001very good thank you um it's 5 o'clock on January the 10th 2022 I call this work session of the larmy County School District number one Board of Trustees to order um this is a training work session we have our guest here today Dr Rod Kesler from the Wyoming school boards Association um he's the director of leadership development and um at this time Dr kler if you don't have anything I will turn it over to Dr Kesler Madam Chair by all means thank you well first and foremost thank you for the nice weather today it was gorgeous in Wyoming 50 plus everywhere a little wind here and there but it was pretty nice day um for the patron that's are out patrons that are sitting out here uh school boards across Wyoming do workshops on a
002regular basis and and one of my jobs is to travel around and work with different school boards for a variety of different reasons and so during this session the board doesn't make any decisions on anything I'm going to challenge them and work with them for a little bit and it's probably not going to be like an interact with the community that'll H that happens in your regular school board meetings so if this is the first work session you've ever been to and it seems a little distant to you I'm just going to try to challenge the board work with them a little bit tonight and I only have 45 minutes so um because you guys have a board meeting at six o'clock correct so I will be done at 5:45 so that you guys can
003have a little bit of a break before you have to recess and go back down and get started will that work for you guys perfect thank you and what we don't get through like we've done before uh what we don't get through tonight or on our discussions or our topics I'm going to push you a little bit on a couple of things and uh but what we don't finish feel free to email me call me follow up whatever you have all my contact information and I'll be more than happy to get back at you uh I'm making several trips to this part of the state in the next couple of months for other districts that I'm working with and um so I would be available you know to stop in and even in the middle
004of the day sometimes say hello and have lunch or do whatever if you'd like so thank you just you know that well first of all I'd like to thank the folks that are out here sitting and listening so you get to learn with the board tonight the purpose I'm here for tonight is to uh work with the board a little bit and not that you need more challenges in your life but I'm going to try to try to challenge you with a couple of how teams work effectively things you can work on to get better how we can better communicate with our staff or Community I'm going to touch base on some things that I see going on around the state in around the country um I think I have this little this little statement
005kind of hits me every now and then I've had it with me I had it in my office for like 40 years um for those that are out there I was a school counselor a teacher a principal a superintendent I served on some boards and I was found sometimes when I was getting frustrated I had to take a look at this statement to find out where I was and my myself and I found that to better the situation that I'm working in whether I was on a team or in a family situation whatever I always had to kind of look at myself and say okay what am I doing to make this better than it is or am I doing things that are being that aren't being constructive and so I always put that out
006there as a challenge for people to take a look at Dr glosser was old school family therapist back in the 60s it ages me a little bit that's what I learned when I was growing up uh about how you how you take care of people and and really um this little statement's worked for me when I when I feel like I'm overwhelmed and um my wife kind of even brings it out and shows it to me once in a while because apparently I get opinionated when I don't like what I'm doing um here are some of the challenges that you guys know you're probably dealing with some of these but School boards in general so the last couple of months I haven't been on a road a lot but I have fielded a lot of
007phone calls I've ran into a lot of people throughout the state and here are some of the things that whing school boards are dealing with as you guys know these school funding economic slump I mean the whole issue about school funding has been an issue for what how many years now last two or three years you guys four years it it's not gone away has it yeah so that that's going to be there so that's an issue that school boards are dealing with that I helped some districts with covid related issues uh every school district I work with um when I listen to the news driving down here today no matter what channel I listen to um there's huge issues going on all over the country I don't know if you heard about the Chicago
008one Chicago Teachers Union decided they weren't going to go back to work they're fighting with their mayor and parents and all kinds of people the school they they School District wants them to come back they won't come back I have no idea what's going to happen there it's just crazy um finding retaining quality leadership and staff I don't know if Cheyenne faces that but I know a lot of districts that I work with really struggle to find good leadership struggle to find good teachers bus drivers Cooks um anybody on staff it seems like it's just harder and harder to find people I don't know if you're experiencing that down here but I know a lot of districts in Wyoming presently are dealing with that I kind of mentioned this the political unrest in the country
009state county and District uh first of all I want to thank you for being on a school board anybody that serves on boards right now for the high pay that you guys get it's crazy City Council Members County Commissioners it's it's a tough time to be in a position where you're leading and trying to uh meet the will of the people because not everybody has the same opinion and so I know that's a struggle that a lot of districts have to deal with across the country and I know you're not immune to it you guys get to deal with it as well uh graduation rates student dropouts I listened to some some uh article I read some articles and heard some stories on that today uh student performance they're talking about a f month to
010a 9month drop in student achievement across the country in a lot of districts thank goodness Wyoming has pretty much stayed in session face to face for the most part but a lot of places in the country have not done that like you guys have done so kids here I think are going to have a better chance but some of these districts have been out of school for a long time the state of Hawaii I'm not sure is even back in fulltime yet at least they weren't this fall so there's some talk about what are the studies going to look like down the road here on kids retention then it leads into an area that that I've got a background in i' did a lot of counseling I have a daughter runs a Counseling Service uh
011up in Billings right now and she's got clients from Wyoming Montana and Hawaii and she has to turn clients away she doesn't have enough employees working with her and we're seeing a lot of 12 to 17 year old age kids across the country um just a lot of issues with the mental health and so um that's another topic you get to worry about and deal with as as educational leaders and then uh the one I've been spending of course most of the time on is the board leadership Effectiveness and the question there is simply this all of these things are very important and they kind of intertwine and touch each other would you say that all of these things are something you have dealt with or potentially will deal with while you're on the board
012yes sure you dealt with already have you not yes Dr creso as a superintendent every day every day yeah so it's not really new stuff right um but those are the things I sat down over the holidays and I started looking at all my notes from all the districts and all the phone calls and questions I get and these seem to be the things that popped up the most and of course the whole Co related issue I I got to be honest with you I I work with people and I have family members and we are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum of what we believe about that and that's okay if people have differences of opinions about what they believe absolutely perfectly okay what's not okay is when we're not willing to listen
013to what other people got to say and what we can learn from that and then the challenge I'm going to give you tonight deals a little bit with that but it deals with the board leadership Effectiveness the question simply being well let me get to it hang on here I take a look at question number two um you've seen kind of some of this before in my trainings I worked with you but question number two says how are we doing as a district leadership team as a school board along with your superintendent how are you guys doing right now and then 2B would say what evidence do you have that you're doing your job well so can we just take take a few minutes for you to talk about how you feel you're doing as
014a board what's working what might not be working and then I'm going to take you kind of to a challenge where I think you can learn more information if you want kind of thoughts do you have about that question two or 2 a or 2 B anything I think we just just a couple of thoughts I think our board does a good job of respecting varying opinions among the board okay and as you indicated on a lot of the issues that you brought up initially you know there are some there are some pretty disperate beliefs on on a lot of things within the board but I think we do that respectfully and even if I don't agree with people or if they don't agree with me you know they don't they don't beat you up
015over it right you know you have a right to your opinion so I think that's that's part of it if you can't respect each other's opinion then you're probably not going to be effective as a board right I would agree or you're not going to have a whole lot of fun being on this is supposed to be fun too right yeah right yeah I I think sometimes you know I've asked this question before what do you what did you know and what did you think about your role as a board member before you became a board member and what do you think and what do you know now about being a board member that you didn't know before you ran and became on the board and I think that's a good thing to kind of
016think about when you serve on a board because when the community comes in and shares their information or a staff member comes to here somebody stops you at the street because your role doesn't stop and start at 6 o'clock tonight when the Schoolboard meeting starts and then when you're done at 9 10 11 whenever you're finished your day is not over with a Schoolboard member is that correct so it's with you 247 pretty much no matter where you go and what you do but that doesn't mean that we can't learn and get better as a board as we move forward okay let's go back to that under the thoughts about what seems to be as a district how do you think you're doing and what evidence do you have that says you're kind of on
017the right track in certain areas I've seen some of your evidence in the past so I know you have evidence but so I think we're making progress okay um but you know as a board I think it's crucial that we that setting the Strategic plan and goals is piece of what we do and we have not had an active strategic plan for a few years and with covid the you getting all of the pieces together wasn't working um we've made significant progress but I think that's that's a piece we've got to make sure gets finished and implemented and articulated and so I think it's been a challenge yeah and is something that can go better and do better yeah three years ago before Co hit you didn't think about dealing with Co did you no
018no you may not have run for the board point being that's added that's added some fuel to the fire May the job a little tougher hasn't it really has but the what other other comments you have on that before take you back um I think that uh what makes this a really good effective board is we're all willing to do the uh learning that we need to do be we do professional development we go and research something we need more information about it our Administration is very good about being open about us asking question we need more information on a particular item so I think that commitment on each and one of our parts to make sure we know the issue before we making decisions is very very important yeah I I've listened to some
019of your boards and I've worked with some of you in the past and I would you know can tell you that as a board you guys um have met many challenges and have accomplished a lot of things and so just for the parents that are out there and community members I work with school boards all over the state some school boards need my help and some school boards don't need my help some school boards just need a shot in the arm some school boards need to be challenged some school boards I go learn with them and I take that information and share with other school boards because there's good things that are happening so let's go back to what affected school boards do they say the key work and we've talked about this before but
020what I'd like to do is kind of do the rubber meets the road with this with these Five Points so the research that's out there says that school districts or School boards leadership teams do a host of different things that they were accountable for and responsible for and one of them um you just brought up which was the SE division for the district you guys haven't probably tighten it as much as you wanted to do with your strategic plan which went from 216 to 19 and then you guys get hit with Co and then you make a superintendent change at the same time so now you're trying to figure out where do we put that piece in so one of the most critical pieces that I would like to challenge you to continue to work
021on is to go back and take a look at where the rubber meets the road on the vision and vision basically is simply where do you want this place to be what do you want to work on and how you you know how you put that together becomes really The Challenge and as Tim said you guys are all very well involved you're knowledgeable you do a lot you do a ton of training you guys are in trainings all the time learning and trying to do a better way of doing the job so getting getting that Vision set and breaking that out and making sure that that's known and people have input to it and all those things is really critical the second part about it is the accountability process and as a school board it's
022your responsibility um to set the accountability process in the organization so if people aren't you know buses aren't on time there's people that are hired to manage that stuff but eventually it could flow up to the board if you don't have the right accountability structures in play um one of the things that I think people forget about when you serve on a board you guys haven't because I know you do a self board evaluation do you not on your roles and responsibilities have have you done that yet this year we have we just finished it we just finished it we haven't G um we haven't gathered to discuss it yet but we did just finish it yes so for the folks that are sitting out there like teachers principals custodians everybody has kind of like
023a job description of what they're accountable for and what they have to do Schoolboard members actually have responsibilities by policy of responsibilities behaviors things they need to do and then they need to measure that in several different ways and one of the ways to that to be measured is to do a self- evaluation and then what do you do with that self self B when you guys are done what's the process well what I'd like to do this year um um margarite was chair the last time we did one so what I'd like to do this year is to gather as a group and um all the information is broken down question to question as to what it's a grade grading scale three four to where we need Improvement and then each board member got
024to weigh in um with a comment if they chose to so all those comments will come forward and then we'll discuss those we'll take each individual question and I'd like to discuss um the input that we that we got back so that how do we make each other better how do we hold each other accountable what do we think we're doing well what do we need to you know what do we need to work on um how do we work better together um there's you know a lot of there's a lot of pressure on individual board members not only um you know in the position that we're in but also um as community members as well and so how do we balance all of that and and how do we have this conversation going forward
025so that we can work together and trust each other I think that's really important well the accountability piece there's one more challenge that I'll talk about here in a little bit with that but you guys have those basic ingredients in play there are a couple things that I've seen some other districts doing that might give you a little bit more information and we'll talk about that here in just a little bit okay um developing good policies staying on top of your policies as I watch some of your board meetings and you have p and staff members or that have concerns about things that are happening in the district or not happening in the district the question that always comes to my mind when I'm either sitting in a board meeting or watching is I bet
026there's a process to manage that in the district so board members don't have to manage that out of board meeting now eventually it could come to the board if things aren't managed or dealt with properly through the process for example um a lot of the smaller districts seems like they deal with a lot of coaching issues and sometimes parents get really upset or staff members get upset or or kids did and they'll come directly to the board and say well you know this coach is not playing the kids leave their corner you at the grocery store or wherever and in reality there should be a process for that you probably ought to start by going and talking to a coach right and then you call it going up the chain so to speak and then
027athletic director principal or whatever that doesn't always work we know that but what I was thinking about is I was watching you guys listen and which I thought you did a good job of taking in a lot of information is that I would think that there would be some kind of process in place place already within your organization so if somebody had a concern about something could they go directly to that building where the concern was and go in and go through a process where they can form a complaint or fill out a form or go through a discussion and maybe get it resolved at that spot yes and sometimes that doesn't happen because I I'm human as well we're all human sometimes you just want to go where you know um the voice is
028going to get heard and you know you guys are going to ask questions of Dr preso and when Dr presel is going to ask questions of the staff to make sure they're getting those things done that happens to every board that I know of but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't encourage people to to follow those procedures and policies that you have in play and that's why I always tell board members you know do you have a policy for that do you have a procedure for that and that doesn't mean you have to memorize every policy but you can look it up you can ask a phone you know phone call back press or whatever and you guys seem to do a pretty good job with that as well I've kind of been falling that
029a little bit the fourth one I think is probably the big has been the biggest challenge in the last couple of years is is promoting the community leadership now I'll give credit a lot of districts do a nice job of allowing people to come to their board meetings you guys not only give one but you give two um open mic Open Mic probably not word but you have comment periods twice during the board meeting do you not we do yes sir an hour a piece an hour a piece some districts do just one um some districts don't even do them at their board meetings what they might do is they might hold a like a special work session like this where it's a special topic like if you're going to tear down a school or
030build a new school or whatever the big topic is they just specifically have a topic for that have a protocol for how it's going to get managed they do it that way people can have a voice and share what they want to share so like a public hearing like a public hearing it doesn't have to be necessarily a hearing but it could be just where people have an opportunity to talk about topic I've seen that done in some organizations I think the district did those when we did five six schools I I do know that you get good attendance at board meetings you have people that are coming and sharing some things and then I I would just say the what else to that is what are other ways that's one of the challenges I
031have for you tonight is what are some other ways you can you can do the Olive Branch or the engagement process with not only your public but with your staff and my my thinking was this I have it here in a couple Pages down let me get to it um right here just some statements and reflection um really affect effective teams and effective boards always use reflection they always take a look back how did that work how didn't it work what do we do well what do we screw up what can we do better and you learn from it and you move on and here's a couple things I joted down you're six months into a new administrative leadership so you have a new superintendent basically the district leadership team which is the board members
032and your superintendent maybe some your some of your upper management that's different and so what's working what's not working and I don't know if Dr crespo's interest learning this or not but I'm I'm guessing she would maybe this is the time when you talk about Community leadership and Community engagement maybe there's some strategies you can use other than just people coming to a board meeting what other types of things could you do with your staff with your community and you could go ahead and focus on particular subject topics and find out what people are thinking or what they're saying it can go as simple as doing District surveys of some sort yeah it can be like I mentioned earlier like a focus group on a particular topic whether it's co or you name it curriculum
033building structure grade structures how for example the one today that really CH I mean kind of challenged me and I I have kids that teach and work in the profession I got grandkids and I'm sitting here figuring out how are they going to catch up um those kids that haven't been in school how are they going to catch up with what they've lost and be competitive and so I mean you know maybe a focus group is so what do we do for the L time even though you've been in school pretty much the whole time the last couple years have you not you haven't had any school closures per se for Co no just spot Li limited ones okay so maybe you haven't lost as much ground but I I think there's definitely some discussion
034there or what kind of support mechanisms may be needed U by students by families by staff um that they may need a whole issue of mental health I've worked with some other agencies other in public schools and one of the things they're noticing with their employees I worked with a hospital administrative team and they're having some issues with u with staff having some mental not not you say the term mental health people think it's something that but I mean people going through depression and having a hard time with what they do every day at work and those kind of things I think the whole Co piece has added quite a bit to the load of classroom teachers bus drivers Cooks parents and so how are we doing with that so the point being how can
035you go out and learn more about what people are thinking and what's working what's not working working and so the challenge that I would give you one of the challenges I'd give you is just don't have to make that decision tonight and I can work with Dr Crow or give other ideas other districts what they're doing but to do that that number four that Community engagement Community leadership piece and to work harder that one oops sorry um maybe above and beyond just having people come to board meetings what other things could be done in certain topic areas that would be helpful and strictly because you do have new leadership and now board members you've been together for going on two years one year one year one year so relatively kind of New U and you're
036doing very well with that but maybe it would be an opportune time to do some kind of focus uh either surveys U some districts have done site visits um for example the soup and a couple of board members go to you know with a with a mission in hand question answer thing go to like a site like to the transportation department or to an elementary school or or whatever you go to the Rotary Club yeah yeah I would just like to uh just kind of bring you up to Dr Crespo actually uses a lot of those various techniques in different she has put out surveys targeted surveys for concerns um and also with her leadership group and also with um our community members so she does she has some of those things that you're talking
037about in play but I um I I think it's definitely worth a continued discussion but we'll have an update to today outside of this we have something else we just launched that I think we be Twist on the Twist on that Rosanne would be that it would be about board leadership that board Effectiveness how effective is the board doing his team very you know and and if I was just going to judge from the outside looking in can I judge by just what happens at a board me because your role doesn't stop at a board meeting you you go to grocery stores you go you know right you go shopping you go for walks people talk to you go work out people visit with you all the time and so how else can you go
038about Gathering that data that can become meaningful then to you unfiltered grab it take it and what can you learn from it what's going well what could do a better job of and I think with the whole Co thing the way it's been and so much well misinformation or information it just depends who you are and what you listen to it's confusing it's all get out um I can't imagine um being in your role right now that' be as a parent and as a grandparent I really struggle with it because I see what my kids and my grandkids go through and it really confuses me and I'm I'd like to think that I'm smart some days right and I'm confused and a little upset um but what I have learned is no matter what your
039opinion about that is the goal at the end of the day is how can we best serve the kids how do we best make sure our children are going to be successful how to make sure our staff safe our community has engagement and and input to what we're doing and we're trying to make the best decisions we can to move forward I don't think this came with a game plan that said answer a b and c and it's easy I don't think it has or we wouldn't be here um the final thing that really effective boards do the key work is the whole area about the relationship that you have with your new superintendent and the expectations you have of each other we've done some work in the past about what do you expect what
040don't you expect and my challenge to you there is with each other and I'm glad Tim shared what he shared you guys don't always agree about things but you're civil you get through it and you move on and I think really good boards do that they work through all the issues gather as much information as they can make a decision and then move forward because guess what there's going to be another decision waiting for you when you're done with the one you're working on right Dr Cris I think it's a good opportunity to share the weekly updates that I provide to the board really are I hope you find them helpful so that you can ask questions it's difficult as board members we we really can only talk you can all really only talk during
041forward meetings during public session but by giving you those weekly updates if you have specific questions you've all done a nice job of just asking the question can I get clarification or can we talk about this um so I just for purposes of the board I just want you to know that I do appreciate you reading them you know it's long some of them are really long um and just keeping up to date and asking questions about what's happening and concerns or you know clarifications and then the second one that I think is important to mention is the board FAQ that we share after board meetings that came from the board um um and after all the board meetings as you know things come up we put them up there on the website for Community
042because we do have community that may not be able to attend a meeting or maybe interested and not sure and then we're able to send them back and you are able to send them back if somebody in the community says what happened about you can say well if you look at the board FAQ it's right there so those are two pieces that I think help you as a board to navigate kind of some of the conversations as they come up without feeling the pressure to have a meeting and a meeting and a meeting so just appreciate I would just say those were brought on by our new superintendent so awesome I think your level of you know that number four talks about how do you identify the things you need to work on as a
043board and district and we've talked about some of these before but you know you have the little issue the issue of teaching and learning which is the number one priority of course student Student Success student achievement and there's some some things that have been added to that you know that whole mental health piece the loss of time loss of instruction some of those things got to be I think we got to be thinking about those uh the communication what you're you guys are just talking about you've really improved and worked your communication one of the best things you can do to support your superintendent and each other is to make sure that you guys ask the questions you need to ask and put them out there and and you know they told you like we
044said before if they told you you only had to come to one board meeting a month that's all you had to do then somebody lied to you right you got to work on this all the time it's never ending and so thank you for for being on the board and doing that um operations I don't know you know what you hear about operations as board members maybe sometimes things come like if there's mechanical issues at building sometimes it will get to a board level but usually gets settled at the board level it's I mean at the building level um Student Activities and programs are always big issues no matter if you're in a small community or a big Community I those are really critical for kids and I know I was listening to kids today
045online or on the on the radio when I was driving complaining about their loss of not being able to do Student Activities thank goodness we're doing that here in Wyoming but these kids that was their only social out was to I mean because going to school for them wasn't such a big deal but going to basketball practice or playing games and stuff was really critical so thank you for keeping those things well um I think culture and governance are the two areas that I think you as a board um could have more effect on if you want and that might be a subject area that you might want to consider if you were going to go out and do some surveying um or some Gathering of more information and the characteristics of good boards one
046of them is that your D Savvy that you when you do data you do it for a purpose not just do it to do it for feel good but do it with an intent that you want to learn something you bring that data back and you use that data to help you make decisions you know the co thing can be one of them um I I don't know what kind of surveys you've sent out to the public or having sent out to the public um but it you know if you have the opportunity to do that maybe your staff has an opinion about what they think's been done well or hasn't been done well and maybe you're hearing that in conversations privately I don't know if you're doing it organizationally if you are then I
047apologize for suggesting it but if you're not I would suggest that maybe that'd be a Target area you go out and learn some things you know go go to parents Elementary Middle High School go to staff members bus drivers Cooks uh those folks all kind of have a different play and that might give you a little more data as a board when you're making these decisions and trying to move forward about what do we do next because all that confusion coming from everywhere else I don't know it's just real difficult to listen to that you know appr propose that I mean you're talking about getting people's opinions and reactions but I think the other thing we do well is we go back and when we do something like changing the um schedules for junior high
048or um does the 56 work are are parents and students navigating that we have data so that we can it helps us it's not determinative but it helps us say is it succeeding or not so I and I think we do a good job I I I've observed a lot of things you guys have done over the years and for those that don't know worked in the state for almost 40 some years so I I kind of when you're in Wyoming you kind of get to know everybody everywhere I was in Buffalo for a really long time GRE remember for quite a while in laramy for a short time um so I know a lot of history about your organiz you have a good school district you have a good Community you got great kids
049you got excellent staff um it's just a lot of lot of bumps been thrown out there in the road the last couple years that I don't think anybody ever playing for it so trying to figure out how you take all that information in Channel it use it then make your best decisions as a team and move forward because at the end of the day you're you're setting the stage for what's happening for kids that's that's your calling that's what you here for that's why you all ran for the board was to make it a better place for kids I I know I know enough about each of you to know that so um the last thing on here was uh are my responses as a board member different than that of other team members on
050my board and I would say I hope so because if you're all exactly the same then you probably don't have very many good discussions so if you have a difference of opinion that's perfectly okay as I mentioned in my own family in my profession the people I work with we have completely different opinions politically about what's going on in the world but what we've learned is there's a bigger cause than my opinion or Brian's opinion or someone else's opinion it's the people we serve so what is our job what are we going to compromise to work on to get that decision made so really at the end of the day and I watched you guys do this too you once you've made a decision you have the data that you need you feel comfortable with
051it you make a decision you move on then you support whether you're the Nay Vote or yay vote just is what it is because tomorrow there's a new challenge there'll be a new one tomorrow there'll be a new one next week guarantee it so I always try to remind folks hang in there voice your opinion make sure you're well informed and then move on move on if the public doesn't like what you're doing you won't get reelected right because that's how this works that's how the world Works um any questions here before I push you back a little to this two talks about school district across the country you saw the list of stuff I'm dealing with with school districts across the state of Wyoming um those of you that have connections in other states
052you you can you got other stories to talk about but um Wyoming's busy right now big District small districts there's a lot of issues going on um not so different than yours um they're all managed in a little bit different way but the key for all of them is to make sure that we're doing a good job of listening and really doing a good job of communicating back out and that two-way street communication especially when things are frustrating um um number three is if you do go and gather more information the question I'd say is what kind of evidence is necessary for you to have what what do you need to know uh what if you're going to go out and be focused about doing a survey or doing uh special interest groups on a
053topic know upfront what it is you want to go get and what you're willing to accept for evidence is that make any sense in other words if you just send out a survey and you don't have any discussions or any breakout and you get the numbers back you look at the numbers you choose to do nothing with it you might as well not do that right right so be focused about why you're doing it and what you're going to do with that information be transparent with it if you ask teachers to give you information give that information back to teachers if you ask parents to give you information or fill out surveys give that information back to the parents so they can see what the results were as you move forward and you make your
054decisions that transparency builds trust because people you know that if if there's a frustration about what's accurate or what's not accurate what's shared what's not shared that that creates distrust gaining trust is making sure and you guys all know this um do everything you can to gather the data but do everything you can to be transparent about what the data says and then you guys ultimately make the decisions because that's what you got elected to do your neighbors elected you to be on this board and so they want you to do the best you can so ask yourself about evidence um what what are you willing to look at or not look at and then are you open to suggestions uh there are a lot of districts out there doing good things there's a lot
055of resources out there uh you guys as an organization I think have your own survey instruments and stuff you guys could probably you know come up with your topics did Dr Crow the green light she could probably come up with topical areas for you that you thought were that you're interested in as a board um and really the key here is what what is the staff and what are the patrons that you serve the stakeholders you serve what else can they help you with information wise that will help you do your job better maybe that's the question at the end of the day I don't know um thoughts about that I think that's a good point I think uh we have a good example of that when they did the portrait of The Graduate throughout
056the state and they found out that the things that some of the things that we have typically thought parents wanted in a graduate profile weren't actually what they wanted at all in the discussions that they had so I think um going forward that's good to remember and and um maybe use some of the maybe use some of the things that we learned there because um that will be coming out and it will be directing how districts across the state are um after the standards you know address their findings um uh then we will be looking at that as boards um in education across um our state for graduation standards and and the direction that our school districts move to support our students any other thoughts I'm sorry to push you along but I know you
057got a board meeting here B normally I go a lot slower folks but just trying to get get some of the thoughts in there and get you thinking about these not expecting you to make any decisions of any kind tonight in your work session but maybe as you move forward um you know to talk about that strategic plan what are those things you working I know you're doing some things with reading um you have some growth going on in this community or at least you were I don't know if you still are but you were growing like crazy what do you do about that I mean those topics that are going to hit in the next three to six months and the ones you're still dealing with might be good things to learn more about
058and see what people got to say and then take that information and and again be transparent about it do your very best to to act on it in a good way that that that's kind of what the challenge is out there there's no I haven't found that bucket you know where you open it up and all the answers are there I've been looking and I I can't find it anywhere so when I do I'll let no right make sure it's not Pandora's box right um I think another thing that's really critical you guys know this from your role on board you got a lot of irons in the fire and so certain things are going to be loose on certain things going to be tied on if you've given clear Direction and your leadership team
059with Dr creso and the people she works with that are you know aligning and working and carrying out your mission and your vision um you guys have to constantly decide where you where you're tight and where you're loose on how things get managed As you move forward and I think like the whole Co thing for example I think that's a tight one just because there's so much tied to it there's so many political things tied to it there's so many other issues that keep coming up every other day um that's that's one you're probably going to be pretty tight on as an organization as a leadership team how do we go about doing that how do we gather information how do we make those decisions how do we get it out there you know when
060it comes to what's happening in the reading classroom um You probably don't have to be quite as tight on that you got professionals who are really really good who know what they're doing but you'd like to see the results especially that was a a goal that you're going after so having those conversations with a new superintendent I think is healthy to do that for a while because otherwise people just assume things and that doesn't work so thank goodness you guys do have good communication flying back and forth um so the loose tight piece is one to think about as you move forward you can't do everything at once you've seen this before I really think the you know the importance of smaller steps doing the right things and the right timing being patient about it
061and and you get to your goals that way if you try to do too much too fast and I'm not encouraging you to go do 72 surveys tomorrow all I'm just suggesting is one way to help you through where you're at what you're dealing with now I'm looking at what other school districts are trying to do to build that uh those relationships you know those five key steps the vision that they're trying to work on those kind of things so that as they move forward they have the support the need to make the decisions you need to make and the parents are there to help back the staff members are on board those are all really critical and really important so take the little steps to make sure that you get where you want to
062be at the end of the day um the folks that are sitting back there my name is Rod kler if you there's a phone number up there and an email address if you ever got questions about what's going on at school you want to ask I work with school board members parents all across the state on a regular basis um I'm not stationed out of Cheyenne I do the training for the wyam School Board Association but I actually live in another location and I travel all over the state uh when school districts request for me to be there or when there's some kind of big activity where I work with a lot of boards so um board members thank you for just letting me throw a whole bunch at you in a really quick time
063frame just like you need one more thing to think about for tonight right that's a good thing I appreciate you Dr Kesler thank you is there anyone that has questions for Dr Kesler I have a leading question yeah isn't it true that with the 48 school districts 48 vastly different even when you look at the little districts in feont County there's a bunch of there's a variation diversity among them it wyomi has amazing yeah I would tell you I've worked in well I've worked with all the districts at one time or another in the last three years but I've worked probably pretty actively at least 30 districts out of the 48 and I can tell you that there's some commonalities but there's definitely some differences of need does that make sense they have strengths and
064weaknesses just like you guys did and different challenges yeah that's true I had a question for you about surveys because we've we have at different times done surveys and I I agree in fact today I was wishing that maybe we had um sent out a survey on some things but um do people get tired of surveys I mean do you see that in districts that are doing that a lot because I've heard parents kind of griping oh another survey blah blah blah but if I mean I I can see where it' be super helpful but do you reach a point where you're surveying too much I think that's why I think you have to know what it is you want to learn up front and be really specific about that and don't Overkill don't go
065do you know 17 surveys I would agree um but that's why there might be some other ways of doing that you know one District I worked with a couple board members of the soup went to the went they divided in concr they had like five elementary schools not as many as you guys got like 26 or whatever they went to to the five elementaries and had this conversation about you know a couple topic areas that were of importance to the staff and they did a given take for like 20 minutes to a half an hour and then gave them a link that they could do like a monkey survey type thing and for those that wanted to put their name on it they good for those that wanted confidential didn't want their name on it
066the board accepted see put your name on it great if you don't we don't care we don't you know say what you want to say so maybe combinations like that may or may not work it may not work because you guys got other lives above and beyond being on a Schoolboard um but there are strategies you can use if you focus what it is you're trying to learn keep it tight and don't do too much I would agree so how do you on the survey part because that's something I think even as a parent I struct um so when we have 28,000 or yeah 28,000 parents 26 to 28,000 parents and we have um 5,000 I think the most I've ever seen is five or 6,000 um on responses on and some of them you
067know I've had teachers say oh yeah I filled it out three times and I'm like okay that is not the point of the survey okay so then we you know then we're trying to figure in or not us but I mean the the data guy Trevor is trying to figure in okay well these numbers are you know all from the same IP addresses we still run into that and I you're have yeah you're always going to have a little bit of that but if you just did a judgment from the outside looking in so what's the biggest crowd you've had on the issue of Co just have curiosity because you're the biggest District in the state what's the biggest [Music] crowd we have to get a zoom count 500 no no may maybe 100 people
068so if you just did math and didn't use any brain power at all um that's less than 2 and a half% of your total population so that's why my encouragement to you is not because they're right or wrong because I agree with some of the things I listen when I want I mean I have a difference of opinion right but my point being if you want to have other information you might get a little bit of repeat on some surveys mix it up and take in a little more data because data- driven decisions sometimes are better than decisions just on a hunch and if this is a hot enough topic that you have to deal with at every every board meeting after every board meeting after board meeting after board meeting i' listened to some
069of your board meetings you spend two or three hours on that topic alone it doesn't do anything to help student achievement that I know of maybe it does but my point being go out and focus about where you want to get more data and then see what see what the other 98% of the people are thinking if 75% of them are thinking that the people that are here are right on then you you probably want to listen closer if 50 it's 5050 well then you got what you got so 5050 of 5,000 or that's but my my point is be specific about yeah be specific about what the focus specific about what evidence you'll accept as a as a team and then just use that information because the more information you have the better decisions
070you're going to make I believe if I could look back and redo my career I probably should have listened a little better to some people along the way because they had good ideas and I didn't pay attention it's too late now they didn't fire me but came CL no all right guys 5:45 enjoy your ton night you mind if I sit and listen for a while tonight I won't you at all I didn't sign up to speak yeah I did I got chair now if you want to sit thank you guys and again call me email me if you call me if you where you living these days are you in Montana I'm living in Billing still when I'm not doing this I'm babysitting four little grandkids isn't that great more thanks grandpa so my
071three and a half year-old came home the other day and she said from preschool she goes Papa I say whatab she goes I need a new mask I says what are you doing mask my keeps falling down my teacher got mad at me oh my God three and a half years old teacher got M ater mask falling down and thinking well you talk to your mom and dad get a better mask I don't to say three and a half years old I'm oh I'm sorry Margaret you gonna say something I just want to share um not everybody's here but y'all sit next to somebody um so if uh if it gets too full we have set up the outside of story until basketball's over and then we can do some flow into the story if
072we feel like that we get there and then in the past we've split you um as a board if we needed to for recess we are not doing that we will come all through this back door to here um until we can K will come in and set up the um conversation I don't I don't expect that but I don't want to say that like if we had to end the meeting or whatever recess take a break go to the bathroom we would all come in here okay what did you say first Margaret the over if there were too many people people in that space we would overflow into the lobby would we actually oh no they would sorry they would we have people navigating that I just want to let you know in case
073it does get crowded we don't want to you know like we just want to direct to that not pause to have it the television out there showing the yeah we're yeah we're doing the TVs there and then inside in the lobby yeah it'll be Lobby in the gym if once theiles on it I'm sure he is thank you for thinking that yeah and then we did not because we did the 45 minutes here the Strategic Plan update that would we would have talked about in the work session here we moved that to the update from the superintendent so you'll hear that same presentation that we were going to do here in there so these are the updates for tonight if anybody wants a when was that just as of like this morning see like maybe
074I did some I'm just wondering if I I printed it so I wasn't sure if I had the most recent I mean I didn't change that but I didn't know if anybody wanted a hard I think the big one is the rescheduled of the of the pack meeting yeah so it was last week and so they moved it to Tuesday so that's the new date all right thinking I'll be thinking about you than thanks for being on the board you guys you do really you do really good work by the way with all the issues you get to deal with you guys manage it well as good as you possibly can don't have magic answers to make it thanks I just think sometimes people want to be heard well that's right they do if you
075if you can somehow process that you and learn from it as a board and make better DEC you move now we need to turn that off this yeah I don't know how to turn that off there go is the off button out yeah we go it's 6 o'clock um i' call this uh business meeting of the larmy school district um larmy County School District number one Board of Trustees to order um it is January 10th uh 2022 welcome everyone please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance United States of America and to the Republic for it stands one nation andice for all thank you everyone if you are not seated please find a seat either in the Overflow or if someone has a seat next to you that's vacant please raise your hand okay if
076you could find a seat in the Overflow area that would be great thank you so much we have a certain number of IND uh seats that can be in the in the this part of the building so um I appreciate everyone cooperating thank you um at this time again welcome everyone um Dr creso do we have any adjustments to the agenda no Madam chair we do not have any adjustments to the agenda this even trusty Madam chair I move to adopt the agenda second all in favor say I I oppose no the agenda is adopted moving on to section B um res or recognition of staff and students for outstanding achievements um if I could have uh principals Fred George from Central High School principal Phil Thompson from South High School and principal Derek Nissen
077from Carrie Junior High join me with your students up here and if everyone would remain up here um when uh our Western Vista Representatives um award them their certificates so we can get a picture that would be great the aisles need to be kept cleared sir that I'm sorry that chair will have to be moved thank you go ahead Mr George good evening it's a real honor to be here this evening and introduce our Central High Schools student of the week and let me put on my glasses here our student of the week is Lydia Luby and her parents are Megan and Joseph Luby and I know that they're here tonight if they want to stand I sure appreciate them being recognized so thank [Music] you Lydia maintains a weighted GPA of 3.95 she's currently
078an AP and concurrent college credit courses she's in the National Honor Society yearbook and volleyball and I do think it's notable that she works 20 hours a week in retail in addition to all those things so uh she's a hardworking young lady uh she was selected for this award for her involvement in school her work ethic leadership and her optimistic personality and one thing I really appreciate about Lydia is I have the Good Fortune of greeting every single Central High student as they come through the front door in the morning and not many of them have a smile on their face if you can believe it at 7:30 in the morning but this young lady always does so I very much appreciate that so I'm going to turn it over to LY and she can
079tell you a little more about herself thank you um hi my name is Lydia Luby I'm a senior at Central High School um next year I'll be attending the University of Wyoming um I plan to study uh chemical or civil engineering um in the end I hope to be an OBGYN one day um women's health is super important to me and I think it's a great part of Society um I'm like Mr George said I'm a uh take part in lots of extracurricular activities um I do work at Alexus St downtown and in my free time I like to snowboard and spend time with my friends and family um I just want to say how honored I am to receive this award um and I'd like to thank my counselors and teachers and especially Mr
080George for all he does for um our school and our students at school I do really appreciate see in the morning and him greeting everyone so um and I I'd like to thank my parents my dad especially for always encouraging me to um be my best self and uh trying to make me such an extraordinary person I really appreciate that and my mom she's my role model if I one day achieve half of what she's achieved in the lifetime I'd be extremely proud so in the end she's who I want to be up so um I just want to say thank you especially and to all the board members I really appreciate all this thank you let's give her a round of applause thank you hi my name is Kristen seagull and I'm representing South
081High School one of the assistant principles and I have with me Shan Emery um Sean is a very quiet and humble student when we recognized him with this award um he couldn't say enough good things about himself because he's so quiet and humble um his mom and dad are James and Tamara Emery and unfortunately she's in the Overflow area so to your mom um so Sean is a senior at sou High School um he was nominated by the selection committee for excelling academically maintaining a weighted GPA of a 4.0 and taking multiple honors and advanced placement courses according to the committee he's a quiet hardworking student who's always willing to help his fellow classmates teachers and and parents and he uses his 3D printing skills to help teachers with projects for their classrooms he's an
082excellent math student the committee said and he works hard to understand the materials and has grown during his time itself into a role model for his peers he enjoys robotics Math and Science and is a member of our skillsusa robotics club and the AVID program at sou high school as a member of skillsusa he has lettered several years in robotics um Sean has competed in robotics every year and continues to prove prove to be a leader at South High School last year he was state champion in First Tech robotics Club he's always trying something new with his 3D printer and he and we believe he'll go far and give 110% everything that he does um I'll let Sean kind of say a few words but like I said he's a pretty quiet [Applause] kid can
083you go ahead and step up to the mic just a little bit bab so everybody can hear you and if your parents are um sure the they're listening in the Overflow please go ahead and come into this room so you can see your son receive this award please thank you and if there's any other parents out there that have a child receiving award please come in thank you go ahead my name is Sean Amry I'm South High Senior don't really have much to say um I really enjoy the robotics Club I've done that majority of high school and was excited to be champion last year very good let's [Applause] get it is my pleasure um as the principal of Kerry to introduce Kaden Haynes to you he is an exceptional young man he's involved in
084football and wrestling and baseball he does excellent in school but he that's not why he's up here he's he's up here because of a little phae called let me help and there's not a student at Carrie that won't go out of his way to help teachers to help other students to do everything he can for every student and make the world a better place and so we appreciate um Kelsey and Andrew Hayes sharing him with us and even brother Kel Kobe but uh Kaden Haynes is an exceptional young man and will go great distance so if you could give him around a [Applause] app I really don't have much to say but thank you to Mr niss for all the nice things and I'm really grateful for my teachers recommending me for this award thank
085you congratulations if his parents would go ahead and stand up just so we can thank them very good at this time we'd like to thank Western Vista our sponsors for our student of the week and I'll introduce Mary quas and she'll be introducing our Western Vista guest good evening P it down don't want it to fall there we go okay so [Music] is is Lisa appid aaka here hi Lisa um she is with a Western bu Federal Credit Union and after I've uh tossed the mic around I'm going to toss it over to you fine good evening I'm lisaa I'm the Cher supervisor and Wester Vista is honored to support the School District student of the week program once again this year each week we are delighted to learn about the amazing kids we have
086in ly County we are proud to present a certificate of achievement and $25 gifts uh Bea gift card to each student we congratulate you on this honor and wish you nothing but success in the future [Applause] so you can get a picture yeah go ahead and get your certificates and then we'll get together to get a picture principles you're you're all in there thank you thank you that's a trick microphone thank you congratulations thank you congratulations everyone one more round of [Applause] applause thank you very much um the students work hard in our Administration I appreciate their support and it's U amazing to hear um in the in the bio pieces that we get um all the accolades that those students have um there's not enough time to read them all so I really um
087look forward to our student achievement and our student recognition so thank you um at this time we move on to see items from uh um information and reports items from visitors concerning agenda topics um the purpose of the board meeting is to conduct the business of the school district in public it's not a public meeting the board recognizes the value of the public comment on issues related to the operations of schools to ensure that our meetings are conducted in an orderly manner we ask that you address the board directly that you state your first and last name please keep your comments two to three minutes so others have time to voice their comments please keep your comments General in nature not directed at a specific individual or individuals and suitable in language and content for
088K12 grade students if there is someone who is going to read any content of a book um that has explicit language or text um please summarize that and make sure that you give us the text name um and we will make sure that that goes to our Administration um any additional um information or perspective please try and add that and try not to be redundant um while it is while the board sincerely values public comment please note if any time the meeting is willfully disrupted and could not continue in an orderly manner and if the business of the board has not been completed the meeting will be recessed and reconvened at another time to make P public comment at our board meetings you must sign up with our administrative office um as soon as you
089may sign up as soon as the agenda is posted um no one you must call in person there are no substitution if you cannot be here and your name is on the list you may try and attend through zoom and make your comments that way or you could send us an email thank you very much at this time I'd like to call our first uh individual app for public comment Hillary Hardy Hillary Hardy we're okay we're gonna check the Overflow thank you Mr Frey and would you check online I don't have a notation that she would be Zoom but um I do not see that name oh I believe guys thank you sorry it's all right all right so my name is Hillary Hardy I can tell you that I agree with mask wearing and
090consistent and thoughtful scenarios I agree with vaccination for those who can I agree that we learn new things about covid every day and I absolutely do not agree with the censorship of books but I have personal bias towards those things as do folks who believe the opposite of me but I choose to do what I feel will help my community especially the tired healthcare workers and teachers in our school district since I'm not an expert in public health or education my Lane is being a parent to a senior a sophomore and a seventh grader when my kids leave for school I often ask them do you have your backpacks your brains and are you ready for a good day and I'm sorry I'm nervous simply stated do they have everything they need to be successful
091and I have always felt encouraged that this statement would help them set them up for Daily Success so my challenge to other parents and grandparents listening is this how are you helping prepare your kids I hope you're are managing up their days whether they will face all great things or face potential challenges our kids feed off our negativity as well as our positive energy even in challenging times my three kids have three very unique personalities but none of them complain about the current state of chaos because we choose to focus on things that will continue to ensure their Daily Success I have listened to every single one of these past board meetings I have seen the abuse that that the board has been through from folks but I do believe if you pull back the
092layers from the screaming and demands you can sometimes hear a little of what they're trying to say but it's also extremely important to weed out the information that is fact that it and also the information that is fiction it's also not okay to tolerate the horrible Behavior I have witnessed here we aren't helping set our kids up for Daily Success by teaching them bullying is okay in this boardroom I encourage everyone to bring back civility to conversations turn off social media and the news news sit around a table or a boardroom and have a difference of opinion and find a way to work together compromise and manage up these tough times let's get back to the real task at hand raising intelligent hardworking and compassionate human beings that will be ready for the next phases
093once they graduate high school the biggest three words in the Constitution are being ignored we the people we the people need to find a way to get through this together divided cannot stand last thing as you wake up tomorrow and you get ready for your day I hope you have your backpacks or your briefcases in your hands your brains and are ready to take on your day thank you thank you Ava um I'm I'm not sure if I'm going to say this right Ali Aliva Hardy I think it's um yes and would you correct me when you get up here thank you very much um I'm Hardy Olivia thank you very much I've never seen it spelled that way thank you uh I'm here today to talk to you about the issues on book Banning
094I recently did a project in my English class on book Banning and the directions were as simple as this one find a band book two read it and three write an essay on it whether it should be banned or not I chose the graphic novel Drama by Raina TM drama was challenged in many places and was actually challenged right here in Cheyenne it was ban and challenged for multiple reasons one being it has quotes sexually explicit content and two there are characters in it that are part of the lgbtq plus Community the parent that wanted it banned and Cheyenne said that it quote takes away parents rights to teach morals and values and praises the normalization of the lgbtq community end quote first of all there was one little kiss in it that's hardly what
095I would call sexually explicit and two people being homophobic isn't a reason to ban a book normalizing the lgbtq community is a good thing not a bad thing we don't want kids or people part of that Community to be scared especially since there is a really big increase in violence against that community so bending these books is basically saying it's okay to be hateful towards them that is not okay I think that drama is great because it shows the struggles of middle school and growing up some people think it's bad because like I said it has characters that are part of the lgbtq community but I believe that's what makes it great the message I got from drama is that it teaches that it's okay to be yourself and how it's not a bad thing
096to be different I read this book when I was in the sixth grade and I didn't even think twice about if it was sexually explicit or had the wrong message I do believe that the literary value of the book outweighs what some would call the objectionable content now this isn't about the book Drama so back to why I'm truly here we shouldn't ban a book all because it shows one little thing we don't like I get it if the book teaches kids violent things but when someone tries to ban a book because they don't like the fact that they are same gender couples that's where that individual is in the wrong if parents don't want their kids to read books like that or they they think they have sexual content they should really be trying
097to ban what their kids watch those things are easily accessed on social media for example Netflix YouTube and Tik Tok in conclusion please when you are looking through the list of books that people are trying to ban look at the literary content of the book and the message it has because most of the time those books have a good meaning behind it thank you thank you Darren Smith Madam chair members of the board as always I'd like to say I'd like to encourage everybody here to walk in love and logic and be respectful tonight I'd also like to thank all the teachers and the paers who uh make education possible here for all their hard work if they're listening if they're here thank you I'll be brief we've all been un inundated with data on
098both sides and it's it's like the quote there lies s and lies and statistics and I think we're all tired of that right so here's the bottom line it's time we lift the September addendum on the Smart Start Plan it's now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt everybody that we can keep our schools open have low to no risk for our kids and staff all without the mask mandate the rest of the state has already proven it this has been a spiral downward and it's just gotten worse first it was 6 feet then it was 6 feet in The Mask then it was two weeks then it was two months now it's been almost two years first it was the vaccination that was needed then it was the booster the second booster then the
099third booster then it was the kids need to be vaccinated now some of you I heard last week at the work session are saying well if only our vaccination rates were higher please stop moving the goalpost you've gotten everything you need you said you needed to unmask our kids everything to our embarrassment even ton county has figured this out several of you said at at the work session last week that you are tired of talking about masks and you're ready to focus on Reading Writing and arithmetic awesome prove it it's real simple vote for remove theendum and unmask our kids the heat that you were under will go down and everybody can have a sense of normal seat in closing I'd like to implore everyone including you madam chair to be respectful of others while
100they're speaking and in this meeting walk in love and logic and let's put mask behind us and let's move this District forward one last thing I think it's reprehensible that the mother of the East child excuse Scott was not the other lady talked on something that wasn't on was just here with with the uh with the the parents that were in the room is that what you're addressing she yeah she should have been allowed in the room she very at the very end she was allowed but she did she missed most of it thank you Mr [Applause] Smith Kathy sigano Kathy sigano to say that I was a little discouraged and taken back from your meeting last week is an understatement it was embarrassing to say the least your blatant disregard for your fellow trustees
101Madam chair and superintendent was a disgrace the fact that the trustee that called for the meeting didn't get a chance to speak on the subject matter much even lead the discussion made it very clear that you had zero intentions of having a productive discussion you had nothing short of rude and condescending remarks not to mention the fact that you let the health department take over the meeting a meeting that was called for the board members did your other trustees es know that they were being invited did they have the opportunity to bring guests the way that you spoke to your fellow trustees shows that we aren't the only ones you are willing to disregard superintendent you spoke about not being able to get back to the basics of Education like Reading Writing and math well
102we couldn't agree with you more but with the perfect way of gaslighting your community you put the blame on us and the fact that you are only here to discuss the fact that we have masks or no masks quarantining or not quarantining is our fault and that you can't do your job but isn't it our job to come to you with concerns with the hopes of a resolution and to answer your question Mr readers spun last week yes we are willing to roll the dice we roll the dice every day we step out of the shower into the car and send our kids to school we roll the dice every day several of us rolled the dice All Summer in in the beginning of the school year in fact some many of us rolled the
103dice that the majority of us chose to have our kids not wearing masks at school finally with the new protocols you may or may not set forth tonight for those of you who don't know ly County School District 1 with the help of the health department wants you to agree to a test to stay procedure that means if your child comes in contact with covid-19 with a covid-19 positive person they want you to agree to have your child tested every day for five days to keep them in school and not be sent home that means putting swab in your kids noses every day for five days straight even health workers aren't getting tested every day but you want us to test our kids every day no thank you Caleb Ziller Caleb Ziller thank you I'm
104Caleb Ziller long time listen listener I'm just joking uh uh yeah so I actually first time here I usually been listening on Zoom meetings over the last this pretty much this school year and I will want to they want to say thank you that uh you have W woken me up and I think you've woken a lot of parents up to the garbage that's going on in the school district with what they're teaching the kids and the corruption going on behind your desk there um you know it starts out you know the second the second week of school you had your first meeting after school to bring back the masks well all there was was talk about oh we had to quarantining you know nearly a thousand kids but did you guys ever follow up
105to find out if the quarantining was necessary did you call any parents that their kids were sent home find out their kids actually tested positive or was this just a political Ploy bring back the masks I can answer that because I know kids that were sent home and another parents got a phone call an email to find out how the kids were doing okay so that's the first thing and I think we already saw on that same meeting it was 52 minutes into the meeting the meeting was stacked with so-called health professionals well how does that happen who calls health professionals professionals saying there's a board meeting about masks okay before the first parent was able to speak okay um last week the the work session okay I heard uh well I saw all the
106wiing Health Department officials there and then I was emailing some of the board members and they weren't even aware that they were Health officials were going to be there okay who invited them okay um let's see oh and then uh Dr creso last week in the work session you mentioned that you're receiving Federal grant money to follow Federal guidance okay does that mean that we're getting Federal bribe money seems to me like we're keeping getting bribe money to keep our kids in school or keep our masks on our kids that's what that sounds like to me I would like to know how much do you guys know can you tell me how much is that grant money no not going to answer that okay if you could refrain from comments in the in the audience
107I would appreciate that thank you does test a stay well you're going to test we already know I think many of us know that there's many false positives okay so if you have all these extra kits testing every morning because they were exposed well guess what going to have so many more kids with covid that don't really have covid and so you're going have to mask up and even test even more kids and I'm not test letting my daughter get a test while stuck up her nose you can guarantee that okay most likely pull her out of school this this if this passes and I think I'm not alone as a matter of fact I know I'm not alone because I've talked to many parents that will pull their care kids out of school if
108this test estate happens thank you Aaron was Ain wasz my name is aarin wtz first I hope you plan on giving details of the $800,000 being voted on for Educational Services that's an awful lot of money for such a broad category if it's on the website and I missed it then I will ask that it be linked to the agenda also I'd like to make a suggestion for future agenda I would like to see more details on agenda items if you truly believe in transparency you'd give us more information next the addendum to the Smart Start Plan I'll reiterate what I just said I would like to know more information on what you're voting on before the meeting if you have you have a nice section of the meeting carved art for public comment on
109agenda items but most of the time I just don't have enough information to speak on it if you value public comment please give us more information on the agenda so I can gain knowledge on the subjects at hand or change your agenda to reflect a board discussion on agenda topics followed by public comment without having to sign up Then followed by a board vote I'll guess the addendum has to do with maass so I'll go ahead and speak on that as you've said before you're not medical professionals so you look to those Professionals for guidance you even call them your partners I'll come back to this in a minute that's great that you look to experts for guidance but the simple fact of the matter is that if these medical professionals believe and have the
110authority to implement another mask mandate they would I'm certainly not the smartest person in the room but I'm smart enough to know that in today's information overloaded society that it's imperative to be a critical and independent thinker the spoonfed stats and information that your so-called partners are feeding you are strictly for theatrics and agenda-driven brainwashing not for anyone's Health if this was about health we'd be having discussions about the actual number one killer in America heart disease statistics aside though the first and most important thing you should be looking at when making these DEC decisions should be the Constitution we have rights our children have rights as a as a reminder the Wyoming constitution in statute 14223 protector protection of parental rights States the liberty of of a parent to the care custody and control
111of their child is a fundamental right that resides first with the parent finally I'll end by I'll end by going back to the idea that your partners are the bureaucrats that you invited to the work session on Tuesday this is the number one reason why I will continue to encourage parents to pull their children out of lcsd1 when's the last time your school board referred to parents as partners Acy leech hi thank you I'm Stacy leech why are you all here I'm here because I care about the children in our community I'm disappointed that no one in the work session today mentioned the children of this community you talked about your vision accountability the policies and how great you guys are doing as a team but nobody mentioned the children in your District not once
112Mr Kesler did you all did not mention the kids at all I heard at last week's session that you were sick and tired of talking about masks you're not concerned about how your decision on masking children affects their future you don't care at all about the decisions that you make you're just following in line raising your hand and voting to go along with these decisions what is more important to a community than the children you have decided without parental input or the consideration of long-term effects to mask 13,459 students in laramy County you have to decide it you have decided to physically distance them from their friends to isolate and quarantine them to offer child pornography in the libraries to test them in order to let them stay in school we should have drawn the
113line with math ask what's next will you make the decision to mandate vaccinations for 13,000 children without parental input parents don't have very many choices in Chyenne right now in schooling their children but if you refuse to take the masks off the children or if you even try to mandate vaccin vaccinations on children these parents are going to make their own choices they're going to pull their skids their kids from your schools and they're going to make their own schools thank you Becca Sofer can you see if she's in the Overflow room or on Zoom please s u f r Becca Madam chair she's on Zoom very good thank you Becca can you hear us yes I can can you hear me yes ma'am go ahead please hi my name is Becca Cipher and thank
114you for the opportunity to speak tonight I'm here because I care about my kids and I don't want them to have to wear masks anymore so I would please I'd beg you to to remove the mask mandate on lcsd number one kids because nobody in the community is wearing masks and our kids shouldn't have to either if we have to wear a mask for short durations I could understand maybe on a bus crowded full of kids sure that makes perfect sense but when they're in a classroom all day long they should not have to wear masks we also as parents have the right to make medical decisions for our children and right now I'm not making medical decisions for my children the school is so I would please again ask that you remove the mask
115mandate for my kids so that I can choose if they wear a mask to school or not masks I'm not done yet masks aren't effective so I would say please remove the masks it's about a 5050 shot it may or may not help so no thanks then the next thing I wanted to say was we aren't afraid we have all the information in front of us and we're willing to roll the dice the larmy County Health Department constantly says things such as our hospitals are full our transmission rate is too high but they say that no matter what the metrics are or what they what the data says I believe on September 14th hospitalizations were at close to 60 and now they're only at back down to 20 so therefore is it always too high
116when when is it not too high kids can get vaccinated now so we're good we don't need mask anymore we should focus on Reading Writing and math masks are gross and we don't want to wear them so please vote to remove the masks from larmy County School District One children thank you thank you Becca Freddy fores Freddy Flores hello I'm Freddy can you guys hear me all right so um I've noticed at a couple of these meetings that the board and superintendent like to say that many of our concerns relating to masks books and other things are not political nonpartisan or bipartisan that's a lie the board voted for a future Chief uh superintendent from the advocacy group of chiefs for change this group it just took a simple Google search to see what this
117group was all about and it's very easy to understand why we have the problems today that we have with the board this advocacy group says that they are petitioning or advocating for excellent education and that they want a self a safe and welcoming school for for the students that includes not Army um teachers because of school shootings immigration and daa and the Border they're advocating for required vaccinations to stay in school they're also funded by Bill and Melinda Gates so I don't know what's the surprise about how we've gotten here today the superintendent wants to focus on school resources like teachers and nurses to assist the Wyoming Department in health in combating covid-19 and contract contact tracing and testing how about getting our kids proficient in reading math and arithmetic right now larmy County school
118districts uh numbers are pretty dismal and embarrassing averaging only at about 50% Proficiency in either the superintendent and board kept referring to the Wyoming Department of Health as their Partners they are not your partners we are your partners they are bureaucratic agencies we are your partners parents and Community stakeholders these are our children not yours or the Wyoming Department of Health you do not work for the Wyoming Department of Health these are only guidelines and recommendations you can't complain about having to do them when this is not mandates these aren't laws mandates ain't laws your job is to educate our children with no mask how to read and write that's your job Heather Smith good evening Madam chair members of the board I'm Heather Smith when we presented you all with over 1300 signatures from
119our online petition to remove the mass mandate in April of 2021 I never would have dreamed I'd be standing here in the same spot talking about the same exact subject line nine months later and after taking a four-month Hiatus from attending these meetings live it's my C civic duty now to return tonight after what happened at last week's special session I can't help but wonder if the Wyoming Health officer takes part in school district meetings all over the state or if we're the only ones lucky enough to be graced by her presence while I appreciate that you're seeking advice from Health experts into revising your policy I don't understand how certain CEOs and executive executive directors can actually um you know weigh on weigh in on this decision many school districts across the state as
120Darren said have have already already recognized that this this disease is becoming endemic and we have to find a way to make make peace with that in our district lcsd2 and others across the state have been successful this year by adopting a very less stringent Co po Co policy but I shouldn't have to tell you that I shouldn't have to tell you that pediatric case numbers have been massively inflated in the mainstream media and right here in this boardroom I shouldn't have to tell you that Co isn't the only commun communicable upper respiratory disease running rampant through our schools this year All That was supposed to be protected by a mask or that the youngest person in larmy County to perish from covid-19 was 24 years old I also shouldn't have to tell you that
121many people who choose to be vaccinated have now had three doses by now so what is the new arbitrary metric that we have to meet to resolve the mask issue give us a really good solid reason as to why our district is one of the very last in the state to amend the mask quarantine excuse me the mask and quarantine policies we are not asking you to break the mold at this point but to rather follow the lead of other districts who have done so success sucessfully I know the question that probably keeps most of you up at night is what if we do this and things get worse what if we have to go remote I'm sure those other districts ask the same question but please don't don't misunderstand me here if we change
122our mask policy but do not update our quarantine and contact tracing policy we're going to be right back where we were those first two weeks of school so we have got to amend the quarantine policy before we try just making mask opt optional again and then see that you know a thousand kids are quarantined according to our district District um the co tracker on your website it's about two to one uh that you know quarantined individuals versus covid positive so that means 50% of the people we quarantine never end up testing positive in our district which means a lot of unnecessary time that they're missing in their classroom 10 days and many of the parents in this room are here to tell you guys it's not your burden to carry to keep our kids healthy
123that's our responsibility and I looked up the Wyoming School Board Association role for you which is to focus on what is best for the students and it says that is providing a worldclass education can you honestly say that we've done that or have we' been paying more attention to our strategic Partnerships this year than what's best for the kids thank you Susan ederton good evening Susan Edon ask the experts who told us that the sun revolved around the earth who said that the Titanic was Unsinkable who filled the Hindenburg with hydrogen ask Albert Einstein who said nuclear energy was unattainable ask the expert who shut down our economy and killed most small businesses ask the experts who tell us we have to mask up so we won't kill Grandma except those experts at crmc had
124a Gayla event diamond and denims I have seven pictures on my phone I can email them to you afterwards they went to this event without wearing masks to include Grandma when the CEO of crmc was confronted with this by me he told me that they knew better I spoke to him about this last week after your mask mandate workshop and I showed him the pictures I asked him to explain this to me his response was that everyone in attendance was fully vaccinated because we know that that stops Co and stops the spreading please thank you everyone ask the experts at County Health who tell tell you that if you test positive for covid to go home and self-isolate first it was 10 days and now it's 5 go to the hospital if you can't breathe
125no preventative care or immediate treatments once you test positive but why would they tell you that would they do that if you had strep throat influenza pneumonia RSV menitis pink eye whooping cough to reference County Health one more time I emailed the director on 1132 21 in regards to a photo of a group of unmasked teachers at Davis Elementary School on their website and asked why our children had to wear the masks but the teachers did not her response was and I quote thank you for the information because there is not a mandate from the health department this would be under the purview of the school district not laramy County Health so while we're getting the runaround about answers to our masking questions questions and fear-based links to crmc with Co positive ad Admissions and
126on respirators Etc I say let's take matters into our own hands let's start talking about preventative care a good multivitamin vitamin D3 zinc curatin all those things can help you but don't wait until it's too late I say right now let's take a vote let's take the masks off our kids and let's empower the parents for what they're supposed to do parent the children thank you very much hi I'm Michelle Hayes at the work session on January 4th there were several concerning things said I got the impression that our kids are carrying the weight of laramy County's Co numbers the work session was not like a normal session much to everybody's surprise when the CEO crmc CEO and members of the county and State Health Department walked in unfortunately members that support optional masks were
127cut off while those in favor of requiring masks were given the floor those that are in favor of requiring masks pick and choose what information is provided and then heavily criticize anyone's speaking against them I'm a former crmc nurse left long before Co and let me tell you their staffing issues are not new they have been short staff for at least as far back as 2010 why wasn't the question asked of how many agency nurses they use on a regular day prior to covid it's a parents jobs to have a plan for our kids in the event that they cannot go to school especially when we're in the medical field this is also not new do you know how how frequently the hospital hit capacity prior to co or why they are remodeling during covid
128therefore having less beds available Mr thorell stated that the other hospitals have avoided hitting capacity because they have transferred patients to crmc so why are our children having to Bear the weight of other counties covid patients in our hospitals why wasn't the patient population broke down to only represent larmy County patients more specifically Within L csd1 District boundaries you are putting adult responsibilities on our kids there is a nationwide Staffing issue implying that you do not want to remove masks because lcsd1 is short sta short staffed is absurd implying that you do not want to remove masks because it is more work is absurd it is not our job our kids jobs to carry this type of responsibility every District in Wyoming is facing staffing issues and more work because of covid yet they have
129removed masks and put the kids first first yes Co can be scary but so can crossing the street in front of your school school board members should not feel like they have to gamble on removing masks from the kids it is a parents job to decide what is best for their kids health and decide whether they want them to wear masks or not this is not the board's job board members that believe it is their job to decide if kids wear masks or not is giving the impression that you do not think parents are capable of doing what is best for our kids it is the superintendent's job to keep the schools open by making sure there is staff to teach and the school is clean and ready for our students it is not her
130job to dictate what is best for our kids health we don't shut schools down all winter because it might snow which would make the roads unsafe or cause power outages lcsd1 keeps parents informed when there is an increased risk of hazardous weather by notifying parents of changes and concerns and then allowing them to decide if they want to pick their kids up early or or keep them in school thank you Abby mildenberger m i l d n b r g r Abby thank you so you you got it right it's Abby murger thank you most people don't so thank you um so I emailed all of you this morning only got a couple responses so I figured I would just give you the numbers again last week during the special session there was a lot
131a lot of talk about Teton County and how Teton County had just removed their Mass mandates and it was because their vaccination records are so much higher than ours and I just want to give you those numbers again Teton County has a total population of about 23,000 people they had an indoor mask mandate that started in August their overall vaccination rate is 85% with children 12 to 17 at 85 and 5 to 11 year olds at 39.5 laramy county has almost 100,000 people has no countywide indoor Mass mandate has an overall vaccination rate of 45 12 to 17 year olds at 39 5 to 11 year olds at five you say that that mattered that that's why we can't get rid of it but they can in their County of 23,000 people they currently have
132676 Active cases and had 1225 confirmed cases over the last two weeks in larmy County where we have almost 100,000 people we had half of that we have current Active cases of 293 and 600 confirmed cases in the last two weeks so if we're comparing us to Tong County our numbers are way better than theirs way better than theirs but you're saying that because just because of their vaccines they could get rid of theirs and we can't get rid of ours to compare just one other County who's closer in numbers to ours neutrona county has about 880,000 people their vaccination records are actually slightly lower than ours and their Active cases and their confirmed cases are even smaller than ours as well so please remove the mask from our children it's clearly not doing anything
133thank you Wendy bulk she on we're up good evening Madam chair members of the board and superintendent chriso my name is Wendy vul ly county is currently at a high risk for Community transmission of covid here in larmy County there has been 173% increase in school age cases in the last week alone two children are hospitalized due to covid one 12 years old and an infant there is 129% increase in County cases since last week 800 19 new cases in the last seven days this has doubled each week for the last three weeks we should all be very concerned about this Staffing of our critical infrastructure is going to be an issue at this rate and lack of Rapid test right now if you try to go to Walmart or Sam's Club to buy a
134rapid test they are not to be found so testing at home is becoming very difficult thus masking is the best and the least expensive and the most achievable to slowing this down schools that required masks this past year had a lower incidence of Corona virus cases than those that did not and that reduction within schools also slowed Community spread that's all we're asking is that we slow the spread we appreciate your time this evening thank you very much please keep the mask mandate in place thank you Amanda Shay bickart Amanda sh Brookhart is she online or in the Overflow Madam chair I do not see that name online okay the last name is s h y hyen b r o o k h r t Amanda last time M chair she's coming pardon she's coming
135oh very good thank you sorry it takes a while to get in from there thank you I'm Amanda sha rart and as a teacher in our district I'm not allowed to have an opinion about Co so I'll tell you just my experiences as a teacher um you know we have staff that are hurting so badly right now um people who have had babies at the beginning of the year and have had to use their time to take that time off to have a child but then they have kids who get sick and they have to stay home and then they catch Co and they've used up all of their sick time and then maybe you have to have a surgery and you have no sick time to take off yes our teachers make an amazing
136amount of money compared to just down the street um and we are incredibly blessed by that but we have to find a way to protect our staff or we're going to lose staff just like they are in other states and other counties um one thing you guys um it sounded like we are looking at eliminating contract contact tracing and getting rid of um The Mask mandate making it highly recommended I have staff in my building that are at a high risk if they catch covid and I personally have a spouse that is about to have a massive surgery and while a lot of us are not afraid of covid we do have people in our lives and in our schools and our staff that are amazing individuals and who are putting their life on the
137line for our kids but we need to protect them as well we also need to protect our kids yes masks are a huge um inconvenience and I've worked with students who have had masks that haven't been washed in a week and they're disgusting I have taken kids' masks home and washed them at my own house because they didn't have a clean mask at home and so I understand there was a parent online that had Ted aled about that masks are disgusting when they're not washed they are disgusting and we do have kids that they're not getting T those things are not getting taken care of at home and that is a concern but one of our biggest concerns is our staff and our kids I don't want to lose one of my staff members because
138they caught covid God forbid I lose one of my children in my classroom I care about my kids every day I worry about them every one of our staff members every one of our teachers they care about your kids and they want to see your kids do well and and we don't none of us want to lose a student this year because of covid and you have a lot on your shoulders a lot of weight on your shoulders and I know this is a big decision but I hope that you will think about the staff and at least make sure that we have enough Subs to help cover staff when they're gone because we're stretching our staff short and we're making them to the point where they are working a lot of overtime especially in
139junior high and high school where they're having to cover their staff members that are out thank you thank you Justin H good evening Madam chair woman trustees superintendent uh Justin Hesser I'm a parent of a kindergartner and third grader in this District we're going to switch gears a little bit uh I'm here to talk about agenda item uh d3.5 titled permission to contract for Education Services I think it's important you understand what I saw and what other members of the public see when they go look at the agenda on board docs the only information we provided is the following proposed motion I move to Grant permission to contract for Educational Services in an amount not to exceed $800,000 there's no detail regarding who you're going to pay what it's for what period of time it
140will cover is that for a month Services two years or anything would give a reasonable person notice of what you were doing fortunately I was able to get the additional information from a truste on this topic within minutes of asking I might add the information gave me enough to at least figure out what you're were going to try to do I do have a couple questions one was it doesn't look like paper applies to elementary students at all there's no reading tutoring that I could see um I hope you ask questions tonight before you spend almost a million dollars if this board and District truly values transparency and parent in public involvement then I encourage you to consider reconsider how you give notice of what you will be doing at these meetings so we can
141participate in a more meaningful manner why can't parents in the public have the same information you all have the county does this with theirs if you look at theirs you can just click on each agenda item you get all the information they have when you take action like this regardless of how well-intentioned you are it makes it looks bad it makes me wonder what are you what are you going to try to do with that $800,000 finally I must say that I'm currently speaking at attending a public meeting pursuant to the Wyoming open meetings act I have no idea why every time the uh Madame chairwoman introduces public comment she says very clearly this is not a public meeting not only is that inaccurate causes myself and ensure others to distrust what you're doing and
142saying specifically this is what I hear we're now at that portion of the meeting where we have to hear from the public however we don't consider what you all about to say as part of a public meeting because we don't care what you have to say as an attorney often think of hypotheticals I wondered what's the legal effect of an action at a meeting which you say is not a public meeting is it valid because it wasn't at a public meeting and if these aren't the public meetings I'd like to know when the public meetings are because I'd love to attend them uh please reconsider how you take certain actions and how you say things if you truly value input of parents also consider a work session or an update on literacy efforts and computer
143education in the elementary uh for elementary students which I'm sure you're aware is replaced with uh social emotional learning I have concerns about both thank please hold your comments thank you thank you madam chair Renee hle um I'm an OBGYN physician here in Cheyenne Wyoming I'm also a member of the Wyoming uh Board of Medicine I want to thank you for allowing me to speak today I feel it's important for the members of the board to hear from people in the district who feel differently from the loud minority of voices you hear at this meeting every month we are tired of the pandemic we are all tired of wearing masks we are all tired of having to think about group Gatherings and travel and vaccines the Physicians and staff nurses housekeeping staff and now the
144Wyoming guard members at the hospital are all tired of the Endless shifts and critical patients and death this past week there were three deaths at the hospital at the VA Hospital over the weekend there were four from Co we would all like to stop wearing masks and gowns and heavy and Loud paper equipment that are required to take care of critical covid patients we are all tired but we must continue to be vigilant and help everyone who works at the hospital and everyone in the community we cannot give up yet the crowd behind me will groan and make snide comments but the Omron variant we have with with the Omron variant we have to continue to be vigilant yes this variant appears to be less severe but the numbers are staggeringly high in other parts
145of the country and our numbers are starting to increase the number of cases in the county went from 367 the week after Christmas to 819 this past week the number of pediatric cases went from 41 to 135 in the same period of time this variant spreads more easily and even though vaccinated people tend to have very few symptoms unvaccinated people are getting critically ill and dying our county is only 44% vaccinated the state as a whole is less than 50% vaccinated this could be devastating to Medical Care here in W in Cheyenne and in Wyoming as I have stated previously the high census of the hospital does not affect just covid patients it affects people with heart attacks people who have car accidents we even had a woman on labor and delivery with complication post
146postpartum who couldn't go to the unit that she need it because there was not a bed masks are safe and easy to use the majority of kids teachers parents do do not mind wearing masks they would rather wear mask and be in school than not be in school and they want to help keep the community safe please please please be patient a few more weeks when our numbers start to go down again that would be the time to considering masks taking masks off in school it is too early it could be devastating please keep our kids and teachers and other employees in the district safe as well as their families this is the most important thing right now the folks behind me may be loud but they do not represent the majority of people in
147the district thank you please be still please be respectful thank you very much please be respectful this is hard for everyone and it's very hard to get up there and speak Mark Moody uh Mark Moody uh the Board needs to end the mass mandates um again violation of Article 1 Section 30 as I keep saying you can get a copy from the secretary of state which was very nice no Mass mandates there right there by the capital and again as we say uh C uh a each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own healthc care decisions the parent guardian or legal representatives of any other natural person shall have the right to make Health Care decisions for that person and again C the legislature May determine reasonable necessary instructions not
148school board not even Governor Gordon can do that okay he faced backlash doing that that's why he stopped it again we are the majority we're 65 to 70% here in laramy County gr stronger every day we don't want the Mas anymore they are going against the Constitution and also against your constituents which is the majority of Wyoming to 70% we don't want it okay we're the majority we are the majority that's all I have to say Benjamin Fitch fch thank you my name is Ben Finch thanks for allowing me to come up and talk um I am a parent of the kindergarten students and I do hate how political mask vaccinations and everything about Co has been Co is not political nor should our response to it be I know we are all tired of
149wearing masks Co um Co is real contagious and has been harmful though more contagious we are seeing that this new variant is much less severe our hospitalizations are decreasing a lot since the beginning of the school year I want to keep our students in school and in-person learning is the best thing for them if we got rid of mas how would this affect our in-person learning as well as our substitute shortage I'm not sure how eliminating eliminating our Mass policy would us but I know where to look for answers other school districts have already made Mass optional can we not look for them as a role model and what they've done and what's been the effects I know Jackson lury Riverton even down in gy they've made Max Mass optional has that been detrimental to
150the operations of schools um I don't think it's been detrimental to them because they haven't reversed course from what I understand other districts have been making Mass optional and have altered how they quarantined students they also have substitute shortages that's not just for us it's everywhere um but did making Mass optional make it worse for them it's also important to listen to our health officials but we also need to listen to the public parents and our students I respect that earlier in the year we were concerned as a community about how our hospital was uh how full it was due to co cases let's look at the numbers now six days ago the hospital reported that 24 people are hospitalized with covid December uh 20th there was 31 December 13th there was 40 November 22nd
151there was 45 September 13th there was 52 and then September 8th there was 57 see the trend we are getting better it is our is our goal to be zero before we move masks from our students I would I would just really like us to stop moving the goal post it just keeps changing if maths were made optional however this is my biggest sticking point though we have to change how we quarantine healthy students when we have had hundreds of students quarantined and very few of them testing positive at the beginning of the school year that was very detrimental we just can't get rid of the mass mandat so we do have they have to go hand inand um the beginning of the school year was rough for me as a parent I I never
152knew what day I would get that phone call from my par from my principal that my kid had to be in quarantined and um that was pressuring me to get my kid vaccinated because I can't miss a ton of time off work to keep a healthy kid home that's what parents are dealing with every day we don't know when we going to get that call from a principal saying our kid has to quarantine so thank you for hearing us today but I would really appreciate us hearing from the if you guys would hear from the um the public and not only remove Mass make Mass optional but also change how you um contact race thank you Barbara Smith do we have Barbara Smith in the or online Madam chair there is a Barbara online uh
153if that is Barbara Smith if she' raise her hand okay Mrs Smith if you could raise your hand Barbara if you are online please raise your hand so Mr mckenny can admit you madam chair there's no hands ra oh she's coming oh very good thank you I just want to thank you for the opportunity to speak I am a teacher can you go ahead and pull the mic a little bit there you go that way that'll be on Zoom as well thank you have a quiet voice yeah um I appreciate the opportunity to speak and I've gone through a lot the statistics and I guess the thing that I wanted to say is that we should have a choice I think at first when teachers wore a mask and the students didn't I mean I
154do I space my kids I try to take every precaution but I think it should be a choice and I think our choices are being limited our choices are being taken away and I understand that we're in the kind of in the heighten but like I said one in my class I always hand sanitize I try to keep my kids you know so they're space and try to keep them healthy and then safe but I just thought at some point when when is this going to end I mean I kept saying from a year and now we're getting two years are we going to be three years and I think a lot of times our students need air they need that fresh air they masks aren't providing that and so many times I see their
155masks are disgusting parents don't always take care of their masks I mean we're having to we know the schools do provide masks but I still think it should be a choice it should be you know our choice I respect if um people want to wear masks my brother wears a mask my brother's been vaccinated I think that's great but that's not my choice I like to I like to trust my natural immunity I like to I mean I keep I'm a clan person I Caan things and again I think it should just be our choice and I hope that it will become a choice if you feel comfortable wearing a mask wear a mask if you don't if you don't want to wear a mask then don't wear a mask you know hand San TI
156wash your hands those are important but I think masks should be a choice thank you thank you our public comment I appreciate everyone's uh taking the time to make that comment um we will move on to our agenda there'll be a second opportunity for uh public comment later on in the uh meeting okay um thank you upcoming meetings January 12th 2022 is a rescheduled meeting at 6:30 for parent advisory committee in the boardroom um February 2nd 2022 at 6:30 pm parent advisory committee in the boardroom so one is the regular January meeting was rescheduled so that's why you see that on there twice um and February 7th 2022 a 5: PM work session 6 PM regular board meeting in the boardroom at this time um we will go to individual uh board Communications and reports
157do I have anyone who would yes Mr Bolan this turned on thank you mam chair um earlier this week I had sent an email to our executive secretary asking for two items to be changed on the agenda it was interesting that one of those got changed for me and I appreciate that other one came up in the discussion tonight which I thought was interesting and that is our public deserves to know at least who it is we're giving our money to and about half of our agenda items do not have the name of the person that is the money of their company that it's going to and so I think they we probably even give some additional information as was requested today but I think it's very very important that we at the very least
158tell them who we're spending the money with so I would appreciate the future that we we do that for all of our item is that all yes thank you okay thank you trusty CL thank you madam chair um I agree with that Mr Bolan thank you for that um I also wanted just to report out for the Cheyenne community recreation District that we met last week and three of the board members serve on that committee and um and then we also have someone from the parent advisory committee on that board and uh staff from our construction department and um and our operations Department too and um I just wanted to let you know that we elected officers for the the this new year um I'm going to continue on as the chair of that committee
159and trusty renie is the vice chair of that committee we have Mr Jeff dhy who is the treasurer and then also um a new member to the committee we got threw right in and we put um trusty Smith on as the Secretary of course there's only five board members so there wasn't a lot of people to so and she was gra gracious enough to take on the the role even though it was her first day on the committee so uh we did do that and then in addition we approved two projects and um I'm really proud to say that we worked on um we funded as the rec reill board we funded a project at Johnson Jor High to replace their Turf and um their uh they that project wrapped up and they they saved
160actually um quite a lot of money over $100,000 and we were able to approve two new projects the replacement of the turf at cheyen Central High School um we approved that project at that meeting it is um passed its life and um and it also there needs to be some drainage done for um for that Turf so we're going to get some drainage done as well as new turf at Central and we were able to approve that project without expending any funds because we had leftover funds from the Johnson Junior High um project that just was completed and in addition we had a little bit more money um that that turf at Central will be 125,000 and then um or that's what the expect cost will be and then the um we were able to
161approve three scores boxes to be built at the um New softball um grounds that uh our softball teams are playing at now in the city um location down by um Odell range and windmill windmill thank you so I was pretty excited that we were able to use funds then not have to expend any new for two projects that will really benefit our students so um kudos to our operations department for the work that they did on the Johnson Junior High project and and then um coming to us with these projects that they think they can get done without expending new funds thank you any other yes trusty Herman thank you madam chair and just I'm I'm not going to report out on myself but just um just to um sort of build on what uh
162trusty Clawson said is that um the uh the wck mill board and staff determined several years ago that really um artificial turf needed to be installed at our secondary schools um both for the safety of the students for the durability of the turf to save money on the grounds Keepers um and also um they had to be they were limited when it was when it was actual graph there had to be Li Li mited access by the community to those fields and it's really been allowed that the community to use the fields at the high schools and the junior highs and so it's it just was a smart thing all the way around and and um again kind of also at the the staff of of the district has done a real good job of
163um getting a replacement schedule Central High School was the first to get it and now several years later I don't how old this exactly but it just it wears out and you lose the resilience and so now um it's it's in the cycle to uh to be refurbished and replaced and it's going to go through all the schools we now have the artificial turf installed or will be at Johnson at all the secondary schools and so um it's just it's I guess a way that um sort of a very responsible way to use taxpayer money to um serve our kids and serve our community through it through Rec be Mill so congratulations to the board and and the staff that's doing a great job for our students thank you I think trusty Clon has one
164more thing yes thank you madam chair yes um it gave me time to to remember I forgot to mention something that we're able to uh host um the state soccer tournament this year on the hopefully on the central Turf so that will be a really great opportunity for our community to make um to to host that and have teams come in but also I think will benefit our economy so I'm excited about that and then there was one other thing I I meant to mention and this is just off the cuff but I wanted to say thank you to um to John to our McCormack principal Mr Burns he has been um out Manning the crosswalk many a cold morning and afternoon and um it just means a lot to me as a parent and
165um I know to our community especially given that we had a student that was hit I know I spoke to Dr Cris about this issue and and they you're looking into um street lights with the city and hopefully we'll get some support from our city who are in charge of street lights to um take care of our kids when they're crossing the street to get to their schools so I just wanted to say thank you in the meantime um I don't I haven't had a chance to talk to Mr niss about what's going on over at at that at that junior high but those are very busy streets that those two schools are on and um I just I think that it's not worthy to to say thank you when when people are going above
166and beyond to make sure our students are safe so thank you thank you is there any other word member that would like to share thank you all right at this time uh we move on to the reports from superintendent and staff thank you Dr presell thank you madam chair uh good evening Madam chair members of the board uh Community I would like to introduce uh Mr Jim Frey to come on up uh we have a couple of agenda items that specifically relate to instruction uh and I would ask that he um take it from here good evening thank you Dr crisal Madam chair members of the board it's a pleasure being here tonight and to discuss the wonderful things happening in the uh Department of Instruction in our district uh that serves our kids um
167right off the bat we are going toh share from Amy Castle our math coordinator uh a 45-day review proposal for um updates on uh math materials so I'll invite Amy Castle to speak to you now good evening Madame chairperson Dr preso and trustees my name is Amy Castle I'm the secondary mathematics coordinator for larmy County 1 I'm here tonight to invite you and our stakeholders in our community to help us adopt the new advanced placement statistics honors trigonometry honors pre-calculus algebra and college algebra and trigonometry curricular materials by participating in a 45-day public review of the textbooks we are considering for adoption the 45-day public review will begin today and will end on February 25th 2022 materials can be reviewed by um going to the the second floor of the ly County public library or
168by coming to our office the mouse science and World Language office in room 352 of the administration building um I thank you for your time and your consideration and I'm open for any questions at this time thank you any board member have any questions thank you Mrs Castle I think after we review them we'll probably have some thank you awesome appreciate your work all right next I'd like to uh invite up Matt schel Matt is the U multi-tiered System of supports administrator for our our school district and uh he would like to share how we engage kids across our district in K12 with multi-tiered system of supports Matt thank you Mr kley um thanks for having me Madam chair members of the board Dr Crespo um appreciate the opportunity to share with you you some
169of the work that we've been doing um this year to really meet the needs of students across our district escape from that right one thank you Mr mcken um across the district meeting the needs of the whole child um we know that in order to have a robust academic institution and District we have to meet the needs of students academically and social emotionally and so through the work that we've done this year and in previous years uh really putting some things in place to help support students and the whole child in a really systematic way through a layered Continuum of evidence-based practices and supports and I'll talk a little bit um about just the seven main ingredients that we've really been focusing to make sure that we have in place um talk about the the
170tiers here in a second um but I'll start with universal screening this is something that we complete three times a year um in order to one make sure that we have a really healthy learning environment and kids are gaining ground but also we don't want our students to have to wait to fail before we say hey we need to provide you some additional supports so we're doing Universal screenings we're actually in the process of completing our second Universal screener right now so that we can have some real time data to say hey we've identified some students who need some additional support and provide that in a seamless timely manner for them um the third one that we've talked a lot about this year with teams and across the district is Fidelity of implementation um we
171know that um when we when we go to a physician and they prescribe a medication for us and they say take this pill three times a day for 10 days um life happens and sometimes we don't follow their directions quite like they say and then after 10 days we go man how come I still have this cough um so we've talked a lot about Fidelity of implementation when we're working with students with a in in the area of reading or we're doing some work with social emotional if we don't do it the way that it was designed and the research says um we don't get the results that that we should anticipate from that and we know that time in it in public school is precious and we want to get the most out of
172it that we can so really working on everything that we're implementing we're doing so the exact way that it's supposed to be done um the several the last couple items on here really honors the PLC process that professional learning community and teams are working together to identify any problems that they have um in in the learning sit with their learning um targets and then dividing ways or figuring out ways to to solve those problems um we're also using data on a regular basis um through those evidence-based practices and then progress monitoring research tells us is probably the hardest one for schools to do but it also has the biggest bang for its buck so we're constantly assessing kids seeing where they're at and making sure that we're monitoring their progress that they're gaining the grounds
173that we need them to gain um in a systematic way let me see here file any ideas here sorry just a little bit slow okay this diagram here I think is probably the Pyramid of interventions that we're familiar with when we talk about mtss or RTI or DBI By Any Other Name but really we talk about these tiers and we want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the whole child and so on the left hand side of the pyramid you see the evidence-based academic content and we call that tier one and at the bottom right we see those evidence-based behavioral supports um all students in our district that's our basket of goods that might be the math curriculum that Mrs Castle was just speaking about or foundations Integrity we want to make sure
174that we have have evidence-based things at that tier one level for academics as well as social emotional and behavioral supports on the bottom right side for tier one that's where you're going to see um schoolwide positive behavior intervention supports and OAS those things we make sure all students get we want to have a robust tier one situation and setting for students um but we know that the tier one is going to meet the needs of about 70 to 80% of our students we are going to have to be ready through progress monitoring to provide addition help and support to students um and that's where tier two and tier three come in students continue to get that robust tier one but in tier two if you struggle a little bit through progress monitoring Universal screening the
175professional learning community Through common formative assessment says we got to help this kiddo we can provide them some more targeted small group interventions and supports um in order to help them the best way to help tier two and tier three numbers is have robust tier one okay um so through tier one tier two if students continue to struggle we're going to provide them some more intensive supports intensive sometimes seems like um an intimidating word but usually what we're talking about there is um if we have a student who's struggling academically or behaviorally we're going to make the group a little bit smaller we might give them instead of 30 minutes three times a week we might give them intervention and academic support five times a week for 60 minutes so we make the group smaller
176we make the time a little bit longer and all the time we're monitoring the progress to make sure we're meeting the needs of students three goals that I would share with you that we've come up with through our implementation of of mtss and pretty robust goals and creating some baseline this year we want to make sure that we're increasing literacy rates and academic achievement at all levels across our school district we also want to make sure um that we have a way to really focus on engagement and participation and increase engagement um across the school and inside the classroom inside the school and across the community and lead to increased positive behaviors for all students and our third goal that I would share with you through our work with mtss is to work with each
177individual school to develop site specific um plans so that each School while they're a little bit different um Can can meet the needs of their their children I was a a principal of a title one school and so through the utilization of some of that that Federal money that I had the interventions and supports that I have will look different than a school that doesn't receive some of that Federal support so we're busily working with each individual school to make sure that the the plan that they create allows them to meet the needs of the students within on their building talk a little bit about resources that we've been really lucky to have this year uh through the utilization of the cares act funds this year we've been able to hire additional staff to help
178um across all the tiers and tier one tier two and tier three we've been able across the district to provide academic interventionist to help Reading Writing and math support um from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade we've also hired mtss Specialists we talked about those folks in the spring those were the folks that were really working on social emotional learning um or teaching life skills inside of the classroom they're they're spent a lot of their time in tier one and dabbling a little bit in tier two as their schedule allows we've also been able to hire additional counselors and behavior interventionists to help meet any academic or behavior and social emotional needs of students um in the in the spring we we talked about those newly created positions at mtss position and those were
179the folks that were teaching those life skills I want to share two big goals that we've come up with this year as a group um the first of which is to become experts within their school every elementary school has somebody in there working with them and we've ask them to really um to work with the collaborative teams and be prescriptive so that they can support everything that's occurring inside of the classroom an example of that is I was working with the school and their primary Wing um was really struggling after recess for the first 15 minutes after every recess kids were coming in they were frustrated they were crying there was tears there was fighting um and when it came down to the the professional Learning Community said our students are struggling with kindness empathy
180making friends and sharing and so this person identified and developed lessons specifically aimed at that took that away from the class teacher deployed those lessons and within a very short period of time those teachers gained back about 30 minutes of instructional time a day and students got much more success on the playground and really kind of changed the dynamic of of that school and so lots of luck and success with that so far the second goal that we had for those folks was to teach evidence-based curriculum that had been within in the school district for several years and again the best way to improve tier two and tier three is to have a really strong tier one and so every day they're teaching evidence-based curriculum and I wanted to share some of the topics that
181they've been teaching so far this year they've been working with students to teach them how to have a growth mindset how to set and Achieve goals identifying and managing emotions empathy and kindness that was a big one right about the holiday season problem solving and responsible decision making but above all working together inside that school to meet the needs of kids is really where that new position is landed and having some great success in those collaborative efforts um so our with mtss is really just about meeting the needs of kids both academically social emotionally I think we're off to a great start and collecting some great Baseline data for you and with that I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have thank you Mr Shel yes Mr weers spond trusty readers spond
182Mr SEL thank you for your comments and appreciate the information so increased literacy rates has been a focus for this board since I've been on the board and I appreciate your comments on that and I would like to delve a little bit if I could into the progress monitoring piece so I assume those are formative and summative assessments and what forms do those take what if we were to find if we were to look at that in detail what would that look like yeah that that's an excellent question um there's there's several ways that schools are doing that and probably the most common right now um trusty weers spawn is is there we're working inside a fast Bridge um at the elementary level to really Identify some specific skills and areas that we can provide
183those interventions that's also our Universal screening tool so they take that Universal screener and then they can go in there and progress monitor as often as they would like to now the the standard is three times a year unless you're in tier two or tier three and in some cases we're progress monitoring kids every seven days or every 30 days um but the more at risk you have the more we want to progress monitor okay Madam chair I just wanted to follow up so how would that progress in the district be reported and how often would that occur to like at the school level or District level District level um you know we're in the process of doing our second Universal screener right now that's going to close on February 4th and we should be
184able to share some information with you right after that now at the at the individual level when we're progress monitoring students we're hopeful that that's being shared with with parents and teachers every 30 days so parents know hey this is where my kiddo is and we can see the trend line and how kids are improving and growing so that's a 30 day cycle okay thank you very good I think Dr creso had no you're good okay um is there are there any other questions yes trusty Smith thank you madam chair thank you Mr scha um you mentioned that and I I don't know if it I here's where you can clarify I guess um are all of those positions Car Act funded are some of them um more permanent positions what I'm just curious about
185the permanency of the program um and I apologize that I don't have that information already thank you I I would tell you that the the positions that I discussed those are the car's act positions and I know that we've worked with the human resources department and Jed's office to take a look at that um whether or not those are position or one year only which is right now where those stand is one year only um but our goal is to really make sure that we have such strong systems in place um that we're not starting from scratch if we lose everybody based upon that funding thank you thank you any yes trusty Clon thank you madam chair I have one quick question um I was just curious if I I really think that being able
186to handle your your emotions a lot of times plays into your behavior that's been not my observation at the elementary level especially well at all levels um and I was wondering if you've seen any or if you have any data as a result of this push toward having a whole um uh a time frame in the elementary um I'm losing the word but it's where they go to the they special thank you okay when they go to the special they get this this training and I'm wondering if you have any data um that might show that it's had an impact at all on behavior um between this year and last year thank you thank you that's an excellent question and we're just in the process of putting some metrics together to begin to measure that
187some real Baseline type of information um but as part of that Universal screener that I mentioned we're using fastbridge for the academic side and then savers for the social academic emotional Behavior rating scale we'll have that second assessment done on February 4th and we're hopeful to see some trend lines there as well but certainly some some baseline data that we can share with you soon thank you Dr creso has something to add um thank you madam chair trusty Clawson I think what's something that um is really important that we keep in the Forefront of the work that we're doing is that this is all brand new to the district based on the funding that was made available and what we recognized through lots of discussion with many of our building principles that there would be
188a need coming in and some of you have heard through our updates you know certain um when students were coming in and they weren't necessarily able to regulate what are those systems that we can put in place and then there are many students that can regulate and we need to make sure that they're getting the opportunities to advance that um component so the data that we're Gathering we will be coming to the board to report um we're just waiting for that window to close and actually had that discussion today like the window's closing how much time do we need so the board the trustees can anticipate a report on that um not long after that closes so that we can have outcome based on do we know it's working which we we can see that
189it is in the observational but what does that look like in the data very good any other questions okay thank you because um Dr chriso answered um some of the funding questions um but Mt um our our multi-tiered systems of support isn't actually the the this new part that's new to the district the the additional individuals and and that um the philosophy behind implementing this but we have had multiple tiered support in the district before this is just a because of the co because of the car's funding we're able to really Target um some some uh real work um and and um progress and and actually honestly I think one of the things I think we've always been missing is being able to have the Personnel um the funding to to bring those people in
190the extra hands to make that happen so um on that note when you do these how do you evaluate or as a child start do they start all over again at the beginning of the year like if you've had um when they go up to that next grade level how do we pass that child to the next grade level what does that look like there there is a process that every school goes through on on how do we move one a kiddo from fourth grade to fifth grade or how do we transition from sixth grade to seventh grade and so we we want all of that data to move with that students but also the the history of the interventions that we've tried as well so if if you had a lot of interventions because
191maybe you were struggling in second grade and in third grade and in fourth grade you started to get it we want everybody who works with you academically to know hey here's the things that have that we've done in the past so we do make sure that incoming teachers next year's teachers get that information um and that we can look at that historically in order to meet the needs of kids and that's a fairly new thing for us some of our programs in years past didn't talk to one another so at the end of a year the next teacher didn't get to see it but right now we'll have a really smooth transition from one grade to the next and from one level to the next as well I'm looking forward to that I think that'll
192be a good process thank you Dr pres thank you madam chair yes yes that just kind of raised a question that um is how much of how much um professional development are you helping teachers with so that your there's some kind of a sustainable durable strategies and that sort of thing going on yeah and and I think that's a big part of it mtss might not be new to our district but that's a great question and so we're developing those things right now in order to be able to train schools and teachers and not just this year but next year when we get new teachers um how do we make sure that we sustain this and so as as part of our work through the Strategic plan we've had conversations how do we make sure
193that what we do this year gets built upon for next year and the following year through a really robust professional development plan very good yes Dr is there another question down there okay I just wanted to take a minute and say thank you um to Mr Sagel his his um Team this is they we have had a comprehens we have had a program this system that Mr scho and his team have been working on has really brought it together in a comprehensive way so that we do we don't have those gaps because of a building or a classroom and one of the things that we've been doing as a team is um going out to certain buildings if we know that you know what does it look like what are the interventions so that we
194can replicate as and help other staff if there you know every unique situation with every child so that we're able to duplicate some of those strategies and I just want to say thank you thank you that's very very important work um I I appreciate all your I appreciate your presentation I look forward to getting that feedback from the data thank you thank you madam chair Board of Trustees at this point in time we have our library procurement process uh based on the amount of questions and uh and comments that we've had in regards to our library procurement procedures in the district uh we've invited our uh library media Specialists I'll ask them to come join me now and uh especially uh Jen Marcus She Will present to you our procedures outlined in policy and uh
195process processes throughout our secondary Library procedures thank you good evening Dr Crestville Madam chair members of the board it's a pleasure to be here to share an update on our secondary librar and share some information about our procurement process as well first we would like to state that our goal as Librarians is to provide quality Library services for all students in our schools we strive to ensure that all students have a positive Library experience no matter the reason for their visit to our facility and they do visit us for all kinds of reasons students have visited their secondary libraries 56,600 teachers with additional education and certification in library and information science so we collaborate with classroom teachers to embed research instruction into their curriculum we teach students to search subscription databases evaluate websites be Savvy
196Google Searchers site sources properly and avoid plagiarizing material many students also visit the library on their own for a variety of reasons the Librarians are responsible for circulating iPads in the secondary buildings and we do a fair amount of troubleshooting iPads with students to support that onetoone initiative at the high schools we have students who spend every off hour with us to study and catch up on homework and students of course also visit us to check out books and get our help selecting an item of interest to read so far this year we've circulated 2,96 print books in our secondary buildings last year we received $144,000 from the cheyen schools Foundation at the secondary level to purchase ebooks and audio books for our collections to help support book access on the item we actively advertising
197these additions to our Collections and have circulated 2512 ebooks and 327 audio books thus far this school year we purchase materials for our libraries to support classroom instruction but we also support students independent prechoice reading needs as well When selecting materials to build diverse collections that meet the needs of all of our students we follow chapter 7 section 21 of school board policy we've created a handout that's posted on the district website that explains how we put this policy into action as we actually build in Place book orders parents May formally request that a purchased item be reconsidered and that process is outlined in chapter N9 Section 8 of board policy we are always happy to work with our parents to assist them in making reading selections for their students parents can complete an official
198optout form that's on the district's website and we have created on the website um we've created a webcast that walks um parents through actually accessing that form and um parents are welcome to also create an individualized list of titles just for their student and then the school library staff will only check out materials on that list to that student we provided directions for how to make a personalized list in the optout screencast on the district website if parents run into problems accessing or completing any of these options they should not hesitate to contact their Secondary School librarian thank you for the opportunity to share information about Library services at the secondary level thank you question yes please um yes Mr ban we just heard about um the the books going out for adoption for our
199mathematics and we do that for all of our C areas is there any time when we we are selecting the books for our libraries or a master list of everything that's being purchased for our libraries is available to the public before we actually purchase them so they could do some review on those and is that an idea we can put in place if it's not being done that is not part of board policy at this time so we're not doing that trusty Clon thank you madam chair thank you for your presentation and thank you for your excellent um video on our website that you put together um to show people how to use the op out form I know I sponsored that language um and we passed it into policy last year so I'm pretty
200familiar with it um and it was it was in reaction to a parent um just having concern about what might be in a library book and wanting to be able to have more control um since then we've been made aware as a board that our secondary libraries have books um that are a lot more explicit um on well sexually explicit I'll be just say it um and to the to the degree to the the the explicit degree that the language in those books can't be read out loud in our in our board meetings um and this is a really it this is a really difficult issue because it's nuanced and I think we deserve as a board in our public deserves for us to have a conversation around the Nuance that um you know people
201stood up and said you're you're trying to ban books I would say we're not trying to ban books for those of us that that share the concerns that some of the parents have raised but I'm wondering I think that the the issue is the level of explicity in these books um parents were not aware I know I wasn't aware that there was that level of explicit explicity in these books um regarded regarding multiple topics from rape to Prost child PR stitution to um someone mentioned lgbtq and and it really doesn't matter I think that there there is going to be on any topic people who will say I don't want my kid reading that but the concern is when we don't know what's in there and so and even my my students would probably choose
202not to read certain topics if they knew it was in the book so it's a long way of around going to a question and the question is do we have a means for in our libraries right now I'm just wanting to know what the current situation is do we have a means for um warning students that these books over here have adult themes in them or how do you how do you help students without talking to them directly and without them coming to you and saying I want to avoid this topic or that topic or I don't want to get to two level detail how do they know what they're getting into until they're reading it I mean we have policies on not teachers not being allowed to cuss we can't show our rated movies
203in our classrooms you know um we we have lots of policies on lots of different issues so we have censored for K12 these topics in other avenues or other areas and I'm wondering about this book situation because this has kind of come to the the surface lately and I'd like to know what is our current situation and maybe that will help me think about um how many maybe we as a board can discuss it further so I'd like to just talk a little bit more meded in depth about the process that we use to choose the book so part of board policy is that we use professional selection tools for librarians so we use selection AES they're reviews that are published in professional Library journals to select our books and the people who review for
204these Publications are people who work with children and teens who've studied Child Development and who've read many many many children's and young adult B so when they're reviewing the books they have like a wealth of knowledge to compare them to they're Librarians they're professors that teach children's literature classes at the college level their literacy structors and their other professionals who work with kids when they review these books they actually do um give a grade level or age rating for them and so I reached out to the Publications and one of them had their information online two of them emailed me back and I said well how do your reviewers actually determine grade level and they first said well first of all we we only choose people who have a background in both working with kids
205in books to do the reviews so they have a lot of expertise and then they consider factors like this they look at the age level of the protagonist in general we say kids like to read up which means they like to read about kids their age or kids maybe just a little bit older they do look at the actual reading level of the book as measured by Lexile or another reading measure they look at the complexity of the concepts presented in the book and the age at which kids are typically interested in the topic and then they ask themselves questions like would the references in this book fly over a fourth grader head or would it maybe be better at a middle school level they do look at curricular tie-ins they are aware that kids
206Across America tend to study certain topics at certain ages and then they also do look at the Publishers recommendation so when we're ordering book books we do take the reviews pretty seriously um they are tools used AC in libraries Across the Nation both in schools and um in public libraries as well and they're long-standing Publications the oldest one that we used has been in use since 1872 so they're well respected wellknown and very very well used reviewing Publications at the high school level they do we do have books that very much talk about deep societal issues and very forthright ways and what I'll say about the books that have been mentioned if you read the summary and then the first few pages you very quickly realize it's going to be a book that covers deep
207societal issues and that the author is pretty R so I I think the books themselves do a very good job of letting the reader know what they're about we don't want kids to be surprised either like we want them to have an idea of what they're going to read when we do individual readers advisory with students I often End by saying if you don't like the book bring it back it does not hurt my feelings and the great thing about the library is you didn't hand over any money so you don't have to feel like you need to finish it if you don't like it and we have kids bring back books all the time um what I'll say too is we do a lot of us will have um tools for students out and
208about so I have genre lists out so if I'm not available kids can use that list to find maybe sci-fi books or fantasy books and then they'll read the summaries on the books the Publishers are very good at letting kids really know what the book is about so the Ellen Hopkins books for example that were on the list you know from the summary in the first few pages that her books really do cover kids who are leading difficult lives and are in difficult situations and so kids generally if they're not into that they're just not going to read it because they're pretty heavy books can I just add could you could you also share the parent piece just um yes what are the the tools and strategies and resources thank you yep and so we
209we absolutely respect parents rights to determine what their kids have access to and so something that we really do like with our new online web Catal that we all share across the district the webcast explains how parents can go in and actually build a list just for their child then they can send that opt out form to the school with that list and we will only check out the items on that list to that student we'll just place a little note in their account that says see list only check out books from list or you can opt out of a specific author or you can opt out of specific titles what I really like about the individualized list because I've heard the complaint I can't go through 17,000 books in the East High library right
210it's too many so we're not asking you to do that we're asking you to maybe send us like 50 or 60 that'll keep a secondary kid pretty busy for a while and then we'll only check out from there or if there's just an author you don't want them to read fine we'll do that too it's easier if you build a personalized list if it's a topic we we don't want there to be any question in the parents mind that their child is only going to get what they want so that personalized list to me is the perfect way to achieve that need it respects both that parent's right to opt their child out but other parents rights to have access to all of the information that that meets board policy for their child I think
211it's a great balance and really respects everybody's rights thank you for that I um I I personally would like to see our board discuss this a little bit further I think it is a nuanced discussion I mean there are books out there some of my favorites that deal with very weighty topics but they don't go into every little detail that makes you experience it as a reader um and so I think that you know we do have policies on the books that talk about what we can say with profanity profanity is not allowed in our district and these books have profanity in them that's just one example but um there we don't allow teachers to show our rated movies these books describe our rated depictions of different situations and scenes so I think it's worth
212a conversation about um how our Librarians should choose books and content um and maybe I'm the only person but I'd like to have that conversation as a board um just to be consistent and also because our parents trust us I do really appreciate that we have we're using the tools we have available right now um but I also think Dr creso that we do need to make an effort to um on a regular basis and I I asked for this at the beginning of the year um but I I think that this warrants us letting parents know at the bare minimum that there will be um books in the secondary libraries that have this kind of explicit um detail in them and they deal with these explicit you know these weighty cont content topics and
213that they're aware of the op out form at the bare minimum but I'd certainly like to see our board talk about how um our policies deail with how we choose books so thank you madam chair thank you I noted that thank you trusty Clon um I'm gonna go down a little further if you don't mind trusty bowling um go ahead um trusty Ashby please I can't see you I don't know if you raised your hand um so I was trying to what I was trying to do is pull up the form because I looked at it when it went out and that we were notified um that the video was there and the um but I haven't looked at it since the form does it can you can opt out a specific you said specific
214authors specific titles there's not is there there's not a way to do topic specific so topic specific would be difficult because there'll be a range of books that cover that topic that's where I really feel like it's best when the parent tells us what is acceptable for their family's values so there's no question in anybody's mind that that children's needs are being met in the right way that yeah yep so they would make a they would make the list and send it in with their child so we I mean we we have books that non-fiction books on societal issues that present just very matter of fact information and then we also have fiction books on that topic that are going to cover it in a different way and we don't want to have to guess
215as Librarians about what would be acceptable to the family so creating that individualized list of titles when it's a topic based situation is probably the easiest route to meet everybody's needs okay okay um actually could you run that statement one more time I'm not so sure that I didn't get so it what answering trusty Ash's question is that it's better to have parents spec pick specifically right either the author not the topic in general because our Librarians don't want to be judging where um how comfortable what where the cut off is in language or where the cut off is in in content um correct right if it's a whole topic like I don't want my child to read about team pregnancy well we have non-fiction dry factual and then that is covered in some of
216our fiction books and we don't want to gas about what's acceptable which one is when it's a topic okay if it's just an author or a title that's easy so parents just need to be as specific as they can that would yes because we want to we want to support their needs much as we can choose yes yes gotcha all right does that make sense trusty Ashby yes okay great trusteth did you have a question no okay um trusty Bing I just want to ask does the system I think in one of the emails back for one BR the districts they mentioned that you the you can apparent can op to see which books are being checked out by the student yes is that a feature in the system that it sends them an alert
217that shows which books or you have to go in and and actually look at there you can check your child's reading history in their account um there's no way for us to send out emails every time a child checks a book out as far as I know in the system but you can go into your child's account um have them log into class link and go to Destiny and they can see a history of what their child has checked out and read thank you any other comments or questions no all right seeing none um I would like to compliment I you know um it's amazing how far the district has come in trying to address these needs and um having uh the ability for parents to actually be able to um guide their child's reading
218and select what they're comfortable in I think um speaks highly of of the district um I appre appreciate everyone going to that to that length um to make that happen that was not available obviously when um we were in school so um I appreciate that I think it's important it's a good thing for parents a good great tool for parents to use and uh and really have those conversations with their kids on what they're reading and how they feel about things I think that's important so Madam chair I would just like to take a moment and um honor and and acknowledge the secondary Librarians who are here this evening to support their colleagues as well as the district you can stand good please stand up ladies thank you very much thank you very much for
219being here this evening thank you thank you all right Mr freely I would like um any quick up any updates that you have related to instruction that haven't been addressed absolutely thank you Dr presel Madam chair members of the board I only have uh three um items uh to summarize our first is our um opportunity for students to receive 247 that's 24 hours a day 7 days a week tutoring uh through our uh Educational Service um Services called paper uh it offers over 200 courses uh it does help students with homework writing feedback from essays and narrative writing student study support uh working on study skills ties into their uh schedule via Infinite Campus so it goes right into their scheduling and it connects with the courses they've outlined in their schedule that they need
220support So when they log in they have approximately 15 seconds before they're met with an online tutor to receive that specific course support they have uh students that will have gaps in their learning this closes those gaps with this opportunity at school through services at academic support extended day opportunities as well as home so it works in the educational setting as well as home settings teachers are able to review classroom teachers are able to review their tutoring sessions and receive feedback from their tutor on how the student is doing with those Concepts this is uh also available in a monthly report to those uh child's teachers this is an option uh for students um when they are struggling from grades kindergarten through 12 over our district has purchased or would like to purchase grades 3
221through 12 because of the chat feature that students would need to be online in actually typing with a device and so we thought third grade on up with contingency of possibly SEC adding second graders later on how they would chat with the tutor to get support across the board in their content areas like I said over 200 courses uh of support for students that may be struggling in various Concepts 24 hours a day seven days a week for an 18month period of time so it would cover this school year and next school year as well it's wonderful opportunity for our students take any questions or or anything with that before I move on yes trusty ban um you mentioned that it's a a texting backboard format um our chat format is there any video to
222for example if you're working on math problem having a video there to show you some of the steps might be very helpful so is there some video Support also Madam chair trusty Bolan yes there is a uh CH with that chat there is a anime picture of the tutor and a visual of how they would be interpreting that math problem whether it be Advanced arithmetic it would show um the students and how they would uh complete that math problem and guide them in that process wouldn't necessarily do the work for them but help them through a a Socratic type of questioning uh procedure so they would be able to uh to see that visually as well as ask questions verbally yes um I'm gonna trusty Smith thank you thank you um so I'm a little
223confused is this is this a a program we have done a pilot with or it's just something we're we're looking to um secure with that funding Madam chair trusty Smith that's a great question uh we have not conducted a pilot although we have done tutoring academic support uh for for many years across the district uh however this is a comprehensive 20 like I mentioned 247 tutoring program that is online available to kids whenever they may need it uh offers support in conjunction with their current schedule and um and uh we we look forward to the opportunities that it provides kids both in and out of school when they need to connect and get some help all right thank you um yes Madam chair trusty Smith I think um part of it too is that many
224of these programs that are emerging at this level of comprehensive uh detail are emerging based on the learning loss over Co versus years past when the tutoring programs that were online and available were less in capacity it's because there wasn't that level of urgency so this level of comprehensiveness um didn't exist before to say like we've piloted or let's pilot this so that's why we're coming to the board this evening with a large scale uh discussion thank you um trusty Smith has a followup sorry I thought I was done um how will we roll this out to students I mean I I I think it really sounds like an incredible resource um and I you know with my own students at home sometimes they have questions about um School work or um you know I
225noticed even in in looking at a little bit of the information on the the paper program that there's even the opportunity to have your writing reviewed and so I think it it really sounds like it could be an incredible asset but how do we what's what's the plan to get students and parents aware of this opportunity of if this is approved um to make sure we're we're really getting our money's worth out of that huge purchase Madam chair trusty Smith great question again the communication is key in this instance and trying to get that information to the parents and students turned around after the procurement of this is our utmost priority in trying to put this in place as soon as possible we have principles uh fing at the bit after they heard the news
226of this possibility and ready to try to implement this with their teachers so communication will go out in several formats to uh to connect with kids as I mentioned before it connects with Infinite Campus so their data uh the database and the student ID would be uh private with the student and that tutor that they would be able to connect um not in just a classroom but a one-on-one setting and we hope to get that communication rolling as soon as as soon as we can the end of this month would be Be Our Hope okay thank you thank you trusty Ash okay so um is there some kind of built-in feedback or accountability system with this I you know I went and kind of glanced through it but I didn't see anything you know we
227all know that when we Implement things there's great intentions and it looks like they're certified and those kind of things but if something's not working or if there's a tutor that is not has problem is there some kind of way of making sure that it's working like we want it to Yes uh truste Ashby we do have a contract that is very in- depth Brian harmson can speak to that if you'd like but it we do have contingencies in there as far as adding more or or or not renewing and um it is it is one of those um pieces that yeah we are taking a leap of faith we do have some extra monies through cares funding uh to try to help our students uh in some of that learning loss right now and
228willing to take that uh that risk that we have uh minimized risk controlled risk that we have students in need right now um at all times of the day whether they be working at night and need some support after they work at at 8: or 9 um so we are uh we're ready to um to pull the plug and try to try to go go with this full ahead I don't know if that answered your question trust thank you any other yes trusty come in thank you thank you thank Madam chairman so um Mr Fry um um we chose this I would assume well did we Cho choose this because of what we knew how it how it had worked or what U what was the basis of our choosing this to answer what we've
229already identified as a need in the district yes uh trustey Herman we have um you know as we've discussed this option for students we've learned that uh Boston public schools and and major school districts across our nation utilize this tool uh that it is robust across our nation and students are reaping the benefits of of extra tutoring when they need it and so um as far as our state goes I I didn't do a a comprehensive review of how many folks in our districts in our state is using are is using that but I can follow up okay thank you thank you any other questions I just can see as a parent um that sometimes when you've worked all day and your child you know you're trying to help help them with their homework before
230they go to bed and you're tired and they're tired and you this would still be a great opportunity even for our little guys that um a parent would be able to navigate maybe that lesson a little better with that tutor help um that ability to to plug in that third grader with um some parent support in in tutoring their kid because so many are are um curriculum is rigorous enough that occasionally I get a call from a parent that says I have no idea how to help my third grader my fifth grader or my sixth grader in their math or their science lessons so that's been a long time since I was there so I can see where parents might really appreciate this opportunity as well so I hope it goes hope it goes really
231well thank you thank you Mr fre thank you our second uh update would be on the college man management resource we hope to roll out soon our counselors are in the process of getting trained now in our college man management resource called SCH score score connects students in the high school with over 1450 opportunities with colleges and universities across our nation like Notre Dame Georgia uh many many other local University of Wyoming is on that list as well as uh um other states that surround us here in Wyoming as well it helps students connect as well as their parents with the admissions process so it makes admissions much much easier with their uh counselors it uh ties in students with academic programs of interest that they could pursue uh postsecondary um they're uh uh they're
232actually using this across our nation as well in many large school districts and um we we hope to implement this soon like I said we are training our our counselors right now and hope toh provide communication to parents and students through the counselors of at each High School on this opportunity to help them connect with uh with colleges across our our nation and lastly virtual learning day we learned some things uh we sent iPads home to uh nearly 14,000 students for the first time in the history of our district we have many positive stories of students engaging with their teachers engaging with programs like M maxl at the high school level uh with their Math teachers and English teachers on completing work during our our uh day of storms we have uh high school students
233preparing for end of the semester exams and being able to complete that work so they're not caught um behind the eightball as they try to get that one last percentage grade to uh to put them over the edge it was a challenge as well we had some teachers and principles get back to us as well as parents and students on our levels of preparedness and so we'll work on preparedness Comm Communications as well as professional development in the areas of canvas and technology and engagement strategies using iPads in the future uh a survey um has gone out to all the principles parents were asked to contact their principles with positives as well as challenges that they uh they received at home and so we'll gather that information and confer with all the principles and how
234we can evolve this to make it even better next time with that that concludes my uh review from the Department instruction if you have any questions thank you are there any questions yes trusty bowling I have two questions one of each the last two topics that you had first of all the score program does it connect them to um institutions that are just giving like Technical Training like wotech for example it's all of it there's a I'm sorry Mr B and your microphone may be off trust um Madam chair there's a variety of opportunities um through score for many many um Educational Systems not just a four-year option and that was one of the first questions that we had asked including the technicals and one of the benefits of the organization is that if there's
235something that we don't that a student is interested in that we want to have them add they will work with those Partners um out there in the higher ed to make that an availability and process for them again about the second one um first of all is that going to count as a school day for us have we gotten permission to count that as a school day so far so good yes it will because it was considered a virtual day and all the southeast school districts also um followed suit or in some cases we followed suit uh for that virtual opportunity so that we could see what that looked like so yes we are excited to report that it will count okay secondly on that same topic I had a couple parents complain to me
236that it was not a good experience for their students and so I said well this is really just an experiment so please if you had trouble to contact the principal of the school is that the right advice to give them to provide feedback if if it wasn't a good experience absolutely and I will say trusty ban we did have some families that found it to be difficult and we want to make sure that they do reach out and give us feedback one of the benefits of having it for a single day was that the long-term impacts of perhaps a five-day event weren't weren't as large because it was a single day that we could make adjustments very quickly so that we can be ready if we have to go in that direction for another snow
237event or another weather event so that was the benefit of it and definitely if there's feedback um that individuals have we will gladly take it um because want to make sure that it works for our students and we're monitoring all of them yes trusty thank Madam chair I just wanted to say that I was really excited for our district to be able to have this technology and ability to go virtual on our snow day and I just want to say kudos for um for the district for for being prepared telling the teachers and the families and the kids ahead of time take your tablets home get ready um and and this is this is way this is what we asked for last year when we got these tablets and so I really appreciate that that
238you're um working through the Kinks and and and moving that direction um on the other topic of score I was I asked you this Mr Frey but I didn't quite get the answer I wanted so I'm going to re askk um there's something called career coach where a student who has no idea what school they want to go to and what field they want to pursue can put their interest in to that system and it will produce for them different career opportunities that they can pursue it gives them ideas of what careers are out there and I wonder if score has that capability or not because I think that a lot of times young people just really don't know what what the options are for for pursuing careers and and and I'm wondering if we
239have that ability through this score Madam chair uh trusty Clawson great question so for example if a student excels in Say speech and debate or another club in their in their schools and they want to pursue say that club at a at a university or College close by say Casper College which is on the list that would it would Point them in that direction here's an option for you here's the cost here's the admission process uh so yes it would uh dtail nicely into their interest base whether they'd be in club or academically driven as well yeah I'm I'm I appreciate that I I'm kind of looking for I don't know what I want to pursue so therefore I'm interested in this I'm also in speech and debate I'm also in this and something where
240you can plug in your interests and it produces for you there's careers in this field this field and this field does it have that capability is that more clear that question yeah trusty Clon that is more clear uh right now I don't know that answer but I can get that to you uh at a at a later time uh I believe uh we do have that capability in the district already as far as uh having students that are going into High School uh taking a an inventory of their interest now an eighth grader ninth grader as opposed to a j Junior and senior are quite different as you know and so uh as far as using this tool as opposed to the current one we have in place I'm not sure how they differ as
241far as choosing a a college but I'll get that information to you thank you Dr C so trusty Clauson I do think that's something that we're looking at even with strategic plan that emerged in terms of content related to all of those transitions third grade sixth grade e8th grade then on through high school so I would anticipate that as we move through strategic plan you'll start to see some of those benchmarks of Interest inventories emerging so that we don't want students to feel feel like they have to decide really many of us have changed our careers right we want them to know what their interests are and what might be access points throughout the system so although I'm not aware of whether score does it at that level of depth that we need to I
242do know there are other factors that we're looking at that will be bringing to the board through strap plan that will allow for exactly what you're talking about in a comprehensive model at those Benchmark years very good any other questions oh all right very good um I appreciate all the work and um thank you I thought virtual I had a lot of feedback as well from parents and um directed them in the direction uh to that where they could get some help and and they seem to be very pleased when with the results so thank you all and thank you to all of our staff who put that together and and worked so hard to make it work and we will continue to improve so thank you Mr fley I just want to say thank
243you Mr fley appreciate that I we have a couple of other quick updates that we need to get to um I'd like to invite I'm pretty excited about this opportunity so I'm going to um I'll come back to strategic plan thank you again secondary uh I would love to invite um Mary cost and shellan Hy up here to talk to us about um our navigating laram 1 program you did receive a little bit of an update on this regarding uh during your weekly update around where we're headed this emerged also through strategic plan as well as the um trustees feedback so with that and I quick shout out to Mr McKinny who shows up every time somebody needs to present um to navigate for the system for them this is this is uh chelan's first
244appearance at the board meeting welcome oh thank you Madame chair members of the board my name is Mary Quast and and thank you so much for having us uh here this evening we are excited to uh present uh to the board and members of the public some information about a new program that we're starting this spring called navigating lamy1 um and so the the program is is actually a four Monon um it's an in-depth program um the the purpose is to um educate uh parents and community members kind of take them on a journey throughout our district um by providing some educational activities um and our goal is that uh people uh who go through the program will learn some new things about the district and also hopefully make some new Partnerships uh through the
245program uh space is limited and uh participants will be selected uh following an application process um so the goal of navigating Larry me1 is to provide both parents and community members with the opportunity to be more involved with lcsd1 and these schools and we want with this program to provide the participants with the opportunity to learn more about you know how we work what we do and what we believe in here at lcsd1 and so um the the goal is to provide in a short four months um you know four uh areas um that uh delve into the school district and the structure so our topics uh for this uh initial program will be finan and Facilities human capital and talent and academic learning um followed by um a culminating event which is the laramy
2461 Expo where we're going to invite a variety of departments throughout the district to provide booths and information the applications will be um accepted starting tomorrow January 11th and then and uh February 8th and to apply please visit the district website um and then for more information feel feel free to call us at community relations at 77122 38 thank you thank you and if you have any questions yes please as a question first of all a great idea fantastic um but for people to before they decide to apply can you say what kind of time commitment this requires so um each um event it's a monthly event uh two hours um on a Thursday and uh all of that information will be uh presented out there um on the district website very good who else
247yes trusty weers thank you madam chair so is this a oneandone kind of thing so so you have it's a monthly kind of get together and you you share all this important information I think it's a great idea but so you're having just one a parent will just sign up for one event and they will get all the information they need do they come back how does that work um so they will so you will sign up to be apply um there will be a application process and selection through the applications um and then it is once a month so from February through May as stated um you go through and you learn from the speaker the presenter more about financing facilities for example um and they will provide interactive activities and um and then
248more information for those attending um and then they it's a four-month commitment so you do have to attend all four of the events um and then you'll be part of the class of 2022 um and then you'll also receive a certificate of completion with that as well Madam chair I think sorry trusty would we respond I think it's important to the application process is really because we're hoping that we'll be so inated with applicants that we'll have to navigate what that looks like and we'll be able to put people on the next cycle which we anticipate will happen in the fall our goal would be that it's a monthly commitment ongoing um this year if you sign up early then you just do the four and then you bring a friend to the Expo and
249um that individual will then be invited as your um nominee for the following year to be able to go through many of us are familiar with organizational like leaders uh leadership Cheyenne or lead Cheyenne that share um similar systems and our goal is to really partner with our parents and our community to make sure that they deeply understand the nuances of what we're doing um in terms of making decisions and building leadership so that we can make those connections CommunityWide okay just one followup pleas so it's a it's an application process how many people will be selected um uh Madam chair uh trusty weers span um we will have uh 25 people in in each class um so this is the inaugural program um we thought 25 would be a manageable number but that uh
250we can bring people in and it can be interactive and um again a pattern uh very similar after uh programs like leadership Cheyenne leadership Wyoming that sort of thing but um just thought it would be fun to invite people in to learn more about our our school district and um you know get more engaged with with what we do terrific idea thank you thank you thank you um any other questions yes trusty Smith thank you my question's um hopefully quick and easy the lari1 Expo or the navigating lari1 Expo is that open to the public or is that just available for the 25 members of that class uh Madame chair uh trusty Smith um the Expo will be available for just the members of the class and the additional person that they uh choose to
251bring to the Expo thank you thank you very much thank you have a good night thank you very much so I'd like to add um ask Mr sarelli if you would come come on up please we have um a quick budget update we want to make sure that um we've got a comprehensive update for the board as well as um our community there it is thank you madam chair um Dr Crespo members of the board um before I go over um this quick and hopefully short slide deck for you considering the the late hour I'll do my best to be brief I did want to provide uh two quick updates uh with regards to the finance unit some of the Cooperative work we've been doing with other divisions within the district um specifically uh you
252guys know as a group that we embarked on a large Endeavor to uh Implement a new enterprise resource planning system or what we call an Erp earlier this this summer um I had explained in the October meeting that we were looking at an 18-month possibly longer uh implementation calendar that um is certainly not a small workload for our district and our staff um as I was sitting um in our implementation meeting today with our team members it occurred to me that um we have less than six months until we go live um on our core financials now um I'd probably be remiss not to tell you that that does cause um a little sense of anxiety boarded aligning on Panic a little bit um as we move forward with that work um but I did
253want to um acknowledge the work of of our team as we've worked forward with that process um specifically we've worked across um a lot of different areas in the district um to start this work and and and see it through um anyone from the planning and Construction office to of course our partners in the purchasing and procurement side um and of course our department of Technology staff that have been um uh just integral to that process it hasn't been without um our trials and tribulations I believe we're on the third project manager with our vendor as we've worked through this process um we've had to do a lot of rework as we've been developing our our general ledger structure our project Ledger structure um our business processes and procedures um but I think a good
254note to point out to group now is that thank to the thanks to the work ethic and the capability of our District staff uh we've been able to conserve a lot of resources by performing a lot of the work on our own without relying on the contract Services through our partner with the Erp project so I I just wanted to take a moment to thank our team and and acknowledge the hard work as we've worked forward on that piece um B Madam chair also um you've heard me uh a number of times provide some remarks around um kind of the regulatory oversight as a Wyoming Public School District that we receive uh quite frankly we're no stranger to Audits and and reviews in any given fiscal year we can see our comprehensive Financial audit from
255our partners with MHP uh we'll see Federal program monitoring visits from the W Department of Education uh we'll have other um specific audits from other entities across the state particularly the Wyoming retirement system um and probably most notable is that we do receive from time to time audits from the state department of audit uh as a matter of fact they have a whole arm devoted just to school Finance audits across the state of Wyoming I I did want to give you a quick update with regards to a state department of audit review um we have received the the results of what they call a blitz audit um what that means is that the department audit will do a full programmatic review of every school district in the State uh this time they selected average daily
256membership which as you know is the measure of student enrollment and how it articulates into our funding mechanism and determines resources for the district as a whole um I'm pleased to report report out that overall um over the entire State uh the ADM ADM was found to be 99.5% accurate now um for our district in particular um it was even more so um in taking into account the net effect of the Audits and I'll be the first to tell you that we review any audit as an opportunity to review our procedures our practices um in an effort to improve um our net findings result of that that audit was $1,874 um and that is the proportion of our total funding that year which was over 209 million so if you look at that as kind
257of percentage basis uh that was 0.001% of our over overall finding so um again uh kudos to the team our partners with the Department of technology and they work to make sure that um we navigate all those nuances associated with accounting students for our state funding model so um Madam chair just quickly um I did want to provide an update on the American Recovery plan act or what we've referred to as the ARP plan and just by way of a little bit of background um in December we talked about um reaching out as part of the requirements with the federal government to develop a formal spending plan which will require some level of monitoring and review as we move forward on the grant Peri Grant period so we did survey parents students employees community members
258um as we start to develop and deploy those resources under the art plan so we had a public link available with a survey that was um open to participation through the end of the year and I want to talk a little bit about some of those preliminary results of that survey so just to to give you a little bit of a summary of our respondents we had about a little over 21100 people respond to that survey uh you'll see about 50% of them identified as parents or guardians of students within the district and followed by teachers representing about 18% um you'll see there's cross-sections of number of different groups within our district um administrators School District staff community members all had an opportunity to provide some feedback as we start to structure that overall ARP
259spending plan um just quickly here is a uh representation of the school level um results that we received back from from those uh respondents uh virtually every school in our district had some feedback provided through that survey um you'll see that uh on the higher side um C and East had the most people respond and probably um you know intuitively some of our smaller schools had less of a number of responses but I'm happy to see that again that nearly every one of our schools had some feedback Force as part of this process um Madam chair before I go over this um arguably hardto read slide here I would like to uh comment a little bit about um how we receive resources as a district um as you know um our district receives millions of
260dollars a year through what we call restricted or categorical grants now these funding sources can range from anything from Title One funding for um instructional services for disadvantaged students uh special education uh USDA funding for our nutrition services program um even State funding sources for Capital Construction major maintenance and other areas all of these different categorical grants have their own specific rule and regulations associated with them car's funding or what we're calling ARP is no different um I would this is probably a good opportunity to clarify that although there are a number of different allowable uses for these resources there is no um requirement to either support or not support a masing mandate it's just not a part of our eligibility for those funds whatsoever so with that in mind our survey did ask for
261feedback from individuals on the allowable areas of uses of those funds there's approximately 16 so what you see on this slide here is those responses broke into core tiles so at the very top you'll see that we had the most respondents identify as providing Mental Health Services and supports as a primary objective to utilizing those resources and this Dove tells in with um Mr slal um program with the mtss and some of the other things that we've been able to do with these resources and there there seems to be some clear indication that um our Community Values those type of resources um to kind of round out that top core tile of responses we see recommendations for providing principles and other school Leaders with the resources to address their specific needs um resources to address
262to address lowincome or disadvantaged students and of course addressing learning loss among students as well and more specific to the instr constructional loss you guys will recall that um I talked about another requirement on the carriage grants that required that we have a 20% set aside um that we would have to use 20% of those resources to address uh learning laws so we asked for feedback on how to approach that learning loss piece of the requirements and you'll see again um mirroring some of the feedback that we got from the previous question the social and emotional learning opportunities was a priority as well as academic interventionist at the elementary and secondary schools level and Remediation recover um and Recovery to include after school programs um as well as you can see some other recommendations around
263things like summer school and those type of things so Madam chair as far as next steps um we also asked for open-ended questions and recommendation on the utilization of those resources as you can imagine it takes a little bit of time to distill 2100 open-ended comments uh so we're working to try to navigate all those our next step will be to work with our unit rep presentation our school and Central Administration staff to put that plan together and then have that structure and that framework available for the public here soon so Madam chair I'm happy to address any questions thank you start yes I don't really have a question I just want to say thank you for reaching out to the public and asking what they would like to do and I've had some conversations
264with some parents through email and they weren't even going to take the survey because they thought we didn't ever listen what they had to say but um I assured them that we do and I think it's some proof that hopefully this is going to provide something that the public actually wants so thank you thank you very much Mr saril I don't know if there any any other questions all right very good thank you Mr selli so um Madam chair I want to say thank you for hanging on with us we've got a lot of information that we needed to make sure we got covered it might be time for Yes actually um I think I turn my we're gonna take five five minute um break five can we do yeah five minutes is great five
265is good all right we're going to take a five minute uh break and then we will uh reconvene the meeting thank you so much I think everybody yeah thank you we'll go ahead and start uh reconvene our meeting I think we have all um we will we are waiting for one board member I'm sure she will be here just momentarily thank you if everyone could take their seats I appreciate that Madam chair while we're waiting Vicky thompon she's here oh thank you thank you at this time um we'll reconvene and I turn it back over to Dr creso to finish the presentation thank you madam chair uh trustees I just have um one uh update that I want to share we're really excited about uh from HR come on up this is Vicky Thompson um
266and she'll be sharing some information that we've been working on uh and are really very excited about for our employees okay well thank you Dr creso Madam chair trustees um I'm just excited that we' kicked off a new um employee assistance program um at the start of the new year it is um with a company called support link so it is um for all employees and their dependents they can access the 247 365 days a year um they can access some mental health um Counseling Services um financial consulting services um help with housing if they are displaced um so just a lot of um shortterm uh help and assistance and then if it needs to be ongoing they can be referred out to a local provider which is covered through our benefits program most cases
267so we're really excited we'll be um monitoring this to see what the um utilization is and then come back and determine if this is something we we should continue with or not any question very good are there questions yes trusty weers spond just quickly Madam Madam chair is this an internal program or have we contracted with a company to provide this service Madam chair um trusty we respond this is with um an outside counseling service or an outside server service provider okay thank you okay um any other questions um oh yes no yes maybe just a clarification Madam chair is this something that we'll need to vote on no okay thank you I should we're just continuing the update thank you um could you um provide a little bit of information about um how this
268is being paid for um yes it is uh Madam chair trustees um it is through some of the cares funding um and through our benefits program okay so it's um pretty cost effective it's like a140 per employee per month very good thank you very much Madam chair yes we had a we had a a program that was similar just not as robust and one of the things that we heard and we've all heard as we've listened to our staff share that they have concerns emerging that we really want to make sure that they're their healthiest selves so through that that um HR was able to navigate finding somebody that would finding an organization that would have a more robust option some of our um existing EAP support was we weren't able to access them there
269wasn't anybody available we had staff that were waiting for a week two weeks never heard from somebody and we definitely don't want somebody in crisis of any kind to have to wait for that support um moving forward so that's where this came from very good thank you any questions thank you very much thank you all right thank you for hanging in there with our updates um Kyle would you mind um we're going to we're during the work session we also had had an opportunity which we didn't get to for the Strategic Plan update as promised we want to make sure that we're coming to the board with our strategic plan updates on a regular basis I promise it's not a lot of slides so we'll go very quickly um but it was important for us
270to go through this process so as of 11022 what we've done in lcsd1 as you can see here and I won't click on them because you can navigate this as you'd like we wanted to make sure that our Mission Vision goals and core values stayed at the Forefront of what we were moving forward with if in the future we decide we need to realign as a community that's fine but for our purposes right now working on our strategic plan we wanted to make sure that we continue forward with those things that we know we're working and then um there's a link here which I'm not going to click because I don't want to take the time um at the moment but there is a link to our strategic Plan update page which the community and
271all of you can click on at any time if you want to see how we're navigating lcsd1 so if you notice there's a little bit of a trend around making sure that we're providing opportunities for our students to be able to navigate into their future so as you remember the Strategic plan started before I arrived in 2019 we contracted with an organization called MGT that organization came in and did surveys uh they were on hold due to covid and then came back to complete the process of their work when we started um back again in August they and you remember that previous update where we surveyed all of these individuals Community parents and all of that information is on the website as you know March of 2022 and then now we're in July 2021 when
272I was hired my first 100 days and visiting with all of the schools and Community uh and then simultaneously pulling the MGT survey that they were working on and we found as I mentioned before that much of that was aligned so what we heard in the 100 days and that I reported to the trustees and to the community also were seen in the survey results so there was definitely some consistency through that process what you can anticipate moving forward so we've did we've done our MGT and lcsd1 collaboration we started developing those next steps which I'll get into here a little bit through our theme teams so we invited um individuals from our community our parent advisory group um some other groups within the district and outside of the district Community Partners as well um
273to give us feedback around what the theme were as they had emerged from the survey information on December 1st we had an administrative meeting with principles wanting to let them know here's where we are giving them the opportunity for feedback as well um and then we started meeting on 128 as a theme team so some of you have been able to attend those meetings um and that's essentially what those theme team meetings are we get together and I'll show a picture here in a minute um on 12:16 the leads met and then took all of that information together and put it um in a usable format that we will be going out again looping back out to the community for Triad meetings starting it um tonight is the launch and then we'll be doing meetings
274over the next three weeks um and you'll see the 111 date has been moved we're moving it to next week our virtual day which I'll change on the website our virtual day pushed us back a day and we didn't want to push parents to make a commitment with only a 24-hour um turnaround so starting next Tuesday the follow and then three Tuesdays in no yes sorry three Tuesdays in a row will'll be at each of the Triads um and this time around we're doing elementary school so if you remember the last time we did either a high school or a middle I mean a secondary program through the junior highs now we're doing elementaries because we really want to expand that view and then um one on 127 we have another strategic plan meeting that
275you'll be invited to just to see where the update is so these are some examples of what emerged we know that what we heard really loud and clear was around making sure that we had healthy relationships for our employees our staff our community our trustees as well as our parents and students and that included things like our Community Partnership um we wanted to make sure that we had healthy relationships so that our students would have access to career in college and school opportunities um and building those robust relationship certainly student achievement instruction we knew that process and policy was going to be key and then those those you can see the similarities between the MTF the um ngt which is on the left hand side and the 100 days there's a consistent message across both
276systems these are just some pictures of some of our individuals who were able to be here while we did the brainstorming a couple of more and then this last piece of the themes that emerge we want to share them with you you'll see this moving forward many of you have heard these as we've done this work provide a phys a healthy environment provide a physically an emotionally safe environment for all stakeholders Community Partnerships we want to develop and nurture collaborative relationships with shared goals and responsibilities that promote the welfare and vitality of lcsd1 and student Readiness we know we want to prepare students for their future through engaging and enduring education the next steps were to make sure that they aligned to what our mission and vision was the guidance that was provided by the
277trustees and the community and making sure that um what are the recommend commendations moving forward for our outcomes so you can anticipate that we'll be building outcomes in the next month or so that are specifically related to how will we know that we have healthy relationships what are the indicators um and we have a team working on that including Trevor swarm so I'm Trev swarm so I'm super excited that he's uh doing the data on that healthy relationships what does it mean to be a successful student for every child not just for the general but what if a child has an interest in something that we currently don't offer how are we going to navigate that and then that goes back to truste Clawson you're you're ask about what are those interest inventories what are
278those Benchmark indicators how do I know as a parent my child is ready for kindergarten third grade fifth grade eighth grade and what happens if they're not and then what happens if they're ahead so we want to make sure that we do that and then the last one as I mentioned is that Community Partnership how do our partners feel about what we're doing how do we feel about what we're providing and then those outcome measures will be reported reporting on on a regular basis moving forward okay so quick overview I just want to let the community as well as our trustees understand and know that our covid funds as we know you've seen this slide before we are working under um a cliff we know that the funds will be gone in two years we
279know that we want to take full advantage of every opportunity that we have to make sure that those systems are in place so that when those funds um are no longer available we have the the the program the systems and the part the partnership for all of th those things to remain so that's something that's key to us you'll hear us say that a lot that we want to make sure that we're planning for the future what does that mean when it's not available okay so feedback we're looking at feedback through Triad meetings there will be an inventory chart that you'll see about things that have emerged for plans and programs and ideas that we should be using based specifically on what are those things that we're doing really well in the district already the
280that we don't want to duplicate or get rid of and what are those things that we know we have gaps that we can do better so a great example is the proposal around paper we know that we do an incredible our teachers do an incredible job of meeting students where they are but how do we build more capacity so that tutoring continues and students who may not have access in the evening or have to work or in athletic programs don't have to wait till the following day to be able to do their work so that's just one example and then the other piece is connecting with our school Partners we've heard from our um economic Community often that we want to make sure that we're meeting their needs in terms of an employee Workforce so
281that our their employee we have our students want to stay in our community they want to be robust contributors and in order for that to happen we need to make sure that our economic partners are coming alongside and we've been very lucky we've had really incredible feedback and opportunity and with that that is the update on the Strategic plan very good do I have questions for Dr criso yes truste CL thank you madam chair just a quick question about these um going back to the Triads will the Triad will those principles in those Triads be notifying parents or is it by invitation how how can people get involved great question so we wanted to make sure we announced today the launch and then on the Strategic plan website it will be there and then we
282will be sending remind messages out we just didn't want to get ahead from the very beginning I committed to the trustees that you would know information as it was coming out um and we we always wait to launch so our next step will be to launch that on the on the website as well as a remind message and then principles are aware so they will be also like you know in the pickup line and things like that hey don't forget the meeting please make sure you're coming so that we get that information as well very good any other questions no thank you Dr creso thank you madam chair all right so on to miscellaneous I would Kyle would you mind bring up sorry was more sorry about that so um our final um item for
283today is just the information related to the Smart Start Plan agenda Kyle is going to bring that up right now so and I'll kind of read from it a little bit while he's pulling that up so since the covid pandemic plan began our goal at laramy County School District 1 has been to ensure the health and safety of our students and staff and to keep schools open for inperson learning while knowing that conditions are rapidly changing the availability of a covid-19 vaccination for children and adults is helping to change our response to the pandemic these changes are made following consultation with Cheyenne larmy County Health Department and new guidelines provided by the Center for Disease Control and prevention and the Wyoming Health Department of Health additionally vaccines are now readily available for children's age five
284and up boosters for 12 and up we approved on Friday it's not on there because we're trying to keep up right uh those who choose to do so are encourag enage to receive their vaccination beginning Tuesday January 11th individuals who have been exposed to covid-19 will not be quarantine from school unless they are displaying symptoms symptomatic individuals will immediately be sent home and may not return to work or school until they have been fever-free for 24 hours without the use of fever reducing medication and symptoms have to be significantly improved symptomatic individuals will be required to wear a mask while in the building awaiting picture although new recommendations allow exposed asymptomatic individuals to submit to daily covid-19 tests to stay at work or school lcsd1 currently does not have the resources to provide this option
285however our staff will attempt to provide as much support as possible and available so that families and staff have additional time to consider their vaccination Choice students and staff will be required to wear masks through Friday January 21st an announcement will be made on the day on that day regarding the revision to our Mass protocol on Monday January 24th lcsd1 will open schools with the big four including face coverings as highly recommended but not required we anticipate most families will choose to wear masks those diagnosed with a positive case of covid-19 will be required to stay home and isolate positive individuals will be responsible for contacting those with whom may have been in close contact with if you are a close contact masks should be worn for 10 days and testing is recommended on day
286five if there is a need to quarantine a classroom grade or School due to transmission rates or illness families will be notified as they would with any other communicable disease such as chicken poox and pressus we encourage everyone to follow our big four for staying healthy if you're sick stay home and contact your health care provider wash and sanitize your hands frequently masks are highly recommended social Distance by six feet when you can we will continue to work through this process including how we can help ease the testing burden on families when we and other districts across the country initiated Smart Start plans at the beginning of the pandemic time frames were uncertain plans were developed with the mindset of a smart of a start and end date we now know it's not that simple
287as it turns out our only known fact factor is that the conditions change rapidly relying on the transmission rate dial has become obsolete due to the new guidelines from CDC that were updated January 6th 2022 and then there are the links in addition a variety of mitigation strategies listed above were not available when the original plan was developed our or when our September 2021 agendum was enacted we will continue to adjust our protocols based on these factors we thank you for your p patience and Grace as we navigate through this complicated situation so before M um Madam chair we move to trusty up um questions I have uh our head our lead nurse Janet farmer who's on the call I want to provide the most upto-date current in District numbers and um Jan's been on
288hold waiting for that information I want to make sure you have as much information as we have available um so Janet are you there I am here can you hear me I can thank you very much for hanging on would you share with us our current data please so um our current data today um we had a total of 70 new cases reported that's 70 10 of those were staff um as you all saw on last week's um press release we had a 100 new cases um last week from December 30th well it would be the 30th um it would be the previous seven days so we had 100 cases if you compare that to um November and December the week of November 28th we reported 44 cases the week of December 5th we reported
28934 cases and the week of December 12th we we reported cases um I I personally think this is probably significantly related to the Omron virus um we're going to see those kind of this kind of Spike I think through the community as well we have seen it um in speaking with uh our partners at City County Health they're seeing a significant Rise um this week this past week but those are our numbers as we stand right now thank you uh Mrs farmer so I would like to um just share that these um this entire draft has been navigated by many of our employees many of our staff that make the decisions um people that have to to work in this environment we to navigate so we appreciate your time in letting us navigate what this
290looked like and we um present this as as we are right now very good questions yes trusty we respond so Madame chair this this item comes up is an agenda item under new business is it appropriate to have the discussion now or do we wait until the agenda isem is introduced you certainly can ask questions we typically would for a presentation and then um it is on as an action item yes so clarification questions yes please so um um Madam chairman and Dr Crespo so under um a regimen that has um only masks recommended and the and the cdc's um require new quarantine so um say a student or staff anyone who's who test positive stays home for five days then comes back with a with with a mask or without a mask Mrs farmer
291Madame chair trusty um Herman they would come there it's they would come back with a mask for five days and I guess is a follow just so and as far as uh quarantining there will be so people have to self-report I was close to Johnny who tested positive and then what does that so then they would behave how how what would they do then Mrs farmer Madame chair trustee Herman if if a person is self-reporting that they are a close contact the recommendation is the same that they would quarantine at home for five days and then um return to school and wear a mask for five days um if they are unable to do a um 5-day quarantine at home there is the option to do the 10 days at school but they have to
292wear a mask for the entire 10 days thank you any other questions yes trusty leers fun Madam chair do we have current numbers on the vaccination rates for our students um a percentage of of students vaccinated we have current numbers for that um Madam chair truste we we do not have that information um we we don't have that information very good um I just are there any other questions oh yes trusty Ashby um just de clarify um where it says that people will be notified if the classrooms are closed down or anything we will not notify if somebody test positive in general no is that correct correct because we will not be doing contact tracing we will close once not once we would have to close a classroom if there was lack of a teacher
293there were um more more kids than you know typical reasons that you would close a classroom if you had pressus and 40% of the class were gone you know what's the Equitable educational experience for the children any other questions yes trusty Smith Dr chrisell thank you for your work on this I know that you and your team have spent a lot of hours trying to navigate the updated guidelines from the CDC and from the Wyoming Health Department um and I you know there's just no easy answers and we've seen that the last two years there are no easy answers but I um I appreciate the time you put into this um I did not a question I had after reviewing this and coming into tonight's meeting was my understanding of the Wyoming health department and
294the cdc's recommendation that that if you had been if you tested positive and you were home until your fever broke that then that that remaining time if you came back to school or to work after five days that you wore a mask um I didn't see that in this document and I so that was a question I wanted to ask tonight um if we if we move to go forward this it that might be something to clarify just so that it's in writing that that Co positive person would wear that mask as five days in school correct and if there's and and if there's symptomatic um the the staying in school piece is where the testing comes into play so if a student is tested positive if they they can certainly come to school and
295wear the mask for five days with that positive test but we would anticipate that those individuals that don't want to wear a mask if we know of a positive case we want to leave that up to choice and they would stay home any other questions okay I um would like to ask um Mrs farmer when the new uh covid uh CDC guidelines came down I sat down and tried to write down all of the different scenarios that could could happen and how we would navigate that in the district so who's going to be responsible and what does that conversation look like when a student or staff member um primarily a student probably tests positive um and then uh comes back to school at that fifth day with the mask or sixth day with the mask
296um as long as they are not showing symptoms um who who's how does that look what does that look like in the classroom um whether you know Johnny's on his fifth day his eighth day wearing a mask not wearing a mask um uh now I'm 10 days wearing a mask because I have um or five days because I have the vaccination we're not able to ask our students who's vaccinated and who's not and I know there's a cavey out there uh trustee Smith provided our board with several different documents um at our last meeting and and the last page um specifically addressed uh whether or not students had vaccinations and then there were caveats to whether they would or wouldn't be in a mask and I just all I could think of was oh my
297gosh who's going to keep track of this so um Can Can you tell me what we have in place or or what that might look like Madame chair um I I wish I had a good answer for that I would say that um going forward the School nurses have generally the School nurses and usually a building principal have been the ones uh navigating the contact tracing and the quarantining so that those particular individuals would be the ones that would know who should be wearing a mask or who when they should be coming back um I I would say that to begin with the principal would certainly be involved beyond that I don't know we'll have to be working on some kind of system to make sure the classroom teachers know that this student is coming
298back they be they'll be required to wear it a mask through Friday or Tuesday or whatever that is um but I don't know until we actually start the process I'm not exactly sure how it will work mam thank you um I'm sorry to put you on the spot like that I have a whole long list of those kinds of questions so thank you very much Mrs farmer yes Dr Cresco Madam chair I think that's one of the reasons that we navigated to where we are is because um when you think about other communicable diseases you navigate them similar and and that's what we would anticipate having to do albe it right now it will be larger as if we had had an outbreak of something else um as we navigate covid and we will provide
299updates to the board around what that looks like um every meeting you will we will know how it's going um because we also know that the dial at this point uh because of the change in the in the guidelines as I said has become obsolete okay any other questions okay seeing none are we thank you Mrs farmer I appreciate your work and and actually a shout out to all the nurses in our district that have been navigating this pandemic since the beginning and and all of the other very unique scenarios that you all deal with in our district with our very special and very precious children thank you thank you madam chair that concludes the superintendent's uh update thank you very good we are on to our D1 consent agenda all items listed with a
300designation of CA are considered to be routine items by the governing body and will be enacted in one motion there will be no separate discussion on these items any item removed from the consent agenda will be considered in its normal sequence on the agenda does any board member request to remove a motion from the consent agenda seeing none Madam chair I move to approve all motions listed as consent agenda second all in favor say I I oppose no motion passes we are moving on to we have no old business we D3 is new business trusty weers Madam chair I move to approve a contract with tolbin and Associates PC for architectural services for the administration building restrooms remodel an amount in an amount not to exceed $528 second um is there any discussion hearing none
301all in favor say I I oppose no motion passes Madame chair I move to Grant permission to purchase one service truck for an amount not to exceed $67,100 and to declare one truck as Surplus second any discussion yes Mr bowan we let the public know who we're buying that from yes I'm sure Mr dhy Mr oh I don't know which one yeah Mr Rell oh Mr Rell thank you stand in this evening for Mr Greenwood thank you oh for Mr Greenwood okay thank you um Premont Motors Premont Motors thank you and could you just briefly talk a little bit about what that process looks like when we do purchase a truck like that through the RFP process is that what you're asking yes okay well initially we requested because the vehicle being surplused hit its
302um replacement cycle with the wde so we made the request got the approval so then we went out to a bid process through bidet so all dealerships have the opportunity to put a bid in which only three did oh very good is that common usually there's a lot more than that yeah all right thank you very much appreciate you any other questions hearing no further discussion all in favor say I I oppose no motion passes Madam chair I move to Grant permission to contract for tires for the transportation department for an amount not to exceed $75,000 second discussion yes trusty I would like to have them specify who this is going to okay and you can also say where they're located I'm sorry I didn't hear the question Mr sorry who's getting this contract and
303where are they located uh an Ty out of Colorado okay very good and it goes through the same process exact same process of course with the exception of the wbe request right and there were two manufacturers that submitted bids very good thank you very much thank you my understanding is it's hard to get tires and supplies there's been a shortage and and our our supply chain is not what it used to be so thank you very much um hearing it is there any further discussion no all in favor say I oppose no motion passes Madam chair I move to to approve a contract with Ellis corporate Construction Incorporated in the amount of 975,000 [Music] okay yep thank you can I have Mr dhy and Mr dordy if you can State your position and and also
304your position with the recck mill that might be helpful for everyone too absolutely Madam chair members of the Board of Trustees I'm Jeff dy I am the planning and construction administrator for uh the school district here and on the rec district I serve in the capacity of Treasurer so the the distinction between the two numbers that you heard their trustees is the wre District had previously funded a certain amount for the purpose of replacing the turf for the field um and then they they included a supplement for that part of the price is going to be paid for out of major maintenance and so the 120,000 $125,000 figure that you heard um from trustee Clon a few minutes ago was just the additional supplement that they moved over from Johnson Turf in order for us
305to do this project and that is for Turf only the field grading and the drainage will be paid for out of major maintenance and that's what uh makes up the difference in the in the contract price just CL yes follow up clarify clarify so the is that 580,000 or whatever was approved previously yeah so what I've got for you here is that the actual price for helis for just the turf was $684,900 that's what helis is going to do the the contract for of course it's got that $22,000 contingency built in there that we may or may not use but that's the contract price that they're going to do the the field for okay but the the larger dollar amount that was different from what she reported was was approved a previous R yes sorry
306thank you yes Mr B I'm chair thanks um I understand there were some irregularities in this bidding process for this particular contract can you go through a little bit what happened on this one ABS we're not going with the contractor that has done all of our other fields is that correct well we've used a couple of Madam chair trusty Bolan we've used a couple of contractors over the years on our our various Fields um helis is one that we have not used in the past it's a it's a newer contractor that uh We've qualified for this this particular project um I want to be clear that there there were no irregularities in terms of our procurement procedure with regard to this item um the concern that that has come to light recently uh is this
307we had a firm we had three firms that proposed on this project it was a request for qualifications um the district didn't know how much money uh we would have available to us and we also had two elements of this project that we wanted to try to accomplish we wanted to replace the turf as well as the associated drainage and then the track has experienced some settling over the years um the surface was due to be replaced but we wanted to see if we couldn't address that that track surfacing and and settling issues that were associated there at the same time so we didn't know if we'd have funds to do both elements of this this project so the way we put together the the RFQ was option one was you put a price in
308for the track and the turf option two was you put in a price for the drainage or excuse me option one was drainage and turf option two was track and drainage and option three was everything so as the bids came in um we realized that we did not have the funds or the time to complete both the track and the turf because uh we've been blessed to host state soccer this year we only have eight weeks to get this entire project done two of the three firms proposed in accordance with the directions set forth in the request for proposal one of the firms did not respond in that and they only proposed on option three which was the track the tur and the drainage so because we weren't doing the project in that manner uh
309we determined that and because they failed to propose on option one and option two we disqualified that firm from bidding as being non-responsive because they didn't comply with the RFP so that left us with two biders the bidder that we've we've recommended that the board approved tonight is the bidder that provided the lowest price for this project question when is this project going to be done it uh it has to be done in time for football next year so um it'll be done over the summer is that yeah we we've spoken with the principal at Central High School they may be practicing for the two days during the summer they may be practicing on the turf field that's our expectation that the field will be done in the 8we period between May 28th when school
310ends and uh when we return to to school in the fall so we've got eight weeks the state soccer you were talking about that's this spring in the spring and that's delaying the start of the project is that correct it it is oh I I thought we were going to get it done before that no it's DeLay So okay any other questions okay and at this point um uh Mr Dy you are confident that um and satisfied with the with this bid and with um the contractor you've selected correct yes Madam chair uh to that point we did receive some communication from a member to the public thank you for reminding me of that um that indicated that this particular firm had done some work in Sweetwater County on a field up there and that
311there were some problems associated with that project I called my colleague who is the facilities director uh up in Sweetwater County explained the nature of the concern that the parent or the Community member had brought to us um in and he made the following comment he said with regard to the turf replacement he said we are absolutely satisfied and I Have No Reservations about recommending that you use helis as your as your contractor in this instance he did clarify that um the the project up there also involved some concrete Replacements some curving and some retaining walls um and so we contacted the helis as well on that to get their perspective on the matter so what happened is there was some honeycombing that had occurred in some of the concrete work we're not doing that
312concrete work with this project um they felt like that they being Sweetwater County felt like the contractor had responded and tried to cure and correct some of that honeycombing they are concerned about possible cracking and sping in the concrete so um helis and Sweetwater County have agreed that that school district will hold their retention for another year um and they've they've tried to do some things to make it make it better and if that doesn't work then they'll come back and replace the sections that are of concerned so at this point Sweetwater County is is comfortable and confident in telling us they have no reservation about us proceeding with this contractor very good thank you for updating all of us and and also replying and and reaching out to uh Sweetwater um we are not
313working with concrete we are replacing a Turf so we should be good to go thank you very much thank you madam chair if there are no further questions um all in favor say I I oppose no motion passes Madame chair I move to Grant permission to contract for Educational Services for an amount not to exceed $800,000 second discussion yes Mr weers span U Madam chair I think one member of the public raised the question about maybe getting some addition explanation as to what this $800,000 is going to be for I think that's an excellent idea maybe we could get an idea of what this is about Madam chair I would ask Mr Frey you did hear a little bit about it during the update thank you sir mam chair trusty we respond can you repeat
314your question I didn't quite get just some elaboration if you could on what this $800,000 is going to benefit the district absolutely um paper is the U the product uh that we are purchasing for Educational Services it's a 2472 ring uh that will last 18 months so the remainder of this school year as well as next school year we evaluate the program um through means of each school and how how it affects students and student achievement okay thank you very good any further questions my question was answer than trusty oh okay very good anyone else no with no further discussion all in favor say I I I oppose no motion passes Madame chair I move to approve the January 10th 2022 addendum to the ly County School District number one Smart Start Plan second discussion
315yes trusty Herman um Madame chairman is this the time to yes explain this is the time to discuss this uh this particular agendum and and what this long awaited uh agenda item yes um well I will just pref this by saying um the past three or four days um the all the trustees have been blessed by by scores I could say uh scores of emails from people from Left Right Center on this on this subject and so uh we benefit from all all the input we receive and I appreciate it including in person but the email and and I and sort of I want to explain to everybody that we read every email so that's it's a good way to to be heard heard in a different way um I say first of all it's
316difficult to learn from other states districts um because so many differences explain outcomes we've been told to do what Teton County is doing um their numbers but there that's not analgous either because we don't know where their numbers come from they have their very high high density housing in Teton County they have only 3% of the land is private and that houses everybody who lives in the district second of all they get a lot of Tourism that we don't get flying in from all around the country so there's enough differences there are enough variables to say that it's interesting it's informative it's not completely analogous um and we learned something but it's not it's not determinative also it's difficult to apply low mask efficacy numbers collected even before Delta hit the country and state and
317even more difficult with Omron reported to be many times more transmissible than Delta so where are we going to take our lessons from I just wanted to make mention those two things so what do we know we know Omron virus is much more contagious than the alpha beta Delta variants and we are entering a surge with whatever the next variant will be we know that our wider Community is in general taking fewer precautions when it comes to vaccinations maske wearing distancing Etc we know that mask and vaccinations work not perfectly but enough to make a difference in slowing transmission of the virus we know that masks are a pain they make it harder to communicate some students are downright miserable we know that masking disputes are distracting our staff from focusing on our Prime obligation
318which is and that question was asked last week what is our job and it's our job to provide a quality education in a safe environment that I would have to say trumps everything else for me um we know that if we drop masks into the protocols M we um we won't have to bother with them anymore so situation solved perhaps what we don't know how bad the Omicron surge will get and when it will Abate and what we'll get after that we don't know how quickly a higher transmission rate could result in closures of classroom schools in the district we don't know what will happen and how quickly we will know it if our if we drop our covid protocols when do we measure when do we know that that where that is what can
319we do we can continue to require actions that make school safer for students and staff and address individual student hardships we can continue to assess conditions and risk and adjust protocols accordingly we can drop the protocols and expose all students and staff to the risk chosen by individual parents students and staff what are the stakes a small but important number of children who cannot wear masks or are miserable doing so we can do some things to help those students increase their breaks give them exemptions that sort of thing and a number of Staff who retired of Fielding complaints and monitoring student behavior that goes away and it which has been a distraction and and uh our superintendent has listed those very well it has been a very big distraction so we could get rid of
320that distraction get rid of the Mask debate get a rid oh okay so then also alien well the stake is also alienating we we we run the risk of alienating people who don't believe in the virence of the covid and the efficacy of masks or we could alienate people who want schools to be as safe as possible for the vast numbers of students and staff for some trust concern over political repercussions of keeping mask in place as a factor losing the abil we also another stake we run the risk of losing the ability to see each other's faces with if we keep the masks on so we can't see each other spaces or if we take them off we also might run the risk of losing in person learning altogether we could slow down the
321covid transmission by making schools as safe as we can by keeping the masks or increase the risk of transmission in the risk of going remote with the possible loss of learning social life Sports and activities so this is a set of priorities and I I weigh both sides of it um sometimes practical considerations have to control just what are the practicalities and that would say just you know let's get rid of the distraction for some politics will prevail and I don't blame anyone for doing going for either one of those things those are legitimate concerns um but I do want the latest health numbers people said how how dare you have Health Data um but actually I find that useful Health Data so I'm kind of glad those Health officials showed up last week I
322thought the numbers were ful to me I want to keep schools open and use the tools we have yes including masks to reduce um to reduce the the chances of going of going silent and going remote we all hated remote everybody hates remote and I'm trying to re avoid that so for that basis I think I am going to oppose this but I do not I do not um criticize anybody who votes to go for it for their own reasons I'm just explaining my vote now that's all thank you very good anyone else yes trusty Ashby yeah so I I want to make a statement too I don't um I have spent more time going through all of your emails all of the studies all of the studies you've sent all the studies that people
323that are for for the mass have sent I've read to the detriment of probably my job and my family this week um everything and honestly based on the data itself um it's hard it is really hard and I know some of you are much more convinced that it says one thing or the other um but wow um I've also spent a lot of time talking to people um and watching the trend as it moves across the country I do think we've got to get out of mass I desperately wanted to find the data I desperately want to find the answer and there is no answer um that that doesn't help you please please if we could be silent want me to vote please please um we also have terrified teachers terrified teachers that we are
324going to end up back with in you know online that you know we worked for a day last week kind of but it's not helpful we also have terrified teachers that they're going to take stuff home because they're the adults that's fair that is fair y'all um and I so I also do not want us to end up without teachers in the classrooms or or uh substitutes in the classroom and that scares me to death it scares me to death I do think that getting through this wave because I right before Christmas before the wave started moving across the country I in I was fully in I'm moving this way um but as it comes across it scares me and I would love to see you know can we get through the wave and set
325a dead it's set a deadline and I know that's been the push is can we have a deadline so I will make a motion and you can kill it if you want I'd like to make a motion that we table the decision until the next meeting okay at this time I need I look I really want to finish this meeting and I I I understand that we're all passionate about this if we can refrain from discussion the board will work its very best to work through this please thank you um at this time I would just like um do we need we would we have a motion on the floor to table what is the if is that an automatic I can't remember um for Robert's Rule of Order when someone asks to table are
326you asking to table a discussion or postpone there's a difference what's the difference can you help me Madam Madam chairman I believe yes I think is also the I believe you can you can move to lay it back to a date certain that or a tabling is non debatable that puts it on or you can um move to lay it back until a certain date and then that is actually discussable the first is not debatable the second is I thought if you tabled it then we would it's non debatable and that's a done deal so want to dat okay you back so you would like to make a motion to lay it back is is that what you would like to i' like to lay it back to our next meeting February so I'll second
327that just for debate person so we can have debate on that okay very good all right the debate begins on the motion yes trusty Clon yes Madam chair um I oppose the motion and here's why um I really appreciate what the staff has done to come up with the proposal that we are taking up today and one thing that struck me is that this wouldn't go into effect for two weeks and so we do have a buffer in in the motion uh in the agendum the proposed agendum and the reasoning I was told and and please Dr creso correct me if I've got it wrong but the reasoning was to give everyone plenty of time to take precautions as they see as they saw fit so I think by postponing this vote it's just again
328what we've been doing um and I want to I want to just say here's what we know from my take here's what we know we know that we are no we are not under the quarantining guideline uh under restrictions by the CDC or our health officer to quarantine as they've recommended we did not know that earlier at least some of us did not even though we asked repeatedly and um so we put we voted for the mask mandate in our district to keep our students in class and so now we're in a new place we have more information and uh we even have more information about covid we're dealing with Omicron now which has less severe symptoms we know that we know that our um we all know that we don't have a state mask
329mandate in the state of Wyoming and yet we have our students wearing masks we know that um the data shows that masks up has really had no significant impact on the numbers um in of positive Co cases in our in our County um as a result of that we know that Co has a very very minuscule risk to students um to young people I should say we know that um the availability of the vaccine now is available to all from 5 years old up and I think I heard tonight that the booster is now available for children um and we also have and we know we've always known that we provide a virtual school for those who may be in the high-risk category and so that's an option um we also know that Co is
330here to stay and we have to learn to live with it like we've learned to live with influenza and other um types of viruses and diseases I would State again we have to treat our kids with a level of respect that we show our adults adults in this state have a choice and I believe that we need to give our students a choice thank you madam chair thank you Mrs discussion if we could refrain thank you so much everybody I know we want to get through this and we have public comment as well thank you very much um is there someone else um on the board that would like to add anything trusty we resp yeah Madam chair I guess we do have a motion on the floor if personally I don't see any need
331to delay this but if if we have trustees that would benefit from some additional time to consider this I'd be happy to support it um otherwise you know I I personally am am ready to vote but um if others would like to lay this back to our next board meeting I'm I'd be happy to support that I'm the only yep I'm the only one that would like time um thank you please thank you um then I would withdraw the motion okay we can vot trusty Smith as trusty Clon pointed out we do have a two we window with this before it even goes into effect um I'm comfortable with that I actually thought maybe that was too long if we were going to be voting on it that we would even wait two weeks but
332um I do you think that allows our families an opportunity to react and make decisions for their children um for our staff to um you know those that are that are concerned about it to um make accommodations I guess um we I just we are we are more restrictive on our kids than our county is on any of us than our state is I mean we we we're imposing mandates that nobody else has to live by and we I just I we've we've got to Mo away from it and I have pages of notes that I would love to go through but I just um I'm not sure that waiting until February 7th I mean giving it a four weeks um is going to change much um if it's not the Omicron variant it's going
333to be another variant um it's we we deal with the flu maybe not as much now because everything is co but we um I mean we we have you know the the flu comes every year and there are different strains of the flu and um it really stinks if you get the flu um but it it makes its way and it morphs and it changes and and that is it's really just with the virus that's just the way they work um I'm not sure that we're going to get to a point where Co just goes away and I I really think we need to as a board and in thinking about this district and how we move forward we're not going to contain covid we're just not so we need to figure out how we're
334going to manage it and as a board we have um I think we've made a concerted effort to um rely on the advice of our authorities um we have we have relied on the advice of our Administration um we are at a point where um the CDC and the Wyoming Department of Health have come out with guidelines of how to navigate this um and anything different than moving to a new addent to our Smart Start is circumventing and doing more than they're requiring us to do um we have an Administration that has work I'm positive very very hard um in the last four days or so five days um to come up with a plan that they believe will work um in this district and within you know the confines that we have in this
335District um I'm positive that they they know what they're going to be up against in in making this happen and so I would suggest that as a board we rely on the advice of our expert and that we rely on the plan that our Administration has put together I didn't draft this I was ready to draft something but I mean this is um this this is our administration's proposal and so I um I'm confident that they've done their homework and what what is workable and i would support that thank you trusty Ashby so I'm going to circle back I am not entire comfortable passing it however we've got to move forward with something I would be far more comfortable if we could see what this wave is doing it feels like that's not um something
336that the board is interested in so I just want to clarify with where I'm at so Madam chair I I believe trusty Ashby okay trusty Ashby could you restate did no just did just clarify did you withdraw that motion I did okay so that that is no longer on the table now now we're back on the main right we're back on the main motion and truste Smith relay her um her viewpoint and concerns and and competence so go ahead trusty weers respond okay Madam chair thank you so I made a number of comments at our work session and you know I tend to defer to our state local and County Health officials that's just makes the most sense to me I'm not a health professional and the advice that we're getting from our state and
337County Health officials is that we do not take our masks off of our students at this point ly county has just been upgraded to severe risk on the covid scale the highest risk level that there is our primary respons responsibility and my primary responsibility I believe is to keep kids in school I'm not convinced that if we remove the mask mandate that that's going to happen somebody earlier made a joke about my comment about roll the dice well it's not funny serious business you know and if I vote against this and it doesn't p and it does pass I really hope I'm wrong I would like nothing better than to have our kids out of masks and be able to go to school every day and have our numbers continue to go down wouldn't that
338be great we've already been it was reported in triban Eagle that we're currently being sued over this issue well you know somebody some guy you know it's it's it's everybody's happy about it but someone said you know if in fact we are being sued and if it's illegal like some people people allege I guess we'll find out the Court's going to make that decision we're not the only School Board in the nation that's being sued over this issue and I've yet to see a decision come down that says that mask mandates are illegal if they're illegal then a court needs to tell us that they're illegal so we're waiting for that please thank you very much please so I really think that keeping inperson learning is is something that we need to work on I'm
339really concerned about our availability of substitute teachers we don't have enough substitutes right now we have teachers who are currently sharing students because there is no substitute to cover the other teachers classroom if we remove masks from our students you know we're going to lose even more substitutes we've received emails from staff members who are terified that we're going to take masks off of our students please please thank you I really want to continue this meeting please so I guess to summarize and without being redundant I really believe based on the rapidly increasing case numbers and the low vaccination rates in the country I can't support lifting the face covering requirement people have raised the issue of well what are you going to do next are you going to mandate vaccines you know I've heard
340that a couple of times nobody on this board that I'm aware of has ever brought that up yes I never I certainly would never support that I don't believe that the board would present that and I've never heard anybody on this board say well you know we need to mandate vaccines nobody's said nobody's told me that and I wouldn't support it anyway so you know so that's kind how I feel about that but I do really hope that at some point our parents will choose to have their children vaccinated that our public will choose to be vaccinated because I know that we know that vaccines work please please so so you know and some somebody asked me the other day you don't really believe that masks work do you yeah I do believe that they
341work and somebody said while you go to the grocery store there's nobody in masks that's not true no here all right please we would like to finish this meeting if I cannot have an orderly meeting and we cannot have a discussion as a board we will have to recess this meeting and resume it via Zoom that will be my last my last conversation on that please allow us to have the board discussion so we may take the vote that so many have been waiting for for such a long time please so rather than continually be interrupted I'll just close my comments with that thank you thank you trusty weers spun are there any other comments trusty Clon thank you thank you madam chair I just want to comment one more thing I I think that
342those of us with children um that those of us on the board with children we know what happens after school and um we know that our kids are out hanging with their friends at their houses they're going to movies they're going to birthday parties they're doing all kinds of social things with other people other young people or adults um and they're not wearing their mask so that's just the reality of it so if you really want to think about exposure and the science and whether or not we're keeping them from getting covid we're really not in my opinion and I just wanted to add that because I think that is a factor to consider that outside of the classroom there they are mixing and they're mixing without their masks thank you trusty Clawson is there
343any other comment yes just very very briefly to respond to that and that's been an argument brought up repeatedly and I understand that that um and then you know the children go to a birthday party or their events and and um my position is simply um again not perfect but the best we can do to provide an environment where we're slowing down minimizing transmission for the people who for whom that's a priority for the people who that we heard um emails got emails from people said I have you know a sick husband at home or I have a child who cannot get vaccinated so that they can they can control they won't go to the grocery store they won't go to the trampoline park and they know when they walk in the school door they
344will have a they will have a as safe as can be understanding nothing's 100% but as safe as can be for them and it's it's um um someone someone mentioned a an analogy of a um smoke free bars and smoke free restaurants and that if you need to be smoke free you know that you can go in establishment and shy in have that have a meal without smoke waing over from the other room and so in that so it's that's more analogous I think and um anyway i' I've said everything and I apologize for redundant thank you madam chair yes please thank you madam chair just in response to that I understand and and and as I think my colleagues here said this is a really difficult issue we are all struggling with it um
345how to create that as safe as can be sort of scenario just to use your words um trusty Herman but I will say and I think that this is this is maybe where we differ is that for those types of examples you just gave there will be no scenario in which Co will be safe for them because if you have um those comor comorbidities Co will always be a risk and so what you're asking is if you if if we're motivated just to protect those those individuals who want to mingle amongst the rest of the population and I want them to I'm not saying that they shouldn't but if if we follow the logic then we'd never we'd never remove the mass because Co is here it's it's it's part of our world now and
346unfortunately we have to we have to make the best of different situations and so just to follow the logic out I would say that that that would be arguing for never removing the masks and that's a difficult thing that I don't think we should consider any further comment okay um at this time um I did vote on the addendum I also voted before I was board chair on the Smart Start Plan um and uh so I will be exercising um uh our board policy to vote um that is chapter 2 section two um the last time this was revised was July 9th of 1989 so this board policy has been around for a very long time I'll read the paragraph that allows me to do this a majority of number of members of the Board
347of Trustees shall uh constitute a quorum for the transaction of business at any properly convened meeting of the Board of Trustees no action of the board shall be V valid unless it receives the approval of the majority of the membership of the Board of Trustees during a properly convened meeting an individual board member of the board does not have the authority to act on behalf or of the board or accept um or except as a design uh delegate delegated by the majority vote of the board sorry um an elected member of the Board of Trustees as an elected member of the Board of Trustees the chairman may vote subject to the same provisions and limitations as any other member of the board furthermore the chairman shall vote in the event that any item for uh
348decision before the board is tied prior to casting of the Chairman's vote so there's two things I can vote when there's a tie I can also choose to vote whenever I choose to all all right so that is board policy it's been around since 1989 so um I wanted to make sure there were some questions in the public about that I wanted to make sure they understood that that is within a board policy and I will be exercising that tonight now that being said there is no one here that has not struggled with this decision and there is no one on this board that doesn't want to be there for our kids or our families there's nobody here that has hasn't been connected to this community that isn't that doesn't see the the valuable relationship
349that we as board members as individuals have in our community we're all involved in our churches and our communities historically most of us for many many years so I wanted to uh I want you to my part of this is that I when looking at this Smart Start Plan and I appreciate appreciate all the work that our Administration Dr creso um and her staff put together trying to navigate this Janet farmer um as I said earlier when this uh the new covid guidelines came down the new quarantine guidelines came down I thought oh my gosh how how are we going to navigate that as a district so at that point I thought all right we may be tweaking our our quarantine guidelines and we may we're going to have to navigate that chunk and then
350the second shoe fell that we were going to take the masks off too and I thought I I cannot imagine how we we are going to see I'm I'm I don't have a crystal ball but I'm guessing we're gonna see some increase in quarantine numbers um even if it's for five days and I hope that you are correct I sincerely hope that you are correct but remote learning has not been has not been a total win for every child in this district and our teachers have to teach hybrid so they're teaching a hybrid classroom they're teaching kids in the seats and they're teaching students virtually at the same time it's double the load and this is a conversation that came back to this board multiple times when the pandemic first started was that our teachers
351were trying to navigate two classrooms at the same time so I I see that this protocol that we have um is is going to make that a lot more difficult and a lot less likely um for us to be doing it if it's five days at a time or 10 days at a time I don't know that it really matters we're going to have kids in and out of the classroom it's going to affect their learning so that being said I also feel like I I can't see putting the two of them together for sure um remov the mass and um and literally trying to follow the the new puzzle of the CDC guidelines so um I cannot get my head around that um with all my heart and when we come back to uh
352Stu uh community members we are a third we are a third of the of the size of our with our population of students and parents we're a third of larmy County uh population our student population alone is as large as um Evanston Riverton um Green River so what we do in the community matters we are Community we can't say that we're going to be Community Partners and we want all this input and we want community members to have their input we want our Community Partnerships whether it's corporate or not to have input we have all of these things that we want um from them and we want their input but when it comes to this we're not Partners when when we finally draw the line that says we don't really care what you say or
353what your situation is I don't see that we can do that I don't see that we get to pick and choose there if we want input and we want and we consider them all our stakeholders then they're all our stakeholders all the time like it or not so at this point in time I think we can call for a vote if there's no further discussion and at this time I would like you to raise your hand all in favor of actually yes all in favor of voting uh for the new um agendum say I and raise your hand I I oppose n thank you at that time at this time we'll be moving on to the rest of our agenda fut business no future business the next regular board meeting will be held Monday February
3547th 202 two at 6: p.m and a work session will begin at 5:00 p.m. the business of the district is done at this time we will have public comment I will call your names up all of the rules that were in the previous session's public comment still apply thank you I would like to finish this meeting with um just one second my list is in here there very good so if we could all refrain from discussion and comment and we could have Carol um matthia um come up please and if I have pronounced your WR name incorrectly I apologize thank you Carol Madam chair she is on Zoom thank you Carol can you hear me can you hear me yes ma'am please go ahead yes my name is Carol maiah bias thank you I apologize
355Wyoming law does say that parents have the right to make Health decisions for their children but all laws have exceptions your child cannot attend school without having their childhood vaccinations a decision not made by the parent science and societal responsibility require these vaccines I feel that a mask requirement fits this category even before Omron I read of a child who had covid and passed it on to his grandma who eventually passed away with it this poor boy felt very guilty that he had killed his grandmother this situation could possibly happen here when children stop wearing masks especially now that the Omron variant is rampant Omron is very contagious and is still killing especially those who are unvaccinated thank you thank you Carol OD day Carol thank you Carol I have two points firstly I was
356very disappointed in the way last Tuesday's work session was conducted at the previous work session I attended trustee Classen was first given the floor to present her case for withdrawing from the nsba this seemed right and appropriate since it was she who had called called for the session and then questions naturally the questions and discussion naturally flowed from that unfortunately trusty Smith was not afforded this same courtesy instead the several P public health employees were given the floor and proceeded to dominate the discussion thereby unfairly using up much of trustee Smith's time I'm sure I'm not the only person who was surprised by their attendance at the meeting that I thought was intended for the board surely their appearance could have at least been mentioned in the dear lcsd1 family's email text that had gone
357out on Monday the day previous clearly they were there in part to offer their expert medical advice on the benefits of masking our children but I found it curious that no other experts also known as parents had been invited to offer their expert advice on the deleterious effects of children and how those effects might actually outweigh any perceived benefits we constantly hear from some members of this board phrases such as we're all in this together we want to work with our stakeholders we want to be open and transparent inviting five or six additional people all of the same mindset to speak in a setting with already limited time constraints doesn't strike me as keeping true to those purported claims of teamwork secondly and to close there's seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation
358in our community recently about banning books I'm not wanting to ban books nobody I know is talking about banning books inflammatory language however such as Banning books means making them completely unavailable burning them prohibiting their publication or sale and is used for one purpose and one purpose only that being to paint with a broad and unfavorable brush the intent of those of us who object we simply want them out of our schools since they're all widely available at the county library and in bookstores any parent who wants to can wants to can easily make them available to their children there's a huge difference between using discernment when choosing age appropriate books that should be in public schools and banning books the former involves mature reasonable adults with morals and principles ensuring that the innocence of
359childhood is not Stripped Away by government schools the latter involves silencing anyone and anything you disagree with to be clear words matter we don't support Banning books we support protecting children through wise discernment and careful consideration thank you n slier Nancy slier this is about the mask mandate it's useless to require students to wear masks in school masks are not effective in stopping the spread of covid anyways children are not harmed from covid if they do get it natural immunity is the best way to handle this virus the CDC stat stats show the seasonal flu takes a about the same amount of deaths but masks are harm AR they are harmful to children they're their faces are stuck in like a petri disc dish all day long masks get dirty from being touched and readjusted
360all day long children are rebreathing their their own CO2 so the brain can't work at Peak capacity regarding learning wearing masks impacts children's ability to read emotions lastly the CDC data shows the leading cause of death in children to be traffic deaths so that's that's where the that's where the schools can concentrate if they're worried about children's safety that that would be something more important than something that doesn't kill the children thank you thank you Megan sir H H Madam chair there's a Megan online Megan if it's Megan Hesser would you please raise your hand please uh can you hear me Madam chair yes ma'am thank you uh Madam chairwoman and trustees my name is Megan Hesser I'm a parent and someone wrapping up a M's in Reading science it came to my attention before
361Christmas break that my kids school is going to be short a reading per sometime in January for an extended period of time due to maternity leave when I asked if they had a long-term sub for While She Was Out the secretary had said no in their checking with HR they have now learned they are not allowed to hire a long-term sub to fill that position I decided to work your system and reached out to an administrator who told me it was likely that the subpool was too small and then I was later told it was an HR issue and he couldn't help I was given a similar answer from superintendent Crespo and told I should call HR myself which I did but I've never heard back from anyone to explain why this can't be felt
362especially given that I would be happy to add my application to the pool after being assured that I was more than qualified to be a reading Pais sub myself I'm sure that there's some Co learning lass money available somewhere to make it possible to hire someone for this position and others like it I'd like to know if literacy is a top priority for this board why are you leaving several groups of K2 students without their small group support for several weeks even if these aren't your most struggling readers it seems like a huge waste of their time to sit and do busy work and also an unnecessary load on already strained teachers and staff during small group time I've also been told by someone at one of the schools in our district that reading interventionists
363aren't allowed Subs how can it ever be appropriate to leave the most vulnerable of our struggling readers without the support they need and forget about the fact that we don't even have enough reading interventionists to start with given that approximately 15% of the population is dyslexic these are vital pieces of the multi-tiered systems of support you heard an excellent presentation on mtss but please please make sure you are fully training your staff on how this model works it takes an enormous amount of learning and work to make this model work but it is well worth it it's not about additional Personnel to make mtss work it's about properly training the staff you have from my perspective as an IEP parent and someone trained in mtss it was not actually implemented in your schools prior to
364this if it had been our son's reading struggles and subsequent trauma would have been greatly reduced there is solid replicated research that shows where your reading level is at the end of third grade as in proficient basic below basic is where you will graduate last school year 892 third graders were assessed and 444 were proficient or at grade level and 429 were at risk of reading difficulties or below Benchmark this means they only have a 20% or less chance of reaching proficiency without intense intervention proficiency simply means grade level I'm really not okay with this and I hope you are not either there's also testimony at the last joint education committee meeting by Dr Ken Pew a leading reading researcher with has Haskins Laboratories at Yale University he said that even top performing districts and
365schools in this country aren't performing where they should be or could be for reading I encourage you all to listen to this meeting recording from November of 2021 this lack of differentiated small group instruction that our school about to experience is one reason why our reading levels are not as good as they should be thank you for your time thank you Mrs Hesser Alicia green Alicia green is she on I'm sure it looks like she's on Zoom very good thank you Kyle can you hear me yes ma'am please go ahead my name is Alicia green I attended the work session last Tuesday was very frustrated to see the surprise attendance of the health professional say comment after comment about Hospital numbers vaccine rates and many other things that have zero to do with children's mental
366physical and educational Health how is it they have employees to send to schools to do daily testing yet their hospital is overflowed and they're understaffed this is what US parents are constantly hearing contradictions they keep talking about low vacc rates wouldn't that tell us that the majority of our community wants to live our lives unafraid of an illness that will never go away at the work session I heard a trustee say We'll automatically adopt the new CDC recommendations because we've always followed the CDC well did you know that the CDC recommends children eat at least three servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables a day do you have staff going around mandating children eat all their fruits and vegetables do you mandate parents pack lunches with adequate adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables the
367CDC recommends children be physically active for 60 minutes a day does your staff mandate children run vigorously at recess or do they allow them to just hang out as well as a mother already mentioned tonight heart disease is the number one killer in America I'm for parent choice and against mandates but if we had to mandate it would be it would make more sense to mandate these things to keep our kids healthy and keep Hospital numbers low we' heard one doctor call us the noisy minority wouldn't our vaccination rates be higher and wouldn't you see the majority of people wear masks around town if that were true we go around town and see maybe 10 to 20% of people wearing masks so I would say that we're noisy because we are the majority she also
368said to keep masks just a few more weeks until case counts go down case counts are going up right now two years after it all started what implies with that that in a couple weeks we can take the mass off kids if cases are going up now two years later shouldn't we accept that this is here it's not going to go away for those of you thinking that's because we have a low vaccine numbers no look at the states with much higher vaccination rates than Wyoming and they have higher Hospital numbers per capita than we do if we don't take Mass off the kids now you never will Co numbers are going to be what they're going to be there are many ways can be careful without masks like that lovely teacher who said she
369spaces her students encourages hand sanitation and good hygiene and those who are afraid or immune compromised can wear their mask and get vaccinated and boosted thank you thank you Josh ISU Josh is he online see yep thank you hello hi Josh go ahead oh this is Josh M I'll keep it short so I just wanted to say to the four of you who voted in favor of Parental Choice thank you it is much appreciated to the three of you who did not I have a I have a fairly good idea that there's a Day of Reckoning to be held for you at the voting booth not too long from now so much appreciated for your time and have a good night appreciate you thank you Katie Peters make it really really quick too because I
370have to be to work at 4 AM tomorrow so I just want to thank you thank you guys for taking a minute opening your mind and looking at other resources of information not the main mainstream media not the health departments not all these people sitting behind a desk looking at numbers and deciding on data and what to do and making major roles in people's lives you actually took the time you I I'm sure you listen to Frontline doctors and Frontline nurses that kind of gave you some insight to what's going on behind because I promise you the numbers that the hospital is giving to the health department to help make these mandates for you guys they're they're wrong and the CEO even admitted it at your work session that yes you'll come in for a
371broken leg but we're going to test you for covid and you're going to go into our covid numbers if you're positive so I just want to take the time to thank you for for stepping up being strong and to you guys that voted no I hope one day you'll listen to more people like me that is the Frontline that has dealt with this for the last two years that knows really what what's going on the thing about it now too is the CDC has come out and said that it's okay for healthcare workers to go to work with a positive test okay so you really are worried about our little little kids spreading covid no when you come into that doctor's office we could be positive and asymptomatic and just spread it right on to
372you so really what governing agency do you really want to listen to because you're trying to say you're listening to the same one that says it's okay for me to go to work last week when I was covid positive and I was me too thank you thank you Dian Bufford and I may be pronouncing that wrong and I'm very sorry please go ahead and correct me um actually if you can just leave those at the basket that's thank you usually I make that announcement I appreciate that thank you beer yes it is thank you thank you for letting me speak um I'm kind of late to the party but that's all right I have some throwaways for you but I really hope that you look at them it might ease some of your minds I
373want to thank you for that very tough vote and I know how hard that was but the one thing that I heard all night long was just emotionality and and opinions and feelings and thinking and then I heard from Mr slel facts and data and research and we are a data District right we are data decision District you have the data for this tough decision that you made tonight on your website so when you get that information please look at it if you want to uh see I'll just briefly go over it in August was our Baseline you have to have a baseline of at least 10 days we had 15 days in August so it counts as a baseline there was no masks and we had uh 6.6 covid per day then we put
374on the mask mandate because this is an intervention you guys I know that you did not have best practices you did not have research space because this was new so you did what you thought was right and I really thought that our numbers would go down so we looked at at and I'm sure you looked at this monthly because you research you look at your data monthly um in in September our daily covid rates raised to 10.2 that was with a mass mandate all right so then you go on to October thinking well surely the mass mandate will will help reduce the rates and it did it was back down to your 6.2 but as as far as a statistical difference for an intervention as a special ed teacher by by the way I have
375a bachelor bachelor's and a master's and special ed in a doctorate in administration so I did my own stats for my dissertation and everything so that little tiny 100th of a point is not statistically um different so then we go into November and we're up to 7.6 so um the only time that we had a degree decrease in covid cases in our district was in December when we had a 10-day break and altto together it was a 16-day break and it dropped down to 3.4 so your data shows that the mask mandate worked when we have more than 10 days off during the month which means that it it does not work for the the public school system so you can look at it the green is is your vacation days the yellow are the
376days that there were no reported um covid cases so I guess my request to you is is carry that data seeking activity to this as well um I really don't care what goes on in other counties I don't even care what goes on in the uh County Health I care what goes on at laring County School District number one you had your data and according to your data you made a proper decision thank you for your time thank you Daniel maret um Daniel I should be able to say this by now um it's m a rcees m I'm Cherry is on zo is he thank you Daniel please say your last name for me again thank you very much it's yeah it's Marcus with the soft sea so it's Marcus okay thank you all right
377you bad uh my name is Mari and my wife and I are a product of district one and the same for our four children over 35 years my wife and I have seen superintendents and board members come and go but never in our lives have we seen a more disgusting display of lack of bravery and leadership in security from certain board members bravery is being responsible for the tasks that you are entrusted with as the trustee no matter your political or Personal Agenda there's nothing Brave or righteous about forcing kids to wear masks that you know does not prevent infection nor spread infection of covid and you want proof are you aware of the many cases of double vaccinated individuals who have been triple boosted have worn masks religiously and still tested positive for covid
378how is that not proof that masks don't work if the double vaxed and triple boosted mask wearer can still get covid how in the world can you say that the mask is a remedy if you're not aware of these cases why aren't you and if you are aware why are you ignoring it here's more proof the CDC prevention director the prevention director Rochelle wilinsky just admitted on CNN today today that vaccines do not prevent transmission of the virus that's today look it up but you still think masks will prevent when the vaccine itself and the boosts will not prevent the spreading of the virus it's logical but even if you choose to ignore these facts mandating mask is still the wrong thing to do because bravery is knowing that you are not beholden to the
379superintendent she's paid by the state and is beholden to the state that is why you are not paid so that you are not beholden to any agency or state or federal health industry your job is not in the legislative branch those Industries and departments have their own procedures and paths to mandate Health regulations their path for mandates is through the legislative branch of our state government and even if the Govern Governor does doesn't know this you do or at the very least least you should because it's in the Wyoming Constitution Tim knows this margarite knows this nothing in the description description of your position gives you the authority on matters regarding health mandates kids health yes not mandate you know you have to know the difference you have allowed other agencies to use the office
380of the board and you to bypass their proper paths to mandates you are not their path the office of the school board is not their path youve allowed them to weaponize the office of the school board against parents you've allowed the other agencies to reject their responsibilities through proper path and put all put it all on your lap for which you have no constitutional authority to act on you took their bait line hooked and sinker and you ought to be ashamed of yourself thank you Anna Burke okay very good this is Burke B ke hi can you hear me hello can you hear me yeah you're not muted so it should be are you able to hear me are you able to hear me at all hello Mrs Burke this is Rosanne rinnie the board
381chair we're having a little bit of difficulty see if we can get this to work I think it's out my [Music] mic testing just one second hun okay thank you I could hear her so would we be able to hear if you just do that Kyle I think we're I think we're good okay let's go ahead and start Mrs thank you for your patience I apologize we had a little technical difficulty there thank you go ahead and begin okay so you can hear me now yes ma'am thank you okay um most of my comments have been covered so I'll be pretty brief I wanted to thank everyone for their thoughtfulness and in their votes tonight but one of the things um again my name is Anna Burke I'm a parent and I'm a teacher here
382in the district and one the one thing that was not covered here tonight I have a daughter who's been quarantined twice both times she tested negative um she has health issues related to asthma and conditions related to genetic disorders um and so she's in a high-risk C category but she's never tested positive for covid but the tests that we that our insurance did Cover and again I have school district in insurance that was not accepted by the school district um the test that we would have had to the the the test that the district would have accepted would have cost us $100 out of pocket our insurance would not have covered that and so we need to make sure that this test which as we looked into it was equally as accurate as the one
383that the district accepted um you know our insurance covered it but the district didn't like that test I don't know all of the background behind it but um in order for my daughter to go back to school we'd have to pay $100 every time that she was exposed um in order for her to go back to school sooner and she's got a lot of special needs and she needs that that time in school so um I I think that's all we just need to make sure that things are available for Parents Without undue hardship that I'm sure Dr cres will look into it thank you very much thank you Marcus CW or CR k r a l l Marcus are you online Madam chair he is online I can't hear I'm sorry he's online he's
384online thank you very much Marcus please go ahead yes can you hear me yes sir I can thank you all right thank you I would like to thank the board for the decision tonight um for you four who had the courage to stand up and do the right thing I thank you and for you other three I know you're likely voting with your conscience I would ask that you reconsider your position and uh listen to the feedback from the community um when I spoke to you last I spoke to you uh regarding I quoted Alexander sulzen nson and the lie and the lie I believe is still infecting much of well pretty clearly is infecting much of Western civilization and another way of describing that would be Mass Psych and that is uh gaining a
385lot of traction in entering the vernacular now but of course the antidote to the lies is the truth and I would like to quote someone else who has been speaking absolute truth and dropping just say bunker busting truth bombs on this whole ordeal and that is Archbishop Beano he's a Catholic Archbishop I'm a Catholic and he has been courageously speaking truth and I will quote him now he says uh quote the entire psychop pandemic farce clearly aims to lead towards the establishment of a dictatorship whose purposes to control the citizens through a violation of their constitutional and natural rights under the guise of a health emergency end quote when asked about the planning of this farce he says quote the operation required meticulous preparation and needed the participation of large parts of the public institutions
386and private sectors including the complicity of the Judiciary of law enforcement and the media these combined efforts are the real couet in the pandemic is just a pretext through which is introduced the seeming inevitability of the violation of fundamental rights in the consequent establishment of the totalitarian regime of the New Order in the this new order the pandemic Superstition Reigns Supreme with its magicians its vaccine temples its irrational rituals and ex excommunications of Sinners Vante means to be avoided those who do not agree to give up their reason even before apostasis from their faith in order to embrace this insane ideological Madness now we've heard a lot of discussion tonight um scratching the surface of this we we really need to dig deeper into what is actually going on I appreciate the vote tonight I
387encourage you all to to the line my only fear is with two weeks um there's going to be more scheming and the possibility for this to be rained back so we hope we are here again in two weeks thank you thank you Ross um c h a te do we have Ross on Zoom Madam chair I do not see that name these were signed in kind of late so chrisy T Ru NE y try she should be on Zoom there's a notation here I think our numbers are getting much smaller I do not see that name on Zoom okay all right at this time that concludes our second um public comment portion umy weone Madam chair I move to go into executive session at this time prior to adjournment for the purpose of possible student
388long-term suspension expulsions personnel and litigation second all in favor say I