001The Dakota, the name of our state is Minnesota Makochi. Land, Minnesota Makochi, land where the waters reflect the skies or clouds. Minnesota, mini means water, sota means clear, but not perfectly so, cloudy. Makochi means a place, land, or country. Recognizing the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory we reside on, and a way of honoring the indigenous people. So for roll call all four members are present tonight and now I would like to ask you to join me in saying the Pledge of Allegiance Now I am going to make a motion for a closed session upon the conclusion of tonight's school board meeting The meeting will be closed as permitted by Section 13D.03 to discuss the district's labor negotiation strategy related to the district's negotiations with all bargaining groups. Is
002there a second? Second. Okay. Who do we give it to? Director Bennett? Okay. So the motion was second by Director Bennett. And all those in favor of approving this motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? So the motion passed. Then next, we're coming to approval of the agenda. And before that, I also need to make a motion to amend the agenda by adding an item to Part B, authorization of employment of the school board director, Tom Bennett. Is there a second to that motion? Thank you. So there is a motion and a second. All those in favor of adding this item in Part B of our agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. Okay. Next we go with... approval of the agenda with the amendment, with the approved amendment. So I'd like to move
003approval of the agenda with the amendment included, Annette. Second. Thank you. All those in favor of approving this motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Agenda has been approved for tonight. And next we have recognitions. And for recognitions, we have Isabella Luné, AA 2021 All-State Second Team Girls Soccer. Congratulations to Kennedy Girls Soccer Junior Captain Isabella Luné on being selected for the AA 2021 All-State Second Team. EASY made it through the rigorous process starting with Metro West coach nominations and rankings through the Minnesota State High School Soccer Coaches Association All-State Committee Deliberations. The 44 players selected for each All-State team represent the top 3% in each class, 44 of more than 1,400. So I'd like to call Coach Mario Lunette to say a few words. Please come to the podium. Good evening, Superintendent Melby,
004Chair Corman, and members of the board. Thank you for inviting us here tonight. This year marks my 10th season as the head coach for the Kennedy Girls Soccer. Our 2021 season was a record-breaking one under my tenure, and I'm extremely proud of our program and our varsity team. We earned double-digit wins, finishing fourth place in the Metro West Conference and finished 11-5 overall. Compared to our prior season, we reduced our goals against by 43%, and we had 409% increase in goals for and 700% increase in assists. Junior captain Izzy Loney, a four-year varsity starter, made a consistent impact in our games. She finished the season with four goals, two of which were game-winning goals, and 11 assists, a team high. Izzy has been involved in 61% of team plays leading to goals, including both of
005our goals in our epic Eastside sweep of the Battle of Bloomington. When a student athlete contributes to the game on a consistent basis, Opponent coaches take note. Izzy's effort for our team earned herself a spot in the Metro West All-Conference team on the 3AA All-Section team nominated by the Visitation Head Coach and the AA All-State Second Team. As an All-State Selectee, Izzy is recognized as being in the top 3% of student athletes registered for girls soccer in Class AA in the state of Minnesota. Izzy is my first... Kennedy girls soccer player in the past decade to make it through all the layers to earn an All-State honor. She is excelling on the field and holding her own in the classroom as well, having just earned her second academic letter. With pride and joy, I'd like
006to introduce you to the 2021 AA All-State second team, selected Kennedy Eagle, Izzy Loney. Thank you so much. Appreciate it for the invitation. Well, congratulations once again. Yeah, this is awesome. It's been wonderful to see you, you know, going through the years and growing up and seeing you playing and, yeah, working really hard. So thank you to you also, Coach Lone, for all the work done. Yes. Definitely. Yeah. Let's be very proud. Yes. All right, so continuing with our recognitions tonight, we have David Holman for 45 years of service. So I would like to ask David to join me at the podium, please. I hope it's a new car. So Mr. Holman, tonight it is an honor to recognize you for 45 years of distinguished service as legal counsel to the school board and Bloomington
007Public Schools. Over the last 45 years, you have provided wise and strategically valuable opinions and advice to many school board members and superintendents on a variety of topics. Always keeping the district... in strict compliance with the law. Definitely. With our sincere gratitude, congratulations, and we look forward to many more years of working with you. Here's your question. Thank you. You know, over these few years, I've worked with lots of boards and superintendents and staff. It's been great. And I have to thank the teachers in this district because I matriculated right through this district. I'm sure they never thought I would leave and they were right. But I owe a lot to all of them. It's been a great time. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Well, I think we're done with
008recognitions. So now we're going to... The previous one, which is the Canvas of 2021, 2021 School Board Election Results. Could someone please read that resolution? Director Olson. Okay. Resolution for the board to adopt. Whereas the School Board of Independence School District 271 has canvassed the election returns, therefore be it resolved that the School Board hereby declares the following candidates elected to four-year terms beginning January 3, 2022. Beth Beebe, Tom Bennett, Matt DeMolch, Don Steigoff. And Clerk of said Board is instructed to so notify the candidates according to law. Vote Recap. Beth Beebe, 6,702. Tom Bennett, 7,876. Matt DeMoke, 6,730. Kat Eggers, 1,798. Markeisha Fulford, 4,046. Danny Indovino-Cowley, 5,887. Natalie Moroz, 5,700. Patricia Riley, 2,137. Jeff Salovich, 5,401. Don Steigaff, 6,936. Rydens, 106. Okay, is there a second? Second. Okay, thank you. So all those in
009favor of approving the Canvas of 2021 School Board Election Results, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? So this one has passed. All right, so now we go back to, Superintendent's report. Superintendent Melby, please. Thank you, Chair Corman, members of the board, viewing public. My update for this board meeting, I'm going to start off congratulating the Jefferson girls volleyball team because they're headed to the state tournament. I got a text from Principal Anderson on Saturday night, and I always sort of flinch if I get a text from Principal Anderson on Saturday night, but it was great news. Girls volleyball team made it to state, so they play Wednesday, I think at 3 o'clock, versus Eastridge High School. So congratulations and good luck. Go Jags. Wow. Some other updates. My administrative team and I continue to strategize
010how to increase our sub pools, teachers and paraprofessionals. And so we're diligently working on that. And again, when I have the microphone, I put out an all call bat signal to Bloomington folks who might be interested in helping us out subbing as either a teacher or a paraprofessional. Contact our HR department for more information on how to make that happen. And continue to meet regularly with BFT President Marchek and other BFT leaders to talk about the best ways we can work to keep teachers in the classroom as much as possible right now and manage workload for teachers. The Board Policy Committee met last week, had a great meeting, I thought, to review and fine-tune two policies that you're going to learn more about tonight if you're not on the Board Policy Committee meeting. And I
011point it out just because I'm really proud of the work that Bloomington does with policies. It's important board work. It's not the most glamorous board work all the time, but it really helps the district function and run smoothly when you have updated current policies. So thank you for that. attended the Hennepin County Mental Health meeting last week where I learned that Hennepin County Is allocating some of their American recovery recovery plan pandemic money to increase mental health supports in schools So that's good news They're starting a process this month that will begin with a survey And I just want the board and the public to know that we're well informed here in Bloomington And we'll be participating in that process to make sure we're accessing all available avenues to support student mental health this year
012I also wanted to note that I provided a district update, and I do every month, actually, at the district PTSA parent-teacher-student council meeting. And I just want to say how impressed I am with the commitment that these parents have coming to the meeting. And it's a cool meeting, if you're not aware, because some administrators like myself go. Wendy from the BFT is typically present, the parent PTSA folks from all the buildings. And they show up, and they ask great questions. It's a great opportunity for us to communicate, get parent feedback, and then have those parents bring that information back and share it with their communities and their schools. So I'm impressed with it. And I also want to note for folks who don't know that it's fairly unique having a district PTSA council in Minnesota.
013We're one of three districts in the state that has an active district PTSA council. So I think that's impressive. And I'd like to brag it up. Go Bloomington again. I think that's very cool. And then I want to note that I attended briefly, I think a week or so ago, the Bloomington Chamber of Commerce and the Hilton at 494 in France hosted the chamber Future Leaders Conference for our students from Kennedy and Jefferson. And wow, what a cool event. And to see those kids learning about opportunities for future leadership in our city is impressive. So I just wanted to note that. I'm gonna put out another information PSA here about the educational benefit form. School meals are free for the 21-22 school year, but it is still very important for families to fill out that
014application for educational benefits form. Why, you might ask, when every meal is provided free this year? Because this one form benefits all of Bloomington Public Schools through additional school funding, athletics, activities fee assistance, discounts on college application fees. Pandemic electronic benefit transfer program there. There are many reasons. It's important to have that form filled out if possible So I just again encouraging all parents to complete Parents and guardians to complete the application or actively opt out before December 10th. That's our that's our deadline for that Also wanted to give an update on inclement weather learning days We're now into November even though it felt like it was I don't know what it felt like it was a great weekend But this fall, I asked my cabinet team to create an inclement weather day learning plan,
015and I'm happy to announce that they've completed that work. They engaged employee group leaders, teacher leaders, parents as they created the plan. In essence, when we know that inclement, boy, I picked a hard, that word's hard for me to say for bad weather's coming this winter. We know in advance, there's a high likelihood we'll know in advance, and that. will make us ensure that students have their needed devices sent home with them ahead of time and ensure that families understand what the process for that day is. how those days will operate. Our calendar in Bloomington is tight with days. So if we need to hold a day or two or whatever of these days, it will help us not have to make up days in June, which I think is important to everybody. And I
016just want to let folks know that starting tomorrow, our community relations communications department will be sending out more information for families with some of the details of the inclement weather days. You know, the pandemic has taught us a lot of lessons, of course, but... One of them, although not ideal, is that we can provide that instruction at home, and so we're gonna take advantage of that. I'll also end this section with a note that winter severe weather is pretty forecastable, so we believe we'll be able to have time to get those devices home, like I said. However, as soon as I say that. You know then it's not predictable so there there could be a day or a water main break or something like that that would cause us just to have to cancel school
017for the district or a building at a certain point so I'm not saying we won't have a cancellation, but we're gonna try to avoid it as much as possible and then finally I'll end Noting Veterans Day is this week. So Thursday, November 11th is Veterans Day want to thank All our veterans who have served to protect our country and our freedoms, and to those men and women currently serve in the military, we thank you for your service. And that ends my report. Try saying Clemente now. Yeah. Nope. That's a lot easier for me. Okay. Well, thank you, Superintendent Melby. All right, so now we need to approval part A of our agenda. So I am going to make a motion to approve part A of our agenda. Is there a second? Second. Okay, a second
018by Director Beebe. All those in favor of approving part A of the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, part A of the agenda has been approved and we move to part B. And the first item that we have for Part B is approval and ratification of paraprofessional contracts. Could someone please read the first resolution? Director Bennett? Be resolved that School Board of Independence School District Number 271 approves and ratifies the 2019-2021 Master Contract between Independence School District 271, Bloomington, Minnesota, and the Federation of Paraprofessionals. Second. Thank you. And we have with us tonight Ms. Maybror, Executive Director of Human Resources. Chair Corman, Superintendent Melby, and members of the school board, before I start going through the resolution, I wanted to introduce Bill, who's the president of the para unit, and invite him to
019say anything that he would like to say before we start going through the resolutions themselves. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Dr. Melby, Chair Korman, and board members. I'm pleased to say tonight will probably be the first meeting in quite some time where Mary says the Paris are the only ones without a contract. In fact, after tonight, she can probably say we're the only ones with a contract. So I'm overjoyed to be here. I think we made some... very strong strides and feedback from our members has been great. Last week, we ratified this con- or both contracts. And the first one was unanimous. We had one jokester who decided to reject the second contract for 21 to 23, but that passed with 98% approval. I would like to say one of the things that touched me
020most was when we were reading the contracts to our members. We had a para who stood up at the end and said, they feel a little bit more like a professional tonight and a little less like a mom who took a job to work in a school. And I think those are the impacts that we're making with this. I also want to go on record as we are not the petulant children of the district, even though we held out for so long. But we had members who firmly believed and really encouraged our negotiations team to continue to strive to get the best deal that we possibly could. So I want to thank the school board and Dr. Melby, Mary and her team that we were able to finally come to that point. Thank you. Are
021there any questions from board members in regards to this specific resolution? I can walk through the highlights of the first contract if that's. Yes, please. Okay. So, as Bill said, they did vote and it passed. And we're all very happy about that. So, the tentative agreement included wage increases to schedule each year of 2%. In addition, we also changed some of the language in it. The fair share language was removed because of law changes that happened. We updated the district posting language and started changing the way that we were doing para-postings to provide more information on the posting. We added new language around the president's release MOU that was put into the back of the contract. We increased longevity pay 2021. And then the board has previously approved changes to the health insurance, so those
022were put into contract. Added new language about notification of student behavior for parents who are working with students that have some behavior things that need to be pointed out. We updated titles in Appendix B and we did a market adjustment and also housekeeping. And when I say housekeeping, I mean changing dates basically throughout the contract to reflect the current contract years and cycles. Any questions on that one? No questions? Okay, I think we're ready to vote on this one. So all those in favor of approving this first resolution, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, this resolution passes. Then next we have our next resolution. Can somebody please read that one? Director Beebe? Be resolved that the school board of independent school district number 271 approve and ratify the 2123 master contract between independent school
023district 271 Will meet in Minnesota and the Federation of paraprofessionals. Is there a second? Thank you So the 21-23 contract included a 2.45% increase the year one of contract and 2% for year two of the contract. Additionally, changes were made in the dues checkoff were updated to match the current language in the signup form through Ed Minnesota. Changed the access to membership lists. Again, the health insurance information that we previously agreed to was put into contract. We also did an MOU regarding overpayment, underpayment of wages, which happens occasionally when you're working in the world with hourly wages. Sometimes there's an overpayment, sometimes there's an underpayment due to no fault of anybody. And then we also did an MOU regarding labor management committee. and added that to the end of the contract. And I know we're
024looking forward to start those conversations as soon as we can. So I'm looking forward to working with the unit on that and other people will be pulled in to do that committee as needed and as we need to discuss those topics. And again, housekeeping, dates were updated. Any other, any questions on that? No questions. Okay, it seems like we're ready to vote here again. So all those in favor of approving the resolution, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, then it passes. Thank you. And a special thank you to your negotiations teams and your leaders and also especially to our professionals. A huge thank you for all the hard work that you guys do every single day. We truly appreciate it. Thank you. Next item that we have is the enrollment report 2021. And then
025we have with us tonight, Mr. John Weiser, Executive Director of Technology and Information Services. Welcome, Mr. Weiser. Since I'm going solo, I'm going to take my mask off just to give me a little more breathing. Speak more clearly, I should say. Good evening, Chair Corman, Superintendent Melby, school board members. I'm here tonight to present this year's fall enrollment report. Sometimes we call this the October enrollment report. At the outset here, I want to thank the staff who across the district maintain data that feeds this report. Talking about building secretaries, anybody who touches the enrollment of a new family. It can be an overwhelming process sometimes. And for the vast majority of our families, they do a lot of this. They know school and they do it electronically and they're able to work through the multiple
026steps. But there's a significant number in our community who aren't that good at knowing school. And so a special thank you to our Office of Educational Equity staff who often are those hand holders in walking families through and onboarding. students in this district, so thank you to all of them. The purpose of tonight's presentation is to help us all be better students of enrollment, something I've heard Superintendent Melby emphasize in previous board meetings. This enrollment report, because it's an annual report that uses the same set of rules year over year, it helps us do a year by year comparison and see our district as we compare it to other districts. We also have some long-term trends built into this report which help us understand how we're changing as a community over time. I don't have
027to tell you it's been an unusual couple of years. And so I would just caution that if you're looking for a trend over one year or a two-year period, answering some of those why questions becomes difficult because we are coming across unusual data points. pretty much on a weekly basis. I'll do my best if you have some questions for me at the end here, but just know that the data around our data, all of our data reporting is now kind of much more variable than it has been. I'm just going to, there's a lot of data contained here. I'm just going to hit some of the high points. So I'm not going to go page by page. But I would encourage you, my coaching sometimes in the past has been, if you take the last
028couple of data reports, which are available online, and you set them side by side, especially if you're attached. to a school, you can kinda look at some of the variability of how the second grade classes changed, how the demographic numbers have changed at a site, and it gives you some depth about the complexity of the neighborhood that feeds that school. So I'll start us on page four. On page four at the top in the purple table there, you can kind of see our overall highest view of the district. The third column over shows our October 1, 2021 actual K-12 enrollment, 9,805. You'll see that number sprinkled throughout here. We are a 9,805 student district is what I like to say. For many of the years I've been... Bringing this report to the board, we've been
029able to say we're a 10,000 student district. And so now over the last two years for the first time we've dipped below that 10,000 mark. It's an artificial milestone, but it is important. There are some bright spots, which is that if you look over at the last couple of columns in that top purple table, you'll see that we are up 160 students over this time last year. And so we know that COVID, we lost about 350 students or so during our COVID year. It was a bit of a mad scramble for our families. We haven't fully rebounded in terms of our K-12 enrollment, but we are up 160 over last year. That's a bright spot. In addition, Director Zivkovich does the projections in the spring of each year. That's how we do our financial planning,
030our staffing, our budgeting, all of that, those sorts of things. And so that second to last column, difference from projected, shows that we've actually outperformed those projections by 217 students, another bright spot. Students mean that we're More students mean that we have a more stable foundation, we have more resources, we have more stability in our district, so that is a good sign. The bottom two tables there use the same data, the last year's actual enrollment compared to this year's actual enrollment by school. And so I won't go over them in detail, but you can take a look there at how the different schools play out. I will make a note here that last year we had Bloomington Online School. It was in response to the pandemic, it was our way to offer parents an alternative.
031This board and our administration decided to make that a permanent option for parents going forward. We now call that option New Code Academy, as you know. And so wherever you see NCA throughout this report, those are the New Code Academy enrollment numbers. On page five, you'll see a makeup of each grade level by site. In the lower right-hand corner of this table, you'll see that, again, I want you to be familiar with 9,805 students, K-12. I'll make a note also that I keep saying K-12 because this report doesn't cover the full breadth of what we do in Bloomington Public Schools. It doesn't include our early childhood. It doesn't include some of our alternative programs, our great adult basic ed programs. So just know that this is a slice of what we do here and it's
032not meaning to say anything about those other programs. It's the best apples to apples comparison when we look at other districts and we do this comparison year over year. It's not meant to say anything about those other programs. On slide five, I might point out that grade 12 will have a graduating class this year of 812 students. That's good and strong compared to previous years. And our kindergarten class, incoming kindergarten class, has 708 students this year. By comparison, last year when we took that dip that I talked about, that COVID dip, the hardest grades hit were our elementary grades, especially at kindergarten, first and second grade. And so that kindergarten class last year was 600 students. You can see the rebound there, 708. We have, again, as long as I've been doing this report, our
033kindergarten class has been between 700 and 720. And so this feels to me like a good sign. of our community starting to return to some of those normal patterns of schooling. Page six, seven, and eight is where we start to look at some of the demographic breakout areas that we pay attention to. I'm only gonna give you a little guide on this page and then you can look at the following pages, again, broken down by school, by site, by level. So in that first column, the total column, there you see at the top are K-12 enrollment, 9,805 students. Are you tired of me saying that yet? A little way down that column, you can see the breakdown of our federal race ethnicity population. The ethnic diversity percentage there is 54%. I sometimes phrase that as
034that we're a 54% ethnically diverse district. That amount moves by about a percentage every year. We become about one more percent diverse, more diverse each year. Not evenly spread across our sites, not evenly spread across those federal race ethnicity code areas, but just to know that on the aggregate, we are becoming a more diverse community. Below that, and I'll talk a little bit more about that, those race ethnicity numbers in a minute. Below that, you'll see the number of students receiving English language services. That is at 14%. Comparatively, that is up 1% over last year. And it has been about 14% over the last several years. So that number has stayed fairly steady. You might notice that it varies by grade level. There's reasons for that, programming reasons for that, that the bringing on of
035a child who receives English language services happens primarily at the elementary level. And as they grow out of the program and test out of the program, it would be natural for there to be less. students needing those services in the higher grades. The next set of data is around students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. I appreciate Dr. Melby's plea to fill out those educational benefit forms with the extension of free lunches. We've seen a dip that we think is associated with just a lack of reporting, not necessarily less need in our community. This number Bless you. This number is at 36% at this point this year. Last year at this time, it was at 34%. So it is up a little bit. But for the last 10 years or so, you'll see in
036a chart later on in this report that it usually has been around 40% for our community. And then I'll repeat something that Dr. Melby said, which we're officially, we still have some time here. So we have until middle of December before that number gets finalized. And it, again, drives some resources. And so we're continuing through our principals and through our community relations office to make that plea for families to register whether they qualify for benefits. Last two areas. Yes. I'm sorry. On that, there is no breakfast numbers. No, that intentional because everybody gets a free breakfast Director Zivkovic Thank you The second to last grouping of demographic data there is students who receive special education services. That percentage there you see is at 14%. That number has been pretty stable over the last couple of
037years. Even during the pandemic of last year, it was also at 14%. And then that last set of data is a point of pride for all of us, which is that's our non-resident open enrollment. We sometimes call it open enrollment. These are students who live in other districts, but get up in the morning, somebody gets them in a car and drives them to Bloomington to come to one of our K-12 schools. We're at 9%. this year. That's about where we were at last year, but it has gone up over the last two years. As I was preparing this report, I was looking at this report compared to pre-pandemic because I feel like that's the better comparison. And that number is up. And I think it's a testament to some of the differentiated programming we offer
038around gifted and talented, around arts education, around online learning and computer science, I think is what I would attribute that to. Again, pages seven and eight use the same demographic areas to just sort of break down by school the different demographics by school. We do have a pretty diverse community, and it varies by location, so you can look there and kind of track over time your favorite school. We have no favorites, right? Let's go forward to page nine. We try to put some of these numbers into a graphical format to better understand, to give them some more meaning. So page nine is a graphical form of some of that demographic data. Here what we've done is we've added the percentages of students qualifying for free and reduced meals. plus the percentage receiving EL and special
039education services. We're calling out those three areas because for a couple of reasons. They usually are indications of students who are in greater need. and they usually drive programming, they drive staffing, they drive resources. And so you can see on the left hand side is the comparison of our two high schools and then New Code Academy High School, then our middle schools, and then our elementaries. The point of this page isn't really to dig into those numbers, but just to show that we're, again, we have a pretty diverse community and the experience can be different depending on what school you're at. On page 10, I'm trying to do a little bit here of some added meaning around our district ethnic diversity. So since the federal categories, we follow federal race and ethnicity. like every other
040school district. They're imperfect though and every time I present this report I spend some time here because of those imperfections. So what we decided to do a couple of years ago is to kind of give two views of our race ethnicity data. On the left, you'll see a pie chart with aggregate data showing the breakdown by federal categories. So these are the official federal categories. Again, you can see based on that blue wedge of the pie, which is those reporting white as a race ethnicity, that's where I get that 54% racially diverse district. It's important to know that when families enroll and we ask them to review their data every year, all of this data is self-reported and families and students can select more than one race ethnicity. So the bar chart at the right
041is trying to represent what we would call the multi-categorical view of the same data. So for example, a family that marks both on their enrollment form, American Indian and white, would get a check in both of those categories in the bar graph. So it would be fair to say that 2.7% of our K-12 students either partially or fully identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native. When you combine that data and put it into that pie graph form, which is often what is required for reporting federal and state reporting, Families who have checked more than one box get combined into that black wedge of the pie, which is the two or more races. And so you can see a disparity there that the American Indian, Alaskan Native wedge of the pie is much smaller there. So
042we don't want to under-represent some of our different ethnic groups, and so we try to do that with both of these forms. The second half of the report is, again, like I said, 10-year trends over time to see how we're changing. If we look at slide 12, you can see this is our overall enrollment over the last 10 years. You can see the COVID dip there in 2021, and then a little bit of a rebound in 2021-22. Let's hope that trend continues. Slides 13 through 16 show our steadily increasing ethnic diversity over time. that I've already talked about a little bit, you can see that aggregate number changing by 1% per year, 10% over the last 10 years. I'll pause here a little bit on slide 14 just to walk you through one of these
043kind of pull-out charts because they're a little bit messy, but we have 10 elementaries represented on this chart, and we also have New Code Academy Elementary represented here with just two data points because it's only been around. We used the Bloomington Online data from last year and then this year's New Code data. You can, if you are a... attached to that, let's say that very top line that is Valley View Elementary, you can see the kind of the ups and downs on the ethnic diversity data over time. We generally see some stability there, but know that the aggregate, again, has changed slightly. The next couple pages are just the same for our middle schools. Page 15. And then for our high schools where you can see sort of that trend more clearly because there's less
044data on that page. And there you see the two data points for Newcote Academy High School, somewhere between Jefferson and Kennedy. Lastly, pages 17 through 19 use the same 10-year timeframe to track free and reduced lunch eligibility. So there again, remember I said we've always, as long as I've been reporting, hovered around that 40% mark. Again, we think that this dip isn't really related to people being more well-off and having less need, but we think it's more of a reporting, a depression due to reporting. And you can see that we've done a little better in that reporting, from that reporting perspective this year than we, we're ahead of the game this year than we were last year. Slides 18, 19, and 20 then do the same for each of our sites. Elementary first, and then
045middle school, a middle school page on page 19, and then high school on page 20. We put this report after today. We put it up to our website. I like to tell people, including our community, that you can find it fairly easily if you just do a keyword search for enrollment or enrollment report. There's a couple of places that we like new families who are often shopping for schools to see this report. And so it's in some of those areas that a new family might also. get to. It comes out of my department, so it's in the technology and information services area of our website. And there you can go back and look at the last five years of those reports. I'll put it up later this week. Nine out of 10 questions I get
046from community members, I can usually answer with this report. So it's not unusual that I'll fire this thing off in answer to either a reporter question or a community member question who wants to know something about one of our schools. So with that, I'll take your questions. Thank you, Mr. Wessler. Wow, that's a long report. Very detailed, thank you. Questions, I'm sure there's a lot of questions and comments. Director Sorum. Just notice that the enrollment for the past ten years We've been a really stable district overall, you know right around 10,000, you know So as people have left and as the homes have changed, you know, we still maintain Right around 10,000 and while the diversity is creeping up You know what that's indicative of you know variety of diverse people are moving in or
047whatever it is, but I've been fascinated. I would say, you know, for the last 10 years, that's a pretty stable view of what the district enrollment is, which I think is good. Director Starks. So I have a clarifying question first. So for the students that we qualify as New Code Academy High School, are those students that are doing New Code Academy full-time? For the high schoolers? Yeah, that's a great question. So the data rules from the Department of Education are that a student who attends more than 51% of their day should be reported as an online student. And then when we received certification from the MDE, then we were assigned a school number under which to report those students. So these students are the... Those that are over 50% enrolled in online courses. And the
048other percentage might be at a Jefferson or Kennedy face-to-face courses. And I would say maybe 80% of those are fully online, and the last 20% are in that kind of mixed category. And then, as long as we're there, we have another 1,000 students that are... below that 50%, between that zero and 50%. And so if you think about that, that's most of our high school population is taking one or more online courses because of all the reasons that students take online courses, flexibility, adding a credit, getting their course schedules to work out and so on. Okay. Thank you. Bennett? Since we're on the New Code Academy question, when you were reporting the non-resident residents and it was 9% for the district, which is good, and then I look at the breakdown in New Code Academy
049and that was some really good news. Elementary, like 39% is non-resident and high school or middle school is 17%. High school 32%. So those are really good numbers. And what's brilliant about the program is people can enroll, but they don't have to physically drive here. So they can be in Ely and register online and stay there, but just send their money here and we're good to go. So I'm wondering, the question is, did you expect that to happen? Was that kind of in line that you thought that much of our New Court Academy would be out of district students? And do you think that's... Something we can look at every year and we're going to see a large portion of those students being from out of district. I was surprised by how high those numbers
050were, but I, you know, the logical case would be that we were pretty bold as a community about providing this option for families. We were pretty proud about, and we were, I think we did a great job with the help of our communication friends in stating clearly in our public. efforts about what you were getting by joining last year's version, Bloomington Online School, and then transitioning that into a permanent option. And so part of me wants to, you know, pat myself on the back and my team on the back for like, this was a smart bet we all made together, including you all who took a little bit of a risk. in investing the resources into this option and I think the community is responding to it. You do see articles still about other families
051in other communities who've tried their darndest to get rid of anything associated with distance learning and I think they're probably not serving families in their community well. Those are the inquiries we get. We get a lot of inquiries into new code, even still into the fall, because there's so much variability in the way COVID is working its way through the state that we're still getting inquiries about wanting a more stable option where there isn't a question every day about whether my school is going to go into distance learning. So we were aiming at a three-year, 20% open enrollment number. And so we surpassed that easily in the first year. Super proud of that. Well, you might not want to give yourself a pat on the back, but I will. You guys have done a great
052job. You and your team should be commended. This is a home run that you guys have hit with Dakota Academy. And I say that as a parent as well. As you know, I've got my student in there, and he loves it. And he'll probably do it again next year too. So thank you. There's a little Bennett there. Well, certainly, you know, when we have meetings with other board members from other cities in Minnesota, and, you know, we... this comes up, you know, when people start asking, you know, who has a current online school? And people start talking, and then I have the opportunity, we have the opportunity to talk about Bloomington. We do it with a lot of pride, you know, because everybody goes, oh, wow, can you tell us more about that? Can you
053send a link so that we can hear more about that and learn more about it? Director Steiger. Well, that just made me think of another question. I don't know if you have any numbers on this, and obviously you wouldn't want to say, you know, where they're from. But can you see where, you know, like maybe one family or one individual in a certain town or community joined, and then the word of mouth has gotten out, and all of a sudden they have five friends joining? You know, because I could see that happening if they, you know, because they get... wonderful Bloomington public school teachers and staff in that online school. And so if they have a really good experience, you wonder how much that's going to spread within their individual communities also. Yeah, I haven't
054gone that deep on the new code enrollment, but I know there were some of those trends around our gifted talented programming where there was some community spread in the neighborhood I live in, in Minneapolis, South Minneapolis. I know a lot of my neighbors just through word of mouth and having a really successful experience recruit people. So I don't know that we're going to have that trend this year, but I would hope that. the experience is so good that that we'll start to see it yeah for next year it'll be interesting to watch yeah director olsen hey so i noticed that um jefferson kennedy both have equal 10 non-resident and all of the schools cap at 10 or less so outside of new court academy so i'm just going to do is that because we have
055a limit for non-residents that come in person We don't have a limit, so I think that's just happenstance. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. Any other questions? Director Starks? Well, so I was looking at if you go to where we've got our numbers on the page, well, page five on your slides. I don't know. the enrollment by school and grade. So Hillcrest, I noticed, has a very low kindergarten. And then you go down one to Indian Mounds and they just exploded. And so, you know, Hillcrest, having been a former Hillcrest family, I know we have the most control over that enrollment given that it's a school where families apply and there's a lottery to get in. Indian Mounds is a neighborhood school, so I know we're much more subject to who lives in the neighborhood and
056who comes in. How do we handle, so I've got a two-part question, how do we handle explosions like what happened in Indian Mounds where you're up by 30 over one grade? And then what's being done at Hillcrest for, because we have the most control over that one to get those numbers back up? I saw your email. You gave me a little bit of a preview time. So I appreciate that. I'll tell you what I found in the 30 minutes before the board meeting. Sorry about that. I would say that when I looked at where the, well, so number one, COVID hit our elementary students in terms of enrollment hardest. our middle schools and high schools actually were fairly stable last year and then again this year. We've seen the increases that we normally see as
057families leave the parochial system and they join in ninth grade, for instance. And so when I was looking at the kindergarten and first grade variability, what I saw was five... I looked for changes of 10% or more. So kindergarten class that went down by 10% or up by 10%. And I really compared just in the very briefly compared these numbers to pre COVID numbers, because again, our kindergarten class pre COVID was about 720. And so we're it that felt like more of a comparison. I found that actually five of our Five of our elementary kindergarten classes are down more than 10%, and three of them are up more than 10%. And so that's worked out to be about a break even. I don't know exactly. We do do some speculation about what the reasons are.
058I think the way you described Hillcrest is a good lead into Hillcrest and then New Code Academy are both choice schools. And so they depend more on that word of mouth, the application window process, the... The school movement process and I think that has is an added sort of multiplier of Chaos over the last couple of years because I think families choose how to choose Kindergarten has been a very difficult choice over the last couple of years So I think that my hunch would be that there's something to that New Code Academy which didn't exist two years ago has 30 students in a kin in its kindergarten class this year Some of those students came out of our existing elementaries So there's that. Indian Mounds, I had enough time, so I texted Principal Coons at
059Indian Mounds, and I asked him, like, Jeremy, what are your hunches about why your kindergarten class is doing so well this year? This is going to be a typical principal answer. This is my impersonation of Principal Coons. Our reputation has been steadily improving. We have a good reputation with our community, and so we've seen steady growth over the last period of time, so we're retaining more members in our community. The pre-K program that started a few years ago has made a big difference at Indian Mounds, according to Principal Coons. Families tend to stay there. If they have a good experience in their pre-K, they tend to enroll in kindergarten. Our kids love their computer science experiences, and that adds a sense of joy and fun to school that is getting kids more excited about being
060in Indian Mounds. And then he noted something that I think we don't talk a lot about, but there's two new apartment buildings built within the Indian Mounds enrollment area. And so those are two to four person dwellings, and they can... that can be often a driver for school-aged children enrollment. And so those were the four things he cited. How we deal with, the second part of your question was how do we deal with those changes? We use a, Director Zivkovich and team use a staffing process and Dr. Michler guides that staffing process with the elementary principals. It starts with the projection. in the spring and then it adjusts and adjusts and adjusts through the summer and into the fall. And so when we have, I don't wanna misstate what we've done, but there was an
061adjustment made to the kindergarten class at Indian Mounds because of the surprise great enrollment there. And then we would do the same at any of our schools. I know our high school enrollment was also a surprisingly positive and so there was some enrollment or staffing adjustments there to help with the enrollment surge that we saw. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. And I know those were really big questions, so I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Director Bennett. Well, looking at that question, what's interesting is if you look at... The enrollment for kindergartens, and you look at the ones that have the computer science immersion programs, Indian Mounds and Poplar Ridge, both of them are at their kindergartens are over 80. So, and that's a big jump from last year. So that
062might be fun to look at the numbers of how many school, how many kids from those schools are requesting a transfer to Hillcrest and has it gone down? And maybe that might be because of the... the computer science immersion programs. Yeah, that's not a good, that's not a bad hunch. We talk about, and we talk about this in looking at data with school leaders. When you see something that stands out to you, like... propose something and then we can start to we can dig into that data we often don't have an answer but um but watching those things and seeing those trends that i think that's a good a good thing to notice i would tie that to another trend that we know which is school of choice is becoming more and more prevalent for
063families we see that in the growth of charter the choice of charter schools by our school age families and last year was all about choice right And this year, again, is a lot about choice. And so we might see more mobility or more families willing to make different choices following their students' interests or following their work or following whatever other reason that families make school decisions. Well, you bring up the school choice and that's important. We know our families do want choice. So I think it's great that we have innovative programs like Computer Science Immersion and New Code Academies as giving choice, but it's also keeping students in our district. So we're not losing them to charter schools or private schools. And we were worried about any amounts for years because they're really come on
064dropping and dropping and dropping. So it's good to see that they're up over 300. So now we need to look at some of our other schools and say, okay, now those are dropping. What can we do to help? keep families in those schools that'd be more innovative programs in those schools to to you know get keep the kids there or get more kids there so anyway we could talk about that all night we're gonna need to make our schools bigger director um Was just looking at we've often thought of our Eastside schools having more diversity than our Westside schools But as I looked at Washburn and I looked at Westwood that are in our the Western West of I should say 35 W we see quite a bit of diversity in those schools and And
065I guess I just am thinking maybe things are really changing, too, in those ways with our demographics coming further west in our diversity and the impact that may have in balancing out some of the things within our schools, looking at some other western schools where the diversity is very low. So anyways, just some observations as I looked at it and went, hmm, things are looking different than I thought. This has been happening in Bloomington for a while now, and diversity is all over. So it is important that it's noticed, and it is noticed by members of our community as well. Any other questions director also so bringing students to each school, you know Indian mounds having the preschool program Which I love to substitute teach preschool so I know about that and that brings more
066students as well But eventually we'll have that in all our schools, correct? I'll look for some help from my We're working on plans Director Starks. So do you have a chance to chat with or find out data from other school districts and how we're comparing in terms of enrollment, if they've seen declines starting to come back from COVID or kind of where we are with our neighbors? I saw that question also in your email. I started to research it, but I couldn't find. There was a whole surge of articles, newspaper articles, where reporters dug into that specific question last year. It didn't start until a little later in the school season because school districts aren't doing their official reporting. And the places that you do that research when you're trying to compare different districts is
067typically you'd go to MDE. And so I couldn't find anything of substance and so I don't really have an answer for that. I think mid-year is about the time we would take a look at that. I did see this summer, this last summer, there was concern in at least a couple of a couple of those reports about the drop in kindergarten enrollment, that the kindergarten class of last year was down 9% across the state, and that the K-12 enrollment as a whole was down between 2% and 3% across the state. And so we're in line with that overall number, but we've done much better with our kindergarten number in terms of coming back up to our pre-COVID numbers. Thank you. Another question. I do have one more. And actually, I did warn Mr. Zikovich I
068was going to ask this because I know it's an enrollment report, but because enrollment is tied to funding, I do have a funding question. So the question that I had asked earlier via email and warned him that I was gonna ask at the board table was, I know that there had been talk at the federal level and at the state level about support for school districts for enrollment loss. So could you share a little bit about what either we've received from the feds or the state to help with this and how long that, how many more school years we'll have that or if that exists? The extra additional funding that they gave us was about just under 400,000, and that's just a one-time money that they're giving out. We lost about, if you're looking at
069about 370 students, so you're talking about 3.7 million that we lost. Now, if you look at it, we've gotten a lot of federal funding in other regards that is kind of offsetting some of it, and we're using it to... make up for the lost time and things like that. But to that exact year and everything else like that, we lost 3.7 million and we got 400. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, well, I think it's important to put that in context because we'll talk later when we get to budgets and stuff about the money that we got from the state or whatever. And it's like, okay, we lost 3.7 and gained 400,000. Like, thank you for the 400,000. I'm not saying not, but it matters a lot. No, no, thank you for asking. I would also want
070to jump in on the kindergarten numbers. Our bursts in Bloomington have been consistently over 1,000. And about five to six years ago, we were capturing about 80%. Last probably six to seven years, if you throw out last year, we've dropped down to about 70% in capture rate. The bursts going for the next few years are falling under 1,000. I guess from my projections of looking long term for the board to be aware that our numbers will probably within three to four years will be under the 700 mark for kindergarten. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. So I do have a question on page 10. So page 10 is the district ethnic diversity profile and I know that it's You know, we get those those categories based on the under federal guidelines here. So for the
071percentage for black students Do you have an idea or do you happen to know how many of the black students would then be African American, how many would be Somali students or even Latino, black Latino students? We have access to, again, this is all self-reported data. A couple of years ago, I want to say three years ago perhaps, the state and feds started to ask sub-questions under these categories. And so if you're enrolling in the district and you're filling out our online, multi-page online enrollment form, if you select black, as is your example, you'd get the... Drop-down menu that would ask you for the next level of categorization It's pretty complex. I think under if you select black. I think you have like maybe 30 subcategory choices because black is a very broad category. And
072then similarly, if you chose Asian, you'd get a drop down with 17 choices or making those numbers up. But there is another layer of detail underneath that. That data has only been collected for the last three or four years, I want to say. So it's not super detailed. And if you haven't revisited and... and changed your that self reporting, we wouldn't have anything but that top level check for you. So we can report on what we have. And we do that we we do that when we get asked the question, but it's often incomplete data. Hopefully over time then we'd be able to get a more complex picture to dig in a little more. Right, and all this time and they haven't changed those. Right. Because I remember, you know, we were talking about this
073years ago as well. And so it is possible that in the black category you might have some Latino as well, right? Right. There is a little caveat, too. There's a separate law, separate federal law, that if you get asked, maybe you've seen it on a questionnaire that you filled out, where you get asked a single question about your ethnicity that just says, are you of Hispanic origin? That single checkbox puts you in the Hispanic Latino category and then takes you out of the two or more. And so then you'll see on this chart in particular that the Hispanic-Latino category on the one side and the other side is the same percentage because even if you selected Hispanic plus black plus white, you stay because of the federal rules, imperfect federal rules. Yes, don't change. You
074stay in that one category. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. That is very interesting. Okay. Yes, Director. I'm confused by that because my kids, when I look at their thing, it'll say race, white, ethnicity, Latino. So on this, they're just reported as Latino? They're not white at all? Correct. That's weird. Okay. So the breakdown information you have, is that something you can share with the board? Because I think that'd be interesting to see, like the black population, how many of them are, you know, is it? you know, Somali American or African American, I mean, what's the breakdown? Could you send that to us? And same with Asian would be interesting. Yeah. If you have that data you can just send to us, it would be great. Yeah, give me a few days and I'll see
075if there's something meaningful there, including if it's just a mess, then I might have to declare that as well. Well, send us the mess. You know how I love looking through all these numbers and stuff. You don't have to clean it up and make it all pretty like this or anything. Yeah, that's true. All right. Anything else? Anyone else? Just to follow up a little bit on that one. Is there a distinction between the federal categories and the state categories? That is a good question that I realized halfway through this presentation I don't have the fine point about what the difference is. There is a difference. We start with federal. We always apply the federal rules. The state adds to that. It doesn't subtract from federal rules. But I don't know what the state adds
076are. And so the state ads might be some of that sub categorization. It might be some of the merging of data, the rules around merging of data. I can get some clarity around that too. Might be a 27 page document from the state. Yeah, from the state because when we first started categorizing these and everybody was saying, talking about the achievement gap and a variety of things like that, there were just eight categories including special ed and... different things like that. So it was pretty simple that there were just these basic categories. And now all of a sudden we're seeing all kinds of different mixtures, if you will, two or more races and so forth like that, which is diluting some of the statistics that we had used before. Another issue with the achievement gap,
077right, that it's just that we're looking at each individual box as if it was just that one, but within each one there's so much. There's so many differences that we haven't completely acknowledged all those differences to really look. very deep way into the data chipping gap. Yeah, we would say Dr. Heistad, I've heard Dr. Heistad frame it as race is a window through which you look at achievement data, and if that window has changed over time, then it can distort. how we perceive those gaps. So this is powerful data, but it still does take human interpretation. Well, therefore, the importance of really looking into race and statistics. All right. Well, thank you, Director Weiser. I think there's no more questions, so thanks a lot for a very detailed presentation. Thank you. Okay, so next item
078is the policy review. And so here we have Director Tom Bennett, who is the chair of the Board Policy Committee. Thank you. So the policy committee met last week to discuss two different policies and we had a long, robust conversation. I think we met for about an hour and 45 minutes just on these two policies. I think we met so long that Dr. Melby was late for the next meeting. So he had to dip out like 10 minutes left so we can finish our questions. So I want to thank my committee members, Heather and Jim, for all their great questions. We do have a new policy, so... there were a lot of questions and conversation around that so i also want to thank uh rick and kate for uh answering all those questions and being
079so thorough and in the um the presentation of the policy. So the first one we're gonna talk about is policy 524, computer system and internet access acceptable use. And this is a MSBA mandatory policy and the revision policy has been aligned with MSBA model policy, matching up the language and rephrasing. The references to the social media guidance have been deleted and removed since we're moving that into a different policy that we'll talk about after this one. Everything else, I'll just go ahead and turn it over to Mr. Wiser and he can go over all the changes. Yeah, I think that's it. Thank you, Director Bennett. I think that's an accurate description. The goal here, this is a policy that hasn't been reviewed for five years in technology. It's a highly changing area of all of
080our work. So there was some more cleanup than was probably necessary in other policies. The bulk of the changes are to put the policy back in alignment with the MSBA model policy. And so I know if you see subtle changes where a word has been deleted or a word has been added, that's often due to the MSBA's changing, modifying their language. In addition, the MSBA is recommending that this move to a yearly review. And so, at the very end of the policy, there's an added statement that this will be a yearly reviewed policy, again, because of the quick-changing nature of technology. The only other the only other major change I would point to is what director Bennett pointed to which was we we struck the social media aspect of the policy took it out because
081we wanted to deal with that in our in a its own policy and we didn't want two policies to conflict to give different guidance, so I'll take any questions that you have On unacceptable uses A1, users will not use the district system to knowingly access. Knowingly was crossed out, but then in A2, users will not use the district system to knowingly or recklessly, et cetera. Knowingly was not crossed out. So I was just wondering why it was in one area and not in the other. Yeah, I saw that question, and that was MSBA changed language. Okay. And then, so do you know? I don't know the reasoning why. If I were to look at all the changes as I was working through, I think what I, the trend I would note is, of course, they
082took out some older terms. You know, you don't see floppy disks referenced anymore. They changed some shells to maize, some maize to shells. We had a little bit of that discussion within the board policy committee. I think the word knowingly, for instance, my hunch would be that whether you do it knowingly or not knowingly in the case of using a district system to access, review, upload, store, print, or distribute these non-educational materials, knowingly or not knowingly doing it doesn't matter. The district would still say don't do it. Okay. And then the word share was... crossed out. I was wondering about that. Yeah, and I don't have more information about that. Okay, but I did understand things such as, yes, like you said, tapes. Tapes being crossed out. Yeah, tapes. I'm not going to share tapes.
083Yeah, I kind of like the unacceptable use. I like that it doesn't have the knowingly because, you know, when you're posting pornographic or obscene materials and you ask a student, of course, they'll say, well, I didn't know I did that. So it's nice to say that knowingly or not, you can be held accountable. Well, really, my question was, though, it was crossed out in one part but not the other. Yeah. So that's why it just drew my attention. If it was crossed out in both or not crossed out in both, then... I'm sure there was a large conversation with MSBA as to why they kept one and not the other. Okay. Any other questions on this policy? Yes, go ahead, Heather. Okay, so, oh. That's what you're pointing to him. Yeah, he's the chair. The
084chair on the committee. So it's his job. So going back to, so just a comment about the knowingly and unknowingly. So if you go to also see in that same section that you were in, Director Olson, you'll notice that there's a section about if a user inadvertently accesses. So that was, I. pointed that out in the meeting because i do remember when i was a teacher i had a policy about like if you get to a page that you did not mean to go to you like put up your hands you say mrs stark's mrs stark's right so i did appreciate that there was this section in here because we know that happens right and so um so the knowingly stayed in the numbered part under a whereas the knowingly got removed from the overarching
085so i think That then didn't have that conflict about the inadvertent part But I do like that that's in there and then the other thing is that I just wanted to point out if there's any parents or students or community members That we discussed too is that this policy is not just for district computers on district systems, but district computers on home systems or personal devices on the district system. So just the wording in this policy was cleared up to make that clear too, so that it's not just a district computer on a district network. Sorry, they removed the word network, internet, that it encompasses a lot more than that. Thank you, Director Stark. For clarification, any other questions about this one? I guess we're looking at everybody. Seeing none, I think we'll move on
086to the... I just wanted to... I just have a comment. I agree that it made it clear that it doesn't matter what system you're on or you're an employee and have a certain standard of conduct that should be higher than... others out in the general population and therefore it was also good to have that clear. One question I have relates to software that is being used by the district for example, Newsela or BrainPop. Some of those are being used but some of them are inappropriate which I discussed with Andy Kubis and he agreed and So the question is so what prevents our students from accessing? things on those software that are inappropriate Director BB I think generally when we're talking about instructional content, where the mode of delivery is maybe less and less important over
087time. And so, you know, whatever instructional content is chosen as a district standard would, as you appropriately said, go to Director Kubas in the Learning and Teaching Department. mode of delivery, whether it comes over a computer or it comes in a paper form, probably isn't something... that we would necessarily control unless it really falls outside the bounds of education. So you can see some of the categories listed here, and they're pretty drastic categories. We're talking about pornography, we're talking about gambling, we're talking about some... So there's a... The internet is known to be a few extremes and then a large, large area in the middle which can serve a lot of good and it can have a lot of... Less good and so we really work at you know blocking the things that are as
088you see outlined in the policy pretty egregious I guess what I'm trying to determine is it may not fit in this particular policy but when Mr. Kubis and I were discussing it. He mentioned that some parents have come to you and asked for there to be more parental controls on some of those types of curriculum, as it were, that is now software because there are great age spans that it is. Made for and so a first grader one of the complaints was that there was inappropriate material that the primary grades could access That was inappropriate But it was available to them we might have to have a discussion further about that but it's still part of using the computer and Protecting kids and being appropriate Not sure where it fits, but maybe we could discuss
089that. I don't think it fits anywhere in this conversation. Yeah, just really quick, Director Beebe. I use one of those that you have talked about, and it's Newsolay. And my experience with that is that it's a platform that is used by teachers, so the teachers get to use the kind of content that will get to the students. So the student doesn't have access to that content until the teacher... carefully selects what is appropriate for what age and then delivers it to the students. So you get to assign it to a student through your own account because as we have purchased those or the rights to use those, then we get to pass it to, or we the teachers get to pass it to the students. So they're carefully selected as I know from my own
090experience. Okay, moving on, since it's not really relevant. Any other thing about this policy? Okay, we'll move on to the next one. Thank you, Mr. Weiser. Great job. So the next one is policy 458, employee use of social media. And it's a brand new policy. I'm sure you guys have lots of questions. So I'll just go ahead and turn it over to Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Martin, who did this policy and did a great job explaining it. Hopefully they can do a great job explaining it to you guys as well. No pressure. No pressure at all. Everyone's watching. There's at least 12 people watching. Madam Chair, Board Director, Superintendent Melby, and members of the in-person and all of those cast of thousands viewing audience tonight, we are bringing forward to you the new policy, the
091social media policy 458. Got some opening remarks, and then Kate has a few things to give you more details, and then we'll take questions. Well, we'd like to acknowledge first and foremost is to thank members of the Board's Policy Committee. It's been mentioned a couple times tonight. Directors Bennett, Sorum, and Starks did a really diligent review of these two policies, and we'll share reasons why this is new compared to what Mr. Weiser provided to you. They did recommend some revisions that we did make and they asked a lot of probing questions, which is really what we expected and want for new policies, especially of this nature. We also appreciate the legal review that was provided by District Legal Counsel David Homan. It applies to current legal standards, knowing that the courts continue to wrestle with
092due process and speech rights with respect to social media use. As a district, we strive to ensure electronic communication tools are part of our school curriculum and are used responsibly and safely. We're proud to embrace the power of social media as a tool, as we've done for a number of years, to not only communicate, but to engage our parents and caregivers, our students, as well as our community. We also support staff's use of social media as a communication and learning tool. Social media is meant... to encourage interaction complete with and at times diverse opinions and points of view. For more than 10 years, we've provided and frequently updated social media guidelines for staff. It was part of Policy 524, the former Internet Acceptable Use and Safety Policy, and its accompanying regulations. These guidelines were meant
093to assist employees in not only navigating the appropriate use of social media tools in their personal and, most importantly, professional lives. Social media guidelines are often an organization's first attempt to provide a quick reference tool for engaged employees in doubt as to handle and how to behave online. Guidelines offer a set of rules or directions as to how social media is and is not to be used in relation to the workplace. Guidelines are typically not mandatory or enforced. They're often viewed more as an attempt to streamline a process based around a sound practice. Several years ago, we encountered a rash of incidents that prompted a push to create a more comprehensive approach to firming up our social media risk management efforts. Enter Policy 458. As with most of our school board approved policies, this social
094media policy is a direct reflection of the district's values and objectives and provides a clear decision-making pathway in specific situations. If approved, the social media policy will serve two primary purposes. One, it will serve as a source document for educating employees on using social media in the particular work environment in which they are employed. And secondly, to protect Bloomington Public Schools from uninformed and often unintended misuse of social media to the detriment of the school district, its employees, and its students. To be clear, This new policy, if approved, is not intended to interfere with the private lives of our employees. It is not to impinge their right to freedom of speech. It is designed, however, to ensure that Bloomington Public Schools' image is maintained and protected. So Kate Martin, our manager of marketing communications, worked
095with our former communications specialist, Andrea Alice, to draft this social media policy. I've asked Kate to join us tonight to provide additional remarks about this new policy and then be happy to take your questions. Kate. Thank you madam chair board directors superintendent Mel B and the viewing public as Rick stated while this policy is a new policy the content and the context are largely drawn from the existing Social media guidelines that have been in place in this district for several years As part of the process we reached out to communications colleagues in Minnesota and around the country to research and analyze best practices in other districts So although there is not a model MSBA social media policy, the language in our guidelines and in this new policy is aligned with current practices. Likewise, the shift
096from guidelines to policy is also consistent with current best practices in social media management. The policy is intended to be both protective of staff and the district, not punitive, whereas guidelines could be interpreted as suggestions and perhaps overlooked, a policy carries more weight and underscores the importance of appropriate social media use. The policy outlines the district's authority over official brand social media accounts, emphasizes existing social media guidelines for staff, and establishes guidelines for employee use of personal... personal social media accounts where the context relates to their employment by educating staff about appropriate use covered in the policy we are intending to prevent the unintentional misuse of social media again that sometimes can be detrimental to the district's reputation and perception thank you we'll be happy to field any questions I really like the guidelines. I
097thought they were written very well and It was the first time that I had seen them actually even though they have been written in the past and I thought it would be a great thing for Each of our board members to have when we come on board because it is a transition for us But you said it's not meant to be punitive But should violations occur I don't see any type of action that could be taken such as was in the previous policy I believe I'm gonna pull up the draft policy here Maybe maybe at the very bottom. Yeah, I believe the guidelines but i'm gonna quickly media networking postings that fail to comply with the rules and guidelines set forth on policy regulations and may be subject to discipline number up and including determination
098number two on roman under roman numeral four oh i see it there for some reason i thought that was in the guidelines nope it's in the policy any questions from anybody else I was just going to say that I agree when we first transition onto the board, it is something that is quite challenging when you are used to social media and then you have mistruths or something written on social media and you can't respond to it and you have to hold back. And I can see why that's important to do because we... Have we're held to higher standards on a school board Then most people realize then many other Legislative bodies even are because we speak as a board and we cannot speak as an individual and So sometimes we have to look at something
099that's out there on social media and we know it's misrepresenting the school or the board or the administration or the teachers or a curriculum and misrepresenting or false. And it's really hard to not respond to it. And I just think it's good for the viewing public to understand that we really can't respond to that without going down a path that is going to take us into maybe somewhere where we don't want to go. So I know that I need to hold back. And I like that in here. It says, you know, if you're not sure, Then to just stand back and not say something Yeah, go ahead director song oh, yeah, this was we we did we did enjoy at the Policy Committee meeting talking about some of these but I like where the social
100media guideline first paragraph talks about If you are an employee contributing to blogs, social media, both inside and outside of work, these guidelines pertain to you. We expect all staff and board members to use social media to understand and follow these guidelines. Now, isn't it true that every year staff reviews the guidelines or understands the guidelines? Maybe this is for the superintendent. We have a number of policies that the principals asked staff to make sure they're aware of at the beginning of each school year. To add on to that, what we're asking the board to do is approve this new policy. The guidelines which were used as the basis for the policy will continue to be shared because they do provide some specificity. goes deeper level than the guidelines. Those guidelines have periodically, well, we
101review them every year, but periodically have been updated, and we do share copies with staff through our various different communication channels, particularly if there's significant revisions or changes based on court cases or rulings with respect to those various different platforms. But even though this is a new policy, the guidelines have been... developed and implemented over the years. More than 10 years ago those guidelines were developed and I can state as being with the district almost 15 years that we have done multiple updates. to those platforms have changed. Social media has changed. More platforms, more use, more misuse. And so that's why we've updated those. And yes, when those have been updated, we do provide copies and make note of them, again, through our various different channels of communication. Thank you. Yes, go ahead, Chair. Thank
102you, Director Bennett. I was just going to follow up on the comments of Director Olson, you know, on how we keep ourselves and high standards when it comes to the use of social media and any kind of information that we give to our community where we are expected to maintain or maintain always. information that is accurate, not to spread things that are not accurate or false information. When you talk about things that we can post on social media or people post that can be detrimental to the school district, some of those can also be detrimental to the work that the school board does or to individual people as well. So we continue to hold ourselves to the same policy, to those kind of high standards and expectations where we tell the truth. We don't spread
103false information. And we are responsible. And that's part of what we try to teach our students as well, right? When it comes to technology, we have to be wise. We need to be responsible. And so we continue to hold the same expectations to this as well. Thank you for that, Chair. Anyone else have any questions? Let's go with Dr. Steigoff over here. I don't have a question, but I just want to add on to what Chair Corman said. I think that's a thing in the community. Often people will... name someone and want them to respond to on a community page. And that goes back to what Director Olson said. We don't speak as individuals. So that's, I know that sometimes people don't like that, but we're not going to respond individually to those things because
104this board speaks as a board and not as an individual. That's the way boards are designed. So along with what Chair Corman was saying that that when when people do that we're not responding to that so i just you know i think it's important for people to realize that's why it's a great example thanks for sharing that because that happens all the time where on the community page someone will tag me and what do you think about this tag tom bennett it's like well i think i can't respond so uh director uh sorry she had a question Sorry, we're not seeing a lot of questions right now, just a lot of comments. I just want to share a little bit about some of the conversation that happened in the policy committee that I just wanted
105to share with my fellow board members with the community. So the first one is that I like that this policy spells out if you are responsible for posting something on social media on behalf of the district, right, that's one thing. And so in my head, it's like big district, big D. And then there's the, like, if you're the coach of the football team and they have a Twitter or a Facebook, you know, how you spell that out. And then if you're a classroom teacher and you have your fourth grade classroom page. So I like that each of those is spelled out individually. And then it talks about the personal use for individuals, right? So in my head, those are very different categories. And I like that we have them all in here. I did ask
106about parent groups like boosters and PTAs, but that because they're their own organizations and many times their own 501c3, we don't have authority over what they do or do post. We just ask that they, we politely ask that they stay in line with what the district does. I also wanted to state that we looked at a lot of other district policies in this arena. We looked at other state agencies because I think sometimes there's the misconception that if you're a publicly funded organization, you can't have the same standards as a privately funded organization. And so I like that those standards are not different necessarily. Kate had mentioned when we were in the meeting about the idea of protecting employees, which I hadn't even thought of before. So I don't know if you can expand on
107a little bit or if you remember what you talked about in that about how we're going to use this to help protect our employees so they know potentially what consequences might be. Sure, and it's really more about awareness and educating staff to the idea that their personal social media still reflects on them as an employee. We always say, you know, you're always an ambassador for the district. We expect you to be good role models for our students, and likewise, we... hope that our staff are positive ambassadors for the district. And so educating the staff to just put the awareness around the idea that it's not just district accounts, it's not just classroom accounts, and that that's where the unintended misuse phrasing comes from. I don't think people logically make that connection. And so it is...
108best practice. It is common. It's more common in industry. Again, lots of precedent where leaders and employees have faced discipline actionary up to termination for something that they posted. in their own time on their own social media account that was reflective either poorly of their company or just misconduct that was against policy or against the values of their organization. And so it's really to make that connection and be able to educate staff that that exists. Yeah, and that we're not outliers. Like the Department of Transportation has a policy. Minnetonka Public Schools has a policy. So we're not alone in this. Yeah. Thank you. And as Ms. Martin said earlier, there's not an MSBA model policy, but hopefully this one will become the template of the MSBA model policy because it is something that organizations need
109and more and more school districts are adopting. So anything else to share? Yeah, my last comment was what you just said, you know, other school districts and my experience working with other school districts. I have gone through this kind of education from the very beginning, you know, from the moment I was hired on how you're going to or what's our expectation and how you're going to be using social media. And even to the point of not allowing you like to take pictures inside of buildings because of safety reasons. So it's just another example, you know, the many things and the many different ways that school districts might approach this. Do you all have any questions? I just have a comment. Go ahead. I just want to say thank you very much to our policy committee
110and to Rick and to Kate for your work because I think it's very relevant and it's important to stay up to date on this. Appreciate it. So is that it? Anything else? So without any objection, both of these policies will be moved to our consent agenda of our next meeting for final passage. So with that, I'll turn it back to you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Director Bennett. I'm back to being the chair now. Thank you. Thanks for the word, Dan, Policy Committee. All right, so our next item then is the authorization of employment of the school board director, Tom Bennett. And we have a resolution. So, Director Steiger? Be resolved that the School Board of Independent School District 271 authorizes the district to employ Director Tom Bennett as a reserve teacher with earnings not to
111exceed $8,000 in a fiscal year, exclusive of board member earnings. Second. Thank you. Director Bennett, would you like to say something? Yeah, sure. So I saw, you know, Dr. Melby's bad signal about a month ago that we needed more substitute teachers. And as you guys have known, I've been subbing in another district for the past couple of years. But obviously, my loyalty is to Bloomington during this, especially during this time when we have teacher shortages. So my idea is to sub here just while we're having the shortage. So hopefully just this year and then. Hopefully we won't have a shortage next year and then I can go back to employment elsewhere because I think it is kind of a conflict to be a board member and a substitute teacher in the same district. That's my
112own personal feeling. And I wanted to do this a couple weeks ago, but I thought that if I would have done it right before the election, some people would think that I'm doing it for political reasons and trying to get votes. So that's why I waited until after the election. And as you saw in the reporting of the... the election, I didn't need the extra votes anyway. So that's why I'll go ahead and start doing the subbing now. That's wonderful. Wow, well, we so much appreciate it. Thank you. You know, sometimes people ask, you know, why aren't they in the classrooms? Well, we are in the classrooms as much as we're able to. And those of us that might be able to help, you know, some of us are not able to help because we
113have other commitments through the day or have other work somewhere else. So thank you, Director Bennett, for getting there. I got a question for Mr. Holman. Should I abstain from this vote? No, you should vote. I should vote? Yep. Okay. I want to make sure before we get to it. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So, Director Sorum. Yeah. I'm going to vote no. I have always opposed elected board members being employees of the district. It just doesn't seem, perception isn't good for the public when they think of an employee being their own boss. at a different time, so wearing a different hat. And so it's just not a healthy board makeup. The fact that we're gonna have now, starting in 22, all educators of sorts, past, present educators on the
114board of, this board of education is not a healthy situation. As we go through so many times there are other perceptions Perspectives needed on a board and so with that in mind I just am opposed to this as much as I appreciate What time is doing and how he handles all of the situations and everything else known him for at least eight years You know, I can appreciate that he does it but I just am opposed to the principle of people school employees working being on elected boards director Olson well I can respect your opinion on that I on substitute teaching in the district I did speak to MSBA about this because I said that I would like to teach more than I am allotted because of the amount, the limit. I used to do
115it full-time, and since I've been on the board, I haven't been able to. And they told me that, you know, outstate... in Greater Minnesota, this is a really big issue because there are a lot of school board members who have dual roles in small towns. For example, bus driving and also substitute teaching. And with the dire, dire need of being short substitute teachers, that it is good to get in there and show that you're supporting your district. Director Bennett? Oh, yeah. So just to clarify, before I even decided to do this, I had a conversation with Dr. Melby to make sure to get his thoughts on it, if he thought it would be a conflict or not. I don't want to speak for him, but I'll go ahead. He was kind of like, you know,
116in this situation, we need subs. So, you know, I know we criticize that we have too many educators on the board. I mean, to clarify, Director Seigoff is not, never has she ever been an educator. But the good thing about having educators on the board is when we have sub shortages, it's time for the board members to kick in and help out the district. And so I respect your opinion and thankfully the voters disagreed and they voted differently. But you won't be on the board come January. So maybe you can be a sub and help us out. I thought about driving a bus, but I just want to drive a little bus. I don't want to drive a bus. And they haven't responded to my request. Well, thank you everyone for your perspectives as well.
117All right. So I guess we'll be ready to vote. Mr. Holman, do we need to do a roll call then? You do, yes. We do, okay. So we'll start there. So all those in favor, you're the lucky one. So all those in favor of approving the resolution for authorization of employment of school board director Tom Bennett, please say aye. Director Olson? Aye. Director Bennett? Aye. Director Beebe? Aye. Director Steiger? Aye. Corman, aye. Director Starks? Aye. Director Sorum? No. Okay, so we have six votes for yes and one no, and the resolution passes, the authorization passes. Thank you. Now, next we have board member reports. Director Bennett. Madam Chair, can I just quickly say, since it's already getting to 9 o'clock and we do have a closed meeting after this, out of respect for our cabinet
118members who already had a long day, could we skip the board member reports? Or if people have something they really, really have to say, make it quick and so we can move on? I'm good with that. Does everybody agree with that? I don't want to silence anyone. Okay, we're good. We're going to skip board reports for tonight. Any other business? No? Then I'd like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting. All those in favor of adjourning this meeting, please say aye. Aye. And you oppose? This meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much and have a good night.