that but now what we need to do is see can we promote in the attendees you seen up on the screen an odd view of us at this moment there's linda wonderful and we have so

014actually several of our nurses on that are going to join us because we have a recognition of our district nurses throughout this year and our nurses have had an extraordinarily complex job their job is always difficult we have six nurses in our school district that provides service across our entire 6 000 student population that's one to a thousand for our registered nurses so uh good evening linda can you hear us all right fantastic thank you for being here and so i i see you have we have several with you and and we're bringing everyone up onto the panel and um just want to say that we have been we are so fortunate to have an amazing health services team in this district they have stepped up through this pandemic and have been amazing at working

015with our staff with our students with the health department figuring our way through what is it it was an extraordinarily complex situation that no one would have been prepared to take on and so what i want to do also i'm going to see if i can somehow split this so you can see um okay do we have everyone up there i think it's wonderful i'm going to go ahead and just bring a powerpoint slide back up and for those who are on zoom you may not see those slides but i'll read them so you can hear what we're talking about so we'll lose you for a minute but i have a couple of uh a couple of slides oh gosh i need to skip to the next one i have this in the wrong order

016so the recognition is afterwards so we're going to go down and restart the slideshow just a little bit lower and come back we'll do a little loop-de-loop in this presentation there we go so you may know this number because i just said number of nurses this is our number of rns in the district six our registered nurses serving our students 61. that's the number of positive student coveted cases we had since we moved to hybrid instruction now most all of those after as a contact trace were traced back to outside sources just a couple that we identified that we that they said okay we think this might be in school transmission i think two of those and linda will maybe nodding us or shaking her head no but we can't see her right now so

017hang in there linda um over 300 and this is just giving you a sense of what they've had to do students that we had to quarantine due to contact tracing efforts so that's in that was in the most of that happened in the first couple of weeks after we came back full four days a week because we we're at that higher number in the community and when you have higher transmission in the community it's inevitable that we'll see additional situations where we go okay someone would tested positive and now we need to identify who are the close contacts and quarantine them to make sure that we stem that transmission in the community so a lot of a tremendous amount of work and trying to do so in a way that's caring and compassionate and understanding

018and our nurses definitely do that so that's just part of the the work that they've done oh there we are and then i had this one well it's now three i should say we've had in the past two weeks only three cases so that we had this wave and now as transmission rates dropped in the community we're seeing much less in our student population that's made that more manageable but i think just to frame the complexity of what they've been working through and supporting it's important to to share a few of those numbers so i just want to say we are incredibly fortunate to have this team supporting us and we felt like as this year ends we can't end the school year without taking time to say thank you to our nurses for what

019they have done to support this district to support our students to help us manage our way through this pandemic to give advising to our buildings and so they were constantly getting questions about regulations and either getting having the answers to those questions or consulting back with the health department to get answers all they were getting calls all hours of the day and night weekends and um had some some marathon days of contact tracing so i just want to say thank you and linda i i mean you you've been done a tremendous job leading this group but wanted to give you the opportunity to share anything you'd like to share about about this year and what this has been like for our nurses well thank you for that thank you for the kind words and it

020means so much to be acknowledged for the work that our team has done um unprecedented and we hear it all the time but that's exactly what it's been um the the upside to our work has been the um new relationships that we've built with public health and other organizations going forward that's going to be so great for student health and i'm i'm very pleased with that our team is excellent i i just wouldn't choose any others than than the folks that are working in health services for our district they just have worked tirelessly but in addition to that i just have to give a shout out for our district administration in supporting um us and and the guidance that has come to us from thirst to county and department of health um you know total

021water needs to be so proud of the fact that we have adhered to the guidance we have done what we've been told to do and it has shown itself in students safety and um i'm just really proud of being a part of that i'm proud of what our district has done in response um it's it's been overwhelming and and um exhausting at times but we've done the best we could do under these circumstances and many of my colleagues have said being a school nurse and a pandemic it is something for uh for our scrapbook and and i absolutely feel that but thank you sean for all your support and kellie erschmann has been awesome in supporting of health services and has led us tremendously so um thank you for uh for the kind words tonight

022we sure appreciate it kelly is there anything do you want do you want the biker i would like to not follow linda i don't know if you heard that linda but uh kelly is going to leave it to your word she does not want to follow what the she doesn't want to follow you and your kind words um does anyone from the board want to say anything um i would like to just say also thank you to everybody um not only as a board member but as a tomorrow parent myself thank you for helping keep our children feel safe and as parents to feel safe and guardians and everybody in the district for doing such excellent work thank you agreed thank you very much for your energy and your passion and for sticking with it

023thank you um i remember linda coming on at an earlier board meeting uh it was before we reopened and there was just a lot of fear and i know that linda and her team's dedication to making sure that we did this right is what really helped and there's a lot of pressure on you linda and your team and you guys came through and um and everyone is just really happy that we were able to open when we when we did and it was because of your team so thank you very much all right all right yes absolutely in just a couple more days and there will be no more cases right end of the years all right thank you all our our feelings will not be hurt if you leave the meeting and you go

024on we said the same to coach mcgrath's team that was here so um thank you very much go get some sun so now you're gonna do by the numbers yes i'm gonna i've got a couple here let's see let's i can bring this back up and get back to the right slide now because i'm i'm moving all over the place tonight on this there we are that's the slide where i want to begin so i have a few more numbers that i just i think helped frame kind of our year in some interesting ways so 540 is the first one i cheated and saw that you did okay what what the 108 tell us the 180 graduates yes tum water graduates that we celebrated this past week yeah so it was so wonderful to get

025the chance and you're going to see a little more of my superintendent's report from this week on that but uh it was exciting to get the chance to see everyone together both at um well a couple different venues new markets lecture hall was a fantastic place for our ale graduations and tumwater district stadium so we had a debrief this week and we're continuing to have that discussion about do we continue with that in tumwater district stadium do we come back to st martin's i know blackfields high school has done some student surveys and they're getting student and parent feedback to say what do people think of it really interesting to start digging into that feedback we've had a chance to talk with with people in different roles in that people who coordinated it our music

026everyone to say how did this work and we're starting to get that information together and and there's that discussion about what role will our will that student voice of our incoming class potentially play in making decisions around that so uh so really excited to continue that forward and make a decision around the right thing but it gave us an opportunity to try something so sean will we hear that the debrief will you give us a report on yes absolutely yeah we'll get you that information from the student survey blackfields really really interesting and helpful information so you can see that and look forward to continuing that discussion with the board and the staff and figuring out what next year looks like so hundred and eighty-six is the next number uh no it wasn't that long

027it just feels like it was it might feel like that was right outside participants in our tumwater school district's virtual pe events this year wow so i know lisa summers did a lot of work around starting off and getting and working with pe teachers to set up these virtual pe events we had tremendous participation in that and this i mean it started out early in the year when they were saying how do we keep kids active when they were remote and and we got tremendous participation so an exciting and thanks to lisa and the pe team for coming up with innovative ways to help kids promote physical activity 21 is our next number oh that's the uh well technically it's the last day of school i don't know if that's the number you're looking for

028it is 21st is the last day of school this is actually our retirees oh our retirees across the district are presenting over 544 years of total uh years total in education so a lot of years it is so we have we are we have some uh great staff members who are retiring from service will miss them tremendously we have the chance to recognize at our graduation some of those at our high schools but i know all of our schools are doing what they can to to thank those staff members for their service they're all getting a t-shirt we know that i think is unique to this year so uh if you're a friends fan you you may uh this may look familiar to you but uh yeah we we have uh i know they're making

029sure to do different things to honor and and thank our staff who are leaving us after uh supporting our students in so many different ways so just the last one is a little celebration i've shown you this number all year long and oftentimes we look at it kind of cringe and say okay what does that mean for us and where are we we're at the end of the year so we don't have to worry about changes anymore but i think what's nice is you see where in our main meeting we were up near the top of that curve it went up a little bit more but then it's come back down in a tremendous way and so as of today we're at 102 cases per hundred thousand over two weeks and that number is falling

030and hopefully uh we'll continue to keep going in that direction so really encouraged to see that and hopefully bodes well for a very much more normal fall start that i'll talk about a little more later so that's what i have for by the numbers right any questions for sean becky do we have anyone signed up for public comment wow and just like that we're at reports to the board mr plaguer yes so we are fortunate to have corey player and john gores here both from d.a davidson um to who are tremendous resources to us in the school districts as we make decisions around school financing and so when i invite them up i'm going to set up their powerpoint presentation save a lot of information to help us process where we are and possible options

031for the future so we have we have 30 minutes for reports to the board so you know what i know we have 15 on this i want to make sure your questions are answered so since we don't have public comment if that allows us a little bit of flex time i want to make sure that you're able to get any questions answered you need it this time there's no decisions tonight but when while we have them here i think you know it's a good opportunity makes a lot of sense all right you know i'm trying to get better at keeping this on time and i almost forgot for a moment there so all right so i'm going to go ahead and oops no problem no worries thank you for being here tonight my pleasure we

032do have a lengthy presentation but we will skip around to be cognizant of the time so i had the privilege to work with the district on the 2014 bond issue but i was thinking back today i remember starting work for the district back when weissner was the superintendent so a three-part presentation tonight we're going to talk about your election history and some tax rates we're going to also give you an overview of capital financing options specifically bond issues and capital projects levies and then lastly corey's prepared some information specific to tom water school district to share so a quick overview on just property taxes what school districts can levy so you have your maintenance and operation levy which we often refer to now as education programs and operations or epno levies those run one to

033four years your levy now does not expire until 2024 so you don't have to rerun that for several years also capital projects levees are a very common tool school districts are using and the district took advantage of that as well and passed a two-year capital projects levy in 2020 which expires in 2022 and capital projects levees can go anywhere from one year to six years transportation vehicle fund levies purchase of buses those are one to two-year levees you do not have one of those currently and then bond issues bond issues are 20 years in term and they're voted which requires the 60 percent super majority where your other levies require only the simple majority no validation and bonds do require a validation which means if you pass a bond in february you have to have

03440 percent of those who voted in the last general election turnout and then 60 of those oh yes for the levies there is no validation requirement so just a quick overview on what's happening with elections across the state you can see in 2020 and 21 the success rates are down slightly we currently have four school districts in the state that are suffering through double levy failures we hope that they will now pass as we get into the next round of elections we had a total of six and that was the most we've had and we've been tracking this for more than 50 years so the most we've had in the last 25 years was five so to have six was was quite unusual capital projects levies those continue to pass at a very high rate

03593 percent in 2021 bond issues a little different story here this is my 32nd year working just with school districts in the state i have never seen a february election with zero bond issues on the ballot in fact november february april we have no bond issues in 2021 so that was quite unusual for us you can see though when you passed your bond issue in 2014 that was a low point in election success but you passed at over 68 percent so tremendous community support so at this point i'm going to skip ahead to some slides and turn it over to my colleague corey thank you john can anybody hear me okay up there so my name is corey flager uh i came and joined john as his colleague about three years ago i was lucky

036enough to work with sean dobson into the spokane area esd101 as the director of finance at the time supporting 59 school districts i remember filling in for a year let's see the vacancy there lucky enough now to work with school districts across the state like jim and sean also before we talk about capital finance options i think one thing is to set the stage on what are your current tax rates and tax rates are a big piece about how the community supports these measures moving forward and we did a review here 10 years plus the most current year and in green is your education program and operational levies and in tan are the the school bonds and in this brown color you can see the new capital levy that was passed in 2020 and what

037this shows is the tax rates over the last four years been somewhat stable and followed by a period of stability between 2013 and 17. we know it's one of the district's goals is to keep a most predictable level tax rate for the taxpayers these are the rates that are actually under control by the local community local school district on the next page on page 14 we're going to overlay this with the state schools tax and for those of you are familiar with the mccleary act i know being close to olympia here and following that quite closely that was when they changed the funding methodology completely and trying to better fund education trying to use the word ample not sure if they quite got there yet but they did change the tax structure significantly and in

0382018 they put a new state schools tax in order so this light gray and dark gray are state taxes that are dedicated to school districts throughout the state that every property tax owner pays there are exemptions of course for certain seniors or other exemptions depending on your county but we did want to share this that while you saw the districts locally declining on a statewide level when you consider state schools taxes in your case they've been very level uh over the last decade but just something to keep in mind here as we move forward talking about how do you finance this and how tax rates play a role and when do existing bonds expire existing capital levies expire and how you can kind of continue these strategies and take advantage of when these other tax

039rates drop off but just give you a little bit of background i'm going to skip a few slides here the board has the full packet i think the whole pack is available uh those are interested but we just placed just for example the thurston county tax rates but really what we'd love to get into is just doing a basic presentation on what are the financing options available to the district and what the most uh commonly used primary methods and we have two options usually and that is voter proof bonds and capital projects levies and the districts had success with proving both those in the past but on this side we're going to talk about voter approved bonds these are the unlimited tax general obligation bonds we call them utgo bonds and john mentioned earlier that

040these were approved with 60 percent of the vote with validation so a little bit of a higher threshold than we see with epo levies and capital levies and what are bonds they're essentially a security issued by local governments municipal governments to finance capital improvements so this would entitle the investor to interest payments and principal payments from the district taxpayers funneled through the county treasure and is repaid by property taxes locally within your school boundary most issues we do are tax-exempt being a municipal entity and you are limited you can't ask the voters for a billion dollars unless you have the tax base that can support that there's a five percent of your property value debt capacity what does that look like it's hard to kind of visualize that but you actually have 6.4 billion dollars

041in assessed valuation within your school boundaries if we multiply that by five percent state statute says you can actually uh sell up to 319 million dollars in bonds but there's still some outstanding debt that we want to subtract from that and technically you could sell uh tomorrow 228 million dollars in bonds but that doesn't really it's not really how it works you've got this fear what's that cost what the taxpayers responsibility would be for that and at any given time that's the limit of what you can sell not quite what the voters can approve so if you had a longer term plan you could possibly prove more than that and then just sell bonds as it was legally available to you on slide 18 we talked about how this is super majority which is unique

042uh to other states we're in the um on the west the east coast we're one of the only school districts that still have super majority they've been slowly changing to simple majority or in this case of california to middle majority of 55 um maybe we're grateful to be at 60 and we're not like idaho which is two-thirds majority however i think we just bring this to the attention of those that are really uh passionate about this subject i think it'd be a little self-serving for john and i to go to olympia and campaign for a simple majority since this is what we do for a living however there's a lot of people that have asked for this information and we think this graph is a great visual to try and see how we compare to

043our peers and we also provided information about how many issues would have passed if we were a simple majority how many would have passed if we were at 55 and you see there's a lot of school districts that would have been able to update their infrastructure we could talk about lead water we could talk about asbestos if we could have on natural lighting or you know stem classrooms a lot of these projects would have supported that kind of infrastructure in schools should there be not a super majority in place but moving on we talked about voter approved bonds and the the negative connotation of the 60 but there's a lot of positives here the positives are this the cash is generated up front and that's really important in times right now when there's project inflation

044and construction inflation and when you have to save up to do a building project uh tax rate management if you think about you've been in a position before where you buy a car and they say well here's the four-year payment but if you do it over six years your payment's even lower bonds are the same way you have some tax rate management you can do whether you're doing 20 years 22 years 25 years so you have some flexibility there as well as i said payments are spread over a longer period of time and therefore the tax rates are lower we feel that some of these bonds that you can do 20 or 25 years or 15 years are more accurate uh match to the term of the useful life of that asset while capital levies

045as john mentioned could be one to six years you tend to be paying for something over a shorter period of time and therefore the rate could be a little bit higher cons super majorities one validation i can't think of a district right now we really blame kobet a lot for schools not running bonds but validation has been a part to see the by the trump election and the turnout that we received how can a district get 40 of that on an election that might only have the school bond on that ballot how can we get that many voters to turn out this it depends on the community we've analyzed that for jim in the past and your voters are actually some of the best voters in the state and we don't think validation has ever

046been an issue here would be but it could be in other areas um and there are issue costs there's arbitrage reporting so there are a couple cons to voter proof bonds but they're the primary method that districts use to finance long-term capital projects capital projects levees as you've utilized over the last year and you're still in your second year of that capital levy thankfully your simple majority two to six year collection with some exceptions for one-year levees there's no interest cost you collect the resources in and as you have enough resources to do your projects you do them in the community these tend to be safety security technology hvac roofing repairs a lot of flexibility in the capital projects levy and i was here i think two years ago and we were presenting on this

047theory of jump starting a long-range capital plan and i think um that's been a really successful strategy here and i have a slide coming up on that as well but a couple of the pros there's no validation there's no interest costs no issue expenses you're just collecting those resources there's no debt limit there's a logical limit but there's no legally statute guided limit less reporting but there are some cons too where you say there's maybe some life cycle that assets the mismatch you're paying for it over a shorter period of time and cash flow can be a problem you have some big projects it's hard over a four to six year term to collect enough to do a large project but we have talked about this jumpstart plan and in this example we just have

048a two-year example of a district over time doing a two-year capital levy to try and buy some time to do some long-term range planning and surveying the community on what the needs are and then going for a bond and how that can be a strategy to be used in while we use a two-year example here like we did two years ago it could be three years four years six years it could be whatever is necessary to bridge that gap between a long-term strategy and we've seen statistically voters respond very well to this tax is expiring and this tax would replace that there would be no impact to the taxpayers we've seen a higher success rate from that model as well this is a really briefly what is the ideal time frame to do a major

049decision when it comes to a bond financing and while we've seen districts do short time frames depending on the needs 12 to 24 months is a very common period of time in which we do a ospi study and survey of your facilities maybe up to six months before that of actually doing the defined detailed planning setting your election date so there is really a lengthy process involved to a bond which might not necessarily be there for a capital levy to consider and for those of you interested i did put a few slides in here behind the scenes about some other things to consider for bond finance but i think those are kind of jumping ahead because you're still in that area of deciding on the capital let me versus the bond but they'll be in

050the packet for you to look at in the future and john i are available anytime they answer questions or numbers from the back but one thing i will stop on is is rates and rates are the lowest they've been in i think we went back to 1970 1950 and we just couldn't find a rate as low as they are today august is where they did the lowest we had some increases during the uh election some uncertainty about uh the election and then when the one point something trillion uh package came out uh the stimulus package and the uh success of the vaccination rollout came out we did see some good news in the markets which raised some of our rates here with the fears of inflation so it's settled down a little bit on the

051right but you'll notice the chart on the left shows historically over the last 20 years we're very low so it's it's been a very great time for those that have been able to take advantage of tax exempt bonds however it's been a it's been a little tough time to think about doing infrastructure in a time when we were having our students in our classrooms and my kids went back to school in march and so it's been great to get them back in person a little bit um i don't want to stay too long on this topic as well but we did have a major overhaul to the way that we were rated so much like your personal credit score when you go maybe purchase a home or trying to get approved for mortgage the school

052district has a bond rating and this year moody's one of the major uh rating agencies decided to change the framework and they put a higher reliance and a higher waiting on fund balance so this puts a lot of pressure on jim and sean to think about how does that relationship fit with the board goals and working with fund balance because now they're looking at in your debt service fund and your general fund they'd love to see between 15 and 17 fund balance to be considered a stable district from their perspective we had 16 school districts downgraded this year many of them due to the fact that this new methodology they didn't feel that the fund balance was accurate based on their peers across the nation now one thing to consider is we're in a state

053with very stable revenues from ospi from our funding model and other states are more locally funded so they have to have a higher fund balance to operate which we do not we've been advocating for our districts in that manner but something to keep in your back your mind as a board as you're maybe possibly setting minimum fund balance policies or setting goals or working with unions is that there is something happening right now that could impact borrowing costs of the voters in the near future as they're taking feedback on this model yes a quick question can we do questions an hour question paired okay um just for if anybody ever decides to watch this and hearing all this amazing information that we're getting from you um can you inform us and how moody's i mean

054we all know what moody's is most of us i guess but what gave them their criteria to decide to realign their bond rating structure for school districts it's interesting they used to the rate us similar to a city county or these other governmental units and they felt that the school district was so different compared to maybe a water district or a county or and so they felt they needed a more dedicated system and as they reviewed these states they reviewed every state there was hundreds of districts under review however states if i remember michigan and washington had the highest number of downgrades and a lot of us due to fund balance and there are some other factors as well is our state does not do full gap accrual so we do not do the full

055accounting that other states may do and we are completely following our state laws and what our superintendent public instruction mandates through our accounting manual however moody's wants to see more information on the depreciation of school assets and post employment benefits and so there's a couple factors that have combined but they put out this model last year and we gave a lot of feedback a lot of people gave feedback and to be honest it fell on deaf ears and they released the model anyway so we're still continuing to push to hopefully get this model adjusted and to have a little more flexibility for different states which haven't got there yet thank you yeah and there's still while it's frustrating to see 16 districts downgraded there's still over 100 and something districts rated by moody's so while

056did impact a large percent of them there are still many like yourself that were not impacted thank you so much just a couple more slides here this is what your current principal interest payments look like we just call it a debt profile so you see in 2020 a significant portion of the debt was reduced in 2021 and that's when your capital levy actually was put in place so that it was a minimal impact to taxpayers based on a tax rate you'll notice that it just slowly adjusts based on inflation until 28 until your next round of bonds significantly mature so there's another opportunity there and there's so many flexible ways that that can be structured around this but just something to visualize here as you move forward and we use that to help us generate

057some scenarios so jim and sean the team said can we work on what would be just a couple high-level bookend scenarios to start the conversations and and the first scenario here is we're calling bond scenario two and it's a term of 20 years and the goal is the tax rate knows we don't want to exceed five dollars per thousand at any given time which is really similar to what the rate is now and in that case the district can generate up to 85 million dollars in scenario two and that's assuming that's sold over two different periods of time and why is that one the same as bond scenario three if the tax rate note is the same in the goal but you can generate 100 million and that's because after those bonds expire in 2028

058the rate would drop even more so when the first scenario the tax rate would drop uh and give you a bigger a bigger chance and centered two to ask for another bond at that time than scenario three but if the district's not ready for that kind of uh you know capital project quite yet a capital levy scenario is still on the option that's very viable and this is a two-year model we just trying to keep it shorter instead of four years because we're not sure if you then in two years be interested in trying a bond again but if you renewed the expiring capital levy um for another two years that could generate 10.3 million dollars of those two years so you can see a big difference between 85 million and 10 million but that's

059between a long term versus a short term and we have all the details for the numbers people we have all the details on these slides to estimated tax rates full bond projections we just felt that might not go over very well on the board stage for many um but i'll go back to this slide to see if there's any questions as we set these bookends just to spur spark conversation and i thought i'd just add here you know if you remember back two years ago those who were on the board and we had the discussion about it we said we you know we've seen this enrollment decline but we know tum water is growing and we expect that's going to turn and take off and when it takes off we're gonna need to be ready

060to prepare facilities because it takes five years from starting really to get a school from just the idea of let's build a school to having a school open and what we're seeing in town water is a lot of construction right now you can't drive around without seeing new uh housing complexes and coming into our district because of cobit because of some changes that we've made over the last couple of years we've seen this enrollment decline we anticipate when it turns we're going to start climbing we just haven't seen it yet and and so two years ago we were pretty confident by now we'd be coming to you saying wow this enrollment growth has started and we need to get going on the next building in order to have it ready in time when when we'll

061need it what has slowed that is copen that's changed the change the profile of things and so we expect that'll be a little bit slower now but when it does come we're going to need to be ready once again and so we've started some planning if we were to go for a bond right now we could go forward and build a school but we're in this odd zone of not having seen the enrollment growth that we expected we would be starting to see um if you we ran a two-year capital levy extended the current capital levy remember we brought you a list of about 30 million dollars in capital projects that were important and we said let's what you said to us let's whittle that down to a smaller list and we did we could

062continue that work to maintain our current facilities to prepare for that next school do the early planning work and then at the end of that time we expect by then we will be seeing that enrollment growth that will mean it's the right time to go forward with the bond so that's kind of that's kind of where we find ourselves right now and why maybe it might make sense to look at something like that at the end of this capital levy well another reason we put two years as a scenario here is it doesn't it doesn't seem quite logical but when you actually pair a bond election with the renewing ep no election we see no detriment to the epno election but the bond receives higher support and we have some theories is that you're more

063you're communicating two methods at the same time rather than asking for the approved tax measures twice in a row or two years in a row i think that's one of the main reasons that you're communicating we've heard the term levies are for learning bonds are for building there's some kind of communication here that makes it this is what the long-term plan is renewing the levy for four years and the bond for 10 15 or 20 years has been very favorably received as compared to running a bond alone we're not saying bonds alone haven't been successful our ep alone have been successful but statistically over the last 20 years there's a bump of about a seven to eight percent success rate for that bond when run at the same exact time as a renewal so that's

064another strategy of why a two-year levy might be a strong strategy if the district's not ready for a bond at this time and thanks to our current capital levy you'll see this summer black lake elementary is getting a fire sprinkler system which is really important uh i already see painting work going on at black hills high school and and mel i'm sure there's some other major projects that uh i was thinking they all start next week they all start next week so yeah things are are going so we're doing work to really take care of the investment we've already made in our current facilities with that and it helps keep us up because once you start falling behind the cost to do those projects gets bigger and so what we've been trying to do is

065really manage a tax rate that keeps for our community this level tax rate while taking good care of the facilities for our students and community okay any other questions questions questions um you aren't looking for any feedback at this time are you sean i think we have some time to process that the idea is so decision points so probably if we were going to run a bond we would really need some start to be i mean we'd need to be hearing from the board we think it's time to run a bond right now because you saw that six months that's we would be running a very tight window to run a bond now and and the challenge of that has been when we ran that lesson we said we'll have time to do that preparation

066for a bond covet has turned all of our attention to crisis management of course and so over this last year and a half we haven't been able to really dig into that as much and so we have a study and survey starting that we're working towards starting a study and survey right now that's one of those steps to re-evaluate our facilities we have a facilities committee starting as well right yeah we started a facilities committee and we've kind of said to them hey we're gonna slow down a little bit because at this stage we do not feel like we we are on a pace to be ready to recommend a bond this this coming year so if the board said boy we think you we really need to move forward with the bond we need

067to get those marching orders now so we could do that work and get underway at high speed otherwise if we are wanting to think about a capital levy as a possible uh way to continue we have some time um the the filing date for that would be december i believe for february if we were to look at something this coming february you have that i know you have a slide on that and so it's in your packet you can see and so we need to make a decision we need to be ready to make that decision about october so that we could create the resolution file it and and move forward with that process all right questions all right so um thank you corey thank you john both of you traveled to lovely tom water

068for this presentation thank you um yeah i'm when we run these things it's always important to get community input long before we actually really have to make a decision uh whether we're going to run it so this gives us time to do that um and there are there are lots of other projects that we can get done that we don't have to include in the bond and have to pay 20 years on it um so it would be good to get some of those projects taken care of and a new school costs 40 million dollars or something like that right is that about right depending on the size of school you're building yes yeah yeah high school closer to 100 yeah all right well thank you i remember the days when ballard was like setting

069the and how much was that they're 38 million yeah that was like out of the world 38 million for school yes yeah yeah and so i mean and i'm saying there's there's a range there depending on what you're building but it's it's it's uh those costs have gone up substantially well and that's why i like the capital levees we can take care of those little things and if we're going for 85 million half of that's for a new elementary school that we know we need and so then thinking about what the other schools get because we have to think of all the other schools as well when we run it on so all right thank you gentlemen yes thank you thank you baird i i have a need for us to go into a recess

070for uh i'd say approximately 15 to 20 minutes uh all right uh is it is it executive session for um yeah well the board would have an opportunity to go into an executive session all right for um it's under the for the personnel yeah so for rcw 4230 110 1g um we're going into executive session to discuss personal performance evaluation or qualifications for employment for those of you who are later on the agenda i am sorry but we're going to take about 15 minutes and then we'll come back [Music] oh lori was a good kid in school sean all right thank you everyone for your patience we're back in session uh and we are moving on to tomorrow virtual academy presentation [Laughter] we wanted to start by having an opportunity to share with you the

071work happening at tumwater virtual academy that's our newest online k-12 school and before we get started i would probably like to tell you i mentioned this to their staff when i was talking with them i think my heart smiles every time i see this logo and this work because um we know the dedication and commitment and passion that went into getting this running and off the ground and i will tell you it started in 2019 in july when i arrived taking a look at a set of data that said we had about 150 or 200 students a year that left tum water school district to pursue online school opportunities in some capacity so one of the things that i thought would be extremely important is for us to try to recapture that so sean and

072i sat down for a little bit and said what would it look like if we were to create an online virtual academy and the truth is we had no idea that pandemic was right around the corner so the timing of taking a look at an online school in the course of thinking about what we now know about work in the pandemic means that this is a real opportunity for students in our school district to have yet another pathway to be graduate ready and career ready so this is a k-12 online virtual school and the last thing i want to say before these folks go is my tremendous amount of being proud as an administrator here in tumwater school district for the work these two gentlemen have done both kyle grunenfelder and andrew lendowski have spent

073tireless hours working to get this into a place where i would tell you this is one of the better online opportunities i would say gentlemen around the state in a short amount of time we get requests from around this region and also around the state now for taking a look at how maybe to model a program after this online school so it would be remiss for me to say and i thought it would be a great opportunity for them to share with you what tom water virtual academy is all about and to offer a chance to answer any questions you might have thank you thank you time to i think like 15 minutes so we're going to give you 15. thank you um and thanks for letting us be here and thanks for letting us

074share a little bit about what this year's been like and there's no way we're gonna be able to tell all the stories um we laughed about that a lot but uh we wanna do our best to kind of explain what tomorrow virtual academy is and and where it's at so we've actually worked with um strategies 360 right shawn um a marketing company to set up this commercial that is out there trying to try to tell our community who we are so we thought we'd share that with you i'm cool right now [Music] virtual academy is a virtual school option for the tumwater school district it uses a platform that's completely online it's like many of the other virtual schools in the state parents take a role in their kids education they're what's called a learning

075coach i'm really mostly there for backup you know do you need any help with this how are you doing do you get what they're saying just making them sit and go back over their lesson and see what did they miss what i like best about tva is it's nice how you can learn faster if you want but you could also make your learning process slower if you want freedom if you just want to plan your own day out i think tv is a really good option for that we care about each individual kid and we've got systems in place to help monitor students and monitor progress they start to fall behind we're there to support and we can provide different interventions for them it is so personable and local and we know the students we're

076not overwhelmed with a huge caseload of students we have the time so that we can look and see where everybody's at you know we have time to schedule those meetings every day to respond to them to find out what their needs are kids don't work well in a factory we can't shut them in a school do the exact same thing with every kid we all need different things we all learn differently we all think differently we all just process our world differently working at home working with your parent and working on tumwater virtual academy's platform is a pathway for education that works really well [Laughter] so a little bit about this school year um we had so it was it was our online school for students in k-12 established in really in august so the

077planning had been happening but you know we started taking uh taking students on in august we hired in a short amount of time 15 certificated teachers uh that includes six teachers in k-5 eight in secondary 612 and then one sped teacher k5 and we just hired one this week for next year for a secondary sped teacher we have one counselor at 0.6 fte two office professionals two administrators um and then 304 students currently enrolled and that represents about 150 kids in the elementary level 81 in the middle school level and 72 in the high school level so just a couple quick looks at uh some we thought we'd look at some demographics uh these are this is kind of the the race and ethnicity breakdown in in our school and you can see here we

078also have 88 students that qualified this year for free and reduced lunch status which is about 29 of our student population just a breakdown of gender a few more girls than boys and then this one this is um visually that the pie graph makes sense but um the data that pulled is is accessing k through 12 and so if you if you were to add up those percentages it doesn't add up to a 100 because it's including like the elementary folks so visually you can see it works to look at the gpa of the high school students about half of them had a gpa above 3.0 and then the yellow represents like the 2.0 to 3.0 range and then red is below that so that just gives a picture of really where we're staying at

079right now who chose tva and interestingly enough that's who ended up finishing the year with us um it was an odd august i'm sure you remember and uh and at the time when we when we you know jumped into starting tva because we really did put tva together in like four weeks instead of the the nine months i really wish we wouldn't have it and we had about 450 students initially start and at that time we were still trying to figure out what remote learning would look like and and what our world at school would look like and so i think a lot of families just chose this quickly and so right now with our 330-ish kiddos the that's that's the demographics that we have but um it's changed over the course of the year

080we've had kids move in and try and move out and we had different options this year so um it being a place of choice we just wanted to go over a little bit like who's eligible for tva and any tomorrow student is we have the capacity to take 10 of students outside of our district there are different applications for ale schools and the application that we did uh allows for ten percent um out of district students so 90 plus percent and this year it actually ended up being like 98 percent of the students were all tomorrow students so we're serving our community and the reality was we didn't put any there were no walls or stairs or steps or ladders it was if anyone wants to learn virtually come on in because we don't know

081how to quite do this yet anyway so we'll just figure it out with you so we figured that out with students with ips and 504s and adaptations and needs and um honestly ended up being a lot more successful in some situations than i had worried about as a dad and an educator you know because you worry about what an online learner needs to look like but we found with the right kind of like supports um it was pretty amazing who could succeed so tva's different than remote learning was a big conversation all year and i think it still is because i don't know the exact numbers but i know that there's quite a few students learning remotely so we have our 300 students at tva and then there's 1400 students that are learning remotely so

082next year tva is going to be that virtual option that tom water school district has to offer right so this message that we're trying to share with people because to be honest andrew and i we know we're talking about because we talk about this way too much and all the time but what's the difference between tva and remote learning is still a question there are a lot of people i know that i've talked to that are learning remotely like they're doing remote work with a teacher from one of the schools and they think they're in tva because it sounds right because it's a virtual school right i'm at home i'm doing virtual school am i in tva i'm in tva right and so we find that we're trying to explain the difference and the main

083difference is is that we use k-12 platform as our curriculum um mode and we have teachers that support parents who are learning coaches to be the at-home supporter and it's much more of a supporter at the k end than the 12 in the kindergarten parent could imagine you know you're going to do everything with your kid and a 12th grade parent is just making sure that your kiddos up to do the classes or the work that they need to do so um and so then like you know another big difference between remote learning is that there's no schedule for classes the students work mostly asynchronously so they're mostly working on the platform on their own and they they might have depending on the grade level they might have um you know one or two class

084connects or synchronous meetings during the day but other than that they're they're really able to work at their own pace and even those class connects you know we worked really hard not to make them required that students could we record them and watch them later so in those ways it's very different than the remote expectations and then another question comes up is what's different than the other online schools in the in the state or even in the nation because other schools use k-12 so what do we do that's different and um the biggest thing that we do is we have tomorrow teachers that keep you connected to the tumblr community and we found the success with our teachers because we did actually have to access some what we call ist so those are staff members

085that work for k-12 if we had a kid that wanted to take ap stats we didn't have to wait for 25 kids to want that class we could actually get the kid that class and would be actually it would be taught by a k-12 staff member who might actually live in vermont and our students with our teachers had um quite a bit more success than our students with teachers that were in our community and we don't have any solid proof but we feel like it was the connection it was the adaptability it was the know the known factor i know you we live in the same community i can call you i can talk to you and even if i have to and we have teachers do this we can drive to a park and

086work at a park bench together so you're not doing this alone so it's different in the sense that we had our own teachers be the be the staff and we we connected with the kids at that level so even if we didn't require a class connect the teachers and the students had a lot of connection yeah so there's a couple options uh for enrollment and uh this is true this year and then we'll also talk about the future so full-time enrollment that was true for for k-12 kids um they could just be a tva full-time they could still do extracurriculars and clubs at their neighborhood school if that was something they were interested in but we also had this option of dual enrollment for secondary students so um and i honestly think this is probably

087the future of tva um it's a good mix of the social interaction at their local school at their neighborhood school but also having the flexibility that tva provides so students could choose to take a class oftentimes we had a lot of students that took music classes at their neighborhood school and then they took their other five classes on a tva and parents would provide transportation once we got into hybrid and in-person instruction and then another thing uh so this year we worked as a bea so we were we were because of the pandemic we did have a little bit of a benefit there that we did not have to to follow all of the alv compliance stuff and so we spent this year getting trained on that through some contacts at ospi and sort of

088planning for this upcoming year when we will be in an ale program that stands for alternative learning experience basically that's anytime that some or all of the instructions delivered outside of a regular classroom schedule so it's and so you know cascadia is that way for us now um and tva will also be an ale program next year and it's important as we're communicating you know it's not home school but it is school at home so the main difference is you know in homeschool it's it's the teachers or the the parents are in charge of everything and for us with tva we have the curriculum there's still a certificated teacher they're there to help and there's a lot more parent interaction and family interaction um and so that's kind of the the neat thing about it

089along with ale we have wslps so that stands for written student learning plans so we'll look at a sample here in just a second but basically this is this is you know accountability for kids and for teachers so you know if we give them all this flexibility how do we know that they're actually doing you know doing their schoolwork and so we have a lot of data points from k-12 but we also write out each student's plan and have monthly progress checks and if they if they aren't passing their classes if they're not making adequate progress we start to put in intervention plans and that's all part of the ale compliance stuff so you can see here if i get the i can't find the cursor we're going to look at the sample but there

090it is this is a sample sample plan i wonder if i can make it bigger for you basically um it's each student's name their grade this is at the beginning of each school year it's got all their contact information and then it has the start date and end date and then this student for example was uh was mostly this was a dual enrollment student and they shared the the other part of their enrollment at tumwater middle school there's a there's an expectation for the minimum number of hours that they're working on the platform each week and so in this student's case because of their 0.9 uh or 90.09 fte they're they're at 25 the the usual full-time equivalent is 27.5 hours per week and then it you can see there's spots for signatures from the

091parents and from the teacher and then it just it just takes through their courses and it talks a little bit about you know again what are the expectations what what counts as weekly contacts so students have to contact their teacher at at least once per week and there's different ways that that counts um and so all of this was was part of our learning this year as we got ready for uh ale next year yeah i can there's two different sets of policies that are part of this work one is 2024 which will deal with online learning tom water school district already had a wasp model for that sean and i and these two are actually in the process of looking at that procedure because the last time it was revisited here i think was

0922014 maybe somewhere in that in that process and we don't have a procedure for it so now that we have an online school we need to go back through and update that work the other is ale policy which is 2255. that's changed drastically as well so we need to take a look at our alternative learning experiences policy excuse me the procedure side and sean and i have a scheduled meeting to go back through that now based on what we've learned more recently and we'll be talking with you further about those two policies because at least in the alu world significant changes have happened since the last time we looked at that here in sun water school so five more minutes guys does that work for you okay so just what we imagine is we look

093ahead so tba next year is the right now my understanding is the planned remote option that tsd is offering and families can choose to homeschool and there are other online academies that can be accessed and um and and as we think through that we're implementing ale which is different than bea has some different expectations and some different rules and the wslp process really puts a stamp on the fact that it's not homeschooling it's schooling a home so someone used the picture of we're still in charge of the ship so the student and the parent might be captaining the ship but we're we're we have to be the bosses because we're taking the fte and so we're also taking the responsibility um we need to formally adopt our curriculum choice so k12 is the one is

094the platform that we use this year um but there is some process with formally adopting that and um researching a home parent partnership which would be having a partnership with families that want to homeschool which is different than schooling at home which is what tva is expand dual enrollment at neighborhood schools if you're a student at timber high school and you want ap stats and there's not an ap stats class how can we help you access that or if you're a black hills high school and you really wanted to take um latin as your foreign language or chinese there's there's quite a catalog of courses that we could actually access without having to find um you know all the classrooms and the teachers in the books in the brick and mortar school it just opens

095up opportunity um adding secondary sped support hey we check that off and intervention help and support one thing we found was working with families you know especially the younger kids have this parent role that acted almost like having a parent in the classroom with you or a teacher in the classroom with you so learning how to support intervention which which would be situations where you know the curriculum which is pretty rigorous um if you have if you had a third grader who had some some needs for intervention like how we support that and then um increase the in-person engagement so this year we we didn't we saw each other on screen a lot but we didn't actually get together and see each other and tba made itself a cozy little home over at michael t

096but um just learning ways that we could actually see students live and in and in present and then because we're a school that people have to choose marketing our program so our staff has actually spent some time really sprucing up our website so if you have anybody that's ever curious they can take a look at our really cool tomorrow virtual academy website that is is um it's got our colors it's got our icon and it's got the the stuff across the top so someone wanted to look at hey what's it look like to be in sixth through eighth grade they could click on this and meet mrs witkowski with koski and mrs colette and they explain what it looks like to be in middle school so is there a link to that on the actual

097tillwater school district website yes right yeah yeah it's another school just underscore so if you just go here oh it's underscored so does someone graduate from tomorrow virtual academy yeah great question this this year we partnered with our with the two high schools black girls in tomorrow high school um we felt that a lot of our enrollment um especially seniors they they were pandemic related primarily and so um our students wanted to to graduate with their neighborhood school this year and that may be the case again next year but eventually they will graduate from from tva looks great any questions for the gentleman okay or comments and a question um so i often find myself talking to my current and former colleagues that we as an educational system have to find i wrote this down

098so i know i forget um innovative ways to promote and provide different pathways to success and this is definitely one of them uh i might start crying here in a second so let's talk about kids i get a little emotional yeah yeah yeah um this to me is not the whole pie but it's piece the pie of the definition of what equitable inclusive education means this this is really hitting the mark i know there are other pieces that we have to address and the pandemic brought that to the surface and this is a very powerful way to address a need and i absolutely love it i'm astounded that half your students are k5 i think early on a year ago we would have said no it's going to be the flip of that the majority

099lead the older kids they have a job they have to x y and z not the younger kids but i i find that truly inspiring and just my curiosity is how do you deliver lunch to your free and reduced uh this year they says beginning of the year they picked up lunches at their neighborhood schools so as our students did they were in remote learning they picked up lunches at their neighborhood schools and then i believe there were a few sites that remained open for lunch pickup i know michael t was one of those where students could come pick up lunches i want to commend you all on this this is phenomenal this is an absolute lighthouse whatever word you want to use that guides people to our district this is huge yeah i would

100echo scott's statements 100 and i would also add that uh my direct neighbor um decided to chose to put their kids in the tva and i've heard nothing but rave reviews about it so positive community feedback has been outstanding from my point of view so thank you so much for all your effort and hard work thanks guys yeah thank you uh when sean said uh this is unheard of to stand up a school in the summer um we knew that it was a it was it was gonna be hard and you guys excelled so thank you it took tremendous persistence and dedication on the part of that team so i just want to say thank you to all of you because i know what it took to make that happen i watched it and i'm

101so thankful that you guys were willing to stick with it and make it happen yeah thank you a lot of late nights i'm [Laughter] sure what they didn't mention but was really cool was that they have a teacher that took it upon herself to form a parent group for some of the parents that she was supporting um you may have seen it in the staff updates last week and it's just an another testament to the amazing teachers that we have working in our schools they're they're finding the need and finding a way to fill it and i see that just continuing to grow with that parent group for next year yeah um excited to see where it goes it's been fun working with sean and the team and with strategies 360 to see how can

102we let how can we make the most of this and let people know of this awesome resource that's available so good job it's been a pleasure working with you guys trying to help in any way i can alright thank you gentlemen you are also free to go if you want all right so now we're gonna do uh we're gonna take action on second reading for policy 31 14. yeah this one will be very quick we had our first read at the last meeting there have been no changes to it essentially some language changes on part-time home-based or off-campus students due to updates in law scott would you like to make a motion to approve i'll move that we accept the policy 3114 part-time and home base and off-campus students yep darby would you like to

103second oh second all right all those in favor of approving policy 31 14 please signify by saying aye all right post all right motion passes now lori wait a minute i'm ready we'll present on the renaming sorry about our middle school oh no worries you [Music] i am here this has been a really interesting process i was contacted by our teacher librarian at bush middle school a while ago who shared with me that he had been in contact with kathleen clark who lives on a portion of the bush settlement property and she had a concern because she had found in her research that george bush did not have a middle name of washington as we had named our school and so in contacting her she provided me some backup documents that she had found including

104a census from the state in which he came that only had a first and last name i contacted don trosper a local historian and he concurred and he has done quite a bit of study and research on this matter and so we brought a committee together after you guys gave sean the okay for us to start a process to consider renaming bush middle school our committee members included a student sierra han brown an eighth grader and she was wonderful to have on our committee and had a great voice at the table lucy mendoza is a parent she's newer to the community and was also a wonderful voice we had leah mueller who's a bms history teacher she has actually been instrumental in having the washington state history book revised because they had improperly placed where

105the bush settlement was so she knows what to do if if we move forward and it was great to have her we had sean guthrie the principal who was there and kathleen and dawn and myself to discuss this matter we've provided you with the backup documents um that go over what i've just shared it was also important to note on the point of the committee was that the picture that we have that displays george bush's face is actually not him it's an artist's rendition and the and don could talk a little bit more about this but the pictures that we sent you are have on this page these are his direct ascendants correct these are these are george bush's children and so it would be if it's hard to see because it's not a great

106picture but um it just it was important to the committee that if we do move forward well whether we move forward with the name change or not that the pictures that are displayed should have a caption added that saying that this is an artist's rendition of what he may have looked like um so that that's what i have if you have any questions i'm going to point to don it was a little intimidating i'm going to tell you to sit at this table with these people who just have such amazing knowledge of this wonderful settler in our community an important part of the history of tongue water don thank you for serving on this committee did you have anything to add well this is that the water is significant in the state its history is

107very significant one is the olympia brewing company that makes us famous and then also the we're the first permanent american community north of the columbia and largely due to racism in oregon mixed race family of george and isabella a black man and a white wife and mixed-race children and they weren't allowed to settle in oregon on the american side of the river so they went to the british side the north side and that's what brought them to tumwater one of the things and so uh it's a we want to honor bush family they're a fine character i mean i've fallen in love with these people and i never met them but i think they are a really instrumental part of our town's history and our state's history and it's good to honor them especially in

108the current atmosphere that we're in with race relations and so on any questions about i graduated into 71 from timewater high brunenfelder was one of my co-classmates [Laughter] lauren and karen and so uh we had 120 i think or so in the graduating class at tillwater high never thought we'd have two high schools and all these elementary schools and now middle schools i graduated eighth grade at the brick building that was on this very site and that was the last eighth grade graduating class there before they started tom water middle school so i've got a history here trust for road name for my kathleen yes i really admire her oh she's not okay well she and her husband have done a great job and we just had a memorial for the bush butternut tree that

109finally after 147 years collapsed on may 1st and so we just went to a funeral for the tree but anyway it was it was very good honoring the bush family and their contribution i know it's going to be costly to get rid of all the signs or changes of signs cart on carve the stonework but it's it's worth doing for historical accuracy and honoring that memory and perhaps call more attention to the history of timwater and and the significance we have historically speaking where did the washington come from well there was a different guy that's named the father of centralia was a black man that was a former child of slaves and george washington was his name and he was he was a fine character also but there was the george washington and centralia and

110george bush up here in tumwater and somewhere in the past they could conflated the two names together and that's where we got the george washington bush which is not angry okay thank you there is going to be a monument being added to the washington state capitol that is going to be the george bush monument and um as you saw we had a letter of support from the washington historical society and then the new edition of backup support that we found another book that lists him as george bush and then there's a george washington also in that list so i think that you know if if we want to be historically correct and truly honor this family that this should be something to be considered any other questions for don or lori before we take action

111all right so lori would you like to make a motion to approve the renaming of our bush middle school of course i will make a motion to rename bush middle school to george to make sure i get it right at george bush middle school casey second final second all those in favor of renaming our middle school george bush middle school please signify by saying aye opposed motion passes all right thank you for all your work on this highly honored bush's wife i love that that that park is named after isabella bush i think it was the first park or anything named after a woman in town water and it's appropriate that it was isabel oh yeah oh great and the and the post office but isabella bush was created um but it did not come

112before isabella bush park mr trosper that was my point wow i just corrected mr tosman no but we appreciate uh we were talking about the the book uh the history of time water schools lori's really excited to read and um i think all of us might have the book and it's really instruct it was really instructive to me over the to read about the history of the schools and how we got to be where we are it really um is helpful in even in present day to understand where we came from so thank you for all your work [Laughter] i will say that is i had the opportunity to get a tour of the schmidt house uh by don trosper he did a fantastic i just learned so much from that experience it was really

113great we should do this all right thank you so now we will go on to the superintendent's report are you only going to take 10 minutes yes i will in fact i might be able to do it unless all right okay my report today is mostly to focus on a few celebrations and a little reflection here because a little bit of information for you and then we'll move this so so first just giving you the latest update because i think people are very curious about fall i continue to get a lot of questions about what is fall look like and we're still working on the first guidance given by department of health in may around fall what fall will look like we know the cdc is set to put out guidance for fall for what

114school should look like in the fall across the united states likely washington department of health will look at that guidance when it comes out and it may result in some revision so this isn't final but essentially what we know is every school in washington will be back in session full-time five days a week for all students who want in-person instruction we'll continue to have tva as an option for our students who want to stay remote well distancing at this stage we've been told washington department of health's guidance says to the greatest extent possible distance students three feet in the classroom and six feet in all other areas but it shouldn't keep you from serving kids so that's so it's it's it's to the greatest extent possible one of the big challenges for us six feet

115in a lunch room is extremely challenging we i was at little rock uh elementary today at lunchtime they have their gym also full of tables so they can give students and but that's a challenge when you're trying to also serve students in pe so we're managing that we don't know whether cdc guidance or later doh guidance will adjust those guidelines that that may come until then we're preparing for the possibility we're still going to need to try to space kids three feet in classrooms and six feet in the cafeteria as much as we can but the priority is getting all kids in person and my phones didn't understand that for some reason i guess so um and then at this stage doh guidance says everyone will be wearing face coverings in the fall we don't

116know whether there will be any changes to that we have started to receive a lot of feedback from people saying they would sure love it if at least our teachers could be not wearing the mask those who are fully vaccinated so that they can so students can see their faces see that you know when you're teaching kids to read being able to read lips there's a lot there uh so you know we're hopeful that conditions will allow recommendations to be changed on that at this stage we'll wait on further recommendations and we expect that will come in the summer we'll continue to have uh enhanced cleaning protocols in place says as appropriate there is even that's under discussion now is what level of cleaning is necessary given what we're learning about uh surface transmission of

117the virus not being what we thought it was hand washing ventilation and a response plan if we have a student who's identified we still have to be ready to contact trace we'll continue to have quarantine rooms in place or a space where a student could go so that there's they're not in the same space where we might have kids getting their medications or other things so we can so we can keep safe we'll have ppe for our staff all of that in place athletics and activities will follow the road map to recovery guidance which i think we're seeing full open of the state supposedly around june 30th so hopefully that means that we'll be back on track for for activities to be on a regular pretty regular schedule but we'll continue to watch as guidance

118emerges for fall but it's there there's that's looking up we will have a state assessment sometime in the first half of the year that is the us department of education has said you will assess kids for last year ospi said we're delaying that from spring to fall we're not gonna they weren't going to do it this spring but that continues to mean there's a required assessment in the fall we understand that they're still in negotiations with department of education about what that looks like length the ideas that it should be shortened and simplified from what it normally is us we've had i i've had a lot of feedback around whether students should be required to be vaccinated or not at this stage it will not be required that students are vaccinated we can't require that

119unless the state were to pass a law saying that is required so at this stage that's not within our preview to make that decision so um student and we're working under emergency you thought use authorization there would probably need to be fda approval before you'd see a legislature start to make decisions around that or health departments so that's what we know on fall school start at this stage we do have we continue forward on our equity work and there'll be an equity report so i won't go deep on this but i will say we have posted and we'll are moving forward to hire a director of diversity equity and inclusion in tumwater school district that work is substantial and we've had other people picking up pieces of it over time and it's time to really

120make sure that we've got the expertise to do that work to the level that it should be done to really support all of our students in our district and so i'm really excited that we're moving forward to hire that um the position is posted and we look forward to an inclusive hiring process posted now a full week it's been posted a week i don't know i haven't gone in to look at our applicant pool yet uh it we have the first consideration set next week so we'll we'll look at and see what our applicant pool is if we're ready to uh screen an interview but we're going to prioritize making sure we have a quality pool of candidates so if we need more time and we need to do more recruiting we'll do it thank

121you we have tom what are you our first day of that in oct in august will be an equity focus day where right now sean and i have been in some meetings to identify uh who we might partner with to really make sure that that is a high quality day of learning for our staff and uh and and looking forward to giving you more information as we get that solidified just want to just take a couple minutes to reflect back on our year and as i started looking at some pictures i was i realized what we have gone through and what our staff has done this year and i think we just have to once again say people i know this has been a disruptive year but i am so impressed by the creativity the

122support and the work our staff has done through in virtually impossible circumstances when we started this year you see we started with the strong start days because our students were going to be home remote that turned out to be a really good decision and something our staff said we learned so much that even if our kids are back we want that opportunity so we've moved a few of our conference days from uh fall and spring to the beginning of the year and we'll start our year with a strong start k-8 so that our teachers can meet with students and uh and families to get to know them right at the start of the year remote learning we saw tremendous creativity our schools bringing in small groups so that we could get kids in person who

123really needed additional assistance what you see in the picture below is we had pe teachers someone going out to neighborhoods setting up activities so the kids from different neighborhoods could come out and get some activity it was uh just an example of the creativity of people demonstrated and finding ways to get the kids we had a principal who was going and reading on pre on on kids porches with them so um continued with some of our holiday activities you see easterly there uh we we always have a massive some massive pumpkins over there to enjoy in the fall and they have drive-through events at so many of our schools just give kids something to get out and stay uh stay active and continue feeding our students our nutrition services team was tremendous those aren't massive

124pumpkins yes they are yeah those are those are she brings him down to california and her kids her her students like you know predict and you know she uses it in math class and that type of thing yeah yeah yeah our hybrid reopening you'll see a familiar face there um i would say figuring out how to manage the traffic of the number of cars we had coming in to get all of our kids in that was a feat uh the screening ever helped teaching our students the routines to make that successful was a a huge project that our staff took on with enthusiasm finding ways to keep kids distanced in every setting you see them in the library there uh reading together in one of our libraries and and and keeping kids engaged and making

125it fun teachers used whole different a whole different set of strategies than i think they've ever used before and we found a way to get back to activities and athletics and some of the things that our students enjoyed that was tremendous learning for everyone to figure out how do you do safe uh engage in safe activities under these constantly shifting sets of rules but um was i i so enjoyed the chance to get out and see some of our students participating in their favorite sports and activities um remove returned to a four day week you see at tomorrow high school in the morning it was setting kids up as they were coming in it was it was a production figuring out how to use our space in ways that kept students distance to the greatest

126extent possible while having them in our classrooms but as soon as the health department said we could do it we started moving forward on each of these each step along the way as they said it's safe to bring back the hybrid we came back to hybrid when it was safe to come back to uh additional days we came back four days a week and then just this last week so cool to see our students um i love the ground walks and we got out to as many of them as i could to see our kids returning to their elementary schools and getting the chance that the kids loved seeing kids that went to their school graduating it's such a nice way to say to them this is this is the reward for your work uh

127and just so and and the kids are never too old to want to play on the swings so there's a bunch of our graduates uh enjoying the play equipment tumwater high school same thing that's uh little rock elementary and you see this i can't see it very well but students coming down the halls the kids were all excited to cheer them on as they came past peter g [Music] so i don't have from every elementary but i grabbed some examples just to give you those are amazing events if you get the chance to see one and our graduation events at tomwater district stadium it worked out really well and fortunately the weather cooperated for us i see a couple of familiar grabbed a couple of graduates there i couldn't help but i mean that fantastic

128picture uh two of our board members where that was a particularly special ceremony so um listen laurie and uh and and it was it was fun to see our community together for those events so so nice to be able to actually hold a true graduation for our students and tumwater high school similarly we thought it was going to rain the rain stopped uh we got that chance to enjoy it outside and so i was so thankful for that opportunity to celebrate all of our kids so it has been an extraordinary year uh and i mean looking back on it i i've been walking through classrooms every chance i get this week and as i talk to teachers what i keep hearing is i'm tired and i've learned so much this year i will never my

129teaching will never be quite what the same as it was before because the things i've learned i'm going to be taking from that to make make things better so that's that is that's the message that seems to be consistent and i'm really happy to see our staff have a chance now to take a breather reflect on what they've learned recharge and get ready to come back and and um and learn become what we're what into our new normal whatever that is a new normal where we have some new skills we never had before this whole event that's what i have tonight thank you for that reflection i forgot all of that stuff actually i blocked it out i'm not sure which one but we've been through a lot this year yes we have um all

130right so now more discussion equity update mr tiller uh okay this will be brief um mainly because this was a month ago and i'm having a hard time remembering that it's a while ago uh so catherine sailors uh she was speaking on a equity institute that i believe it is occurring in north thurston school district and it's done by or facilitated by vince vincent perez who turns out is a resident of tomwater and so she i i think in a way it'd be something that we could bring to our district this this institute or this concept or have victor khan speak to us during one of our equity meetings um what does that mean equity institute well an institute about what we'll get there oh sorry sorry okay collection of diversity and inclusion consultants developing

131a holistic approach to equity in districts okay currently they offer two equity fish bowls one they call an open call which i my mind went to like office hours virtual office hours and then a youth call it's all just kids and catherine was saying is she just kind of popped into one of the youth calls and she was blown away just by conversations that were happening the the pushing the pulling on each other and where they're at and what they're learning she said it was astounding and so if she kind of gave us an open invitation to drop in on those just to kind of hear what kids are talking about uh i think these next two bullets are kind of in the genre of like maybe mission and vision so the service it's in

132the service of racial healing and intersectional social justice that might be a mission um and they like to foster structures so that students and families can make policies that impact their day-to-day experiences so it's kind of empowering them to be involved in the policy making process when it comes to equity work uh our vision going forward so they would like we've talked about this many times and sean's been a part of the meeting so he's he's heard this as well but keeping uh in the fall future sound esd offering the foundational work possibly to our new staff so again we all have that foundation to move forward uh winter and spring of because that should be 2021 2022 tomorrow school district community and staff facilitated planning and management so involving our community in this planning

133going forward we've talked about the organization of the five subgroups and then there were some breakouts on the pros and cons of having large group discussions small group discussion large group committee council meetings small group um more focused subgroup meetings so not only have the monthly large group that have maybe two weeks after that the small students get together just to work on their focus area okay and then finally i'll wrap it up so that all can hear there are three summer sessions june 23rd july 28th and august 18th all from 6 to 8 and they will all continue to be on zoom and we're going to try to do those six to seven to make it a one hour oh that's right for everyone so yeah we have it on calendar six day but

134we'll try and see if we can shift that to an hour if what i think catherine was saying it's more of a as a check in and stay engaged so we just don't hear from each other for three months and then try and pick things back up in september that's true that's what i got i will send you a link to that the equity institute's website so you can get a little more of a look at that if you're interested how's that any questions first esteemed colleague in this was there something you missed uh no like i mentioned i was on the first half of the call and then left for a soccer banquet so i think you covered it well thank you all right no questions all right and lori new member update okay

135um thank you for giving me the time to have a few minutes to discuss it'll be not really long i promise um i just wanted to kind of um take a minute to reflect on my new member observations since i've been a new board member here at tom waters school district i recently had the privilege an opportunity to visit many of the schools in tumblr and i met with principals um got to go into classrooms i got to meet teachers i got to see students and i'm just here to say that i couldn't be more excited to be a part of tumwater the schools that we have are incredible our administrators are are oh my gosh our teachers principals they are just doing the best job that they possibly could have with kovid and the

136things i saw i think sean kind of talked about little rock i was at little rock and how they were managing the lunchrooms all the schools and the overflow uh the distancing all the different things that have had to um overcome have has just been incredible and you know i wasn't sure what to expect when i walked into schools i thought well gosh you know i'm new we'll see how this goes um but i was welcomed wholeheartedly and it was just an incredible experience and um it's just it's just really wonderful to know that um my children are going to such incredible schools and that we have such amazing people that work within them so thank you to all of them personally for me for all the hard work that they've done um and then

137also i just wanted to say that uh i was going to talk about this a little bit but then mr trosper was here it was so exciting um the history of our of tumwater is really truly incredible and to have mr trosper here today to talk about it is just it is wonderful thank you so much for your time um i've done a little background um reading about it myself and i would just like to add that we have an amazing book on tumblr school history we have it here in the district so if anybody wants to see it or read about our incredible history i strongly suggest you do so um you learn a whole bunch of stuff that you maybe that didn't know um but uh overall i would just oh and i

138did want to add one more thing about tomorrow virtual academy just wow just incredibly amazing and again as a new board member trying to digest and learn which is basically a pretty steep learning curve if you're coming into a situation like this has just been absolutely incredible and again the two gentlemen that we had tonight just blew me away with what they're doing with tva so um again i also would just like to add that um if anybody again would like to talk about anything with the district or they want to um talk about things that i've been discussing here tonight please feel free to reach out to me i'm happy to answer any emails or take any calls i'm here for you thank you all right thank you lori so now it's time for

139board member comments two minutes where's my phone all right anyone like to start i'll start all right um i wanted to uh thank all the graduates and congratulate them on graduation it was an honor participating in the events this last week really cool uh special thanks and congratulations to my daughter for graduating from tumblr so excited about that i should have had that picture in there too yeah well we have lots of pictures my wife and the pictures i wanted to also thank the teachers and congratulate them for getting through the year and it's been really a joy to go around with the food truck and spend some time with them at least saying hi um it's always nice to get thank yous i don't know if we earned them but it's still nice and

140then i want to thank don prosper and the renaming committee for the work that they did for us i appreciate that it's always great to hear more new great information about our history and again as lori mentioned the book is awesome so get that uh tva as well kyle and andrew thank you both two great gentlemen that are working on that i know of them prior to tva and i say we have two great people that are committed to that program so congratulations there i look for good things for that to come and then finally uh thank you to coach mcgrath for everything he did i know everyone's gone but again a special thank you from me he's personally helped my family through part of this pandemic if you will but i think he's helped

141the community out more than anything for sure so thanks again coach mcgrath thank you casey taylor who's next oh i can go just yeah um i also would just like to say congratulations to the graduates and to my son who did graduate from black hills high school um and i just echo casey sentiments about the teachers again um what an incredible job that they've all done this year getting through something that we have just all never seen so thank you to everybody it's quick yeah i'm good good okay first off this is my vote for graduation outside literally it has been decades that teachers have been saying we've got to have our graduation on our property in our city outside i loved it it was phenomenal i want to see it going forth that's my

142loop okay to each uh dave myers mr cutler and students great speeches i love them dave if you're listening out there go ahead and take the time you're a great speaker your kids love you give a longer speech it was good make it longer than that okay jeff broom great speech i loved it but i want to hear some students get some student voices mixed in there and finally i believe it was gertrude stein [Laughter] who said hey it's gonna be summer it's gonna be warm let's listen to some music and we might as well dance let's celebrate that's a paraphrasing group okay well it's uh it's hard not to just kind of echo everyone's thank yous it has obviously been the most challenging year and the work that everybody has done is just incredible

143um i still i'll probably never actually like really it'll just never sink in you know what this district pulled off it was it was amazing um so that being said i i hope everybody is able to tie up the end of the school year and then go off into a restful place um i continue to be just this is kind of my personality about these sort of things i continue to think about things going forward into the future i am feeling maybe somewhat protective i guess in a way of wanting to know and anticipate what is going to happen next year as much as possible in order to be the most prepared in order to avoid as much stress as possible so um i've mentioned this slightly in passing but i'll just throw it out

144there again at our next meeting what i would really like to see is a sort of a new decision-making framework but not you know not the one that we had created clearly because that is done as far as i'm concerned but in terms of the entities that really truly do dictate the rules so department of health cdc ospi however it is that that works together so we have a very clear understanding to the extent possible to the extent possible um when we have to make these kinds of decisions these are the kinds of you know this is who we have to follow and and and have have a road map so then we we can communicate that out to everybody as much as we can in advance and he was having a consideration for this

145part we don't know yet but we do know that it's this entity's guidance that we will need to follow and just again just to try to minimize the stress of the upcoming year as much as possible thank you so like a pandemic governance structure basically yeah yeah yeah no that's actually good yeah we have one of those um so i want to put a plug-in for the wazda conference in november it's going to be in person it's a great opportunity for us to get together to get some training and just to regroup and start thinking more as a team i everyone's done the thank yous that i would have done so i want to thank all of you um this journey has been amazing because of all of you and i love our team because

146of all the different perspectives that we have and even when i start rolling my eyes about something someone else will talk about why it's important to consider and i appreciate that so i thank you for ignoring my eye rolls but um i really i really do we spend a lot of time together not just graduations but trying to figure out the best way to move forward and i really do appreciate each one of you and all the time that you have put in people do not understand that we don't work for the district that we are volunteers um because someone said don't you work at the district office no i just have my picture up there um so they they but they see the work that we're doing and um they're even more amazed that

147we're not paid to do all of this and so thank you for dedicating all your time and i can't think of a better team to work with so with that anything else uh now uh we're going to recess the regular media enter into an executive session to discuss personal performance evaluation qualifications for employment pursuant to rcw 42 30 110 1g the executive session is expected to last approximately 30 minutes uh i'll be coming back in here to adjourn the meeting there'll be no decisions being made um after executive session so if mr chester would like to leave he won't miss anything so [Laughter] all right now we'll go we're going to executive session thank you [Music] you