001[Music] so [Music] so [Music] good evening i want to welcome everyone to the dearborn school district board of education meeting regular meeting for september 12 2022. before we do a roll call i just again want to welcome everyone and i just want to make a new uh a real quick welcome to the beginning of the school year statement so first of all welcome back everyone excitement is in the air and on the faces of our students and staff around the district we are here to support and serve students throughout their educational journey that is our sole purpose of being and to that end we must make sure that every student feels a sense of belonging no matter who they are or what challenges they may face they are welcome here and will be cared for
002and supported although we face countless challenges during these difficult times we can and must work together to find appropriate solutions to adjust these challenges working together begins with respectful dialogue and collaboration accusations inflammatory posts do not solve problems they only add to divisiveness and discontent our children are watching let's teach them how to appropriately interact with each other while respecting a wide range a range of viewpoints and differing opinions so thank you again for coming and spending the evening with us may i have a roll call please trustee berry here trustee d'ambrosio yeah bestie mozip here trustee petrakos here trustee thorpe here rusty watts here president mcdonald here next item please pledge allegiance to the flag miss tammy fournier principal of house school will introduce students that will lead the pledge of allegiance thank you
003for having us here today i have here with us eleanor welton eddie welton and celine khatib to lead us in the pledge of allegiance thank you okay go ahead i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all very good thank you coming up girls i have something to give you and i want to present each of you with this recognition for coming we appreciate your helping us this evening with the pledge celine there you are and you can keep the bubble wrap and put it in there so it stays fresh before you get home eleanor thank you and evelyn good job thank you so much [Applause] i also just want to take a
004quick acknowledgement and let everyone know that um our new chief of police chief sheehan is here and thank you so much chief for coming and joining us this evening next item please superintendents update moment of silence all right thank you madam president uh dr malacho was not feeling well today so over due to an overabundance of caution he asked me to step in today so i i thank you for listening to me today uh the first one is a moment of silence uh unfortunately we had a sand incident at woodworth middle school of a passing of a student abraham ali and i know dr michael attended the funeral and the school event so if we could take a short moment of silence please thank you do i just go on to the next yes for
005agenda items uh we are recognizing two retirements pamela kronowitz 22 in the third year of service and emmanuel mura for 21 years of service let's give him a round of applause [Applause] sorry oh go ahead he's learning his new role yes absolutely non-agenda items uh so we were excited we had an excellent start of the school year the rain held off to later in the day which was good so everybody got their pictures and the excitement of lining up in the right spots the right doors the first day of school david i believe you have a video for us [Music] chills [Music] chill [Music] my arms [Music] cheers [Music] [Applause] thank you david from your team for putting that together and all the staff administrators and that made this day a great success and a
006very happy day for a lot of kids especially those are coming for the first day and i'd also know that dr blakeland made it to all the buildings that same week to make sure he was visiting everyone and saying hi so he works hard there's no doubt about it so moving on on the non-agenda items the covet update or we're still monitoring the numbers and the vaccine updates so more information will come out regarding that bully prevention we are working on a few things including program with assembly sports world principal meetings at all levels and i'm sure that what more information will come out on that also as we go along and with that uh if i can have ms mesa malabazi come up and talk about the hiring process well you can do that
007if you want we're flexible all right yeah we just discovered that thank you okay so this is a conclusion to uh the last two board meetings we shared what our current process was some ideas that other districts are doing we received board feedback and then we also had a committee to review potential changes to the hiring process this is everyone that was on the committee and we want to thank them for their participation in their time throughout we met in june july and also august a few times um and so the changes that we'd like to move forward with based on this process is as follows for the central office director positions the directors and the union presidents and or the designees make recommendations for the superintendent interviews and so for the central office director
008positions this the major change here is that there would not be all the stakeholder committees like we previously have done previously we had staff students for high school staff students in community parent committees so for central office positions the director positions it would be the directors and the union presidents or their designees and then that committee would interview all the candidates make a recommendation for the superintendent interviews and superintendent and the executive director of that area okay okay okay i'm going to talk about this second right so it's a major change right there the major change on round two is that finalists will be interviewed by staff and a parent community uh committee combined the staff committee is combined with both parents and community but we will note that during this process if staff wants
009to meet separately in caucus or parents want to meet separately in caucus they can so that way we're hoping to kind of shore up the timeline on the interview process and then and read the other ones you can and then most of these we discussed at the last meeting so i'll just touch on them this was based on the feedback of things that we could do to improve the the hiring process throughout the last seven years i can tell you we've tweaked it along the way and we'll continue doing so it won't end here based on what we learned and and the feedback we continue to get they can continue our selection of the most qualified candidates internal and external adding a spreadsheet for screening committee to add their thoughts regarding the candidates so when
010we used to do everything on hard copy excuse me we had a sheet that we wrote all this down and then when we went all electronic that that piece kind of got lost so we're going to add it back in electronically so everyone can put down their comments and their thought process as to why someone should or should not get an interview participants uh to be limited to two times unless there are no others that volunteer so that way we get a mix of who's participating on the committees but of course uh like for example we always put out there to the all the directors who wants to participate so it's really based on volunteering but if we don't get anyone else then we'll go somebody can serve a third time and then the drop
011in our ranking sheet so in the interview process you have um usually everyone just sets down their ranking sheets face down in a pile so instead we'll either have a box or a folder that they put the folder that they put their sheet into so it gives more anonymity we will consider using a digital form for voting [Music] already we already removed the names from the ranking sheets so now it just says like what school do you represent are you a parent are you a teacher um are you a community member or are you a student and then we would consider giving all executive directors the opportunity to participate on the administrative committees which we already do unions provide their member participants they already do that so the human resources has nothing to do with
012who participates from each union that's done through the union leadership so we'll continue doing that the committee will consider ongoing feedback which i said in the beginning regarding this process as needed and we want to start um trustee mozip had shared what was done at uh henry ford college uh presented by tracy uh davis i believe and so i did look at that handbook and there's a sheet in there it's a really good process so i'm still gonna dig into it some more to see if maybe the executive directors could at least go through some training that has to do with um how to interview um from a diversity equity and inclusion perspective and so it would be difficult to train everyone who participates but if at least our leadership can go through that training
013i believe that would be beneficial but there is a sheet in there and it talks about our our commitment as a district and a practice statement about that when we participate and this is for all applicants or i'm sorry all participants on the interview committees i would just take a few minutes to read in the beginning and it talks about what our practice is as far as diversity equity inclusion and things to consider and it basically says you know recognize your own biases in this process and um it's it's worded much more eloquently than that though and that's it trustee barry i'm very thankful for all the work that went into this process uh i know uh former trustee mary lane joined us today uh there's something she said a couple years ago kovit taught
014us anything is we can't keep doing what we've been doing because that's the way we've always done it so minor changes let's see how it works and if it serves us well we'll continue if not like you said we'll give some feedback from the community and from the board and we'll go from there so thank you very much you mentioned that uh committee members can be on it twice is that in a certain time frame oh good question we didn't specify the time frame i guess annually okay um because you know most of the hiring takes place spring and sometimes we get unexpected processes but usually yeah so i would say annually off the top of my head thank you anyone else thank you so much for that update we appreciate it thank you next
015item oh i have one more under oh yep one last thing on other if i could have dr ross groover and mr adam martin come up and talk about library books so this is just a follow-up to the previous board meeting in regards to media centers and some of the uh books and information that is in there so dr gruber is overseeing it she's going to fill you guys in this is my introduction for dr gruber good evening everyone board of education chairperson mcdonald and mr wall as a district we've been continually refining our processes and procedures for materials in our school media centers for our students we expect to have these processes updated and finished by the end of this week and soon we'll begin the formation of the district book review committee with
016parents teachers administrators and media specialists to review books while we work to update these processes we've taken the following steps we've temporarily removed from circulation seven titles that were submitted by parents we've also temporarily removed student access to all ebooks that are available through the soar app in the wayne consortium and the dearborn public library overdrive collections as their first task the district book review committee will meet will meet to make a recommendation about the appropriateness of the seven books that have already been identified dearborn uses the destiny system to provide an online catalog of district media materials that are in our collection the district also subscribed to the soraa app that is provided through overdrive to provide students access to ebooks through the wayne consortium in the dearborn public library this was actually done
017started during covet in an effort to provide e-book access to our students and has continued this year all students had access to the soraa catalog one school merged the soar catalog ebooks with the destiny system this made it appear as if the books in question were only available at one school but that's not the case the soar catalog was available to all of our students access to all of the books i'm repeating this in the wing consortium and dearborn public library overdrive soar collections has been restricted for all students while the district works with overdrive to link to gain local control of which ebooks are available to our students through the soar app are there any questions trustee patrick um with the review committee is it possible that there could be other community members because
018um what we do in public education impacts our whole community and reflects the values of the whole community so i was wondering if uh community members outside of the parent community could also be considered to volunteer for this review committee as well that's a great idea and we certainly can do that thank you anyone else continuing yes i have one question jesse mesa yeah we talked about flagging any of inappropriate books that might have been in our libraries and i believe you mentioned dr grover if there is like some kind of form where students can flag or parents can flag any books for review yes is that process now in place so it will be finalized by the end of this week and we expect very shortly to have that up and available for the
019public okay thank you and if you could just speak to what they will be reviewed what the review process is and what they're looking for in the review age-appropriateness and greater pride yes so um there is quite a process of looking at what's appropriate but we need very specific criteria and that's what we found we have always had these processes but we're finding that we need some more specifics to make sure that we're all on the same page as we're looking at that and this will actually be applied to books we purchase in the future as well um the the more specific criteria as far as appropriateness for our libraries okay so a lot of it is tightening down process that we already have in place exactly and also we have uh over a hundred
020thousand we actually have over three hundred thousand books we have over a hundred thousand discrete titles so um different titles okay multiple copies we have over three hundred thousand books okay that's a lot of work so we appreciate the work that you're doing um thank you very much and we oh i'm sorry go ahead trust me watts so something that was mentioned at the previous meeting if we have parents who um would like their students to opt out of being able to borrow books do we have a permission slip for that just like they can opt out of sex education that's one of the things we're looking at is how can we manage that system with our with our staff to make sure that something isn't falling you know through the cracks we want to
021make sure the system is as tight as possible so that's one of the things we're reviewing as well as tight as possible in that parents that are concerned about access can have controls over that and parents who are more open um are able to let their children uh explore different ideas and thoughts and books just one of the things we're looking at okay yes for sure all right thank you trust you what so speaking of the timeline i know that you were saying that the access through soar right now is restricted with the idea that we're gonna have a chance to look through i.t to allow access and what that would look like do we know what sort of time frame it needs for that i'm not sure if it's i.t that looks at it
022it's really looking working with overdrive to find out because right now we have access well we just stopped access but we did have access to all of the books in the wayne consortium as well as the dearborn public library um and one of the things that we um we noticed is that we kind of had all books or no books and so that's what we're working with overdrive on right now is to see how we can gain that local control if we decided that a book was inappropriate for our students through the book review committee right now we don't have the ability to remove that from our overdrive wing consortium so we need that local control so that we could then not have access to that book if our book review committee decided that was
023an inappropriate book in my understanding that that is a problem throughout the system with other districts that use the consortium exactly so so we so to be on the safe side we just have temporarily restricted all access to it while we can gain work out a system and i imagine they will be working on that because that is their business yeah so imagine chelsea well that that is uh the direction of my next question we've had this um ebook availability during the covet pandemic and libraries were closed to help our students access other opportunities to read material it had some kind of qualifications for restrictions of books due to age or whatever but their experts determined what fell under those umbrellas of books available to a certain age group i would have to believe that
024any student with a dearborn library card can access the dearborn library book system and any of the other libraries that fall under their purview sure regardless of whether we have the sorrel app yeah or not yes because the dearborn public library actually use it quite often myself i'm used as an app called libby to access the overdrive collections that are available at the dearborn public library and that's how you check out books i mean we can't restrict students with library cards from checking out books i i wanted to make clear first that there's still accessibility in an alternate way than what we have offered if we cannot um have uh overdrive find a solution to this um that meets the needs of this district then does that mean we then eliminate this app and students
025are back to their own devices in accessing library books outside of their individual school systems um i guess that would could be the final decision i i am thinking that overdrive is working on this problem because they're hearing this from lots of districts there needs to be some kind of local control over the books that are selected for the correct i mean they are curated for k-12 students um the through the soar app um so you know i think there's other possibilities but really it will be up to the book review committee and um to see how we move forward with this right now there's no access and i just worry that we've eliminated this possibility currently temporarily hopefully for students who have no other way to access outside libraries because they don't have transportation
026or other options to um and this was an option that was easy for a student to um take advantage of if they wanted to read and one of our promotions in a public school system is to get our students reading sure and we know that a lot of the books that were under consideration hadn't even been ever taken out by any of the students they were brought to our attention by a parent but they were never actually taken out um by a student that we could see right every dearborn student is eligible for a dearborn public library and can access books ebooks as well as physical books through the dearborn library system if we were to have to abandon this one app do we have a way to get dearborn libraries to come to individual
027schools and help students apply for a library card so that they would still have access to library books yes many of our schools do that already as part of open house or parent-teacher conferences i know when i was the principal at snow we would have the dearborn public library set up a table in the lobby to sign kids up from for library cards so um that is certainly something that many schools already do and we can encourage that as well okay i just wanted to read one more thing as well um and we we were getting a number of emails from parents who are concerned about um limiting access to um books and uh there was a supreme court decision in 1982 it's called the pico decision and in it um the supreme court judges
028says while it is possible for such school level or district level reconsideration committees to decide to remove or restrict books legal precedent and expert best practices demand that committee members and principals superintendents and school boards act with the constitutional rights of students in mind cognizant that it is better to allow access to literature for those who might want it than to eliminate the access for all based on the concerns of any individual or faction i just want to remind the community that the role the role of public education is to help our students enter the adult world where they will be faced with a variety of concepts that may not necessarily reflect their own perspectives or values but that we cannot eliminate their having to deal with those kinds of consequences in their adult world
029and it's our responsibility to educate them under our tutelage in a manner that they are prepared to go forward as responsible citizens as they enter the adult world [Applause] dr gruver can you just briefly define what ebooks is in case someone doesn't know what that term means sure it's an electronic version of a book that can be read on an electronic device such as an ipad a kindle a nook even and all of those can be added to a chromebook or a laptop as well so thank you trustee barry i respect the committee's uh work on this uh i want to call it a debate because it is a national debate at this moment i just a couple months ago i watched a three-hour congressional hearing on this so i mean that's going to continue
030but i just want to make sure i don't expect an answer tonight mr wall but uh is our lawyer involved in this process let's not you know take anything for granted let's get our lawyer get an opinion from our lawyer you know work on these processes together we just want to make sure that we're not crossing lines and putting our taxpayers our investors into jeopardy so i don't want something we did overlooked and we end up in a lawsuit or something we'll do thank you sir anyone else i was just going to say the same thing after trustee barry as this committee does start to form i think we need legal on hand to know whether or not we are violating supreme court law here so great anyone else thank you so much appreciate it
031next item please next item recognition and acknowledgements commendations uh good evening commendations to the payroll department for their work dealing with employees esser money and other responsibilities thank you to marcia sand wendy cosa and martha quake especially to cary bancho for answering questions with patients in grace commendations to the communications department food service payroll and others who planned another successful staff picnic on august 26th can you please introduce yourself oh yeah thank you for being here thank you uh good evening i'm uh hassan i'm also a fortson student uh commendations to the district operation crew and to the city's department of public works public service division these groups came together to help create long elementary's outdoor reading area which now enables students and teachers to read together under the trees from district operations thank you
032to brian kelly joe kelly nicholas harvith anthony gouche and nicholas bussinger from the department of public works public service division thank you to holly malewski scott racer matt holland silas gray adam hatland brian lavangie and jake tomilac and lastly commendations to the lindbergh principal zainathiba ms stiba recently served on a statewide committee helping evaluate the criteria related to the english as a second language for the michigan test for teacher certification thank you very much [Applause] yes this one is hot off the press uh that's a ford sophomore olivia macklin representing the dearborn figure skating club representative dearborn in the u.s figure skating national solo ice dancing out in california this past weekend and she plays sixth place nationally congratulations to olivia [Applause] thank you for that update trustee barry next item please acknowledgement of donations
033good evening board mr wall a donation a variety of school districts uh school supplies has been offered to excel forward high school by nick lissering to be used for students at edsel ford a donation of backpacks and various school supplies has been offered dearborn public schools by keller williams legacy to be distributed to students in the district they are still some are still here some of our schools came and picked up a bunch but some are still back here a donation of backpacks paper and various school supplies has been offered to the dearborn public schools by jack demmer automotive group to be distributed to students in the district and those supplies have been all distributed a donation of 125 has been offered to woodworth middle school by the dearborn education foundation to be used for
034endangered species adoption a donation of 350 has been offered to snow elementary school by mary lane to be used for a tree to be planted in memory of shirley wetmore i think we had a nice eulogy of miss whitmore at the last board meeting a donation of 759 dollars and 50 cents has been offered to cotter school by the dearborn education foundation to be used for the epson bright link replacement a donation of 900 has been offered to lindbergh elementary school by the dearborn education foundation to be used for yoga materials not yoghurt yoga a donation of three thousand dollars has been offered to woodworth middle school by the dearborn education foundation to be used for paint it's good paint a donation of 20 000 has been offered to the dearborn public schools by the
035dearborn education foundation in partnership with ford to be used for the robotics program we want to thank all of those who donated to our district it truly truly is a partnership that helps the school district survive and helps the school district do those extra things and we appreciate all of those partnerships we appreciate all of those donations and we thank them all for what they've donated we certainly do and thank you mr messing next item please staff recognition custodial and bos staff hello uh shawn donahue assistant director of plant operations how's everybody doing tonight good um i'd like to first thank dr malacho i know he's not here all members of the board appreciate everything you do for us for the students you know first and staff uh parents much appreciated um we had a
036pretty rough summer this year uh trying to get the buildings ready um it's a little different than years past with our extended summer school program we have a couple members here as you know the majority of our custodial and bos crew works evening so a lot of them couldn't be here tonight but we do have a couple here tonight uh representing uh the custodians uh first of all i'd like to thank uh kara lewis custodial c from mcdonald elementary and next i'd like to thank ms debra uh liscus custodial c also from mcdonald elementary thank you for your time and appreciate everything that uh you do for us thank you thank you thank you hold on just a moment let's get a picture thought you were coming here small group but very important thank you
037thank you staff recognition so as you recall we we pull um staff who always has the opportunity to nominate their colleagues for making their day and their workplace a better place and over the summer months we we took a break and now we're back to it and the people that are selected get a 50 gift card and 100 winner uh special thanks to nicole beckham and hr because i kind of handed this off and and and she's she's um going to be facilitating it so thank you to her okay so the winners are nadine sharara she's a teacher at river oaks kristen luttrell teacher at edsel ford haifa murad shama a teacher at dearborn high lorie courtright a teacher at duvall maureen nocevic teacher at howard jennifer stortini a teacher at henry ford elementary jamili
038al ghalal a teacher at snow don hunt a speech pathologist at howe emma hodge a teacher at edsel ford and also danny may a teacher at hague oddly enough all 10 were teachers because usually we have um it comes out with a bunch of different classifications so so this month it was all teachers and i'm just going to read one of the nominations um i'm going to read they were also awesome but um i'm going to choose to read emma hodge teacher at edsel ford emma had a couple nominations she has made film study and interesting and sought after class at edsel ford high school her students adore her she is the level leader for our language arts 3 4th 10th grade team and works very hard to keep us organized she's very tech savvy
039and creative she does a lot of work for our 10th grade team in terms of running our professional learning communities creating reviews for us to use before assignment assessments and working for our union to keep us united she is very organized and detailed in all that she does congratulations emma and thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] next item please approval of minutes approval minutes of the following dearborn board of education meeting regular p12 meeting august 22 2022 board report 22 hyphen 27 recommended action make any necessary corrections and move approval of these minutes so move support we have a uh motion by trustee d ambrogio and supported by trustee barry are there any corrections that was a slow month compared to july yeah hearing none may have a roll call please trustee barry yes trustee
040d'ambrosio yes trustee mozart yes trustee petrokov yes trustee thorpe yes trustee watts yes president mcdonald yes