February Regular Board Meeting 012022

001evening everyone we're going to call to order the regular board meeting for television community schools february 21st if we could all stand for the pledge please thank you can we please have broca here clement here barbara garcia here morris here here white here just a few little housekeeping things and i'm sure i'll miss something that i'll follow up on later so welcome to all of you hope you're enjoying the little warmer weather we're having at this point this is a meeting for the board of education that is held in public so it is open to the public we do allow for public comment during the meeting if you choose to participate in public comment we do ask that you fill out one of these cards where it does ask for name information on here so

002that we can follow up as appropriate given that this is a board meeting though at this time we do not respond to public comments and we do follow up at later time as appropriate you will see items voted on tonight as action items please know that those action items have been brought before us there are exceptions to this rule but typically things have been brought to us at least one meeting prior sometimes several meetings prior as well as committee meetings so there has been discussion about all of these items before they're brought to us as action items to vote on occasionally things come to us at last minute due to either timing or requirements from the state or other things that we do have to move through a little faster so typically at these meetings

003you will see voting on some of these action items but not a lot of discussion at that time so just be aware that that's why so thank you again we are going to move on to four which is our consent agenda we have january 31st 2022 minutes february 2022 personnel report in the january 2022 payables i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda as presented we have a second second second by brittany were there any questions on those any corrections anything no all right thank you could we please have a roll call asper yes clement yes robert garcia yes morris yes say do yes white yes motion carries we're going to move on to five which is reports and information we do not have a student representative here tonight so we will

004go to 5b which is our student achievement goals progress with mrs berkowski test thank you [Music] all right so annually we're reporting out on our student achievement update and just start want to start out with a few talking points the very first slide just gives a little bit of an overview of really what we've reported on in the past which is that we really anticipated a dip in our assessments due to the 2021 school year we actually just met with curriculum directors from around the county and this was true of all districts that we that i spoke to that year not as you remember not all students were tested many students were online parents could opt out and choose not to test so this was not a typical year and it is not a depiction

005of all students so when you see that in the data and i know that you've seen this in advance but just wanted to highlight that next slide um a few other talking points during the 20 20 21 and 21 22 school years we saw higher percentages than previous years in math and we really attribute that to the adoption of a tier one curriculum k-8 so we had consistency across classrooms in that area which uh also again the curriculum directly aligns with the nwe assessments that's a data that we'll be looking at obviously reading is more conceptual and the district was in an upward trajectory from 16 to 20. and then less so from 21 to current really because again less instructional time due to covet related absences both for staff and students so that has

006impacted progress and again that is very consistent with districts around the state the third talking point slide is really just highlighting the current school year that we our plans were to develop a teaching and learning framework for the entire district to address just some of the again student achievement concerns we wanted to seek feedback which we just finished friday so we dr trover and i have been in every building in the school district sitting for an entire day seeking feedback from staff letting them know in advance that we're going to be there wanting to get feedback in areas that i've mentioned curriculum instruction assessment professional development and technology and then really the next plan will be to take what we've done with our strategic plan and align that to three to five year priorities for

007the curriculum team um and then share that with staff at the march staff meeting which will be on the seventh and then uh start rolling out and implementing those priorities um in spring of 2022 and we look forward to you know an update at the curriculum and learning committee meetings monthly and obviously as a board on a more regular basis as we roll this out so with that just a reminder that the nwa test that we give is an adaptive achievement and growth test so again this is helping to measure progress and growth for each individual student so it creates a personalized assessment experience so we can see growth over time and this is focused on k through eight in the areas of math and english language arts the writ score that you're going to

008see in this first slide show slide presentation is measuring and comparing academic growth so you again will able to see a student's score at various points throughout his or her education and we'll show reading and math so the first one is the reading and as you can see um we're pretty cons the line is the kent isd average that's listed there and you know despite the fact that we had uh you know covet happening in the um 2020 year we were real still you know extremely pleased that we were above the kent isd average but b we're also looking to see and what do we need to do to be even further than that despite the fact that we had coveted so that was exciting to see this next one is this is again these

009are fall over time snapshots was for math and in fall of 2020 that's when we had our first math tier one resource across the board so you know there were slightly an implementation dip we're guessing from that particular area when you look at like sixth grade for instance um so we're in fifth grade and fourth grade and third grade and again we implemented this for the first time where we're having consistent a new curriculum for all staff during that year in the middle of covid crazy doctor oh sorry i don't say something the next slide is just a district overview of the growth over time so from 2016 to 2021 this first slide is fall assessment so fall and then we'll show winter in just a second um a six year span of time we

010had a four percent growth from 16 to 20 21 and you can see the dip for both reading and math uh that happened and again the upward trajectory especially in reading you know from 19 to 20 was a big jump um and then you know the dip and then so seven percent growth in math so again we're attributing that to having a consistent math resource across the board the next slide shows a little bit more detail about amid the mid-year from 2017 to just this past winter assessment and still despite the you know various challenges with absences and students out for long periods of time or doing some of their their learning uh via google classroom or doing it at home and then bringing it back in we still saw growth as an overall across

011the board which again this is one of the district goals about students above the 50th percentile is the goal and the next two slides are really just a snapshot over those six years oh can you click it one more time i'm sorry i think there was a transition thank you um and i apologize it should there was a um i think the down the second one over from the left from 1617 should have been down four that was not listed there so um again we still had growth despite some of those challenges again this isn't even the 2020 school year yet but um still very much in line and all above the state average and at most times above the kent isd average next slide please same thing one more one more forward please michelle

012thanks um same thing here and again despite the fact that we had that that blip in the 20 20 21 school year um still moving forward and progressing and we think that the reminder that in the 1920 school year there was no state assessment so none given at all and then the 20 20 21 school year was the year that parents could opt out of state testing for their students so we didn't have everyone test during that year here's the quick snapshot i'm answering can i answer any questions tim tim thank you for the report yeah you're welcome with the scores that have leveled off or are are falling due to the the covet issue how much time do you think it's going to take before we can get that back on track can you

013predict when this will all be over and we can have people well we're moving forward despite that when we don't know that factor right i mean it's unknown but um i'm really proud of the work the stuff that we are doing to try to make sure that we have consistent curriculum instruction assessment resources and i think this again this teaching and learning model and framework and then the feedback that we've gotten from staff is really going to help us build some systems that are i mean despite students being gone or staff being going i i i see that increasing despite those factors all right there we go thank you uh you know right now it's a complete guess on when maybe students will recover if you will i've heard some people say it will take

014two or three years for some students to recover i think a lot of it just depends on how it affects some students individually or their families how some school districts respond to it one of the things that we heard loud and clear from our department of education is expect to see a dip in scores and for the most part that was the state trend fortunate for us our teachers our staff has done an amazing job so we were one of the few that actually stayed where we were to previous years or saw increases in many areas when the state trend in the national trend was actually a significant drop but how quickly we recover it's going to be so hard to tell because some kids didn't test some kids were out during the testing some

015staff was out during the testing so so many factors yeah some students were online and they really struggled with it some students were online and they accelerated so it's it's really going to be a challenge to to determine what the impact and how long it takes us to get back to normal footing go ahead so i think i guess maybe over time or as we move forward if we can as we identify where the students are lacking and what groups those might be if the board can be informed as to what we are doing from what we are seeing i know we are kind of doing this now but i think it's going to become more of a a taller topic for all of us on the board to to know that we're addressing areas

016where maybe they don't grow next year the year after you know what does that look like so yep and certainly areas where we could add extra support or things that would you know assist with all of those so thank you any additional questions jason and maybe this is a lead into a future presentation um but so we we implemented the new curriculum for k-8 um just wondering what um [Music] what are we expecting to do that's going to be updated in our next presentation okay coming up next good question yes you you preempted that for sure more details coming i will wait for the next okay and maybe ask more questions okay great anything else on this presentation all right would you like to go ahead and go right forward with strategic plan or who's

017going to start dr martin is going to start okay we'll hand it over to him [Music] thank you so good evening to community members board of education tonight like with previous years the members of the administrative cabinet and i will be providing an overview of our an overreach overview summary of our strategic plan at a glance this updated strategic plan at a glance document will be published on our website in the next few days if we can go to the next page so board members you should have received a more expanded version of this document for tonight's report for your review with your board packet but in the interest of time we will provide an overview and highlight of some of the most significant accomplishments as well as areas that we plan to continue to

018work on during the lifespan of this plan this plan is broken up into four primary areas that cover 117 different individualized individualized activities programs processes that had to be either changed tweaked or completely developed those four primary goal areas are teaching and learning whole child whole community fiscal sustainability and organizational coherence and systemic improvement in each one of those there are a number of individual tasks some of them are a small task that can be completed in a matter of weeks but was critical some are ongoing maybe the development of a committee because it was required for us if we want to see strategic uh systemic improvement or it was something that was required by the state and something that we just previously hadn't done so some of those tasks are ongoing and will be

019ongoing every year sometimes some of those tasks are it's done once and is completed but as you will see tonight we've made significant progress on all four areas and all 100 and the majority of the 117 projects so if we can go to the next page so this plan was originally drafted in the spring of 2019 and officially adopted by the board of education in the fall of 2019 for implementation tonight i'm very proud to say that we are only two and a half years into a five-year plan and as you can see we have already completed anywhere between 72 percent and 94 percent of the 117 individual action items projects or tasks that were identified in the long form of this plan so we have been extremely busy over the last two and a

020half years even though we were bothered with the pandemic and that made some parts of this plan where we just had to stop or pause because we could only do so many things before we were just on overload which was over taxing the system going to the next page so on this slide you can see that we saw positive progress in terms of completed and ongoing tasks and so looking at these two columns just comparing last year the second year the 2020-2021 year as compared to the 21-22 year and we look from january through the end of the calendar year so january 1st to december 31st you can see in the first area which is the teaching and learning icon we've moved from 80 to 84 of our items or tasks being completed uh for

021the whole child whole community we've moved from 51 to 72 percent of those uh items completed [Music] for the fiscal sustainability we've moved from 66 percent to 79 of those items and tasks being completed and again you see a large jump in organizational coherence moving from 72 percent of the task to 92 percent of the task uh being completed we saw some improvement in the number of things that were initiated or started so those are things that will continue to be a work in progress so we're not saying that we're complete there but overall you can see on the far right the positive change if you will in progress from one year to the next with these different tasks [Music] now we'll go to the next page and i'm going to turn it over to

022miss perkowski so that she can give the highlights and notable accomplishments as it relates to the teaching and learning goal thank you dr martin so goal a student achievement we're again the goal is by the 2024 state assessment that we have students demonstrating proficiency on that so since the beginning of the strategic plan launch in fall of 2019 the district has adopted a consistent tier one english language arts curriculum for k-5 a math curriculum for pre-k 8 a social studies curriculum for 5-8 and new units incorporated into science curriculum at the 6-8 levels as teachers have begun training of the new curriculum since it was adopted in fall of 2018. we we've also adopted a seven-year curriculum review cycle plan for consistency in all areas of the curriculum and they will be that will be

023incorporated as part of this teaching and learning model that we uh has previously mentioned aligned to what we heard in our feedback listening tour from all the buildings and we shared with staff in march of 2022 with the goal of implementing this spring as we revamp initial initial plans in this area uh post covet or prior to or after the covet challenges so with that we feel that the aligned curriculum and understanding of what is expected in [Music] instruction and assessment will increase our state standard our state proficiency standards on the state assessment the second one is related to stem and this was an area that was for we moved forward but not as fast as we would have liked despite because of kovit's situation but the middle school stem curriculum resource was updated per

024tech trip that's our partner with their latest addition we developed career pathways at the high school last school year and teachers and administrators from the middle school are making recommendations on the five six seven eight stem expansion for this upcoming school year additional long-term planning is occurring in the spring as we review priorities as determined by the development of the teaching and learning model that best fit the timeline for reimagining all the stem initiatives that were originally planned back in the fall of and the third area in curriculum and program alignment around curriculum maps for all content areas the curriculum maps have been developed including pacing guides and assessments for grades k-5 and english language arts during this school year caledonia high school math teachers have met and begun to develop curriculum maps following the

025adoption of the math curriculum we had math curriculum adopted pre-k-8 during the 2020-21 school year and 9 12 this current year ongoing examination is occurring related to summative assessments with the psat which will begin in seventh grade starting in the spring of 2022 so that we have a more comprehensive look across grades 7 through 10 before students take the sat assessment in 11th grade we are also establishing unit assessment expectations for any newly purchased tier one resource and planning will be completed by this spring with implementation during the 22-23 school year for a district-wide new teacher induction and instructional coaching model supporting teachers more comprehensively as part of a greater teaching and learning model so at this time because this is a pretty voluminous document and you have had the opportunity to have it in

026your hands for a little while we'll stop and pause if there are any questions before we go to the whole childhood community section yes sir so i'll just um because it kind of goes back to the other presentation too just when we talk about we adopted the pre-k eight math curriculum and we got a seven year refuse cycle we adopted and the scores go down a little bit i guess what are the expectations around making sure that we course correct within that curriculum or you know make sure we move those things in the right direction with the curriculum that we did first so we anticipated an implementation dip often with uh with a new curriculum with any yeah with any subject area in the curriculum at the same time we do part of this feedback

027is seeking what do we need additional now that we've implemented it so it's always about review of after it's been implemented do we need more professional development what um additional supplemental resources do we need you know an example might be second grade teachers saying you know we really feel like we need more resources and time and money to teach that skill and the math curriculum that you know has a very limited amount of time and yet the standards are pretty weighty in that particular area so we go back and get feedback from them we would typically reach out to a grade level chair department chair to seek feedback on some of those areas but we were able to do that like i said in person being in the nine buildings this year so we already

028have a game plan for that but that would be an ongoing part of the review process and the cycle of reviewing curriculum and adopting it and then implementing it thank you other questions uh dr martin did you guys get pretty good feedback when you sat in the schools from the employees the feedback has been really great um [Music] uh i i i mean i don't think it was surprising a lot of the feedback but it was very consistent across the district i shared with the curriculum committee the five areas that were consistent across the board um and you know to highlight that for you it was um again so it was support of uh mental health resources counseling for students that are struggling that was ever in every building more professional development for mid-year higher

029so teachers and peer pros get hired mid-year new teacher induction mentoring and support for for new teachers um ongoing profession i should run it was positive yes and i think it really gave us a great um launching pad for this teaching and learning models it was much of what we were planning but we were able to go back and tweak based on what we've heard principles have just summarized and now we're trying to really formulate a timeline for this because i mean when you think about there's 25 pages of detailed single spaced you know feedback that we received and so we want to make sure that we're being really thoughtful about it and making sure that when we we get back with the staff that they have hurt we've heard them and that what they've

030suggested as part of the plan right especially in terms of the things that we asked which were what are you know the roadblocks to student achievement and we in those in those areas curriculum instruction assessment professional development and technology i could give a plug for the curriculum and learning update the top five are in the update they are they have to indicate here so thank you you're going to do that in the update i appreciate that jase thanks additional questions okay with that then we'll move on to the next slide thank you very much whole childhood community and so i will apologize up front i will be doing my best miss dubison impression unfortunately they had a death in the family and so she's not able to be with us tonight so i will be

031pinch hitting for her and i'll have some back up if i need it if there's a question i cannot answer but in the first area uh the first two areas for whole child uh whole community the the objective goal is to develop a positive uh school climate uh in order to foster higher levels of academic achievement so a multi-system a multi-tiered system of instructions and intervention has been developed for pre-k through 12th grade which includes universal screening to help identify needs every building has implemented components of pbis or positive behavior intervention systems or psc for positive school culture these systems are annually reviewed for fidelity and improvement professional development is provided to staff to intentionally support a positive school culture so some of the individual things that has been a part of this process is

032developing tier one type of supports and we did that through social thinking the samford harmony program as well as be nice being well established and implemented across the district also working to implement more systemically aligned tier 2 and tier 3 supports and interventions and being able to track and document what the supports and interventions are and look at the data in terms of the effectiveness one of the things that when i got here that was a challenge is unfortunately we lost several students uh due to suicide or attempts of suicide so from 2018 and and moving forward every time that we could find a sustainable way in the budget to increase some of the social emotional learning supports through staffing or programming we've added a little bit each year not as much as we'd like

033but we've added something pretty much every year to try to bring more of these supports around students who may be struggling in non-academic ways but may impact their academic performance we've implemented student risk screening scales as well as a k-6 trails to wellness screener which is and and the trails to wellness screener which is used in 7th and 8th grade as well as 9th through 12th grade on the the second goal in this area the effectiveness of instruction and supports were measured using various data including provider logs and school-wide information systems we continue to seek ways to enhance and expand mental health supports and resources for our students and families so by some of the ways that we're doing that is making sure that we started to develop a process for training and giving time

034for training for dealing with trauma poverty non-violent crisis response diversity suicide and mental health awareness so staff training was provided to support the positive school culture and student safety cpi training is provided annually by the local district training team we've also partnered with alliance counseling group to provide on-campus access to mental health supports and we've used e3 grant partners identified for future applications so we're continuing to work to see if we can bring in more money and more resources because you know what we'd like to do is try to bring these resources on in a way that's sustainable we can keep it and not do it one year and have to drop it off and so sometimes that's grant and other times as our budget grow we look for strategic opportunities to try to get

035us to more comfortable levels because that is again it was identified as ms prokowski was doing her listening tour as an area in the buildings that pretty much all building identified some what of a need another area in the whole child whole community is dealing with 2c and that is the district wellness committee was developed and meet quarterly to facilitate initiatives that support student health and wellness learning our school health support services continue to provide important training and direct care so this wellness committee was initiated in 2021 this is something that we were really required to do but we weren't doing consistently in our district as well as a sex education advisory committee that was something that was required by law but we weren't doing so that was another thing that we implemented in addition

036to that we've added school nurses through a partnership with spectrum health and because of the anticipated impact of covet and contact tracing we hired health and safety paraprofessionals in all of the buildings because we just knew what was coming and what we saw at the end of 2020 when buildings were forced to go into shutdown and the things they were heading for 2021 we knew the buildings would need some additional capacity to deal with the challenges as they relate to trying to educate in a covet environment and area 2d partnerships [Music] the goal in this area was to identify and establish school and community partnerships and so in this area partnerships with the community support for our students and our staff and reaching both academic and non-academic district goals was our focus here this will

037be an area of renewed focus for the upcoming months and upcoming school years we still have a lot of area to grow here but just given some of the things that we were struggling with it was really hard to put some priority on that and meet all the other needs that we had however we did have some progress here a great start readiness program and the quality effectiveness the quality and effectiveness was evaluated during the 2020 school year and we continued to do that with ongoing rating reviews and our preschool license was renewed in the fall of 21 and so that review really came back pretty strong and positive for us in our district so overall we saw a substantial increase uh in this particular area as compared to last school year i think we

038saw a a jump of about 21 of the individual items or processes or programs put in place over the calendar year from last year to the next as we evaluate the performance with the strategic plan so at this time i'll pause before we go to the next one and see if there are some questions that i can try to answer yeah um so given that you know the teachers and the feedback that they gave to mrs parkowski and dr troger identified you know the need for mental health supports and social emotional learning supports for our kids and we know that that's impacting their ability to access their education i just want to hear and and also knowing that we don't have access quite at the level we need no social workers and school counselors folks

039like that in the building i'd like to hear a little bit more about what you guys are doing across the administrative team collaborating within the team to think about creative ways to solve some of those problems um and how you're prioritizing that yeah so wendy will probably be the better person to speak to that but if i can and if we can jot down that question we'll make sure that as a team we respond to it but it comes up pretty frequently as we look at our strategic plan goals our department goals and we look at our budget and what we need to do for the upcoming year so last year i'll pick on this this particular facility we knew based on previous data and information that wendy has put together in our system and

040just through anecdotal information hearing from our staff that we needed more support and we were seeing that particularly at the middle school level and particularly some of the behaviors you were starting to see in sixth seventh and eighth grade so as we transition from a traditional middle school to a 7-8 environment what we did do is add a full 1.0 fte for counseling support just in this building alone to increase that student to counselor ratio there are standards nationally in terms of how many students each counselor should have and we as well as most districts throughout the state are woefully inadequate with that there are standards for if you're going to have school nurses how many you should have per student we are woefully inadequate there's even standards for how many administrators for students we

041are woefully inadequate these are things that have just happened over the course of you know a decade plus 15 20 years as funding has become strained in michigan but the need is continuing to grow so um we probably i would say at least each quarter kind of have discussions and we make incremental adjustments when necessary so that's how we developed a partnership that wasn't there a year ago with the alliance program because we realized that even though we added another counselor another social worker it still wasn't enough and so we sought out a partnership where they were able to come and provide more mental health support in our facilities one because we had some grant funding that is not long term and so we knew that was an opportunity to use that grant funding and

042in the event that that goes away which grant funds often do we weren't having to downshift staffing because it wasn't part of our general funding so we had to be very strategic about how to provide more supports but be nimble in case the grant funds go away so we're constantly in this back and forth debate about how much we can add and sometimes quite honestly it's a half a fte or it's only two positions and you have eight buildings you've got to figure out where the need is greatest so then we look at the data we talk with our building administrators and then we try to add more support where we have more need because there's a need for more counselors but there's also a need for social workers the role is very different people

043think they're the same but the role is actually very different same thing like we knew that there was a need for nurses there's a lot of there's a lot of legal requirements for what our staff have to do and it seems like the kids are coming to us a little bit more complicated in terms of healthcare needs so having two nurses on staff now that we can refer to um is a great improvement and so we continue to look at that and actually i think we added additional nurse from now to the remainder of the school year because we had a little bit more money allotted to us in the grant and so we are starting basically in february and is it a 0.5 or a 1.0 okay so do no one is no one

044has applied yet but we have it out there for another 1.0 for one more nurse to get us through the remainder of the school year so the short answer it is probably reviewed every quarter and then we determine based on where the funding is coming from sustainability in need thank you okay thank you i got off easy with that next up uh we'll go to the next slide and i'm going to turn this over to mr reese and she is going to go over fiscal sustainability and some of the progress and changes we've had there all right thank you so in this area our first goal is reinvestment in student staff programs and supports so when dr martin joined us it was identified over the years we had made reductions especially during those economic downturns

045and in those reductions that we made many of those just weren't built back into our budget so there were areas in our budget that just were not funded appropriately so this was one of our strategic goals and in this i just wanted to highlight we were able when we started this strategic plan in the 1920s school year we were able to make some nice reinvestments and some of those included in the area of athletics we reduced the athletes pay to play um by a portion and that included in our club our club sports as well we added additional trainer support for strength and conditioning instruction we also added game management support in the fine arts we um put funds to replace our band uniforms which hadn't been replaced in a very long time and hopefully

046this is the year that that's able to get finalized so we're hopeful for that in the curriculum and instruction area some of those additions were we had created the student support specialist positions prior but we also then made a full-time student support specialist coach we also increased instructional supply budgets in many areas we as mr kelsey's perkowski spoke to earlier about the middle school stem program we added that we also had the math adoption the social studies five through eight adoption we also um were looking to transition and we have different funding sources to really try to put we had things for instance in our enhancement millage funds those are additional funds we get through the isd millage we had things like textbooks in that funding source when truly that should be part of our

047general fund so we're still in the process of transitioning and getting those textbook adoption cycles and have that be built into our actual general fund budget this year we are able to add 9.4 teaching positions as well then in technology we are now one-to-one with our devices so with our replacement cycle plan that's built in now to our budget bus replacements we increased funding here for our bus replacement cycle trying to reduce the age of our bus fleet try to keep get that more to industry standard so that was an addition in that area then administrative supports we added two middle school assistant principals a shared a part-time shared time coordinator we um also have a high school dean now and we increased a couple of our support positions from part-time to full-time so we

048really have done quite a bit in this goal area so of course we're still always looking at this and what are ways to continue to build up those budgets to align really with a district our size and what that budget should look like um the second goal was in the realm of operations so operations in looking at budgets this was one of those departments that were hit the most and of course when we're making budget reductions we try and keep that as far away from the classroom as possible but in that that developed this kind of gap in our operations so areas here that we've added additional funding was specifically around our grounds added funding for additional mowing fertilization weed control snow removal also invested in our public improvement fund and looking all of those

049items that did not make the bond list that are still needs within the district so trans transferring and investing from our general fund and the goal was a half a percent up to five percent of our operating budget to transfer to the public improvement fund to work away at some of these additional needs that we have staffing is another area um so part of our strategic goal is to develop a custodian grounds and maintenance staff plan so that's something we are starting to develop we have some plans in place this year we were able to transition a few of our part-time positions to full-time but staffing is continuing to be a problem and trying to get and maintain staff so that is something that we are looking at looking at all different avenues then when

050we get to goal c needs-based budgeting process so this is an area we've done a little bit of work we have transitioned to a per pupil allocation we've also clearly identified what are those district responsible things what are the things that come from and should be out of the building discretionary budgets we're looking at avenues of what does it look like to move to an actual needs-based budgeting process so that is more of the work that's going to be taking place and hopefully will be implemented with the 2324 budget planning cycle then in gold d that's a multi-year operations and capital needs planning goal this we did a lot of heavy lifting at the onset of the strategic plan a lot of this work had to be done looking at the needs across the district

051as we were going to go to the community and had to bring to treasury the treasury department what that looked like as far as capital projects so we have a actually five plus year facilities operations plan and that gets looked at now on a regular basis um so we are feeling really good about where we are and how we're tracking that goal e the final goal in this area is improving fiscal accountability and best practices so this goal we are providing best practice supports to our outside organizations as well as staff and we will continue to work in this area and providing professional development opportunities for our staff when we are able to do so also looking a couple of the areas in this section was looking to develop processes for instance with our facility

052use reservations billings payments etc what we did and we were able to contract with an outside auditing firm so we were thankful this year it was a delayed a little bit with the pandemic but we're thankful they have been able to come in and review so they walked through and looked at our operations they looked at our high school athletics our preschool program as well as our community resource center so they looked at everything from who's opening your mail who's taking in your funds and just did a holistic view of this and so we're waiting to get the report back from that and then we will be able to utilize where are the areas that maybe we have some gaps and build that into some of our written processes and on the final note in

053this section what are we going to do to make sure that we are operating and you with our processes that we're developing and making sure that we're operating so we're going to and we have the last couple years done um random audits so just internal audits ourselves and go to a specific building or department and make sure internally are you doing our processes following them if not you know what do we need to tweak and what are we are things that are maybe missing so i think that sums up everything in this section were there any questions so either one of you can take a crack at this one inflation is you know now hitting like 40 50-year highs and we obviously don't print money here so how how are we going to deal with

054that from a budget point of view and what have you heard from the state and what their solution is so that's going to be a challenge because inflation is extremely high right now early indication at least from the governor's budget is this will probably be the best funding year that we have seen in probably two over two decades so we're hopeful although it's very early in the process the governor may suggest but by the time it gets through the house and the senate and special interest groups will see what we actually get but assuming that we are doing better than normal we will have to try to figure out the balance of what areas that we've identified that is a sore spot that needs some support and then other areas you know how best to

055divvy the funds with our staffing because as as the pricing have gone up on everything it puts in it puts a challenge on our district and every district in terms of doing the best we can to keep up with inflation and give all of our staff a fair equitable wage that's competitive regionally but at the same time try to also continue down the path that we've gone to restore areas where we may be understaffed or under resourced or underutilized so you know it's great to have someone with a lot of money but then if they don't have the the tools necessary to do their job you're not going to get what you were we're seeking so we're trying to do that once we see what the actual budget will look like then we'll start to

056prioritize those dollars based on weaknesses in our district based on our strategic plan based on the data that we have but right now we're probably in a unique situation where there is a lot of one-time funding out there and so we're going to have to be very strategic and how best to use one-time funding to one first and foremost benefit the academic as well as the emotional and mental support needs for the students those are probably the top two priorities because these last two years have been abnormal and this one-time funding is projected to be around for about two more years so when you talk about how long it takes to recover that's probably going to be our first priority there then after that you've heard ms perkowski talk about you've heard sarah talk about

057systemically and our next area is organizational coherence what we have realized is in some areas despite our best intent we have grown we have cut the budget from the you know 2000 3 4 5 fiscal challenges and i think when i got here our actual operations budget for maintenance and operations was higher in 2007 than it was in 2018 when i arrived and yet we added the south campus and we added paris ridge during that time so we were woefully short with custodial maintenance and operations to just to cut the grass so we're still going to have some of those challenges to work through so we can't give every single dollar into a person's paycheck when it's not sustainable that's our big focus doing things in a sustainable fashion as much as we can project

058out the future so i don't know if there's anything left to say but i'm going to let mr brees clean it up if i i think he did pretty good so we obviously know there's a lot of areas we need the money for i think that that the audit you talk about the external audit is important to clarify to that that's that's a secondary audit right that's uh correct that was um that was a secondary audit not our typical annual audit that we do on all of our books every year this was something supplemental we went through a separate auditing firm um just for complete separation a new set of eyes just to look at these specific areas so yes and thank you for that question because we really are saying to ourselves we think

059we might see something but if we can have outside expertise look at something in our mind it might be well we've always done it this way here but we want to make sure that we are legally compliant and we are using our resources fiscally sound and that we are making sure that we don't have uh systems in place that would lead to bad fiscal outcomes or loose management of facilities or resources or loose management of money so we've contacted a another outside entity above and beyond what's required for us in the auditing process so that we can look at various aspects of our organization and figure out what's working well what's broken and what we need to do to adjust and fix you know i think that that's it's just so important just especially what

060we've seen in other districts that can happen what are we how often are we going to bring them in because it's above and beyond what we normally do i think it's a good use of resources but we obviously want to be cognizant of that but first question i guess is that we're i'm assuming we're rotating to different areas to have them look into and then if so is this going to be an annual thing or or do you see this every couple of years or give any idea on how the frequency there i would say that without having the report back yet from this initial audit it's a little preliminary to know yet whether this will be an annual or but definitely this is something that we will want to pursue and kind of keep

061on a schedule and i would say from from my experience in other places somewhere between every three to five years depending on what you're seeing in your organization if we are in complete disarray i'll probably do it much more frequently so every other or every third year if we are starting to see that we are moving in the right directions in a lot of areas then probably every five years as a spot check maintenance but there are probably 20 different areas that they can review and audit and so she mentioned probably about five or six areas that we wanted to have a deeper dive or deeper look in and have someone who that's kind of at least where while they're contracted that's kind of their full-time focus because her office still have all of the

062day-to-day functions to do and so we do we wanted to get it started so we got it started and it's probably postponed by a year and a half because of covet they simply wouldn't come in for jobs like that but now we're doing it we want to see what this first report looks like depending on the depth of how much we have to do will determine how fast we go back because we may have a lot of things we need to fix and so we'll need time to really focus in on that and then bring them back for another in-depth look at some other areas that need to be adjusted but i would say three to five years is about appropriate well thanks i'm just really happy we're doing that just as another check checker

063balance so but how long is it before we expect that you will get the results back from that um by before the end of march but i would expect it probably a little bit sooner but i think we had talked about with with their firm it's a larger firm that we went with and which has its benefits as well and so they have teams that actually review our auditor's work who was on site he writes up a report it goes through a couple different departments for review and and to make sure they're making the best recommendations for us as well so that that part takes a little bit of time to get work through their team okay thank you any other questions okay and last but certainly not least is organizational uh coherence and systemic

064improvement so that is almost exactly how it sounds we're looking at areas at that time that we've identified that could use some improvement and in a lot of cases that's a lot of moving parts because you're trying to add or implement systems so we saw a huge new software conversion that we talked about previously to power school in school messenger system daryl and and i will talk about uh some some things that have improved in this area um as well as you know some other challenges so i'll give it over to mr kingsbury thank you dr martin good evening board um we just talked about fiscal sustainability and in order for us to do that we really have to align our resources make our organization coherent have us all pointing in the right direction that's

065a big piece of it right there and we just spoke briefly about the student information system well what's the big deal about a student information system well uh not only does it house all of our grades historical transcripts do our attendance does state reporting for us you know it's a big part of what our teachers do every day and what we did is we move for a i don't want to say it's an antiquated system but to a system that gives us much more capabilities and a lot of those capability capabilities will be discussed by dr martin but uh that is a huge lift by our technology department to take all that data transfer it you know i don't even know the technical terms just all that stuff and moving it over over some wire

066somewhere and get it to accurately come through with the appropriate grades appropriate transcripts so our technology department did a a huge lift in making that happen you know with everything we ran into our glitches and things like that but it's worked very well for us and i'll kind of jump ahead a little bit and one of the things that allows us to do is really create a more user-friendly enrollment process for our parents um before a parent would have to bring all their documents into our office drop it off or drop it off a school office or if they had enrollment and two kids in two different schools they had to enroll in both buildings now we have one central collection point that allows scanning pictures and all that all those documents to be done

067in one area and that's at our central office which is much more efficient for the for our staff our buildings and for parents you know sometimes there are some documents we might need to see firsthand but it allows us to collect that information and hopefully make that first experience with our district not so hectic or if somebody's got to go home and get something else a little less frustrating so uh we rolled that out just this last fall and it's it's been working and we're getting better at it too as we learn more and we identify ways to improve we continue to do that then jumping back you know this is all new for us here so you have a whole school system that doesn't how do you know how to use powerschool so we've

068got to learn how to do that and it takes time so our tech department actually went and they dedicated a position where that position is used to train our staff not only in power school but in other um areas other technologies that we have so they can go to an expert or a training blog that they put together so they can go and ask the questions that sometimes may i mean i just want to ask this question but their person is willing to help them out do one-on-one training or do whatever it needs to take to really become proficient in the use of those tools so it just hats off to our technology department and our teachers who jumped right in and learned the system and how it worked because it's it can be frustrating

069when you have something new there's always a learning curve associated with that so let me just move on to make sure i didn't miss anything there and i think dr martin will talk more about some of the specific capabilities that powerschool allows us to do these are add-on modules and if you remember back in the day when we stuffed the newsletter in your kids backpack you know we don't have to do that anymore we can send those things electronically so he'll talk about some of the capabilities and then as we uh reflecting to dr garcia question about you know are we where we need to be with supports for counseling and supports for students the answer is unequivocally no we're not there yet i think that same thing can be said for technology i think

070over the course of time we either added a 0.5 or 1.0 i can't recall over the course of like three years in reality they're still one to two positions shorter than what they probably need considering that we are moving to one to one and so many different things so i took my hat to uh dan him and his team have been doing a phenomenal job but uh moving on from that and this is kind of a collaboration between our communications coordinator as well as our technology department we've moved to greater utilization of our school messenger system for text and emails to parents as well as growing our social media presence so i'm sure our entire community have probably been noticing that we completed a second redesign of our district website with the goal of just

071trying to it's so many so much information on our website but trying to continue to find ways to make it easier for people to access information or find it everything can't be on the front page or loaded to this or that particular piece when you're talking about a 50 to 60 million organization so we're continuing to try to do that and we feel good about our redesigned website as well as our development of a district-wide app so that you can get the information plugged right to your phone now more quick more timely more user-friendly for our parents also we did a huge conversion of our schools of choice busing system to a geographically zoned system for elementary boundaries and so the overall impact of that and one of the things that we heard is that

072we had so many of our kids particularly at the elementary level who were on the bus for more than an hour when you factor in the time they were picked up from school then they had the bus transfer system and then getting to their new bus and to their community in some cases this was just excessive compared to other school districts and it was really a factor of our growth as we have grown as a school community doing things the way we have done it in the past created a challenge where in order to meet that need we would have had to significantly increase the number of drivers as well as the number of buses and as we can see around our state and around the country it's getting more and more challenging to fill

073those positions so by going through that change this year we have reduced the ride time for 22 buses to less than an hour whereas just the previous year these students were on our buses for more than an hour that was significant as part of the the challenge and we also converted our buildings from um k4 or from traditional elementaries to a k4 intermediate and to a 7 8 facility that sets us up in the future for some of our instructional things that we were looking at whether it's with stem whether it is academic support or whether it is academic acceleration now being organized in that way makes it easier for us to build on in the future so we had to get that portion in place first before we can move on with some other

074things that we have in our strategic plan but that was a huge undertaking for the staff and quite honestly for the parents in the community to go through that type of seismic shift and i think the other thing about it is we see more housing development it set us up for as we grow as a school community [Music] it will push out the date for us to have to do another elementary because by that reorganization we'll be able to get more students into our elementary facilities more students into craft more students into duncan lake in our high school because of the south campus is already set up and have capacity for a lot more students you know i know we still have the challenge of the roads but that's not in my strategic plan and

075we're not allowed to change that so those were some of the big highlights uh that i wanted to speak to for this year and daryl did you have more all right thank you sir um and finally when we're looking at our last goal um it talks about a frontline system just streamlining not only our human resource processes but a lot of the other things that we do too when i started this position we were still using paper and pencils to get documents around and that's not a very efficient use of time so we've uh i'm working with the software provider that allows us to digitize and automate that so somebody can go in and start a function that function will flow on to the next person once those tasks are completed we still refine that

076every day because we find different situations where we need to accommodate but those are some of those ongoing things that we always have to do and just in evaluating the systems that we had so it's high loaded oh yeah we had we had a highlight just because uh they recognized some of the unique things we were using um the system for um because a lot of districts they just have it they store stuff for us we want to archive and document any personnel changes that we make so we can set the system up so the documents we create it will automatically go into the file that person for their employment here then it it archives it too so it's really kind of a nice way to go back why did what happened in this position

077why did this person leave so a lot of unique features that we have with that too so no thanks for reminding me about running reminding me about that um another things uh evaluation of some another part of our human resource process and we currently use a different um tool that's all on its own um so we're always trying to find ways to bring things together in-house and one of those problems is uh there's only several of us that use it in the county and when we work together as a county consortium with kent isd we really have the ability to leverage our buying power our and justify going on finding those things so finding a way to utilize an observation system whether it's taking on the the program that kent isd uses they often offer

078more supports that we might not have as a standalone district so that's really a nice plus there so we're going to continue to explore that it has been put on the back burner for a little while because uh it's been pretty busy the last couple years but uh we will pick that up um staff planning guide you know instead of just taking a guess on what our staffing needs are we're really looking at making a systematic formula based decision making model it's not going to be 100 accurate because you're dealing with classrooms they have different numbers of students in there so it's not going to be 100 exact but it gets us pretty close so when we analyze our student populations and the programs we want to offer we can use this to help guide

079our decision-making processes so we'll keep refining that it takes a lot of work a lot of looking at what other districts do and sometimes people don't utilize that type of system but we want to be one that really does um always a concern for us is our emergency operations planning that's an ongoing process we have a very great benefit here having uh mr jason russell who is a renowned security expert for schools living in our district he gives his time to us pro bono no cost with that so i had a chance to meet with him he's going to work with us in the future and uh we have a great sro too but when we work together we can really make sure environments safe and evolving as you know different threats evolve um through

080time so that's something we always focus on and dr martin you mentioned about the k-8 organization reorganization and just a tremendous lift like you said not only was it the logistics of getting books deaths and people to new buildings but there's also the anxiety of the building process during the summer when am i going to get in my classroom you know the day before school starts is when i can start you know adding some decorative uh items to that so that's that's what was a big stress and just the planning for staff and all those things that went into it and like you mentioned allows us to grow without having to increase the number of schools that we have because we know as inflation rises that prod their products cost a lot more and you

081know wages rise and things like that we want to be able to pee our people competitively but do so smartly when we do that so i think that's all i have unless there's any questions tim i think one important highlight that may not be mentioned here is that as we achieve the goals and eventually reach 100 percent that these goals are maintained they're not just reached and then ignored we're constantly grooming them making sure that we keep them at the level that they're intended to be at through the strategic plan no that's a great point and even when you look at the details of our plan we have it identified as completed and ongoing because sometimes once you put the system in place you don't just walk away and never look at it again there's

082going to be review there's going to be maintenance no different than when we adopt a curriculum we want to see you know sometimes you put a system in place and you still have that implementation dip don't quite get what you expect right off because we have to learn the system we have to figure out what works what doesn't work and we can adjust but uh ongoing is listed in there with completed because it's substantial to sustain certainly completed is never completed because obviously staying stagnant and anything is falling behind so and i would encourage all of you i know that the document is really extensive for the strategic plan but if you do have any questions or you know additional information that you want on that to please email dr martin so that he can

083not only answer it but then he can um email it back to all of us just in case there's something that you know somebody might think of all right jason one quick comment um i get a lot of good feedback on the app um i love the app my wife loves the app so um good job on the app um i appreciate all of the progress that's been made on the strategic plan um as i look here we're in 2022 and this goes to 2024. um so when do we start sort of that thinking about the next sort of strategic planning sessions is that like a 2020 three time frame [Laughter] um you know i keep you on your toes i see clearly as we look go into the 2023-2024 school year i think we

084have to then start looking at what areas um that popped up that have been new and so occasionally we have added things to the strategic plan we had to because of colvit and you just had to do it um but when we get into the 23-24 school year then we start to look at what needs to be completed and determine do we need to do a whole new strategic planning process do we modify that in a way of other areas that have naturally come up because some of the things that have evolved as as mr perkowski talked about when you go and you do a listening tour the way we did it sometimes you hear some things that you want to hear sometimes you things that are tough to swallow but it's actually good to

085go out and hear it because that's the only way we know that we still have work to do in areas to improve so some of those things may not show up right now but it might roll into the next strategic plan so right now today i can't say what the process will be but it will be sometime between the 23 24 year that we start to look at phase two of the strategic plan thank you i'll just add great work to you and the team appreciate everything you guys got done i know there's a lot going on and also to the staff um it's it's it's impressive so good work thank you okay thank you all right thank you all right we're going to get ready to move to our discussion items 6a which is

086food service dishwashing stations bid packages and as i said before typically we you know talk about something over a couple month period of time at a minimum this is one of those odd situations where something comes up with some constraints that we have to move a little quicker on so please feel free to ask all the questions you need to i know this has also been talked about in committees as well so yes so we are looking here at getting a dishwashing station both at duncan lake facility and craft meadows facility currently both of those facilities are hand-washing all of their dishes so this would actually put in an industrial sized you know dishwashing machine at each of these locations as well as putting in a new three-well sink so the bids went out in

087january and were returned in february so the recommendation is to move forward with the second lowest bid the reason why it's the second lowest bid that is recommended is because of the timing they are able to commit to being able to get this work done as soon as school is out also the reason why like ms white mentioned is the timing so when this came back it's great that we went to bed when we did because pricing for these items go up in march so being able to move forward and take advantage of the lower pricing is is a positive thing so these would be paid for out of food service funds and would be a great opportunity for both of these buildings and for the staff and with the increased students that each the

088buildings have will be much more productive as well on the cost for both of these is 122 that includes the bulk of like includes all the equipment and installation it does not include some of the electrical work that may be needed and potentially a little bit of plumbing that might be needed but otherwise it is the bulk of the cost any questions just one and it's maybe a little bit tangential i know that part of why this was pursued was because of the fund balance for the food services budget how was it chosen for these schools to all the other schools already have this type of setup or you can just explain about it so yes because for one to answer the first question so with food service funds and being that we receive federal

089reimbursement dollars for um free and reduced lunch meals now the last couple years all of our students have been eating for free so all of our student meals are reimbursed with federal dollars and there is a rule that you cannot carry in excess of three months worth of operating expenditures in your food service fund so we do have some excess dollars that we do need to spend out of this fund so this is a great way to be able to do that and something that we actually really could need so the reason why these schools were identified some of you who have been on the board a little bit i'm trying to remember what year it was we did at the high school implement a dish room and we paid for that with food service

090funds and so at the high school we did take care of that and then these are the next two schools that have high numbers of students which is why we're looking at doing it at those locations thank you any additional yeah um so just quick with the guaranteed of of the work being able to be done um is that taking into account any of the supply chain issues that that we hear about all the time like do they have these things in place ready to go okay yes thank you tim yeah on your point jason excuse me this uh the low bid in in the second bid was less than one percent i think of the total and to get it delivered is one thing then the scheduled installation is another so it really had

091too much ambiguity to where we thought it would probably be best if we went with what we knew versus what might happen thank you thank you any additional questions on that has the system at the high school been successful i mean are they happy with yeah okay i mean i'm assuming so but you know just in case there's anything you know all right one of the things that we added several years ago as well were instead of having the disposable um lunch plates trays whatnot we are actually using reese recycled so those need to all be washed as well so it just adds to the to the washing so yes i think staff will be very pleased with these next two buildings absolutely all right thank you on to 6b which is summer 2022 um

092high school av technology bid package mr hubble good evening uh yeah so we have on your agenda for discussion tonight um what's titled the summer 2022 high school av technology bid packages um i believe everybody has been briefed on this through board memos over the last couple months and then this was presented to the operations and finance committee last week these bid packages were released last week on wednesday and i believe this week we have a pre-bid meeting on the 23rd and then bids are due march 9th and then the intention is to make a recommendation to the finance and operations committee next month and then bring it to the board for approval next month the bulk of the work is going to be at the high school south campus learning commons where we're adding

093presentation equipment this was something that was overlooked i think in the initial design or maybe it wasn't ever intended for that purpose but it's a great pd space it just has no presentation capability in there so we're going to put a pretty decent system in there and then while we're doing this work we have some classrooms over at the north campus the band choir orchestra rooms where their presentation equipment sitting on a cart in the middle of the room with cords running across the floor and stuff and they've been asking for a number of years to get that all mounted i don't know 30 some feet up in those rooms which is a little bit more than what my people can do so we're going to add that into this project and then we're also

094mounting the wood shops presentation equipment in the wood shop and then the last thing that we tacked onto this kind of at the last minute was some alert strobes and visual strobes in those spaces because they're loud and when emergency now announcements are made they don't always hear them and so these strokes will given a visual alert that there's some type of emergency announcement going on so that that's pretty much it any questions the strobes that will be in the wood shop and then where else they're gonna we're gonna put one in the band room one in the orchestra room one in the choir room two in the wood shop just because they're not all generally facing one direction and then one in the metal shop okay tim this is a i'm not asking for

095a decision just more of a point for the board that this is not a a i say large expense and because it is technology we may want to consider finding a way to fund this on a general fund rather than financing it with the bond i don't know good time to talk about go ahead jason uh yeah so just real quick in in some of the organizations that i've worked with and and know people in they're moving a bit away from projectors and more towards like larger tv screens um is that something that we maybe looked at um instead of projectors that would have to be mounted you know 30 feet in the air mount a tv on a wall or something like that yes that's something that we always consider in these rooms these

096these screens are going to be 12 feet screens i don't know that they make displays that large yet so you know that's one of the challenges there also even in a in a regular classroom a challenge is is the cost those displays you know like say for an 80 84 inch display they're still you know in the three thousand dollar range for you know commercial units that we would put in the classroom okay thanks okay we'll look for more information to come on that through finance and operations committee thank you thank you i'm gonna quick stop and take a minute before we go on to our board and superintendent reports i've seen a few people come in and i just want to make sure that everyone is aware if you are here to speak for

097interested citizen or public comment section i do need one of these cards filled out and i will need them turned in before the public comment starts you will have three minutes to speak at that time to address the board as a whole and there will not be personnel issues at that time addressed thank you all right we are going to move on to seven which is board and superintendent reports we have a curriculum and learning committee all right bear with me this is a little bit lengthy uh curriculum and learning committee met on february 15th 2022 at 7 30 a.m there was no public comment uh dr garcia mrkowski and i provided an update regarding the reproductive health committee meetings the recommendation from the committee will be shared at the march board meeting ms hamister

098joined the meeting to discuss truancy versus chronic absenteeism and some challenges with the current policy more information is being compiled from previous years on chronic absenteeism prior to covet 19 and will be discussed at the march meeting mr kowski provided an overview of the district listening tour seeking feedback from staff on roadblocks to student achievement in the areas of curriculum instruction assessment professional development and technology she and dr troger spent a day in each of the nine district buildings listening to staff about their concerns in the above mentioned areas as promised here are the top five counseling support mental health and social emotional needs of students common curriculum across all grade levels and departments onboarding and mentoring support for new teachers professional development throughout the year for mid-year hires and district team meetings and structures

099having a vertical alignment across the district for those more information will be shared at march 7th staff meetings ms burkowski shared the criteria for the sr3 spending along with recommendations from the community survey and community staff and student feedback forums as a reminder these funds are designated for one-time short-term expenditures and must address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic specific to at-risk disadvantaged students in our district defined as low-income and diverse racial and ethnic groups english language learners students with disabilities and homeless migrant and foster care students the plans for spending include creating supports for students in the areas of summer programming before after-school programming tutoring freshman mentor program evidence-based interventions and professional development and additional supports removing roadblocks for the at-risk population like transportation translation services internet access et cetera mr prokowski provided an

100overview of a recommendation from the high school administration to change policy 5463 related to private school students transferring into the caledonia high school the recommendation is to strike the last sentence from the policy which states although credits from non-public schools may be granted and placed on a student's transcripts no grades will be entered on the transcript or considered for class ranking this would align with current practices this would align with current practice in our district and in the state dr martin missed a reason mr kingsbury shared updates from the finance and operations committee which met on february 17th 2022 the meeting adjourned at 8 59 a.m the next curriculum and learning committee meeting will be held on march 15th at 7 30 a.m question any questions for that committee thank you very much all right

101the next one is 7b which is finance and operations committee tim thank you as we start a new calendar with committees i wanted to thank kyle clement for his service to the finance and operations committee it's been what about four years i think since uh we came together on the community and welcomed ms julie asper to the finance and operations committee who's joined already we have of course finance and operations committee can be in wednesday february 17 at 7 35 a.m there are no individuals present from our community for comment mr hubble presented a recommendation to purchase media equipment for two locations at the high school in addition a request for purchase of emergency strobe lights in various rooms throughout the area near the performing arts center that may be impacted by emergency announcements and

102make hearing difficult this recommendation will be discussed at the 221-22 board meeting and without judge without objection recommended for a boat after the committee meeting in march miss mahani stahlser presented a recommendation to purchase and install dishwasher rooms at craft meadows and duncan lake cost will be 122 508 dollars and 50 cents recommendation will be discussed at the february board of education meeting and brought to a vote mr hess gave an update on progression on bond projects he also elaborated on measures being taken to attract operations staff he's been asked to look at creative solutions to filling open positions this prokowski provided an update from the curriculum committee meeting which is now held ahead of our meeting mr kingsbury discussed shifting our health health safety paras from esser funding to general fund and changing the

103position to safety positions at the secondary level staff members will be reassigned with no loss of employment impacted the district is exploring an additional two retired police officers to serve in a safety role at district secondary schools principal bill martin described the roles of the safety positions at the high school the committee also discussed the use of esser funds to increase social work staffing support within district elementary schools mr kingsbury discussed six sick day forgiveness with the district's largest bargaining group he shared the practices of other districts and how cal might model this concept another bargaining group formally requested a change to eligibility requirements which would permit nearly all members to become eligible the committee shared its thoughts on that and input with the staff mr kingsbury then spoke about the need to schedule a

104board of education meeting with district legal counsel in preparation for upcoming upcoming negotiations meeting adjourned at 904 the next finance and operations committee is scheduled for thursday march 17 at 7 30 a.m thank you to all of you are there any questions thank you all right thank you very much on to seven ch board reports are there any additional reports from board members no all right we'll move on to 7d superintendent report uh yes so i have a number of things to report this first on friday we sent out communications to all families regarding the latest set of update information that came out from kent county health department in a press release as it related to changes to educational setting and various requirements so we did send a copy of that information out to all

105of our staff as well as i believe that letter went on our district website in terms of the changes for the public can health hear now okay essentially that uh changes on february 18th um the it was the expiration of the indoor mass requirements from our kent county health department so we wanted to make sure that our staff and our parents had that information what it did still with the kent county health department does not have control over is the cdc order for transportation but all other school-related mass requirements are effectively gone also kent intermediate association of school boards is hosting a dinner on coping with covet and supporting student mental wellness and overcoming learning loss so as you've heard us talk about this tonight as they pertain to our district and how to best

106support kids i think this is just kind of a nod that this is a challenge across the region and across the state and having recently gone to a superintendent conference clearly it was a theme across the country that you know people students families are struggling and we're seeing that impact so if you're interested please let myself or mrs zoett know [Music] we'd hope to find out by wednesday so that we can get you registered for that meeting it is march 10th or that dinner march 10th from 6 p.m and with associated costs so please let us know if you're interested we'll make sure that you get registered or you can rsvp yourself we heard some information tonight on kind of the listening tour if you are on the curriculum committee you've seen what is the

107early stages of a development for a instructional model that the curriculum team is working towards and plan to share with administrators and develop a three to five year plan and share with in a more broad fashion moving forward and align to our strategic plan so more of that even though it's in curriculum kind of organizational coherence we want to be crystal clear or as clear as we can be in terms of what our tier one two three supports look like what our curriculum adoption cycle look like what our student mental health support services look like when to get access what our professional development needs look like in ongoing things so great work from the curriculum department and we continue to look forward to progress in that area also you saw information coming out from our

108special programs department a letter was shared with the entire community regarding what we call childhood 2.0 it's a video that we plan on facilitating a virtual panel discussion on based on this film so if you recall approximately about a year ago we had the community those who were interested review a movie called the social dilemma and we invited some panelists to come in with various areas of expertise to kind of talk about the impact of social media on our society in general we're taking another look or a deeper dive a childhood 2.0 and we're going to have panelists that include some high school students miss katherine smith from yoga zen we also have a representative from barc they're working on another mental health expert to be determined as well as mr chris mckenna founder of

109protect young eyes so we invite anyone who is interested in participating in this virtual panel discussion to please look on our website you can see the letter get the information how you can view that movie and then be a part of that panel discussion moving forward also like to just congratulate our high school honors choir we have several students who [Music] were recognized for their outstanding accomplishment and accepted to the all state honors choir so congratulations to those students as well as our ffa regional competition we have several students who did an outstanding job at regionals and who have qualified to move on to state so way to go to our ffa high school program as well as our chs honors choir members for their selection to the allstate honors choir program so always continuing

110to see great things happening in our school district so happy to report that and that's all i have for this evening any questions for dr martin all right thank you very much at this time we'll now move to public comment i believe i have all the cards at this time all right i'm going to um call the first person to speak and i will call the follow two or the follow-up the next two to follow up just so that we are prepared please know that you have uh three minutes to speak at this time we do have a timer somewhere first we'll have melissa van gessel for our cea report followed by betsy and after that is it on i think he's working hang on he's doing something he's scrambling up there i see movement

111we could probably swap with the one right here couldn't we hang on series on it maybe not [Music] um i just wanted to mention on behalf of the cea that we appreciate that the administration has seen the toll that covet has taken this year and the recent emails in regards to covet sickness forgiveness and merit pay were well received by our teaching staff so thank you for that thank you next we have betsy followed by beth and after that mark [Music] he's right behind you for help [Music] so i'm going to do something a little different not complaining yell at you tonight kind of um it's black history month i know i've had this discussion with some of the board members before i don't think that the school teaches enough on a regular basis about

112black history i'm only speaking from experience because i talk to my son every day about what he's learned and he told me of course martin luther king and ruby ridge to me that's not acceptable black history month is almost done and the knowledge my my son is getting isn't okay with me so i went through and i printed out some prominent african-american people that had changed society changed their country now i did run out of ink so i wrote some names on a couple of back but i think that maybe the curriculum board or someone should go over it i mean you're really short-changing our kids we hear that history is whitewashed well it's whitewashed because it's what they're learning in school it doesn't have to be if i can learn this stuff in an

113hour it shouldn't take long for someone to come up with things but i also learned most of the stuff in high school or in elementary school in junior high i did go to a different school but it's time for some changes we talk about diversity equity and inclusion well here's a start and it's a positive start minority kids don't have to be left out in history but our school is leaving them out so i'm just going to give this to you that's all i have today no complaining that's it thank you next we have beth followed by mark and then justin hi i'm beth and i have a child in this district in high school and i was going to speak last month but we couldn't make it because there was ice at our house

114we are very concerned about how the high school exams were handled last month who in their right mind tells their tell students that example not count if they if they are negatively impacting their grades and letting teachers suggest to students to only put their names on their paper and turn it in without even attempting to answer a single question you have given students no incentive to try and are continuing to damage our children's opportunity to a good education by eliminating the negative impact of low exam scores you have done the following you have taught children to not study and retain information for exams and beyond you have taught children to not persevere or do their personal best but promote a mediocre behavior and academics from students you have not kept students engaged and challenged you

115have not helped our children prepare for college because colleges still do cumulative exams and students that go into trades with rigorous exams you have not taught the students how to prepare for exams and how to handle stress from them in their formative years creating a more unstable and volatile adult in their future with not having the coping skills for them you have not taught the students to take pride in their hard work and what they can do you have greatly undermined our teachers they were all told also must belong that exams would be the normal format and not deviated from men because they were told us and they believed this was the case and had their greeting weighted accordingly had they known this was even an option they would have weighted things differently in the

116scores when manipulating the numbers like you have allowed it does not make the district look better with students having false high scores it will catch up not only to these students later in their lives but also the building administration the district and you who are sitting in the seats on the stage before us you may think i don't know all of the details i have done my work and asked questions from many people concerning this i asked the board members students administration staff and teachers what exactly was going on and whose idea it was to allow the tampering of the exams things do not add up and it appears that it's an upper level problem and not the teachers when i asked a board member if they knew what was going on this person was

117not aware because they do not receive high school communication this person questioned the superintendent and he was told he told this board member that it will only affect students that were impacted by quarantine this is false and a lie because it applied to every student that had a score that negatively impacted their class grade i asked the assistant principal whose idea this was and the reason for this i was told that because up to 200 students were absent and that it quote would have resulted in a hit a heavy burden end quote while 200 may seem like a lot that is only 13 of the 1491 high school student population i would like to also point out that there is a weekly mandatory study hall class that all students must do so why was this

118time not used to make up exams using the excuse that it would have been too much of a burden was starting a new semester is a bunch of baloney because i went through this exact experience of missing exams when i was in 10th grade and had the chickenpox i actually had more study time for the exams than my peers when i asked staff questions about the exams i was informed that they were not asked and department heads were also not asked what they would what their expert opinion was do you see why parents are not trusting of our school administration and board of education i would like to read the district's mission statement it states in pursuit of excellence caledonia community schools will empower and equip all persons to achieve their best by ensuring the

119highest quality is lying manipulating his numbers and deceit your best is depriving our children the very best education your best is this really your highest quality this is all very disappointing and not acceptable and not what we are paying for in our children's education thank you next we have mark followed by justin hi there my name is mark hardy i'm a grandparent of children in the school system elementary middle school and high school and i'm here tonight to speak about school safety and security there was a publication in the local paper the sun and news about the incident that happened in our neighboring school district tk thorn apocallo there was an incident where they had to shut down the school and react to that as well as we all know about the incident that happened

120in november just four months ago at oxford schools here in michigan um the school administration or the actually a superintendent was gracious enough to print that week in the local newspaper on what steps they had taken to secure the schools and what their protocol will be now going forward and i was going through the website for the california community schools i couldn't find a lick of anything on security i was listening tonight to the um the strategic plan and there was absolutely no mention of safety and security in lieu of the the announcements for emergency at the uh the wood shop the metal shop the band room the strobe lights that's all i heard and that concerns me only because i know safety and security is a big issue these days i'm sure that these

121kids that are in the schools want to feel safe parents believe that they're going to be safe and i couldn't find anything on the website is there a safety committee i can't ask questions i'd like to see if there's a safety committee is it in the human resource department who oversees it is there a handbook protocol a one-year plan a two-year plan i hear that there's no money for another sro or maybe two where thorn apple has three um we we heard tonight about one time extra funding may be a good idea you know we should have a goal i think this is going to be an ongoing problem and i'd like to know that there's going to be some progress made in the concern for it thank you for your time thank you justin

122good evening my name is justin nichols i have six kids uh in caledonia i'm going to talk about the same thing mark was was talking about just before the goals at a glance there was a sentence or two that talked about safety but it was only in the context of contact tracing and hiring someone for covet it didn't talk anything about actual school safety the community has asked a lot recently about the school safety the dialogue with doc which was a great meeting on the safety side of things officer frederick stated another sro would be helpful dr martin stated that it was too expensive so my question is has anyone called middleville how can they afford three retired police officers we are a better funded school system how come we cannot so that's my first

123question how can they afford three and has anyone called to ask that question to them number two would be how and how much funds are going to be adjusted for the next year's goals at a glance so that we can add one of those or two of those safety officers and my third question is talking about the school computers that are issued to all the students how is there no safety controls on there or parental blocks so that the young elementary students can't accidentally or purposely look up or see inappropriate materials so thank you [Applause] thank you all right at this time we're going to move on to nine which is a bus stop change request brandon all board members will find that you had some printed copies provided to you hold on [Music] hello

124my name is brandon cavanaugh i'm representing summerwind association i want to thank you all for hearing my appeal tonight so what this pertains to is a bus stop change the day before school started this year we were notified that the bus stop which had been going down our street if you look at slide one that was sent to you it's an aerial view of our street so for 15 plus years the bus has come down our road made multiple stops turned around in our cul-de-sac and came back out never seemed to be a problem i'm not aware of any incidents and i've lived there since 2009. so it's always worked well never had any issues the bus stop if you look at slide two there's an aerial view of a close-up of the new bus

125stop so essentially they want all the children to come down the road and sit on the edge of patterson and get picked up from there in a normal street i don't see a problem with it right i'm sure there's plenty of private roads and cul-de-sacs throughout the district that this works just great unfortunately patterson has or this particular stop has many safety hazards and concerns first of all patterson is extremely busy road so i actually reached out to the road commission to find out how busy busy is 4 400 cars a day which in their words is extremely busy i would think that would definitely put us top five probably top three for busy roads in the district i mean m37 is obviously number one but a lot of streets or a lot of roads

126nothing compares to that as far as traffic volume the other issue that patterson has is the amount of gravel pits that are on the road so we get a lot of construction traffic so the gravel trains which for the those who don't know is a semi truck pulling two dump trailers um side note i'm in the transportation industry as well i sell semi trucks i sell gravel trains i deal with that on a regular basis i've been in this industry for over eight years so i'm well aware of what they are and what they can do um a gravel train fully loaded weighs 164 000 pounds in comparison a normal semi truck going down the road that you see all the time 80 000 pounds your passenger car that you probably drive on a daily

127basis 4 000 pounds so to see the kind of damage that a gravel train can do to a bus is insurmountable okay um so you have high traffic uh gravel trains and then the other unique safety concern with this stock is that that that line patterson now if you go to slide i'm going to kind of bounce around here on you a little bit slide four the trees are far enough off the off off of patterson and oh kyle you kind of brought this up in the committee meeting um that it isn't a problem for visibility when you're pulling on or off of patterson where the problem lies is if you kind of look at slide two and slide four the bus comes down the apron and then stops blocking summer when drive so if

128you can kind of imagine a bus parking across the road that's where the bus stops um the problem is is as the bus is coming down that apron traffic coming out of summer when can't see the bus and the bus can't see the traffic so both vehicles are going to meet at that intersecting point and and i had it happen to me so i was leaving for work one morning and the bus had five cars behind it i know it had five cars behind because i had to count the cars because once the bus got on the apron i couldn't see the cars anymore fortunately i counted them waiting for them all pass and then i had to move so the bus could come into the stop again another safety problem you'll also see in

129slide five the traffic that backs up down the road what's the slide here yeah slide three i'm sorry slide three and slide four or five side three and slide five um so all the parents line the road now in mr morris's or mr hess's report rather sorry uh they talk about it's reasonable or it's a a state record or state i don't wanna say this um basically uh the state sets a level that the expectation is that a student can walk down the street okay our street does not have sidewalks so therefore in the winter that makes things extremely difficult so now you have children elementary age walking down the street with traffic so this parents bring the students to the end of the road there's on a normal day six cars lined up there

130okay now you've got a two lane in our private drive mind you is two lanes wide it's not one of these little itty bitty ones i've seen them you can't get a bus down you can't get anything down it this is a two lane ride road or a two lane wide road um so traffic goes out around it and it again if you look at the slide three you got a cement truck coming out with kids that are trying to get out to go to the bus again safety concerns like it's not necessary just have the bus come down the road like it had been for 15 plus years and we avoid all this now when i met with dr martin one of the things that he brought up was well this is more of

131a you know a street problem our association's problem and he's right on the level that yes that that is a problem of ours with all the cars lined up however it's created by the problem of the bus now at the end of the road if the bus wasn't at the end of the road and came down the road like before that problem doesn't exist okay these pictures are from the morning the afternoon from what i understand i'm not their music work way worse way more chaotic i did get one picture slide six shows a fedex truck going around the school bus while the kids are unloading and coming down our road and then slide seven just kind of shows the fedex truck continuing on now one thing that we've witnessed and dr martin went to

132sit when he watched the stop we have seen the bus come in with its red splashing with its yellow splashing with its hazards on and with nothing on if the school bus driver doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing when he brings the bus into the stop how is the cars and traffic around them supposed to know what they're supposed to do so going back to my gravel trains right imagine you have a bus that the car around it doesn't know what to do we've watched cars past the past the bus we've watched cars stop for the bus and another car pass on oncoming traffic which will go around the bus now you're in a gravel train that weighs 164 000 pounds and all these cars are are stopping and going and not knowing

133what to do i'm telling you i am licensed to drive those vehicles they do not stop on a dime it just creates more problems and more safety hazards than than needs to be going to that point if you look at the last slide slide 8 just a month ago ironically enough within a mile of our stop a gravel train got in an accident with a passenger vehicle the passenger vehicle driver was hospitalized if you look at the rear that that trailer they didn't even crack a tail light that's how much force and strength is in those gravel trains imagine what that would do to a spool bus so along my process of meeting with mr hess and going to committee meetings and meeting with dr martin the one comment i get a lot is well

134if we do it for you we have to do it for everybody and i don't agree with that i think that this particular stop has enough safety hazards that any rational parent will look at that and go you know what yeah my street doesn't compare again i don't think we need to go down every single street in the district i get it we need to save time but in this particular stop the extra five minutes it's going to take to go down the street is putting this district at too much risk for a child to be hurt or multiple children now in mr hess's report that he's probably going to present to you he's going to talk about how you don't want a school bus to back up in any in any cost right again

135i have my cdl i would much rather drive a bus and turn around in a cul-de-sac that's completely empty with no traffic than to try to merge onto patterson after i haven't stopped traffic because they're still moving and look out a mirror about the size of this paper and keep in mind a bus does not accelerate like your passenger vehicle does another thing that he's going to bring up is private roads or not public roads totally understand and i have been down some private roads that i would not want to bring a bus down ours is not one of them it's very wide it's easy to get it out of and again it has not been a problem in 15 plus years again into you know state standard you can have a stop at the

136end of a road it's it's fine it's it but i think each stop needs to be measured on its own merits again i've gone over this the particulars of how this stop is not safe where it's currently at again i i think there's plenty of plenty of streets in our district that that's not a problem off less busy roads with less less traffic [Music] he's going to bring up how it's a hazard it's not a hazard light stop i i i talked about it a second ago we've seen it used all different ways when dr martin watched it he had he admitted that it wasn't done properly and that he was going to talk to mr hess so again if the school bus driver doesn't know what's supposed to happen how are the how's the

137traffic supposed to know um again to dr martin's comments in the in the meeting we had he admitted that this is not a great stop if it's not a great stop let's just fix it i i just don't understand why it's that difficult um he's going to talk about how construction traffic is is present throughout the district no other road that i know of in our district has four or five gravel pits on it and we just do we're just we're just in a gravel belt it is what it is again going back to my point about other streets you know having to change it for us if you change it for everybody else i don't know of any other streets that have worked their way all the way up to the school board to

138have this conversation i could be wrong but i don't know of any so it is is critically important to me and the rest of our neighbors some of them are here present today that we change it and then we get the bus to go down the road and avoid any of the safety concerns if you have any questions i'm more than willing to answer but the one thing i'm going to ask all of you to do i know you're all parents right and i have an eight-year-old a four-year-old who's soon to be going into kindergarten and a three-year-old we all can relate to that five-year-old going to their first day of kindergarten right that little child going down every parent has it right now pitcher pudding's pushing your five-year-old child for the first day of

139school up on patterson with all that traffic going on see why i'm here any questions or anything that i can answer to kind of explain this better go ahead tim in inside six and inside seven there's a school bus it looks like it's behind or it's entering the picture yeah yep what what is that if you remember i do not remember what that school bus was there for but it was the second bus but to that point um last year we actually had a school bus get in an accident not this district another district fortunately no children present but that bus was hit about a quarter of a mile eighth of a mile from where the stop is and rolled into a field any additional questions at this time all right we can certainly circle

140back if there's additional questions after mr hess speaks to perfect thank you very much thank you good evening and thank you for allowing me to provide the administrative report response to be clear at the start there are no federal or state laws that prohibit or disallow a school bus from entering or having bus stop locations on a cul-de-sac private road or dead end the standards for routing school buses by the state of michigan the national highway traffic and safety administration are based around the safe turning around and backing up of a school bus what does exist is a list of best practices policies safety warnings and guidelines that point school bus transportation professionals away from these practices and toward making safe effective and efficient bus stop locations safe locations i'm going to track through the

141report that you've been provided you can follow along the michigan commercial driver's license commercial driver's license manual cdl manual states unequivocally that backing the school bus is strongly discouraged you should back your bus only when you have no other safe way to move the vehicle you can see the many bullet points involved with the safe turning around safe backing of a school bus vehicle and i enjoy you to look at those steps and make them with a busload of kindergarten through fourth grade students one of the notations is to provide a lookout in this instance we do occasionally try to provide a lookout based using a student at the back of the bus asking them to yes unsafely leave their seat and look out the window and try to tell the bus driver if they're

142approaching something we receive complaints about that from parents who are concerned that that responsibility does not belong on their student and i agree with them it does not in the current year we have reduced backing incidents complaints and costs and the report says to near zero i will report that it is at zero we have had none these included hitting mailboxes damage to driveways yards vehicles and other objects we have entirely almost entirely removed the concern of parents who have complained when their student is asked to spot for a school bus backing up a publication by the national highway and traffic and safety administration selecting school bus school bus stop locations indicates that a full-size bus requires 115 feet to safely turn around the average cul-de-sac in the united states is 90 feet in this

143specific incidence on summer wind drive the cul-de-sac is 76 feet as mr carabagno said private roads are not public roads the builders of neighborhoods and subdivisions are required to meet a basic set of standards for road construction and maintenance they are not the standards for public roadways and often truthfully they are exceeded they do exceed them sometimes they are better however we know the characteristics for road maintenance for the kent county road commission we know exactly what they will do what they can do and what will happen we do not know the standards for any private contractor or contractors providing road service to private roads throughout the county in the current year we have reduced complaints from non-student family homeowners on private drives to zero we would normally receive quite a few a significant number

144of complaints from families complaining that we are destroying their private roads by putting school buses on them in the current school year we have not had a bus get stuck in a cul-de-sac and i would also we have not had a butt to get bus get stuck at all in a normal winter we have multiple situations where in a cul-de-sac a bus cannot turn around and become stuck and has to be freed by a tow truck and or our mechanics this secondary result of the delayed bus is students waiting in the cold complaints and students late for school in the current school you have experienced zero route interference from other vehicles blocking access and interfering with turnaround locations and cul-de-sacs at summerwind drive we have had several years where concerns were repeatedly documented about an

145atv driver and interfering with the safe operation and turning around of the school bus in the cul-de-sac walking distance to school and or the bus stop the state of michigan has established that students living within 1.5 miles of a school are not eligible for school bus transportation unless a walking route hazard has been identified by the school district walking around hazards include items such as railroad tracks industrial sites and criminal sex offender registry locations the state has also established that no specific law no specif the no law specifies the maximum distance a student may walk to a bus stop and that it is the responsibility of the parent or legal garden to see their child get safely to and from the bus stop the school district provides transportation as a non-mandated service in this instance

146the 1.5 mile requirement i should say for non-transportation where students are in a walk zone around a school has no qualification for sidewalks nor does it have a qualification for even pavement simply route hazards that can be you know clearly identified in the case of summerwind drive there are no sidewalks we agree there is a fully paved two-lane road students are being transported by their parents they are not required to wait at the side of patterson road they are lining up on summer when at a safe and significant distance from paterson the longest walk requirement on patterson road would be 0.39 miles for a student the second longest would be 0.18 miles bus stops at the entrances to private drives cul-de-sacs and dead ends is an established bet best and normal practice we've established that

147turning around the bus can be challenging is dangerous and is taking more room than we have so we're required to back the bus up in a review of idex schools this is the 11 districts in the state of michigan that are compared to hours on a financial budgetary demographic and a variety of other other qualifications eight of the school districts out of the 11 provide regular ed transportation zero go into cul-de-sacs or dead-end situations all provide bus stops at the end of the road in a review of the kent county isd area school districts 19 districts provide regular ed transportation zero go into cul-de-sacs or dead-end situations all provide bus stops at the end of the road safe efficient and effective routing the caledonia school of strategic planning and the significant changes to school bus

148transportation for caledonia referenced two strong objectives to establish a higher level of efficacy and efficiency and routing that maintains safety and reduces district costs within the boundaries of caledonia there are 226 cul-de-sac dead-end roads both public and private in ownership 107 of these have bus stops 54 are specifically elementary and or ecc level stops caledonia transportation travels to one of these so of all the districts around we travel to one of these near garbo lake because of a significant difference significant distance that the student would be required to walk to the bus stop greater than a mile and we are in the process of determining options for the bus stop that will change it in the future to establish a 60-minute maximum ride time for students in recognition of health and safety in the 2021

149school year part of the implementation of elementary routing there were 22 elementary bus bus routes with a ride time greater than one hour for students it is not just the boundary application or the removal of the transfer that has given us zero routes where students are riding the bus for an open hour it is many changes and many hours of effort on the part of our transportation department that has made the changes including end of road bus stops many of them in the 2021 two year following the implementation of the boundary system and efficiency and routing like i said we have zero students riding the bus for greater than one hour at the elementary level the current bus stop is identified as a hazard light stop a hazard light stop is one that is performed

150only using the hazard lights of the bus it does not require the overhead yellows or reds be activated at all if this has happened it has been a mistake and it has been corrected and addressed every time to ensure the safety this type of bus stop was codified into michigan in 2004 the school bus is fully out of the lanes of traffic no students cross the roadway and the school bus does not impede or control the flow of traffic the style of bus stop was adopted and put into use where applicable applicable and advisable and it has reduced significantly reduced the number of accidents at bus stops nationwide significantly reduced accidents where available space is present to pull the bus out of the lanes of traffic a hazard lifestyle is at use at almost all

151subdivision cul-de-sac dead end and private road bus stops in the state the hazard light bus stop is extremely common we use them on m37 which has significantly higher traffic flows as mr carbagno has stated in all bus stops clear visibility of the bus is required where the speed limit is greater than 35 the bus must be visible for 400 feet in either direction the summer wind bus stop fully meets and significantly exceeds this standard for visibility by vehicles traveling on patterson road the speed limit and traffic patterns of the roadway are a consideration for the placement of a bus stop they are a consideration they are not a deciding factor many of our roads in caledonia are 55 mile an hour roadways the average driver does do much faster than that that's our reality truck

152and construction traffic are present throughout the district they may not be gravel trains but they are large vehicles we have other areas with gravels with gravel pits we have large construction facilities we have amazon that hauls semi-tractor trailers all over the all over our main roads by using the hazard light traffic we do not impede the flow of that traffic we encourage it to keep going and bus drivers are specifically trained very well on how to operate the school bus and how to use the mirrors that are provided for them and how to pull out into traffic safely in summary the bus stop location at summerwind drive in patterson is a safe and effective bus stop for the transportation system it is the same pattern of bus stop that is used in many locations nationwide

153and throughout our state and district the use of bus stops at the end of roads subdivisions dead ends cul-de-sacs has dramatically reduced complaints costs route delays vehicle and property damage and unsafe conditions the answer to this specific request obviously will determine the future of our routing system even if it is just one stop and one change it will affect and implement and truly i want to write the word impact because it doesn't quite fit but it will impact our future routing choices and our routing decisions so i look to the concept of safety that we have provided in conclusion i would like to reintroduce your caledonia school transportation leadership staff to you and to our members of the public that are present betty nelson is our router who creates monitors and modifies school bus routes

154works directly with drivers to assist them in how they operate their routes how they train for their routes betty has 19 years experience solely in school bus production nothing else she heard a cdl certified school bus driver she is a state instructor for the state of michigan training agency new school bus driver course she is a recognized certified transportation director by the state of michigan brenda widovine is our transportation director brenda has 26 years experience solely in the school bus transportation field she has worked in both public and school transportation and contract school transportation in a wide variety of management leadership and supervisory roles i am your executive director for operations and transportation 24 years experience working in school transportation solely and school operations past recipient michigan transportation supervisor of the year six years on

155the executive board and president of the michigan association for pupil transportation i presented it to and hosted a national association for pupil transportation conference i am a recognized certified transportation director and certified operations director with the state of michigan your leadership staff in transportation and operations at caledonia community schools represents 70 years of focused dedication to safe efficient and excellence in transportation our k-12 students every single day thank you at this time i will ask board members if you have any questions for mr hess or or brandon either one before there's any discussion of any kind go ahead yeah mr hess was data looked at on the number of cement trucks that were going up and down patterson on a daily basis we are aware of the traffic counts on patterson road i don't think

156cement trucks or gravel trucks impacted or were looked at in our decision to be real knowing that we have cement trucks and semis and a variety of trucks on all of our main roads throughout the district the pattern is not necessarily that different at all do you think the previous administrator who made the decision to go down that road with a bus looked at what how many gravel trucks which i'm sure has grown over time to be frank no they did not because we were going down a lot of cul-de-sacs we've been going down cul-de-sacs in the district for many years where the practice statewide nationwide has been ceasing and we have not so you think it's safer to pick up on the side of patterson versus in the wrist set pull me palmigate from

157that versus pulling in i mean this this route has worked great for 15 years why suddenly the change the change is based on the standards of safety and the standards of providing safe effective efficient transportation to students and yes i do believe that it is a safe bus stop and it does not indicate a problem so the standards and recommended recommendation guidelines we're following all of those could you well you gave us a list of 10 documents to look at of which i've read through all of them except for the 512-page national transportation safety document but there are a lot you you refer to them in your discussion here are we applying all of those to the transportation plan or not we are applying as many as we possibly can i think you will find

158that in those documents there are contradictions the cdl document states that we should turn off the bus secure the bus leave the bus and go look behind the bus where as the bus driver curriculum says that we should never do that while it is on a on a road so there's contradictions in them and we do our absolute best to follow the safest procedures for our district so with that said do you think you still think it's more safe to pick up kids on the side of patterson with these trucks that are not they're almost twice as wide as some cars versus reverting back to a plan that has worked over 15 years but that's safer i can think of a lot of plans this district that have worked for 15 years that we are

159changing and we have changed in the past five years and i would say that while i do not judge that it is more safe i judge that it is a safe bus stop okay then why is there such a big push back to not allow them to receive what they're asking for i would say that your decision affects 54 elementary and ecc bus stops at cul-de-sac's throughout the district at 107 cul-de-sacs for k-12 transportation with bus stops well you're assuming that we would we would decide and they're all not coming here to bring their cases we certainly wouldn't decide them all the same i am saying that you open a window for every one of them to appeal with a right to have it changed and that that becomes they have that way no no

160we wouldn't be opening anything go ahead julie i live on a call off at 92nd street and 92nd street that that ends into the high school and there are many many many many many cars and we actually built our cul-de-sac to be wide enough for a bus to go around so i why are you know so i see what you're saying because now my kid's safety is now not as important to me we have as a neighborhood figured it out but initially i was like what i want my kid to be picked up right in front of my house because it's been that way for 20 years [Music] so but sitting here as a board member not a parent pat [Music] as a board member you should have a 50 000 square foot view of

161what's going on and we need to make sure that we hire people with 27 years experience and that you in turn hire experienced people in what you're doing that's our job our job isn't to decide whether you're going whether you're stopping or you're going down my cul-de-sac or anyone's cul-de-sac if so i guess i just don't understand why this is a a bored thing to decide what cul-de-sac or whose kids are more important than other kids or whatever um i think that we put you in place and you put your staff in place and we put dr martin in place actually put dr martin in place and he puts you in place um i i misspoke but um so i guess even though i understand and i feel that it because our kids it's our

162it's emotion pure emotion and scary and all that kind of stuff but i can see that you did your due diligence i i think there's a lot of people that will be like well and mike then we're back at an hour and a half two hour bus rides for everybody which is terrible um too so it's there's no easy answer to this is i guess what i'm saying and i live on a cul-de-sac and many other people do how many cul-de-sacs or whatever so even though i understand but there is always a risk there's a risk when i put my kids in my car to go take them to school um so i i don't know i guess as a board i feel like our job is to put dr martin in place who puts

163mr hass in place and he does his due diligence so i haven't forbid i mean that it's a tough it's tough because we have the same thing in our neighborhood so i don't doubt our experience with our administrators but i think when when a parent sees the risk and puts the time and effort into working the way through the proper channels to come to us that should say something as well i understand that but if we do that so you're saying that no other so my neighborhood might do that too next and then other people's neighborhoods so i mean at what point so i guess what we have they have to decide is is the two-hour bus ride okay for kids or you know at some point there's got to be we can't have it

164all you know i'm not saying that we are i just think parents shouldn't weigh in have the ability to weigh in and we should be uh understandable enough to know that well maybe maybe it worked great for 15 years for a reason and well arguably too but ours are two right i understand that i'm looking at this from from the uh appeal perspective but we're not seeing we're not seeing everybody come to the board over an appeal like that and i would trade it on a case-by-case basis i would only take that in the form of a question but just because he is educated and it's taken the time to do it makes those kids on that street more important than the kids on my street no it doesn't again i would take that in

165the form of a question only to add that we receive hundreds of bus stop change requests annually hundreds you do not see them this week i have heard them as well this week i approved two bus stop change requests that made perfect sense and were perfectly safe and were perfectly appropriate because situations had changed they had made it to me most never make it even as far as my level and i'm step two most of them are addressed immediately by transportation but we do receive hundreds and parents do have a voice and parents are heard and parents are listened to by our transportation professionals and by be they are not guaranteed a yes because they because i listen but i do listen and we do listen is there any other questions or discussion i think

166that there's you know certainly there's a couple of you know if we're looking at the fact that if it's meeting safety guidelines you're certainly the professional we hired to put in this position we understand all that we're also taking into account as our administrative team um and we we thank you for following all the steps um and meeting with people along the way because that's part of what the process is about so thank you for doing that so i have one more point i'd like to make you'd mention there were 200 requests by parents for changes we only have one here tonight so sorry repeat that please you had mentioned that there were hundreds of change requests we have one here tonight you've made two so why are we not seeing 200 requests come to

167the board because they're addressed appropriately either denied or approved or whatever by the transportation department i only pointed out that i actually approved two this week right that came to me or last week i should say i'm sorry that it came to me they were based on on students locations moving and student density that made perfect sense one in dutton mill where they provided us a bus stop for us that was actually significantly better closer to the main road and on the entrance and exit ramp of a ramp driveway of the dutton mill community but they provided us an excellent location so we moved the bus stop but the vast majority of bus stop change requests are addressed at transportation level either investigated and approved or investigated denied and that's they stop if i can

168go ahead if i can add to that i too can attest to not only in this circuit but this is my third time at this as a superintendent um and even when i was a director in another district the volume and the number of change requests for bus stops is typical it generally will go into several hundred every year this is common so and when you look at our district policy as well as what you see in most school districts our policy really states a process for starting at the lowest level and working your way up in many cases the vast majority of the cases an appropriate decision is made to make a change somewhere along the process or in some cases it is not because it's not deemed necessary or appropriate in those cases

169sometimes we have to make a difficult decision that that parents or people don't want to hear but just because it's a difficult decision and they decide to keep going until they get a yes doesn't mean that we just unilaterally turn it over because they exhausted everything and they went to uh my office or his office um or miss widoveen and we just said yeah we're going to do it because at some point we have to establish standards so that we can run an effective system so right now i know we're talking about one stop but not all stops are designated equal and we have to rely on the expertise of the team that we put in place because i i would say in every community i've lived in with the exception of one we were

170fortunate or unfortunate we happen to live in the cul-de-sac so what we're doing is not an abnormal practice in most places it's new to us but it's also part of the challenge that we were getting on the opposite side of it in terms of the number of small accidents we were having going into the cul-de-sac in terms of the challenges of how many hundreds of students who were routinely riding bus stops much longer than is necessary so you know i i think we got to be careful not to characterize this as we're not being responsive to parents we are actually doing what i would think the board employ us to do is deal with the day-to-day activities and and the hundreds of these type of requests that will come in uh not only for transportation

171but a number of different issues and we try not to bring every single one to the board just quite honestly it would be exhausting just in terms of the numbers that you would get so i i don't want it to be characterized as if we are not being responsive we are but that is the work of the transportation department to vet those to determine what's most appropriate in this case after it went through a couple levels then it went to the assistant superintendent and myself and after looking at this you know yeah would i like to see things different uh you know wider lanes or or um a different pattern absolutely i would but again not all streets are equal not all cul-de-sacs are equal but just because it is not the same doesn't mean

172that our procedures our process are not safe and should be supported so that's just kind of my commentary to it i guess go ahead jason so um mr cabinero and i apologize if i got your name incorrect all right perfect um i appreciate your advocacy advocacy for you for your children i do you you you did your job and you you advocate for your kids and that's what you should do as a parent that's what and what any parents should do um our job as a board i view we have to take that and weigh that with all all children and the rest of the the district's needs as as well right and understand that and just so everyone understands where i'm coming from too i live private drive cul-de-sac off of whitneyville by 96th

173street so whitneyville is also kind of a busy road our our neighborhood's actually bifurcated by whitneyville so we have on both sides right and it's the same stop stops at the front and all of that our neighborhood private drive we tried to get the county to plow our road and the county says no your road's not suitable to be plowed so you know i i don't know that i would expect a school bus to to then come down if the county is saying we can't even bring our plows down your road because we can't do the turnaround so you know that's that's just my background yeah and the garbage trucks come down mine too so and again so um i also just wanted to point out that you know yes things that have worked for

174the last 15 years right but just because something has always been done doesn't mean it's a reason to keep doing it we've changed right we had uh you could go to whatever elementary school you wanted to previous to the last couple of years right that worked for forever but we change as a community we change as you know school district and everything else and so some of this we just have to change um to go with everything that changes right like we can't just keep doing things the same way and expect that it's not going to cause problems at some point so um you know again to julie's point yes i think we we should stay above we hire a superintendent we hire people to do these things um fantastic i've had conversations with betty

175fantastic you know and in terms of routing things so you know i i don't know that this is where we want to be as a school board yeah i just follow up too on what you guys are saying first thing is i'm gonna hopefully not but your name kevin narrow right okay i've appreciated your the way you've handled things i think i told you that in our meeting you uh you did things the correct way although the outcome's probably not what you want i've appreciated that the i have three youngsters at the house i told you the same thing it's if you're dealing with the safety of your kid you're willing to do anything so i completely understand where you're coming from where i end up lining up in this is it's gonna sound like

176beating a dead horse but we have to rely on the experts that dr martin hires just like when the safety concern came out we have somebody with 20 years of military experience helping us put our plan in place and we rely on that because that's what that's what that's who dr martin's hired put in place that's an area of expertise i it's more than anything i know right so at the end of the day as a board member you have to rely on who you have so we have somebody who was the president of organizations you know understanding these rules and safety um so i guess all i'm saying is i agree staying out of the fray here i think we have to rely on who we hire having said that i just want to

177thank you for the way you handled yourself and conducted yourself through this process i wish it could be worked differently and maybe it is with the other six um i i wish it could be different that's all i can say just uh as a parent i certainly appreciate it and uh yeah i i one thing i would like to say though when i was starting here i hope this shows a little bit that we're listening to the parents that the i know some of you shaking your head know but the reality is dr martin mr hess i don't know if mr kingsbury or not was out at the bus stop in the morning multiple times i believe right checking on this transportation was there i believe right helping out with this process so there was

178a lot of steps taken to get to this point right so it wasn't like they just came up here and said no it was over there there was an effort put in place again you i'm sure you don't agree with the outcome but we listened and i know they took the appropriate steps and as a board that's what we asked for right so um thank you again for the process and uh that's all i have to say i think that i agree i mean you you certainly i i couldn't have asked for more from you from following through in the process and your communication we do have our administrative team in place and i think often when things come to us for an appeal at the board there's typically things that we're looking at where

179there's been a violation of policy or guidelines that create a situation where it's we're asked to go back and look at it to reevaluate you know something that's perceived as wrong is it as it's written you know based on this you know we don't have any violation of any of those guidelines or policies um just as you followed through with the policies as they are in place i think that um you know we certainly as a board with this based on our policy we do follow up with some a response to you in writing within five days of any kind of decision um that would be a decision that we either make now that we don't feel like there's a reason to go any farther than this with the board or if there's some reason

180why a board member needs more discussion we are allowed the opportunity to have the next month until the board meeting in addition to the five days to then after to respond based on our policy um so i just wanted to be clear you know if we go with consensus here as a board if there's more information that needs to be had if we are walking down the road of you know our administrators have made this decision and done their due diligence and just moving forward on this because i certainly want them to have their answers and closures too so i don't know brittany did you have anything you wanted to share okay all right i just want to add that our policy in transportation does not have any details specific to anything that we're talking

181about here that is correct i when i'm saying we followed our policy it's based on this procedure and and all the hoops that you feel like you've jumped through and and that's the policy that i'm referring to so when i say that there's been um we don't have any guidelines for transportation or anything of that nature that are in violation is what i'm looking at okay i think before we end up weighing in on this that we have to also understand that the board is fully accountable for this and not like it unlike anything else but i just see i've been to the stop twice different times i looked at it and to me it was a no-brainer and and i said i i can just see this being an issue and [Music] i i

182don't like to be involved in in administrators work either when i see something i believe needs attention i'm going to get behind it and that's all i'll say i do think just for the record i do think that i don't want to speak for everybody but i do think if not all i think most board members do did also go out to the site as well so i don't want to say everybody did because i'll be proved wrong but yes ultimately i do believe um that that everybody did or most people did make a trip out there drive the road and at least so that they had some familiarity with the with the site that we were talking about um [Music] at this point in time i i'm not feeling i don't see that there

183that there is going that there is support in consensus to ask for it to be changed um so at this point in time with that being said there will not be a change asked for at this time [Music] with that being said though i mean certainly as we have policy committee meetings and other things certainly if there's anything that we need to discuss or look at that we will follow through on that end all right do we need to call the question on this appeal because this doesn't sound like it's an answer it sounds like more like it's a feeling that we have you can we can call it the other way if you'd like questions on the appeal so what would you like to do weigh in as board members where we stand okay

184i'm in favor of the appeal julie i'm in favor of keeping it the same yes essentially yes tim is looking forward to weigh in to make sure that whether you're in favor of of remaining the same at this point or i would keep it the same okay um i'm in favor of supporting the decision made by the administration okay keep it the same i at this time will also support our administration at this time based on that information then there will be no further action taken i want to thank everybody for their time and effort put into this we are going to move forward to our action items 10a which is school of choice resolution i move that the board approved the resolutions to opt out of section 105 opt out of section 105c and

185participate in the kent isd collaborative schools of choice program for the 2022-23 school year can i have a second place second seconds brittany no you're good were there any other questions on this i know this was discussed fully everybody's good can we have a roll call please ask for yes clement yes barbara garcia yes morris no sorry yes yes white yes motion carries 10b food service dishwashing stations at duncan lake and craft intermediate i move that the board approved the purchase to add dishwashing stations to both duncan lake middle school and craft meadows intermediate school from gold star products using food service funds oh second any further questions on that no no real call please ask for yes clement yes barbara garcia yes morris yes white yes motion carries all right thank you to all

186of you i just need a motion to adjourn emotion motion by kyle second all second second by jason all in favor say aye aye any opposed all right thank you