Wenatchee School District Board Meeting 11-9-21

001go for it we i just clicked live on youtube so we should be good to go right now thank you i want to welcome everybody to the november 9th meeting of the wenatchee school board and as our first order of business i would ask that you would join us in the pledge of allegiance and we have a flag coming up somewhere yep give me a second it's okay a second to get that particular screen shared there we go thank you i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you okay first up on our agenda is our consent agenda on which we have our october 26 regular minutes board meeting minutes vouchers

002and payroll personnel report surplus report and contracts is there a motion to approve the consent agenda i'll move approval of the consent agenda as written thank you michelle sir second all second thank you julie is there any discussion okay this is a uh roll call vote uh martin i michelle hi julie hi maria aye and laura is i as well that motion passes thank you okay next on the agenda we have um citizen comments and it's my understanding that there are somewhere between three and five people who have signed up to speak this evening correct we have four and i'll call them in order and then if they're kim's gonna continue to look to make sure we got everybody but first up tonight is johnny houston so let me bring him over and after johnny

003tonight is allison just so you're ready okay thank you whenever you're ready mr houston there you go can you hear me yes so apparently i need to say this now sending your child to school is not implied consent if mandated are you the wenatchee school board for or against inoculating our children with the experimental gene therapy as a requirement for attending school make this a topic of discussion now tell us where you stand if you are against it formulate a written plan that states so why wait for ensley to force it upon us and let's not be naive it's coming parents deserve to know which direction you will take this in advance you have two weeks till the next board meeting let it be known parents if this worries you as well demand to know

004act send emails or speak out don't be docile parents i also urge you to make plans in advance that will enable you to remove your child from government schools when and if necessary talk to parents talk to retired teachers find teachers who are forced out of the system and speak to the churches even if you don't go to church get the ball rolling for community learning outside of government schools the fewer children in these schools means less funding and less power your children are yours they do not belong to the collective do not allow the government to bully you your freedom and rights are given to you by god not the government san francisco has now mandated the shop for children in australia there are places where thousands of children are being forced to take

005the shot without parental consent in some cases knowledge professional athletes in their prime from around the world are dropping dead on the pitch for heart failure it's becoming a regular thing for example 24 year old austrian hockey star borah sudecki dropped dead on the ice of cardiac arrest none of these athletes had any heart issues prior to taking the shot these stories are only becoming more prevalent so what happens to our children i'll read a quote from christine anderson of the european parliament all through europe governments have gone through great lengths to get the people vaccinated we were promised the shots would be a game changer and it would restore our freedom turns out that was that was not true it does not it does not render you immune you can still contract the buyers

006and you can still be infectious the only thing the vaccine did for sure would spill billions and billions of dollars in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies the majority of mep support oppression of the people while claiming shamelessly to do it for the people's own good for it is not the goal that renders this system oppressive it is always the methods by which the goal is in pursuit whenever a government claims to have the people's interest at heart you need to think again in the history of mankind there's never been a political lease sincerely concerned about the well-being of regular people what makes us think this is different now if the age of enlightenment has brought forth anything then it's certainly this never take anything any government tells you at face value always question everything that

007government does or doesn't do always look for it to your motives and ask who benefits whenever a political lead pushes an agenda this hard and resorts to extortion and manipulation to get their way you can almost always be sure that benefit is definitely not what they definitely not what they had at heart as far as i'm concerned i will not be vaccinated with anything that has not been properly vetted and tested and has shown no sound scientific evidence that the benefit outweighs the disease itself or the long possible long-term side effects which to this day we know nothing about i will not be reduced to a new guinea pig by getting the vaccine violence with an experimental drug and most assuredly not get a vaccine because my government tells me to and promises in return

008i will be granted freedom let me be clear no one grants me freedom for i am a free person end quote parents if you think you're alone you're not if you think you don't have a choice you do please protect your children no more tyranny no more shots thank you mr houston who's next please so allison rasmussen and i just brought her in whenever you're ready allison all right can you guys hear me yes do you have a camera this evening um [Music] trying to figure out how i can see you now oh yay okay so my name is allison rasmussen and i am a retired wenatchee school district teacher and former esd specialist um i have two children in the wenatchee school district and my um comments and questions are um on in the

009october 12 2021 school board meeting president jake said the state or stated uh that um discussion had resulted in support from the majority of the board to continue to hold me meetings virtually until after november elections so my question to you is why is this school board meeting being held online when it was stated at the at the october 12th school board meeting by president jakes that after the election school board meetings would occur in person again um and then i stated in an email to you those exact minutes in that october 12th meeting um secondly i strongly recommend that the current and newly elected school board members have time to review um oh sorry skipped here we are um yeah i strongly recommend that the current newly elected school board members have time to

010review staff comments concerns and questions that were provided to the wenatchee school district staff survey following the dei training on october 8th before approving the equity audit proposal this proposal is costing over 169 000 and if the school board has not seen or reviewed these survey results then i urged the board to table the equity audit proposal on tonight's agenda and i asked the question district staff attended this training has the school board been presented with all and not just selected high remarks of the staff survey results following this training the audit seems extremely costly to implement given current budget constraints and declining student enrollment it is my opinion that our limited school budget could be spent more wisely on student staff and building needs question has the school board looked at the 16 educator

011and student focused groups and the in the positions that are to be held in the equity audit proposal that will need to be created there's eight educator focused groups so that would be teachers and that'd be eight separate groups will these educators be paid for their extra time spent assisting this audit teachers have been pushed to their limits given staff shortages increased classroom sizes added job description duties and meeting the needs of students missing 10 to 20 days of school due to covet contamination protocols and another focus group position that would be added would be eight student focus groups when will they do this during the school day or will students be pulled from the regular classes or asked to stay after school another question are these positions going to be paid positions on top

012of the 169 000 or was this budgeted into the 169 000 it seems to me that many of the questions being answered in the audit i and there's an example like in table one um in the proposal of the audit the equity audit could easily be researched and found by a committee or by a school district staff rather than spending this enormous amount of money for an outside source and um that was i think chosen i think the person to do the audit was education northwest to complete this audit another question only two out of 295 washington state school districts have paid education northwest to complete this type of audit has a school district or board received references from the two school districts of evergreen public schools and north shore school district to see whether

013the audit is worth the money proposed to be spent allison i'm going to interrupt you because you did have over your three minute time limit we did receive your comments in writing by email so we do have the full context of all your remarks okay thank you so much you're welcome okay next i understand is rachel yep rachel's next don't bring her across great hi there the three-minute pressure good evening folks first i wanted to thank um staff and superintendent gordon for the information in last uh the meeting wrap up where the dei video was published i think the link was wrong originally but it did get fixed so thanks for that i would really um encourage you um to post that somewhere static on your website along with the handouts i haven't received the

014handouts yet that went along with it um since you did send that press release out in july i think it it deserves that kind of status not everyone clearly not everyone attends school board meetings and not everyone reads the minutes so it'd be great to just have that out there static um so thank you for that um in regard to um the agenda tonight the equity audit proposal thanks alison for your comments in that regard i think there's a lot of good questions and again um i'm gonna focus my comments tonight just really on governance so here is a a lengthy proposal it's the first time i've seen it i have no idea if it's the first time you all have seen it and i am forced to comment based on not hearing you all

015ask questions and have the dialogue back and forth so i don't have an opportunity as a constituent to hear that dialogue and then weigh in as a constituent um with my board on my thoughts on that or any concern so i would encourage you guys to have a robust dialogue tonight go through that proposal um and then seek feedback from your constituents and i will note that as dismal as our turnout was for our election and a meager 46 percent i will note that it's a 60 what i calculate like a 62 increase over the last uh the 2017 election so we have a lot of people interested so we had at the peak we had um in those races in 17 we had uh 7 400 people uh weigh in uh and and and

016vote um and this time we had twelve thousand so people are interested these are your constituents and i would just really encourage you again to take a look at how you conduct business so that we have a real opportunity um to get back with you and and have real dialogue about um this proposal that could obviously um it will is intended to affect our district in the future um and then my final comment would be that my recollection regardless of what the minute say from the october 12th meeting was that there would be a consideration to a reconsideration after the election of how to conduct meetings i don't see that on the agenda tonight and that's a little bit disconcerting as the election is now over thank god right so um i would like you

017guys to have that discussion uh as you said you would um on october 12th and that is it other than um johnny thank you for your comments on um the vaccinations um i would just like to say um that i believe in informed consent um and i also believe in parental consent as well for these vaccinations so i think the medical freedom and the choice of parents is going to be very very key and i would love to see the school board support support medical freedom for our kiddos that attend our public schools so thank you thank you rachel next up i believe we have brian higgins is that correct hello there my name is brian hicks i teach at wenatchee high school and i live on south butthouse street um i just want to

018talk today really briefly do you look frozen a couple of teachers are okay sorry about that um so first off a shout out to tanner dots hour tanner dot tower took his sophomore avid classes to take part in the uh dia de acer la deferencia or the make a difference day and uh made a pretty positive impact on our community so thank you very much tenor dotzar for being able to make connections for our students where they can work in our community and be a productive part of our community it's really important to see that kind of work going on i just want to give a shout out to lauren brown um one of our marketing teachers at the high school and jake bucholtz who supported lauren brown in creating a really cool learning opportunity

019today for his students uh where he brought in another teacher to teach some different material that was it seemed very engaging and exciting for his students and to be able to do that for students and to make the day just a little bit different every day is what keeps students engaged so fantastic job lauren brown and jake bucholtz for making sure that he had support in that activity and then finally i received an email today from one of my freshman avid students with a kudos for janaya johnson and they don't send these emails to me because i'm going to say anything at meetings they send these emails because they're really excited and what she communicated was that jania johnson was dealing with the situation in a class and took some really intentional steps to respond

020to students needs um without getting emotional and providing a lot of support and she just wanted to tell me how excited she was to see some of the things that we're learning in our avid class to see teachers using that in the workplace with how they interact with students leaving kids feeling positive and productive and supported so big shout out to janaya johnson who is one of our avid partners and a supporter of our program but someone who is also trying to live the values that we're trying to instill in students in their lives and in our community so thank you very much to all those teachers and thank you very much to the board for their work this year thank you brian appreciate that so next up on our agenda is um policy updates

021first read all right laura thank you and i'll hand it over to maria and michelle here in a moment um all three policies that are up tonight 52-53 43-11 and 21.95 are all wasda recommendations with some a few minor adjustments um the the first one being uh 5253 um one of the pieces that we altered is in the uh third to last paragraph on that second page really dealing with social media accounts and the first iteration of the policy it literally said there's no social media uh use from staff and staff could not friend so in consulting with legal counsel what we did was move the language soften the language slightly students on social media unless done solely for educational purposes in the context of an authorized formal school relationship and only through an account

022that is strictly limited to and used for performance of job responsibilities any such an account must be created and maintained in accordance with district procedures implementing this policy in today's day and age there are different ways to engage students and some of those are through social media but we really felt like the committee felt like this was an appropriate uh way to to blend um the the desire to not from wasde not to have any social media any friending or anything like that to this type of policy that is educationally based it is a wsd policy social media account that way we're able to be able to track those aspects making sure that our students or our staff are both put in a really good place to do the things that they're doing maria michelle

023anything on that one well if you could just kind of give an example of um where that might be appropriate versus not appropriate i think that would that clarification could be helpful i'll just use my own the superintendent has a twitter account uh and i'll give you an example of how wenatchee high school has a twitter account run uh by students and they will like some of my uh you know i'll take a picture at an event and students will like it or they'll take a picture or they'll they'll put something out on a social media and i would like it so based off the original was the policy i could not like that uh that um that social media posting so it just was very restrictive and again my role as educational making sure

024that it's done appropriate through a wsd account uh maintained uh and done appropriately thank you michelle though that's a well and and on the flip side of that with liking or friending or following so students could follow you on twitter but you wouldn't be following them correct so yeah so you have those different aspects that that allow you to to do the work but ultimately we still want our educators to engage with our students and we recognize um late into the 21st century there are different ways of doing that than email um and our students use instagram facebook many other things that i have no clue about uh but we recognize those pieces are out there so we felt like this was a very appropriate way so did legal counsel felt like this was a

025very appropriate step forward with this policy maria anything are you good we're good okay yep the next two um the resource officer piece um went through some changes due to house bill 1214 really including the training expanding the role of the sro to include building positive relationships with students and defining a new category of safety and security so this one really just followed along with with that house bill and needing to make those appropriate changes same with 2195 that academic acceleration um needed to make sure that we had that in place uh for our students as well maria michelle anything on those two yeah i think the the addition to um the academic acceleration policy which was added by our district staff correct was um the um prior to the automatic enrollment of the state

026assessments that we would be looking at are i ready data and other classroom data to um to ensure that students were ready and that they have the resources um to support for their acceleration and learning so his board that wasn't part of wazda correct right i have a housekeeping question on 4311 are we in sync and up to date with our sro contract with the revised policy okay yes danielle has reviewed all of those in line with these new policies good question so there no other cons questions or concerns we will move those to second read and then that means that they will be on the consent agenda at the next meeting unless there are some changes between now and then okay great next on our agenda we have a fiscal year-end presentation jeanette will

027be joining us and assume sharing your screen jeanette yes let me get that started here and then share my screen here we go it's all yours okay i'm gonna apologize in advance there's a lot of information in these slides so we will be taking breaks for questions as we go um so um just let me know if you guys have any questions as we go um we're gonna be reviewing uh basically um the impacts of last year's uh finances so we're actually going to kind of work backwards normally we start with the general fund and end with transportation and we're going to start with i believe transportation and then work our way to the general fund because the general fund is uh beefy and it'll take us a little bit so i wanted to hold

028you to the end um so we will start real quick maybe here we go okay so the other funds so um i did kind of a multi-year snapshot here for you guys um some of it on the left or on the right um is mostly just kind of reminder of what we just approved over the summer with the budget so those are those four columns and won't really touch on those we'll be mostly focusing on the 2021 actual bottom line in transportation vehicle fund is the actual fund balance came in about 50 000 higher than the projected that projected is what i projected during budget um so definitely good news there um asb is complicated and it's a tough one to kind of project especially i think during this pandemic time with you know things

029happening things not happening um definitely not are normal at all so um bottom line their fund balance dropped about thirty thousand dollars overall uh from the start of the year to the end of the year um you know there's a lot of factors that go into that here on the next slide i have it um you know a multi-year history for you guys that kind of shows towards the top you know over time what has that fund balance done and as you guys can see in 1920 the fund balance did go up quite a bit again that was the year that school was closed sports got shut down all of the craziness happened so a lot of the things that were planned didn't end up actually happening um so that um resulted in a higher

030fund balance and then this year um we've decreased by almost five percent in fund balance down underneath is a snapshot of each building um asb is very tracked kind of basically in buckets right so if a club raises a dollar that dollar goes into that club's account and that's where it stays until it's moved or spent any questions on asb i just um had a question jeanette i noticed that um between the 1617 and the 17-18 school year there were kind of some significant reductions in some of the middle schools um uh not one of uh one of them did not have a reduction but i'm curious why orchard and pioneer went down so significantly those years um i would have to look into that off the top of my head i don't recall which

031building but i know one of the middle schools used to do a big fundraiser and it was about that time that they decided to stop doing that fundraiser and so that um that very well might have been that year i can look into that further and kind of try to narrow in you know where exactly that reduction happened that's okay i just i just thought it was kind of curious so i didn't know if there was a redistribution between the middle schools and the high school or if it was just individual buildings based on enrollment and other things i didn't know if it um if this if some of this was enrollment driven or uh not tied in necessarily to fundraising but some other elements so yeah uh asb is somewhat impacted by enrollment because

032um most all the buildings have asb cards that they hand out give to students in exchange for the asb card fee so that they can students can attend like other events and things like that so it is somewhat enrollment driven it the money will i mean i guess a school could choose to transfer money to another school but that probably won't happen um so all the money is contained within the school uh oftentimes potentially we'll see transfers um you know between general asb and clubs and things like that but typically that money i've never seen it transfer from one school to another asb is very much fundraiser driven so you have you know some schools who are more um willing to do fundraisers and you know they don't mind kind of the extra paperwork and

033things like that um so they will do that um you know they see the the positive side of the fundraising um compliance piece and they're able to you know spend that money to do you know either to do a class trip or or whatever their kind of working on so um not hugely enrollment driven definitely don't doesn't transfer between schools or anything like that that would be that would be a new one for me okay thank you thank you for clarifying that well while we're at a pause um going back to the last slide regarding the transportation i know we're focusing on the actuals uh but i was curious to see that your projections for 23 and 4 um were quite a bit off given our actuals the the with 2021 being or 19 being

034500 000 i mean can you explain why where we're getting the 215 to 18 220 when we're at 500 300. so um the 500 is in 1920 that is that high because the district transferred 250 thousand dollars from the general fund and we did not choose to do that in any of the four years um for the budget that we just passed that's why that's lower uh also uh our department of ecology grant ran out so this uh 2021 year was the last year of that grant and so i did not budget that going forward because we aren't we don't have it okay so we potentially might have to look at transferring money into capital projects in the future um at this point i am not planning on that but we will definitely look at

035trends and our fleet depreciation and our fleet um health and factor that in um when needed okay yeah i guess that's what was the concern is if we've needed about 500 or more how does that look in those few years but um that makes sense yeah um you know it's kind of a game with transportation vehicle because you know you have to spend money to get the money down the road but you need the money up front to be able to spend it so um it really is a management piece of you know keeping making sure that you're continually purchasing buses so that you're continually getting that appreciation money back from the state but really you know that 1920 year and i believe a couple years prior to that with the transfers from the general

036fund and that department of ecology grant that really um you know helped helped kind of set us up to be able to um hopefully for a few years get by without transferring money thank you okay moving on to the debt service fund um so this fund basically um or not basically but this one pays for our voted debt um so our bonds that are outstanding sorry um so um you know basically tax collections coming in some interest earnings and then um on the expenditure side that bond principal in interest payment and then um a small bond transfer fee as well so that's kind of the summary of that fund we ended at about 2.85 2.86 million to carry us into the next year and just a quick snapshot um so our 2020 or sorry 2010

037issue um actually will be paid off here next month yay um and so um after next month we will only have the 2014 bond issue that we will be paying on capital projects i decided to keep it a little shorter and sweeter because you know previous to 20 20 21 the bond projects were wrapping up and there was a bit more activity capital projects unless you have like a sustained long project is kind of difficult to compare year to year even looking here at the 2021 actual and then next year's budget you can see they look very very different so each each year is very individual so looking at long periods of time typically isn't helpful so as you guys can see uh for 2021 the majority of the funds actually came from network projects

038sorry network projects that we were able to use are some of our keras funds for as well uh really network expansion that's supporting our all of our one-to-one devices um really beefing up our network so that we can handle that heavy load of devices on our campuses so that's where the majority of the revenue came from on the expense side we had quite a bit of building security projects we had some alarms fire alarms and uh the high school portables sunny slope portable that went in and that's also going to be expensed in the new year and then um some preliminary work on the softball fields that basically the feasibility aspect of that so at the end of the august 31st of 2021 we had almost 2.5 million dollars left in that fund which is

039about a 500 000 decrease any questions on capital projects before we jump into general fund okay here we go just some highlights uh basically reminders at this point from last year our enrollment was down quite a bit 366 fte it's definitely quite a bit um due to that we made budget reductions mid-year to help us financially be able to sustain that large of an enrollment drop we knew that we could not just continue as normal with that large of a decrease athletics also due to the pandemic operated with shortened seasons so that impacted costs as well we were in remote learning until november so a lot of our costs that we would normally incur were not happening you know we had some staff laid off for a while those kinds of things also we had

040the one-time coveted funding so that's included in here as well this is a summary of the revenue so the blue bar is the budget and then the red bar is the actual um so you'll see uh the two longest bars those are state general purpose so that is our apportionment funds and that's the enrollment so the difference between the actual and the budget is really that 366 uh student decrease and about 3 million is what i was planning for in in my head when we were looking at those budget reductions we made mid-year i also included some other items on the side there the federal general that's our fema funds so that's where that is the federal special that includes a lot of things but a couple of items that are kind of different our

041food services revenue actually came in about four hundred thousand dollars higher than um kind of normal basically um that's probably a lot due to um the way we were we were able to clean meals and the reimbursement rate we got also that cares funding it's about five million dollars a little over so that's a another reason why that actual budget or actual bars higher than the budget any questions on the revenue okay so the expenses um so kind of a slightly different approach here um on the left hand side i kind of wanted to explain what is included in each of the little or each of the big buckets um and what types of um or what cost centers these basically are in those so um the bars at the bottom which is the support

042services so that has transportation nutrition um it's called district-wide support so it's basically kind of i think of like the backbone of the district tech warehouse the motor pool our insurance cost for property district you know typical district office staff that kind of thing the school board that's where your guys budget goes um so as you guys can see that was about a million or two million dollars lower than the budget when you just consider we were in remote learning for two months we unfortunately had to lay off some staff for almost that whole amount of time you know it makes sense when you look at the two bars also the community community support item that's the child care piece um that piece was actually paid for from the cares budget because that 29 thousand

043dollar actual was um the first responder child care that we were required to do um when cobid first hit then um the other instructional programs um that's kind of a big random mishmash group uh 21st century match billable expenses which are basically you know if we pay for something but we're going to be reimbursed by something other than a grant that's where we put it um fema the first round of cares was coded there um avid those kinds of programs then compensatory instruction is a lot of the programs that you guys are typically used to hearing about right the lap the lab high poverty bilingual migrant title all the titles 21st century the juvenile detention center all of those types of programs and then federal stimulus is new and that's where all pretty much all

044the rest of the cares grants are going to live for the most part is in that federal stimulus category and then regular instruction is everything else okay so um fun balance which is mostly what uh people just want to skip to so um something that's uh relatively new that i kind of wanted to walk you guys through is um there's now kind of two different buckets within the general fund and there is the general fund which is basically all of our state and federal programs and then there is what's called the local sub fund so that's where any of our local funds are directed so our local tax collections if we collect any fines and fees from students and families those go in there there's some other little programs that also fall in there if

045we receive any donations uh that kind of stuff goes in there so anything that's considered you know locally received goes into the local sub fund that's actually a state mandate that came through 1920 was the first year that that was implemented so i wanted to separate that out for you guys because on the year-end f-196 report it is it is separated and i think as time goes on it will become more and more separated on reports and kind of pulled out so the general fund is one fund when i report to you guys every month basically you're getting the snapshot of that total column because our reporting doesn't have it broken out into the two on that same report um let's see here um so basically bottom line our total general fund balance ended at

046about 12.9 percent again that's a factor of the expenses for the year um we did end up um with a couple minor adjustments um we'll skip to the next slide here um so basically what this slide is is looking at what i was projecting as far as fund balance ending fund balance over the summer as part of the budget process and then what our fund balance actually was um you know just making sure that we're um aligned and that there's not any like crazy surprises or odd things that came through um the first item on the list is restricted revenue for carryover so basically we ended up with less grant carryover which is fine we can spend it in the current year or we can carry it over so we just chose to spend a

047little bit more in the current year um restricted for skill center so that's the wenatchee valley tech center and all all of their funds are tracked separately and they um all of those are there so basically one of the things that happened was during the legislative session they passed a learning some learning recovery funds for them but at the time of the budget there was nothing out there as far as how much we were getting when we were getting it anything like that so those funds actually ended up coming in august and then we will just be carrying those over into the future to support the tech center also um our donation account came in a little bit less just finalizing some of those ended up being less anticipated carryover which again is fine either

048spend it in the current year or spend it in the next year um kind of some of the big are kind of bigger things that came through is the expenses ended up actually right on projections so i felt pretty good about that um and revenues came in higher than projected so the resulting increase in fund balance was mostly due to revenues being higher than i anticipated so um some changes were towards the end of the year our enrollment did increase slightly um our bilingual funds um we actually received a little bit more towards the end and then the cares funds as well those were um you know at the time of the budget there wasn't necessarily final um plans in place and so you know adapting as we go that was just one of the

049things that happened uh also some unanticipated and unknown items came through um we've had some insurance claims and reimbursements so we got those finalized um so we were able to count on those uh we also got an audio system grant and so those funds came in we were approved for some safety net funding for special education we apply every year typically when we do the budget we don't know exactly how much that's going to be so we don't count on that transportation also received some hold harmless funding and again we didn't know how much that was going to be uh nutrition services uh the meals were meal claims were higher and they also received some additional funding um i believe it was passed through from the feds to use up some of their extra allocation

050and then we receive some additional medicaid match as well so bottom line i was anticipating we would end the year last year with about a ten percent fund balance uh we actually ended at about like i said about 12.9 um so i'm hopeful that that will help us you know carrying forward into this next year looking at the budget shortfalls that we were kind of just seeing this year and then into the future any questions on those two very wordy lots of number slides jeanette what does transportation hold harmless so basically what the state did this last year in the legislature is they uh basically held held harmless districts for um not having students on buses at the beginning beginning of the school year that's basically what it boiled down to because you know we

051started students back up going to school in november there were districts that i don't even think started this school or students back to school at all last year so the legislature decided to essentially fully fund or provide what they had committed to initially in the budget okay i got i got it hold harmless normally is an insurance thing it applies to money too but i do i do remember what it was now thank you okay we'll roll right along so you guys probably wonder well now that that's done what are you gonna do jeanette you must be bored um so kind of rolling through what what the next few steps look like as you guys know we've settled numerous collective bargaining agreements we're still working through some of those but looking at what are the

052cost impacts of those putting those to um you know putting basically those through the process and making sure all of our salaries are updated and everything like that um also updating projected revenue uh based on our you know increased enrollment um and hopefully continued increased enrollment uh you know continuously reviewing our spending plans what we're what we're thinking for this year what hiccups have we found so far um those kinds of things working through that um we're also going to be working on a more transparent budget process and web page um and so we'll be we'll be working through that process um also i will be presenting kind of a mid-year financial update to the board um i don't have a final date on that i'm thinking probably january february i think just after all

053this pandemic crazy our collective bargaining agreements um a lot of them changing uh our enrollment being what it was and is i think that we it would be good just to kind of take a look at that especially before budget season rolls up upon us again uh again we talked about last summer the staffing model so working on developing and implementing that for next school year [Music] and starting budget all over again so that's kind of the road ahead i see you left off all the fun auditing you're gonna have to do with the cares funds i try to ignore it [Laughter] you don't have that much free time i know thankfully i have an awesome awesome director accounting karen who handles the auditors very well board any other questions for jeanette thanks for sharing

054kind of the differences between what you budgeted and what was the actual uh especially kind of where those different pots of money change so that's a really great perspective to have for the board and you know it's it's good that i i'm thankful that you really did some really thoughtful projections um that put us in a better position you know kind of imagining worst case scenario but of course that worst case scenario didn't happen with our budget so i appreciate your forethought in in implanting such a budget so thank you great all right jeanette thank you so much yes great job okay moving along um next item in the agenda next section is our action section and first up we have the highly capable program plan and tonight we have kathy moody with us uh

055to present to the board a brief outline of the program and what's in in part of this action tonight kathy all right well um good evening everybody i appreciate this opportunity to share a little bit about highly capable programs in the wenatchee school district and you um received a copy of the i grant form package 217 which is our highly capable um program plan and this form package sorry i'm trying to get my screen up at the same time i'm trying to talk and sometimes that's tricky this form package requires school board approval in order for us to receive state funds so the budgetary impact the budget for high cap programs is 527 um and the state funding formula is five percent of our student population which covers about 39 percent of the high cap

056budget the rest of the funds come from bea levy and local dollars and just [Music] laying the groundwork um the mission of highly capable programs is to provide services that acknowledge and address students diverse advanced learning needs in the wenatchee school district the multi-tiered systems system of support model or mtss is a framework for providing services for all students which does include those with advanced learning needs um there are national standards for highly capable programming um developed by the national association for gifted children and um these are the guiding principles um that guide our work giftedness is dynamic and constantly developing and it's found among students from all backgrounds educators should be focusing on positive student outcomes and all educators are involved um so that students needs are met throughout the day um in the

057wenatchee school district there are currently 740 students grades k-12 identified as needing program services and over the course of the year we have ongoing identification activity we expect that number to grow to about students so i'd like to share uh briefly about the identification process and range of services provided to students with advanced learning needs um but before we move into this process i do want to note as it stated in the form package one of the directives from the state is that district practices for identifying the most highly capable students must prioritize equitable identification of low-income students and so ideally the identification of highly capable students should roughly match the overall demographics of our student population because students needing highly capable services exist in every segment of the population um there are some complications

058um and nuances to that though based on definitions and the way data is collected and so i just wanted to share one example for example english language learners in the washington washington state the definition includes a component that says an eligible student for purposes of the transitional bilingual program is a student whose primary language is other than english and whose english skills are sufficiently deficient or absent to impair learning and the federal definition is different but similar and so when we're trying to match our demographics to demographics of the district what we find is that typically students with a native language other than english who are identified for high cap services especially for reading or language arts do not have that do not have difficulty in speaking reading writing or understanding the english language and

059they typically exit from the transitional bilingual program early usually quite early and so while they continue to be students who have a native language other than english after a period of time they're no longer counted as just tradition sorry transitional bilingual students and so um the number of students who have exited from the transitional bilingual programs who are being served in high cap programs is not information that's collected by the state um so we've been exploring some ways to try to capture this data of former el students um because i think that number is going to be quite a bit higher um than current el students so um that's one of the ways that the data that we compare ourselves to is a little more nuanced um equitable identification is being addressed um in multiple

060ways um to make this state imperative all students are automatically considered for identification every year so in essence all students are considered automatically referred for possible hi-cap services um testing and screening occurs during the school day at the students homeschool um and and that is in there because in some districts it's you know saturday testing at some distant location right um communication about the identification process is available in english and spanish and we are reaching out to families in their native language seeking to share information through attendance at district events like the migrant bilingual pac event and the migrant bilingual and avid information night recently at the high school um in data that we review for identification we do look at language acquisition scores so alpha testing and um upcoming soon to be weeded testing

061would be considered for for rapid language acquisition and then just in general we use criteria guidelines rather than cut scores for identification we consider multi-year multiple measures of data so there's more than one pathway for identification we also do universal screening in the district using the cognitive abilities test it's shifted to second grade and is now online which uh gives us the opportunity to test students when it's not timed it can still capture their reasoning ability and problem-solving skills but it uses pictures um and this online uh cocat screening also gives us a chance to offer different languages for providing directions to students um so languages are available they can listen to instructions in english spanish and i think there's six other languages at the moment um we do consider nonverbal testing as well and

062we use local norms whenever possible so that we're comparing students to other similar wenatchee students um throughout the year this year there will be working groups meeting around the identification process at the middle school level the high school level and elementary level to evaluate the structure and process and to seek additional ways to remove um any bearers barriers for more representative identification and part of this process will be to include efforts to utilize flood rating scales which is culturally linguistically and economically diverse and those scales expand on the characteristics traditionally used in identifying students for high cap services so the identification process as on the screen there's annual notification each fall provided in english and spanish to all um households we send out mailing as well as publishing online communicating to families that all students

063are considered for services and sharing the identification timelines um referrals again we consider all students automatically referred but we also accept referrals from teachers parents students can self-refer community members can refer and that just gives us additional information that we consider in the identification process if there is going to be any additional assessment or screening done of an individual student we would get permission to assess we conduct the screening and assessment and then the multi-disciplinary selection committee meets and you know following the criteria designated by the state determines students most in need of highly capable services based on multiple objective criteria uh once students are identified as meeting services a notification letter is sent to parents and guardians um providing them with information about services and then they would need to re return a letter

064of understanding in order for us to serve their students and so the services that are provided um effie can i can i interrupt you just for a quick second um so back on your last slide um part of the the screening process that that begins at third grade correct it is uh k12 okay 12. sorry um so how how is that it are all the screenings um paper and pencil tests are there some online tests i guess i'm wondering how we're serving all our population because um i don't know how it changed last year with a lot of students being online but with waa i assume you're you're testing there as well um we do a little bit different testing at wia but yes we do offer the opportunity to test in in our experience

065and from talking with people around the state um testing remotely does not yield as accurate of results as having students in front of you testing um even if it's online in front of you so for example with wia we um communicated out to parents for the universal screening portion if that's if you were asked about universal screening or were you asking about screening screening in general well i'm just wondering you know if we're if we're looking at k-12 um but we know that we have some students who have chosen to to do a remote learning option again kind of looking at that equitable piece how how are we reaching out because all our other students are back in person full time how are we reaching out to those wia students because we know for for

066those kids obviously online is a is a better model that's why they're choosing it but how are we engaging and testing them if we know that online testing is not optimal well i would say the the cogat is difficult to administer online okay we universally screen students they're taking the i ready um exams we use that universally for all students k-8 um for the cogat testing though we provided an opportunity for them to um you know i met them at wia at a certain time and we would conduct testing there so they do have that opportunity great thank you so much you're welcome all right so let's go in the wrong direction okay so services um be provided in four different ways um just universally students are provided services in the regular classroom again k-12

067through differentiation flexible grouping content acceleration they might be working on independent projects and then another way services can be provided would be in the elementary we do have a unique uniquely highly capable program which is a once a week very brief pull out services provided by a high cap specialist and we do identify students based on strength area and the services typically are focused on strength areas um and then through acceleration of curriculum or instruction that can happen anywhere um k-12 curriculum compacting advanced coursework at the secondary level um access to college-level coursework and then programs outside the traditional school day or school setting um it can be outside the traditional school day as well so there might be after school math is cool competition groups and some of this um obviously has been impacted

068in the last couple years so those things have been happening to more or less degrees than they have in the past um or through uh mentorships um like directed study um and um additionally one of my roles um is as the advanced the ap coordinator for the district and supporting directed study students at the high school so there are a variety of directed study students uh currently 28. 28 with projects with topics and social studies preparing independently for ap exams advanced piano studies studio arts and advanced placement um not surprisingly the number of students taking ap exams was lower last year than the previous year um there were 139 exams taken and the percentage of students receiving scores of three or higher did continue to climb so it's now at 72 percent and this year

069again we expect to have about 110 ap exams in this in the spring um students well not students but exams taken by students um that's where we're at um so far and then um while form package 217 addresses highly capable program plans um additional district plans um exist for a continuous evaluation cycle um and all of the um items that we focus on are are happening each year but last year we developed an evaluation plan to really focus or concentrate on making adjustments to one programming component at a time so this year we're focusing on identification k-12 um and have working groups so that we can best use our district resources to maximum effect and then next year focusing on services for students and then the following year on professional development again all of those

070things are happening every year but just continuing to review and improve our process um and outcomes for students so our challenge is to continually provide appropriate learning opportunities for our students and to continually grow capacity in our staff to address student needs um so do you have any questions for me no i do have a couple of questions go for it oh i'll go first in the detail section kathy just for my information since i don't know very much in the testing systems we use we use the wexler whisk for i also see there's a five that's used could you compare and contrast what the two testing regimes are um those are tests that are administered by a psychologist and um used i guess we used both um have in the past year we're transitioning

071to the more updated wexford five but we had purchased a wexler for um so the five is is more robust and it's more current um that's really used um in very limited situations because it's individually administered it's used in the case where a student might be requesting to whole grade accelerate or it can be used kind of in the final stages of determining whether a student is eligible for early entrance to kindergarten okay now that's great then my other detail question you have a nice table of how many students are served in each grade when we get to the middle and the high school where instead of everybody being the same school we've got cte alternative school and mainstream uh are there any differences in the proportions i mean we seem to build up to

072close to 20 percent um from a lower percent in the lower grades but then what is the meaning of the percent participation by those three categories of education in the upper levels um are you talking about the chart with just just the numbers you just got the numbers and then uh me being a mathematician looked at the percentages by grade compared to the enrollment and i don't know how to interpret grades middle school and high school given the changes in where they're educated what page are you referring to martin uh it's page 19-21 okay okay um so um what i would say sometimes the numbers just vary based on based on different cohorts of students are yeah well for example in grade 12 there are 80 students yes um are they across all of our

073institutions uh yes we do i mean obviously not an equal number but we do have students at um the internet academy we do have students at westside high school we do have students do you classify some skill center students in that way and serve them um i believe that the skill center students show up on the wenatchee high school rosters so um they would be included yes yeah if they're identified for high cap services right so you're able to cover all the full spectrum and uh and the participation you don't and my other question is you don't have challenges in differential participation between different pathways of education like you have more let's say more part participation in traditional school than in other forms of schooling or are they all have fairly similar opportunities in application

074um you know i don't know the answer to that question um it's an it's an interesting one i i know that students are everywhere but in terms of the percentages based on the numbers of students for example at west side if it's proportional um but i can find that out um i yeah i think my main interest would be to understand what the best thing to do is and i was just curious to get some information okay am i understanding that you're asking if it's relative i don't need statistics i'm just saying we should be looking at it as a district what you know what's the right thing to be doing don't go get extra statistics at this point but if the question means better statistics is better management of the program in the future

075yes okay sort of dovetailing on martin's question about statistics are these projection numbers lower than we would potentially see because we're coming out of covid um how was enrollment expected to be impacted because of basically a year out of school in some cases um this is a projection um those numbers um and it's probably pretty similar to uh pre-covet i think that it's five less than we were projecting um for the end of year last year so um yeah it has i mean it has obviously impacted everyone but um in terms of numbers identified for services no in terms of what the services might look like that may be more impacted and there's no change this is a program that we've this is the same format of program that we've had going on this is

076essentially a continuation of what we've got is that correct um yes although i would say sometimes people think that the the pull out model is the only way services are provided and so services are provided in three other ways too so yes all are continuing okay so kathy i'm i'm more i'm wondering how your staff numbers have been affected because i know you always have some shifting of folks uh into the regular classroom and some people moving into high cap as far as your your teaching staff so um i'm wondering you know with our enrollment numbers changing over the last couple of years and different you know different building needs and the creation of wia just kind of everything what does your staffing look like right now compared to maybe two years ago and um

077you know and how how how are we as a district kind of meeting um are we are we staffed where we need to be for high cap right now to kind of meet those high cap student needs or are we a little understaffed help me understand where we are okay well um the the only staff explicitly designated um you know that come out of this budget would be the four elementary high cap specialists um and that continues to stay the same um uh again as as the education of all students is the responsibility of all educators um general education classroom teachers um k-12 you know are part of the high cap staffing if you will because they are working with those students daily so so the the staffing needs are met i guess is what

078you're telling me or not um well i i think there's always room to grow i think there's opportunities for professional development um but i do think that we are making um some some great strides with multi-tiered systems of support of differentiating for students and and um addressing students needs by scholar by skills so um yeah it's the same as it has been so in terms of staffing numbers and if we have parents out there whose um students are interested like you said um students can be kind of self-referred i guess um [Music] who who should they reach out to um is there a general high cap number um if if their building doesn't have an assigned person what what would be the best way for a parent to reach out so they could talk to

079someone at their building if that's where they're most comfortable they could also reach out to me um at the district office um there is a high gap number there's a um and hike uh high cap email so would you mind just sharing that sharing that just so anybody watching um okay put her on the spot sorry it's kind of your your your time to market yourself so i just want you to be able to share that if you have that information so the phone number is 509-663-8161 extension 3331 six would get you to nilaya since i'm part time in this role um she can get a message to me um the email would be hi-cap at wenatcheeschools.org thank you i don't have any questions but i do have to say that um you know we

080had this presentation about a year ago and i've seen the the recruitment efforts and the information being presented in spanish and english more of it it's been seen kathy there as well as well as naila there speaks spanish at avid nights minor male lingo packs so um kudos for that um that you know taking that initiative to really put yourself out there and be able to present the information both in spanish and english so thank you for that thank you i don't have any questions either but i do want to thank you for the thorough uh presentation that you've delivered that was a lot of work and compiling and all that and putting into presentation form so thank you very much for coming to the meeting tonight with that information all right thank you kathy

081thank you thank you and then an action item though too so yeah it is an action item [Laughter] so after all that is there a motion to approve uh scrolling back to the beginning is it the application for the grant is that what our motion prove the data and information in form fp217 is that right okay i would propose that motion i will second that is there any discussion okay this is a roll call vote maria aye julie aye michelle hi martin aye laura is i as well that motion passes thank you okay now we move on to our um when ea collective bargaining agreement all right thank you laura so uh the wenatchee educators association and the district have come to an agreement i'll highlight two of the biggest areas it's a two-year contract

082starting september first 2021 and ending august 31st 2023 their salary schedule increases of two percent for 21.22 and two percent or ipd uh which is whichever is higher um but i sincerely want to thank all the members on the negotiation team from both the the administration and our educators association for coming to the table and working together to come up with this agreement and i also want to thank the board for their work through these negotiation processes so board laura back to you thank you um so this is also an action item on our agenda this evening if the board is ready to make a motion i will entertain one i'll move approval of the wenatchee education association collective bargaining agreement thank you michelle is there a second well second thank you julie any discussion

083i just want to thank the team for um focusing on the work and um getting it done with minimal uh minimal conflict at least none that i heard about so so that's that's good good work on part of the team okay so ah if you are in favor of the motion please signify by saying i am the roll call martin aye michelle hi julie hi maria hi and laura is i that motion passes okay now we move on to the rather large item in our packet this evening um the equity audit proposal um paul could you give us some yeah thank you absolutely uh so tonight uh the board has in front of that the equity audit uh from education northwest um so why an equity audit for the wenatchee school district short answer is

084to support the improvement of student outcomes you heard from kathy just a few moments ago it's about supporting all of our students to ensure that each student has opportunities and access to all of our programming throughout our school district first it's also a key component of our strategic plan um equity is one of the board's three values equity educational excellence and accountability um i would also say that equity is a part of educational excellence and accountability you find that equity when we we're doing right by our students and supporting our students for what they need when they need it you heard kathy earlier or just a few moments ago talk about skill by scholar skill by scholar is really working exactly what the board asked us to do the previous board in this current board

085to really working with each individual student and by skill by scholar it really is looking at where are those skills that i may have a a deficit in and what are those skills that i may have great strength and and how do i continue to work our students work with our students to expand them wherever they're at accountability accountability is to our students that we are delivering on an equitable and an excellent educational outcome for each of our our students equity is essential to our promise statement we promise to build a foundation of diversity equity inclusion from which each student emerges future ready equity is about ensuring that each of our students have what they need to be future ready equity creates belonging equity creates access equity is about opportunities equity is doing what is

086right and not what is always easy for our kids the equity audit that is before the board tonight is an opportunity for our district to engage a third party expert to conduct a review or do a deep dive into our schools into our curriculums and some other areas the curriculums the policies the materials and the resources the discipline policies and procedures and practices are instructional policies and teaching practices hiring and recruiting policy and practices access to grade level instruction and access to advanced and honor level instruction so really looking at the core of what we do instructionally for our students is what is at the core of this equity audit how will they do this work they'll do it through the collection of curriculum and documentation review they'll do uh district-wide teacher surveys focus group

087with teachers district by survey with families and students focus groups with students interview with administrators to really get a deep understanding of where we are at in our school district and how are we serving each and every one of our students throughout our district the activity audit will culminate in a final report that summarizes the findings which will be reported to the board it will also be reported in both english and spanish the full report the report will recommend targeted culturally responsive strategies grounded in research-based practices that leaders can use to establish and sustain a district-wide culture of equity and inclusion specifically the findings from the audit are meant to identify areas of opportunities inform short and medium and long-range action that the district can take to advance equity and illuminate other areas for further

088investigation um the report will identify systemic patterns of racial or ethnic proportionality of teachers for classified staff members for administrators and analysis of the extent to which these groups reflect the district's student population and then also probably more importantly how do we help uh transition that work from our the hiring practices to really reflecting our community our student population uh because we know right now where our staff population is we know that um but the key is what are those steps we need to take what's the research what's been proven in practice to actually change that so all of this work will be done to make sure that we're able to really have a shared understanding of our strengths our opportunity gaps and areas for improvement across the entire district including our educators our families

089our community stakeholders and students [Music] this is will be an incredibly important aspect of where we're going in what we're doing i'm also pleased um with the two co-leads that they're assigning that they would assign to the wenatchee school district the two leads have an incredible background of experiences working in non-profit working in school districts working at almost every level within the equity diversity inclusion field their backgrounds i believe uh are incredibly impressive um phd both are phd leads both have been in this work for a number of years both have really unique backgrounds that quite honestly i i think help us understand where we're at and where we're going um the groups that they've worked with evergreen public schools in washington lower marion school district day in pennsylvania north shore school district in washington

090u.s department of education u.s department of justice the oregon department of education office of equity diversity inclusion so there's a lot there within the plan itself but how did we get here how did we get to this point the board remembers last spring um way back when in that march timeline um i brought forward um uh a concept uh based off of our our emerging strategic plan and our values uh and a concept brought forward to bring forward an equity audit along with hiring the director of equity through those conversations and others it was clear a few board members supported doing both the equity audit and hiring of the director of equity and other board members supported starting with the equity audit first to discover the different needs of our school district however all the

091board members supported the idea of the equity review we paused on the hiring of the director of equity and we've moved forward with the audit the equity audit is also a critical aspect of our strategic plan in each of the five different iterations of the plan that the board has seen since june there was always an equity audit in the plan within our priority of thriving environments welcoming spaces where all individuals flourish are seen and valued feel safe and though they belong there's a the the heading of working to hire staff that reflect our community also within that same month develop facilities and operations that reinforce the equitable learning opportunities within our priority of opportunities which is equitable access to high quality academic extracurricular and real world experiences we literally have a heading that says

092build the skills and knowledge of our staff in diversity equity inclusion says conduct a district-wide evaluation of current practices implement a dei plan district-wide based on the evaluation under remove systemic barriers and obstacles for each student the plan says the district completed an equity evaluation and has implemented an equity action plan at the conclusion of the equity evaluation the district will commute create a community-wide equity group to support the implementation of the equity action plan the work is important work for each of our students as we as the boards recognize this board and the prior board recognized how important equity is for our kids that we're delivering what each student needs or said differently like from kathy moody by skill by scholar by doing right by our students by making taking a hard look at

093the work we've been doing and owning our data we've been very transparent with our data over the last two and a half years of where we're at and trying to really dig in deeper i believe i believe way back in march and through different communications with the board i think this is an important step for our school district um to to engage an outside party to do the surveys to look into our curriculum within that curriculum do do all of our students see themselves in our curriculum to be able to make sure that we're having conversa having focus groups with students with staff and making sure we're surveying our community in these areas and i know the these are challenging topics now in this day and age for me what this is all about are

094our kids what this is all about is making sure that we we deliver on our promise to build a foundation of diversity equity inclusion from which each student emerges future ready part of that is being really honest with where we're at and partnering with organizations that will help us move move the ball down the field for our students in a really positive way so laura i will hand it to you thank you yeah i'm good with that one more note but i was like if you need to go keep going no no no i'm good i just looked at one more note but it'll probably come up during some questions or something else okay well i have a couple questions that one of the questions that was raised in either an i an email or

095comment from the public i don't remember exactly which but there was discussion about um the current workload of our staff and um i'm wondering about the expectation of staff participation in this audit and how much of an extra burden if any are we going to be placing upon our staff and to what level does that go district-wide i think the the majority of the burden will be placed on the district office part of the one of the things internally we're working with within our strategic plan are aspects called [Music] working plans uh the work plans so for dei i'm the owner i i'm the lead individual on this work but i'll have contributors who will be from our learning and teaching [Music] from the from the comment a public comment tonight around focus groups and

096those people those will again be voluntary if people don't want to participate uh they would not have to participate uh we'll work through the the the logistics of the when the where the why with the company um if the board approves them uh to make sure it has less impact on the day-to-day operation for our teachers and our students during the day i would not want to pull students from their classrooms or teachers from their their classrooms either to conduct a a focus group does that answer it laura yeah i think it does and i think it it also um answers the next part of it which i also heard asked of us in public comment and or emails um if the board was aware of the survey comments out of the dei training and

097um i assume i don't know what the bulk of those comments revealed but if it was regarding workload and is that why it pertained to this equity audit do you have that i i don't know um i i think they're i believe again based off of what the individual said that um there were some comments in our and i'm forgetting the date our staff training in october where not everybody uh appreciated the the equity training the the diversity training part of the training around um house bills that we had to have gender the gender training and because the large the vast majority of the training was around inclusion inclusionary practices but there was an aspect around gender and gender identity that is part of a legislative house bill i'm forgetting my or senate bill numbers

098that we i think is like 50 44 that we had to address and we did discuss gender identity we did discuss other aspects so i i don't see that correlation quite honestly between that and this um but i recognize in our society today that there are some words and different ideas that are troubling for some i guess my concern about that sharing comments such as that i think it would may um restrict people from being openly engaging in future trainings if comments like that are made publicly then from either side um you know people are might be less willing to share um with their building with their with the district with staff if comments like that are being shared that's just my takes on that and we we we do surveys after every district training

099that that's nothing new that is just and there are sometimes some people don't like our trainings let's just be honest and then there are other ones where a lot of people like our trainings and they think they're one of the greatest things ever but sarah wall who's our director of professional develop does an outstanding job of making sure that we get feedback does everybody fill it out no no but do we give access and opportunities for people to give us their feedback absolutely but how it relates to this i'm yeah laura quite as i'm not 100 sure on that piece i'm i'm just wondering um if maybe the comments meant or were also meant to include the groups the the staff comments you mentioned a survey related to the strategic plan if maybe that might

100be what they were a portion of what was being referred to um and or i believe if i read it right in the introduction to the audit it mentioned a group had met to discuss the audit maybe i'm maybe i'm making that up but um i thought there was a small committee type work that we haven't seen those comments or something but regardless i remember the survey i remember you mentioning a survey of staff related to the strategic plan and and i know we haven't hadn't seen those and maybe that could have been encompassed too in addition to maybe the the training so yeah it could have been one or both yeah yeah it could have been one of one or both of those julie um i'm just going to go out on a limb

101and say i don't think we look at every comment available on every survey that the district has done over time um you know i think that's kind of getting in the weeds and um you know i think that's we have staff that review that just to look for trends so um but what i will say is and you know you know paul you gave a very um you know a great synopsis of kind of where we've been you know and and this equity audit has been something we wanted to put on our plate for quite a while so i'm i'm quite pleased that we're getting this um tonight but also i mean a 267 page proposal i mean i couldn't get through that on friday i said i'll send if i have more questions but

102i mean it's quite lengthy and of course it includes two examples of um the products that they gave to two other districts and um you know just as a reminder for those of you who aren't aware north shore is generally a board of distinction in our state their superintendent won washington superintendent of the year last year and they are doing great things and you know i i look at this equity audit as a way for us to be marrying up not just our accountability and equity but also being very transparent you know being vulnerable as a district to say hey these are some areas that we're probably not going to shine in um we're trying to but we want to do better we want to do better for all our students and so i think

103to acknowledge you know any shortcomings that are presented through through the audit and our strive for continuous improvement are good things and so i think it's time to get this this audit done um again like you said last spring um you know i think the audit was uh a big discussion item and you know and the other i think wonderful piece although you know people might look at the price tag and go oh that's really pricey well we're using sr3 funds for that because that is a component that we can use that for and i think that is that's wonderful you know it's not something that we have to use levy dollars for bea dollars but we can um look at okay how has covid maybe also exacerbated um in equities in our in our

104district that already has you know some struggles with equity so i i think using those s or three funds is a pretty much a no-brainer um so i i'm quite pleased that we can target those s or three funds for this um audit and i'm excited that you know that the proposal that they um sent could meet our deadlines of starting december 1st and ending by the end of june so i i think that's quite exciting and um i look forward to the board taking action on this and thank you for highlighting the the paper through the cares the astra because that was the piece that i forgot but i knew it'd come up so thank you for that sure other board members yeah i have quite a bit to say um paul we listen

105to your concept and thank you very much i think there are a lot of different ways to do an equity program that are not the way i prefer and i'm very open to them um i think i'm to begin by saying that equity is board business yes it's in the strategic plan and yes we've defined the wishes and the general objectives that is a world away from looking at a detailed equity audit and how you're going to implement it successfully i think it's very important that the board understands this this might sound a little bit frivolous but i'm going to say if i were to allow my biases to rule unchecked i would have instantly supported this proposal based on one sentence in the introduction equity audits are never neutral and that's the lesson we

106learn with equity we're always bringing something to the table um i've spent uh i know somewhere between six and ten hours since friday going over this because i wanted to understand it because it is board business and there are a lot of different ways to do it well and i have a saying that sometimes it's not the choice that is important it's how you implement it there are often equal choices in how you implement it it's going to matter a lot and i looked into consequential threads um and i didn't finish to four o'clock this afternoon and i have more time than rest of you because i don't have a job um the end result without the benefit beforehand of your input and i've got a little bit of input from you right now is

107that i think the proposal is more likely than not to be a good one but i would have preferred to go through a kind of workshop type preparation and and do this in two steps so we do it better what matters is not just a technically well done study but the perception and uh and reality of transparency and getting as much buy-in as we possibly can for the process as we can achieve um and that's much more likely when at all stages we get interested parties time and space to look at that i have about a couple of pages of questions and clarifications and thoughts doesn't say basically i think it's a sound proceed uh proposal but i don't feel that it's totally responsible just to take a snap when we're looking at it pretty

108close to blind other than that was a good idea and that's my input and the two pages of questions they're more than than we could handle in our in a board meeting oh well i would like other people to have the time to think and i think i have then comments that kind of dovetail on on martin's thoughts on this um you know i i very much appreciate that we're doing an audit before we're hiring a full-time fte i think that was i was one that was on on board with that my and i completely understand this is this is very important work to the strategic plan it's itself i'm very mindful of that and i understand it's budgeted by cares so it almost seems like it's you know hooray let's go but um the

109things that caused me a little bit of concern and maybe wanting to pull back is martin touched on this a little bit i'm used to more of an rfp process where we talk about the needs a little bit in more detail when you said equity audit last spring yes i think we were all on board looking at this 265 page proposal with a 169 000 price tag was not what i anticipated back in in um you know when we were first talking about it so being able to work through some of the details to make sure that we're getting exactly what we need out of it and that we have resources available to implement it to me is is really important um so i realize it's critical but our strategic plan also says that we're

110committed to this within the first two years so since we sort of just inked the plan last a week ago i'm concerned of the need to run out the gates and do this um i'm a little bit concerned about how it might impact our already finite resources um you mentioned it's kind of voluntary for staff to participate um but you know we don't know where we're at right now with our learning recovery programs and and what emphasis that is taking on staff to add something else to our focuses and our plates you know i kind of liked a little better understanding of priorities in that regard um i'm also worried about doing this audit during a period where our our systems and operations may not be what they are a little on a more normal

111basis i think you know we're still in kind of a covid model where we've got students attending primarily online we've got exacerbated absences we may not be running everything full steam so i don't know what they use as data points in this and i think those are things you know that could be fleshed out a little bit to understand if this is you know this spring when we're still recovering from covid is the best time to do it versus a little bit later um you know we've heard our staff are on the razor razor's edge and i'm worried about you know exhausting resources and and kind of pushing them over um a little worried about the signaling that this is another mandated thing that comes after this so there's just you know those were some

112of my questions in looking at this and so it's more in the nature of of timing um i understand need and i'm you know and i understand the importance to the plan and i i'm supportive in that regard but i'm just a little bit worried about about the timing and you know whether this is the best use of our resources right right now versus maybe a little bit later when like martin mentioned we can think through it a little bit more and have some more time to plan in some ways um i'm i'm a little confused how the timing is awkward given that it is that we're still in a pandemic we don't know when we're going to be out of the pandemic um and also you know equity is exacerbated during the pandemic so

113i think it's actually a great time to be pursuing an equity audit because equity has been magnified by the pandemic so i'm not sure how timing is going to get better if you are looking for a normal school year i think we knew in our normal school year our equity was probably not so great and i think it's probably not even it's even worse i think during a pandemic so i think the time is really to kind of get on it now again this got brought up in the spring why do we need to keep why do we need to delay it and as far as the request for proposal you know i think we need to kind of get out of the weeds you know the staff can you know pick what they think

114we need an equity audit on um if you look through the 267 page proposal you saw two other school districts and the different questions that they had and i think what our staff is asking in terms of how we're serving our students needs in an equitable manner for academics and hiring staff that is representative of our student body i mean those are just two components but i think those are huge in our district so i think rather than micromanaging our rfp you know our staff put this together they assess the proposals that came in this was the one they picked we've got esser funds to cover it i i'm not really sure why people are balking you know our board value is equity and i'm really disappointed to see that people are not embracing that

115right now um because this is an opportune time for us to be doing it so i'm just saying put let's put the ester money where our mouth is and go for the equity audit the rfp has been evaluated by our staff they've had submitted their ideas for what they want they've received an adequate proposal i'm not sure why everybody not everybody why some people are expressing hesitancy when we have a board value equity so well and i'm not debating the board value of equity nor am i suggesting that i'm in any anyway think this is a bad approach to take at some point my my concern is i think martin raised it well this is a board decision how we implement this um i think i i don't know what staff think about this i

116know our administrators put together a proposal that maybe is reasonable i've never seen one of these before and so when i look at it now 264 pages it was very much different than what i expected and i am concerned about what audits bring out because audits identify issues and if we're not ready if we're not able to tackle the issues when we identify them then we may expose ourselves to legal liability liabilities i don't know if our attorneys are comfortable even with with us putting out something that is going to expose us i think i i agree you know i i mean i'm getting off in it yeah i don't think i don't think turning the turning our heads around or putting our heads in the sand is the answer either no i agree and

117that's not what i see looking at the proposal and you know what what will be evaluated curriculum policies materials and resources discipline policies instructional policies hiring and recruitment strategies access to grade level instruction access to advance placement and honors curriculum i i honestly don't feel like our school system needs to be 100 percent in person learning going you know full bore in order for those things to be evaluated in a way it's better if um we're a little bit on pause when we have a team of people coming in to evaluate those things so i i am i am not so much concerned after paul's comment um regarding the staff resources related to this proposal um i'm not so concerned about that but i am wondering about we've been talking about this for a long

118time you know and we can put it off forever and ever and ever and ever and we can never do it and um i'll be ashamed of us if we if we never do it but i i do want to know why is the timeline important i think i know why the timeline is important the december 1 to june 30th 2022 but can you speak to that please paul yeah great question really to to a number of the issues that julie and martin brought up that we're giving them time on the ground to do all of the evaluation of the aspects that you just talked about laura to be able to bring back to the board in the community a full report for us then to start to build within our strategic plan the aspect

119of how we're going to tackle this because it will not be just a once one thing it will be like in our strategic plan it will have to be phased in leveled out because we're not going to be able to do everything in one moment but it gives us a time to be able to to see from that early june period through the summer how we would phase it out or how we would phase it in and then trying to get a group of educators staff members to to become part of an equity team that would help us think through the whole phasing so it would not be august i'm going to say 26 i don't know if that's our first day of next year but on august 26 you're going to see transformational things

120occurring what you will see is a team starting to come together a key a team diving deep back into their recommendations and then a team helping us to decide what is that phased approach uh to what i would assume would be a multi-step approach so the time between december in june is for them to be on the ground to be talking to be evaluating all of those pieces it's them going into the curriculum and looking at this work do do we have representation in our curriculum across k-12 across all content areas so a lot of this work is on them i will be the contact obviously learning teaching will have an aspect will there be some time where where their team is speaking with our teachers and speaking with our administrators yes but will they

121actually will anybody be implementing anything from that plan between now and june 30th no and quite honestly it will be even later than that i believe once we have that equity team in place for the district to really talk about it and lay it out and the board i would propose that the board have a member on that team so they are part of this to martin's point laura thank you for that question and i throw in a few things i want to dispute friendly michelle your characterization what i'm saying i am saying that precisely because this is so important it has to be done well okay uh the next thing um and quickly it wasn't really on my agenda but i think a board involvement in the process would addre paul would address my

122concern that this is board business because i think this is not something that we delegate to the administration this is something that i feel personally we are accountable for and in a ways i am very ready to accelerate the process um and maybe laura i can reduce my few questions since some of you answered them already and we can prolong tonight a little bit but i do want to have one question well i'm going to make one comment first the easy part is getting the data and stats and that can be done without disrupting everybody very much and that's really valuable but that's technical when i read the evergreen recommendations i thought they were a little light and generic i would like to have seen something with a bit more specificity in it and if

123you go back to the 2016 north shore one which is a little bit older and it was a little bit more focused the word i threw in there was dilemmas it recognized the necessity to involve the community well i think all of us have advanced since 2016 in realizing the critical nature of equity and picking up on what michelle said how much it's hurt in the last 18 months i mean equity i'll get out of that too but uh there they talked about dilemmas and i think that's part of it that's why i said we've got to have buy-in now a couple of i'm going to pause for a moment um one is the human burden on our staff that's not going to hurt so much with the data but it is going to hurt

124on focus groups and ideas and the other one is how do we select stakeholders for focus groups those are both things that in a workshop i would like to get a level of comfort that we were not pushing our idea people because it it's not just the data the consultants can do that the consultants who are very highly qualified but actually they all came out of their phds pretty recently um and um you know to actually develop a little bit more um martin if i could just jump on that piece yeah the thing there is i i think it's important to select a company first yeah and then have that next work with the board to to define all those pieces even further what does that look like um but i think to do that

125pre i most companies wouldn't spend the that amount of time uh doing that if they weren't selected but i'd absolutely would set up you know if it's tonight if it's whenever that i would set up the time with the board to make sure they're sitting with the two lead uh the the two leads to to be able to talk through those pieces yeah that's for us to get our acting order yep um and you know i just wanted to say something else to reinforce this and i'm just going to hold this up this is a 2019 where you can't read it probably oecd report on social mobility we are and just by coincidence while i was having a snack this evening before reading but before the board meeting i picked up an article on precisely

126that so a briefing on social mobility in america and it stated that we are less socially mobile in canada and the eu and in that uh table that i just showed you from the organization of uh oecd the rich countries the world we are the average oecd is 4.5 years for changing social mobility we take five you know good countries take three germany and france are worse than us they take uh they take six but we are not heroes this is really really important but i think what i'm stressing is we've got to do it um and um i think i think it's very important to have a third party look at it not just ourselves i didn't say that before and that's a characteristic there um the reinsurances i that i would look at

127is manage the burden on our staff uh oh this is my critical question do we have to finish by june 22 for using s uh cares funds no i i believe it's no no i can't remember but i believe we have two years beyond that i think we have in jeannette if you're listening uh remind me the the last when we have to finish up the cares dollars or have them expensed so 2023 but then we have one year of carryover so technically june 20 because when i look at that timetable that was another red flag to me one so these were my red flags overburdening our educators and staff and anybody who's involved in providing ideas and input to manage it we can talk to the consultants about that i think i'm fairly satisfied

128we chose group consultants um i haven't heard any i i reached that conclusion by myself um that uh selecting the stakeholders i think that's really important between us and the community as well and that's the buy-in and that's what north shore called their dilemmas and blindness in their report as they identified factors so we see it in the reports and so i think that we would need to manage the implementation with a lot more in it than is in the proposal which is fine and logical so then i will then shut up because i think we could move forward if i had real promises that we were going to do it right and that would resolve my concerns yeah the pieces that you mentioned tonight those are all aspects that i see as very doable

129by bringing together again if the board selects to do this tonight and takes the action then bringing the the education northwest out for a workshop with the board to talk through those different components that you just mentioned uh martin so they're very well aware of the concerns how do we select what's the best way to select individuals on uh to participate all of those aspects and like you said working with the experts who've done this type of work before i monopolize the podium they're four more board members and i just have one more comment because i think i that's where i'm struggling with this particular proposal at this stage right now and timing could be we start in january and still get it done i'm not i'm not sure what i expect in terms of

130timing i know our to our strategic plan said we've got two years to get this done um but having those elements that martin spoke about decided sort of in advance in the proposal that we're deciding that's kind of the what i'm looking for because right now if we if we were to approve this we're going back to them and saying well you didn't put this in your proposal um but can we get together and meet and and talk further does that mean their price goes up um those are the kind of you know the the promises that i would have liked to seen solicited from them to so they would come back and tell us that yes this is part of our process this is who we're going to engage this is what we're going

131to do that's why my my struggle with timing is that i don't know that this proposal incorporates everything we want to see at a board level in terms of the process going out and and i echo the concerns on staff or yeah the data is one thing but the staff involvement is potentially quite another and if we're short subs short in every position is is this the right time so it would i would appreciate a little bit more feedback from our staff who might be impacted with the information gathering to confirm this is the path to go down but that's that's it for me well the document has been on the website since last week so um folks could check it out um you know i i think the audit is one thing the in

132the actual implementation of the ideas is another right so we're talking about getting the audit done guys and i don't think they're going to be trying to take our staff away from teaching time i mean they you know everybody knows that um surveys and interviews uh people people are going to volunteer for that who want to do that right and and i think we'll have enough people who who care about equity in our district who are going to volunteer to be involved in that and i don't from what i read i don't think the time commitment will be onerous so i would love to hear from maria because maria's been very quiet and you're part of this board maria so please chime in thank you um yeah this is something that just hearing this conversation

133is actually um you know the timing piece um this is actually really frustrating for me to hear because i asking my colleagues to please consider this audit as if it's your son or your daughter being impacted directly um there's never going to be a right time to push this off and say the timing is not right i'm sorry but equity there's never going to be a proper timing to bring in equity into our school district and look at it from a lens from that parent or that student that has been underrepresented in our district for so long um and so as a parent of a student of color as a person of color this is really challenging for me to hear this that you know there could be better timing to address these inequities that

134are happening have been happening for way too long in our district this is not about race if this is the concern this is about underrepresented students let's think about our students with disability our students on 504 plans are lgtbq plus students low-income homeless students how what are we currently doing right now that's working to put them in a better place academically um we have stuff in place but are we are we digging deep enough to really address those inequities and do what we have agreed to do as a board as one of our values you know like i said what are what we're doing isn't a hundred percent working for all of our students let's look at the data um you know i hate to go over this data because it's accessible to anybody that

135but when i look at our english our dropout rate our english language learners our dropout percentage is almost 17 when compared to our non ell learners is six six percent our low income students eleven and a half percent compared to non-low-income students at three percent i can go on and on let's look at our um our discipline you know discipline is one of the things that we're going to be looking at why are homeless students being um disciplined at a 3.1 when our non-homeless students at a one percent uh students with disability three point three percent with the one point i mean like i said i i i can keep going on this data if you take away if you look at our caucasian and our white students meeting the ela standards 71.2 percent of

136our students are meeting it when our hispanic and our black students are meeting in at 38 that's less than than half of the our counterparts meeting it and this is so troubling for me when i hear that we need to wait and really i mean like i said look at it from a lens of a student or a parent of one of these students we owe it to all of our students to do this we owe it to our district we owe it to our community you know we say we value the diversity as one of our values and like our students said in the strategic plan committees um we need to stop pretending because um you know if we we really need to take action if we say that we're gonna uh we need

137to show that action and really say hey all of our students matter and we're gonna uncover the ugliness of what our district um of what we're dealing with you know it's we can't sweep it under the rug any longer uh like i said once we it's an investment for all of our students an investment for our district and once we identify those areas and really start um addressing the needs everyone in our district in our community will benefit so you know i like i'm i'm very passionate about this again i i i bring the unique perspective of seeing it from a different lens from a different perspective um and you know 169 000 is a lot of money but it's to me it's a small investment for all of our students so i um i

138don't know i you know after all that i i don't want to cut anybody else's discussion sure but i would like to actually make a motion to um for the school board to consider approving the recommendation of having national northwest conduct the equity audit audit for the cost of 169 per hundred and thirty six dollars okay there's a motion on the floor is there a second i'll second thank you michelle so for the discussion anybody i have something but i'll defer to the rest of you first i was actually going to suggest that maybe we if if we're looking at a december first start time maybe we table it for a week let them come back with a more a proposal that inc encompasses some of those the elements that you know martin suggested regarding

139ensuring that we're going to have teams collaborate on this and whatnot incorporating a little bit more of that information to have more assurance that would that would be my thought and then um it's ready for end of november assuming approved then you could still meet a december time frame and just to be clear the equity team is not run by that group that is within the the strategic plan the equity district team that is our team that we work from it based off of the the findings of the organization so i just want to be clear that the team the the stu the staff burden would be surveys would be a focus group would be potentially some time looking at the material but the equity team itself is a district team that is not dependent

140upon this group moving it forward that team is taking the recommendations from these findings and then moving those forward i just want to be clear what the two things are and also i want to say that what we're looking at right here now today is the is their response to our rfp this is not a contract correct so i would assume that you as superintendent would have the latitude to negotiate some of those deliverables you know prior to bringing the contract to the back to the board for final approval i assume that the contract has to come back at a future board meeting is that correct this is that contract this is that's the contract yeah but there is when i spoke to them when i told them that this was the group that that

141the administration is recommending that i would speak to them tomorrow and making sure that if there is any uh necessary adjustments from there but what i heard tonight was um the one adjustment would be in a meeting with the board to to have those workshops that that was the additional takeaway what was an additional time with the board to further understand the work okay so i want to say sorry one more thing in response to um everybody's comments really so for far too long and i want to bring up again that i have served for 18 years on this board but one of my main sources of frustration has been related to the amount of time it takes to implement things in our district and so that by the time we have implemented a curriculum

142or an initiative you know the four or five or six year implementation plan by the time we get to the end of that we've basically forgotten the reason that we started in the first place and it's been extremely difficult to track progress or to make improvements and in spite of everybody's best intentions over the years we have not significantly moved the needle on student achievement and that is not acceptable to me and this study we talked you know one of my passions is kindergarten readiness and kindergarten readiness impacts students of color and students of low socioeconomic status i think that this audit is going to confirm that early learning is essentially important to those groups in particular it's going to identify some other things that we aren't aware of and that we have to work

143on but if we want to be a world-class district which at some point in time some of us have said we want to be we want to be award winning school district we want to be the kind of school district where our statistics blow people out of the water that we've got really high percentages of achievement in every grade level in every subject area for all ethnicities and other elements of diversity and if we want that to happen i think that implementing or enacting this um equity audit is the first critical step in making that happen i don't think delaying it to tweak it if paul can tweak it with the team delaying is not going to get us further down the road the only thing that's going to get us further down this road

144towards a world-class school district and high achieving students is taking action on this plan today and laura uh thankfully i have uh my trusted colleague jeanette and you were correct the the the contract will come forward we're approving this company thank you for asking a question yeah so we'll have the contract of the contract itself with and i'll work with them to make sure we have that language within it so thank you laura for doing that and jeanette for correcting me yep thank you okay i still want to say two things um i do want to stress that doing it right is because it is so important and i totally agree that we should work really really hard to accelerate it but that means we have to recognize and secondly i would trust the district

145and the superintendent to take care of the concerns that i've raised but i want to quote michelle on one thing people who want will volunteer this is the poison pill for a lot of um projects that you don't get everybody the passive the opposed and the enthusiasts also having buy-in and i think that is so important in this unfortunately misinterpreted frequently misinterpretive initiative it's really really crucial but we have to combat the misinterpretation as well so it really needs to be if you have focus groups we really need to make be sure and that can be done after acceptance it's just that that wasn't evident beforehand and we haven't listened to each other i completely agree with that we need to have the detractors actively involved in the process as well as the supporters and

146that's a good focus group and i think people who are energized on both sides whether they want equity or they don't want equity they're going to come forward to be part of that it's not just going to be the equity folks and the consultants recognize that in their north shore report in several words yeah okay so that was a lot of discussion there is a motion on the floor is there any further discussion okay this will be a roll call vote martin i julie nay michelle hi maria hi laura is i that motion passes thank you for that robust discussion so now i believe that that concludes um the business on our agenda tonight so we move into um board communication are there any board members that have communication they wish to share with the

147rest of us yes yes i have i have some parting thoughts tonight is my last official school board meeting so i just want to throw out some some brief comments and recognitions so i just want to let um you all know it has been an honor to serve as a school board member for the past four years it has taken a lot of hours a lot of work but i've truly enjoyed being a representative to this board and have learned so much not just about our district but about school districts across our state i've learned more about equity and i've learned more about student voice and i hope we continue to see more on that area with the board in the future our board our district we've been moving forward for some time and i'm

148really proud of our board for moving forward with this equity audit tonight i know that it has been our board value for a couple of boards now and i'm just asking that you remember to uphold this value in all the work that you do in the future um you know our district is on this course for greater success for all our students and you know the board has a lot to be proud of i wish that the board has continued growth and success as the pandemic continues and eventually ends i know it will end eventually um i hope the board can you know continue to be respectful in communication and get rid of things like rolling eyes and um talking under people's breath while they're muted on zoom probably go back to inline in-person meetings

149soon so um maybe that won't be an issue i did want to address um because came off of a busy campaign season with two others of you and there were some public comments tonight about a vaccine mandate so i just want to clarify if paul wasn't already going to do this but you know vaccine mandates for students are not determined by our school districts in our state they are determined by the washington state board of health and for anyone who wants to google that feel free to do that that's what i did months ago in addition the mass mandates which we're all pretty familiar with before governor inslee's current indoor mass mandate ospi had mandated it for students and staff for this year so i just want to remind people it's not the school board's

150decision on those mandates we have higher authorities that are telling us what needs to be done to keep people safe finally i want to address the term crt or critical race theory that was has been all over the news as we all know and for some of you who don't know it's a law school offering it's a law school class offering not offered in every law school it is not a k-12 curriculum in our state or other states although some states have banned it and our school district back in july put out a press release that we don't teach crt because there is no k-12 curriculum so i hope that's helpful in addition social emotional learning or sel is not part of crt i had people asking me that this summer so those are just

151some helpful thoughts hopefully for those of you who don't know about mask and vaccine mandates and how they apply to our students and those who are in our buildings and crt because it's still on the radar um but i certainly hope that our district and our board can continue to move forward for our students with equity as one of those guiding principles that we're all behind so thank you all for being colleagues of mine and thank you for allowing me to serve it was an honor and i wish you all well thank you michelle i mean we all know that being on the school board um is not all fun and games um and it can be difficult at times and you certainly rode a difficult wave in the last four years and i appreciate

152your service so thank you very much for stepping up to serve on this wenatchee school board thank you laura um any other board comments tonight i would just say in regards to michelle michelle i work with a large number of board members over my time now there are very few who put in the time and effort that you did um your attention to detail um was unmatched um your your details around the questions that you had asked um we always ask that our board members you know send questions and you're always there asking questions clarifying questions um just different ways for you to understand the packet at a deeper level so you you you were ready there for our tuesday nights but your attention the work on our policy committee over you've done that twice

153now again attention to detail your understanding and your willingness to to want to push for more voices in those policies was instrumental when i think about the dress code policy and the powerful opportunity to sit with students and listen to their why you pushed that michelle you you were adamant that we we made sure that that was something that made that policy come to life and it really helped all the other board members uh understand where our students were at so you i'm with laura thank you for the four years this last year and a half two years i i wouldn't wish that on any board member i mean it it has been some of the most challenging times and making really hard decisions and everybody on this board yeah this board should be very

154proud of that i mean never in the history have board members been asked to to to vote on things that were presented to them in this time and each of you you you stood up for those challenges but michelle thank you thank you for always showing up thank you for being present thank you for for advocating for our students and our staff and our community i appreciate your service so thank you and good luck on having time back in your life yes i might have just a bit more free time i think um so just one note on on legislative rep since i was the ledge rep this year and since it was all online just to let you know whoever want is going to be taking that over there are weekly meetings which are

155really great um that give you an idea of how the bills are moving and and you also get to hear from other districts in terms of like esther funds and different things of course we're in a little bit different place now than we were a year ago but um super helpful weekly meetings um for the legislative rep so i hope whoever is willing to take that on i would be glad to meet with them and tell them some of the things that i learned because it was a very unusual year i think to be alleged rep but um but i i wish you all good luck and continue moving our district forward um with paul as the superintendent thank you so much thank you michelle michelle my words um thank you for the dedication and

156diligence you put into your school director job uh during the last two years i have really valued and greatly benefited from your contribution to giving us a very to be one of the five board members giving us a varied and independently different input so that we can behave appropriately thank you very much thank you wish you well thank you everybody has summarized it pretty well um it's been an honor and learned um working on the policy committee has been a great experience for me um to just jump in and and learn a little bit more about the service that we are here to do um please don't be a stranger i think you know as as a parent as a district parent community member um you're still pretty well invested so um you know let's

157continue please continue your your work um you know as outside of the board um advocating for all of our students thank you for everything i will i will continue to advocate for this district and its students and our boards so thank you maria i also just wanted to say thank you for your service to our board and to the community and i know we are often on different sides of several issues but i think healthy differences of opinion are me for productive decisions and well thought out board decisions so i appreciate the perspective that that brings and um enjoy tough conversation so you know i hope you stay involved and and you know good luck in the future thank you julie okay so i wanted to move along um to talk about in-person board meetings

158we did say that after the elections we would be considering to return to in-person board meetings our next meeting we have uh [Music] our next meeting is the 23rd but we have a rebound uh what do we have on monday paul a workshop we have a board workshop from 1 to 2 30. 1 to two three okay um and so i would like to propose that we for sure go to in-person meetings at our november 23rd meeting we will be having swearing in of our reelected and new board members um at that meeting um but doing the workshop remotely is that what you're thinking paul we're open to having it in person for this it may work better if it's in person quite honestly uh but that's up to the board okay i'm with respect

159to the 23rd that's the day the county certifies the election so i think that will happen in the afternoon so that sounds fine hopefully before six o'clock so um and i did also want to say that that be prepared board members because that is our reorg board meeting where our president and vice president positions our alleged rep position and um i don't know if we'll do the committee assignment at that meeting too but we will have a vacancy on the policy committee um so be thinking about that and it will be other than the pieces that laura just mentioned it will be a very light agenda because it's more ceremonial we'll we'll pay the bills and do those pieces but then do the ceremonial and then exactly what laura said the the president the vice

160president those pieces but as far as kind of the overall content it will be much lighter in much just to be clear i will not accept a nomination for a third term as president so let's be clear oh bash and then justin for in preparation for the meeting on the 23rd obviously we are following through with previous discussions about the masking requirements um because it is a ceremonial expecting our meeting i'm expecting uh we're probably expecting more than just your average board meeting attendance um and so everything that was discussed what a month ago um is applicable for the upcoming embarrassing meeting correct correct yeah masks are are required and i would hate to move that meeting online so because it is it's a special moment for for board members uh for catherine coming on

161as a new board member those are important days and as well for julia maria who worked really hard throughout their campaign so yeah the mask mandate is will will be in effect and everyone will be required um to to be wearing the mask during the meeting um inside our building inside our building so okay and we will have masks available for those who might have forgotten them and we'll also have folks outside the door um giving a friendly reminder all right superintendent's report um just a couple pieces um just want to be clear uh miss petro said you know we put out a press release on that crt we did not that was just it was posted on our website and the media picked it up uh so there was no other communication from us

162on that um with the two with the training we actually put it in two different places we put it in our board summary and we put it in our wsd weekly so i feel like we did a really nice job of communicating out that information um the other questions board members into our conversations i feel like we've answered those i got to read you something so this doesn't happen very often often i won't read the individual's name but i received this um a few days ago several weeks ago while walking my dog in the morning i collapsed on the sidewalk across the street from my house at that moment three of your buses were paused at the stop sign there the bus drivers immediately came to my rescue took our dog back to our house

163called our ambulance and stayed with me until emts could get there then they explained to the emt what they had observed i ended up spending the night in the hospital but i'm fine now my heart was touched by these heroes who gave me such comfort and support i just wanted to thank them again and for hiring such a great staff just a recognition that our staff continue to go above and beyond continue to do the right things even in really challenging circumstances so we'll be reaching out to the three uh bus drivers and presenting them with something very special but i wanted to just one more highlight of what our staff do to support our community members and for um this individual to make sure she wanted to make sure that i knew about it

164um and celebrated our staff so like a good way to finish this portion of the meeting very nice okay well with that the school board will now recess into a closed meeting for a period of 20 minutes to discuss collective bargaining sessions with employee organizations including contract negotiations and discussions related to the interpretation or application of a labor agreement or when the board is planning or adopting the strategy or position to be taken during the course of collective bargaining professional negotiations or mediation proceedings or reviewing the proposals made in the negotiations or proceedings while in progress pursuant to district policy 1410 and rcw 42.30.140 this discussion is exempt from the open public meetings act and will be closed to the public the board is not expected to take final action following the closed meeting so

165thank you everybody and somebody what if we take a five minute we can take a five minute break and then somebody can do whatever is necessary to shut down the public street