001and good evening are you ready to roll okay um here mr arnold here this is here um i move that the board of education approve of the meeting minutes from 2 7 22 and special meeting minutes from 2016 2022 as a second any discussion seeing uh on february 7th and february 16th say aye aye a second all right we'll move on to our school presentations um we the board will recognize students who were selected for all state high school band and all-state middle school band and we have a performance i just want to say welcome to mr dammit it's so great to have our students back here at board meetings thank you very much i just wanted to say thank you real quick uh again my name is uh miss famous band director thank you
002for having us this weekend uh so thank you everybody for being here um here we have jasmine victoria they're gonna play two short pieces for you this evening uh they just finished up solos [Music] me [Music] what [Music] me [Music] team [Music] thank you so much have some certificates for i was hoping you had i do um so um this is for all-state middle school honors band and we have catherine most and for our high school we have audrey hudson colin johnson any meals and um [Applause] yes thank you so much for coming tonight i know how much hard work you put into that honor and we were so delighted to finally get a school presentation thank you very much participation um before we move on to public participation i would like to repeat the
003policy 0167.3 which is public participation in coordination just to follow the guidelines the board of education recognizes the value of a comment on educational issues and the importance of allowing members of the public to express themselves on mr banner's matters to prevent fair and orderly public expression shall provide two periods for public participation and public meetings of the board the rules shall be administered and enforced by the society officers pres presiding officers shall be guided by the following rules aged public participation shall be committed at a time on the agenda and is determined by the presiding officer anyone with concerns related to the operation of the schools or to matters within the employees board may participate during the public portion of the meeting participants shall direct all comments to the board and not to stop
004for other participants the presiding authority surveyed prohibited public comments which are frivolous or harassing interrupt warn or terminate a participant's statement when a statement is too lengthy personally directed abusive obscene or irrelevant general rules for public participation individuals will be recognized by the forward president or society each speaker will be asked to announce their names and affiliations before beginning to speak one speaker yields their time to another no person may speak more than once in either commentary opportunity no person can speak more than once on the same subject during the single feeding a large group plans to attend they are encouraged to select up to five representatives to speak on their return persons who wish to address the board and coordinating should complete the public comment card or spreadsheet screen sheets are available on the
005district website for the super attendance box and at all locations this form should be presented to the board president or presiding chair at the beginning of the meeting before the beginning of participation while members of the board of district employees will not answer questions or comments during public participation the superintendent or fourth president may make a statement of clarification persons requesting an individual response shall note the request on the public comment part and include appropriate contact information assistance with screenstars or complaints about school employees should use protocol outlined in ford policy citizen complaints assistants are encouraged to utilize established channels before bringing the matter to the school board employees have contractual and legal rights and may request a close-knit complaint support level features addressing the board shall take into consideration rules of common courtesy speakers
006who make attacks in the personal nature and or who do not abide by rules of common courtesy will be reminded of such rules as board president or presiding chair such individuals may be asked audio or video recordings are committed subject to the following conditions no obstructions are created between the board and the audience you know interviews are conducted in an accumulated time of 30 minutes time may be extended with the discretion of the board president presiding chair individual speakers will be allowed in the maximum five minutes however the time may be reduced if a large number of people wish to address the board in these instances the number of speakers will be divided equally it's a 30 minute time into the 30 minute time limit for example if 10 persons wish to address the board
007each individual will take them in three minutes second opportunity for public commentaries limited to an accumulated time of 15 minutes time may be extended at the discretion of the board president or presiding chair persons who wish to address or show during the second opportunity for public participation shall form a line at a location to be desiccated that will be recognized by the board president or presiding chair in the order of the senate individuals will be allowed in a maximum of three minutes however the time may be refused of a large number of persons wishes to address are there any persons in the audience who would like to comment yes do you want this now or sure okay hi i'm carissa keller i'm a parent here in the district and i'd like to um circle back
008to how the customer three plan was established um and after inquiring about this issue on the um at the february seventh quarter of dr timmins established that the november fourth state of the district zoo meeting um was what was used to take the box of including all stakeholders um i can't chance to process this and it truly doesn't sit well with me so i'm just speaking about this again i attended the particular state of the district zoo meeting and i appreciate and i remember the opportunity to give comments via the bot exchange app that um you had to access with the qr code i have appreciated that truly however it was not clear at that state of the district meeting that it was specifically for us or three because it wasn't it that meeting included
009multiple other topics so today i thought let me go see the thought exchange um information and maybe i'm missing something maybe like it could be just me i mean i'm kind of new to coming to these meetings and so i found the thought exchange and the first thought exchange from that state of the district zoom meeting had 41 participants and thoughts the highest rated thoughts um are this number one teach history science math english leave your politics at home two lose the masks emerging readers are at risk three all health decisions are private admin has no business strong arming students to get a bax or stay away from critical race theory five stop treating vaccine contracts differently six teachers should not infuse their political feelings i went on to look through all of the other
010thoughts you know there really wasn't anything specifically towards esser then i went to the second thought exchange and that one included 46 participants and 66 bots highest rated number one um teachers should stop pushing their political agenda on students number two the problem isn't systemic racism and dexter it's slipping expectations and lost class time three respect the health privacy of all families four some students are going through multiple quarantines when they are not sick have negative tests does that seem right and number five and the top five highest rated was why aren't ieps or 504s being followed those students need the most help during those in recent certain times as a former special ed teacher i truly hope the parent who wrote that question found some solutions i find that alarming i went on to
011look through the rest of the thought exchange those 66 thoughts there were four comments number 18 28 31 and 40 that were specifically about esther three front two comments talking about the summer programming um and which is great and then two other comments are about uh more social workers and psychologists great suggestions of course there was a lot to unpack at that state of the district zone meeting i understand that you know that checks the box of following the rules to receive these funds but i'm frustrated because it really wasn't clear why wasn't there more than one way to access information from parents on this what about those parents who were unable to attend this zoo meeting so dr intimus and i had been having some email exchanges and further explained that several smaller groups
012were utilized to dig deeper into how this money would be spent i'm a parent in the district therefore part of the biggest special interest group it concerns me that perhaps my voice and my concerns weren't represented in these several smaller groups you know moving forward i just asked that all stakeholders be surveyed or looped in in a transparent way parents should be given more than one pathway to advocate for their child that's a legit concern i i'm asked a couple of times in emails and i i'm asking here now in public who is included in these several smaller groups who chose these individuals for these several smaller groups what method was used to handpick only certain individuals for these several smaller groups why wasn't there a survey specifically for sr-3 funding sent out to all
013parents you know the ones who are you know your biggest special interest group i've asked this question multiple times in an email and i don't get an answer and i think that's why i'm frustrated i think anyone here if you ask somebody a question you would expect an answer so that's where my frustration lies the lack of transparency i it's really hard like to keep putting my trust here when simple questions aren't even answered um thank you thank you are there any other um so this morning we were able to share out a nice start of the week from a group of wily students in our spark classroom mrs beaver's class and mrs bowman so i'm sorry i've decided can you click uh so the um this is bowman and this is class it's a
014great little video it's a very good [Music] is but do it all over again [Music] is [Music] we all need someone to assist we can all be friends we can choose is [Music] a [Music] do it all message again [Music] is [Music] so it was just a nice way to start the week off um our kids are doing some great things in school and that was a group of third and fourth graders in other little updates we have a set of bid documents out to replace asphalt and pavement throughout the district the bids when they come back we'll have to make decisions we have we set it up on one of the base bids and then what are alternates based on the cost so for example the jenkins parking lot we have some areas that
015we need to fully grind down and completely replace we have areas that we just need to uh grind every day we have wiley parking lot you can see there's some spots that are in pretty bad shape so we have some parking lot work to do this will probably come in a million dollars plus this entire bed so it's gonna be sizable um we have mill creek we have some parking lot work we need to do some is packed some is full over at the high school we have entrance and [Music] some entrance way work that really needs to be done in section so you can see it marked up on the sections and then at all red we have bids out for visitor features but it's in two com two combos we need to redo
016the base because currently they're kind of just sitting on the ground that's why they haven't been touched forever so we need to redo the base so that's part of the pavement bid but then we also need to set up a way to be we're going to have to shift them to get around a drain we're going to have to shift around a white post because the distance is different on new bleachers and for ada compliance and then we have as an alternate we have this top section which is a raised area for handicap seating because if we do for example on the home side it's higher already on the visiting side there to the ground so the actual accessibility seating is looking straight into the players so we want to raise it up we just
017need to see what the actual cost is and how we're going to piece it all together with the asphalt so you can see the the setup from the features so those are out and kids are due next week next week um meanwhile we ordered today or you know last week late last week we ordered two tool cats i don't know if you've ever seen those things that drive around they were 72 000 each so they'll last another 15 20 years we do everything with those we move everything around the campus with them we clean snow with them we do everything we ordered three mowers we have 360 acres so we can't just get a regular mower we get 28 000 dollar diesel so they can handle the wear and tear we ordered three plows four
018poly spreaders for salt and a gator if anybody has seen our gator it has seen better days there's times where we need to get a player somewhere and we're trying to get it started um so it's time we've gotten 25 years out of it or so it's it takes a beating so that was 277 thousand dollars worth of work items that we ordered uh we also are working on turf bleachers at the twin turfs and we're trying to get bids to be able to get our bleacher get smaller bleachers and they're removable that will move with dual cats we have a uh today was the first day of mass strongly recommended cdc came out late friday and removed your order for buses still on federal transportation like planes etc but school buses were removed we
019have a scientific survey that will be conducted with the community checking out communication systems they have perceptions etc that'll give us it's a 15 to 18 minute survey it'll have the same random selected sample and actual interviews and it'll give us a plus minus five percent confidence interval but then we'll follow up with another broader survey that it won't be scientifically reliable but it'll give us good data to work off of that we'll send out to the entire community perception survey of the district so this we'll do two layers of it we'll do the scientific one and then we'll do the abroad just google survey that doesn't have because of the nature if you don't have a random selected sample you can't apply a confidence interval it just is open to whoever answers instead of
020making sure you get a good cross-section um it's randomly selected won't only be parents it'll be members of the community epic mri they do survey work all over the state um and then we are planning to mail every week we send out twice a week we send out the making waves we do it digitally we're putting together a complete publication to send out so that it gets to non-parents and we can get it through the whole community this year some of the great things we have going on in schools which would be really nice to see especially all melanie does a phenomenal job with it and to have them all together it's gonna be great to do that a couple times a year um craig's also working on finalizing bids and quotes to replace the
021ovens stove tops and our life skills rooms and we're working on how to get so we have a um we have a child care class that we teach but we don't have the babies we have real babies but you know we've given our high school kids babies the babies are about 1800 each so there's a set we've historically borrowed but the set has seen it it's not so we're trying there's only one vendor for the babies which is making it kind of complicated so craig's still navigating how to purchase life skills babies for our classes because we do need them and then last graduation statewide graduation rates came out they were finally released back in 2013 or 14 our graduation rate was down around the 89 90 range it's currently at the high school 98.2
022and across all district programs 97 when it's broken down on a four-year graduation four-year cohort so as soon as the student starts ninth grade and the ticker starts and they have four years to finish for that calculation so what happens is if a student ends up moving or homeschooling or something sometimes you can't track them down to be able to show where they actually went out of state's always a challenge last year during the pandemic if we looked at our students that do not have an iep so we do have students that will not finish in four years because in cognitive impairment they're severely impaired that it's just going to take a little while so so those students if we take and look at our students without ieps we were at 99.6 we had one
023kid which during a pandemic was pretty good we're really happy about that we're going to continue working to improve that we don't want anybody so we're going to keep working and uh it's been a point of focus over the years and it's really that focus is paying off it changes noise for kids part of our programming options with all ted our eca program even our early middle college helps provide other options for kids the pathways we've done through fifth through eighth grade really has set up a lot of kids to be successful that we break down the data may have struggled so we've done a lot to be able to help our kids and we want to continue working on it so um that's the update we're back in school for the week we're hoping
024for no snow we'd like to go to school on a friday again last week we made it through on a friday it's nice sorry for students you liked it um next time black history month about other youth like society of all heroes through descriptions of little rudolph and grand tracker for team usa in 1956 and 1960 mark junior the purpose of this was to get students thinking about how they can make an impact additionally a music group called common force came to sing songs uh the high school right now senior survival is coming up around the corner that's every and then the shutter box charity event is starting up soon i think it might have already started and then uh creekside game day for the melbourne brown team happened at the end of their math
025projects i think i touched on that previous meeting they have these [Music] then in mill creek they had to reschedule their wellness day due to a snow day to march 9th and uh right now the enrollment process for next year's classes has begun which is receiving the january budget report i move that the board of education received the january 2022 budget report any discretion so you know when rushing to discussion we will put the consent items receiving the january 2022 budget report which starts off with the nesb board of directors election your package includes a list of masb board of directors we are in region seven so our region center campus and an election booklet supporting so we have three candidates um is from lansing school district we have susan marlin from the royal public
026schools [Music] we have michael mckay she is so completely motion and discussed okay um [Music] um oh i'm so sorry i just said that um miss zilser is uh she she only has one here on the board and so although that's ambitious to want to run for this but that would be a little bit of a hesitation on that you know i have a general appreciation for everyone who puts themselves there feeling is that anyone who puts themselves out here to see this is going to have a nice um intention i guess they don't have any particular answer about it i would just say that kind of you know the other thing that's going on with funding and the teacher lack of teachers lots of truck drivers all the stuff that's going on that's being
027discussed at the state legislative level um again i don't know i've seen this day on the isd um and michael they he's got five years experience he just took over the wisd presidency last year i believe so i kind of like to see someone's kind of stay over that a little bit further in and then you know he's been around for much longer to be represented in our region he's been almost 22 years and i go back to i kind of want to see some experience just because there's going to be a lot of different art schooling around this legislative special session and um experience kind of a fresh voice she's a current teacher she has foster kids three kids girls she's currently a teacher so maybe that's probably um we always [Music] discussion um
028saving the is with disabilities education act to ensure that every child with a disability has access to educational opportunities legislative pledge funding 40 of the cost of special education services has never been met and costs fall to the state and local governments the idea or idea of the full funding act of 2021 currently considered by congress really increases the funding for idea that programs federal government reaches an annual appropriation of 40 percent of the plus is there any discussion just have a question about where this would go from here we would send it to our federal representatives we would send the board's resolution to uh [Music] so it is a mandate across the country that is not funded and it is it does create issues for kids and some of the issues even something simple
029like schools of choice so with schools of choice law what happens is a school district can participate in school of choice and take students from within the council they can also accept students from contiguous isds unless that student has an iep if they have an iep there has to be a cost sharing agreement from the resident district to the educating district but then to later on what happens is because special education costs are funded from the state and then mostly locally the local plans for special ed funding say that a local district cannot pay for an out-of-county student's education with special education so the fact that you're saying after entering an agreement is actually held up by the way the funds are set up so you have you have a natural discriminatory process happening that's
030in the law and if this is one of the layers to help address it is to get what was passed as federal law that actually pay part of their cost a portion only 40 and we look at special education costs we have we do whatever we have to do to help our kids so we have students that have full-time nurse they have um they have a full-time nurse and para there may be three students in the class i mean we we really do provide services you're extended year services we do pre-preschool services we have we we provide a tremendous service and it's all locally funded that is not it's not equitable to kids that don't have a community like washington county to fund so if you look across the state in the country there are
031districts that they may get the 14 of federal that goes to the states which turns into about 30 or 40 percent and they get 20 or 30 from local funding and they're picking up the other 40 plus out of general fund hours so they're taking away programming they could offer all kids in order to fund something that should be fun and that's the domino effect so there's a there are there's a bill in congress that has a chance of passing because it's really the right thing to do it's just this is a chance to give a local board's voice on really the law exists at the federal level should probably live up to the promise of when the law was passed it wasn't even a paper at all the board of education adopt the tax
032resolution called resolution in support of support of the idea full funding act say i call those same day next on our agenda we have the discussion items which are the summer encouragement a phenomenal success of last year's pre-summer programs has led to a lot of requests this year however we would like to offer free recreational athletics and art camps this summer based on last year we estimate the district's cost to offer these will be approximately 100 thousand dollars these camps target target physical mental and social well-being while also providing sexual learning um doctor thomas is recommending that the board of education in funding for summer recreation athletics and other camps for all ages this item is presented for discussion this evening and will return for action at the march 17th so last year we were
033in the dreadstroke summer program which was it was a couple million dollars in the end it was one time funded from federal stimulus and esther dollars part of that plan is we ran every kid every student could choose two camps and they were all priced at a hundred dollars and we gave a hundred dollars towards band camp um and what they were able this was from kindergarten up and we were able to run a whole a whole variety of camps in different athletic activities and arts and music and what we'd like to do is offer that again it was great to see the kids get that access and they were able to try sports and try activities they might not have wanted to do before and they were set up we tried to keep them
034for three or four days a few hours each day and we rotated them so that kids could have a variety throughout the summer um last year we were really we were not able to expand the choir we had a little mishap but i think we pulled off something but it wasn't what we planned on um it was a timing issue with staffing it but we'd like to expand this out definitely run art camps choir camps and drama um orchestra band really talk with all of our different arts opportunities and then the athletic opportunities which the kids really enjoyed it there were thousands of kids around campus last summer and it was great to see kids all engaged and we removed the prosperity it was also easy for the teams because they didn't have to do
035all the individual planning for how they're going to collect dollars and are they going to charge 120 they're gonna charge 78. and we just said it's 100 bucks you get two we ran everything all the registration for community ed through our software gave them their list here's who you got and they were ready to go it was it was great anybody that sent kids last year was really a great opportunity for kids we'd like to do it again it's a hundred thousand that would have come out of general funds we don't have similar funds for it but i think this year based on what we we have unfilled positions we can reallocate some funds to be able to do this budget um sharon when we put that in this budget here or next year next
036year i have heard a lot of the coaches that ran the camps did so because the athletic program that's what we'll do again i'll talk to you okay about right so that's still the plan that is for the funds to go to what was running that yeah which actually it's it's a unique fundraiser to run the program is we say okay we're gonna take district funds and we're gonna give you a hundred dollars program into an activity account so that you can offset what you normally do on a fundraiser but it allowed them a lot of times the camps are a fundraiser that's how they fund extra coaches or they fund extra equipment etc it but it streamlined it significantly and the coaches overall really liked it they were able to get a ton of
037kids involved they were able to really have kids try things well i think the parents liked because it was a one touch like you could say oh there's all these camps right there so i know it was very popular question are there any um we always run some reading and math intervention but we're looking at what we could do we finally had some staff that started talk recently saying if you want to put something together i'll help put it together our challenge last year we were able to there were state grants that paid staff significantly to be able to spend the time um they're the challenge this summer is just capacity and people are tired um so we're hoping we can turn the corner there but our teachers we have to be able to staff
038it and it'll be something smaller but we'll offer we always do intervention with students we do that through our title one we'll do some through esser funds and then through our 31a funds that we run every summer opportunities that we support kids especially in literacy and then usually in that we're still working on those plans this one's way easier to set up that's why i'm just bringing it now the other ones we do normally because they're all tied into the ground in order to participate which seems um it seems like you could have that level of student who doesn't really get to work because they're not but they still have skills to provide you know with another kid buddies i just feel like we could encourage the multi-age learning in some way without charging them
039so that they get some i don't know five bucks headbutts that is something nice so just to be really clear you don't have any insurance done about this hundred thousand dollars budget if we're talking about that if we plan for it now we'll plan accordingly in general on the favor of it we've heard probably dozens of people speak up about how much they like programs so it would seem to make sense and we calculated 100 as a kid 3600 kids it's in any evidence people that sign up for three and they just something happen in the system extra students that were here or it's hard for the like the youngest like the young fibers that's tricky because there's when they're four it's sports are different and arts are that's challenging but we'll figure out what
040we can offer i guess i'll just say i'll just double down on what daniel said which is i i support the reading and math you know intervention maybe i know it's generally focused on the other kids we'll move on to our second opportunity for public just to remind i'll just go through the world where each week there's a lot of maximum three minutes but for about 15 minutes otherwise the other line at this point the meeting doesn't just make sense another person may speak more than once on the same subject during cleaning [Music] the work and preach um i had the privilege of going to visit a few uh other districts or maine's chelsea in particular uh struck a board with me 10 minutes in that meeting they were talking about educational outcomes they had
041three teachers in there talking about the literacy program they were working on and that impressed me a lot we've talked about this before i've been up here two or three here for about a year i remember one principal coming in and talking about the fox program we have got to make this an open line item agenda within the board's twice a month meeting where we talk about educational outcomes our kids are behind whether we want to admit it or not they are and um if we don't talk about it and we don't start going actually it's just going to continue and i just feel like second thing is uh i feel like we're getting back to normal somewhat and i would really urge the board to push our principles our administrators to start putting some
042fun back in the kids lives i think of the prom we're going to have the common outreach i think we can do better can we have school dances can we do some things that we used to do in the past that i think it's time right and these kids deserve it two years and in fact if you have a high schooler they missed out on a lot so let's give them the opportunity we have three months to make it happen so i i just urge you to administrators uh up here in the dexter area and daughter of school of high school and i was sitting here listening tonight about the gator that's being purchased and the lawn mowers and all of that i'm sure those are necessary items i'm sure they're breaking down um recently
043i was looking through um some of the support staff um sailoring that salaries with their paid hourly and i'm very concerned that there's still unpaid lunches um i saw something about 11 something an hour for the support staff we're talking about you know your lunch monitors and people like that progress people and i started thinking that you could go to mcdonald's and get paid more and probably get a paid lunch so i'm sitting here listening about this money going here and this money going here what about the people that every day have contact with the kids they make a difference every single day not that we don't need the gator or the mowers or anything but i don't know and i'm not privy to those uh conversations i know it's a union thing sometimes but
044what are we doing to attract those people and get people in that work with their kids make the difference every day retain them give them good pay it's it's something that's just i've been thinking a lot about your last couple weeks so thank you very much um a couple things uh i thought it was awesome having the allstate band members come in since i've been i've only been on the board during the pandemic uh so i hadn't really seen a lot of the things that normally happened so that was really really cool to see them come in the performance was really good i was really impressed i'm i have no musical skill whatsoever so i'm always impressed by anybody generate any kind of music um the other the other comment i have is just like
045to commend the administration staff educators on our really excellent graduation rate it's one of the topics in the state and we really can't get much higher just that with one person higher i think from where we've come in the last six seven years i think it's really neat it's really great to see the kids back in here that was so last weekend i had the opportunity to present classes at institute um i always like to say thank you to the disparage for supporting education it's very valuable for us to have a better background and knowledge and also have a time to protect the board members in other districts um and some of the opportunities that i had to talk to folks last weekend made me really appreciate the canvas district both as a parent and
046support member um just thinking about the commitment that our staff shows for our kids thinking about the diligence that our past boards have done to put us in a financial position as well where we could be talking about um having opportunities for fits this summer it really struck me some of the conversations that are being had in other districts around the state right now so i just wanted to say thank you to the administration and to all these support members like and um many it is just very clear that having consistency over time very much matters and even as a board member you sort of forget um you're here for your little piece of time and it's hard to see the trajectory until you see kind of that phrase operation plan and we got caught
047up with everything else and called the masking unmasking requirements special warning i just wanted to make sure that they're back we've seen a draft putting out a deadline for that uh just a reminder if you're a basketball team all over the place so they're starting to start one at a title i think it's the first time legitimate run is hard for a while they're hosting two services if you can't support for sure just wanted to comment about the um i could actually have such a strong musical legacy that the parents of colin johnson i was on indiana and they were state audits and all of that so so it's just exciting all right after five minute break the thank you