April 22th 2021 VISD Board Meeting

001so how about just you and me uh my close uh uh the person who had coveted uh i talked to them yesterday and they had it like back in september had all these ongoing symptoms oh and they just got their second shot and they said i feel so he's like all these weird things they're gone he's like i'm not foggy i don't have these headaches i'm not chronically achy it's like it feels like he's like unbelievable this was so good here cuz i was worried it's been a long doesn't say long hauls i've heard that i'm um it's kind of like just like left over it's just kind of haunting them yeah thank you thank you [Music] thanks for coming back was this the uh impetus that brought you home yeah my wife was not

002thrilled that my daughter was not true as we all know yeah public service school board comes first yep absolutely not a haircut i was here right i don't know every two weeks whether i need it or not do you really every two weeks you're being recorded by the way oh you can do it yourself over recording 702 okay thank you members of the audience for moving me along sorry i sit on my cell phone [Music] so in our company we had over a million zoom meetings in the month of march oh my god yep no okay you guys ready ella you ready all right i wonder what that total is for us okay audience ready okay mrs burwell's ready okay uh could i have a motion to approve the agenda so moved a second all

003those in favor all right all right uh so public comment um we have just oh okay check check credit card cash the fifth grade team at chautauqua would like to address the move of our outdoor education program from waskowitz outdoor school to camp south to begin with fashion island school district stands for racial equity and justice yet in deciding to change the fifth grade camp from waskowitz to camp south district leaders will be eliminating an important diversity-rich fifth grade learning experience at camp waskowicz our students have the incredible opportunity to interact with and learn from a racially diverse group of high school age mentors these mentors are recruited supported and trained through the wells program of highline school district these high school mentors become our students leaders role models teachers and friends demographically vaishan island

004is predominantly white time at camp waskowitz provides 5th grade students an opportunity to foster relationships with people who are racially and ethnically different from themselves this is imperative to the development of young people and ultimately to the adults they will become formative experiences like these allow students to see the world through a racially just lens in addition waskowitz gives young bachelon students the opportunity to spend several days getting to know peers from other more racially and ethnically diverse schools this gives our often geographically isolated students a chance to make connections that will carry over into their adolescence and adulthood the immediate and potential lifelong impact of making connections and friendships with people who don't look like you people with varied backgrounds cultural experiences and life ways is irreplaceable we want our young students to have

005experience that foster trust appreciation friendship and unity now so their adolescence and adulthood will be less burdened with confusion hesitation ignorance and fear attending an overnight school at waskowitz offers a safe environment for students to go off island and be away from home this is an important growth opportunity and a step toward independence that is developmentally appropriate for fifth graders while it can involve trepidation on the part of families it is a way for kids to learn that they can be away from home and be safe this helps build autonomy and give students a sense of self-efficacy finally we have a 29-year relationship with the highline school district in camp laskowitz we hope that vachel island school district will find a way to continue the invaluable connection between our young students and the black indigenous

006and other people of color from the wells program we understand the advantages of moving our fifth grade outdoor school experience to camp south however we believe the exposure to racially diverse role models and the opportunities to build otherwise elusive friendships with racially diverse people is an important part of fifth grade at chautauqua we respectfully ask the board to consider the enormity of this loss when approving the decision to switch our outdoor learning experience to camp cell yeah i have it here thank you jody okay so um no other public comments we will move on to the superintendent report okay thank you very much board chair i'd like to thank the members of the public who are attending okay and thank you to the fifth grade team who submitted that public comment i'd like to start

007my uh superintendent's report with a land acknowledgement members of the board the pueblo people lived here long ago 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 their dispossession and continued presence as we reflect on the past and move to the future let us be reminded that our school district sits within the traditional lands of the puyallup people tonight we're going to start off the report with some school year updates as our board understands and is hopefully celebrating along with myself we've had our students pre-k-12 now return to buildings in hybrid models they we've heard from mrs garritzel earlier when we had pre-k through five and just recently after spring break we had our grades six through

008twelve return again between seventy to eighty percent of those students have elected to return and uh we have seen you know more wishing to to return um once the initial group has come in uh but i'm and uh pleased to invite danny rock and mr allison to report on kind of what's what's what stood out to them in this experience coming back with so much planning and and engagement with staff and community what stood out to them what have they been hearing from students and share some of their experiences and then i'm also going to ask mr stanton our director of technology to share what his experience has been like on the kind of infrastructure in that support role so danny or greg have you wrote chambod to see who's going to go first well

009greg went first last time so i just rushed to the mic hopefully that's okay um yeah there's there's really this is a report of celebration uh in my view we have had a fantastic start to our in-person learning and thematically i would say that we have done a great job of over preparing so a lot of the things that we were most concerned about included the the entry to school the transition between classes the accessing of bathrooms the administration of lunch and the exit from school so these were the main things that we were concerned about in terms of logistics and and spacing students out how do we maintain a safe learning environment and how do we ensure that students are keeping their masks on and that they're socially distancing and um we the very

010first day we discovered oh my gosh we are so over prepared for the entry of school like the kids came they entered school and we all like looked back and like that was it that that's that's it so um and it felt that way it's felt that way every day since um the the students are overwhelmingly getting to school not on the school bus so most buses are dropping off just one or two or three kids the only exception to that is the commuter bus that that those buses are full and we understand why the students all line up on the white v's that have been spray painted on the ground they all feign left but he's he's made some amazing changes to the app that our students take the attestation on that have allowed

011us to quickly scan students into the building they go straight to class and um and they um have been doing a great job staying socially distanced all day long they keep their masks on all day long they are playing hacky sack outside they're sitting in circles on the grass socially distanced they're staying in their seats at lunch we're running two lunches now which is really different i've spent the last several days going around just asking students hey how is this working how is it working when you're at home how's it working when you're here how's it going you know are you seeing friends and is this worth it you know are you glad you're doing this and they're overwhelmingly describing yes this is working yes this is worth it they're saying they're tired uh i

012think the change in routine is a big deal for them um and the amount of interaction that they're experiencing is really exhausting uh for them but it's like they know it that we're hearing them tell us i forgot how to interact with people i'm not used to seeing these many people i'm fully vaccinated like a lot of our kids are fully vaccinated right if they're 18. i'm fully vaccinated i'm wearing an n95 mask and a cloth mask over and i'm in this amazingly safe environment on a safe island and i'm still really nervous about being here so um there's just a lot of that to work out and and i i'm glad they're coming to school to work that out the students at home and the students who are um you know on their off

013day when they're at home they're reporting that our teachers are doing a good job of managing the two audiences the in-person audience and the at-home audience we're really working diligently to speak directly into that camera help the at-home student feel like they're being paid attention to and all the advantages of being at home i think are even more readily apparent for the students when they're watching kind of the in-class dynamic take place i have not had a single person lodge a single complaint to me about how the hybrid experience is going how protocols are working there's been a couple good suggestions along the way and but in terms of opening school there's just a lot of good feeling right now going on at the high school i did want to say that there i was

014also impressed with our ability to have a really thoughtful and different orientation week so we had a completely different schedule at mcmurray than we did at the high school for bringing students in and orienting them and i can say that we both made the right decision based on how it worked for us and how i've heard it worked for mcmurray but we ran a 9th grade orientation on the first day of us bringing students in that was tuesday the 13th and we had a great experience we purchased a film or i should say we purchased the the viewing rights for a day's worth of viewing of a film that was focused on anxiety it was a film called angst it was actually made several years ago but our students responded to it really positively they

015appreciated it and it had in it some i think some timely descriptions kind of differentiating the difference between normal anxiety and fear and worry from clinical anxiety worry and fear and then strategies for managing yourself no matter if you're clinically or or not diagnosed and a lot of students appreciated that um the best comments i felt like we received were um i already know all this i'm in therapy like i had anonymous reports and they're like i already know all these strategies i use them all the time so right that's like the right problem is that we're just reinforcing something so um that orientation for ninth graders included the film and included some get to know you games out on the field and included a tour of the building with all of their classes and

016all of it was led by junior and senior mentor students and so we had 15 or 16 of our junior and senior students come and and lead our freshmen that's just a really um that was really cool to see so that's all i think i have questions from the board yeah i approached the mic first um thank you for that report i was just curious what have you heard from or observed your teaching staff in terms of what their experience has been like um similarly they're also tired uh you know this is different um for them in terms of a change of routine a change of location for so many of them their home routines are different so they're putting out a lot more energy many of my teachers feel kind of mediocre suddenly they

017suddenly feel like they had been delivering something that was a good version of what they could do which was promote and and using google meet and now they're suddenly not feeling as is competent and successful so we've so i hear that some of that commentary that they're not feeling as good about their own practice i think that reflects that they're hard on themselves frankly they have high expectations for themselves but they're really happy to see kids they're happy to be working with students in person they're seeing we've actually seen students who have come back they've been gone all year long we never saw them the kid was enrolled in the class they never showed up they were officially dropped out they were a high school dropout at that point they have come back to school

018i'm talking about freshmen sophomores juniors they've come back to school and they only show up for the in-person day they don't show up for the non-in-person day and um so by the way we're looking at the capacity to bring those kids four days a week and we're starting to make those invitations but our teachers are really encouraged by that it was hard for them to watch those struggling learners sort of just disappear so i think they're feeling a lot better about their ability to intervene and to support students but they're tired they're tired too um i i've been hearing fabulous things and so and you know even in our own household it's been it's been thank you thank you really really appreciate all the work you guys have been doing the one thing i have

019heard that people are questioning which is sort of could be a minor issue is just the the assigned seating at lunch um and how that's going to be for the rest of the year are you guys thinking about ever mixing that up or is that kind of um it's going to be a science eating for the rest of the like where they are now it's a good this is like a mine i mean like really like the big scheme of things this is but this but these are the things that like a couple of parents have come up to me and been like assigned seating yeah what's up with that i'm like it sounds a little worse than it is so the first thing to say is that the students chose where they sat and

020we and so the first couple days you know and we really we prepared them for that we told them like this is how lunch is going to work you're going to choose where you sit and and we're we've allowed them to kind of change that up so like if they want to change their permanent seating then they can and if kids aren't there that day or there's an empty seat we've you know we'll let them kind of shuffle kind of in their area the whole purpose of having a seating chart knowing where students sit is that in the event that we find out that that kid was covet positive we want to be able to only quarantine the students who were within a potential exposure radius for that student i mean ultimately the seating chart

021is designed and our whole day is designed that there would be no close contact that's the design but um but at least we can alert those six people around them hey we found out that your kid wasn't a close contact but maybe you know was sitting in the vicinity of right so that's the design so we can't have a everyday different scenario but we definitely could mix it up if desired the bigger problem for students isn't the seating chart problem it's the fact that their friends are in a different lunch or on a different cohort or a different day yeah and we ask students to eat because eating is a higher risk activity than not eating and having a mask on we want them eating inside it has an ancillary benefit of keeping the garbage

022inside after they're done eating which is a five to six minute exercise then they go wherever they want on campus so most students leave their seating and then they go outside they go into the courtyard they go somewhere else so again like assigned seating is not for 35 minutes it's for eating and then they can be where they okay where they want to be thank you good to hear that's helpful yeah any other follow-up questions for danny i'm curious how the special ed students are doing if we have a just an overall assessment i don't know if they're how much money came back for hybrid and if they've been coming i know some of them are coming back all along and i'm just curious what the overall status is and how they fit into the

023plan right now i would say that a higher percentage of our students with ieps have not come back for hybrid right so if students with ieps are 12 of our population they're underrepresented in our hybrid population and um and many of the students that we're most concerned about who we feel like have disappeared and parents aren't responding and students aren't responding are students with ieps so i think that if you know in this pandemic setting with with school being a challenge to engage with if you have an additional barrier to that engagement it's a pretty tough scenario for our students so we're really worried about those kids we meet more than once a week so we have a special ed weekly meeting where where we bring up students of concern and talk about them and

024that's just special ed staff and admin and then we have a separate meeting every week with our counseling team and other support staff and kind of outside support and we also talk about those same students and so we're constantly bringing students up trying the next intervention you know trying the next attempt to get them to come in so that's our that's our strategy right now but no i think it's it's important to to not forget that while we've had a successful re-entry for hybrid it it only highlights the kids who are who are missing even more and i think a disproportionate number of them have ieps thank you which frankly is also why in our summer programming we are specifically targeting students with ieps with some with some programming this summer to try and lure

025them in into the building and to recover some of those skills during this the summer time like i'm i'm hopeful i'm hopeful that they will come but i also have to imagine if i couldn't get them in here in uh during the school year i may be hard to get them here during the summer too we'll see thank you mr rock welcome mr allison well a lot of a lot of similar themes it's cool to hear about the high school experience and uh yeah i would agree the the orientation week uh was really effective i think and developmentally appropriate for for our school as well and you know i think that has led us into a really really outstanding start um this this past week um yeah i think our over preparedness in some ways

026has sort of led to us being just a really calm environment and i think that was what we were striving for to to hopefully de-stress uh the the come back for students with a return to school and i think we've accomplished that and um it's it's been cool to see uh obviously see our kids you know see their white to their eyes or even you know underneath without their mask or with their mask on and can't see their mouths but um you know the the what we do notice um when we try to develop those relationships and redevelop them we're trying to infuse some spirit back into school and some joy for those kids knowing that that things have been been tough for them um the last year obviously but yeah i just give a

027shout out to our office staff just like danny said we were really wanted to be prepared for our entry process that's gone super smooth tech has been fantastic they have uh we have andy james and lauren uh on staff and just there to support our teachers um with all the little kinks of having their mics ready and their uh google meets and dual screens and things like that and so that's been super helpful so shout out to john teachers have really welcomed our students not only in the hallways but we've made some fantastic i would say representative art and we wanted to kind of represent student thinking with our equity initiative in the hallways and and if you walk through some of our hallways there's a video out there a little bit about that but

028our students really got involved with with making our hallways very uh welcoming inclusive and uh just wanting to to send a message around about um kind of being anti-racist and and you'll see those themes in our hallways so that's been a been a nice impetus to come back to just to refresh our hallways um a shout out to the lunch crew we have three entrances and i'm not sure how many you all have two there and couple it by you but three entrances a lot and then our students are taking their lunch as they enter so the food service crew is is a little bit they're they're awesome because it's kind of like when the kids get on the bus the bus driver's the first person they see but often the kids come in they're

029waiting in line but the food service folks are the first person they greet and so they're welcoming them and kids get to grab a healthy lunch and um we were talking to some of them the kids this is great feedback but the kids are saying thank you right like wow like and i i get a lot of thank yous when students leave so i think that's good testament to how kids appreciate being back to school i'll just say just one other thing we obviously are focused on academics but i think social emotional learning as we talked about wanting to to make that a real focus and so our in our home rooms our teachers are really uh wanting to pay attention to where kids are at and and having them uh just really doing a

030lot of checking in with students yvette and kaylee and megan from neighborcare are around and out and about we use our our small lunches to really get around to see um and check in with students and and connect them up to services whenever whenever we need to so that's been been really successful and uh i think that's kind of all i have it's just been a an outstanding start and it's great to see the students and it's a great segue back to school questions for greg okay well thank you very much mr allison mr rock john welcome to the mic the technology maestro well i'll start by saying i'm impressed by danny's ability to speak extemporaneously and kind of blows me away and you can actually remember at the end of the year talk what

031you said beginning your talk but i can't do that so i'm going to i'm going to read off my laptop here i guess i want to start by just talking about some of the tech infrastructure that was built specifically to help safe start happen and probably the most visible and awesome part of that has been thane gill's uh health attestation app it's it's an amazing piece of work he's a really brilliant guy and we're lucky to have him on our staff and he told me tonight he sort of was looking at his stats as he will and he said oh we're about to have thirty thousand transactions which means thirty thousand times people have done this we should have a party or something and i was like okay tell me when we get there we'll

032have a party so we're almost at 30 000 and that's kudos to him as part of supporting that we've also rolled out a bunch of handheld scanners they're sort of like cell phones but with laser scanners built into them and that has really allowed our staff to do our test test at test stations that's a hard word uh in a variety of locations and so we can do them outside of the building we can do them on the ferry we can do them in the parking lots and i think that's been a big win for us there's a whole bunch of other technology around that but that's kind of um the kind of gist of it and as a thing eloquently said it allows us to remain safe so thank you thane sorry you didn't

033stick around um but he had places to go we've also uh upgraded our network bandwidth and i think i reported to you all sort of back in january that we were scrabbling uh to get our bandwidth uh upgraded so that we could support uh safe start when it happened and we are successful in doing that and so far so good so the bandwidth usage looks totally great and we think we can support everything that's going on in our return to school environment and uh i'm also happy to say that we're going to be able to double that bandwidth again so when we start school in the fall we'll have uh five gigabits of symmetrical bandwidth which will easily put us at the top tier of fashion island at least if if not other schools so

034that's that's been pretty successful as for as far as classrooms have gone we've been able to provide all of our teachers with uh tripods and webcams and usb extenders and extra monitors and all of those things that would go around helping them to try to teach effectively in the classrooms and um as danny alluded to all of all of those tools do bring added complexity and so we've uh we've been working with uh andy james and lauren to do a lot of one-on-one instruction with uh teachers and that started about three weeks ahead of the safe return so we did online trainings we did in-person trainings around the technology that we're going to bring to bear on this environment and then we spent the last two weeks all day working one-on-one with teachers who are

035having difficulties so if a teacher was having problems we would come to their classroom spend as much time as would take to make them feel comfortable with the tech that they've got in there and sometimes we're in the same person's room multiple times i can't say that's been you know completely successful it's a complex environment and and some people face additional challenges we have uh three teachers who are teaching remotely and so if you can imagine this the whole experience is inverted for them and so they're really an island unto themselves and it has a special set of tech problems that we're working through we think we're doing pretty well um let's see what else i'd like to tell you i've been working with cte to try to improve the way that we provide the

036digital experience to kids who are doing digital arts programs so we worked with them to locate uh and purchase 20 new macbook airs and get them set up with the adobe software and we'll be rolling those out to replace our much older windows based laptops and that will make the user experience for the kids sort of like the same as it would be if they're in the digilap we hope that everyone's back in person next fall but if they're not we're going to have an environment that mirrors the one that we have in the schools and allow them to work from home i've been working uh with slade and reagan on a visd alumni association project and i don't have a lot to say about it because it's early days for me anyway but i'm

037pretty excited about this this is something i think that has been a long time coming and i think it's going to bear a lot of fruit as we go forward and i think that tech department will have a little bit of a little bit of help to offer in that regards moving on to kind of where we're where we're at right now as a department we're actually preparing for next fall and so we've just received uh our third round of funding from e-rate usac which is the sort of federal funding mechanism by which we upgrade our network infrastructure this is our third successful uh bid in a row so i'm feeling pretty happy about that we had some awesome support making it happen and we've received the second of our third round of gear and

038so this summer we'll be putting in some more network infrastructure and so that that work is always going on sort of in the background it's kind of it's in the environment of what we do we're also going to be replacing 300 chromebooks this summer and that's kind of an every year thing so as we came into this very intensive one-on-one environment we're looking at a future where every year we're cycling something on the order of three to four hundred chromebooks and that takes a lot of work because we have to uh sort of demobilize the ones that we had we have to enroll the ones that we do have coming on board then we have to distribute them to the students and so that's actually beyond our capacity to really pull off along with everything

039else and so i've been working with students like joshua to try to set up a workflow for our summer kids to work and help us out so we've put out a job description and i've had an amazing number of kids respond to it i had 15 kids respond i'm not sure what's going on there but anyway they're reading their emails these days and so i have this huge list of students so we're gonna have an interest meeting in may and uh get a bunch of kids to help us uh get our chromebooks enrolled and ready for next year and so joshua's already been hard at work on that he was actually instrumental in getting our loaner system set up for our libraries at the middle school in high school so thank you joshua it was

040pretty awesome we're also working on a website refresh i may have mentioned that before so our website will look different this fall when students and staff return i think it'll be more functional it'll have a lot more functionality sort of behind the scenes and give us a lot more capacity to message to folks in a variety of meeting mediums including facebook and instagram things like that all from a single location so we'll write those messages in one place and have them appear across the many places that we communicate with our families and uh two more things i guess one is to say that i've had a really meaningful and interesting uh exchange with uh danny rock and uh mukai farmer garden and the vashon heritage museum on a project to honor the japanese american students

041who uh went to the school district here and for you know sort of wonderfully not eventfully up until the early 40s when they were interned and uh you may know this already but the cherry tree is out on the south lawn here those two trees and another one that i believe is in the circle back here are three of remaining 100 trees that were donated by the japanese community japanese american community to bash on in 1930 and there's some really moving dialogue around that that mr nishiori who was committed later at the time used to express what that meant what what the intention of that gift was and so uh we have an opportunity to highlight that and we have a moment in time when it's we haven't had ears to hear it like this

042for a long time so we suddenly are really listening about equity and fairness and we have a story to tell and i'm hoping to that we can do that so appreciate your support danny it's been awesome and the last thing i'll say is uh for next year is as you might imagine people are wondering when they can get back in this theater and do things and so part of our work is to try to figure out who can come back in and when and of course that's going to start with our staff and our students so we need to understand the kind of events that are going to happen in here in the next year and make sure that time is reserved and then we need to reach out to our community partners theater groups

043and the dance groups and find time and space for them and so that's a little bit you know technical i guess you'd say right now because there are rules around occupancy that change by phase um but uh we can certainly do all the planning and scheduling and that's kind of where we're at for this space so i'm going to take a breath and uh i'm open for questions be present for questions yes questions or comments notes yeah i don't really have any questions i just want to say that i really think this year has been an immense challenge technically for for everyone and and that your department has really risen to the challenge and been a big part of success so i just want to recognize and thank you and all your staff for helping

044make this fly this year thank you i got a great team i got a great team yeah i think we all echo that oh i did have a question sorry um so i just i was i'm trying to think how to word it because i have a few thoughts rattling around but i was thinking about reflecting on the beginning of the year and speaking of all that hard work and labor trying to get each of those students access to the internet and i was thinking about how technology is so prevalent in education and i mean it was critical with remote learning but i'm thinking about school or high school if you don't have a computer or a chromebook at home and you have weak wi-fi and you you have to use google classroom you have

045to like really be successful in school right so i was thinking about all the students who probably they're i was curious was there a number of students who even before this incident really you know last year really brought to light how some of those kids just weren't didn't have at home some of those tools that they really needed to be successful are we are we still checking out chromebooks to kids are we does everyone have wi-fi now like in this time have we really been able to make sure that when we return to school full-time in person hopefully in the fall we have as much equity and as much access to for every student to have the technology they need and i know there's only so much we're able to do but just making sure

046we are just curious i guess about that yeah so i'll say a few things about that um i feel pretty confident that all of the students that i can say that we're aware of have uh wi-fi access and a computer from us and upgrades all students grades six through 12 have been issued to chromebook by the district and all grades students k through 5 who wanted one got one so if the families chose not to do that they didn't have to grade 6-12 it's kind of too much to say mandatory but every student was issued one and that will continue so when the students come back in the fall okay six through 12 each of those students will have a chromebook issued by the district and uh if they need wi-fi access then we'll have

047hot spots to give them and there are a couple programs coming online that are just sort of being defined now at the federal level that should provide internet access to families and so we're waiting to see how that gets articulated but we should have a better ability to uh get internet to families that need them right now there's a subsidy that has will run out at the end of the school year so this school year if a family chose to have some say comcast cable installed in their home they could get that for free up to the end of june and uh hopefully by the time that expires the federal government will have a permanent program to offer some connectivity to families it's a a priority of the uh administration thanks zach didn't that make

048sense okay thank you john once again thank you for the work with mukai and bruce hallman and danny um if you haven't yet uh the beachcomber susan mccabe did a story on this that spotlights it so wonderful and in some just uh discussion afterward as well i'm kind of hoping that we can kind of further the installation and perhaps expand on it so i think there's some opportunity there so okay and i forgot one last important update from for the high school we forgot to speak about vaccination uh but we are going to be vaccinating all 16 and over students right next week on monday and thursday cohort a will be on monday from 8 45 to 10 45 cohort b will be on thursday providing access and there's a sign up link that dania

049sent out in an email i've sent it out in the email it's been posted on facebook danny did a walk through with sarah day and members of the mrc on wednesday to just take a look at the facilities and make sure that everything's in order and ready to go tyler from the pharmacy is uh you know we will have vaccines uh for for next week and so um you know thanks to rick wallace and fashion be prepared and that the arm the mrc i know you've been you know kind of side by side with them informing us and keeping things moving along as well so that's exciting news and i hope to to see danny i did have a question i know you don't have a mic on you right now but when i signed

050up um my own uh 16 year old there was a space for insurance is there i'd like to sit down what's do you know what the situation is for students who don't have insurance but i i know right no you don't need to have insurance if you have it it's it's great and if you don't it's covered okay i just want to make sure i can communicate that out to our folks because do you know danny how many people have signed up so far a little bit ago so um truth is right so anyway that's that's great news for the for the island uh just a few more things on my report tonight again appreciate principles and john coming tonight the strategic planning update if you have been keeping up with some emails zabet stephanie

051and i have met with performance fact uh mutiyu fogbay and he met with us and has shared some information i shared a powerpoint kind of giving the board an idea about the process that they use to work through the strategic planning process right now um we're basically finalizing some of the the final discussion points i'll be inviting stephanie and and zebet back into a conversation to kind of put some fine touches on the planning and then hopefully sign an agreement soon i'm also doing reference checks with bonnie sumner bonnie lake and um and north kitsap uh i have um meets scheduled with their superintendents tomorrow so anna and then i've already received um strong recommendations from the superintendents of federal way and highline so so good news for us and stay tuned as we but

052i hope to have something finalized by the end of may and some planning in place uh summer learning academy we recently went out to our staff and we have received 21 proposals from staff in terms of academic academy classes and enrichment classes engagement classes for our students this is a somewhat new um idea or concept um that we're gonna you know be letting staff direct these classes and there's some parity in there because we provided the opportunity both well any any staff in the district and we've received quite a few proposals from classified staff in addition to to teachers this is going to be in addition to our regular summer school program that we have you know at the high school in terms of credit retrieval and also in addition to what we would normally

053offer in terms of extra school year for our students who receive special services i believe we're probably going to be going back out to some teaching staff to fill in some gaps in terms of there's some academic places where we feel there's need to try to solicit more you know kind of classes focused on um you know supporting those students who's who's who you know skills are are lagging right now or who we fear would be not best situated for the beginning of the school year but overall it's i think stephanie and i were pleasantly surprised by the by the number of proposals received and these will be paid for through or these classes will be taught and staff will be provided stipends through esser funds um and so that's really good news too we

054hope to find a nursing services staff who can you know participate in the academy sarah day as we'll be retiring has made it very clear that she will not be available but hopefully we can find a a substitute have you had a chance to think about an equity filter equity lens what's what sort of barriers you know my kids obviously absolutely driving to and fro could you have you had a chance to look at that and identify we we want to provide transportation but we also want to provide a priority window for students uh through an invite um so there'll be a kind of an invitation window where we can hopefully um connect with those families and students and get them enrolled in classes or you know even if it's enrichment classes we feel that

055kind of engagement you know reconnects them back to the schools and some of those students that that uh danny and greg and rebecca have been speaking about so along with um you know uh direct teacher referrals um there's just um you know many ways in which we know we know who the students are we want to capture and we want to be intentional about making sure that they are participating in as much as as possible so i personally am thrilled to death you were doing this and i'm sure everyone is but uh great for thinking of it hope you publicize it well yes so uh i did just send a press release to liz uh shepherd over the beachcomber they're gonna put out an um i don't know what issue they do and i the

056what they call the island child she her deadline was this was today actually no 23rd so well she wanted my she wanted yours today she wanted mine today so i i think that she'll be um probably well because of the um because of a recess lab yeah yeah so uh so i i'm assuming it would be next week that it comes out so cool yeah so hopefully it'll it'll create a buzz and then we'll we'll see what happens there was also this idea that we didn't want to infringe upon you know kind of well-established programs on the island and so with that being our first time we're not quite sure we've made you know other programs aware that we're doing this um we'll just see of you know kind of where capacity is we do

057believe that we need at least five students you know in a class to to run it and that's what we've communicated to the the folks who have submitted the proposal so hopefully we will get that that's great and it's just it's first year so we are expecting to run this two years in a row and if it um because we'll have the esser funding available availability to to use this in 2023 so um uh racial equity consultants so um we the given the feedback from the district uh racial equity team who are comprised of friends and family of racial equity we were pretty clear that uh the two candidates that we had screened uh keisha and nikam that we wanted them to invite them into the district in some capacity and so right now uh

058unfortunately uh through a miscommunication on my end we were supposed to meet with nikam on tuesday to kind of establish what the parameters would look like and and and look at what that programming might look like in the future um but as it was stephanie sent me an email about 10 minutes before and said he's not on the invite and so we have it scheduled we have it scheduled for next week well we'll reconvene and then start to look at kind of some of the more specifics about what the program would look like what a contract would look like and once again just reminding folks in the community who are watching us tonight that this is part of the twenty five thousand dollar over two years i mean across twice each year for two years

059that was a significant donation through the vashon schools foundation that's going to be supporting this work so once again thanks to vashon schools foundation and i know there's you know quite a bit of fundraising on the island right now and there's a lot of programs and partners out there that support the schools and so we want to make sure you you locate those and and hopefully if you're able to give give any questions about the racial equity consultant i'm kind of moving through some of this okay and you're always welcome to follow up with me afterwards uh speaking of partners pie grants so um let me put my glasses on uh karen boyle and marth martha ormseth recently uh sent out and jody brought it up right now and so you know they deviated from

060their traditional fall granting and have offered teachers three opportunities to submit grants and so they've had a wonderful response uh eight to ten request grants per cycle and it's it's quite amazing that you know that there's been a total of over fifty thousand dollars that has been awarded to to teachers and and uh you know to really put on high quality programs and fill in some some gaps uh specifically related to covid um and uh it's just been a wonderful partnership as always uh john you've been a a real important part of pie um so much gratitude to pai and and i think the quote from from karen when i thanked her she just said we love the work we do that was that's that's in quotes so uh so quick uh not too many

061events coming up we have two board meetings in may may 13th and the 27th and then a june 10th board meeting and then uh is graduation the 12th yes of june yes yes it is uh those of you who may have a senior yes i know that very well so uh i will i will expect you know graduation plan graduation planning right now is is in its initial stages uh i'll probably invite danny back maybe the first or second week of may our second board meeting made to kind of maybe shed more details um just uh you know at this point in time last last board meeting on the 25th of march coveted rates of transmission were 104 per hundred thousand and today they're 209 per hundred thousand we are currently in phase three and

062unless we start seeing uh a dip it's uh it's likely that we're going to go over the two metrics and so you know depending on which phase we're in whether we're in phase three or phase two will depend on you know we'll have some a bearing on what graduation plans look like so it is kind of a stay tuned danny and his team his expert team of planners are are well positioned because of our experiences last year and are going to be planning for you know contingencies according to the phases and you know really the way danny explained it and i'm gonna hopefully capture it you know the focus is on providing a safe celebratory and meaningful graduation experience for our kids and families and we excelled at that last year and i have no

063doubt that danny and his team will do the same this year that concludes my report for tonight okay um i am keeping an eye on the time and board member remarks very deft because i i had a 20 minute speech sorry no 20 minute speeches but i'll i'll give bob my time i'm going to give toby my time i'll be fast and just want to recognize how excited i am that we're doing this vaccination push at the high school i think that's uh fabulous and i'm really appreciative of the community partners and particularly tyler collaborating with us to get that done so we're very grateful about that um great on the start uh across the board one thing i remember you saying danny in the fall was we can't make adjustments until we start and

064so i think you're over preparedness that you feel like you've been over prepared but um it paid off so well done yeah keep it up uh reagan you got skipped over yeah uh i just want to follow on on what uh slade was saying about um uh the educational partners uh being out for give big right now uh with washington gives which is the old uh the new format for the the ongoing give big campaign every year and uh just to be specific that comes up on may 4th and 5th are the actual official days it's a two day thing but early giving began on the 20th and i think everyone saw their email box probably fill up on the 20th with lots of recognition of that date but uh clearly these are challenging times

065and and if there's the ability to give it's a it's a great time to support all of our educational partners the school's foundation and pi and all the great nonprofits that help support the schools okay thank you all right great thank you all right ella i guess it's all on you because we're sorry not that mead's not here tonight yeah me said he was going to be here but things come up it happens yeah so we had a student advisory board meeting this week but it was pretty short and i don't think there was much to report on yeah as far as hybrid learning has gone i know in my experience it's been really smooth and it's just been nice to see like how excited everybody is about being back in the classroom and then

066also like distance days i haven't really noticed much of a change in like the amount of instruction i get or like the quality of instruction so it's been i think pretty smooth and i think that's like generally the consensus yeah that's probably all i have to say tonight [Laughter] right that was that was you gave him a brought to you by good grade thank you thank you thank you ella um okay um stephanie the the long anticipated ees survey i guess it's redundant the ees presentation it's already ready for the next hour right yeah right okay so i'll try to keep this fairly short tonight i gave you quite a bit of material in your board packets in the meeting packet this week it's a lot but it's actually only a small sliver of all

067of the data that we have so i thought it might be helpful because it's been a few years since we did this survey last time we've we've done this survey for quite a number of years now they're in their 20th year as an organization they work a lot with they've worked with king county they've worked with the state and based on research that's actually 20 years old now but still very strong research so i gave you the first two pages and i really encourage you to take some time to explore the links but it basically there's four parts to our survey that we do one part was new this year and that was the diversity equity and inclusion piece and that's based off of the harvard rides framework so i give a little bit of

068information on that in case you're interested and then what i tried to do is reference which pages kind of applied to those things so the main survey is the nine characteristics of high performing schools it looks a little different on the student survey the parent survey and then the staff survey they're actually on the staff survey they've added two more areas beyond the nine so just to point that out then there's a social emotional learning piece that they actually worked with the youth development for education results work group on the roadmap project to develop that portion of the survey and the diversity equity inclusion and then the last part is our custom part which we actually reduced quite a bit this year and i just wanted to point out um jody can you just slide

069up another slide for me um on that we started with 10 custom questions about three years ago now lose track three or four years ago now and those were developed with our equity consultant at the time maya mourinho who helped the develop the questions and then we took them to cee to kind of fine-tune the wording for the surveys so i wanted to point that out so we went from 10 original questions down to four and largely because of their new module on diversity equity and inclusion we felt that that that made sense to do that that we wouldn't have redundant questions that way i did provide you just a snapshot of the participation over time and just so you get an idea interestingly enough we had the most parent participation that we've ever had

070in the last several years our staff was about on par and then students was lower but you also have to realize we're down about 84 students overall in our student population since 2015-16 school year so that's part of it the information that i gave you in your practice tonight is all fourth through 12th grade i just want to point that out there is a primary survey that's k through three it's tabulated differently so anything that's referenced in this packet tonight is specific to grades four through twelve and then i did give you just a little bit of the demographic piece up there so you get an idea for who responded out of our participants so i gave you the gender ethnicity and the language at home english being spoken at home just so you get

071an idea it is interesting a question that i had if you look for example at the ethnicity graphic it's interesting because we're pretty close to what our ospi demographics say for white two or more were over represented hispanic latino is quite a bit down but then we're over represented in every group and the best way i have to explain that is it's it's beyond numbers it's just that understand that students don't always identify the way that their parents have completed their demographic forms when they enroll right so just just know that when you're looking at that it may not line up with what our statistics show for ospi because the students are selecting their identities when they fill these out so my guess is that students who get classified by us is like two or

072more races some students may strongly identify as black or asian or whatever it is but basically just no it's just an interesting trend and i'm curious about that it's an interesting piece on identity so it just gives you the overall for who's participating in the survey i thought for the purposes of tonight you'll you'll need to do a lot of just research on your own but if there's anything you want follow up on obviously talk to slade and we can schedule whatever we need to do to come back to it but i thought if we could take a look at page five just to look at some interesting trends i want you to keep this in mind with the narratives that you have formed over our coved days and what you heard tonight and what

073i want to look at on page five is this is the summary page for students and if you look at belonging and identity we had a seven percent increase positive increase on belonging and identity for our students and then jump down to collaboration and interpersonal skills we get here all this isolation and so forth we had a 10 increase in how they're feeling there so again it's like think about these as all um feedback um in the points of time right sometimes we think okay we had this feedback that's how it is or it's going to get worse for example think about mental health right depending on the time of year you're asking those questions and how they're responding is going to be different it may or may not get worse from that point forward

074right one of the great things we've done with cee is we've tried to always administer it around the same time frame so the last oh gosh since our first year which was late in the school year we settled in on kind of february so all of the data was collected in february to the beginning of march for staff and parents this year the student one we left open till the end of march so it's a slightly longer window this year than the last time we did the survey but we try to keep it around the same time of year to control for some of that but obviously with this whole last year um all that's kind of out the window because we've been in really unusual circumstances but i thought those were some interesting trends

075so um just to look at this slide this is giving you the last three times we did the survey most current on the bottom and then it's giving you the percent positive and then that graphic over on the side just tells you the difference in percent positive so just any questions on how to read that graphic okay um jody if you can jump then we're going to look at one more set of questions let's jump to uh 13. i'm probably going to have you go back to in a minute but we'll do 13. i just wanted to remind you of what some of our custom questions were and i want to point out two questions on this slide again just because they're interesting trends so if you look at question two we see um a

076positive improvement there we we improved by nine percent which is this school year i have been made to feel less smart at school because of my race ethnicity so the good news is we're seeing that trend in the right direction but if you go down to the bottom to the fourth question this was an interesting one to me especially since not a lot of students have been in school but they've been online when i report harassment based on racist ethnicity staff members are quick to respond and resolve the concern and that's lower than it's ever been before which is kind of an interesting it's like one of those things like okay what's going on with that we don't know yet we're gonna have to dive in more deeply but then what i did is i

077went ahead and i what um was concerning is if you look at that fourth question go ahead and scroll up to the next page and look at how parents felt it's in alignment it dropped and then if you go to the next page which is staff same trend so it's a curiosity it's something we need to dive more deeply into to examine we're going to have an opportunity part of when we do this survey staff from ce do do a deeper dive with us there's an online tool that'll allow us to start pulling out some of the demographics breakdowns and to see the difference in how different groups responded to the questions so we do that next tuesday and then again the following tuesday for a total of about three hours each building gets the

078same set of reports that we get at the district level and it you get the current year which breaks down all the detail for just that year and then you get the trend data which allows you to kind of see how your um how you're improving or not in certain areas the last thing i did give you i just want to point out in your packet i did give you the full module racial equity module for the students just so you could see what questions went in those main categories and get a feel for what that that module consists of so you do have the full student report from the district level for that and again it's grades four through twelve on that just checking okay any questions um stephanie yeah i am assuming i'm

079looking at page eight which is the um the belongingness and that first one i enjoy coming to this school 32 percent um i'm assuming that that's a reflection and it would be interesting to see again what you're saying like comparison to other years because i'm assuming that is a covered response like i enjoy coming to this school which also looks a lot like my bedroom or my kitchen table i mean is that the answer or is that or is there more to it right so that's where we would want to dive in yeah and find that item i don't know exactly where it would appear in the old survey or if it's supported exactly the same because they've they've rebuilt this sort this section um but it would be interesting to track that down and

080see how it differs or now not kind of shades many of these questions right exactly that's the that's what it makes makes you curious what it actually means does it mean what it meant when we were in in person yeah right what does this this school mean well you probably based on narratives i don't know about you but i was very shocked that it was as positive as it was and out of all the groups students were the most positive so it's a it's an interesting narrative that makes us go huh what's going what's going on or this is the importance of having multiple data points multiple different times so that we're having a more complete narrative of what's going on rather than a singular focused narrative it's all good data but it's like we

081have to piece it all together and make sense and like the collaborative and interpersonal skills just like 10 increase this year yeah because because teachers are rocking it i guess and you know there may be something to the one-on-one engagement that happens or the the breakout discussions that is a different dynamic that happens when you're in a person or in classes of 24 students right you know which right which seems like it just goes back to like what are the positive things that we can learn from this past year and can we bring them forward yeah yeah yeah i always find this uh survey presentation interesting but even more interesting is what comes from it in your conversations at the building level and those aha moments where you find ways to take action to to

082make those improvements that we're seeking so you know over time it would be interesting to hear your your reflections on you know if we found something a dial that we can turn and and groups we can work with to really make a a difference yeah and you're going to have the opportunity in the next year to become intimately familiar with the survey because it'll be key in the strategic planning right so there'll be pieces i'm sure that we as a community will want to pull out and use as our metric to track over time we did make the shift um you know a couple years back to go to a two-year cycle to do the survey which makes sense one of the conversations stephanie i had today was um you know the one of the

083goals that we have is uh after reviewing the data and coming you know with the principals and lead and teacher leadership teams and in the strategic planning process we want to get to the point where we were actually able to implement something and then share with the community from your feedback on the survey this is what we did yeah and this is what happened when we did it you know so um that's kind of one of the things that excited us about the strategic planning conversation that we had with performance fact was that was uh you know the implementation and solution focus you know after the data gathering wasn't it was an emphasis you know and and will be part of that planning so yeah spring did you right before toby i didn't know if

084you oh um you know i i think you kind of answered my question just now okay yeah okay anybody else nope thank you stephanie so much so much is in here thank you mike you are an awesome briefer amy okay so um standing in for amy cesara it will be me we'll be you yeah so um what we wanted to provide you tonight was just a an overview of um and this is of our staffing and where we are in the hiring process um you know whether positions will be you know how the program will look in the buildings and so what you what you see in front of you is basically a you know a list of everything that's been in our consent agendas our resignations our retirees uh leave us leaves of leaves

085of absence um and by subject and at the school and the total fte and kind of what's planned and what's what's to be determined and so um this is the most up-to-date uh i believe amy sent out today uh to bisd staff to let them know that a 0.8 to 1.0 english position at the high school and a 0.8 to 1.0 science position at the high school is being posted so um it was really just a matter of kind of piece of information for the board tonight we also presented this to vea and have been using this as a as a reference tool for them so that they can be aware of you know kind of where we may see reductions in programming and kind of what's being planned and and interesting enough at vea

086i was asked kind of you know to be put on the spot um you know hey you know slade how are you making these decisions you know uh what's your what are your values and beliefs what are your priorities and so um you know for me putting a highly qualified you know person in front of each student is is is right there so but i did let them know that i also have a priority around the fine arts and i'm not seeing this you know this facility being used by our students in a meaningful way is is heartbreaking to me the same with our our music rooms and so certainly being in this chair i get to influence you know some of our priorities and around staffing but right now we are programming you know

087we are funding our programs adequately and abundantly in some in some cases but this will reflect some program reduction uh in terms of because of our student enrollment um you know we're going to go down to 14 15 and so which hopefully that's um you know kind of over promising and uh hopefully we won't be over promising and under delivering you know on that on an aspect so i think i was supposed to say something like over expense there's another saying that you're supposed to say under promise overdoing right yeah overspend this is helpful this is i don't know for you guys but i like seeing this just it's very clear and transparent so i think is mr floyd yeah mr floyd is part of the uh retiree yes yep we'll be honoring them in

088that beginning of that first june meeting so just to give you a heads up that june 10th meetings when we'll be honoring the staff okay great thank you uh amy and slade um matt and matt yes provided to you is our normal monthly finance and enrollment report we have a finances uh the dashboard and then also the larger document but we'll show the dashboard so we usually operate off of is through the end of march or 58.33 of our fiscal year um no major anomalies or blips if you will we're cruising right along obviously we've always been touching upon kind of the lag and expenditures in regard to covid we expect to see that tick up in the next couple of months as obviously we're getting back to more of a normal in school type

089of situation but our expenditure is about 51.3 percent and then revenue is about 50.6 percent and of course the revenues always point out that april of course the end of this month we will see our local taxes come in via king county and so we'll see that reported out next month to see what you should be looking for is the increase finally in the cap tech levy side that was voted and approved by our voters so we'll keep a close eye on that any questions on the finance side all right on to enrollment uh this is through the first part of april and then uh overall uh from march to april uh march we had about uh 1410.07 fte and in april we saw 1410.59 or plus 0.52 ft so we gained just slightly uh

090overall average though is what we are paid via apportionment via the state we saw 14 23.86 in march then going to 14 22.20 our average dropped by 1.66 it's slowing down but it's not quite meeting budget for obvious reasons uh then i moved to the middle table we looked month to month to kind of see where did the families or kids go or come in in particular chautauqua gained 3.92 way to go rebecca it sounds like we had some online students come in person and then also a new family came in if i'm correct and then mcmurray in the high school boat both dropped almost a quarter fte and there were some dropped classes is what i understand regarding the notes um and then we had links that dropped by uh 2.92 and speaking with

091thomas over at lynx we had a family move off island and then there's also he had a little commentary sub commentary and it was discussed in our elt about families telling him about rentals and housing on the island it's getting tougher and tougher to live and stay on the island which we're seeing that in our kindergarten classes and first graders but we're seeing that kind of gentrification if you will so there we are okay thanks matt okay so we have uh oh yeah here we go we got two uh discussion items and the first one is just we're just talking about it we're not making any decisions on either one of these items tonight rebecca and stephanie are you doing are you presenting this too we're doing it together yup yup tag team all right

092i'm going to start off here though thank you for having us here today i you have a lot of information there in your packet i just want to kind of highlight some aspects of it but we are really excited to have a fifth grade outdoor education program where students go away for usually it's three nights and four days and have an environmental environmental science experience and experience building friendships and just so many skills that they get in that program and i think the the board dedication to that is is impressive and i don't know if the community knows but the board we as a district like you decide to fund half of it and so parents usually only pay for half the cost of actually going so it is something the district has said they're

093really committed to and we appreciate that and something we've been looking at for the last few years is the idea of moving to a local camp here on bashan island camp south or sea elf is is located here on the island and provides a very similar experience to the one at waskowitz outdoor school and the some of the the benefits of outdoor education programming are present in both programs the science curriculum is very similar there is social motion on learning embedded too with everything they do this is at camp sales and you would find the same at camp campbell oscars as well the science is tied to the next gen science standards they study forest wetlands marine life sustainability astronomy they do outdoor living skills they have team building challenge courses canoeing archery arts and

094crafts they have the staff leading train staff leading their programs and they can also customize you know to work with us and so it's a very rich program being offered at camp sales a lot of districts in our in our region come here for their outdoor school and some of the reason that i first came to to stephanie and to slade to talk about moving it to a local camp was due to the access difficulty we were having with some students of ours going to camp boscowitz so we had students with different educational needs so are some of our students with special education needs were unable to fully access the camp at camp bosco it's just due to the location and so we would bring kids up for one day sometimes two days but usually

095because of their programming it really only worked for one day and so we had some students that weren't able to participate we also every year have some students that due to high levels of anxiety or other difficulties you know find themselves unable to participate and then we have students that due to their kind of cultural norms like going going away for that long is just not something that they want their fifth grader to do and so every year you know we have some students who aren't participating even though we really work with families to try to encourage participation but we always found that it really wasn't meeting our needs in terms of equity and access for all and because we have a very a similar high quality science education overnight program on island there that

096led us to begin this conversation about like should we make a move and and bring it to bring it home to vashon and we've had several conversations with the staff at camp sales about their programs and some of the exciting things that came up for us is not just that it will meet the our equity needs as a district but also kind of enable us to build some more community connections and connections to kind of place-based education so we talked to them about like being able to build connections throughout the year being able to collaborate with the with our the bachelor nature center and kind of make it um a little more integrated as opposed to just a one you know four day experience and so that was exciting for us as well as we

097look look forward to this partnership and i don't want to overstuck with what stephanie was going to say so i think i'm going to leave it at that for now well yeah i just want to highlight emphasize you know when we're really trying to lead with that equity lens this just seemed to be a really good move for us because we really see the ability to engage all of our students in this program and still hold on to that overnight experience for the vast majority obviously not all of them will probably still want to spend the night or have needs that make that difficult but at least they'll be able to participate in all four days we actually pick up programming time because of the less travel we actually will get the four full days

098and three nights and then just the ability to partner but also what this leads us to and some of the initial conversations with the cl staff is that and work that's been going on kind of behind the scenes with this idea of grow your own which is a program in high schools to recruit or promote careers in education amongst your students we we thought we could start working with camp cl to develop a strong program a cte program and or a college in the high school type program and we could maybe not replicate the impressive alternative school that highline school district has with their counseling program but certainly provide our high school students with some robust training and and develop that and then this idea of being able to develop projects that are long term

099so it's not just going to the outdoor education program but actually creating sustainable projects that maybe students go back to and touch upon year after year so for us we understand that there is some sadness and there's any time you make change there's uncertainty about that so certainly in our conversations with fifth grade team you know that's something that they're wrestling with waskwitz outdoor program is very familiar to them and there's not as much familiarity with the program offered at cl so it's something we'll continue to have conversations about um but i am super excited that we'll be able to engage 100 of our students and i'll allow them to experience this outdoor education program with their peers um and and basically you know meet their science needs meet the social emotional learning and be

100able to develop a customized program with more than just the camp so that's another aspect i see that we were looking at with camp sale not for this coming year because of cobid but in the future we've talked about possibly moving it to a fall camp as kind of a team building experience the beginning as opposed to a culminating experience and so camp sale gives us some of that offer that opportunity as well as they talked about doing some kind of like tree planting or something that kids would be able to go back to on the island and so really looking at building that that um those traditions over the years in the school which was interesting but i do want to say just what kind of what stephanie was talking about like i do

101recognize the loss in you know working with a program we've worked with for a long time highline does have a great the wells program it's like they have high school mentors that are often diverse high school mentors coming and working with them and and that well that's not a program that we have here we can work with our high school to encourage more students to participate and the fact that it's it'll be based locally we will be able to have more students participate because students wouldn't have to be able to take a week off of school to do it they could just come in the evenings and so and still find ways to participate without missing out on a week of school so it'll kind of open it up for more students and we're also

102talking to camp south about maybe about being there when other you know more diverse groups are also at the at camp cell that is something we haven't experienced at wasco it's in recent years in recent years when we've been going it's been just us or us in another school that's also white and i know the program for this coming year it's not it's again us with another school that's also the same demographic so it's not necessarily a more diverse student experience there either but it is something that camp salt is open to looking at with us to see like well what other groups what other students are coming when you're on campus and could you mix somewhat they said often most schools don't want to do that i know wasco is having the same thing

103as they want their their school to have a cohort experience so they don't necessarily want to mix with another school and so it's kind of they're open to having those conversations with us and really working with us to kind of customize what we're what we're looking for and so there's a little bit of area kind of for growth in developing that relationship and then also just a super solid camp that they have that's been well established and i mean they're both they're both wonderful programs it's just the benefits of being on island and being local are large this is a first reading because we know that our community you know will perhaps want to provide some input into this discussion we didn't get any public comment this evening but this is a great time for

104board members to ask questions get more clarity i would anticipate that at our next board meeting the 13th in may that we would be bringing this to the board to take action on as a second reading probably not you know as much discussion um but this is a this is a great time for more questions i don't really comment no that i have a question but i sort of have comments because um i was a camp wascoitz counselor for two years and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life as both a student and as a counselor and i actually believe toby was one of my cabin kids [Laughter] of course back in the day i was miss reagan um so i certainly understand um the long tradition it's had in the district

105and how much affection and tradition is around it and why there's some sadness at the prospect of the loss um that said as a parent now i i do have neurodiverse children and both of them went to wascowitz one of them loved it and thought it was a great experience and stayed the whole time and didn't want to come home the other one went for half a day and then i had to come and get her and then i spent the next four days driving her there to participate at some level and you know i had the privilege to be able to do that so i'm also very aware that there's people that no matter how many wonderful things are happening at waskowitz if you can't access it it doesn't matter how wonderful it is

106there so being able to create the access and have this ability to do substantially similar things on vashon and to create the connectivity within the community i like a lot of the brand the add-ons here that are not just about the the week-long experience but that can be moved around because it's of the proximity and the accessibility and i can see it being a bridge to a lot of other relationships for both our students and for the school district so although i i sad to say goodbye to waskowitz i'm excited about the opportunities at camp cell do we happen to approximately know the participation rate for for in the past like do 80 85 or i'm just curious like what does that look like you know i should i should bring that for you next

107time i i i would give you an in an incorrect statistic if i if i did it is a disproportionate number of our latino families that do not participate and as well as our students in special education but and but it most most most kids go but there are a few students in each class that do not and so you were mentioning some community input so is that lead me to believe that we'll actually be consulting for example some of those families who historically haven't been attending to see if we moved it to south if they would be more likely to attend that has been the recommendation for years now from our from our latino families and advocates as well as as their special education teachers and families so because we have been here that

108has what led us to start this discussion thank you yeah because i i think i was feeling some confusion around the word equity being mentioned by sort of in that letter from the teachers as well as from in this discussion which is obviously really important for us to be looking at that lens but being able to hear that it's actually directly coming from for example our latino families that i think is something really important to note as well as what reagan was mentioning so and not necessarily all of our latino families right some of them love going to auschwitz and they so it's not i don't want to but as far as it goes in terms of a barrier for those who weren't participating right and when you think of equity i think you're looking

109at two different lenses one is the is maybe our white students have experience having experiences with counselors of color at waskowitz versus like our students of color on the island participating in camp so they're different equity and is that equity right like in my mind you know exposing having creating experiences for our way students i think of it as our students of color being able to interact with counselors of color but i think that's a different issue i'm not comfortable really using that word racial equity if we're talking about creating experiences for our white students there's other ways that we could do that right so but our students of color would have racially piece diverse as well so that is a benefit of of of west coast and we've also provided that through um fashion

110also with bringing our own students of color as counselors yeah and i think it's important to remember that the the equity lens is is not only racial equity it's also inclusion equity based on neurodiversity and other things like that so that's there's equity for everyone or accessibility for everyone or the attempt to make it as accessible and equitable as possible and i think proximity is a big part of that my kids also did a lot of camp south coming up growing up on vashon so i'm pretty familiar with the programs and the counselors there and i saw a lot of diversity in the counseling staff for the throughout the years when my kids were going there both uh racially and internationally they had a lot of kids in from the uk and australia and places

111like that so it was a i felt that the kids were getting exposed to people from different places and different traditions which i enjoyed yeah diversity equity inclusion aren't all the same thing thank you thank you thanks for bringing the proposal forward when i first heard about this i really lost my mind i couldn't imagine not going to camp lawsuits because for me it was really exciting time and and i really looked look forward to that and the memories associated with that but as i dug in more and listened more i really i've had a 100 turn around i'm so excited about this opportunity and not just um for some of the things that you that you mentioned uh tonight but it seems to me that there's a greater opportunity to grow this as a

112program and maybe you know it becomes part of our island educational experience and culture year-round and i can see this kind of developing into to something really really extraordinary so i think there's a tremendous amount of benefits here and i did go through that that heartache and uh now i'm excited yeah i know and i really appreciate what the teachers are saying because it's important what they're saying and never but or and i i kind of kind of agree with you toby that i you know having sent my boys there you know it really appreciated it and i loved it and so i had that same like what i'm like what no but then you sort of take a moment and think about it and i think you know i think spring what you're saying

113like it's important that we have we we be able to offer this for everybody on the island for all of our students on the islands and i feel like that's not what i was saying but that's what we're back in 70 years but thank you but yes that's something yeah right right okay yeah but perhaps we have more um agency and and developing it in a way that uh meets those needs in the future won't necessarily happen in the first year but we will have more uh control to develop it and in that way and meet the needs of the greater community and it would be great if we could convince a you know another school to join our little pod of fifth graders so but it'd be interesting to hear from the community and

114sort of see what people are thinking um have you heard have you talked to community members just have you not yet really we haven't really brought out we've just been talking to the fifth grade team and then bringing it to you so we have not put it out there with community what we mostly hear from are our fifth graders super sad that they're not going this year and sixth graders super sad that they didn't go last year so that's good exactly i think anyone the idea of any outdoor camp sounds fabulous because exactly um those two years have have missed it so yeah i've heard more that's the true heartbreak in this whole situation at least it's a win-win right either way that's good and the one other thing actually we've been talking about is

115just one aspect that we hadn't addressed is just the the idea of is this somewhat of a launch for our students and so one thing we stephanie i talked about is like should we look at doing a field trip to go to the uw for a year or something like sorry for a day a year would be great no for like a day like if we want somehow to get our fifth and sixth graders maybe to like launch and have an idea of bigger options for themselves then then that launch might be better off in a heist in a college visit or something like thinking about it's kind of a different a different aspect that we want to look at for our students so we're very open to looking at what would be what would

116be missing and how can we incorporate that in an even better way for our students so this requires a board vote is that we're saying that we're going to go i'm recommending the board taking action the next meeting yeah right okay all right are any other comments or questions from anybody no great okay thank you rebecca thank you stephanie thanks for the thoughtful research and expanding on many of the ideas that i hadn't heard yet so that's that's great thank you um okay uh matt and slade uh yes uh provided to you as we go along this budget journey for 2021 2022 we have a two more pages uh that we're presenting tonight from the budget one is for general consumption as paige roughly will be 16 the district org chart joey if you want

117to pull that up perfect i don't have any questions on that one fairly self-explanatory and then the one that has been under discussion and is we roughly page 17 which is our student fee schedule as you know from the start of our budget process in january until now myself and kay adams have met with every budget manager principal athletic director food service director in the district as we go into those meetings along with looking at our msoc budget we also take a look at our student fees for next year i will point out there are three changes from this year to next year two of those are increases they're on the asb side one happens to be the eighth grade wild waves fee from 25 dollars to 30 that's due to lunch costs from what

118i understand and then also the other one is dances at vhs asb as that's a venue cost from what i understand from the high school there is a decrease on the mcmurray general fund side that happens to be the sport fee working with andy sears in those meetings due to the schedule of mcmurray and the cost there was a reduction of 25 for next year one thing we added on the sheet and help and help in the process of discussion we have that average line kind of down the middle that's on the general fund side and myself and kay took a look at 1718 1819 1920 and included that average revenue from those fees over those years so it gives you a better idea of what's being collected so there you are this is proposed

119for the 21 22 budget is that correct yes correct i don't think you want to add slate or no nothing dad anybody questions nothing no questions all good down here okay all right thank you thanks matt thank you guys good night good night i'm sorry i would like to give a little update as you know the legislative session is ending this weekend hopefully the 25th when we when that ends we hopefully will receive as soon as possible from the state our budget information we call it the f203 hence revenue and we hope to present to you really the guts the meat of the budget at the may 13th meeting which will be expenditures and revenues and amy cesar will present to you a certified classified ft also at that point we do hope to have

120that at that point but it's all hinges on our legislature okay uh so on to decisions we've got three of them this evening we're on time we are on time i'm liking it so uh resolution 79 d1 is coming up for a second read this is regarding the emergency waiver for high school graduation credits as explained in the first read any further questions regarding this resolution i move to adopt a resolution number 791 of a second second uh any discussion all those in favor aye aye aye all right unanimously passes okay next on the agenda is the salary review matrix classified admin salary schedule yeah thank you um first i'd just like to thank the board members last week for uh some of your support that you expressed for our district leaders i didn't mention

121actually last week who the leaders are and i thought it'd be well of me to recognize them that's lisa syrah john stanton kevin dickerson amy cecira matt sullivan k adams and thomas elliott for our ale um and i would describe their their work this year performing at i've heard it described as heroic levels you know during the pandemic so i just wanted to to share that appreciation that i also have for them before my final recommendation i'd like to just share a few more details why i'm making the recommendation so the last three years it's been a clear to me that we have a a system of values and beliefs here in the district that we want to attract and retain the highest quality staff not only for our students but but who supports our

122teachers and and supports our all of all the fantastic programs that we're able to provide here on vashon so stemming from that belief when i came into the district i found that earlier compensation review systems were really failing at providing parity for all of our groups in a way that um that that we that we were able to um you know systematically and predictably and reliably provide mat information uh in terms of our budgeting system while also recognizing that compensation plays an important factor in how we retain we retain folks here you know on the island and so at the onset it's taken us almost three years to do i've wanted to systematically provide a process where we review comparables and that's really initiated with the vea contract those of you who were here earlier

123you know remember the the work that buzz porter did in providing us comparables according to regionalization uh the the and the the districts in our region and also uh like size when looking at comp and then wanting to take that system of looking at comps uh in a three-year cycle and pushing that system out to building administrators and then district leaders district office staff all of our all of our all of our all of our staffing groups um it's taken us up to this year to actually get everybody on a schedule and that's the matrix that you see you know that we presented last week where everybody is on a on a three-year schedule as long as we're last meeting in the last meeting as long as we are you know keeping cba's on a

124three-year cycle we can't make that you know we can't give you 100 assurance that we'll be doing that but that is always the goal when we most of the time the goal we go into uh negotiations with with our boarding groups um so with the three-year process um you know when i would look back at the salaries for this particular group um you know i look back and i see a lot of unpredictability um and i see um what appears to me to be attempts to bring this group up to you know average in the comparable range and it's required the district at times to sometimes give uh increases of up to 15 which can be alarming to communities and to and i feel like it's not fair to boards uh to have to be

125presented with an increase in order to provide you know again parity uh around comparables the comparables for this group that's interesting are not the same as the uh the administrators the building administrators and the teachers and for mostly a singular reason um the comps that we use for the teachers the admin uh also include the regional districts that are quite large for us you know tacoma south kitsap and so those organizations do aren't structured the way uh you know in terms of directors they have much more complex systems and so to try to compare a system our size is very difficult and so i have diminished i have taken the the size comps from the from that teacher group and then added in districts such as riverview to our group that being said i've discussed

126we've had many discussions that it's it's it's extremely difficult to find uh a true comparable to an island in a metropolitan area of 1500 students so that being said um you know the this is the group of districts that i felt were were most represented um and you know our district in terms of size and and and types of uh demographics um that being said there is no perfect comparable group um so we took those comparables in a very similar process and i i took a look at those and recommended uh seven percent which still um brings our directors under pretty much under the average of this particular group of comparables but what's really important to me about this is the process and that we have a system of processes that provide reliability and predictability

127for for us to budget and plan if there's questions about displacing other programs because of the increase of this i want to assure the board that this increase in salaries is budgeted and planned and is not going to result in any um you know displacing the programs or displacing the people who support our students so i just want to make that assurance i wasn't clear about that last time and i want to assure our community and our and our board as well that esser funds are not you know they're not appropriate for this type of expenditure but they're also not being used to supplant any of the funding that would be uh used to support these increases so just kind of a point of interest to to know um you know i i you know

128for me i'm going to recommend the the board approve these these increases uh which would keep us on track you know kind of in in accordance to my plan my review plan but i would gladly take any other questions or you know any other comments that the board has but gladly answer those before you the board takes action okay well so let's um let well let's if someone can have a motion and then we'll get on the floor and then we'll open it up for discussion so do i have a motion to approve this so moved in a second second okay so any discussion about this i just want to say that i appreciate the process coming into play i've since becoming a board member i've never been very comfortable with how the salary increased

129questions were handled within the district and didn't feel comfortable trying to determine on a performance basis who is worthy or not and so this is a much more data-based process it's a more reliable process i think it gives people the employees it gives them a schedule to know when to expect to be reviewed it treats everyone in the same manner across the entire district and it goes on you know what what the market will bear and since our goal is to attract and maintain high quality people we should be expecting to pay what the market cost of those people is so i do appreciate the process and i just want to thank slade and everyone for all the work they've put into bringing this about and it has been a project that's been ongoing throughout

130my tenure on the board and i'm glad to see it completing here and getting to this last group so that everyone is being handled in the same manner any other comments discussion i'm going to vote against this measure reluctantly i uh um i quit i wish the question before us today were whether you guys deserve a raise because if that were the only question before us it's easy of course you do um our tiny district has benefited enormously from having this amazing talent because we're so close to a major metropolitan area we have some extremely skilled people that we benefit enormously from having and you no doubt could go off to tacoma school district or seattle school district or amazon or wherever and and probably make a lot more money but you'd still be working

131at amazon unfortunately for me the decision is much more difficult because um this is a zero-sum proposition budgets you fund one thing at the expense of another and i know that sounds crass um we have to balance paying staff what they're worth with other values that we want to achieve to quote a superintendent from long ago terry terry lindquist said we can do anything we want we just can't do everything we want we may be relatively flush with money right now with a million and a half dollars of esser funding but that is one-time funding and to say that it's not relevant to our current budgetary situation i don't think it's being intellectually honest that's one-time funding and we have enrollment decreasing we see that and until we have a sense i think of where

132our enrollment is going to shake out i'm really reluctant to make long-term funding decisions about this as we go forward into the 2122 budget process and return to whatever normal is we're going to have to pay for things that we like social emotional health for kids early childhood education tutoring programs and when we do excuse me when we do the budget process i want to make sure that we have adequate funds there to do that so there would be many things in the budget going forward that we cannot afford and that's part of the hard part of budgeting but one of the most pressing needs that we have right now is remedying what this last year has wrought for us and i regret that i will not be able to support this measure okay all

133right i'd like to say something bob thank you for for speaking your mind i know it's not easy to take a position that way but the reason i am voting for this a myriad of reasons is i think that the process that we've committed to is so critically important for for the district and for the board to budget uh you know we don't like to write checks of higher amount but we aren't in control of the the economic factors regionally and what it's going to take to recruit and retain the the best staff that we can across the board and that i'm committed to to the process the timing the transparency uh that we've created and this is sort of the you know the final implementation of that so while i do recognize that there's

134a um budgeting could be a zero-sum game and you're you take from one place for another and that does create constraints for us and we're gonna have to make we always have to make difficult decisions about how we uh how we fund the activities and i think that um it would be a bad position for us if we deferred this and then a year or two down the road uh had another big bump that we have to to take up so i'd rather do this gradually and thoughtfully along the way rather than facing you know push a bow wave so that's why i'm voting for it okay right any other comments thoughts oh i just just one thing um appreciating everyone's comments it's really not that much significance but just the idea that to say

135like we won't be able to fund something that certainly we have to make those tough decisions but i think we we don't know that we won't be able to fund social and emotional programs or work i think that there's always the possibility that we'll be really faced with a tough decision but i want to believe if it's a priority that we have identified as a board and a district we're going to find a way right so i feel like i hear what you're saying but i don't want it i don't want to focus on the ways this is limiting us i think that's very pragmatic and i appreciate it and i'm sure um matt was also working really closely with slade um at our at our budget but i just i just wanted to make

136that small comment thank you very much yeah yeah thank you bob also yeah okay let's do it all right uh all those in favor say aye aye aye aye all those opposed no all right motion passes four to one okay uh you want to present this or hey thank you bob for your points yeah um so next up is um the addendum to slade's contract um we have talked about this as a second reading and so we're voting on this as well um let's um let's do the same thing and we'll put up for a motion and then um and a second and then we'll and then we can discuss it so do we have a motion to approve the addendum to the mixihi contract it's all moved second all right so uh any discussion

137about this anybody nothing no just that you're one prolific dude okay okay uh hearing no discussion uh do we have a uh all those in favor aye aye aye aye aye okay thank you board thank you thank you thank you slade for all of your work it's i'll still say it's the best job i've ever had i love working with you all too see what i can do about that no it's a good it's great um okay so then we have the consent agenda uh do i have a motion to uh pass the l moved a second that okay all those in favor aye aye passes any new business this budget question are we are we gonna plan to plan what we're gonna do uh post pandemic or what we're gonna do to are we

138is this budget going to anticipate what the next school year is going to look like that's different from a normal school year what are your thoughts and could you talk about a little bit what is it we're going to start that discussion about um you know i think the the budgeting process is going to be mostly complete but we're going to be discussing about uh what do we keep you know about the programming what are we not going to keep about you know what we've been have experienced we're going to start the discussion the first week of may with the admin team and kind of then let that filter back down to plcs and then begin a a community engagement um process where you know working with chris peliquin and and joe sutton and the

139kind of our parent engagement team uh helped allow them to help us craft a mechanism to reach out to parents and then we'll let student leaders hopefully reach out to students about their experiences you know i don't think it's going to reveal significant you know significant you know pressure on the budget but the things that we have looked at um in terms of you know school start times busing different different those type of things those are already being considered uh um you know in terms of in putting in the budgeting process so i have a kind of a tagline question on that not that it needs to be in tonight's agenda but i'd be curious to after listening to um john stanton's report i assume we've invested uh more in technology resources uh this year

140than may have been in the budget and so um maybe on as a future conversation we could look at how what does that mean for the next year or two in terms of anticipated expenditures uh given the cap tech levy and correct you know how are we doing in that in the budget management yeah it would be a good chance to um kind of update about that yeah so and the next budget advisory board meeting also is in may and we'll be discussing um pandemic expenditures and esser funds and you know you know again kind of improving that financial literacy around you know revenues and expenditures esser funds you know staffing et cetera so and k and matt will be of course centerpieces around that in their conversation okay great anything else all right um

141meeting is adjourned all right thank you jody thank you matt thank you our virtual audience right yeah probably still thank you everybody who's watching i don't know i mean someone might know