001well welcome tonight i'll call the meeting back into open session for the emory board of education and the first thing we will do is pledge of allegiance please join me i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right i thank you next up is consent agenda items and i had those so i will make a motion to accept those a second second all right shar one all those in favor say aye aye aye all right next we'll go to community comments i have two on the list so i'll read the guidelines for addressing the board of education welcome to this meeting in the school district of amery board of education we are pleased that you are interested in
002the work of the school board you may address the board only during community comments time on the board meeting agenda any resident district employee or guest invited by the board may make comments about any decision policy or board meeting agenda items the following guidelines have been established for addressing the name report of education for those wishing to speak before the board a sign up sheet will be available prior to the start of the meeting if the topic noted on the side of the sheep is deemed to be out of order the presiding board presiding board member will inform the person wishing to speak prior to the start of the meeting community comments must pertain to board decision policy or board of meeting agenda item comment time is limited five minutes per person however the time
003limit may be increased or decreased at the discretion of a providing board member political speeches which are not materially related to board decisions policies adopted by the board or are not about a board meeting agenda item are strictly forbidden personal criticism of members of the board of education or employees of the school district are also strictly forbidden please stand to be recognized after being recognized state your name and municipality where you live for the record the board normally receives citizen input and does not respond or debate if there is a need for an answer or response to a concern or issue the district administrator or one of the other administrators will get back to you with a response if your concern requires board action it may be placed on the agenda of the future board
004meeting so with that we'll start with heidi williamson good evening my name is heidi williamson i live in the town of emory and i have two children who attend the amory school district i'm used to writing longer speeches than this so i'm going to try really hard to keep it to the five minutes i'm here tonight to encourage you to reject the book rating system and the change to policy 871 that is being proposed this evening let me begin by saying i am not against a rating system i am not against parents and children being informed about what the content is that is found in literature nor am i suggesting that we have a perfect collection or a perfect system i will argue that it is disingenuous to say that the current vetting process is
005outdated and requires an immediate shift when that process to my understanding has only been invoked less than a handful of times despite the countless hours and a measurable energy that has been consumed by the board the administrators and employees because of that topic however if a shift is needed when we look at the system that has been proposed i find several major flaws that i do not believe the district can overcome at this time unlike a movie rating system there is no universally or nationally recognized rating system or panel which means that any rating system put into place at this time is either dependent upon our district creating one or relying on existing rating systems like the one that was provided at last month's meeting attempting to create a system and assign rating ratings within
006our district is logistically problematic let's do some simple math there are over 4 500 titles in the physical collection in the high school alone but i'll round down to 4 000 for simplicity assuming it takes an average of 10 hours to read one book and assuming you'd like a panel of five people to read each book in order to ascribe an average rating you have logged 50 hours per book which equates to 200 000 hours just for the books already existing in the high school library assuming 40 hours per week you've asked for 5 000 weeks to rate the high school collection alone considering the staffing and sub shortages that exist i can't imagine where we are going to find two hundred thousand staff hours to asses to assess our current high school collection and
007that is simply the time required for reading the books not creating the qr codes or database required to support them as suggested using an off-site rating system like the one suggested last month has problems of its own for the remaining statistics i will be using booklooks.org which is the website that was included in last month's materials one of the first problems that exists is the cr existing creating sorry the existing rating systems are horrifically incomplete and limited in their scope based on the information handed out last meeting less than 100 titles in our district has been given a rating again the high school alone has over 4 500. in addition even if all the titles found on their entire website were in our collection the roughly 300 titles would only cover less than 10 percent
008of the high school collection again not even looking at the numbers of the entire district so we can't read all of our books because not all books have been rated but which books can we rate which books have received a rating when i look at booklooks.org in addition to a lack to lacking a majority of recent popular titles i also do not find historically popular titles like harry potter the chronicles of narnia or the lord of the rings books i would expect to find if what we are looking for are books that students are reading i also don't find books that would likely contain concerning topics like books found in a horror or suspense genre or romance novels by nicholas sparks books that i would expect to be listed if our goal was to cover
009a wide swath of potentially problematic books what i do find however is a plethora of titles like be amazing a history of pride beyond magenta transgender students speak out can i touch your hair discrimination in society genderqueer the hate you give the history of racism in america let's talk about race lgbtq plus writes these are the titles that have been selected out of all of the books that exist to receive a rating and these titles do not suggest an unbiased agenda to me they do not suggest the goal of informing parents and students of the content of books across all subject matters these titles feel incredibly targeted and driven by certain political and religious agendas and when we begin to write certain titles but not all titles regardless of the rating that is given it
010gives an automatic message that these books and their content is dangerous and require rating changing our policy to allow a rating system that only targets specific topics is biased and wrong the public school system and its library is not here to represent just my children they are not here to represent any one demographic of children it is here and it exists so that all children may find literature that reflects who they are and their story our children are not all white they are not all straight they do not all come from a nuclear family they are not all christian and the library is to reflect the complexities of the student it serves and it needs a process that honors that complexity is the system that we have perfect absolutely not but introducing a rating system
011where there is no universal agreement as to what scale to use where when there are so many books that have not received a rating even in the systems that do exist and then to have those ratings be so clearly based on not what kids are reading but a political agenda is unacceptable our students and our community deserve better than that for those who believe the rating system is the answer your fight is not with the emory school district it is not with you the board petition the publishers and the editors petition the state of wisconsin petition those in power who can create a nationally acceptable and accepted rating system and which has the manpower and resources to create and identify those ratings for all books but until that happens i ask you as the board
012to not support a change in our policy that so clearly cannot logistically be done by the district itself and i hope equally as clearly should not be accepted based on the bias and incredibly limited lists that we have been supplied thus far thank you and next we have melinda johnston hi my name is melinda johnson and i'm a mother of two that goes two kids that go to amy school district and i'm from deer park wisconsin and i agree with with someone with heidi is saying some of the points but this is my perspective as a parent what i'm worried about um i'll try to keep it short um for a long time i used to be a social worker and i used to work with the client with mental health services and come from
013a lot of abusive background and a lot of time i i remember working with them and they thought they're the most vulnerable situation for them is books and explicit you know i'm not talking about racism or anything i'm worried about experts such as sex expert details and that's what concerns for me for kids being exposed to her we don't know how much they're being exposed at home and what i'm concerned about is school should be a safe place for the kids if they're going to pick out a book you never know they're going to pick our book they might find explicit there you don't know how much phone book they're dealing with at home so i am i don't support banning book what i want as a parent to see or a consideration is the
014safety of what's in this book and what's going on in the school and i'm sure none of us knew and i had no clue that some of these books that exist in school you never thought that as a parent that um that is a concern for safety of the kids mental health and stuff i think um i'm just worried about the how much more are they going to be exposed down the future so and that i just want to reconsider just look into safety aspects of it especially with um i mean i read some of the detail about there's rape in there there's detail about that exposure and stuff you know and some of these kids are may not be ready for it you know and that's something up to the parents to discuss that
015home so i'm just asking just kind of reconsider i mean history race whatever i support those because that that's important education it's just the ex sexual exploration of the children is what i'm worried about and this is from my experience at the social work of a lot of clients that i dealt with for the past eight years of how much exposure they're being exposed from at home and sometime at school you just don't know sometimes even professional teachers they didn't even know either so and that's something that we really need to kind of consider that's all i'm asking thank you thank you all right and with that we will move to our administrative reports go ahead okay um we have summer school that will be kicking back into place in august and we have um
016two additional weeks of summer school that is planned i want to uh shout out and give a big thank you to laura shogren and all the summer school teachers that did the the first three weeks in june and we're looking forward to getting the kids back um i want to thank the board too going back to the expansion of summer school many many years ago and a lot of that was uh based on a jump start for kids that maybe needed that extra time in august not just in june and so that's been great and we look forward to the kids coming back at that time work the middle school building is continuing um the big thing in the big project there is the those air handler units that are going in to provide us
017heat and air conditioning down the road don't have any air conditioning at the middle school it's been interesting and um but that's great uh um and the nice part about that is that when summer school hits here in august and if it's really warm um it's that those sessions are going to be at the intermediate and not the middle school like they were in june my understanding is that a lot of that work will be done in late august i don't think it should really interfere school a lot of the kids won't even notice what they'll replace panels in the ceiling and wait for the units to be in place and you know by september things should be good and they should be up and running and before it gets cold so um i guess
018it's um it's supply chain it's a sub issue coming in with these heat units but i think that we'll be in good shape and and things will be ready to go before it gets too cool um middle school open house and sixth grade orientation scheduled for august 23rd and that seems kind of a ways off but you know we're really busy finalizing those schedules and our plans and leather letters will be going home at the beginning of august there'll be a district-wide letter that covers some of the um district-wide information and then each building will be having letters that go out specific to our building with some of those things so um that's kind of sums up what's going on right now any questions okay another ela curriculum update i feel like i report to
019you every month on this materials are arriving if you walk through the intermediate school hallways you will see pallets of books teachers are very excited they're not inventoried yet that will happen soon professional development has been set and scheduled and so we'll hit the ground running as soon as we can inventory things and get things in teachers hands summer work pbis the pbis committee has met multiple times and will continue to meet over the summer to establish our building goals for the 22-23 school year we've made a couple changes just to our celebrations and our framework new staff mentoring mentors and new staff have already been meeting throughout the summer looking through their handbooks and reviewing policies procedures and just the nuts and bolts of what we do master schedule a committee came together in
020june and july it's something at the intermediate school that a lot of staff really wanted us to just relook at is our master schedule we have a lot of shared staff so a lot of hours went into developing a new master schedule that will really meet the needs of our students and our staff some upcoming events as tom had mentioned during the weeks of august 1st and 8th summer school courses kindergarten through eighth grade will happen here at the intermediate school breakfast and lunch will still be served within our building here and then there will be breakfast and lunch served at leon elementary for any kids under the age of 18. intermediate school open house as tom said that's also not far away that will take place on august 24th from 3 to 4 30
021p.m we hope that all students will come meet their teacher drop off your supplies and participate in some other fun and informational items and just to highlight one of tracy's fabulous posts school supply lists are out there and available for anyone looking to get on top of it one other thing i already school shopped and i took a lot of heat for that so thank you for that um and one thing tom did mention uh district mailing will be coming out and then also between the intermediate middle and high school parents will be receiving letters coming home forward results coming home in the near near future as well otherwise that's it my first time at this welcome i'm excited to be here um i'm just going to kind of continue on i i kind of
022ditto some of the things that tom and jessica have already talked about one ela curriculum we're excited to there's things are starting to arrive and i have a lot of teachers asking about when their supplies are gonna to arrive too so they're all excited about getting started and getting going fastbridge is something that jessica and i have talked about getting our new staff that are here kind of elected to get them trained as we did last year when we started so we'll get going on that new staff mentoring is happening all over the district but for sure in our building our new staff are very already visible and and meeting with us and it's really nice to see them here and excited and getting their rooms ready our leadership team um you know a big
023wide between john and in the kitchen staff and george custodial and all of that i've been meeting with a lot of them and getting to know some of those [Music] things that are happening in the district so i'm enjoying that summer school we completed ours we had pioneer school that started on july 11th and those kids were so excited to show up every day and take off to balsam lake and and be a student as they did years ago in a one-room school house so that was really fun for the staff and the students and i just to shout out to the teachers lead home and mrs gilbertson and and they're three generations of good teachers there that are doing pioneer school and they just are loving doing that all together grandma and mom and
024daughter so that's really nice and then our referendum we're just continuing as a design team to kind of come up with our final design and and just getting the input of everybody around the district and within our building and the staff and and paris and everybody has had some say and ideas and thoughts into that so that's been really interesting to to do a good to know and so more to come on that um i think the only thing that i have on upcoming events to add to what you guys have already talked about is uh the elementary staff has been doing meet and greets with me here this last week this week and and continue on next week so that's been really fun to get to see faces and names and get to know
025what everybody's duties are and things in the district so i've been extremely enjoying to do that and then junior kindergarten is planning their upcoming orientation rescheduled this year from the spring to august 29th and 30th so we're working on that to get the details out to parents on that and again wire welcome day planned for um august 31st so lots of exciting stuff going on at the elementary be here before you know it i know right then it gets busy yes anything from you nope then we'll go to tracy come on up all right i'm here tonight to do my yearly review of emory community education and um our district communications so i'll start with uh anwary community ed we're back it was nice to have a school year that wasn't completely back to normal
026but by the end of the school year it felt more like a regular community ed program of a couple years ago so that was nice so what i want to do is just kind of go through i have a lot of numbers here sort of in a nutshell what the school year looked like so this year classes workshops events camps trips trips that were offered planned there were a total of 94. 56 of those 94 were education or enrichment classes workshops three of them were events such as prairie fire theater and the two youth rec fairs 27 fit under a category of recreation dance summer camps or any type of youth recreation camps we oversaw four open gyms so the usual weekend wreck youth basketball on sundays family open gym on sundays pickleball on wednesday
027nights adult basketball on wednesday nights and then four trips we went to frozen last fall broadway at the at the orpheum theater come from away was also a broadway show at the orpheum theater footloose at chanhassen dinner theater and wicked is next thursday i have 56 seats and a full bus and a waiting list heading to the orpheum theater next thursday afternoon for a matinee and i did that in partnership with senko falls in osceola community education because it was a summer matinee and i just didn't know how that would go and getting a smaller bus doesn't really save you money because it costs the same amount of gas to get the bus there and back you just have fewer people to help you pay for it so you go for the 56 seat bus
028and you call local community ads and then we have people who would like to be going that don't fit on the bus so that's great so we're looking forward to that and what's nice is i think that will be our first show no proof of vaccination and i don't and no one has to be masked i think we had to both froze it and come from away but even with that people still signed up people still wanted to be in the theater they wanted to go to the show it was okay so it was fun to have that to have the trips back and to move ahead with those and i have plans this year for at least three in the works so we'll see what what plays out of those 94 things that were
029planned 77 of them were completed 17 were cancelled and minimum number of participants 2 412 people served through amy community ed and that's with the plus sign because we have unknown number of people who attend events that we can't count but of those that i can count who actually registered 2 400 people so that's good people are back taking advantage of community ed using our school buildings and our resources i worked with 45 different instructors leaders supervisors and for building these hours which is always a goal of community education is to utilize our buildings after during and after school hours um i counted a minimum of 409 hours that community education was hosting something within the school buildings this school year so that was good another important piece of community education are partnerships with school
030related community related organizations and i always like to list those out because it's important to see at the end of the year who we're partnering partnering with the american red cross the aging and disability resource center of polk county and that was mostly a promotional type thing the department of natural resources premier complex gymnastics and clear lake the balsam branch partnership did a couple classes with community ed this year the golf club the senior community center and then the mental health task force of polk county and amree pupil services we hosted in partnership parent university that's actually a project of the mental health task force it's something they started last year they've done two of them the first one was at unity last fall and then they asked amy to host the spring one actually
031they went to katie johnson from our pupil services and then katie came to me and said can you help me make this happen and that's what community ad does we help make things happen so we had a great day katie worked really hard but the task force worked really hard we had 80 adults registered 48 children registered for child care and it really was a nice day we made some nice changes based on how unity did the very first one some really nice improvements and then i think this fall is osceola the goal of the task force is to host parent university twice per year and hit every school in polk county if they're willing to host it so that was really successful the next piece up there i just like to throw numbers up
032there just to show i mean i've been told since i started community ed a million years ago that i started angry community i'm sorry makes it sound like i started community ed we this year we took in sixty six thousand two hundred fifty dollars fifteen dollars in registrations and that i can count of that the expenses directly related to those classes sixty five thousand six hundred sixty three dollars so we come out a little bit ahead and that's the goal it's to break even or come out a little bit ahead if you can or to not lose a lot of money so i was happy with that and i did make some printing changes this year but it was all good and then something else that happens with community ed that i have on the
033bottom there like i said with parent university one of the goals of community ed is to make things happen so promoting school and community opportunities by working together using available resources such as our registration software social media family folders newsletters flyers website the school app whatever resources we have through community ed to help make other things happen and one of those resources and i've never talked about this and that maybe it's a good time to share this i don't know that everyone realizes so i don't even know how many years it's been since we started using the our school registered class registration software it ties into our facility scheduler and our athletic software and when we started with that piece of the software the goal was to use it for to go online with community
034ed registration so almost all of our registrations for community that are online i hardly process any checks or cash anymore very little but that the use of that software has grown district-wide quite a quite a bit and and i'm happy about that we so last summer um a group came to me when alicia munson was going to run in the olympics and said we want a big community push we want science we want banners we want shirts but we don't know how to make this happen we were able to use the software to sell those things people place orders pay online distribute the money worked great we order our staff shirts through the registration software we order online 4k through grade 8 yearbooks the intermediate square the ipo hosts the family winter ball we sold
035the number of tickets through the software for that the intermediate school walk-a-thon online they mentioned they pace and then we aren't handling all that money we used it for all of our driver's ed registration all of our summer school registration staff professional development and then things like parent university and then it ties into the athletic piece and through community education i manage the gateway that's where kind of the money goes through athletics and community ed so anyway i just wanted to point out the value of that system and how this thing that we started as this community ed piece has just grown and and using it in a lot of different ways so that's so that's very helpful so moving forward with community ed just continuing to serve the community bring back and keep doing
036what's working we have some new things in the works i'm no longer printing the large community education catalogs we're going with just one page flyers and then our email blasts family folders social media the amery free press just whatever we can to promote without spending all the money on the printing and i think that went pretty well this year i had some really good feedback so we're gonna keep doing it that way so questions on community ed do we we have a fair number of older people that participate a lot of in a lot of our community at events and so how is that going like with people that um do they have access to be able to do that online do you help them with that online if they need to like if they
037call you up and say like tracy i don't have a computer but i want to register for that do you still help with that or do we feel like we haven't lost anybody due to that or anything right i think people just expect to be able to register and pay for things online now because everyone does everywhere but i do have people who will call they might register over the phone and say well i don't want to give you my credit card i'm going to send a check that's fine i'm gonna stop and drop off cash that's fine some people prefer to do it over the phone um lots of people just do it themselves on their computer their device so yeah we still do it all sorts of different ways but i do less
038and less over the phone and less and less money when i first started doing community ad we put out the catalog and i'd come in the mail and i would have a stack of checks and i don't i really open any envelopes anymore i feel sad there's nothing in my mailbox you know not like i used to yes so other questions great job thank you thank you so district communications the other piece of my job so i have in the upper left there the goals of district communications and i thought it's kind of nice to repeat that i don't know that everybody always knows but number one first and foremost always to celebrate our students and our staff number two connecting parents and families to the schools number three connecting the community to the schools
039for building school and community pride five managing the school or the district voice brand and identity and then number six communicate in a timely and effective manner with staff parents and the public if they're important school notifications or emergencies so i was kind of trying to put summarize kind of the biggies that caught that fall under that district communications umbrella and those things are regular day-to-day things it's really important to me to try to celebrate our students and staff and their everyday activities not just the big stuff sometimes it's hard to convince teachers to share things with me that you don't have to be doing a big project in your classroom doesn't have to be huge and exciting people just like to see their kids and see that they're busy and they're happy and they're
040having having a great day so a lot of those day-to-day activities regular classroom stuff athletics this summer has been a lot of summer school things and then working a lot with um other departments for example like last week josh gange called me the house is that house number four is done says i have my pictures of the house or you can get pictures i have my kids whatever we need to thank people we need to share this we need to put it out there so then sitting down and putting all that graphic together and sharing and so a lot of that type of stuff and then special projects a big part of this year was referendum referendum flyers postcards videos social media posts websites um crisis communication so a lot of things fall under those
041um those six goals and then um i thought it would be good just to sort of list because by showing you all the you know how we make these happen or make these things happen sort of helps to um i guess summarize what's happening and happening in my office so how do we execute these things the district website which um you know is i suppose about a year old with our rollout now pretty much entirely accessible responsive to all sorts of different devices using our district app heavily using our district app i'm overseeing the bright arrow voice text and email notification system using switcher studio for live streaming and then all of our social media sites the facebook the school facebook the we are amy facebook instagram twitter youtube still doing three district newsletters per
042school year and you can see the cover of the three that we did this year and i'm assuming that would be our plan again unless i hear differently but one will use will come out the end of october and then february and then late may into early june and then the district calendar is in the works as well our artwork calendar that everyone always looks forward to which is nice to hand out to free to everyone it's a great way to get the school into everyone's homes and show them what our what our kids are doing our digital marquees the signs you may have seen that one of them is turned off right now we're waiting for a part but i do all the programming on those and then the last category i put up
043there is just video recording the live streaming the editing publishing that's something that just continues to grow and grow or it has and maybe now we're finally to a to a place where we kind of know where we're going with that and what we say no to and what we record in live stream but i'm really proud of that is the newest thing we're doing i think um amrey amry schools we're aiming the network i really think we've set the bar high as far as our videos i get calls and things all the time from people from other athletic events and they ask how did you do that why does that sound so good why does it look so good what i mean in fact that the man who is in charge of the vr
044network has called me as well and said how did you do that um so i'm really proud of the things that we've been able to figure out we are able to stream to multiple facebook pages as well as our school youtube now we're using multiple cameras we really have put a major focus on our audio because video is only as good as the audio you can have a great video but if no one's talking and saying anything it really is not interesting to watch so we've really stepped up our audio and then i kind of listed some of the big things so athletic events we covered 52 live streamed 52 athletic events through we are amy the we are network 51 of those were home one was away the away was um i went to
045do the it was wrestling conference in osceola because the we are osceola man had said he would do it but he really didn't know how to cover a couple mats and whatever so i grabbed all our equipment head over headed over and spent the day with him we did a live stream and recording of mary poppins the musical last fall we did the community memorial day program the high school veterans day program class of 22 senior walk was a live stream but it's a video we put out that same day graduation ceremony was a live stream we did some referee referendum informational videos we do state send off live streams we made videos for the division we had two division one signing ceremonies for students this school year and then we continue to record and
046put out our music concerts but the music concerts are done by bob johnson who we are very thankful to him have him as a volunteer who enjoys doing those and then our board of education meetings with our superstar andrea behind the camera over there and we're really able to make this happen lots and lots of planning rit is really supportive i know i talked to some people who other schools who will ask how do you do this stuff and i say well we do you know it does this for me they give me my my ethernet or we knew for wresting sections we're gonna have a thousand people in the gym we couldn't have a thousand people on wi-fi and put out a stream so they throttled on wi-fi um but clint and lonnie and
047harley are excellent about helping us to make things happen and they do a great job we have great announcers and then i have a student who's been working he actually works for the we are network but he works with me he'll be a senior this year and he um he's excellent he just loves live streaming he's at every single event his name is gabe grasski he'll be a senior i don't know what i'm going to do when he's gone but he um he's really helped us step it up and then i put on the left over there a screenshot from our wrestling sectional live stream because i'm pretty proud of that um and can honestly say i'm pretty sure we put out the best wrestling live stream in the state of wisconsin and probably the
048best rest better than any regional better than any conference live stream in the state of wisconsin we had six cameras we covered three mats we covered three clocks um it went on for eight hours actually eight hours split into two each of those videos had over 3 000 views um and we did get calls from all over the place people wondering how we did that great job best wrestling people from were calling us during live streams of their sectionals and and wondering actually were complaining to their sectional livestream is that they weren't doing what we were doing i mean that's why i wanted to say it anyway give them the secret sign but anyway i'm just really proud of that that day was sort of like this pinnacle of what we were able to do
049and with live streaming you constantly their glitch is there things happen things that happen and you have no idea why just the internet just decides it's not going to work for you or everything's working and it just stops and you never know why and on that day for eight hours nothing glitched all day long i think i held my breath when you tell thousands of people to watch you and then you know they're watching it's it's a little yeah it makes for a long day but it was perfect it was absolutely perfect so anyway with district communications we're just going to keep on reaching sharing doing what we have to do our facebook school facebook page has exceeded 5 000 followers instagram over 1600 twitter is almost at 700 youtube we have almost 4 000
050subscribers our district newsletter goes into over 7 000 mailboxes three times a year when we did our school perception survey last fall we asked those taking the survey how you want to receive school and district information the top four district newsletters the free press the school website and social media so we'll just keep pushing those things with the goal being share the success of our students and our staff and let people know that we're here and what we're doing so questions you do a fabulous job so thank you for all your work we're very fortunate to have you here and at this element yes that's great thank you this is a huge huge undertaking that i mean obviously you've just shared a little bit of how you know what this is and that was 15
051minutes um so like the time that you were at school and the time that you're doing other stuff it's crazy amount and you've just done like i can tell the pride in your voice of what you've done and you've really done an amazing job and the celebrating the students on social media and like all of the small things that they do during the day it's awesome you know some of us don't have little kids anymore and it's nice to see what's going on in the elementary school like just day to day you know they're out doing a picnic or they're out on a walk or they're just doing a project in school especially for us as board members to stay connected you like that is a huge plus for us as board members to stay
052connected to what's going on in the school and you only have so much time to tell us what's going on and so it's you've just been fabulous like what you've done is fabulous and i have a i have a solution so what you do when your kid graduates is you this year you have an apprentice coming up so that he can teach him everything so you can replace him there's your solution i need to start looking early i do i absolutely need to do that i do and the other and have him give him a couple of incompletes yeah we'll start on that early because he's going to be very difficult to replace and what's neat a victory for me is he started talking about his career and he wants to now do some things
053like cameras live streaming i'm like i want to see you someday out on the nba court with all those great big cameras on your shoulder and you're going to be doing something really cool and he's like yeah it's going to happen and he started with ipads at emory high school yeah yeah because the opportunity that you know like you provided him in a real world situation which is exactly where the job market is going and so you find an apprentice that's a sophomore or junior because there's tons of kids that are interested in doing it help me find that kid i'll try it i'll look i'll with that we'll move on to our informational items okay we'll do a presentation on our book rating system okay the book rating system hey sean can i introduce
054this yeah right all right i just wanted to give a quick introduction of really why i asked this to be on the agenda and i appreciate it being put there in the time that we're having the opportunity to discuss this tonight and i really wanted to make and challenge us to adjust our goals with this to be about education and knowledge tonight because i mean even in our openness or public comment tonight you can see that there is a significant divide on this and i think there is so much room to discuss in between people calling one side nazis and banning books and then also harming children on the other side there's a ton of discussion to happen in the middle here and i hope that our goal is you know i took i took
055hours if not days of trying to learn about this topic and i would love i would love to have people communicate with each other i reached out to sean i reached out to char i reached out to greta and i had an opportunity to learn and listen to them and even though it may not be of my opinion i value their opinion and that's what i think we need to come to because i've seen this you know researching this be an absolute train wreck on youtube videos and i would really like it to make it so tracy doesn't have to silence anyone i would really like to start at a low standard of just trying to better our position currently um and i really hope that again the other thing is is at no point
056in time will i ever be discriminatory towards any lgbtqia plus folks this is about on the other end side of that it's about sexually explicit conduct content and profane content that's really what i wanted to be based around okay thank you all right well there are really two halves to the presentation our media specialist annie brayton and greta mccarty are going to walk us through the first it's about seven or eight slides so if you two ladies could come up this is something you've seen before literally verbatim with the addition of one slide some six eight months ago and then the second half of the presentation um is information that these two ladies provided to me in regards to information from wsdlc in checkout rates and percentages of books uh in our libraries or not
057in our library so i'm going to turn over to the two of you to walk us through the first part so go ahead okay well thank you for having us tonight as sean said we did a little presentation very similar to this in the fall but we are happy to be back and have more discussion we agree with what your statement was so i'm annie brayton and this is greta mccarty and we put together this slideshow starting out with our statement of purpose and the mission of the library media program and you can read what it is i don't need to read it to you but it's really important to us that we have a mission statement that is for our students and for our staff and trying to support them and their successes not
058just in math not just in social studies in reading but in life and so that is our mission statement so this slide just shows the future ready libraries framework that we go by when we're building library programs and the standards that we that our positions fall under and the standards that we bring into the library for our students and kind of the core areas are that we are there to empower learners to cultivate collaborative culture and provide equitable learning through a variety of different means this is our collection development guidelines and principles this is a short a shorter synopsis we have a longer written development guidelines that you can find on the website linked on the website as well but it just goes over what we do and why we how we provide what we
059provide we want to provide a relevant and up-to-date collection we want to provide materials on various sides of topics we want to provide representative materials and provide a comprehensive collection appropriate to the school community you can move the podium up if you want so it's something to kind of add to the guidelines we go by and the policies that we follow when we're selecting resources something that we actually brought in when we became librarians in this district was that we certainly follow the board policies that go along with selecting materials for our libraries but we've also brought in additional guidelines that we follow as well as librarians that kind of tightened up how we select books in our library and how we're rearranging the books that have been previously selected in our libraries as well
060we certainly look towards professional reviews we seek out a lot of different resources online but part of the things that we brought in when we came is that we really wanted to make sure that we're selecting books with an age-appropriate content in each building and so we've been doing a lot of adjusting our collections and and abiding by some additional guidelines that we've selected for our libraries to make sure that all the the reviews that we're finding or multiple reviews that we're finding say that they are age for ever the grade levels within our building and if it's only uh appropriate as indicated by publishers or by professional reviews for one grade level in that building then we push it up to the next grade level so so we have brought in some additional guidelines
061that have allowed us to to kind of curate our collections and change our collections and it's a work in progress it's something we're continuing to do and continuing to re-evaluate books all the time keeping in mind that what publishers what professional review sources what we as librarians what teachers what students believe there's a vast array of opinions around that topic so we bring in as many sources as we can to make the best decision that we can one of the sources that we like to use is common sense media which you know the the resources that you guys provided at the last board meeting is similar to a resource where parents and students and teachers and the common sense organization provide reviews that allow everyone to have voice on that site to tell them you
062know what type of content is in the book and what age appropriate you know level they think it should be at and so adding to that site and putting those reviews and that information into those places where every librarian and every teacher can access that those are the sources they're looking for so we can get multiple people's perspective because it's a hard thing to you know to have to make sure every book we can't make sure every book fits every student in the library not all book is for every student but we go by um you know the the most resources that we can to make those selections so as we're working on making our selections and looking through what we are going to purchase we also go through and do a weeding and re-evaluating
063of materials and this again is an ongoing process just like the purchasing of books so we try to do it once a year at least to go through and look through what we have and what we no longer need and it's based on things like appearance if a book is no longer in good shape i have one that just got returned to my desk and like that one is falling apart i don't think i can tape it the fifth time so appearance would be a reason why we would get rid of it if we have multiple copies of a book sometimes we purchase them for different reading incentives or things like that and we'll get multiple copies if we don't need them we will read them and then we also look at the content so
064if it has poor content if it's out of date if it didn't meet the requirements of our selection policy now if it's a book we wouldn't purchase today it's a book that we need to weed and so those are some of the things a few of the things that we look at when we are going through our weeding and reevaluating process i can take this one this is a slide that is from the wsdlc correspondents from their board of directors provided to us back in february the selection guidelines at wsdlc which is a consortium we'll talk a little bit more about here in a few minutes their position is ground in administrative code which is wisconsin state statute and it states the wisconsin state legislature requires school district library media services too in the bold
065and quoted part is straight from wisconsin administrative code provide library facilities within the school building and make reference to all people's a current balanced collection of books basic reference materials text periodicals and audio visual materials which depicts in an accurate and unbiased way the cultural diversity and pluralistic nature of american society so their selection guidelines aren't arbitrary and ours certainly aren't either and then i'll turn it back to you uh so the destiny discover library catalog is our catalog that it's an online catalog that contains the books that we have in our physical collection so students and teachers can look up the books that we have there it does also contain links to ebooks that we have in our soraa collection as well students in grades 3 through 12 are taught how to use this
066online catalog so as good as stated it also houses our ebook collection so you can find books that are part of our e-book collection on there so sora and overdrive are the same um that's how they access the e-books and we subscribe to wsdla which is a wisconsin online consortium these books the best way i can describe it it's like a magazine subscription you subscribe to it so whatever is in that magazine is what you get um we can't say please don't have page two in the magazine subscription so everything in their online collection is a book is books that are available according to age groups so if a student logs on and they see an e-book on there if it's geared towards their age group they can check it out and read it as
067an e-book only our third through twelfth graders again access destiny so they also access this through that that program as well did that make sense to make subscription any questions for these ladies before i proceed on and use them as a resource as we move on so questions that you might have for grabs and this is this uh catalog this is the one there's what approximately forty thousand books or something right uh so this catalog yes it's an ever growing catalog um so it's sixty six thousand three twenty three it's on the next slide i didn't have that memorized okay it's grown over the last time we've discussed it okay and only our third through twelfth graders can access that to them or well if if our kindergarten and second grade did have a destiny
068login and logged into destiny they could check out age-appropriate books for themselves as well we just don't teach it it's kind of a complicated process and right we would really really rather have them have a real book in their hands than anything like that so they don't have a login they can't access the they can't look at a title to see it to read it to even though they can't check it out because they can't check it out they can't even get into it they can't even see it right i've given that information okay okay if you could stay there because you're certainly the experts in room not me wsdlc for those who don't know what this acronym stands for because obviously education is chock full of them wisconsin schools digital library consortium so it's
069a consortium which is a shared collection of audio ebooks digital magazines with participating schools school districts and individuals there are sixty six thousand three hundred and twenty three books that our kids have access to it is a shared digital collection for all students and it's ground in administrative code and lastly it's curated by library licensed library media specialists so we already did that slide so let's move on to the next one it is broken into three levels as you saw in our previous slide elementary school kids this is wsdla sdlc language as you just heard the conversation it's ultimately not elementary that we use it for here it's intermediate and then middle and then high school access to each co each collection is limited by content access levels which are put in place when members
070join so perhaps you could talk about that just for a moment how does a book become just a book for high school kids i guess that's a sort of a hypothetical question how would that happen well when the the overdrive or wsdlc librarians are selecting it they're the ones who select the content access level that the book goes into so it's not something that we get to choose on our end but it's something that the collection decides it is something that because um there have been a lot of concerned you know librarians with um the lack of content access levels and that we'd like to fine-tune the ability to target appropriate books for different grade levels a little a little more than they have here so that's one of their top priorities this next year
071is to create more content access levels to really kind of section those age-appropriate books out to the different students so that's something that um while they have it set up this way they're going to continue to work on improving that and that's one of their big priorities so you're saying like you would be able to separate maybe like this book is grade nine through up this book is only 11 and 12. is that what you're saying they're going to add more content access levels yeah more categories right yes any idea the timeline on that kind of a change they said they didn't have a timeline but that it was one of their top priorities okay and they're working with um wsdlc is working with overdrive to create that more to follow the adding and removing
072of wsdlc books the collection development decisions are made by wsdlc the works are selected by their selection advisory committee and lastly the collection is reviewed annually to determine areas of need and what needs to be removed probably on a much larger scale what we do here if it isn't in circulation they probably move it on and they don't have it as circulation this last year greta shared with me there were some 4 000 books that were added now don't lose sight of our kids having access to 4 000 new books when we subscribe to the wsdlc having access to six thousand books those four thousand books are not books we have to purchase for us to purchase four thousand books is over a hundred thousand dollars we don't have to do that being part of
073this consortium big districts and i've talked to some of them they do that they curate their own but they have the cash flow to do that we don't so that's the process for adding and removing books and i'm going to periodically ask if there are questions because i don't want you to sit in silence and wait till the end of the whole thing you might forget your thought at that point so any questions thus far on wsdlc stuff how much do we pay for to be a member of this we pay 1 250 per year are there different uh package levels uh they're based on school size or you know what i mean there is based on school size we we pay for our school size yes be at sorry well i would say that
074seems like a pretty minimal fee for access to 66 000 plus books it's been an incredible savings for us when it comes to book studies in classrooms when we need multiple copies of books and when lots of kids in high level classes or kids who are struggling to read a book when they need audio books audio books are extremely expensive they're 90 75 a copy and that's where this system has saved us a lot of money by helping large amounts of classroom copies um in those situations audiobooks are 90 percent many of them are yeah 70 they typically range 60 to 90. i've seen some over 100 dollars in one copy and the reason we would use audiobooks for kids obviously would be for reading struggles or learning disabilities learning deficits um visual issues that
075would impair them to to read ease of being able to access books without physically reading them but listening to them those kind of things is there are those are kind of the highlights of why we see ebooks being checked out well though some of those mandates are in ieps where we're obligated to provide them because that's the least restrictive environment for a particular kid that is on an iep the adding and removing the wsdlc books i think we walk through all of that so let's move on district availability we are one of approximately 220 wisconsin school districts titles are not permitted to be added or removed by individual school districts so we don't have the ability to say book x i would like not to be available to our kids the level is determined by
076wsdlc but we can't tell them this one's in and this one's out in order to deny access to the wsdlc for students in memory of the district we need to opt out of the consortium opting out of the consortium you're opting out of sixty 60 thousand plus books so it's either you're all in or you're all out in regards to the online service that is wsdlc and i'll turn it over to you for questions again if you haven't is is overdrive like is that also in partnering with public libraries yeah so overdrive is the main company that sells ebooks and audio books and so they do that to schools they do that to public libraries anyone else who wants to go through them and then wsdlc is the wisconsin consortium that said we will purchase
077books for libraries share it at a cost that that schools can you know can afford and then sora is just the platform we use to check them out lots of words describe it i would say i think that's kind of some of the frustration on on one side is is again we're talking about a sliver of our problems and but let's just say out of 66 000 books we have a hundred that are going that are and what i've learned from char and from greta is we all have our differences of where we draw the line you know where i draw the line is different from where you will draw the line also with you sean and that's where i think it's it's all i i'll be honest i i dislike the idea of that
078it has to be this all or nothing um it's like again i would question the absolute ability to have to look at every single book for a rating system when when you just couldn't physically do it you just could not do it but again let's just say there's a hundred of them that are just absolute you know pedophile stuff and grooming material and just the worst of what you could think of to read we're still going to go with it because it's it's the better deal to get 66 000 other books and it's just really difficult for me to swallow so one thing i would add to that if i may um is that you know we certainly share the same concerns with you about that we want to be providing appropriate content for our
079students the one thing that wsdlc does that we do as well for our libraries is they provide a request for reconsideration so any anyone can fill out a request for reconsideration on books that you don't feel are appropriate and they'll go through the process of reviewing that material so there there are well you know it that process certainly takes time there are actions that we can take with that system to help influence the collection that they're building do you know do you know who's on this uh team this wsdlc team that goes over and decides that they're going to go who's on their selection committee if you will yes sir they have a board that that discusses these and then i'm sure the librarians who are selecting it will be in on that discussion as
080well i mean if you want me to provide you with their names i certainly can but i can't are they all just librarians then according to the material they provided us yes they are library media specialists yes so the wsdlc philosophy and parental choice is and these are their words wsdlc maintains that while students and their families can make choices about materials for themselves these choices cannot be made for others so parents have the ability to see what books the students are accessing on each through the electronic library well we don't hand out the login information to the parents they have every right to ask the student or to ask them to see their account so it's more through communication and asking but we don't provide account logins for it they're using what a a
081computer or ipad or whatever to read this so there the parents would be able to view what the students are looking at and reading at that that point yes okay sure did did you say maybe i should know this being in law enforcement but 15 and a half years old there's legislation that really parents for medical information yeah so you cannot i believe in the state of wisconsin you cannot access your child's medical information past i believe it's 15 and a half or maybe it's just 15 but even though you you know may take care of their health insurance and pay their bills they are um they are their own [Music] autonomous person to make their own medical decisions yes i could not access my son's um surgical records or anything without him signing off
082on that and he was he was 15. so but thank you your student can sign off on it or give you permission and then you can access their medical records is that right yeah if they sign if they signed off yes for yes just like if i was a husband or wife or a power of attorney or somebody that you just wanted to like i do for my parents they you know sign off and then i am able to access that yes but yes so i i'm i think joe is kind of referencing a conversation that we've had about um parents being warned or told that your child is checking out a certain content but we there are legal avenues that we must follow to not disclose what your children are checking out unless those
083things happen and i don't know the i'm not a lawyer i'm not the ins and outs of that would be for our legal to confer with but yes i think it was just kind of a casual conversation of we would follow the law based on that so i think we're just kind of kicking around some ideas yeah i agree you know that relationship with our children has to be absolutely you know parabolas okay the there is a process of reconsideration through wsdlc that greta referenced a little bit ago uh individuals wanted to communicate their concerns about specific material there is a process to do so you simply submit your request and the wsdlc considers that request and lets you know what the outcome is in that regard i don't know of anyone that has made
084that took this opportunity available themselves of this opportunity went through the reconsideration process no one's communicating that with me in the next slide i can share with you what book challenges have occurred and how this sort of interplays the last slide with this slide so there are three books that have been challenged over the course of time here most back uh at the tail end of 21 into the early part of 22. me earl and the dying girl was challenged on three different occasions that went through our policy 871 which you'll see here in a few minutes and a book committee reviewed that greta was on that team heidi was on that team i was on that team josh gould a variety of other shah was on that team here and was on that team
085a variety of folks look at looked at that book and had that conversation two other books the haters in this book is gay both were challenged at the beginning of the tale end of 21 neither of those books are available physically here both of those books are wsdlc books and to my knowledge those requests or those reconsideration was not made with wsdlc please note that none of the books that have been that are on this list are required reading for any kid at any point during their uh tenure as an emory student the next slide and then i'll turn it over to you for questions gives you a snapshot of checkout me earl and the dying girl has technically been checked out 21 total time since 2012 but three of those were staff uh that
086checked the book out in order to read it for the review uh so 18 total times since 12 and then the haters in this book is gay has never been accessed since it's been available in 2018. so two of the three books uh that were challenged have never been read by an amory kid so questions that you might have at least through our school district correct we don't know if they access them elsewhere that is entirely possible um how do we decide to form a committee on this how do we decide to form a committee out what are you referring to for the book reviews who makes that decision i'm the one that makes that decision via policy 871 to jump ahead the steps in that process are to make your uh your concerns known
087to the library media specialist and the building principle in this case it was high school so it was greta mccarty and josh gould they make a recommendation to me and then at that point i established a committee and within 30 days of that request being made to reconsider a committee needs to meet in order to decide what they want to do and then a response is given to the complainant i guess would be the way to say it and then at that point the complainant has 10 days to petition that decision and there are other steps in the process after that but that is pretty much the end of that process i hope i answered your question i think i did so you i mean the way that you formed the committee was you asked
088greta as philip well to me the most obvious people would would certainly be the people that live this world and greta is the library media specialist josh gould's literally on his first step so he needs to be involved in the process heidi williamson's in the high school library it makes sense for her to be a part of that process there are two board members can't have more than two and that that would be a quorum myself i said very little on that day i'm supposed to be getting a recommendation from all of you and then authoring the response for a couple of teachers a couple of teachers mike bensley was in the room and lisa rilos and rumble teach english at the high school so they all read and reviewed me earl and the dying
089girl did we so those are the check out statistics for the challenge books the next slide are the checkout statistics for the books that you receive excerpts from the excerpts there were 16 total books that were exerted meaning there was a selection from the book that was tran that was printed copied whatever whatever you want to say and then distribute it to you or sent to you via email of those 16 books the first six you'll see those titles there i'm not going to read it to you because you certainly can see it for yourself none of those six books are have ever been a title that's been given access to our kids they simply don't exist as a hard copy or as an e-book in the school district of america so they're not available
090they're not available at all they don't they literally just don't exist uh the seventh is a book that's lost the implicit there is someone checked it out at some point in time and where it is now we do not know so that one is obviously not available and then the remaining again there were 16 the remaining nine books have been checked out a total of 12 times since 2016. so in summary you get 18 books that are exerted six of which um have no you have no access to one of which is lost and the other nine have been checked out twelve times none of the books on this list that were exerted none of them are required reading for any emory kid at any time questions about the statistics about book excerpts be happy
091to try and help if i can i think the email that the board members received after the meeting of last month so we received the packet last month um from stephanie jansen and then um she also sent an email i believe several more books that i don't think were i worked from the 281 page email which had 18 books that were exerted but i mean i guess you know you can keep coming up with lists and ask you know and ask are these available on the wlsd are these available in artists hard copies you know it seemed like there were more books but um in email but yeah so further statistics and i'm getting very close to the end here in the books in the ratings proposal presented last month there were three levels of
092books level threes level fours and level fives you'll see the breakdown of whether they're hard copy an ebook and how often or how many of them uh how many checkouts have occurred occurred since 1999 in the case of um the hard copy books and that goes back to 1999 because of slaughterhouse five most of the books is since 2010. in the e-book since 2018 because that's when the system came to be and more so in the fall of 2018 from what i understand via greta so the total number of books you'll see there again the level three four and five books not a single one of the books listed is a required reading for any kid so the books in the proposal versus the total number of checkouts that have occurred in the district you'll
093see here so the books in the proposal there were 88 total books that were level 3 level 4 level 5 and also some that were unrated and some that were twos and ones there are 679 total books in that proposal the total number of checkouts since 2012 has been 623 000 plus the percentage of these books that uh the percentage of hard hard copy books checked out from that list of 88 of all checkouts is 0.11 of 1 of all checkouts in ebooks you'll see the numbers there 183 and 11 577. that's 1.58 percent of all checkouts so to your point joe from a few minutes ago is it a small sliver of the total number of books by these numbers it wouldn't it would indicate it is a small sliver and then of the
094overall number of books the 862 and 634 700 that's 0.141 again none of the books that are on this list are required reading for any kid in the emory school system could you tell me again repeat that did you say that the ones that were level like two or one or zero are included in these they are checked out okay the two won and there was no rating i think is what it was titled yeah just listed okay so access to books in a general sense if you're not getting a book through the school district of amory again there are 88 books 66 of the 88 books are available at the am republic library and all 88 of these books are available on your reading apps such as kindle when i did the reading of
095the haters i didn't go on the online system i just downloaded it on my kindle and read it there it was more convenient for me to do that i'm sure others do the same type of thing so that's the accessibility and i just have two slides left and then i'll turn it over to all of you policy 871 in short form there are really four bulleted points here first delegates it delegates responsibility of selecting instructional materials to those who are professionally trained to make such decisions these are our two media specialists here are those individuals provides a form for citizens requests for reconsideration that's that's been people have availed themselves of that option in the past establishes procedures for processing and responding to those complaints it's a i think a six or seven step process
096and lastly provides for the appointment of a special review committee committee which i've made reference to and to respond in a timely fashion which is in essence 30 days and i think that's the last slide other than the questions slide or comments or however you want to proceed and thank you for your patience with all of that info questions [Music] i mean i just think you know there's definitely things that you know i don't want to read or that i would not like not like my kids to read um but i mean i remember as a kid picking up books at the public library and you know checking them out starting to read them you know i was a teenager and my parents couldn't read all the books or you know and starting to read
097a book and going uh yeah this is not something i want to read and you know returning it so um so i think you know having those conversations with our kids because because again like we can't read everything i mean it's easier when they're kindergarten first grade you can read all the books but as they get older you don't have the time and the ability to read everything they're reading and so to have those conversations with your kids and you know to be you know encouraging parents to you know be talking to your kids about what you know what you would like what you expect from them or what you would like them to be considering as they're checking out books and stuff and you know kind of what your expectations are and and what
098you hope that they are taking into consideration as they're reading books um and again you know the threshold of what things are disturbing i noticed that you know the one book that we have in hard copy um that people have checked out is that book sold which i don't know a lot about but just looking at some of the materials is um about you know a girl that is sold in a in a foreign country um as the sex slave and um and i think you know based on the descriptions that i've read a lot of that is sad but true um and it's not you know it's not necessarily meant to i don't i guess you know and again i have an easier time reading something than watching it personally i can read about
099the holocaust there's certain movies and things that i cannot watch because it affects me too much to watch it and i can read about it so that but other people might have different you know different things um and different ways that they process and things that they can handle and things that they can't handle um but you know just talking with our kids and knowing those kinds of things and i think also you know the public library the public library has all kinds of books that i don't want to check out i don't want my kids to check out that doesn't mean i don't go to the public library i still take my kids to the public library you know and i encourage them to check out books and we go to their programs and
100we subscribe to their you know cards and everything else so i guess i i kind of think of that as far as that this consortium that we're part of you know we have access to all these books that doesn't mean that you know we check them all out or that we you know read them why the i mean from each one it goes from being able to audit it less and and again we're not you know we're not up here being the board of the public library or up here being the support of the school district right um and again like you're right the the one thing to on the on the website is is really you can pick three different options discovery the the second one is the overdriver sora and the third link
101is to the public library so i mean there's really no stopping by clicking number three right we have real control yeah you could take that link up but i think they know where the public library right that's what yeah you just yeah and we're we're smart enough to get it on the internet but i just that's where again you know it was there i think that you know my specific concern is is and especially when i read some of the content in these books and and where schar and greta really hit this on is again you have to look at the overall book right you have to look at the overall picture and it's really difficult but when i see the content of this book is absolute filth and profane and and i'm just going
102boy i wish the publishers or the author would have taken care of this i could never submit it to college educate you know i could have never submitted an essay in college like that you know i can't go in the i can't go into dick's market and read the stuff out loud without being arrested but yet we're providing access to our children to see this stuff and and that's where i'm having this dilemma and and again i i don't think that's why i don't have the answer i don't have a solution i was just hoping that we could look at this see if our policy is still legitimate and worthy and and also to let people know again i'm just a different perspective like i am concerned with where where we're going in society you
103know what we're you know i'm concerned about the welfare of our kids um it just may be a little bit different than the other person so i'm just trying to find a happy place here and and again like i i wanted the goal of this just to be to talk about knowledge and communication someone else's perspective rather than this is how i see it and if it's going to be my way or the highway we're not going to move you know because i can play that defense all day you know char and i don't have to get together at all we can both play that defense if we just want to be in the defense but if we're willing to listen that's where i'm going okay so um you know greta i have absolute trust
104in you to do the right thing and but then again it's like so then we get lower and then we have the 66 000 books or nothing it makes me feel like i'm being held hostage to something i just don't like the way it tastes and then and then now we're also going to say well let's be truthful keith's right if they just have a phone or again given to them by their parents or whatever they have full access to library materials and and then um and i think it's already interrupt but my materials is kind of like the small portion of what they can access when they get a computer there's no there's no stopping what they can access from video games to designs to make products that are harmful to pornography to everything
105it's just it's wide open well let's just clarify school district computers can't access a lot of that stuff well because they're they kind of can't but we try our best to block him right i mean obviously there are smart children we can put up a firewall and it takes some minutes and they're around it yeah we do our best right have access but i don't know you know and three in our family are really readers absolutely it's kind of like that and and i think the more that you read you're more discerning about what you read and and i don't you know if you're going to pick up a book like that i don't know if that's going to be a real reader person they're just going to try and find the spot in the
106book that they want to read and you know and i don't know that that's helpful or anything like that you know i mean we still want as in elementary we still want those kids to pick up those books and just read about it you know i know one of the books here a while ago was captain underpants well my son read them all the time and i asked him i said well did you know about you know the reference he looked me like no he didn't you know he just reads books at that time so it wasn't something that oh this is what's going on you know credit could you talk to me talk to us a little bit about the uh the partnership that you would like to have with your teachers in the
107schools for their own media libraries or whatnot yeah well when annie and i brought um kind of our our guidelines for our selection policy to the administrative team a while ago we also included documents in there that guided teachers on the selection policy or on selection guidelines for their classroom materials as well that had them think through lots of different steps and review sources and and you know kind of document age-appropriate content and if there were concerns that you know we have documents that have walked them through the steps to document concerns communicate that with the administrators concerns on that if if a student or parent there might be questionable content because it's tough a tough topic that would be brought into the classroom that there's a process for them to think through and evaluate
108and discuss with their team and discuss with their administrators before bringing it into the classroom so we've created documents to help guide teachers in that process and have you know communicated those with the english teachers for sure and it's something we'd like to see continue to be used i don't know if you know this but what is the process for if an english teacher or history or you know whatever for that matter wants to have a book be you know i mean i want this to be part of the curriculum this year and i want this to be required reading well the curriculum coordinator is the one that would respond to that but the first port of entry is the building principle in the actual department in which that teacher works english in this case
109so all curriculum runs through your department first then it runs through building principle then administrative team and then curriculum oversight so through those four channels is how you make a book required there are some books here that are required for english 10 since the dawn of time says some of you were in english town way back when um and some are newer because they weren't around way back when so yeah there's a process for that it isn't arbitrary by any means i i was talking to joe about um he come to a board meeting last year and had voiced some concerns about a book that he had and thought that maybe that it had contained some anti-police rhetoric and the conversation that i had with joe was that he read the book and he's a
110police officer and so he's looking at that book through the lens of a police officer so his experiences and what he does for a living is going to shape the way that he sees that book versus somebody else who isn't a police officer reading that book but maybe has had an experience or an encounter not only with law enforcement or somebody that has that they've known that's had that encounter or things that they hear on the news or see um and they're going to look at it through another lens and people that have never had that encounter at all with any kind of law enforcement or have been heard of it is going to look at that book through another lens and to me though the purposes of those books especially used if those books
111are used in a classroom setting is that is really the only true way that anybody has an idea of looking at a situation through another lens that they haven't personally experienced because our own personal experiences will undoubtedly lead to any kind of bias and shape the way that we see things and then when we come together and we talk about those things especially here in an educational setting like we're talking about that is when the true education process happens and i think that's really what um you know we'd like to see the focus on is seeing the educational value now you might think like some of these books are complete filth one person's filth might be somebody else's actual lived experience so somebody that reads a book about rape and it's graphic and i looked
112at the use of profanity and why writers use profanity in their writing and it's because sometimes you can't get the point across to enhance what is happening in a way that could never be shared otherwise so somebody who has had the experience of going through a rape or somebody who's being sold into sex trafficking and if we think that it doesn't happen here in our own town you don't have to be transported to a different country or a different city for our kids to be experiencing that sometimes those books are triggering and those people can't read those books but sometimes they're therapeutic and those kids need those books and i will say that those books um are books that you can either lose yourself in or you can find yourself in um if i went
113to the grocery store and i stood in the middle of dick's market i probably wouldn't be arrested for reading the book i would probably be asked to leave but that's not an educational setting so for me at the end of the day these books are at some point an educational value to somebody um and i guess that's for me at the end of the day when i was asked to um be on this committee and to look at the material um that's that's i have went back and forth like joe said and it's a different perspective but i think it's really we all have the same perspective and the same goal or we won't be sitting here and it's really to that we do have concerns for our kids and we want what's best for
114kids not just our kids but everybody's and that's kind of where i've come from um but i guess you know we could we could talk about why and the and what we're what we're looking at and we could talk about these books all day but i guess at the end of the day joe asked for this to be put on the agenda and i think your opening discussion point was to get to the low standard of improving what our system is so did you have something that you had in mind that would improve what the current system is well i think i think uh some parental advice on a committee would be amazing on what committee on on a committee of review of books that want to be reviewed for content and whatnot um mean
115i i guess i don't know i i would like to see more well-rounded committee i guess and like so what do you mean by like well well-run so parent involvement so what like how many parents or what who would those parents be or what would that selection process look like yeah i just want to know if it's up for up for discussion first i think anything's up for discussion i mean that's kind of what this this was about i mean i assumed this is kind of our discussion and i i would think this is what you've asked to be to be put on and that's kind of what you said is that this was improving our system and i just want to know what does that look like to you knowing that now you've sat
116through this um now you have the materials of what this looks like so do you have what you want to see happen or is it something that you just kind of need to think about yet or uh no i i mean i just i think i think some at some point we this isn't me we need to i think we need to discuss who we want on this committee because because again i see just education folks on it and i don't i don't see another perspective i guess so on that other perspective but again do i have the time i mean how many hours did it take you to review one book well i'm a slow reader so it took me a couple of nights of reading so again but i guarantee you there would
117be parents willing to volunteer to assist in this and provide i mean just some first respectful respectful respectful um critique or knowledge of how they feel it should be uh should stay or go so you're saying you're gonna some we're going to take a list of books that you're thinking i think this is just for the i think i think if it's challenged so then that's the criteria it isn't like we're just going to start no i don't want this to be another dr seuss this is just the committee that you're talking about that is for you when the book is well i think what you're what you're suggesting is altering policy 871 the composition of the committee itself would be where they in what you're referencing that would be the in who's on that
118committee because it spells out who's on the committee right maybe actual copy of 871 i think is in front of you right you would actually change that verbage if you will what what where is that well it's on the steps for handling public complaints about instructional materials so it's page two sorry so number three a school building media specialist building principal that whole yeah list so what you're talking about there though is actually updating that list to include parents well it does doesn't matter what the last one is yeah yeah so i mean it's there any other person such as a student of parent guardian who might bring particular knowledge and competencies to bear on the specific complaint right so is that in regards to future challenges or is in that regards the introduction of
119new books say for instance new books in 2223 because that's an undertaking and then some to get all those books greta do you need that help would you need that help if we wanted to audit our system so that we can never provide harm to our children do do we need that help joe i wish there was a system where i could say that everything i go through and all the research we do to select books will make sure no harmful content or explicit content is available in there but we can go through hours and hours of research on the book and that's why and then not understand all the content that's in there that's why some of the information that's provided is really valuable to us because that helps us reevaluate books that we
120may have or books that we might look at purchasing in the future so having that information out in a place where people can access that is really valuable to us so we do our due diligence and lots of research to to review the books before they come if we find that parents or students or we have concerns about content that are in books that we've purchased or are in our library we continue to reevaluate that and and annie and i would both love to have conversations with parents with students with teachers who have any concerns about books we don't even need to go through the challenge procedure it doesn't have to be an official challenge if they just have a concern we are reevaluating books all the time i see it fits within our selection
121guidelines and the district policy and the way we do that is we read the book thoroughly i ask other people like my staff to read the book thoroughly we talk to other teachers we talk to students i do as much research as i can and then make the best judgment with all of that information together so we have processes in place we need parents to utilize those if they're concerned yeah i mean i think the process is there but sometimes the process isn't followed so for the specific specific book challenge last year um that process was not followed so we didn't follow one um you know to go to the library media specialist first it just kind of went to an immediate challenge before there was even conversation that was had with the librarians so
122i mean the process is there but we do need to encourage people to follow the process as well and i think if that process is being followed and then we're still struggling with something then additional conversations can happen on if additional support is needed but you have trained educators and trained media specialists in these jobs that are all discussing this together and and we're happy to have parents um discussing their concerns and and their wishes for our collection as well we take all of that into consideration so i can just call you make an appointment yes 268. it's an easy one extension 268. so i guess the couple of things that i want to um point out is that on the the committee that we was formed for uh meteoroline girl um although it was
123you know a lot of staff and the two board members um i can count seven of us that are parents um so i mean they're definitely we have definitely had parents that were involved even though they were you know maybe teachers or the general purpose or yes um so uh there's that and then uh correct me if i'm wrong but can't parents like somehow fill it a form or ask for certain books if they have a concern about a book that they don't want their child to get to be able to check out a hard copy of is that something that they can request or is that not i thought it's not part of the policy you know no i i mean i don't see it in writing here but okay i thought i don't
124have a policy that addresses that at least okay again i think that goes along with having a good relationship with keith is hitting on with your kids if kids are hiding what they're reading from parents or parents don't know or can't ask it would seem like there's bigger issues than worrying about what the kid's reading you know if they're not having that conversation at home yeah i think a lot of times parents just don't necessarily know um but i didn't know i thought i'd heard that you know if somebody really doesn't want their kid to be reading to be able to have access to a certain book that they could i think we talked about it in that meeting but we didn't we decided that at that point when we talked about it it's like
125how do you keep track of all of that and then again the autonomy part that comes in with the legal part of it at 15 of um being able to make those decisions so i think there was a lot of factors that we you know necessarily couldn't do that and how do you keep track of and then we talked about a parent notification system and then what books fall into that and then ah for heaven's sakes when we're you know we're back to the same the same thing so um can i make a clarifying comment i i think in talking with josh if there's a required book that's to be read for a course and your parents felt like they did not want their child to read that book then there were alternate books for
126them to be able to read am i right on that that is accurate so that would be correct and then if you didn't want your child to read this you could voice that but that would be for a required reading yeah so not the books that we're talking about and i think greta had made reference to that earlier that if there was a book that was going to be used as an assigned reading as a curriculum piece then if it was a anything that would sound like it was a controversial topic or a hard topic that those permission slips then are sent home and the parents actually need to sign off on that so there is no like opt out you like have to opt into it so without the parental permission form the you
127know the student then would be given an alternative reading assignment so so i'm just kind of looking through our policy and our procedures um and we could certainly look closer at these and you know you could and we all could to see if there's things that we think need to be added or changed i think you know i guess being part of that process last year um i thought it was a um i thought that our process stands up um it was a it was a rigorous process that i felt comfortable with that i felt good about that i felt even in my own mind looking at the material that was presented last year going into this with an open mind of the work as a whole reading the guidelines that we had as i
128was reading that book i thought that really checked the boxes of what we needed to do in order to provide meaningful content to our students so um some of our neighbors have policy 871 as their own policy because prior to their book challenges they had no policy and they asked who had a policy and we were one of the only ones so now this is their policy i certainly wouldn't you know not want to entertain any suggestions to if that needs to be okay if we could do a better job of that i guess i just didn't come up with any on my own because i i thought it was a good stand-up policy but i guess that's why i'm asking joe if you wanted to talk about this in that kind of content of
129policy of what we control and then how do we move forward doing that you did well what you did well i'm good okay did well yeah our staff did well thank you we're we're confident in you and the way things are going and and it's all about you know parental involvement and some of that doesn't have to be in a form or a policy it's just talking so i think it would be good though if we considering that the last time that this was reviewed officially is in 2008 i think it would be good if we you know officially reviewed this and added another date as far as a day that we've approved it it seems like that was you know i think that's july of 2022 at this point a long time ago so
130i'd like to say that we've looked this over and add another date to it i will ask my favorite administrative assistant to do that you're only the only administrative assistant and you know to be clear this is an informational item tonight obviously and then we would need another reading of it of course just to yeah but if there is changes that need to be made that some that one of us think that would be appropriate um in the meantime we can have that discussion at a future meeting yeah so i don't want to just come out of here and go like yep robert and you know so right no but i think you know while we're discussing it let's say that we've reviewed it and let's update that date on this i think that would
131be a wise thing to do all right thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you annie and now we'll move on to our referendum update okay a couple of items that are in the presentation on a couple that are not um this is the same document that you recently saw as in last month the only change that has occurred here to the document itself is on slide number four and that's the terrazzo the grinding and refinishing here at the intermediate school that work is not going to be done this summer it's going to be bid out again and next summer so that is the only change the update that i have for you that's not on the script if you will is if you go to the last slide and then
132i'll be sort of my talking point this is the timeline for work notice the months of june through august is when design work gets done and the design work that gets done results in finished products if you don't finish your product you're not going to be able to bid out your work and contract it to get done so you'll see here next month a finished product in regards to the design at the elementary the guiding principles at the elementary are a 8.5 million dollars is your price tag can't go above that b you have to make sure that we did what we said to our voters we were going to do safe and secure as part of that expanded child care is part of that expanded elementary access or elementary classrooms is part of that
133and all of those items you'll see until we kicked her out of the room as part of that process um she didn't get kicked out we just stopped inviting her and lhb k a brad wong gardner has been a part of that process and we've had some elementary voices as part of that too so that's all elementary now tomorrow's a big day we've got a meeting here in this room for all of our science teachers all of our special ed teachers our media library media person greta and ka and lhb all in the room are starting to do work on high school the design change at the elementary is truly harder than it is at the high school because high school is very straightforward it's largely mechanical and electrical and less moving parts there are
134some but not as many so that's why we started earlier on the elementary so we have to have things wrapped in regards to design by the end of the summer so you're going to see the elementary finished product here in the board meeting on august 15th questions for me it's very exciting so the plan then for the elementary school you said it'll be a wrapped up finished um the design design so does the so the is there a way to view that prior to that or is there options that well we started with a heck it had to be 15 20 different options yeah whittled it down to a dozen then to eight and then to forward and then two and then to one and basically the two designs that exist that were the finalists
135is you add a rectangle onto the rectangle that is already montessori or you leave just one rectangle and you do your upgrade on the north end of the building where the clubhouse is presently located and that's the design you're going to see updating the clubhouse area and then clubhouse moves to where montessori is presently located uh there are a lot of reasons why that decision was made but it's probably best to have that conversation with the architects and the uh the builders here in the room so that was the basic design that was the design we started with way back in in january february and march to do the rectangle on a rectangle was not the design so we are doing what we told the community we would do safe and secure clubhouse elementary under
1368.5 million and ka is there to make sure that it is that one checks the boxes of the parking situation and the secure entry does you have a safe and secure entrance where they are buzzing into the building and then being buzzed in again you've got eyes upon that person from clubhouse and from elementary you've got a safer scenario for for drop off and pick up because if you well it's rest up it's about to begin again the elementary drop-off and pickup process is is fun i get one more year of fun and uh if this will help solve that problem i'm saying it's gonna be solved but help solve it yeah and does that also address the extra learning spaces it does because on the north end of the building which again is where
137clubhouse is located you move from five classrooms to ten classrooms with collaborative spaces for classrooms to use and you're not losing any clubhouse you're expanding clubhouse which gives us the ability to add about 20 25 more kids and you're going to see in a second why that's a good thing it also gives us the opportunity to have more moving parts for the work that we do at the elementary school we don't have any additional classrooms right now the moving parts have nowhere to move so we're done for so to speak in that regard you you can't put them in places that don't exist this design is going to help that be a reality it's very exciting it's been a lot of meetings to get to this point but it's been a really interesting fun process
138so that's my referendum update all right any other questions keep moving ahead we shall uh act 89 act 89 is a work in progress and what i'm going to walk through with you here and andy is certainly going to help we don't have all the answers because i'm telling you right now the department of public instruction does not have all the answers so what act 89 is it's about financial transparencies of obviously financial information by school districts and also by the department of public instruction so there are really four aspects to it financial information on the dpi website financial information on the school district website financial information updated annually and let folks know that it's there because putting it there and not letting anyone know it is there is not going to be a help
139so the specifics the state legislature through act 89 has given the directive to the wisconsin department of public instruction by february 1st you need to let school districts know what needs to be available it's our estimation that it's already what we have it isn't going to be new stuff all information must be publicly accessible and lastly they're not going to ask districts to do financial upgrades to their software in their hardware in order to fulfill a requirement you can't make folks start spending tens of thousands of dollars to fulfill our requirements in essence what this means we have not heard a word in regards to what's going to be asked of us please know this is not going to be us gathering and putting 17 attachments on an email and sending it what this is
140going to look like is largely what it looks like in the guidance office it's called a snapshot on this day making up a day on february 17th they're going to take a snapshot of your financial information which means in essence they come in and grab it and it's theirs and then they go ahead and put that on their website and a portal where all districts are publicly available the only addition to that is school districts need to do the same so that is the requirement of the dpi by february 1 of 2023 now by september 1 of we need to be able to put this information on the dpi and on our district website so we're ready to do that that's absolutely what we stand ready to do but we have to be told what
141it is that they want so that's by september 1 2023 other provisions this is where i get nervous the dpi says that districts and the dpi itself can delay the implementation until september 1 of 2024 and i'm saying there's a better than 50 50 chance if you make things optional that are law they tend not to occur in a timely way so by hunches it might happen and then the advisory committee that the dpi must establish then terminates on january 1 of 2025 that would also be an indication to me that this may be a law today and a law gone tomorrow because that doesn't sound very permanent to me but we'll wait and see what happens questions for me or for randy go ahead and follow up real quick the first migration to the
142why is that a finance is the first step in this really and that's where they're going and then pulling out information the past has always been us pushing out information to them and and that's the change and based on the struggles we've had with that getting all the schools on board throughout the state set up and everything i think you almost guarantee they're gonna be pushing that off to that further date um plus you know they've gone through a lot of turnover down in dpi also so um the running joke between andy and i don't tell us your staffing changes at dpi simply tell us who's still there yeah because every week we get so and so is resigning or retiring just tell us who's still there because it's every single week and in finance
143it's it's literally every couple of days it seems so i don't even know who's there anymore so mostly this is a lot that we have to follow but we're waiting to see what we actually have to do february 1 is supposed to tell us right now we already have a lot of financial information we have all our audits are all on the website there's 10 years worth most of what you're they're going to be asking of us is going to be auditable material just in the condensed form because an audit's 60 80 100 pages long so this is going to be a much more consolidated version and i hope for what it is because who's going to process an audit unless you have a strong county background so in the i mean i guess that
144we could put this information all out there or put it somewhere or do that somehow but i'm guessing it is going to take some work and some manpower to do that and then if we did it in the wrong manner or the wrong format um we would have to redo it all i would assume once the the government comes in and tells you exactly how they want it yeah i mean i envision it and from my conversation i've had with other people around the state that it more likely will be a link to a site for your district and then that's just what all that will be there instead of having going on dpi page and trying to find everything because it is for the layman it's very hard to go on dpi and fare
145it out different things right and everything will be there you know everything from enrollment you name it it's not just going to be financing it'll be a page for the district which you know but remember the trickiness of putting out a budget that's publicly available we do a budget which begins on july 1 of each year we sometimes don't find out our state aid until november so to put a budget out there would be a guess at best and when we get to the 23 25 biennium where they determine the budget for public schools yeah um we're not going to know on july 1. i can tell you that right now because it's going to be a political football it is right now and that makes it tough to create a budget right now frankly
146the department of public construction has got all of us driving off of a cliff because they've decided to finance schools by using federal dollars and if they don't commit more money from the state we're all going full speed right off the cliff because all of us will have a budget chart fall every district in wisconsin well i don't guess an educated assumption i'm not really sure what that means that sounds like government talk right there oh that is sounded like a good other questions she might have and this might all go away i told her you know i i don't think it will soon but like i said they've got to figure out their why is that a finance pulling out information and getting all the schools not all schools are even close i mean
147majority of them are for for to be ready to go but there's still a handful of them that are not even a number and that of course like this year for instance they're making us do both sets so we're they're going to be pulling information and we're also going to be doing pushing so it can be two different sets of things and if they don't aren't equal then we've got to figure our district's got to figure it out why we're off so which is right so in a way it's i don't know it's gonna be interesting i guess you know i i'm all for financial disclosure and transparency and i think we do that at every board meeting that we do that i think we did a great job of that we set we sit
148every year and have our audit done there's a little we get the big 80 page book that comes out and then really it comes down to the two pages at the end which we freely hand out to anybody so and i don't we could put that on our district web well the audit is yeah yeah so yeah summary version of it is as well so you know i don't know how much more in depth or how much more in detail see what they want it's not going to be a departure from what we already have yeah again you do not just have letter of the law you have intent of the law and and i think part of the problem here too is is is you just started bringing up what does financial transparency for
149our school look like per you know act 89 and and again it's different for all people but i can tell you that again one of you know one of the people who seems to be a thorn in the side around here is dennis and he assisted in authoring really act 89 uh through gay and that's kind of my my concern is and i'll be just honest you have 49 pages of your audited budget you're a stud because i can't i i can't go through all these yeah i mean this is really difficult for me nor can he that's what no no should i i mean well that's my point too and like and again like you know we don't have to talk about sean of of what's incorrect or correct i'm just looking at what
150does financial transparency look like because again this board's not fifteen thousand dollars because i forfeited my salary here i don't get paid that's that's the first mistake on that list but on his list yes correct but the thing is is is there an is there an appropriate way that we can come up with maybe 10 page andrew i mean can you knock this down so where it's that's why there's the summary explanation of everything that cla does a very good job of presenting i believe when he comes i mean quite honestly since i've been here we've had clean audits and there's not been a lot to talk about so i mean i'm not talking about not doing your audit i'm talking about putting something together again i've i've seen it and again i don't think
151that i know that the numbers aren't correct but the guy puts it in seven pages dale right you're getting the emails also um yes like exhibit c would you want dennis carl yes but yeah i mean i think i mean how much you want to get on the rabbit hole on that but yeah i mean i don't want to get into how accurate his numbers are or inaccurate he does that's it he doesn't know him yeah he doesn't know the exact numbers yeah it's not like we're providing them to him probably but the thing is is uh you have a person who is a taxpayer and a large one at that saying and who has a ton of knowledge of experience saying here's what i think it looks like and by the way i assisted
152in you know getting gay gay magnificee to do this here's what the intent was and this is the letter and yeah no one knows what it's supposed to be like it doesn't say but again and you hit it on the head too is i spent an hour today trying to look at dpi and there's so much knowledge there it's it's an absolute rabbit hole and that's where i i mean you have to specifically know what you're looking for um and whether or not it was a it's a it's a because we already have all of our audited budgets on here on here um we already have dpi's link like i think that's huge but again once you get to dpi it's extremely difficult to navigate here are two examples of financial transparency that the district
153is engaged in first we have referendum on the agenda every single month literally going through every single number of what's been in contracted out for work i can tell you right now that is not happening in districts we are giving everyone that information so much so that a number was changed and i brought it back and every single time a number goes public and that number's changed it will be brought back every time you will see a referendum update on every board meeting agenda through the end of 2024 and when we get into next year it is going to be a five-minute deal it's going to be a lot longer because it'll be a lot of work every single month we're going to do it that's transparent here's how your dollars are being spent you
154voted yes even if you voted no you're going to be able to know second example the number one question i received through the entire referendum process is what happened to my 2017 referendum dollars i made that presentation in a board meeting eight times and 30 times in february march and april so if 38 times is not financially transparent i don't know what to do on that some folks simply aren't paying attention in regards to financial transparency because it isn't convenient and one of those folks that is not paying attention that has created their own numbers is the person that you've made reference to here and he and i have had numerous conversations this is 10 years worth of emails and it stopped in 2018 the rest of it is electronic sitting in my inbox the
155information is fraught with errors and accuracies and made-up numbers it's not real and i wouldn't believe the words that you're being given regards to who helped make legislation occur that is not how it went this is make believe and i would say that the numbers that that are inaccurate isn't because he didn't have access to them because he did so there were attempts that were made under previous administrators too that had also given him like here it is you take it but like you said that is a lot of information to go through for just a late person you know when we sit here and we look at these audits it's a lot of information for me to take in certainly more than i could ever process sitting here in a in a board meeting
156i'd have to go through it for hours um but we provide that information if you want to copy you have it anybody that can have it so is there something like that's in there that doesn't like you want more or do you want like it further broke down or is there something that's not accessible to people that are that we would need to provide for their clarification because i think if you're breaking it down into 10 pages you're breaking it you know you're condensing it even more so you're getting less specific so is there something different that you'd like to see happen with that i would just clarify that that's why it's important to have a uniform reporting process like we report to dpi because then all schools have to report the same thing and
157in the same way they report things as salary or a certain benefit not how you interpret it to be a benefit yeah that's just one example but i mean that's important it's very important uniformity wisconsin uniform financial accounting you know uh so i mean that's that's why it's important i think it's important i live by that that directive that's kind of what i have to do they have changes i'm living it right now with changes in codes that's driving me crazy but that's part of it so yeah i guess i would just say that our audit you can you can go into a deep dive on all the details or you can look at the one page summary that's got a pie chart on there that's basically you know 70 of your money goes here
15820 goes here five percent goes there um and we provided every year too right this is how everything broke out and you know if somebody wants to elaborate and wants to request that we're certainly open to providing that for them and then and actually it you know there's a few times where i have you know so and uh and and same with dpi they can actually talk to or you know there's a place to email or even have somebody call you to get the information you want it's not just you're up to i say it's hardest if you're going by yourself and searching through there but somebody will help you get that information you want you know it's it's not that they don't get that many requests for it that they don't have time to
159help you if they need to too so again if if i had a complaint come into me that would take me if it's five pages or or whatever his uh exhibit c is that he wanted and if i had a complaint by by a person in the community i would handle it and and and again you don't like that i'm just wait a minute okay because it has been addressed because you don't budge people just get on the defense right okay like what do you mean no my thing is work for the person why wouldn't we take the the how long i mean you already andrew you already know all these numbers probably yeah but to change to add end to the just do things just for one person when does it stop so somebody
160else wants in a different format then we put it out there somebody wants another format they put it out there so if that was if that was done right off the bat would he have a four inch you know three inch pile of folder you know that's my thing the numbers have been provided for 10 plus years he's simply not attending to the numbers he creates his own numbers and if you're going to create your own numbers there's no following your numbers twyla has spent hundreds of hours trying to track his numbers with no success because she can't track him because they're made up and i've tried and you've seen the numbers that he has sent and they're made up he is taking staff salary and benefits and adding in an incorrect way which makes
161everyone around here the highest paid employees in the entire season because he's adding things in two and three times so i do take offense to work with the man believe me i have tried i have tried repeatedly and so did jim gupta and so did steve shield tried to the point where people became beyond frustrated because you have to have a two-way street there there hasn't been anyone to work with on the other end just do what i tell you to do that's really what it's been for doing what the state tells us to do not what one private citizen tells us to do and i'm going to go with the state every time over a private citizen but if he wanted information i don't think he's ever been denied absolutely not i mean unless
162i don't know the unless i don't know that but i've only worked with you as an administrator in this capacity and one other administrator and i believe that at least as far as i know i guess that was not even an issue under the other administrator we didn't hear much about it as a board we've had there's been private citizens who've been in to look at financial information back when steve was here this is 15 plus years ago um and i mean everything's there it's it's it's there for the taking you know i mean there's nothing if all of you want me to handle it differently in regards to this one citizen you simply need to let me know but i don't think but i don't think this is necessarily about one citizen correct no
163i'm i again i'm trying to figure out what financial transparency looks like and if if right again this is informative but i'll be i'll be really clear i think by your your almost physical reaction tonight again i told you i think he can provide you with the ultimate perfect solution to what financial transparency is and because of the bias we have over the 15 20 years of him dealing with the school district you're not going to listen and that's a concern to me i'm on month three you know so this is a board discussion so what would your recommendation be like what is his solution that you would like to see happen well again sean's been getting the the emails i've been getting he doesn't call me when i ask him to call he doesn't
164call me he calls he calls me he's emailing two of you he's not because i have never seen anything from him other than what he's publicly put so in aaron i don't think you have right you may get a dribble here and there correct no that ended a while ago oh yeah but okay so so i'm asking you as somebody who's had conversation with him i'm trying to learn from you of what is his solution because i do not know that you think would be something that we could implement so as we could have that discussion as a board being all informed as a board because i am sitting here completely clueless what his recommendation is the exhibits are yeah i'd have i'd have to get you those so you just you just said they'll
165like absolutely perfect solution no i'm your your you're absolutely belittling me at this point i said i think you guys are so biased he could have the absolute perfect solution and you wouldn't listen to it at this point okay i'm sorry i heard that wrong i thought you said he has the absolute perfect solution no okay so i definitely heard that wrong so that's why i was asking like what was it because i have gotten no communication from him yeah because every i mean everyone here is like physically upset about dennis i mean some of us have had you know 15 18 years it's not um there are countless examples that go beyond finance of accusations even he's made of this district that call our integrity into questioning this is the same individual who called
166the state of wisconsin and said we were giving kids answers on standardized tests that that's not okay so that doesn't sound like a person that we want to take a cue from and if we want to take cues from there you won't have clean audits because his numbers are make-believe so do i have a physical reaction to that i do i do because it's really really dangerous to take cues from an individual that has that level of dishonesty about this task we've had clean audits here since the days of steve shield which runs 20 years we were able to pass a referendum for that reason if we were to take cues from this individual we would have stripped our staff of their benefits and used that to pay for the referendum that's the person we're
167going to take our cues from if that's so then i got to recalibrate what i'm doing all together that's a nature thing that knee-jerk reaction the same i i mean here's the it's simply an excel spreadsheet with fill in the blank numbers per title i hope you've seen yeah i know i've it at it i'm trying to figure it out and again it's and and again i can tell you right now of course the numbers aren't aren't necessarily correct and i'll be clear to get i mean to get the administration's um salary and fringe benefits i had to go on dpi and that's how i got that which again is very difficult to find but i found it and i couldn't i couldn't put i couldn't put that to coincide with our own because i
168just didn't know where it's at i'm sure you can tell me exactly where it is what i'm asking is again and his was very short it wasn't that long that's all i'm saying is if as if that was if that was his intent of financial school transparency maybe we should go above and beyond it just like we did for rule 871 that no one else had what would that look like well i think we're doing two out of the the the three things correct already i just don't know what a form of pdf looks like for what are the two things that were so i know which to cross off the list like the two of the three what are the three and what are the two we're doing no you already have we already
169have the audited budget on there and then we already have a link to dpi on there which again it's just it's difficult to navigate but most the information is on there i actually feel that uh most of the information information that is going to find out on uh through act 89 is just going to be the information you provide so you're talking the three items are the three items that are outlined in act 89. no well no help me out no what i'm asking for i guess is some is there an option or a the snapshot i love the idea your guy's a snapshot maybe i'm just not aware of it well that that's the dpi that's what they do we don't do a snapshot they snapshot our information snapshot all districts information and grab
170it and like i said i've been i've been a you know three districts now and at one of the districts much smaller district we did do a i'll call it a snapshot each month where we're at you know in terms of the budget but that's not a valuable assessment at a snapchat at a given month because certain things happen at different times in the year expense wise and revenue-wise so you really can't say oh we've used up 50 of our budget this isn't apple's the apples you know it's and that's why most dishes don't do that kind of snapshot just because things happen at different times of the year so you'd better have to look at and you know in a way annually you see this is how the year went and you know certainly
171have been like i said much smaller six where they they do look at that every month but it's much easier and it'd be a lot more work to do that here at this size district too so yeah i don't think it would i don't think we can really have it be completely you know transparent if it's month because again you're right we're going to have expenditures that are right off the bat that but i guess some i more or less i would love to see a year another a snapshot of the year end review what budget and what what is that what is like a snapshot of the year end the two pages review 49 pages is not a snapshot i mean i'm certainly open to it so the two pages though at the end
172that really breaks down like where are um i don't have it sitting in front of me but where are and our fund balances are right all of our funds right yeah and then so and then we kind of go through that every year the polygraphs i mean the paragraphs are a good visual i would say and so would you just like to see that one maybe put that we have that on our website already yeah i mean i i mean i've been i guess i've had rewards or i've been to other board meetings and annual meetings just because i go to different ones and and i've seen all the bells and whistles come out but then it just confuses everything and it okay how many graphs and bar charts and everything else you want to
173look at board sample or which i think is what joe's saying right like let's break this down and get a a snapshot what does that what does that look like yeah i think i'm a mistake and i think i'm looking at like administration adult education community services fun that's not the summer right now no yeah it looks like that's from dpi not necessarily our audit so maybe we should table a discussion and and we don't think there's anything to act on here i think this was just yeah it's just the information right you don't have to table anything i'm just was wondering what that looked like right i'm just saying if we were going to discuss the audit more in detail it would be good if we had it in front of us to be
174able to look at those like last two pages or to look at a summary of it or if we need we want to have something more available well yeah i guess i just was i guess that was i was you know talking about yeah what does that financial transparency you know look like can i see and and i guess i'm gonna make a comment here about i don't think it's financial transparency i that's the reaction you had and i added maybe i wasn't as physical as financial trust the electors elect us to watch over it we hire him to watch over it they do it and if you look at our financial situation in the last two decades we're way ahead of the game and we have great staff because we know what we're doing
175and so i don't know what he wants but to me our community has the trust in our finances and our people and i don't know that another sheet is going to differ that i really don't because we have such support i mean look at the referendums we just passed it's because they trust us and trust is built i mean you have sat through pretty tough times yeah you sat through some tough times here not doing many years trust was built absolutely that every year laid out over years as to you know what the goal was you know like the strategic plan is you know we knew debt and how it was falling off and how it was going to be placed and how we could move ahead at that time and how you know collateral
176damage we had to do in order to make that plan keep moving and so that's my frustration is it's not financial transparency it's they're questioning our financial trust and it's like we don't need to prove it it's it's right here it's it's in this room it's in this building it's what we're doing in the next two years for this the facilities and our staff i think people are always going to disagree of um where the money gets gets spent or um and some some years maybe it gets spent doing this and then some years maybe it gets spent doing this and i think that's been built over time through the community um and then and then of course the trust is as a board we have that trust in each other we have that trust
177in the the people that run this and of course then we have that oversight that's what our job is so um and then of course our community looks to us is to make sure that we have that oversight um but i but of course this is a financial transparency this is an act a law that um is is there that we will follow i just yeah if like you said maybe going above and beyond you know i just want to know what maybe that above and beyond you know would look like so that when we come time to do this yeah what what does that look like is there something that's that other people would like to see that isn't addressed in the in the act 89 and i and i don't i don't have
178those answers i mean if they don't have those answers some people don't some people do i think you know or whatever but they're always welcome to come into the district and ask i think i mean andy's been more than forthcoming with to answer any phone calls or emails i think i think um sean has as well i think his board members um if we've been asked we've been more than happy to let people know i think i um actually before the referendum i supplied some information of those last two pages of the audit i could probably have them screenshot on my phone and provided those of like what does this fund mean um because nobody would know you know what is fun 46 or what so describe so that's part of our job too is
179the board to build that trust so um good conversation to have here what does that look like in two months we have our annual inboard and our budget hearing so that's gonna be coming up here quicker than you'd think so it's a good opportunity if you want to take a look at it and see what you would you like more information on a certain area i'm all you know i'm all open for it it's just you know i have to know what direction you want to give me so yeah feel free to one year you want to look at a certain area next year like another area whichever you want to dig into that's you know totally fine so i figured you know this year referendum is getting that set up and everything is probably
180the first thing and you know you'll notice like francis we no longer have a debt service treasurer's report because we don't have any debt anymore so i mean that's for a minute well for a minute wait wait wait wait yeah but yeah absolutely and you know then the 1.9 million dollar referendum um that was in 2017 that was a common concern about people before um we hired sean you know like where's the money going it was chaotic to say the least of where that money was being spent and then i think the trust in the community was eroded at some point um which you couldn't you couldn't blame the community members at all for it it was it was a catastrophe um but then we turned the ship uprighted it i believe and i think
181we've done a very good job and i think sean's uh made that abundantly clear at a lot of meetings of where our 1.9 million dollars have been going for x number of years since since he's been on board 2019. i think an example that's even like how we are open and asked about our esther dollars for spending that's the example not districts are not as open and awesome that stuff because a lot of them are using it to backfill their budgets yeah is that the intent of it no it's not the intent of it but that's what they're being forced to do by our state so you know i said i was just reading today in the wisconsin education news about all these different districts are backfilling their budget with esser as i go i
182think i think all of the more conversations that we have i think it helps to build trust i think there are people that i think the trust is a good word not necessarily the same as transparency but i think the only way you get trust is to be transparent and um i think we're gonna always do better i think that was what the goal of this board was when we turned over in 2017 is to do that better um i think we've i think we've done we've done really well with that and then of course having the very guy to put those numbers together well our school perception survey said that folks had trust in not just the education we provide but the manner by which we spend their money and a lot of districts
183don't have those high marks on either of those counts yeah thank you for all your input okay yeah i mean i think it's a great conversation to have i think that it's a great i mean great thing to do we paid off for debt so i think that's an indication we've uh you know been doing something right the last few years um now we're ready to start over with referendum but you know that's a good thing you know right we've got a lot of exciting things happening so i think we can always look for ways to do better to um continue to build that trust the community i just want to know what those what those things look like i don't have all the answers to what that looks like i mean i could open
184up my checkbook to people but you might not understand it and i was just summarizing that and i will just i'll just summarize up that i just think you you have to take a little bit of the intent of the request of something sometimes so make sure you keep that in mind when you're looking at certain individuals that are requesting things and want things a certain way so there's a lot more behind it than just the way what we're presenting so yeah i do think that it's a point that as board members we do serve our community we're here as people to answer those questions that's our job um and then how those things get handled and follow up with those things and so of course it's it's accurate to take into people's considerations and
185concerns because those are the people you represent so but then you're also here that you know what's going on and and we have to have some some trust in each other as administration and board of what we're doing too so there's a there's a balance there as a board member all right well let's go on to our clubhouse data okay you made the request last month to see a bigger window of data so what you see here is information on clubhouse and then enrollment in the schools that goes back to 1314 we can't really go much back further back than that because clubhouse didn't exist back before 2015-16 so the big broad summary if you go down the students column where you see the number at the top of each year so look at 16
18617 total go over that's 13. so if you added up all of the kids that spent their days in clubhouse there are 85 4k open enrollments in the last 10 years so kids open and roll from other districts to here 85 of those kids that happen for 85 kids over 10 years of those kids to best understand this 38 of those kids became our kids now they became our kids whether they started in the before and after school program way back in 1516 or they were actually enrolled in in the clubhouse program remember it began as a before school after school endeavor so 38 of the 85 is indicative of almost 50 percent of kids that come here as an open enrollee and take part in clubhouse become our kids we are set to do
187a referendum which increases our clubhouse capacity by approximately 2025 kids if you did the math on that that's just shy of 10 12 or so kids that's a good thing for us educationally it's a good thing for us financially so that is a bigger broader snapshot of the window that you saw last time and i'll take any questions if you might have them well i you know i guess this has always been an ongoing discussion that we've had sean that um the investment of the daycare it's always kind of been a back and forth for me um and i've asked you know i've asked for numbers here they are the uh we talked about when we talked about this referendum is a seven million dollar daycare alone project um which now we're doing an eight
188and a half million dollar altogether project and you know probably the daycare i don't i can't break it out obviously but somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half to two million dollars i would guess um wow so now this like these statistics really back up what we're doing and why we're spending that money remember that waiting list is awful deep you're looking at six eight months wait list no matter what the age of your kid is yeah so if they're going to come here as open and release we would likely hopefully have a spot for them and then they can become our kid when they get school age that's the whole yeah i think the financial you know we talked about the cost of doing the financial business there i'll do on that
189but that um that seems pretty awesome it's working other districts followed our lead yes many have yep so it's good to be in front all right any other questions on that no thank you for bringing those numbers that is awesome i think becky because she's the one that put it together yeah yeah thank you thanks becky all right we'll go into our action items jessica this is the 2022-2023 annual notice of student academic standards school district memory has a responsibility for maintaining a minimum program of instruction guaranteed by the wisconsin state statute 118.30 and for initiating improvements beyond that minimum the relevant statutes encompass standards in mathematics science reading and writing geography and history professional staff under the direction and supervision of the curriculum coordinator are delegated the responsibility for developing curriculum changes and additions
190the school district of amery school board approves the adoption of pupil academic standards on an annual basis the school district of emory establishes standards and aligns their curriculum and instruction school district of amory k-12 english language arts and mathematics are based upon the common core state standards all other program areas are based upon the most current wisconsin model academic standards national standards next generation science standards and college career and civil civic life framework for social studies standards the next slide i really just wanted to highlight what are the academic standards what is our responsibility as a school district so the wisconsin academic standards what are they they specify what students should know and be able to do in the classroom they serve as goals for teaching and learning for educators in preparation and planning setting
191high standards enables students parents educators and citizens to know what students should have learned at a given point in time in wisconsin all state standards serve as a model locally elected school boards adopt academic standards in each subject area to best serve their local community the next is our program alignment so i had already summarized it in the annual notice but again english language arts arts mathematics are aligned with the common core state standards science is aligned with the wisconsin model academic standards and next generation science standards social studies is aligned with the wisconsin model academic standards and college career and civic life framework for social studies standards art music pe health and cte are aligned with a wisconsin model academic and national standards the last image is pulled from the wisconsin dpi and it
192really i just wanted to highlight that it's a continuum within education so for example discussing the ela adoption that we recently under underwent really we're in phase one so understanding the ela standards did change in 2020 and so a lot of our work in adopting a new ela standard or curriculum was back in phase one was understanding how did the standards change is our curriculum meeting it we are moving into phase two and three so just again when referencing ela is really selecting our standards power standards adopting new materials and then moving into phase three of assessment instruction okay jess i have a question sure um so you know you were talking about the ela standards change in 2020 yes so i know um you know back when a long time ago i was in
193education you could pick some of there's a lot of state standards so you can pick your um standards that you were going to cover or focus on and is that still true so there's a lot of stakeholders you can kind of funnel that down and pick is that still true that is correct so for example in the 2020 uh reading standards that came out you know it's this thick and it's it's k5 so i'll just use that as an example um there are many different standards and within each standard are strands and so those strands get really specific and drill down to exactly so i'm thinking of a first grade standard you know by the end of first grade students will be able to understand plot setting characters so really drills it down to a
194really you know specific thread and so educators what we do we work in plc teams vertical teams as we will meet and we'll talk about okay you know what do you expect when a student comes into second grade what are the non-negotiables what are the ones we are really going to focus on those become our essential standards so each grade level has essential standards that are narrowed and targeted paced out within a year of how we're going to meet those and then they are assessed and they're also then reflected on a port card those are our essential standards okay okay i think you know you use that maybe that term of understand what plot character so and then i always know like when you're writing lesson plans then yes you want to say well understand
195this so then what does understanding mean so that's an actual assessment um that can drill down to figure out what does that mean so and i'm assuming that that's still true and very complex and so it's a common common formative assessment so teachers will assess at the same time using a rubric and there's opportunities to support students and that's where a lot of our tiered supports then come in i know that i'm probably talking more elementary and intermediate school language i know tom you know same is happening up at the upper grades as well so we'll plot out what what we want you know sort of what if a student is uh scoring at kind of a minimal stage of two more and exemplary um and then our goal would be is that we want
196them to show mastery and so the purpose of behind it is to drill down and say if this student isn't getting it we need to bring them back and continue to reteach it sometimes in a different way to give them some additional instruction so that we can show that that's childhood can eventually move on and the assessments may sometimes as well change there too depending on maybe they are getting it but the assessment doesn't fit the knowledge base that they have is that still true it can't i'm i guess i feel like that's a difficult question because that's always our standard our standard is always really is is high and so if they're not getting the plot character absolutely we do something called win or intervention time so they could become part of an intervention
197group or a win group that is focusing on just that skill so then when they're reassessed you know that they've made gains and that it's hopefully reflected you know that they're making progress i guess and again to circle back you know we've adopted standards common core state standards wisconsin model academic standards we teach all of those standards you know we from start to finish we hit everyone they're all embedded in what we do it's the essential standards are the ones that we've really you know picked out and said these are really important these are non-negotiables these are ones that we focus on and we assess and hence are reflected in a report card perfect yes thanks so do we need to take action yes motion to accept the student standards are you doing that erin
198yes okay aaron in a second i'll suck it in and joe all in favor say hi hi hi all right there we go and now we'll go with the second reading of that new policy for student representatives okay on the screen near the bottom you'll see a couple of word changes and i'll highlight those they're highlighted in blue the orientation meeting orientation of student representative to be a participant at board meetings uh at least two of the following individuals sort of a word change and then there's a list of folks there and then in the last sentence the orientation shall explain the roles and responsibilities of the student representative at board meetings this is what happens when you have a former english teacher on the board yep every one of my evaluations of english teachers
199in my years at the high school always came back with changes on the evaluation which was an interesting moment for me but i accepted my shortcomings all right and a motion to accept this well i guess i would just like to have a little more discussion about um this i you know i'm the one who kind of has i've been the one pushing for a student representative at our board meetings um i've gone to a couple of different sessions at the uh education conference um about the importance of having a student up at your board meetings and having more student voice and having uh students be able to um you know uh have a say or feel like um they yeah feel like they have a say um and so we met sean and i
200met with josh and heidi um as heidi is the student council uh advisor and um and discussed this uh in this policy um and this idea and i guess i'm just still unsure of whether this is the best idea or whether we're really ready to go ahead with it this school year um and i guess maybe heidi i don't know if you would wanna i wish josh was here to to chime in also but he's not here tonight um but um because we had some discussion about maybe some other uh possible ways to um to have student voice or to feel like um the students are are heard and so um so and i liked you know we had the other idea one of the other ideas that you came up with that we discussed
201um was having a school board member attend student council meetings and kind of having it be on their turf and having us listen in to what they were discussing um instead of having them have to come here now again i would like to have a student be involved but as you know these meetings can go really long and um and maybe this isn't again i would love to have a student come and i can go back to some of the stuff that we talked about that i heard at these presentations um but we were just discussing some of the best ways to um to hear from the students we don't necessarily want to put a student on the spot and although it says in the policy that we want the student to speak for everyone
202as josh pointed out at our last meeting they can try but a student you know is not really able to represent everyone um they can say you know some students say this and some students say that i mean you can say the majority of students i've talked to really want this or really feel this way but we have obviously a very diverse student group and um and even you know there might be things that we're discussing that affect more than just high schools also so anything i'd like to just kind of comment on what you said there about having this person represent the student body and that they couldn't possibly represent everyone but we do the same thing so we're as board members we are here to hopefully have a voice for everyone you may
203not always vote the voice of the minority because it you may think it's the minority you you try to do the most good for the most people but you want to be that voice for the minority you may vote a certain way this person won't be voting they could provide both sides of of any kind of issue but isn't i think the whole idea here of having a student representative of a board meeting isn't just for a voice or is it that they're heard i mean it's kind of an introduction too to somebody who's wanting to think about a political life or getting into politics or dealing with public or being a representative so i think that let's not lose sight of that true meaning behind having somebody here either that's another part so i
204mean because that's like that's that's what we do like literally that is what the being on a board is that you you can't possibly represent everybody right i think one of the the things to keep in mind uh so so a little back story student council this year is making a shift to to move away from what it had um slowly kind of evolved to become which was the an event planning group we did homecoming we did snow week which were great things but we're trying to shift back to more of a student government that's a really long tedious process that i've ever never actually walked through with a group so so i'm learning they're learning and there's a lot of new skills that we're trying to flex in this process while certainly everybody who
205sits here does their best to represent all voices the amount of life that everyone on our board has lived compared to the amount of life that our high school students have lived we have some phenomenally emotionally intelligent students at our high school and and in their best efforts still have not lived sufficient life to be able to always understand the other perspectives we have students on council this year that that are some of the most humble and who are truly seeking to represent as many voices as possible despite some really strong personal convictions which is just a beautiful thing to watch that that ability to take the perspective of another where i get concerned about bringing them into this space is we're asking them to develop a new skill with a lot of pressure on
206them and any of us that have developed those new skills um they're pretty clumsy when we're starting and that can be a pretty intimidating space i think our students desperately want to have more of the feeling of voice and being heard i think we have some students that would do really well in coming into the space and even just observing how it works but i think if the goal is at the start is to just start having some more conversation flow then a safer space for our students is on is in their area where one or two of you come in you have questions that you of the board have formed they get the opportunity to kind of wrestle through that answer in a group setting where where they all get to kind of say
207yeah but what about but what about but what about and that conversation gets to happen among themselves and then that that answer gets brought back that's my at least to start with i think that's a space where our students get to have more voice yeah but but we're a little more gentle with them i thought that was a real interesting comment i know you were one of you two made it about meeting on their turf you know right and maybe one or two board members going to their meeting rather than one of them coming here i think that could be more beneficial um not that this wouldn't be um but it would be i think it's yeah maybe a little awkward a little uncomfortable for them coming here um one of the things that but
208that came out sorry you then yeah no i i really like the idea though one of the things that came out in our discussion with heidi and josh was obviously that that sometimes we're discussing issues that there are polar opposites views and even when we've had students voluntarily come and share during community comments that they have sometimes come under attack because of the views that they've shared and so having a student you know if we ask you know what do you think about masks you know what are people saying about masks you know um that that could be um i guess you know a public space for them and to be attacked or to be you know for their comments to be um for people to get very upset or what do you think about
209the books in the library i don't know whatever it is you know something kind of a hot topic like that where i don't want um i know that was kind of discussion we don't want a student to be getting so much heat from um from people in the community because they don't agree with something that they said during the meeting um as as a you know as a high school student again i mean so maybe then sometimes the policy title of the student representative at board meetings isn't necessarily where we want this to go so that would be maybe a student representative for the board or because then that then that looks very different and it's i think the goals of both are different where i can see um sorry where i can see them
210mingling is is as the board creates questions if you come into their space they talk and then they come back and report that back to you and so you still have that one person that's coming and engaging in this forum and they're presenting and they have to engage with professional decorum and they have to do all of that but it's not asking them to speak on the spot to try and represent a vast number of students they're developing those skills we're encouraging those students who want to take a life in public service or who want to take a life in in government and we're encouraging that and building that but we're doing it in a safe way that actually supports those skills and then the other thing that that i kind of hear is there's
211a lot of things that that you all discuss where student voice might be lovely but they don't actually have a voice in it there are state statutes there are things that you they just don't get to say well i want fridays off that's very lovely but what we know about volunteers and what we know especially about students is when we give them a fake voice that's really really frustrating and that actually discourages them from ever going into those spaces so so i believe the intent to be really genuine i want to make sure that the voice that we're giving them is a real voice and not a fake one um where they genuinely get to see that then impact and be heard and um and create change that i think will excite people to go
212into public service and um to follow those gifts and skill sets so maybe i mean maybe something that we do is you know as we're creating the agenda for the month that we say hey we would like as you know on this topic we would like a student you know to you know have this discussion at student council and then come in and you know answer these questions publicly you know with something they prepared or whatnot so that you know and if they'd like to say for the whole meeting we'd be happy for them to stay but you know these couple things that we would like them to kind of prepare something or have an idea of giving feedback and input i don't know so the high school go ahead would anyone would anyone object
213to making it not mandatory that they have to attend every regular meeting i think attending every meeting would be very difficult for them as josh pointed out last month the students that are involved in student government are your are your highly involved students we actually had to change the the high school schedule shifted some for a lot of reasons but one of the benefits is that now the student council gets to meet every week because we really struggled to find time when all of these kids with all of these involvements could meet and so i think you will have more involvement if they're here when they need to be and they can be here when they choose to be and we can promote that at our meetings but they aren't here to report on yep
214we met and it was good i mean that i think that they'll feel like their time isn't really adding value in that moment but so i guess i feel bad because i'm the one who kind of has been encouraging this but um i think what i would like to yes suggest is that we um we look at this a little bit more maybe we come up maybe we usually modify the policy on i know um that'll probably will look different but i think that we can do a little bit more work on this and um and have a little bit more of a discussion and figure out maybe a better plan that's going to fit with our this was uh this was a policy that i um just modified off of a couple of other
215school districts and i've talked to some people that it's worked really well but i think you know hey we can modify it to something that's going to fit our school district a little bit better this year so yes that is my motion yeah i'll second that all right all those in favor table it say hi all right opposed there we go thank you yeah thanks heidi next uh we're looking at a easement with the city of emery okay i'm gonna come up to the um screen so i can point stuff out it'll be easier to follow me that way yeah make sure to get the microphone so we can hear you all right i should give you a headset oh i think okay he's got three boys yeah yeah here we go hopefully it'll come
216back don't you hear that a lot in the office don't touch them where this came from sean can you basically can you start by just explaining what's like the city of emory engaged with the school district of amery in regards to an easement that easement is an arrangement in essence between two public entities the city and us being those two entities um what the city of amery is interested in doing is doing an easement on the south half of our property and i pointed out to you oh becky's going to get it up there and scream um the south half of our property across the street from the high school the north property of what you'll see here in a second so part of you know don't touch the easement is here where you see
217these lots drawn in in red so the easement you'll see is north of those lots the very southern edge of the property again across the street from high school high schools over here minneapolis is over here the access point is sundance that's an existing road is an existing road and what the proposal is is to create a subdivision of 22 lots so in and then north is how you have access points to most of the lots but what they're looking at doing is creating a road at this at the northern edge of those lots that goes east west from here to here and ends from here to here in the ends the easement is 33 feet from the thick black line north in approximately 600 feet across it's like 586 or something like that that's
218the easement it's our land the city or a developer can't simply just start building on someone else's land so that is the nature of what the easement is now a couple of other factors exist here the first factor is this area here so it's part of the conversation it's not about easement part of the conversation is the blue line or the red line that runs sort of a semi-circle like through that property that's what's referred to as a setback line the setback is from a wastewater treatment plant that's going in it's off screen to the west of there when you put in or upgrade a facility such as that there's a setback and you can't do any new housing development within x feet of that particular operation so that set setback line runs right through
219where we were planning to build homes you saw that proposal here last month if that setback line runs through that area we can't build homes there now there is a drawback that's the obvious drawback we can't build homes there but there is an advantage in that we would have had to put a road in this might enable us to not have to put a road in because there's going to be a road here you could build homes here but another drawback is we were planning to do 10 homes this would allow us we haven't obviously done surveying of land probably four or five at the most six if you do six they're going to be north-south lots which cuts into your crop area because the way it looks right now is a pretty easy and
220understood way to go ahead and put a crop in this makes it more complicated so again the easement you have to take action whether that be a or an a or tabling it in regards to the permission to use that 33 by 580 plus strip of land in essence so that's the description that i have for you and i'll do my best to answer questions if you have any this came up kind of quick it did come up kind of quick i learned of this approximately two weeks ago maybe a little longer but this wasn't on our radar when we purchased the land it was not on the radar radar when we came here and talked about plans for developing the land and it barely was on the radar radar when we had our last
221school farm meeting back on the 12th of july and char was at that meeting and we were a little surprised as to the developments i learned of this just before that meeting yeah i would say that i'm um i guess my level of displeasure um because there was engagement with the city before we purchased this land and the intent of what we purchased this land for was even though not completely spelled out at the time the intent of where that vision was um going to happen was clearly made and none of this had been brought to our attention um which maybe we still had would have purchased the property but our plans would have looked maybe somewhat different and then we we've purchased this property and we disclosed the taxpayers what we fully intended to
222do with this and how many houses we intended to build on it and now that may very well not happen and not that we have any control of what the city does but it is a taxpayer you know you may feel a little bamboozled sort of speak of now the school district is can't possibly do what we thought we were going to do with it so trickle down effect anyways not in the same spots well not the same thoughts but then that also hinders then the production process i mean as a farmer it makes it you inherently will build less homes because there's less space to build homes unless you have more roads right right now you'd only have the one east west right no matter what you do on easement has little or no
223um it doesn't matter in regards to the setback if they upgrade the wastewater treatment plant the setback is the setback that's got nothing to do with it but i think it's clear that we need to make clear that we did not know this when we purchased this property we did not know so our intent has been very much bamboozled of what had happened here or exported if you will even to say that word of what we said we were going to do and and again this district kind of holds ourselves to a standard of we tell people what we're going to do we do it and we tell people what we did and now this all of this is creating a little bit of a headache in that department sure in the 33 feet so
224you understand that if you can move the screen um up so you can see the all 22 the 33 feet is so you can fit 22 lots in if you take 33 feet off of that you're probably shrinking some of your lot size by a quarter which isn't much of a lot size at the end of the day so this has all been schematically put together this is a northland surveying map from from ed phantom and you can't go south as you see because the trailer park is just south of that screen you start seeing the actual residences there so there isn't any self go and there isn't any east to go because there's development there and the land to the west is uh not available either they don't think we're doing this for free
225do they what what do you mean give me a isn't it yeah yeah i can't speak for them dude they made any i mean haven't they there isn't any any negotiated sum of money that's been spoken of to me right that that would be my answer to you and we're dealing with the city of angry not the developer or anything the city of emory is the the entity that would do the brokering of the deal the property owner and the developer is not the city of henry yeah okay but we're dealing with the city of emory so if we wanted to hear from the city of or america have a negotiation with them or discussion or something i mean we kind of i guess feel like you're not obligated to take action on this and
226say yes just because they're asking no i mean they're already gonna win with you know the houses that could they're gonna fit six they're already getting taxes on that i mean i guess you know if you wanna have some of our land maybe it benefits us as a road lady but you're also taking eliminating a big part of the section that we can't build on now i kind of feel like we need to hear from them and we need them to tell us why we should be going along with this plan as a school we have right we have no um we have no interest in helping somebody develop 22 homes or 23 rather than 18 right i mean no you're not a real estate developer in competition with a real estate developer you know
227no i mean i think we need to look because remember the idea of purchasing land there's a clause in the law called arbitrage you can't purchase land in order to be a real estate developer for profit which is what we're not i mean there are a zillion other things happening on this land because besides house building we're not a real estate yeah we don't have that ability adventure we have kids building houses one year that's not a real estate developer right and like dale says i mean we think we need to talk protect your interest in our taxpayers well yeah i mean there's for us to do this i mean there has to be some benefit for us um other than helping the developer maximize the number of lots they can and and i will
228certainly say i'm in favor of increased housing in in the school district of ambry that's good for all parties involved yes that's true tom uh is involved with the aedc and i think he probably has something to share as well from the adc when we sit back and the three biggest things holding us back right now are obviously industrial space for it but housing and daycare and housing is the biggest problem we have on expansion of our community and so i would always step back and say yeah you know where the eastman was coming where they're going to put a little bit of a road in on some of our land but if we had to go back and put that road in from the school district we would never be able to do it
229because it would be so cost prohibitive i look back at this and say the city is willing to come in and put this road in to give access in and we are actually going to piggyback off of that road and sewer and gutter and electricity to build homes in and we're actually benefiting your taxpayer we have to put that in ourselves the district i think that's what we need to hear from the city for is that what what are they what is this for like all we're asking all we know right now is it's a road it's an easement what else is included in that so are we going to benefit as the taxpayer is going to benefit from the school district side of it to that of course everybody wants to see houses put
230in because we desperately desperately need them and of course that helps our school district grow as well but then my other concern and because i live this life and again this affects the lens that i look at things through that this school farm is there and that was the intent of it and of course you're not going to answer this and the city may not answer this maybe the developer doesn't even know but that means there's going to be animals there that's a plan there's crops there now that have chemical fertilizer applied to them they have chemical pesticides applied to them and now you talk about building these houses and all of a sudden people build houses it's not that the farm was there first and i built a home next to it now it's
231i built a home and now that farm is impeding on what i want to do or what i don't like then what does that do for us as a school does that change our complete plans of being able to have a farm there and and look at that so that would be the flip side that i have right looking at that i look at it i would i think that if you look back at like the easement where the road is coming in on the land if we were to go and say that we wanted to build those additional houses which was also part of what we said we would do with that land and putting that road in ourselves that the district had to put that road in you're talking millions of dollars if
232we were able to agree that we're going to give some easement on them we're going to put road on part of this land anyway and if you're saying we're going to agree for the city to come in and put this road in and the school district doesn't have to fund it and we can still build houses off of it to me i see that as a win-win i see it a win for the community i see it a win for amy and the school district that's my opinion but i believe i could totally see that as well and i'm not i don't i haven't made up my mind either way about this but i think i need more information myself to make up my mind what i'd like to do and i i think i
233would like to hear from the city well the information i've provided is the information i have so if you want to hear from the city i would simply invite them in to present to you what their ambitions are if that's what you want can they extend that that north south road a little further so that we could build you know i mean so that we could have more lots because now we're losing i certainly can't speak for them but i could certainly invite them in maybe that's part of the negotiations i think it'd be good to hear from the city sure i can engage with them and get them in here if they're available in august if that's what you want yeah or is it something that like a couple people have to you know
234what i mean i don't know if it's them coming here i mean of course we'd all like to hear but if it needs to happen sooner i don't know if it's you know i don't know their timeline yeah i can't speak to that and if that's the case then i think we should call a special board meeting for them because this has got to be an informed decision yeah if they if they need to know sooner then we meet sooner okay we just call it a special meeting that's all right and just so you don't realize and i'm i sit in a really odd spot here because i'm sitting in front of school yeah that's what i do for a living but i also chair a group that's really pushing for additional housing so i
235have to really be careful but the thing is that we are suffering from um businesses that can't hire people they want to hire people but the people try to come in and say i don't have anywhere for me to live it's holding back the hospital it's holding back our industry it's holding back our teachers from living in town yep so it's something that we just desperately need to address as a community not saying that this has to be the answer but to me i look at the road coming in there and then the school district be able to piggyback off that road as a win but and i think that's there's a usually a quid pro quo for it and again if we can negotiate possibly you know a road so we can get maybe
236more than six houses on you know you'd have to have someone it out yeah but four to six somewhere around it yeah well we've only owned the land for a year and a half a year so yeah we've gotten a year and a half just a year i know but i think the road the road going in and the capital improvement on that land is a pretty big improvement for the district as long as it's meeting the needs that we said that is a true true statement it's always been a concert of ours how do we put on a road yeah that's true absolutely i think i think it's a valid point and something to consider but i think we need to consider it as a whole yeah in a totality more than just five
237minutes somehow we already have six or eight lots plotted and surveyed out north of there nor north of in up further coming off of what is that road i can't even think of it right here over here yeah you're talking about we don't have six or eight homes no no but we have lots that have already been separated yeah that's true yeah but that wasn't our intent right that is true yes but they that road came correct that would dramatically change our plan yeah we built right there yeah and that would still require roads right yep yeah do we need to table this yeah yes i think so i would but yeah okay i'll motion the table all right joe i'll second it all right all in favor say hi hi okay extracurricular contracts all
238right okay this is the next and last step in the process for contracts he did letters of appointment way back when back in may he did certified staff contracts back in may administrative contracts in june and now you're here with extracurricular contracts for the sports seasons that are and uh co-curricular for other activities that are coming up here this school year so you would need to make a motion to approve those if that's what you so choose to do and what changes uh there isn't any changes other than the names next to the who's coach and what okay salaries remain the same salaries remain the same tom jeff josh and i have a meeting to talk about the structure of the salary scale here in the first or second week of august i scheduled it
239to look at a change for the 23-24 year we need a comparative in regards to what everybody else makes for said sports and activities in other districts of comparable size and structure so we can at that point make an educated decision we're not doing that for this year but for the year after i would um as you're considering that process and i think i've said this last year when we talked about when we looked at what our extracurricular pays are um when you look at it on a sheet and you look at it in total and it's a lot but i think as you're considering that i think the only true way that you're gonna actually you can compare districts but is a suggestion i would like to see is maybe a reasonable concerted effort
240of our coaches and advisors keeping track of the amount of hours that they spend in the program i know it's impossible to do because i'm but it's there's a ballpark that they can do i mean obviously if we have people that have extra contracts there's there should be some data to look at with that yes we're not going to make a decision without looking at what the others are doing yes so i guess if i would like to see a concerted effort from our advisors and coaches that are currently there how many hours that they spend in those positions so we're not looking at money here we're just looking at changing the names nope this is to approve contracts to go to all those folks with the same um contracted amounts for those activities as
241in years past for the year after we're looking at i'm moving those uh amounts forward all motion to approve okay joe yep there's a second dale all in favor say aye all right opposed questions passed and then we go to our personnel items okay you have new employment contracts for uh tony azapier high school football assistant coach travis bauermeister for special ed para chris boyd high school math larry dalton a high school football assistant byron hopke high school assistant wrestling and then resignations all the same person for high school math varsity basketball and high school football assistant and that person being jason sergeant and then there was one other not on the list but a recognition of an item of a person that was on the list last month and that person is sophia meyer
242and jessica's got something in regards to soup she did retire if you don't remember that happening she did our wonderful aim teacher sylvia meyer has recently joined the retirement world as sue reflected on her career in education which includes two years teaching in luck 33 years teaching third fourth and fifth grade in amery she shared wonder many wonderful memories with me she said that she has truly enjoyed her time in amory and has greatly appreciated the opportunity to help build the aim program work with amazing educators and support the school forest she appreciated the opportunity to constantly learn to challenge herself and to have the space to apply those new ideas sue mentioned many favorite memories but one that stood out to her was when the aim program in their second year traveled to madison
243the students parent volunteers and teachers met their sisters school of lodi completed a saunter with them rode the ferry and learned about wisconsin the aim program spent the night in madison at a wildlife center went to babcock hall and had ice cream met bucky badger and visited many state capitol and historical sites in madison so also shared with me her role in supporting our school forest by writing grants assisting in getting the pergola and the floating dock and getting our school recognized as an official school forest so look forwards look is looking forward to traveling volunteering in our schools and spending time with her family and not spending sundays writing or planning lesson plans on behalf of the school district of amery i'd like to thank sue for all that she has done given to
244our students staff and community i truly hope that she enjoys this next chapter of her life absolutely thank you yeah she's been with us a long time a lot of years uh a motion to accept personnel i'll make emotionally accept the personnel action items in a second i'll second it joe all in favor say aye aye opposed uh is there a need to go closed yes all right so i'll move that we go to closed session uh you need to read your right go into closed session for consideration employment promotion compensation or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility in order to take personal action pursuant to wisconsin statute 19.85 paragraph 1c you want a roll call i think you have to right who's who
245seconded you yes aaron all right all those in favor joe hi yes dale yes yes and