June 10th 2021 VISD Board Meeting

001and spring um you know what the fairies is no no we should probably shouldn't hold for her i think right yeah right now spring's coming right just about spring's coming that's just very um you know one more day of two boats oh yeah we try not to screw it up yeah keeping it positive though we did three run-throughs and not once did it um there's not a lot of hope on this one dr spencer dr spencer all right should we call this ready yeah all right just make sure you have your uh mic down so they can hear you we're gonna go ahead and get started all right bob's here mike working all right i have a motion to approve the agenda so moved second all in favor aye aye thank you welcome everybody so

002first step on the agenda is uh is this right the board of the organization yes uh there it is oh it's not underneath public comment that's why you're confused right the uh right now um it's a bet would like to assume the role of liaison with um the vashon island emergency management area board representative and spring has indicated that she would be comfortable resigning from that and it recall it requires a roll call vote well first a motion and then a roll call vote to make that change uh i move the bet supplant yes spring as vemma rep second all in favor oh we have a roll call vote so uh how do you vote reagan i vote yes hi bob i toby i all right that is done thank you zabet and thanks spring

003now to public comment uh we have one that was submitted um but is there anyone here that has a verbal public comment all right thank you do you have the honors slate of reading certainly thank you very much this public comment comes from david shaw a visd parent dear miss mccomber and superintendent mikshihi thank you for your service i'm writing in good faith to encourage a more public more robust discussion regarding the potential selection of nikken pond at educate deliberate as the diversity equity inclusion consultant for the vashon school district whether one favors their critical race theory approach to dei as advertised by e2 lc and championed by thinkers such as hooks delgado stefanik crenshaw and recent variants like candy and d'angelo or a more liberal humanist style approach as advertised by non-crt-based dia consultants

004and championed by thinkers such as martin luther king jr bayard rustin and recent variants like woodson mcwhorter lori and hughes the decision on the approach ought to be decided by consensus of the district constituents in the community and the parents this is a formal request to the vashon school board and superintendent mcsheehy to feel facilitate a public town hall style event outside of the normal public school board meeting schedule and structure to build consensus with the community and constituents of the vsd on the important practices and approach to dei in our public school please read this letter at the public comment session during the next school board meeting on june 10th and consider the following question for public consumption why do you think a critical race theory approach to dei is the best approach for

005the students over a liberal humanist style approach to dei in vashon island school district looking forward to your thoughtful response best regards david shaw v d parent thank you slade all right the superintendent report first of all welcome everybody tonight this is getting down to the end of the year so i appreciate you showing up pretty much after a very long year and i appreciate our teachers coming tonight our admin team and our district office folks as well so welcome i'd like to start off with the land acknowledgement the pyola people lived here long before and during the colonization of the americas and the westward expansion of the united states we recognize these indigenous people of the salish sea their displacement dispossession and continued presence as we reflect on the past and move to the

006future let us be reminded that our school district sits within the traditional lands of the pyola people at the end of the year we traditionally well during the year we traditionally get notification of staff who will be no longer with us on to their next adventure in the following year and it's very difficult to have to wait because sometimes staff put in put in their notice early but tonight's the night and so we're going to do some celebrating and we have some magnificent staff members with us this evening who we get to speak to their accomplishments their achievements their dedication and their commitment with us this evening so principals will be speaking uh uh for some of their staff members i um catherine coleman by the way sarah deeply regrets that she cannot be here

007tonight she had some family matters that she needed to attend to and so i told her i would step in and try to do the best i can but it really isn't going to take much because i've been here for three years and sarah it's been wonderful working with you uh and for you at times as well um so oh that that is that is uh the the honest truth to have someone so knowledgeable and such an expert at what they do to support you through a pandemic i just you know i i just can't imagine anyone else at the helm of our nursing services and knowing you you'll probably you know be humble and say you know it was a great team effort but i just want to let you know that it really

008was you and and i i credit our zero transmission rate i credit the health of our community the health of our families and the kids uh to you and so thank you very much but on another note when i came here three years ago i didn't know that our island had a reputation for vaccination and not in the maybe the best way and so i i can speak right now i can't remember the statistics that you you know that you shared with us a little while ago but sarah has significantly changed the culture of the island and and maybe pandemic was a great time to actually even enhance that and carry that you know carry that culture forward or cement it on the island um but i can just say that uh i'm so happy

009because the new laws really prohibit students from attending unless they're vaccinated and we need every set of eyes and and bottoms in those seats uh but uh you know you were just so instrumental in in making that change happen and my hope is that we no longer have uh coin and king and every other news agency calling us uh five times a year and that's no lie everybody uh to figure out what vashon is doing with their anti-vaxxers and so um much appreciated and i'd like to let the floor open to any board member who would like to you know share any any thoughts about your retirement and then and then let you say any final words if you wish but thank you sarah i'm just going to echo and say i mean what a

010year for your final year in health services in a public school district and uh really there were so many unknowns and things were changing so rapidly and a lot of it was left to on the ground decision making by our own people for what was best for our staff and our students and i know that you were instrumental in that process and just really want to echo thanks for all of your hard work and dedication and just monitoring it you know from the start all the way through the end of the year as things changed and keeping everyone informed and calm and vaccinated so thank you so much i just wanted to say uh thank you for your leadership and uh your never-ending advocacy and i don't hold you personally responsible for our historical low

011vaccination rates thank you and congratulations yeah did you have any fun farewell or are you um yeah well we know that you'll be enjoying many years still volunteering on the island enjoying your work outside at your house and so you're obviously welcome to come around anytime and i promise not to call you during the summer okay okay next i would like to invite rebecca gertzel to the microphone who's going to share her experience working with sally adam as we recognize and celebrate her work here in the district i don't believe you're miked it is an honor to talk about sally she is amazing she as when i first entered chautauqua i mean just the the welcoming and warmth and support that she shows every staff member becomes comes through not just to our staff but

012to our families and so sally began working in the district in 2002 as a substitute teacher and then joined our staff in 2005 as a spanish interpreter and translator and she's continued interpreting for parent conferences which is very needed at chautauqua and creates that like super tight bond with families and shows you care about their about their kids and their future and but she provides a lot more than just language support over the years her job transitioned into a role that increased our parental engagement and school participation for latino families and in that role which began in 2006 through a grant the district received then continued in our ecap preschool support and supporting our students k-5 and sally has made a huge impact on our families especially those that have been traditionally marginalized she worked

013closely with her spanish-speaking families and she's often their first contact in school so you're working with preschool families that have not had any any experience with our school system which seems rather large and intimidating sometimes to families and so that first that first person is an important one in their lives she is the first caring face they see and then continues to provide a love stability and guidance that parents need throughout their elementary experience and by organizing events for latino families at school her impact continued to grow she helped them as they have grown their own parent group and supported families at chautauqua by organizing an annual dia de los muertos event which was not just chautauqua it was community members as well partnering with our interns we made it a couple years ago we

014started an after school club for native spanish speakers and we work with families to and our interns to create a dia de los ninos a children's day celebration as well as partnering with fashion artists in the schools to bring in traditional mexican dancing for first graders and so the impact has her organizational impact has been large but most of all she helps students and families feel heard and valued a valued part of our community relationships and connection i tried to think of two words that i think of when i think of sally and it's definitely relationships primary but that connection for families so building those relationships putting her heart and soul into her work it is the care that she shows that really makes a difference her smile which you can't see beyond the flower

015you can tell she's smiling the smile lights up the conversation and her warmth builds collaboration and comfort that all students and families need in our schools it has been a pleasure to work with sally and she will be very missed but she plans on this exciting new phase of her life and spending time traveling visiting friends going to spain new mexico california and mexico and making collages playing music cooking and continuing to engage in our community so i think she's gonna still be a part of our schools in in a different in a different role but thank you sally it's been it's been great working with you board members what's that any comments i just uh marveling at uh that you started in 2002 and you've been a bedrock in the across all the buildings

016and what stands out to me is really the stability that you've provided the families and and guided by love directly for the the entire family so thank you so much i can't add to what toby said just that uh i know you most by reputation and um the people in this community that you deal with most directly um think you're a savior so um that's good enough for me thank you for your service yeah i just want to reiterate what rebecca was saying about the the first contact for especially for our our our latino families coming into the district and and setting things off on the right path and helping them stay organized and on track and feel included is is huge not only for the immediate you know learning of their child but you

017know for their their long-term um participation in the community at large and so that's such a critical role and and i too know you best my reputation and i've heard nothing but fantastic things about you and so congratulations thank you so much for all your years of service and enjoy whatever you're doing next congratulations sally and for those of you who are watching if you'd like to take a look at the beachcomber this edition it has a a great article for sally susan interviewed her and it's a wonderful expose on sally's work in the district and do you have any partying comments for us sally or thank you for your sweet words and i really appreciate working with you too rebecca i love working with you and i feel so honored to have had these

018years when i could do something that i so love doing many times i've thought how lucky i am to do a job that i love so much and get paid for it too and so i am retiring but i won't be disappearing and i hope to continue playing with the kids at the preschool and having opportunities to continue to work with the community and coming to board meetings i hope right thank you thank you sally next i'd like to invite greg allison to the microphone this evening we're going to recognize evan justin he is not going to be able to make it but i have heard uh on good note that he is watching this evening i do think he is watching yes yes significant pressure on you mr alex i know i know i

019know so where could i start with evan yeah she's not here so i will i will you know be very no i'm just kidding um no i want to wish evan just a huge congratulations on 30 years of service uh he told me that he started uh back in which is a lot a lot of years in this district taught a range of science programs at our school probably math along the way i'm sure i've known him for at least half of that time and and just a really unique individual evan for if you don't know evan his love of science is he wears it he eats sleeps and breathes science and so uh he's probably one of the few guys and and teachers that you could learn things from the t-shirts that he would

020wear uh it was actually pretty cool so um but no in all seriousness uh evan uh really worked to kind of share that love of science and uh help kids be curious about the natural world the universe around us and and expand their thinking and curiosity in so many different ways engage them uh he really he was on on in his element when he uh led science fairs i don't know if you've all been to to these old science fairs and it was quite a community event uh for so many years and and evan was responsible for that and got got a lot of community support but and and really the last number of years i noticed evan really trying to work to connect individually with students and support them not only with science but

021social emotional learning as well so uh and i'll say one other thing he was always really quick to he's always supporting his colleagues he had gadgets galore in his science classroom so if we needed an adapter or any kind of a tool he's your go-to guy so um and last but not least evan was i had a conversation with him and said evan what's your next you know what's your next phase what are you gonna do and uh he said he you know he's the type of guy type of teacher who just grinds you know he he goes at it and and really puts his nose uh to to the teaching profession and he's enjoying just that taking a step back um kind of being a little bit more free and uh so i wish

022him well in his new liberated self and i'm sure we'll see him around the island doing science experiments and free air in his cobra i think that's his new passion if you don't know that so anyway congratulations evan thanks for your [Music] service border remarks yeah i i want to recognize uh evan justin uh and i so much appreciate uh evan how you reached the kids with just boundless spirit and passion around science and always committed to uh you know to engaging the kids in a way that that was uh that was interesting and finding different ways to reach out to the kids and just make it exciting and i think that that is a great way to build community and curiosity at that age so thank you evan if you're out there you are

023an offbeat fellow and that's what i like about you and i think that's what the kids liked about you uh and like toby said you're the passion for science you wear it you're a billboard for it and your passion for it uh the kids pick up on it how can they not and uh that's what great you know that passion that comes from the heart uh is what makes a great educator a big part of it anyways um so i will uh i think this whole community will miss you in the classroom yeah i i don't know evan very well personally but at 30 years makes him almost almost in my generation i think we just missed each other by a few a few years there i could have could have been a student but

024um it was probably my loss but uh that is a that is a very impressive tenure and you've had so much impact on all our students throughout that time period and i'm sure that their excitement about science and some of them went on to work in science fields is owed a lot to your contributions so thank you so much for your service i want to say one thing about mr justin is that i know all all teachers spend their own money to to buy things to the classroom but he really took that to a different level and i think it's just because he he showed his passion and couldn't not share it so there's going to be a lot of artifacts coasting around congratulations evan uh i hope you hope you heard some welcoming words

025tonight and we wish you the best uh next i'd like to introduce uh danny rock principal of ashland high school who has the the floor for our remaining retirees uh but he's going to start uh i had paul caldwell on my list but probably doesn't matter where we start but so wherever you want to mr rock you know we we haven't always um been able to to say goodbye to our retirees at a board meeting and i'm just really appreciating uh this experience and i'm really grateful that paul and steven and paul and sarah and sally and you know that you're here and that we're recognizing you and that and they've got to say things about everyone so the word that i thought of when i thought of paul and paul and steven was homecoming

026and i just think it's a really appropriate word um for all three of them when they think about their time with us and also uh their their transition away from us so paul caldwell um you know found a home on vashon but i sure hope at some point you get to know paul and where he's called home over the course of his lifetime he has gone into the soviet union he's gone into war-torn congo he's gone into he's met with kings he's played with famous musicians i mean he has been all over the world and an organization he started over 60 years ago still exists today still doing the same thing and he brought all of that to us and part of it is his love of music but really what paul caldwell is all

027about is connecting with people and he's been doing that with the those most in need here at vashon island high school he's been serving our special education students and there is one person we can count on no matter how disregulated a student is no matter how challenged they are academically no matter where they sit in the learning spectrum we know there is one person who can work with any student and it is paul caldwell and he has served faithfully and it really i know some of you know this as well but he also must win the attendance record for attending the most vast on island high school sporting events ever absolutely i have i am a school administrator and i'm i'm paid to be there and i go to as many as you know it

028still keeps my family intact uh which is to say not all and but everyone i go to paul is there and i bet he's at all the other ones i don't go to um so he is a lover of of youth and a celebrator of youth and not just the youth that he's paid to be with but really all youth and i think that his heart is big enough and it just keeps getting bigger everywhere he goes so his story is um and that's just the smallest sliver so please take take time uh to get to know paul he he is generous enough to share her story with you i promise um so paul we will miss you here and i know it's not the last time we'll see you and thank you um homecoming

029uh for paul is uh when i first moved to the island i moved to kingsbury and paul was my neighbor and i met paul and caddy and met him walking their dog and our he met isaac my son when isaac was two and it was just uh maybe last year when isaac stopped running and jumping into paul's arms for paul to pick him up and he was too big so earlier this week they just settled in on a hug at thriftway instead of the uh the leaping into the arms so uh paul has has been a place you know it was an early place where we called home i also have to say paul you're the first staff person i met when i walked onto campus my first day on the job so paul gets

030that that distinction as well thank you paul [Applause] the word homecoming for dr stephen floyd has everything to do with where we're sitting today people um we are holding the school board meeting in a theater and could there be a better place for us to say goodbye to dr floyd than in a theater um because though dr floyd was an outstanding english teacher and a teacher that we similar to to paul where we could count on any student who needed a different level of care a differentiated touch some compassion some flexibility we could count on dr floyd to serve all of his students with distinction but particularly students with you know higher needs it is in the theater where students really found their home here on washington island high school and he created a space

031that served our students in our theater arts program it didn't just range from typical drama productions and musical theater productions but some of my more impressive kind of favorite memories are our student written plays and productions we actually had a year of a student music written musical that included a student performed and written score in collaboration with our with our english teacher our journalism teacher we've had uh famous actors come and work with our students in this theater we've had community performances and um and to say that dr floyd put his heart and soul uh out here is is to barely do it justice you know he would he would work the lighting board for our community user groups you know deep into the weekend um just because he cared you know and where someone

032else might want to make sure they didn't break something he did it because he wanted to promote the arts and so dr floyd we were we will really miss you uh we're looking forward to more ways to say goodbye to you and the high school staff but thank you so much for your years of service here at bashan high school and homecoming you know when you're when you're raised on vassan island and then you leave ashlan island there is a very um interesting gravitational pull that sometimes brings you back to bastion island i certainly married someone like that with my wife but paul takes it to another level paul peretti has deep roots on the island and um if you didn't read the beachcomber article several years ago and you didn't know that paul planted

033the christmas tree where we used to light up the christmas tree in the center of town uh that was thanks to mr peretti and a passion he had for planting trees and when he was in high school um to all the work that he's done in his own community where he lives now serving on the board and working with folks in that space he has come home and he has made fashion island a place that is better to live on and that is especially true as he serves as students and families here in our high school we call him p-dog he is a a man of humility and compassion and grace and professionalism he cares deeply about his students works tirelessly hard for them and not afraid to um to go the extra mile or

034to figure out how he can better serve them by doing something he isn't used to doing so i've always appreciated paul your your integrity and your humility and and that you laugh at my jokes and um if you really want to to do something um you know if you want to speak paul's love language then go go chop wood with him and uh he will be your best friend so thank you uh three of you very much board remarks i was going to say that uh all six of you including mr justin are legendary and uh have poured everything into your job in this community and uh how cool is it that we that we have staff that is so remarkable so thank you and congratulations uh i have a little to say about each

035of you uh starting with paul caldwell um paul is very notable get the pun there paul uh my daughter lily who is now in grad school in philadelphia uh played was paul caldwell in the night of the notables literally are you still doing that in the notables not anymore oh sorry dating myself uh but my daughter lily uh just loved paul so much that the i think everybody knows none of the notables um she dressed up and did a little vignette about paul caldwell and paul was in there in the in the audience when they asked who am i um paul stood up and said are you me it was very choreographed and very beautiful and just such an important impact on our family and i know others um mr floyd uh you yo danny

036your predecessor used to say our art saved lives or theater save lives i forget which it was but um the theater was very very important to one of my kids um who was uh feeling you know a little isolated and just really found a home and i know lots of kids that have found a home in the theater and they're kids that don't may not play sports so that this may be the only home they have so i deeply deeply thank you for the contribution to all of those kids um mr peretti i just think that you uh one of the um more difficult jobs that you're you're advising kids and counseling kids and providing therapy to kids at a very very difficult time in their lives um college choices and uh whatever emotional needs

037they may be having so i great great great great work and it's it's just such important work so i i just really wanted to to recognize that so thank you to all of you uh yeah i think um the non-conformist kids are probably nearest and dearest to my heart the kids that are on their own path or or don't walk to the same drum as everybody else and and i know that all three of you have had a a lot of work with kids off the on the road less traveled and that um that goes beyond education you know that goes to self-worth and self-esteem and mental health and whether it's through the theater arts or through counseling or through um you know special education work making those kids feel like they're a part of

038what's going on and they have a place is the foundation for everything else that either will or won't happen in their lives and i know that all of you have had a huge impact on our students through the years and i really enjoyed the theater shows that i have seen and i haven't had a chance to talk to the other two of you very much i'm on the other end of the alphabet for my for my kiddos counseling and and my speedster hasn't really arrived in high school yet but uh i know they would have they would have had a great experience with all of you like so many students have had and thank you for your service toby i think is this on you nailed it when you said legends i feel like it's

039reminiscent of that a few years ago when all those amazing musicians were dying it was like prince was dying this is what it feels like um in my short eight years in the district i i have had personal experiences with each of you or interaction and i am so grateful for the work that personally touched my own life with my kids my wild child whether that was with dr floyd or paul feretti saying it's gonna be okay everything's good and he's gonna be a senior and you were right you were right you had faith um or sarah with the lice squad we were trying to kill all the lives on the island or sally there's just it's gonna be really hard no one will ever be able to follow in your shoes and the work

040that you've done something so important to me with the racial equity work so thank you all of you and best luck on your next chapter yes uh so many stories to tell but yet so many more stories to live so uh thank you very much and uh we appreciate uh if you have any other words to say we'd certainly love to hear from you paul paul and and stephen yeah it's just been an honor and a privilege it's been a short six years here but i've enjoyed every year and gotten to know the island again and my colleagues have been fabulous to work with i've made many friendships here and i'll continue to foster those friendships going forward i just can't a big shout out to danny uh he's just been a terrific leader and

041full of wisdom for me um and i really appreciate his guidance through some difficult times in my life and yeah it's just been a great time and looking forward to the years to come with my wife barbara i'd like to take the opportunity just to say thank you for kind of many of the words that you said i want to echo what sally said earlier that i feel very fortunate to have been able to do something i love and get paid for it um i know there are a lot of people in the world who don't have that opportunity and i feel very blessed and grateful for my time here thank you for your commitment to the arts program but i want to also make a plug it may be difficult to find that part-time

042theater teacher that you're looking for especially in the first year don't let it slip away you'll have to maintain the commitment if you can't find someone this year there are more kids out there whose lives really depend on this program whose ability to get out of bed in the morning and come to school depends on having an opportunity like this i've also had uh in the last few years a great opportunity and experience working with some of our trans kids and i just want to say that right now our trans kids are under a cultural attack and assault that will require a lot more love and care from us and so i hope we keep them in mind as we go forward get down hello yeah thank you steven and also just wanted to i

043just don't go to sport events i also attend all stephen's uh shows not just about sports but uh i would like to say first of all a great privilege to work in the in the high school this last 19 years i took it on uh when i came here really as a temporary job while i was trying to figure out what i was going to do next still trying to figure that out but uh and it turned out this was what i was supposed to do next and it was been a you know danny mentioned that i have worked in over 50 countries and sung for and associated with you know presidential palaces and out in remote villages it has been a great experience but this last 19 years working with the students has been

044the highlight of the students and the master teachers because i've been in classes i'm just so impressed with the level of teaching and uh so i'll just say about the but you still glad to see you're here tonight representing the youth uh but um i think the the kindness and thoughtfulness and um the respect that i've seen you've shown me through the years as an old guy is something that's moved me very deeply and it gets me out of bed in the morning i stagger out at my age but when i get to school you give me a shot of energy from you young people so thank you and uh it's been a just a great highlight and also as steven says appreciate what all of you are doing to keep this whole thing going

045so thank you very much and uh i guess for all of us we'll still be around right all right all right one last round of applause for the legend i'd like to also take this opportunity we are uh they're not retiring they're they're moving forward and moving on uh but our two youth as paul was speaking to ella and mead over there this is going to be your last evening with us as our school board student representatives and you really stepped in and stepped up uh to the work and your your you know your camaraderie with us and your collaboration with cebet and i and and pitching in uh especially around the legislative session i was just so impressed with how you came forward and took the time to plan with each other and and

046became prepared and and that spoke about who you are and who you're going to be you know once you once you leave our district and so mead and ella it is with great pleasure that i get to watch you graduate on saturday and i'm sure your families are as proud as can be as as we are too and i just wish you the best we are going to have two new representatives next year ava stevenson and gwen burwell who will be welcome aboard and i look forward to their orientation but until then uh just thank you so much to the both of you for your participation on the board and everything else in the in the district uh i got to watch you also all year long and cross country and track and so i

047i feel like i can truly speak about your character and it's just unequaled and unmatched and so we have been very lucky to have both of you participate all year long on the board so thank you very much mead and ella hi guys um i mean yeah thank you so much dr mikshi for um those words i think this position that um that i decided to take on with ella um really meant a lot to me and it really gave me new perspective on the inner workings of the school and it was just a new side of the school that i had never really been exposed to at all and it was just really interesting to me and it really gave me um something to like look into more and explore more and i think

048i'm going to take this experience and really use it in the future i know our time for recognizing the staff that's retiring has passed i just wanted to say one thing about dr absolutely um dr ford's class june i had him a second semester freshman year but it wasn't until junior year i had him again for american literature um and his class was probably the first class that not only did i feel really challenged in but i felt like that challenge was something that i wanted to take on the work that was given to me made me want to learn it it wasn't just given to me and it was just more work to pile on i really like he really made me want to do the reading to learn about the topics to learn

049about the books to learn about writing and i think it really impacted the way that i look at a lot of work and i think it's going to be the same mindset i take into college and i take into the rest of my life so thank you for that thank you [Applause] and ella promised i promised ella that she would not be asked to speak so okay can i say something about this yes i was going to say board member oh yeah uh so thanks uh ella and me you're uh you come prepared i appreciate your candidness it makes your leadership credible and trustworthy and enjoy your company um we we started the student rep program here just a couple of years ago but it's really matured this year to to a point where i

050feel like as a board we're getting uh value in it and and i hope that's reciprocal for for your uh experience as well uh one cat one uh anecdote is uh me i remember uh youth soccer at agron field where at uh halftime you know the families bring out oranges and mead always liked lemons and so i'm sitting here tonight wishing i had cut up a lemon uh to bring to you so my virtual lemon thanks thanks toby i just wanted to say you guys uh i was impressed with how focused and concise you were you know you uh you you came in and you you knew what you wanted to say it was relevant to what we you know we were talking about and it was always value-added because i always i always learned

051stuff that was going on in your minds and in your your peers minds and at the high school generally it was it was always just very valuable so um and i i came in here kind of well what are we doing with these student reps here and you guys have really contributed and i just just really appreciate it very much having you guys on the board with us yeah i want to say congratulations on graduation and also that for the reasons that have already been said um you know your your energy and your contribution was as a peer on the board it wasn't as a kid and that's very impressive for people your age and so i i'm really really fortunate to have served with you and known you and i wish you all the

052best in your future when you go last your colleagues say it all so just ditto on everything they said thank you so much for your contributions and for showing up the way that you both did and congrats and i hope your next adventures are amazing all right one more round of applause for me and ella okay so uh thank you so much for honoring uh our retirees and our board reps uh our next uh and final part of my board report i'm actually gonna turn it over to a really bright shiny star at the middle school jenny granham who has been organizing and collaborating with our admin team and dr spencer and developing our the first year of our summer learning academy and so we have an update for the board from jenny tonight and

053i'm excited to to have her share i got this i just gotta lower it because i'm little um so i gave you guys in your packets some descriptions of the classes that are being offered and i did that because i really wanted you to see the amazing things that our educators came up with for our students this summer since we i ran that one we've had four more additions we've had a book club in the woods offered by margie butcher a reading support by patty gregorich at the middle school level a math support by cornelius lopez at the middle school level and academic support at the high school level we started out by having people pre-register for students who were either spanish-speaking families a lot of thanks to sally on that one and for our

054tier one in tier two students we have about 600 spots available in all of these and so far we have more than 500 spots filled so we're at 85 capacity many of these classes have wait lists on them so the outreach has been incredible and we're working right now to make sure that we have some transportation services and food services going and it's been incredible and it's really not been hard to advertise because these courses are incredible they're so exciting and if you guys have any questions i will answer them i really like uh how you organized uh the the board doc and showing us kind of all the the full the classes that are full and when we sent our last communication yesterday can you when when are kids still able to apply for

055those or try to fill those last slots what's the deadline um so i ended it for the end of june or until they fill so the ones that are not full really most of them have like five three to five spots available i um i'm really excited my one of my kiddos is signed up and there's something for everyone really nicely done i was curious i think i did i read about maybe transportation we're trying to provide transportation in some situations right so i just started working with matt um yesterday so we're going to be trying to run limited transportation which is going to be like emergency bus routes and so once we get that up and running we will communicate that to all the families who have signed up and let them know where

056the stops are and the times absolutely any other questions for jenny i was going to say when this uh concept first came up here a couple months ago i was scratching my head thinking like really students want to come back and and do more classes in the summer and there's a there's adults and teachers that want to conduct these classes and and as i've seen it evolve it reminds me a bit of the experimental college university of washington offered these classes are are rich and uh i wish i could take the uh roof building with uh with eric morton's the maritime history with tim herford but i i'd actually like to take all of these just seems so cool so really well done everyone to create create this program in such a fast period of

057time and have such a robust response yeah i'm super impressed and i feel the same way except for dissection jigsaw i don't want to do that one i'll pass on that one but yeah right no well thank you so much jenny and uh if all any staff are watching right now um thank you so much because it really is a testament to the creativity and the imaginations and the can do for what kids would want to come back for but also for what kids need to come back for so hopefully it gives them kind of a running start into the next school year which is what i'm excited about so thank you very much jenny absolutely thanks okay just a a a few more notes in my report just upcoming events hopefully as many of

058us as possible can line the roadways this saturday for the parade and then i know families are and our graduates and staff are really looking forward to saturday evening which will be an amazing event really coming out of the pandemic being having a graduation ceremony in person and so uh jackie merrill and her staff including danny are going to be you have been putting have been putting the details and the finer points on that planning and uh kevin dickerson and facilities also i want to give a shout out to them for all the preparation that is going into and the event and our tech staff uh john and everybody else uh you know thane and and i'm sure uh five or ten other students as well so um thanks very much uh everybody for uh

059coming tonight and and making the celebration happen i we will also on our final day on the on our staff i get together we'll be giving you a kind of a a special uh going away gift as well so i look forward to that celebration too all right thank you very much all right next our board remember remarks if there's anything in addition to what we've talked about spring so um just briefly i wanted to mention that um recently many people that maybe have noticed there's been quite a bit of discourse on the subject of critical race theory so i just i just wanted to briefly mention well i am no expert on crt um it it really is you know and i encourage everybody to lots of you already are really familiar with that

060but to inform yourselves and learn more because i think there there might be a quite a bit of misinformation out there um but i think it's really timely because critical race theory is as so many people know it is really um it's an academic concept that really emerged in the 70s and 80s that came out of a framework of um legal analysis and so now we we're seeing it in the realm of education in school districts um but why i say it's timely is because i think it it provides an opportunity if people have questions if they're they're reading about that our families our students we really welcome any chance we have to talk to you about it because we are going to be embarking on our own journey of um racial equity work in

061our district and luckily we have consultants who are experts in this area and there are many dialects of racial equity work so we just want to make sure that if people need clarification if they have concerns if they have questions i personally welcome those you can contact me i'm sure my co-directors or slade or principals would be happy but i'm sure there will also be opportunities where we're going to be really involving the community and making sure that people are really aware of what this work is and what it entails but i just wanted to mention that because we're seeing it a lot in the news right now and it's a little bit controversial thank you spring thank you spring i appreciate that ella and mead um i just wanted to shout out the riptide

062their first physical issue was published yesterday for the whole year um it was run by the incoming editor-in-chief also so not only was is that impressive but it's a new staff that hasn't um even published a paper before all year and i think the product is really impressive too there's some great articles so if you haven't already go check that out me can you remind us who the new editor is yeah the the new editor-in-chief is amelia spence um and she ran this issue next year she's going to be a co-editor-in-chief with lila cohen okay nice great um i feel like mead has really shown me up this time i didn't really prepare anything yeah i'd just like to say thank you to the board for letting us have this experience and also just to

063the school district as a whole it's been obviously a big part of my life on vacheron and it's been a really good experience and well i'm happy to move on i'm also sad about a lot of it we're gonna miss you guys all right thank you i just want to say me just stole my shout out so thanks for nothing all right thanks uh the next part of our meeting is actually a a vacheron school district uh budget hearing and i might need a little bit of hand-holding here to conform to the revised codes of washington and robert's rules of orders but i believe i open a public hearing and uh so i i now open the public hearing for this uh part of the agenda where we're gonna um uh talk about the uh

064the budget well are there any public comments right okay let the record show there are no public comments all right i am now going to close the public hearing for this part of the agenda and then we'll move to our own discussion yes thank you okay the 2021-22 visd budget and resolution 790. uh matt and kay are here this evening if there's any further questions we can certainly pose them to to matt and kay uh but without any further questions i will be recommending that the board adopt resolution 790. uh one one item i'd like to add is that on page 17 is the revised student fee schedule per your direction as the board it's the same uh same schedule as the one that you've pulled apart you have a single pdf of that schedule

065but that's the same one that's embedded in that yes correct um do we have a a motion to approve the what is it number resolution 790 resolution 790 so moved second all right all in favor should we have a discussion first any discussion um i i just wanted to make a couple points um there are great work um there are a few red flags for me um in this budget and i just wanted to i know we're going to get to deal with them in future years um that our revenues are up about 520 000 um but salaries are up of 560 thousand dollars bearing in mind these are one-time revenues that will ultimately go away so um we're going to absent new revenues going to be we're going to be looking at future cuts

066down the road absent replacement of these funds also i think the board we had to make some tough choices here with regard to we're cutting program at the same time we are doing this um yes we have six fewer students but we're down two and a half fte teaching ftd and so when revenues and expenses collide we reduce staff so that's something i think that we're going to have to deal with going forward another red flag i have is off on enrollment or enrollment generally enrollment i think is the lowest i've seen in 20 years and i don't see any prospect of it increasing dramatically interestingly off off island enrollment is as high as it's ever been and so the ratio of off island to on island enrollment is skewing greater and greater in in

067terms of the off island students so i just want to make sure that we don't as a district become addicted to the off island student which ultimately it's a blessing to have but i think we also need to be cautious about not being like i said dependent on those resources um lastly also running start is trending upward long-term trend um so i just see a fair amount of risk for us in the future and i i just think we're going to have to govern very closely and watch these numbers but i am going to support the budget thanks bob regular spring say something spring i have nothing to say all right uh so uh all in favor of uh supporting uh budget resolution 790. i i i all right thank you off to the ferry

068there's gonna be three of them tomorrow right that's weird uh thanks kay thanks uh thank you great work lesson okay uh next up are the policies that mr allison presented for a first read at our last meeting uh if there are no further questions i would recommend that the board adopts these policies as a group policy number 3241 32 and 43 14. moved second all right i have a one question we are retiring some policies do we have to to vote on that or is that not part of it it's just part of the thing okay that was my only procedural question any other discussion all right all in favor aye aye thank you thank you board uh next uh see you all by literacy program update there's mr gus hanging in the background mr

069gus thank you for coming back because you were off island right correct now he's back generously he was collecting materials for off island uh students you know at the return you know return materials so what kind of a boss makes them come back well i also am a recipient of the island's generosity this evening and um one of our staff members is providing me a place to stay and had gave me dinner so it's uh the island gives quite a bit as well so glad to be here the seal by literacy program has a few changes i'll start with that middle column there but the change is fully implemented this year the world language department at vhs recommended that we switch to the apple testing run by lti the format of the test is actually

070pretty similar to what we had used before which is the stamp test through avant last year we did both and this year we just did the apple and some of the reasons why we did this is there was a belief in from the world language department that the apple test has a slightly higher rigor in terms of the expectations of students as well as being a bit easier to navigate the other component some universities will accept apple test scores that earn the the level four the four credit um equivalent as uh they'll accept them and accept payment for for about 20 college credits as well um for about 390 or something like that um and so by being able to take the test earn the honors of the seal by literacy potentially earn the four

071credits if you don't have them already at the high school from taking world language classes here you also get to start off with college credits and i know that made an impact to several of our kids who are considering a double major in spanish now because they're able to to make that change um and then so on the left there the exciting part is just how many students this year that are graduating with the sealed by literacy we have a wide selection of recipients basam al mustafa and arabic oscar bathor and german jacob hue shirt in german and jakob also took the spanish test just a few weeks back and we just got the results back a day or two ago and he will receive distinction in spanish as well um which is just awesome

072very impressed with that guy william kim and korean christopher fontino in spanish maslin hughes in spanish bella in spanish lyla mill then in spanish quinn ryan sienna stromberg zach van dusen eleanor yorkin and max uber all in spanish and it's just a testament to the you know look at the names a lot of those kids aren't heritage speakers um right they've come through our system from middle school either here or at harbor school as well as um our system here for four years in our spanish program so it's pretty exciting to see that um in terms of what the spanish world the world language department here has been able to accomplish with our students and then i just gave a little shout out to some of the kids that have taken the test already for

073um to be future recipients borrowing that they meet all um graduation requirements um coming up any questions related to this yeah who's this mcsheehy kid right yeah in a couple years yeah questions for our guests i don't have any questions i think this is uh you know one of those really cool things that the district does that kind of goes on in the background and then we hear about at the end of the year my college degree was in spanish literature and i know how hard you have to work to to become bilingual in another language and keep it up and to be able to start the next chapter of an academic career with with this seal is it's material significant so really well done to the students yeah how many years have we been

074awarding the seal by literacy now stephanie right right so well done on on your behalf and gus thank you so much for stewarding this program at the high school as well of course yeah i'm glad you directed that question to stephanie because i would not have been able to answer but it's been fun to run and i'm already have plans with some students for offering um what we'll be offering next year as well excellent okay thank you thank you thank you so much ella snuck out of here before we could say uh i know congratulations i'm impressive you have to stay all right next up is uh discussion items uh starting with the instructional materials committee uh and the uh the new materials we're adopting okay well thank you for having me here tonight to

075discuss our upcoming instructional materials adoptions um but before i just want to also give a shout out that one of the primary drivers for that uh ceo by literacy program was to honor students with heritage languages and build that as a strengths-based program and the importance and they often come without all the academic support of developing that language particularly if it's not a language that we offer in our schools so i just wanted to make sure we acknowledge that piece of that program it's a really important part of our program and it's also any student seventh grade up is eligible to start testing in that program so they can front load credits for high school as well as earn a seal so it's a cool program and i'm really glad we got it up and

076running and so glad that gus has continued um running the program so just a little side note on that um i'm going to ask jody to pull up it's something actually that ended up not in the packet and i have to take credit for that i sent some materials well ahead of the big bulky packets that are in your board packet or in the agenda items and if you just put up the memo jody i'd appreciate that um this is just sort of the summary it's really the what we're looking at tonight when you have time you can really dive deeply into the supporting documents that are in your packet and we'll make sure that this gets posted so that the rest of the public can look at it if they want to so we

077have three adoptions that you're looking at for this year to be purchased for implementation next year we have elementary school math middle school math and high school social studies i just wanted to give a special shout out to the teachers who are able to be here before the meeting and thank you for the board members who are able to attend that session i know that's something that we started a few years back and it seems to be a great opportunity for the teachers to engage directly with you about the work that they've done on the committees um this represents a significant amount of work and it's one of those things that happens in the background while everything else is going on and i just i can't state that enough the work that our teachers have

078put in not only in this year of craziness with distance learning hybrid and all that they've continued with their regular duties which is to evaluate program the elementary and middle school actually have been looking at math programs since a year ago from like january it's been a year and a half or more they've actually been looking at the math materials and so um it's a significant amount of work and then not only do we that we have a lot of interchange with staff and piloting students engaged with the materials but then we also go through the bias review which involves students and parents as well as staff so it's a very rigorous process in addition now there isn't i don't know that there's been any recent adoption that doesn't have some sort of technology piece

079associated with it so our tech team is also engaged in the process so it's a pretty lengthy robust process and i just want to give a shout out to the people so this chautauqua middle school math team was layla tanner paul whelan glenda berliner mandel long shannon brown jill reiff schneider holly boyajian leslie cerebirkov kathy hannemann and kathy hall so we had representation not only from each grade level and multi-age as well as special education and our tier 2 instructors and then of course rebecca and john and that team met pretty much every other week last spring before this year it was every week so they've really been dedicated to this work and um participate in a lot of training the middle school math review team was jenny granham cornelius lopez frank daniels karen stendall

080and mary biba and again same thing just putting a lot of time and effort again representation not only from the general education classrooms but also from special education staff and students and then at the high school this year aaron marsh i took on the world history which was basically a holdover from last year we did social studies at the high school but we held over world history because the ap curriculum went through a significant rewrite so he was kind of waiting for the materials to catch up to the rewrite and it was really important for him to select a book that could be used by a full spec spectrum of students so that what they're currently doing at the high school is offering world history with the option to do an honors program but this

081book also if they decide to run ap history ap world history again could work in that that classroom as well so it's a book that works well in a variety of of settings so they've made these recommendations we had world languages at elementary and middle school also like the exploratory classes and victoria clayton did some work but those are supplemental materials so you won't see those in your packets because supplemental materials don't require board approval but i just want you to be aware that that work is going on in the background as well so victoria ended up purchasing a lot of new trade books to use in her classroom to teach language and culture in the specialist block and then at the middle school none of the exploratory languages decided to go with any particular

082programs they're still going to pull from a lot of different resources so you won't see that jody if you can put up the adoption cycle we'll make sure you get a copy of this this is um many of you have seen this multiple times in the past this is sort of my way of tracking our adoption cycles so that we sort of stick to roughly a seven year cycle of review and that it sequentially goes through school by school and different content areas this gives us a map of costs so i update it when we get new information but it helps us with planning trying to know what kind of materials cost we need to kind of account for and it also just helps us keep track of where we're at whose turn it is

083to go in the review cycle so i'm i try to put this in front of you usually this time of year and then also in the fall and it's just continuously in draft because i'm updating it as we get more information or as changes occur so that's what this is and we'll make sure that you get a copy of that so i'm not going to really go through the big packets i'll let you take your time to read through that exciting material but you'll see there's a lot of different pieces when we're reviewing that and if you have any questions i'm here to answer them best i can did you say that summary wasn't sent to us yet but the memo the original memo like the cover sheet that says these are the things that

084we're recommending and then a memo that just had the imc agenda with the notes from the meeting that's our district-wide team and then the adoption cycle these three didn't make it in because i sent them about a week and a half before all of the big pack and it just kind of got lost in the shuffle and i didn't notice till tonight oh yeah so i owe jody a big apology because i didn't check the agenda to see that all of the attachments got in there no biggie i was just thinking it would be nice to get those later maybe the perfect okay yeah so sorry sorry that was on me because i just didn't um check closely your head should roll now thank you everybody okay great work thank you i have two comments

085one is um i really appreciate the thorough planning cycle you know as we think about long-term budgeting this really helps us understand and predict and see into the future it also i think gets the the different peer groups organized and thinking ahead for what they'd like to review and ultimately adopt and recommend so it's just it's a structure that is so well organized it makes it uh you know it makes it easier to to just be in the rhythm and i think that it's also a matter of you know equity for the staff right that they're playing ahead and that it's not just the squeaky wheel that they get some new textbooks or in the old days it was the new teachers sometimes wanted want to make them feel welcome but then their peers had

08615 year old textbooks so this is just the right way to go about it and super thorough on a lighter note i also like that there's student evaluations of the material and i quote a student saying i noticed and i ready that they talk about nonsense for 20 minutes while i could actually finish the damn lesson in 10 minutes and it's just i went through some of the student comments and it was it was fun but i think it's really great to get that perspective and include their voice as well yes and and the nice thing about the program you'll notice that it's the same program we're gonna have k through eight so both teams arrived at the same decision and that piece for middle school is actually going away they're eliminating those annoying characters

087at the beginning of the lesson but the other thing is i think having been in a distance we've used that online component a bit more than it's intended the program is very intentional to only have students basically twice a week for somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes total but in a distance learning environment i think some of the like especially middle school were relying on that more so they had students doing more time so it made it even more annoying my son i thought when i read that i thought oh they must have asked my son but no it wasn't him i had a question about um what's the basis of seven where does the number seven come from and what's the basis for it it's a lucky number bob no actually um so it

088it has to just do with the content areas that we have um has to do with kind of the evolving like how the life cycle of a textbook and content basically um so gone are the days of having 20 to 30 year old social studies textbooks where the language changes drastically over that cycle so seven years is achievable and manageable and make sense ideally you know with technology you'll see some of the things like our social emotional learning and the um edmentum uh that we use we probably will try to bump those to a more regular cycle things that are are updated more frequently but seven years seems to be manageable as you work your way through and it's a good life cycle but there's some flexibility in that sometimes it's eight sometimes it's it's

089less of something significant really happens that was my next question is there a perverse incentive in there to sort of use it or lose it meaning if i have a curriculum that maybe it's it isn't really dynamic like a science curriculum or might be um if i don't do it in seven and i want to wait and go nine is there a perverse incentive to no i gotta do it in seven or else i'll miss my my loop there there is a little bit of that right so we really are trying people to keep people on cycle because of the just being able to afford it right so what what this represents is mapping out the larger adoptions like things like math or english language arts which typically be especially elementary adoptions are just much

090larger and much more expensive so trying to block those up against things that are maybe not so much but we do make like individual adjustments for example like the world history theoretically should have gone last year but because we knew that the ap was going through significant content realignment we waited till this year to do that so where we can we have some flexibility but there is kind of a sense that you have to have a plan right it's like here's time to do it if you're not doing it now we need to map it out and see if it's going to work and it may not work in two years it might be a one year extension and then maybe it is something that will work in two years so it's really there to

091kind of keep people's feet to the fire and as toby mentioned it also when people like well i want to do this like well actually you just your department just adopted two years ago um your next turn is here if there's a really urgent need then we need to talk and try and come up with a thing so the seven years is is there is the guideline and we try to stick to it where it makes sense but we have some flexibility around it great answer i just wanted to make sure it was not a slavish seven years is up let's do it and yeah you guys are thinking on your feet and making decisions as that's appropriate so thank you good answer i think my first year on the board we retired a book

092that i had as a senior i believe we had science textbooks that were written before climate change was was known yeah we had the books that that the students were using that you know were more than twice their age so right yes i think that's a good metric yeah is the climate change reference um there's a lot of um it could have been that there could be folklore there's just ways they talk about families ways they talk about people i mean just the the language can change so quickly and particularly if it's quite an old textbook it's just you can read it and it just it's like if so i collect math textbooks and it's interesting because it's almost like a historical book you can go through and you can kind of get a sense

093of the history going on at the time the book was written and that's what you kind of want to avoid unless you're doing a hybrid math history class but you know generally that's not what's going on so we the other thing i guess i didn't mention that is worth mentioning we do try to look at open source materials but they still just haven't quite come along the way that you would hope in terms of having robust supports for teachers and for students so there are a lot of really cool free materials but they're just not very robust programs they don't function super well um without requiring a whole lot of additional teacher or student work so unfortunately we just haven't been able to go that way yet i'm sorry what's open source materials they're free

094materials that are online so there's a lot of content areas you can go online and look at what are called open educational resources and so it might be an algebra textbook but that's just it it's just an algebra textbook and it may not it may or may not have the teaching supports that go with that or differentiated tasks for students or any of those other pieces they're pretty bare bones but our teachers are pretty um resourceful in that if they see something that's usable material as a supplement they will use things like that as supplemental material what do we do with our old textbooks if they're in decent shape can we well jody always does a great job trying to reach out to used textbook vendors and um we don't always have a lot of

095luck you know because like everybody else there's cycles but some books sometimes have some value and you can get a little money or a voucher so that when you make a purchase down the road you can apply that vouchers we've done that in the past and then the ones that we can't find homes for or will reach out to districts i say we jody reaches out to other districts to see you know is there a need and ultimately what happens is that they get surplused if we can't find a home and so then they go to the public sale and they're either sold or recycled i have a question for slade here uh the curriculum expert uh do you see other districts potentially i i this notion of uh repurposing uh is this the kind

096of thing that uh uh less well-heeled district might have an interest in or are they keeping up with their stuff too i had a very similar experience to stephanie it's very difficult to find other districts or private schools or clinical schools or you know to to use those materials everyone is typically on a cycle of their own and and um we also found that when we were trying to sell them back to a you know back to a vendor we were getting something kind of like a penny or something per book and it was going to cost us you know a dollar to ship it exactly and just resources to package it um it wasn't going to be worth it so it's you know they usually go to surplus and then they get recycled yeah

097that's the most common but every once in a while we do find a fit and even when we're looking for something that you know in the old days when we're looking for something that was obsolete we'd reach out and get them from people i want to be a statewide like an exchange or something where you could put ospi or something i don't know and and you know curriculum directors do reach out to each other sometimes or you'll see an email email i thought i had a pot of gold on my hands when i was you know surplusing some cpm textbooks and not so much so yeah depends on the content we made some good money off our old trig books back in the day and i was surprised because they were old but they were

098like a really popular trig book and so it just depends supply and demand we can give them as a reward for people who take the vaccine right exactly certainly i just want to know too um stephanie does a a a really fantastic job at trying to um wheel and deal in the you know kind of financial aspects of it it really takes a lot of work with the you know with the reps and finding what kind of package is going to best you know fit your teacher's needs it is it is somewhat of a little bit of a moving target because you you haven't seen the teachers kind of fully implement so you often don't know what supplemental materials are you know that they're going to want and know what subscriptions you're going to want

099to you know kind of invest in and you've been very preemptive and productive with you know kind of finding the best solution for for our teachers while minimizing you know while keeping the the budget under control so i appreciate that thanks it's a lot of work it's keeping the budget under control and implementing with fidelity right that's the next step that's the next step yeah thank you uh next up still you presenting a discussion item uh related to comprehensive sexual health education all right okay switch to topics here um so actually jody brought to my attention she was doing policy review and right when i was coming on into this role the district was engaged in updating their sexual health policy and so this policy revision is to bring it in alignment now that the

100state law was was enacted and so that's what you see before you but i thought it might be really useful i asked jody and slade if they might want these bulletins from ospi attached as a q a from ospi and the bulletin i thought they did a really nice succinct job of kind of explaining what's going on because similar to spring's comments about critical race theory you've probably heard different kinds of little headline grabbing uh attention seeking headlines about sexual health and kindergarten and all you know all of the things that that we're trying to do what you need to know in our school district so i would really when you have chance definitely take some time go through the the q and a that's included and certainly pages two and three on this bulletin

101just gives a really nice uh summary of of where we're at in our district we're actually pretty well already aligned with um the policy and the new uh legal requirements because of our work with the exemplary sexual health grant bob you might have remembered working on that team um so we actually are well in alignment and it's sort of perfect timing for us because next year is when we would be looking at our health curriculum at the elementary and particularly grades four or five we already offer social emotional learning curriculum which is a requirement of this law for k through three but we have a set program in place k through eight we use second step at the elementary and we use character strong at the middle school as of this year so we already

102have our social emotional learning we're already in compliance with that piece um and and it's perfect timing to review the elementary because by the beginning of next year not not this coming school year but then a year out we will have to have our new program alignment um i'm leaning towards i talked to rebecca we haven't really talked to teachers just yet but we're kind of thinking about having our health pe teachers take that on at the elementary and take that out of the classroom since classroom is really tight with ela and math and science and so it just seems like a natural kind of model to use what middle school's been doing the health fitness model at the middle school middle school is already in alignment because of the work we did on the

103grant we have a get real program it meets all the requirements the materials we've been using for sexual health is there are the materials from ospi the no curriculum which is hiv and std specific and then also the king county family life and sexual health curriculum which has actually been a program around about 30 years now and as has been shown as a very effective program the other piece that lines really well with our district philosophy is we put parents as the center like all of the curriculum have strong parental pieces like parents are supposed to be the guiding influence in in these kinds of conversations and parents have the right to opt out of school lessons on sexual health so we're all in compliance with that already and also this idea of learning healthy

104relationships and refusal skills and abstinence in addition to contraception but the emphasis is on refusal skills and healthy relationships and delaying sexual encounters so um i feel like it's one of those cases where i actually feel like we are ahead of the curve and it's probably because of that grant that really launched us in the right way and the timing is just right our high school is also going to be looking at their curriculum because it's a great example where um they're cte funded for the last couple years we've tried to kind of get that process going because the textbook they're using is pretty outdated so it's kind of not useful at all so a lot of supplemental materials have had been been used they do use flash but the nice part that that grant

105did bring into play was our team council which has been a huge piece for helping with lessons not only in their health classes at middle school and high school but also for whole district uh whole excuse me a whole high school assembly type settings um for the upper grades who don't have a health class in their um schedule so that is one piece we will have to work on as a district because it does require at least two points of contact in high school um but right now we've been we've been every year but we just need to firm that up i guess in terms of where we're making sure that we get the required content so i feel like we're in alignment i just want to give you the background because it is one

106of those things that you'll probably hear buzz words or little snippets and a lot of misinformation around this um but we're in a pretty good space and after we go through our process next year i think we'll be fully aligned so questions thank you any questions for comments spring um i was just trying to glance through those faqs um i'm just curious i i hear that our policy is really um as you said aligned with the current legislation and that all makes sense but i'm i'm looking at some of what's been crossed out in red and and i'm just curious um just to have you expand a little bit if you would on you know some of that is i like it and it's like well we cross that out and i i'm i'm understanding

107but you know some something like um recognize and respect people with differing personal and family values um so it seems like while we're really paring this down and i i think i understand that but just just a little further yeah that's pretty much all it is is paring it down as you've probably heard about policies that policies should be fairly brief and succinct and then procedural is where you get all of the three four or five pages of detail about how it's implemented and this aligns with what the recommended am i getting this right jody you can bail me out here if i'm saying that wrong it aligns with the wasda model policy the new policy as a result of the the rule the law so some of this language that it's just been lifted

108and would be found probably more in the past yeah i'd have to see exactly how it cross runs but our our procedures for this is i want to say it's three or four pages long and we have things in our procedures like the teen council like the um availability of condoms at the the high school in the procedures yeah we kept those pieces because that wasn't in the model we're like no we need to keep those pieces because they're really strong pieces of our program pet peeve yeah that policy is what procedure is how so thank you yeah any other comments or discussion thank you thank you thank you stephanie next up mr stanton and this is sarah so um in front of you i believe you have three different documents related to a proposal

109to adapt and adopt a new technology salary schedule as a standalone schedule john actually brought forward concerns quite some time ago around his staff falling significantly behind their peers in their compensation and so we launched our typical evaluation looking at comparison districts um looking at alike jobs and what became painfully apparent to me as i started down this path were two things number one as i think we all know every district office district level staff is arranged uniquely in each school district and what i discovered is tech staffing takes that concept to the nth degree and so every tech staff is a completely unique beast for each school district i also discovered that as i was looking at job descriptions most of them were gibberish to me because my text speak is really limited so

110once i reached that point i had to reach out to john and beg his assistants to kind of decipher and identify what positions actually were job alike with our positions foregoing any concern about titles but looking at what the actual job duties were so this became a much more complicated lengthy process than we originally anticipated what we did discover over time is that our tech staff is significantly behind their peers the only way that we could really come to a number that was kind of logical to look at was to take the overall tech staff differential from district to district in terms of kind of the average wage for each tech staff and what you see in the comparison is actually our projected with this new schedule wage for next year compared to the other

111district's wages for this year so this actually skews to even a more um i guess positive portrayal then we'll actually we actually will run into next year um at the time we were doing this we didn't have available salary schedules for the following year um so that's kind of process if you have some nitty-gritty questions about you know finding the matching positions john is probably the person to speak to that but we have come up with a proposal for a salary schedule that does pull away from the rest of the non-represented district employees we did that partially for clarity because they are unique positions and you start to get a very kind of busy salary schedule also because there really are unique requirements around those positions that are not necessarily common to the other non-rep

112positions the the technology world in school districts continues to get more complicated deeper move faster and we want to be able to kind of look at those salaries in a stand-alone place do you have any questions about john how many people are we talking about here uh so i have 3.6 people so to speak on my team how does that how do our ftes compare with other districts comparable in size to ours yeah that's a good question um i i some some districts have a l one fewer persons than us and some districts have like maybe one more than us so we're kind of in the middle of that spread some of the obviously the larger districts have huge teams and that's just matter you know how that kind of rolls for the big district

113what's the net uh change uh for next year uh the net cost yeah 11 000. and i do want to point out that there's actually capacity for that in the captec budget so those dollars do exist and are available other questions from the board not really it seems pretty no-brainer straightforward yeah i think i'm i'm always been a proponent of um you know paying market comparable and i think that's the principle we've carried forward throughout the other staff classifications since i joined the board so it seems pretty clear to me where we need to be heading if we want to retain quality people in this area i do kind of wonder like how many extra hours you would guess our staff worked this past year our tech staff i'm imagining it's a lot yeah it

114is a lot um i can tell you that um in my april 21 report uh i i gave you guys a sort of a look from 2012 to now and uh this when we started school this year we we did a thousand cases a month with you know three and a half people so there was a ton of extra hours we worked weekends uh i went to people's homes to help them set up their wi-fi uh thing was programming on saturdays and sundays you know i get emails from him at 10 o'clock at night so i i don't really have a number for that but i can tell you it was it was a wild ride for sure i have two technical questions one is right not actually tactical from a technology perspective my computer's

115not working but um uh while we look at this as an hourly rate um the pay isn't variable by hours right and in other words if an employee works over 40 hours a week they don't get overtime it's budgeted uh at the capacity right right and and secondly is you have the annualized salary at uh 2080 hours which would represent you know full-time um and like other staff does the it team work through the summer or how does that balance out so we have um three staff who are full-time and that's including me and then we have one staff who's a 0.6 and that's uh sort of roughly six hours a day work ending end of june commencing back mid-august and so the sort of short answer is three of us are working sort of

11620 80 hours yeah okay okay well thank you very much and then so this is a first read for for that salary schedule and then we'll bring it to the board for a second read on the 24th thank you thanks for the analysis i know a lot of work went into that and that's a tough one um all right dr mcsheehy right tell us about start time right uh i'm not gonna bury the lead uh so i'm gonna i would invite the board i believe you have it on your screen but you're also welcome to to sit in the front there's several slides that we're going to be moving through the the last slide i'm going to kind of skip to it but don't skip to it jody we're going to be deferring our decision

117uh to do any kind of start time decision to march or april of next year that's kind of my initial timeline so at this point in time we won't be i won't be recommending to the board again this is a first read so but i i won't at this point in time i'm not recommending the board make a decision right now that involves a change for the 21 22 school year any change in start time would happen the 22 23 year school year that would be my recommendation but that that is the lead but i would like to take us back a few steps and start with the analysis and and uh and the slide so you'll see the presentation agenda just has a list of bullets there that will take us through the the

118data collection process that we use following the uh exploratory committee's report to the board back in april as you know they you know it was mostly cabinet transportation and and matt sullivan who who led that team uh and wanted just to basically give me an indication a recommendation that that that start time switch could be operationalized uh there were some hurdles but overall they said that they wanted to move to phase two in terms of getting more stakeholder feedback um we continued to put the the research in here uh and that also you know kind of was what prompted us but also also high school students and secondary students in the pandemic and hybrid model started at uh nine o'clock so we had some experience with that in in the parent surveys and student surveys

119reflection surveys it became evident that that was something that they wanted to be investigated further we listed some belfairy schedules here you could see that families and students and staff had a choice between option a the grades pre-k starting at 9 15 and grade 6 through 12 starting 805 that is what we call our traditional schedule and then option b non-traditional schedule grades 6 through 12 starting you know just the reverse time starting at 9 15 and grades free through k at 805 those were approximate times but if a decision was made we would iron those out we listed some ferry times it's important to note that we do have southworth ferry students as well to kind of not create a busy a busy schedule slide i just included the fauntleroy's schedule right now for

120those commuter students there's a several points that we took the pulse in terms of uh what our what our stakeholders thought and felt about this particular change so we interviewed families staff and students we had a couple of family q and a's during the evening sally adam and delaney steele reached out to our spanish-speaking families and then families with commuter students i had a single small focus group with them commuter uh comments and students um we saw comments in the in the family surveys as well to where we were able to identify some of their concerns and and thoughts around a schedule change i've been sharing this data with the board kind of all along but i'm going ahead and go through these slides please don't hesitate to stop me because i'm i feel like

121i'm going to kind of go through these fairly quick but if you have a question just raise your hand or give a shout you'll see from this slide from 570 community responses we had approximately 70 70 percent or 67 percent identify that they would like to to change the from the current traditional start time to the new start time and then the slide that follows uh i believe eight of 24 you'll see kind of a breakdown of those numbers and and how uh each of those schools kind of weighed in those the how those families weighed in and so you can see uh what i think stood out to us at the at the onset of this data collection was that we felt that we'd have maybe more chautauqua parents uh resistant to the change

122but actually we saw somewhat of a almost of an even split you know i consider 5545 somewhat neutral and not an overwhelming majority this is going to come into play later on the the family data there were just some themes uh i i was able to to read through all the comments and so i did condense some of those themes those who who chose option a you know they they basically spoke to the how the changes would negatively impact them they weren't necessarily for option a but they were mostly against option b some of those impacts are not surprisingly about our students who participate in evening athletic and after school activities parents spoke about decreases in homework time time for students to seek employment and just overall work schedules and child care needs again not

123surprising and not in in many of the pros and cons that we saw from other districts and other studies same reflections there and then those who chose option b were really about aligning our practices with evidence-based you know science and many parents commenting on the studies that were done out of seattle once they did the change in 2017. and you know they they didn't speak generally too about a positive impact on their work schedules healthy outcomes for students but mostly there was just abundant of comments that they would like their adolescents to sleep more so and how that sleep relates to the overall health of their family the delaney and sally shared from their interviews with spanish-speaking families a whole host of of concerns but most they just said in general most opted for the

124traditional schedule and primary responses being difficult getting getting the small children up early especially in winter and disruptive to work schedules there were some in favor of of their adolescents getting more sleep um but overall they they did weigh in that that this that this change would would not be favorable to to most of the families at least initially uh as presented um several of the families that delaney shared with me also basically just deferred wanted to defer the decision did not see that um that this was a decision that uh families would weigh in on that this is more of a school expert kind of uh decision to be made and that would be in best position to make that so that was interesting to note the what we learned in that commuter session

125uh was essentially two parents had been there and had been um you know adversaries for that kind of change in seattle so it was interesting to hear that those two parents had after their experience had become proponents of the school change and were and were excited about the opportunity that that might be presented to their older students several of those families also had fourth graders he didn't have any students younger than fourth grade so that focus group kind of missed a a segment of those parents with very small children those with fourth grade students felt like they could withstand one more year you know of getting those students up early and then they would reap the rewards of having their secondary students be able to take that later ferry um then we just moved to

126the the data from the staff and this was surprising to me that we had again kind of very small margins from school to school around staff and what they what they wanted to see in terms of a start time initially so as you can see chautauqua 55 wanted to you know choose option b and 45 percent were wanted to choose option a and then some of the thinking behind that um similar again comments that we are going to see throughout the rest of the staff um hard for families with that you know with child care a later start would be better for teens again kind of a mix of comments uh around the pros and cons of the early and late start but no no strong consensus at chautauqua no super majority existed among staff

127around option a or option b murray daf staff very similar um this it was reversed 55 percent wanted to stay option a and 45 percent want to stay option b again a very small very small margin there but reverse from chautauqua and again kind of a representation of themes around pros and cons around sleep patterns improved learning outcomes and then and then concerns about class time missed as the length of day in activity so similar concerns we saw represented in the staff from the from the parents as well those those themes just continued to repeat danny decided that uh basically that this was two um republican democrat these slides so he decided to move away from the red and blue and he went with some nice neon yellow and neon green so there was more

128a majority of staff of ehs but as you can see there's only 26 staff that responded to the survey so most of these staff i would surveys i would say were were underrepresented from the entire staff so you'll see one of the conclusions that we have is is or recommendations is getting more feedback but there you'll see most uh at least most as a super majority not still what i would expect would like to see the times changed and again the science and evidence supporting it but we're still still you know surfacing those concerns for supporting students after school and personal schedules this was probably the most surprising uh that that danny shared with us was that the students uh only 108 took the survey so not the strongest representation of student voice that we

129would like to have seen however there were 55 percent who would prefer to stay in the traditional start time so as denny danny um you shared with us at our at our monday analysis meeting he said that you know the beneficiaries or those who this this intervention was targeted towards at least at the high school these hundred out of these 108 students because uh you know we're it's probably not enough maybe to generalize uh but 55 of them felt that this was not going to be a a change that they would that they would support and then concerns about sports worry you know work and ferry impacts um of course we had some support but uh just not a majority the the next slide which is 21 out of 24 is just my kind of

130simple uh compilation of percentages and who opted for what and you can see you know we had two students two groups vashon high school students and mcmurray staff who had a small majority who wanted option a and then the other three three stakeholder groups families chautauqua staff and bhs staff vote in support of option b and with only the families voting more than uh really the stronger super majority than the than the other two my summary was that there there's there's no clear consensus and a fairly strong analysis was done and and and the process took us a little over four weeks um but it became very clear that we did not build the kind of consensus that we feel is necessary to to make such a substantive decision and so uh you said build

131consensus or measure opinion they're different things so i just want to make sure that i'm understanding you're right right there wasn't a consensus built we did not uh for those who proposed it and and the evidence that's out there and that's the hard part is that we have evidence that shows that we should be doing this but right now we have not collected the feedback and we don't have that consensus around that decision kind of the risk reward right yeah i just want to be clear it sounded like you and i knew it not too yeah we were in the business of persuading and we were right we were not attempting i just wanted to clarify that was a friendly question no no absolutely and one of the other uh possibilities that we did not

132fully explore and which i've shared with matt now recently is is really what what did seem to be a consensus building option uh anecdotally because we did not ask them was the single single start time option and bob as you've mentioned before uh you know we have our priorities right and there's only so much pie that we have and i've asked matt uh not you know in the immediate future but i think it's going to i think i think this uh option deserves a little bit further study you know what kind of ridership are we really looking at um you really get it down to to the dollars and then i've asked matt to potentially present some options in the budget that if you're going to you know give here what would be what would

133be taketh away you know or what what compromises or other decisions would be made in the budget if the board wanted to support a single start time which would be adding some transportation costs on there but maybe there's some savings that we haven't thought about yet some small savings but with potentially some small savings uh but you know stephanie and i uh met um this week and started just kind of you know kind of free free flow conversation and started to come up with quite a few benefits of a single start time in terms of staff professional development small small savings in ferry monitor costs um but there's you know we're it seems like we're always doing things twice you know for staff once in the morning once in the afternoon or once for the

134you know elementary school and then for the secondary schools there may be some there i know there's some cost savings there how much it would offset you know transportation costs we don't know uh but that would certainly be helpful are you confident in i i know you did a back i don't know if the back of the envelope might not give it new credit but uh are you confident in the cost of delivering bus transportation no you know you want to do more work on that okay exactly i feel like what was what was given to us was kind of a strong estimate okay uh but you know in terms of investigating ridership you know where families surveyed you know exactly who's going to ride who's not going to ride you know that kind of

135thing so um i think they gave us a good estimate and that estimate was really just to say you know should we be considering this option and at that time you know between 200 and 300 thousand dollars did not seem feasible but but is that you know what's the real number and that's i think i think because there's a such a consensus and such in the comments that the single start option you know became a dominant theme that we really it deserves more investigation can i add to that um i i find that question interesting about the single start time and i don't want us to lose sight on that our original intention that was because of the studies right that demonstrate that in a lot of sleep studies not just with high school students

136but even 15 minutes additional sleep makes a significant impact but you can't really put a price tag on the mental health of our students so while we really need to look at dollars that's really the primary reason was improved mental health outcomes and academic performance when you look at the studies with college students when you compare students who slept more or studied more it was always the students that got more sleep who performed better so i think that's that's always just going to be really central for me in this discussion absolutely and the idea of a single start time um you know in a time so even moving further into the the slideshow after some conversation with a a colleague of mine it appeared to me that that some families and maybe during the pandemic

137or not i can't generalize too much because it wasn't you know strictly correlated to that it's this idea of you know decisions that we make moving forward i want them to be you know kind of that do no harm kind of posture um and right now the kind of the kind of consent it felt to me that the if we were to be asking our our families who were really sharing with us that this was going to be harmful to them or hard for them to make those adaptations i wanted to have a clear path forward and a stronger message on our why and and that that didn't exist and it didn't exist in our staff it didn't exist you know in our in our students and i think there's more work to be done

138to share that why and to share more of that information there were some families who said that they would have liked to have heard more about that seattle study you know in terms of those students getting either 32 or 34 minutes more of sleep per day and that four and a half to five percent increase in their in their biology grades because that's what that's the class that they studied and so you know how is that how would that transfer to our students here in our district what would that look like uh short term and long term but it would be it'd be really it would be really great if i saw more you know if i back up to this slide right here if we saw other families um you know kind of in

139line with that and other staff saying you know we we share your your purpose we share your your vision for for student you know it's for student health and student learning in the district and so right now we don't have that but i do feel like it's um it's not off the table but we're doing what i what i consider what we're going to do right now is going to phase three of the study it may piggyback into or align with some of the strategic planning that we're going to do but if not my goal again is to have these next steps that i've recommended um more investigation with our you know with our marginalized community you know right now our marginalized community said that they would prefer not to and and i i have

140a hard time you know kind of saying that we're going to make this decision at least without further conversations with with with our with our latino families and we have we have some opportunity to do that in front of us so that being said uh we'll continue the process we're going to take a break from it right now no one's going to kind of continue any work in in july or august but it is going to be front and center for us so that we can come back to the board in in probably march because if anything does require any type of uh if there are any budget implications that's going to be the time for it it's not going to be may or june when we you know if we have to try to

141make another decision around any kind of moving any budget around so so stay tuned uh i want to thank i just want to end this by thanking all the families that did respond 507 is a is a really strong number i hope to get more student voice because that's going to be important and then understand uh if they vote if they vote to stay with the traditional i want to have a better understanding of why they're voting that way so so then i can understand like okay how do you see this decision impacting you so i'd welcome any questions or comments i i have a comment i'm not sure if it's useful um as is often the case the uh it seems to me the financial decision might be a go no go for us

142i mean if it were to cost us 300 thou i just don't think i could support it uh for a unified start time so that that seems to be the most critical data piece and i don't know if i'm speaking for myself only would you be willing to pay 300 000 more for a single start time would you be willing to pay something else so that is a go for me anyway is a go no-go and that the financial analysis is very very critical to me i just right i told slate on the phone i hate the fact that we got buses all running all over this island and parents running all over this island and everybody crossing paths it's such an inefficient way to get people to their schools but i haven't thought of

143a better one yeah i i think it may be unlikely that the single start time will will pan out financially but i am interested in going through the exercise of finding out what the actual costs are but as far as the reverse start time um i i'm right now my thinking is landing with spring where i i do support the science behind it and the fact that the seattle school district successfully made that change and it's interesting to hear that so some of those parents that objected to it are now proponents of it so i agree it's it's no reason to rush it through now without doing some additional research and information gathering but the point is is is science-based and health-based which to me is pretty compelling for making the schedule adjustments necessary if

144it can work for a majority of our of our students and their families so we'll see we'll stay tuned and we'll see how it works out for me the irony is i've actually lost sleep on this uh decision so i'm i'm glad that we're destroying that seriously i i was thinking earlier on that it'd be a a bigger swing one direction or the other and that would be a clearer decision and i read every comment i tried to attend the the meetings and i'd read a comment and be like yeah yeah okay i get that i read the other comments i'm like oh that's a good point so uh yeah more work to be done it's a this is you know it's a very significant uh change and so back to the drawing board right

145um phase three there was a steering committee uh i think at the high school maybe 10 years ago or so that did some work around this and i i remember there may have been some non-school folks on on that committee if there's any value in exhuming their findings or studies that might be additional information that's useful i don't know yeah maybe maybe not but what we are going to probably resurrect is that strategy of some type of a larger steering committee that does have more community involvement right now you know really it was cabinet and administration kind of really doing the lifting and and the analysis and uh again i think that's a strategy that that we'll see put in play um yeah and and and a little just so again a kind of a

146phase three process i to toby thought that we'd have a strong just a stronger consensus of folks who understood the science and wanted to support that um but obviously it's there's so many different variables in uh on our island you know uh so uh but the information that we gather was super helpful super useful and a good place to to go you know to take it to the next level so and when you do this work through surveys you get uh sometimes you get the results so you don't quite anticipate or you think you're asking one question but the responses you get reflect that the participants answered it slightly differently i was i was interested in reading the the teacher's response responses a lot of a lot of them were about their own personal feeling

147about their own daily schedule or you know the convenience instead of the lens of what's what's best for the the students um and perhaps that's the way that we framed the the survey without you know going through it once so there's there's more more work to be done so thank you but i do i do think it's important to be curious and i i think that given the pandemic and the fact that we were we were forced into this model through the hybrid um you know there's it's a good question to ask it's a good time to be curious about it it's it could have been an opportunity and it may be an opportunity for the future but you know the question is why are we piling on now perhaps you know this rather divisive

148topic at the end of the year but um you know the year presented us with a lot of challenges and a lot of changes and i think it was a good question to ask since we were operating on that model and seeing if we wanted to perpetuate it and i guess we'll get the answer that question under more normal conditions after we do more evaluation next year oh my gosh i just have one more thing to say very briefly yeah exactly that like i think that timing is so important and right now and it's the uncertainty i mean so many people don't even know when they're going back to the office if they're going back to the office yada yada so by spring we should know people should know a lot more like what's that

149even going to look like for my own work commute let alone with my kid and i think that life needs to settle in place first before we repose this question to a lot of people so my recommendation that i'll present to you the next part of me will be to defer this decision all right thank you any other comments tonight great you can do it right now let's just let's just decide to defer it and we don't need a board motion dude i mean does anybody disagree well if it's not a uh if it's never a recommendation does it have to be something that we it's not even we're talking about stuff right so i don't know if there's any board action needs to be taken okay let's just i agree unless anybody disagrees want

150to debate it again next week uh let's just sounds good to me yeah i agree so you've got so you're going to take action to defer or yeah we're not there's no we don't need to take action okay we're giving you a recommend we're agreeing with you okay right because it's not actually a decision yeah all right next up the consent agenda does anyone have a motion about the consent agenda i move we approve it second all right uh all in favor aye aye aye thank you uh any new business tonight nope let's hope for the three boats scheduled tomorrow and uh we bring this meeting to adjournment no if i care about other people