January 24, 2017 meeting of the Hopkins School Board

001I call this regular meeting of the Hopkins School Board to order. Today is Tuesday, January 24th, 2017, and the time is 7.02 p.m. Our first item of business is open agenda. Open agenda is an opportunity to address the school board regarding issues and concerns related to the school district. I don't have any cards. I know everyone there. Okay. So... We realize that coming before this board is not possible for everyone and we'd like to remind members of the public they can visit the school district's website at www.hopkinsschools.org to use or contact the board email form located on our school district webpage. Board members district phone numbers are also listed and we welcome your messages. So now we'll go to student board member reports. Who would like to go first? Ian, thank you. It's good to

002see you all again. Minus the fact that it's dark out, the lack of snow makes it feel like it's one of our March meetings. This effectively is not good for the Hopkins Nordic team. This Thursday there's a ski meet at the conference champs, but due to the lack of snow, Peterworth Park has shortened the time we can be there. So varsity will still get the opportunity there is, but JV. cannot race at that. Though we moved to the JV Champs race on Thursday, February 2nd at Elm Creek, hopefully we'll have snow by then. We have some in the forecast. This one is fun. Traditionally, it's been a really fun race. People dress up in costumes and it's kind of a breakdown of boundaries because by then, we're JV. We're not going to state or section.

003This is just the big finale. With the new term starting today, I have two new classes. It will be interesting to see what our next two weeks hold. Thank you. London? Hello, I just got back here from a robotics meeting that I was helping run. So I'm a little trying to collect my thoughts and everything. But one of the things that happened over the past couple weeks is the January 12th Dorian Festival at Luther College that our top concert choir performed at. And I was one of the members in that choir. And it was a really cool concert. We were able to sing from students around the state who came there to participate in this festival. And we were able to get a standing ovation. We got to listen to two of Luther's sophomore choirs,

004I believe. Both the women's and the men's, the Norsemen and the, I'm forgetting the name of the women's choir, but they're both fantastic. Those are freshman choirs. Freshman, okay. But they're both even choirs. So that was for StudGov. The student government is getting ready for Sadie's right now. We're kind of coming up with plans as to how to promote our Twitter online, how to get things ready for the winter weekdays leading up to the pep fest and then going into Sadie's. So trying to come up with plans as to who's going to make snowflakes for the dance and how much supplies we have and money and whatnot. So that's all really fun. And for the boys basketball game on Friday, I was there as a part of LMPM, and it was a really exciting game.

005We started off just getting completely destroyed by Eden Prairie, and they were making ridiculous three points. And we slowly got our defense together, started blocking the game, made it so that we were ahead by one point at the end of the half, and then just kind of kept it within the seven to eight point range ahead for the rest of the game and managed to come back. But a lot of us were like, oh man, this game was over 30 seconds into it, and they came back and kept it going. That was really cool to see. Another thing that's going on that Anna was going to cover but she's not here right now is we're having a band concert on the 31st. So if you'd like to come to that, feel free. Theater is also

006about to show their February 2nd, 3rd, and 4th at 7 p.m. Some of the plays that they're doing are Sovereignty, After Midnight, Before Dawn, The Journey You Need, Citizens Arrest, and Free Falling. And so you can get more information at www.hhsleaders.org and they're always fantastic. So it'll be a really cool thing. Excellent. Thank you. Any questions for London? All right. Thank you. Dr. Schultz, you have a report for us? Yeah, we're halfway through the school year, which is kind of amazing how fast it goes. So at the halfway part, we begin our budget. So we have been working on budgets. February 7th, the board will have a workshop on the budget proposal, which you have been working on since last fall, actually. Starting staffing discussions, thinking about those. deadlines that staff have in January and

007February around retirements, transfers, all those things that planes, that's where I'm working through that. Also working on the equity and integration work as a region. We have our World Cafe at Minnetonka High School. You all received an invitation today to that at six o'clock on February 15th. That will be facilitated by Paula Forbes. Discussing issues related to equity and integration. We also, of course, working on enrollment. We've got the open enrollment deadline, so all that stuff is all happening all at the same time. There's a lot going on. So it's been busy. I want to call your attention to two things. One, the State of the City for Hopkins is this Thursday. The theme is the dating game. So it's always interesting to go to that. London, are you singing at that on Thursday? There

008was a group. I forgot what group it was. I think it was job. You're not job, okay. They're going to be singing at the beginning of that State of the City. And then the other thing, I just want to call your attention to the agreement we have with Park Nicollet that's on their consent agenda. It's really a really exciting partnership that started with Park Nicollet providing us support for medical advising and just having someone have a medical advice when we need it, as it relates to policy. The one thing that we needed it for in reality is that the FDA now requires that an organization has to get a prescription for an AED, so we needed to have a physician write that. So, Dr. Nicholas is helping us fill that role. So, with that, a

009lot going on, but it's all fun. Thank you. Any questions for Dr. Schultz? Do you know what time it is? State of the city? It starts at 5. All right. Thank you very much. And now I would look for approval of the agenda, but I'd like to change item C to item B, just to switch those two items around. So I'd look for a motion with that agenda change. I move the revised agenda. I have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Motion carries. I would now look for approval of the consent calendar. I move approval of the consent calendar. I have a motion. Do I have a second? I'll second. All in favor, please say aye.

010Aye. Opposed, same sign. Thank you very much. Motion carries. Now we'll go to the treasurer's report. Treasurer Adams. All right. Thank you, Chair Donovan. As usual, the... The mid-month report includes enrollment. The January enrollment was actually up 11 students over the December enrollment. We're still down 53 seats from the October seat count. It's coming back. The attrition mainly is happening in grade 12, and that's not unusual. That typically happens during the school year. We're down 21 seniors since October, so most of the attrition that we've seen this year has been due to seniors either graduating early, dropping out, who knows. On the expense side, we're 50% into the fiscal year as of December 31st. Expenses are running at 38% of the fiscal budget through the same period, which is good. And that's 1% less than

011at the same time last year. So expenses are being held in check. Expenses of note this time included $833,000 to mainline transportation for November and December student transportation. It included some expenses for printing and mailing of early childhood screening and in Hopkins spring schedule. So we're starting to move into our spring season. And curiously, $118.46 for a preserved mink for dissection. I thought it was for her coat. I don't think he'd want to wear this mink. So with that I move that we approve total disbursements of $4,441,944.99 for the period December 29, 2016 to January 16, 2017. I have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. Any other further discussion or questions? Seeing none all in favor please say aye aye Opposed same sign motion carries. Thank you very much treasure items Now we'll

012go to new business and item a is sale of long-term facilities maintenance bonds I'm gonna turn this over to John you've Had a couple of agenda items over the last few board meetings related to the sale of these facilities maintenance bonds so when I welcome Joel Sutter to the to the board meeting so Mr. Tolkin all yours Almost the same thing as the other two seats, if you're still up there. So, Joel Sutter from Ellersman Associates, as Dr. Cook said, is here tonight to put the results in place. Thank you, John. Chair, members of the board, it's a pleasure to be back here with you. This has been a bit of a process. We started planning for these bonds and these projects last spring, I believe. And September 6th, my colleague Jeff Sealy was here,

013and you approved a resolution stating your intention to issue these bonds. and we've been working on it pretty steadily ever since. And took bids this morning and we have good results to report. So I handed out a copy of the sale day report which summarizes the results and I'll go through that quickly and then of course if you have any questions. So John already discussed the purpose of the issue, the rating. Your rating was maintained at a double A2 level, underlying rating and accredited enhanced rating. There's a bit of history to that. We were just reminiscing a little bit about the time almost six years ago that John and I flew to Chicago to meet face-to-face with representatives of Moody's Investor Service and put your best foot forward and hoping for an upgrade in your

014bond rating. You did get upgraded to AA2 at that point. AA2 is a very good rating. The highest rating possible is AAA. There are only three school districts in Minnesota that are AAA, and there's a handful that are AA1. So you're right at the next level. I know you've been working hard to get that rating upgraded. I'm looking at John particularly here. And we're still hoping, but you've been maintained at AA2. And we have at the back of the report a copy of the rating report. I may mention a few highlights from that. So that's still a very good rating. We did receive six bids for the bonds. The low bidder was Piper Jeffery out of downtown Minneapolis with a true interest cost of 3.2171%. The high bid was at 3.35%. So pretty good tight

015bidding. We mentioned that we received a premium price on the bonds in the little footnote there. That was a little larger than we expected, so that allowed us to... reduce the size of the bond issue from 14,275,000 down to 14,140,000. In the notes we note that... Interest rates are lower than what we projected at the time we prepared the pre-sale report, which was around January 4th. So it's been a bit of a roller coaster on rates. I went back and looked at the first estimates I did for this bond issue, which were I think in June, and we estimated an average rate of 3.25%. After that, rates took a dive and went quite a bit lower, hit record low levels in July and August. So we were hopeful that maybe you'd do real well. Then

016they started going up in October. After the presidential election, they went up pretty dramatically in November and December. And since the first of the year, they have come back down somewhat. So we end up right about where we had projected in June. But this is lower in the pre-sale report. We were assuming an average interest rate of 3.35%. So that little difference in the rate will reduce the payments and the bonds by about $685,000 below what we assumed in the pre-sale report. So that will help to keep your taxes at a decent level. So I'll go through the attachments really quickly and just hit some high points. If you look to what says attachments page one on it, the bid tabulation, you see the six bids that you received there. Piper Jaffray was the winning

017bid. Baird out of Milwaukee was the next best. And then we had FTN Financial out of Memphis. J.P. Morgan out of New York. Northland Securities locally here. And Bank of America, Merrill Lynch in New York. So kind of a combination of... regional underwriting firms and some of the largest Wall Street investment broker dealer firms in the country. Page, attachment page three shows the sources and uses of funds for the bond issue. So this will be funding almost $15 million in project costs with I think a conservative estimate of investment earnings here. And that's what we had planned. The next page shows the payment schedule for this bond issue. So you see we were paying interest only until 2029, and you'll pay off the principal in four years then. So it's a total of a 17-year

018maturity schedule on the bonds. The next page is one that you've seen various versions of many times before, and I don't expect you to be able to memorize all these figures, but it shows the planning that we do to try to keep your tax rates for these purposes for debt service and capital projects as level as possible over time, and it shows the tax levies you're making for your existing bonds, your lease levy, your capital project levy. These projects are funded by a combination of general fund levies and levies for bonds, and those are shown on the right-hand side. And it's probably easier to read the chart that's on attachments page 6 that shows the combined tax rates for all these purposes broken down into the different categories. And as you can see, we're assuming

019pretty level tax rates from 2018 and on. You'll begin paying taxes for this issue with taxes payable in 2018. If things continue to plan as planned, there may be a reduction in the tax rate back out in about 2029. Then the final pages are the Moody's credit report and some of the highlights. I mentioned your credit strengths, your large and wealthy tax base, and being in the Twin Cities area obviously helps. I mentioned strengths in the state's credit rating, which has an impact on you. Credit challenges, you have a slow but steady declining enrollment trend that they noted, which affects your revenue, and they're aware of that. And then they mentioned some of the things that could lead to an upgrade and things that could lead to a downgrade. As far as the upgrade, I

020don't think you have much control over your pension burden. It's controlled by the state and state law. But strengthening your reserves would obviously help. So I think there is hope that if you can build your reserves and... your debt ratios are gradually coming down. I think you're, over the last number of years, you've been paying off slightly more principal on your bonds than the amount of bonds you've been issuing. And as the district grows, those debt ratios will come down even lower. So there's a... There's hope someday. We're going to be here when your rating gets upgraded. All in all, I think this was a good result, and you have a resolution in your packets prepared by your bond attorney, Tom Deems. Put in some print, Deems, and we would ask you to consider approving

021that resolution. Any questions? Yes. Joel and John, we had six bidders this time. As I recall, last time we only had three. How do you account for that? The lease purchase, you only had three bidders for that. And there's a more narrow market for those. Okay. I don't remember the last time we sold bonds for you. I don't remember how many bids we got. Six is a pretty typical number. Oh, it is. Yeah. We took bids yesterday for bond sales for Eden Prairie and Orono school districts, and I think one of them had seven and one had nine. So that's a pretty typical number. There's been a lot of consolidation in the municipal markets, and so there aren't as many firms as there used to be. And what actually happens on these is... Piper is

022purchasing these bonds on their own, but some of these other firms, like you see Baird there as the underwriter, they're the lead underwriter. They actually usually have about 20 other firms in their syndicate that are working together to underwrite the bonds. So it's unusual to see more than 10, and 6 is a pretty typical number. Okay. Thank you. I was just glad, you know, I haven't seen Piper on anything recently, so to me that bodes well actually for the bond market, not well for us, but to see them back in the muni market, it's been a long time. They've been in the muni market pretty continuously. They're always a strong underwriter of bonds. They won one of the bids that we had yesterday as well. There's always a presence here, sometimes more than others. Yeah.

023London? I just had a quick question. What does it mean to underwrite a bond? Good question. So the underwriter of the bonds agrees to purchase them from the school district, meaning they're going to pay you for, they're going to pay you whatever the price is here in the sources and use his schedule a little over $14 million. And then they're going to turn around and sell those bonds to other investors. And the other investors could be individuals, it could be companies, it could be large insurance companies, mutual funds, things of that nature. So they're kind of the go-between between the district and the ultimate holders of those bonds. Does that make sense? relative to the bidding process, does that have any impact on the rating? Does just what have any impact well the the interest

024in the? amongst the bond bidders in our districts bonds Does that have any impact on that on the credit the rating that Moody's assigns to you? Well, I guess I would kind of turn that around and say the higher the rating on your bonds the more attractive They are to investors right side but The interest rate that you get on your bonds really doesn't affect what your rating is ultimately. When Moody's or another credit rating agency looks at your debt, they're looking at the amount of principal that you owe really. I guess they do look at your debt service payments as a percent of your revenues as well. But the main thing they look at is how much do you owe, how much principal do you owe. Did that answer your question? Well, yeah, I

025think your answer is probably no. I mean, what I'm wondering is that if bids are coming in fairly tight, as you say, you know, if the bidders have a strong interest in Hopkins bonds, it seems to me that that would prompt the rating agencies a little bit to look more carefully at our rating. Yeah, that is that I understand what you're saying and it sort of makes sense But it's not one of their criteria that they they look at there's a number of There's nine main criteria. They look at and then a lot of other factors that take into consideration So the other thing you know in terms of our reserves our reserves You know they're not really out of line with some of the other districts that even have higher ratings That's true. That's

026one of the factors that they look at. So if you're asking why you have a AA2 rating when some of your neighbors have AAA ratings, I'd have to do a little more research on how you compare on those key variables. Some of them do have higher fund balances, higher reserves. and the enrollment trends make a difference as well. And of course our enrollment trends are leveling anyway, so that should be a little more positive. And we did discuss that. We did have a fairly long conference call, John and John and myself, a week and a half ago with them, so they're aware of that. Okay, thanks. Any other questions? If not, I would look for a motion. I don't. I move that the board approves a resolution awarding the sale, determining the form and details,

027authorizing the execution, delivery, and registration, providing for the payment of general obligation facility bonds, maintenance bonds, series 2017A to Piper Jaffrey. Second. Does it require a roll call? Vote so. Aye. That's a the simple answer is yes But if as long as you can record in your minutes who voted yes and who voted no then would require a roll call Okay, any further discussion questions So we can just clearly all When if you vote against it make sure that we know who you are so all in favor, please say aye aye Opposed same sign Motion carried unanimously. Thank you. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Joel has a couple things that he needs the board chair and the treasurer to sign. So he'll come around and get those signatures from you right now. Perfect. Just to

028get them ready. Yeah, I've got to get it organized. Okay. And we can get ready for item C while we're doing that? Yes. The homeless students? Yep. Okay. Get the blue pen out there. Do you need me to go back there? Do you want me to go back here? No. I love technology. I love to paint. Okay. We are ready if you are. You want to go ahead with our... So this is a report on the level of homeless students we serve and really talking about McKinney-Vento Act. and how that supports our homeless students. So it really gives you a picture of what, who we're serving with regards to homeless, which has been growing over time. I want to really take a moment to thank Julie Boehmer for all her work in managing and keeping

029track of this. It's a big job, so thank you. And Linda with the leadership behind her helping her out. So with that, I'll turn it over to Linda. Thank you. Chair Donovan and Superintendent Schultz, member of the school boards, thank you for allowing me to speak to you tonight. I would like to introduce Julie Boehmer-Winslow, a longtime employee of Hopkins. Many of you actually know her. And Julie has headed up our title programs for us in the district, and as McKinney-Vento became more and more unwieldy for... just my desk to handle, Julie has picked up quite a bit for us. So I asked Julie to come tonight to present. I appreciate you allowing me to flip the two topics so Julie could present first. So we'll just let you know that McKinney-Vento is the law

030that relates to... protect students who are experiencing educational inconsistency through homelessness or some other minor conditions. They're not minor to the student of course, but there are some other nuances such as foster care that McKinney-Vento might apply to. The act requires that all school districts identify homeless students in order to provide these protections that ensure educational consistency. At its most fundamental base, It allows the student to receive free and reduced lunch for the remainder of the school year in which they become homeless and into the following year should they remain homeless. And then the secondary part of it is really could be considered school choice in that the parent or the student may select the district that they are currently enrolled in or they may select to go to the district where they are currently

031sleeping. Neither district has the right to say no to that. If they are going to remain in their current district, then transportation is provided to go pick up the student and bring them back to the district. So it's a really important right for students. If you think about it, just fundamentally, a student is going through an enormous problem and change and crisis in their life, and then they have to change schools as well. So obviously the rule is to protect the student and our district. knows what we're doing. I would tell a small story. Last week, I think it was, we had a situation with another district and Julie was able to say, no, no, that's not the law. Here's the law. And actually educated the person at the MDE. who wasn't as clear on

032the law as Julie was. So she took good care of our district. It can be complex, some of these cases. So there's one small thing that has changed more recently. It's not a very small thing. It's the, I'm not positive I made up, the Every Student Succeeds Act. We've all heard about this. We call it ESSA or E-S-S-A, and it replaces NCLB, No Child Left Behind. In the ESSA new rule, A student who is awaiting foster care is a nuance that changes their homeless status. That moment that they become awaiting foster care, they've perhaps been homeless because of, for whatever crisis, the family or for whatever reason has decided that the student needs to go into foster care, and the student becomes a part of the county system under foster care. At that moment, we

033no longer call the student homeless, and the way we're interpreting the rule right now, the school district would no longer be able to be reimbursed for the transportation from that moment. So this started on December 10th of 2016. If we have a student who yesterday was considered homeless receiving McKinney-Vento benefits... and tomorrow we get informed by the county or some other agency, hey, this student is now in our roles and he's awaiting foster care, the school district no longer, we believe the interpretation is the school district would no longer be able to be reimbursed for transportation. But here's the fun part. We will still transport. So they now enter into the benefits of a child who is in foster care. The rules change slightly. It's unclear right now how that funding will unfold. Julie has

034been working to develop a memo with the county to have an agreement and all of the districts are doing the same thing as part of ESSA. We're required to enter into some kind of partnership with our county partner in order to determine who's going to fund that. So it's our hope that the county will reimburse us for those costs at the end of the year. That's our plan. It's our plan and there is I'm set up Three actual meetings with Hennepin County coming up yet this winter to address this issue and how we're going to work with the county to make this happen and who's going to pay for this Transportation and how this will all come to be so it's a it's a brand new nuance in what in the work that we're doing

035All right. So then under the Hopkins procedures, we have a homeless liaison in the district that is identified as a district person. And then in each building, we have a homeless liaison as well that Julie works with. So I'm going to let Julie explain a little bit more about how she does that. Thank you so much for letting me talk a little bit about the very important work that we do for some of our most needy and most at-risk students. My job and my role as the liaison in the district I kind of see as a two-part role. The first part really has to do around building awareness with our staff in our district about not only what homelessness is, but how do I help identify homeless families and homeless students. A big part of

036that is staff development that I do with a number of groups in our district. Certainly we have a site liaison that's designated at each one of our buildings that typically is a counselor or a social worker at the site. But beyond just those individuals who have a lot of background in working with some of our risky families, we also train our enrollment people, our enrollment clerks. We train our nurses. We train our teachers. We train our student support personnel. That's a lot of the work that I do is working with those individuals, helping them understand what homeless looks like, what the definition of homeless is under McKinney-Vento. And then as part of that, putting together and setting up systems. to make that process of identification happen quickly. Our families that experience homelessness, by the time

037we can identify them, hopefully as quickly as we can, and set up transportation for them, the quicker they are in school and are not missing class and are not absent as much as some of them are based on that homelessness piece. So there's that part in terms of the staff development that I do. And then the other piece that I think goes along with that is, I know Linda talked about the idea of equitable services for these students, being that they all do qualify for free breakfast and free lunch automatically, and for transportation. But really the law asks us to go beyond that and to make sure that we're looking at true equitable services. And what does that look like for our house students? And then what does that look like for our students that

038are in transition or are highly mobile or that have lost their housing? And so it's my job to, in a lot of ways, I kind of call it hold everyone's feet to the fire and that those students are eligible for summer school. And we need to make sure everyone's aware of that so that we're making sure we're doing outreach to those families about summer school. Those families are eligible, those students are eligible to be in after school activities, in basketball, in cheerleading, in drama. They can be in the student play, those kinds of things. And it's our job to make sure that we are making sure that's happening for them. I'll tell you one quick story. This is the first experience I had with this this year. Challenged my role as a liaison. And we

039had a young lady who became homeless. She was actually an unaccompanied youth. And so she was really without either parent. One parent was incarcerated and the other parent was just simply not in the picture, not even in the state. And this student was living with another family. They had taken her in and living with another family. And Dan Johnson from the high school, the athletic director, got hold of me and he said, here's a young lady, she really wants to play basketball, but we're having trouble with her, you know, all the students of course have to have a physical and have to pass that physical in order to be able to play and we're having trouble with that. The counselor and the social worker there had worked very hard to make sure she got to

040a free clinic, was able to get that, but they were not releasing that information to us because we weren't a parent or a guardian. And Dan and I worked very closely together when I finally got on the phone to that clinic and I said, this is the McKinney-Vento law and you're putting up a barrier. And indeed they were putting up a barrier and they eventually released that to us so she could play basketball. But that is the kind of work that is ongoing that we need to be doing and being vigilant with our students and making sure that all of our students have access to educational opportunities. So that's a big piece of what I do, a big piece of my role. The cases are very complex. You can see here, do we have a

041visual there of, you can see we have an increase in this population definitely. It's been increasing significantly over the last couple years. I always like to look at that green bar there shows a lot many of our families are in what we call a doubled up situation. In some ways, if you're putting that sort of on a scale, those are families that have a few more resources because they have a family member or they have a friend that's willing to take them in as opposed to our families that end up in shelters or in a hotel or a motel or on the streets. And luckily we have never had one student identified that was unsheltered until this year. I worked with a family that was across three of our buildings, five children. And this was

042a family that was living out of their car for a few weeks and was considered an unsheltered family. They simply were living out of their car. And then another one was at Hoplins High School this year. We had our first high school student. Some of our unaccompanied youth, they're very difficult to track because they're older. They have a few more resources in terms of being able to figure out how to get on a bus, get to school, and hop on with a friend, that type of thing. So sometimes they're harder to identify. But this student was spending his nights at a laundromat in Minneapolis. And so that student was definitely... So now we know at least, next year those numbers will change, we'll have at least six that have been unsheltered. So, you know, it's

043a changing pattern all the time. Every situation is very unique and the families are needy, but it's our, you know, it's our work to, certainly my work and my passion to make sure that they get what they need and stay with us and, you know, stay in school. You can see why we have Julie running this little show. I would like to just clarify, so these numbers that you see here, they're not, the 140 occurred during the school year last year at some point. We aren't necessarily thinking that we have 140 all the time. And students come and go from this status. And one other thing that I would say about it is that while... Most of these students are in some kind of crisis. The other side of the story is when a family

044in some cases they might experience some kind of a disaster in their home. A few years ago when we had the tornado in Minneapolis that was in the 11-12 school year we had a little bump upward. That was a natural disaster and the families were considered homeless. even though they and they were doubled up or they were in different kinds of situations but they weren't necessarily needing to make a choice between living in their car and living in a shelter but they did qualify for homeless benefits at that time or when we've you've heard of families who might experience a flood or something in their home They would be they would fit the criteria for homeless, so it's not always an economic crisis But obviously most of the time it is And the heart of

045McKinney-Vento is it's about school stability. It's about you know making sure that students can stay in their school remain in that school at least to the end of the school year some of our families are homeless or highly mobile is really probably a more accurate term over multiple years a few not very many of ours but A lot of times I get asked, why? Why are the numbers? And certainly it's a complex situation, but a lot of it comes along with the housing crisis that we have, affordable housing, that our families are spending large portions of their income on trying to maintain an apartment and might get evicted because their car broke down. It's more complex. We work on the educational side of it, but that's why sometimes it's hard. We see a number of

046our families come back into homelessness over time. So do you have any questions? Or? I'm wondering how do you, how severe is absenteeism amongst the homeless? Oh, I can tell you that. The mobility with all that. And then also coming to school and having your friends say, you know, well, you know, go home and play video games tonight or what did you do tonight? And then they feel intimidated about coming to school. Right. I'm going to, I will address your question about the absenteeism rates because I was just looking at that the other day because obviously there's a gap, but it's a gap that I think is not as extreme as one might think. The data shows, this was last year's data, that our house students are here about 96% of the time over the

047course of the whole year. About 96% of the time. And our highly mobile students, or our homeless students, have an attendance rate of about 87%. Okay, about 87%. So there is a gap. There is a gap there. And that makes sense because it does take time to get a bus in place. Sometimes our students miss. It may take three, sometimes four days for a route to be set up to pick up those students and get them going, and they might not have another way to get to school. But that is something that I personally... see as a goal for myself to keep looking at that gap and it's a really really hard gap to close. It's probably one of the toughest gaps of all is to see if we can inch those numbers up so

048they are in school as often as our house students are. They're not there yet you know because of the nature of what's happening but that's what the rates look like right now. You've used the term house students. Explain that. Just those that are in permanent housing. fixed housing. Thank you. So I have a couple of questions. Do we know on average how long a student might be unsheltered before an alternative is found for them? Oh, it's such a, it's so wide. We have students that may go into McKinney-Vento status for two days. They're at a shelter. Two days they're out there back Some domestic violence incidents that can that can play into it You know a family might flee be gone for a few days and then reunite with their family But then we have

049others that are in more chronic more chronic homelessness and that can extend over years So I don't I can't say I have an average But just know there's a wide range. Yeah, I mean I just think about that one student that was in the laundromat How scary that is absolutely being doubled up or being in a shelter is at least some security. Absolutely. Unsheltered is the scariest. That's what we tend to think of when we think of homeless. We tend to think of the unsheltered, you know, oh, are they living in a car, are they living under a bridge, or that type of thing. But honestly, in our district, we don't have that many, very few of those students. We tend to have a lot more that are doubled up. You know, they have more

050resources, but they're also harder to identify because, well, we all know there's a lot of... There's a lot of shame. There's a lot of things that go around. They don't want to say. And most families don't even think of themselves as homeless. If they have a place to lay their head, even if it's on someone's couch in their basement, they don't identify themselves as homeless. So it's our job to make sure that we, you know, in a very empathetic way, make sure they're aware of what their rights are because they don't usually bring that up. And that kind of harkens to what you were saying, too. It almost sounds like it could be a campaign that our seniors in high school could take on as an awareness campaign. Yeah, right. What does it mean to

051be homeless in the high school system? In the high school system, right. A couple of follow-up questions. Sure. Do we know what the conversation has been like amongst the cities? Because I know that we have those quarterly city conversations about housing, and how does that play into this? Well, actually, I was going to tell this story anyway. The... Actually a year ago the city of Hopkins was tearing down some low-income housing and actually displaced I think four families, four to six families. And the city council actually held up their decision on that. until they had talked to, they called me and then I said, well, the McKinney-Vento Act is in place. I think Linda sent the information to the city council and that was distributed. So we do keep in close contact and the city

052of Hopkins is the one that's the most active so far. I don't know what the levels are in the other cities. but in Hopkins, they know about it and they're using it. Because I think if you haven't specifically had that topic on the agenda for one of those city's disclosure meetings, it would be a good one to have, especially with this data, and maybe have Julie join you to talk about it. I will say, though, that with the beacon interface housing, the cities, Hopkins, Edina. Minnetonka were active at the table with that so they are very absolutely you know that was issue right yeah um Steve okay hold on to me Julie you know it says in your report that you've identified 96 homeless kids so far this year Which looks like a great improvement

053over last year, but where were we last year at this time is 96? Yeah, we're further ahead than we were we have more So it's likely that we'll end up with 40 or so I would think we may surpass that this year It tends to be that in the second part of the year. We don't have quite as many that It gets warmer. We end up doing a lot more in the second half of the year is following many of the families that we already have identified as homeless. But there will certainly be some. So I think we'll certainly hit that 140 mark. Whether we surpass that or not, I can't say for sure. But we are certainly a little further. We have identified more at this point this year than we did last year.

054Ian, did you have a question? Yes, thank you. So I'm looking at this graph, if you drew a rough line of best fit, it almost seems that it's grown over the years. I know you mentioned the natural disasters, but is there a trend with housing prices? What's the reason behind the last three years? I think there's a couple, and these are just theories. right I don't really have you know definitive answers for all that but I think there's a couple one of them is good and one of them is not so good and I think the the good one is is I think we are doing a much better job identifying okay does that make you feel better we'll find more right so we were really where before we you know when people aren't trained

055in this and we still have many people when I like when I go out and speak about this or like I had no idea this law was in place that that we have this so the more people that know and the more people that work directly with families and students are aware the more we identify and we have set assistance to make that identification happen so I think that's a you know really been part of that increase but the The other part is, affordable housing is very difficult. It's very difficult for our families who are very low income. Here's a statistic for you just to kind of put into your head. For many of our low income families, they spend up between 60 and 70% of their annual income on housing costs, where a typical

056family should not spend more than about 30%. But they're spending a lot more, and they don't have a big income. So their car breaks down, and now some of their resources have to go to that, and they might get evicted from their apartment. And then the cycle starts again. They might end up in a shelter for a while, doubled up for a while to try to get some money built up so they can put a down payment down. So there's... So it goes in a circle. It does. It goes in a circle. Or it can. It can. I just wanted to talk about what I've seen with homelessness at Hopkins. I really only had one close experience with homeless kids in my grade, actually. I just saw a couple kids talking, like, after school in

057kind of hushed tones. One of them was saying, like, I'm not sure if I have a place to go tonight. And he was talking to another kid who they had obviously, like, communicated before about their situations and whatnot. And so he asked for a little bit of money, and the kid gave him some. And it was just kind of nice to see, like, there's a community there and a lot of times they hide it very well you don't know that they're homeless because they don't want you to know because of the shaming factor and what not so it's just very nice to know that I'm going to a school where it's such a nice kind and welcoming place for students to feel however they need to and be able to get support from people who

058they know are living in similar circumstances and be able to find those people as well. So it's kind of accepted and I know a couple friends are and you hear people talking about it and I'm like, you don't have a place to sleep tonight, you can come. It's very well dealt with. It's terrific. So the only thing I would say is that if you as an individual become aware of somebody, just stop into the counselor's office the next day and say a name so that we can reach out and make sure that student knows that they get a free lunch today and it's nothing to be embarrassed about. But the number one crisis in homelessness is they don't have food, right? They can't get you if you're hungry. The only last thing I would say

059too is we have partnered with many, many organizations within Hopkins, Resource West. We do many, many referrals for our families for resources for school supplies, for the ICA food shelf for our families that need food, with Move Forward for our teens that are unaccompanied. So we have a lot of resources and a lot of things that we can do. to help and it really does take a group effort to try to address and help our kids and our families. And we just heard at our state convention that homelessness is the largest growing population there is so this isn't just our issue it's a nationwide issue so whatever we can do Betsy do you have a? Yeah just one other comment whenever we take in ECME classes we get asked a few demographic questions and one

060of them is if we if we qualify for McKinsey-Vento. Do we know, can you tell us how we are asking those questions of other age populations? Is it off? To get information about how... In the enrollment office. Our first place that I would consider it would be in the enrollment office. So as people enroll, there are some carefully phrased questions about that, and they ask those questions, but they also are very well trained by Julie and by me to look for some of the signals. So when we have a student who, and believe me, one of our enrollment people knows. every home in the neighborhood, she knows everybody. So she'll say to me, that's not a house. So then we know, we check into that. The other most important source is probably our counselors. If

061a student's absent for a couple days and we know that they're an at-risk student, the counselor's gonna reach out, maybe in a little bit different way, to check into that and see if there's something more that they need to do or they could be doing. So our counselors here in Hopkins are very, very... Very astute. Very astute and very caring about knowing which students might be at risk. But I would say that that doesn't mean that they take anything for granted. Right. Right. So a family misses school today and they didn't call in, we're going to check into that. And one of our questions is, is there a crisis? Right. Because otherwise the parents going to call in. And another thing that's kind of interesting about that, sometimes with an incoming family, they're coming maybe

062from Mankato and they have fled a situation and all of a sudden they land on our doorstep and they're here doubled up with somebody in our family member that lives in our district and they just show up to enroll. We have no idea if they're homeless and our enrollment people are so astute because one of the red flags for them is that if somebody else is living at that address. they automatically go, oh, but wait a minute. So you must not have the lease here. And it already sets them into, oh, Julie might have to come down and talk to this family a little bit. So all that just comes along with staff development and training and really, really working on making people aware. Yeah. Thank you. Great. Any other questions? Well, thank you so

063much for the work that you do. And now we'll go to the special services update. So Linda, can you? So this is really the first, well, kind of the first of our budget reports. So Linda gives the background on special education and how she, the background that she's using and the finance and the fiscal plans she has for the department. So I'm going to turn it over to her to give you that information. So tonight's report has two main parts. One, I want to give you a little bit of a forecast about what the special education budget development will be for next year. And then I also want to take this opportunity to announce to you what the caseloads will be next year because I do need to let you know every year what the

064workload considerations for my teams are, and that involves me explaining caseloads to you. And that's in statute. So I have forgotten what's exactly in my spreadsheet here, in my little PowerPoint, so I'm hoping I don't stumble along. Basically what I want to make sure that you're aware of, and you all are because I've told you this many times and I know how you memorize everything I say. But in our special education funding, we have three main sources of funding. And I would comment that this, I just happened tonight to look at the previous pie chart and this pie chart, and our federal input of cash has dropped. So that's an important thing to know. But if you were to look at the 15-16 funding sources last year, the first thing we always talk about is

065the federal. The federal funding comes in as a per child count. So the December 1st child count, we finalize everything we think we know about our kids. And then for the following year, the federal government gives us X number of dollars per student, and they do the same amount for every district in the United States. So that's a fixed amount based on our child count. And our special ed child count has been dropping very slightly over the years. And so that is part of the reason why the federal funds are a little bit lower than they've been. The second main source of funding for us is the state funds and you all have heard me say many times It's a very very complex formula I don't actually understand it thoroughly, but I can tell you

066that for in general We will receive around 60% of our reported expenses So we report some of our we spend some of the federal dollars we and we report some of our spending under state dollars and then we get reimbursed the following year. It's based on our spending. Of course, we can't claim our federal spending as state reimbursement, right? But we say, okay, we've spent $100 on this thing, and the state runs it all through a formula. They know that the local share is going to be coming in for part of it, so then they give us back. It comes out to be around 65% of the total. But it's by no means that simple. Because first they take it, and then they take the district portion, and then they give you a proration factor,

067and then they take some more back out, and so it's very confusing. But anyway, we get a state share of just under $10 million in the 15-16 year. And then the local district has to make up that difference. And so that's what we call the cross subsidy. So in the green is what this district contributes to the special education budget out of the general fund. I've said this many times and I will say it always until I retire. And that is anytime you get to talk to somebody about special education funding. Say reduce the cross subsidy reduce the cross subsidy that means that you would be reducing the amount the district has to put in special ed and you're hoping the state makes up a higher percentage Okay Another part of our funding, which I

068didn't put on this chart, is our medical assistance dollars. In my report to you, I considered that under the state dollars, and the reason I do that is because it's a state-managed system. The funds come to us through the MDE. And we can get reimbursement for children who are insured for some of our costs if the services would be available in a clinic. I always use that explanation. So you can get speech pathology services in a clinic. So some of our third party, some of our students, we get reimbursement for their nursing services or their speech services or OT. That's double dipping in that it if we get that reimbursement It doesn't come out of something else that we got reimbursed where earlier I said if we asked we tell the feds we're going to

069use this money for for Federal we're going to use the federal budget for this portion of our budget The state doesn't give us that money as well in third party reimbursement We can get that reimbursement and we can get it from the state or from the federal government. So it's a really nice part of our budget and we this year will make something like 200 to 250 thousand dollars because our nurses have done an Enormously good job getting our paraprofessionals up and running on third-party reimbursement Another topic that I, I'm just gonna skip here. Okay, we're gonna come to that later. Another topic that I always tell you about is maintenance of effort. You remember that maintenance of effort very simply is the fact that the district cannot spend less, the cross subsidy cannot be

070less next year than it was this year. Because there's always inflation. there's going to be, the budget's going to need to go up. So every year I make a reduction to match that maintenance of effort. I never want to increase my budget beyond what the previous, what the district provided the previous year in order to maintain my budget. So that's the thing that we do. In the last couple years, last several years, we have underspent our federal dollars very deliberately. so that we would accumulate a carryover. We're allowed to keep carryover dollars for up to 27 months from the year when we got it. So we roll through this carryover and we try to accumulate a little bit, a little bit, a little bit until we have sufficient carryover right now so that for next

071year we will not need to make any kind of hard cut. in special education in order to do the maintenance of effort reduction, we will be using carryover dollars. If you remember, the district always carries something, I would call it fund balance. I never can remember fund balance because I think carryover. It's really essentially the same thing. Special ed has a fund balance, and we will use that fund balance to reduce budget next year instead of making hard cuts. So that leads to the next part of the conversation, which is workload. Under the workload rules, I need to let you know the factors that I'm considering in developing my staffing part of my budget, remembering that my budget is 95% staff. So the first part to understand is that workload describes what the teacher does

072day to day. It includes both serving students and the paperwork load and the assessment load that they use, right? In order to try to make this measurable, I think about caseload, and I think about how many kids does this person interact with in a day, and assume that that's approximately equal in the paperwork side of it. So an LD teacher that may be serving a student for an hour a day is probably going to be writing a lot of a big IEP. A speech pathologist that serves students maybe twice a week. the IEP is probably not going to be as massive. So it comes out even when you think about a person having a higher caseload if they have students they see for less time. So workload describes the components of a special education teacher's

073responsibilities, and you think of it in the instructional responsibilities, and you think about it in case management. So you you provide active and inactive or active and regular services to a student some of that's direct instruction Some of that's more support So we have some teachers who might do not as much pulling out a student and teaching them how to read or do math or even emotional social behaviors But they might be doing something in the background around making sure that the student has supports they need to succeed in the classroom and those are considered indirect services because they're not necessarily face-to-face with the child. So that's supportive of consultation. A student is considered to be on the caseload of a specific teacher and a teacher may have many students on their caseload. As a

074speech pathologist, I had a caseload of over 40 students at any given time. but I case managed only about 20 of them. The other 20 I shared with someone else. So that's why for me it was okay, I could have 40 kids. So then the next part is, I know I'm being a little confusing here, is the case management. Case management is when you are the one who has to make sure that all of the paperwork gets done. So case management usually hovers around 20 kids for any given person. And people think of the case management as the onerous part of the job because it's the paperwork thing. It's interacting, it's finding out all kinds of information, having to create that plan that sometimes takes all the creativity you have to write that goal. The

075rules change often and they have to keep up. So here's my final thing. The caseloads for next year will be... Our average right this minute for our teachers who do pull-out services for a regular academic services, our average across the district is 17.3 students. A year ago I told you that I wanted to keep that number under 22. 17.3 feels pretty good. When you look at the range, our early childhood special education teachers right today have 14.5 students as an average. They should be under 16 or under 14. It depends on which set of rules I'm using. 14.5 right now is good. In the fall they had 12. In June they'll have 12. Right now 14 is okay. Our K-6 teachers, the academic providers, have an average across all six elementaries of 18 students. Remembering

076that I want to stay under 22, and my district average is 17.3. At the junior highs, the average across all of those teachers is 16. The average across all of the high school teachers doing resource instruction is 21. That's a little higher. Remember that the high school teachers aren't necessarily seeing those students as often. They're doing more consultation. They're doing not quite so much face-to-face. The occupational therapists in our district are around 60 to 70. Right now it's about 65. The developmental adaptive PE teacher, we have just one this year who travels to all of our buildings. She has between 60 and 70. The speech language pathologist have between 40 and 50, depending on the severity of the student. And our school social workers are also at between 40 and 50. I don't have a

077typo in there. I check... often with my colleagues in the neighborhood. The RDC, Regional Directors Committee, we talk amongst each other very often. This week, the conversation was occupational therapy. Somebody sends out an email, how many kids do you have on your caseloads for your occupational therapists? One of the districts is closer to 80. One of the districts is closer to 40. We're right in the middle. Most of us are right around 60. We do this. all the time, next week it'll be another topic, we're asking each other all the time and we're always working to stay in that average range. Checking ourselves, making sure we are understanding our workloads and understanding what our teachers are up against and also making sure that we are not over or under staffing in a certain area because

078then that's a place where I can be more efficient and save money for student services. So that is my report for today. I'm just going to close this. Turn me off, please. Linda, can I ask a question about that last slide that you had up? Sure. I'll bring it back to you. I'll bring it back. It's okay. This is high level enough that I think we can do without looking at it. But if I'm understanding the difference between, because you had the terms caseload and case managed in that slide. Yeah, sorry. If I'm understanding the difference between the two, caseload would be that they're students that you would be seeing. And case manage the students that you're seeing and that you're responsible for the paperwork. Exactly. So those numbers, are those case loads or are

079they case managed? The last slide is case load. So for example, our OTs don't case manage any students. So they have a case load of 60, but they're not managing the paperwork of any of them. They're just doing one part. So that's how we can keep numbers between 60 and 70 because they're not responsible for the paperwork involved. Right. They might be writing a goal or two. Yeah, sorry. I noticed when I was reading it because I banged this out this evening and I thought, okay, I might have confused people. But right, case load is the number of students you interact with. Case management is the number of students you write IEPs for. If I'm the case manager and you're the LD teacher, I have to make sure you give me your paperwork, and I

080am responsible to make sure the paper all flows. So that's a little bit more onerous. And you have to set up meetings and make sure things get filed and mailed. And of the different categories that were on that slide, obviously the last four or five had much higher numbers. Those would not be professionals that would manage those students, but the first couple of categories are the ones that are managing students. Absolutely. The ECSE, the K6, the 7-9, the high school. The only one that's different is speech. Speech pathologists usually case manage about half their caseload, just sort of the industry standard. And again, if you're a speech-only IEP, speech pathologist sitting here, If you have a speech-only IEP, you're writing one or two goals. I'm not saying that all my speech clinicians have it easy

081by any means. They're carrying 40 to 50 kids. But your IEP tends to not be as complex. You're not having to interact with as many people to get information. You might be just going to a classroom teacher and saying, how is the student functioning in this category? And that's sufficient information with the parent. So your IEPs aren't as complex for a speech pathologist and why we can get away with that. Thank you. Yeah, I don't have a question. I've just got a comment For the benefit of the board anyone that might be watching the governor released his budget today I don't know if you saw it Linda. I saw a little tiny piece He's proposing six hundred and nine million for K through 12 and he's proposing a forty million dollar increase for special ed

082which sounds great, except that the cross subsidy total in the state is $680 million. So it's just a drop in the bucket. it's not gonna give us much relief. If you think about 370 school districts or thereabouts in the state and you divide 40 million by that. And I couldn't figure out whether or not that 40 was in addition to the other amount or if it was part of the other amount. Well, and I wondered also is it a one-time 40 million or is it every year? But it isn't good enough news. Linda, can you talk about the total number of students that are served by the department? And also a little bit about referrals to 287. Sure. So our child count comes in two different ways. We have the students that are counted as

083part of Hopkins' responsibility, and then we have what we call the serving count. So a student that enrolls to another district is not in my serving count. but a student who enrolls into Hopkins is. So we have around 800, I want to say 850 students that we serve. And we have around 950 students that are, who qualify for special education services who are residents or who have Hopkins as their home. I did a little analysis yesterday about the number of students that we refer to 287. So remembering that number, 850 students that we have to think about what are we going to do for them, at any given time we might have between 35 and 40 of those students who attend schools at 287. 287, as you know, is an intermediate district that provides services

084to our students who are most severely impaired. For Hopkins, those students are usually students who have more difficulty controlling their behaviors. They tend to be on the side of being violent. They have a more violent reaction. But I need you to remember that the violent reaction is because they don't have the cognitive skills to maintain their behavior. It is not always that the student is just naughty. In fact, if they're just naughty, we can figure it out here at home. So we have around 40 students that go to 287. I also check to see how long our students are staying at 287 because that's an important point. The average length of stay for a Hopkins student at 287 is two years. We have only five students out of those 40 who've been at 287 for

085more than five years. And one of them has been there for 10 years. So you know that if you have a student who's been at 287 for 10 years, they are very significantly impaired. And they are living in a life that requires them not to be able to go to a regular school. That is a really hard thing to live. And 287 provides us excellent services for what we need. They're very responsive. Recently we heard the news that they needed to close the doors for a while because they had so many new referrals. But yet, what that means is that they have to close the doors. They have to just take a minute here, take a breath, figure out if they've got the right students. But at the same time, if there's room in a

086program, we are still able to move our students. And we did. Since the beginning of the year, we've made four referrals to 287. We've brought four home. but we've had to send four there as well. So there is definitely a flow. I'm super excited to note that two-year stay because for me what that means is 287 is doing what it needs to do. It's providing therapeutic supports for our students so that they can return to their home school and get their education back here. They're not disappearing into 287 and living there forever. That's really important to me. Did I answer your question? I would add one other thing. Rita Duane was our coordinator at high school for many years. And when she retired, she told me she'd like just a little bit of a job.

087And so I was smart enough to say, I've got one for you. And Rita is one of my partial people who's a coordinator. Rita's work is to, she does liaison with 287. No other district is doing this. And I would bet you that no other district can brag about having a two-year stay because Rita watches every IEP and she has. She has very decisive reasons why a student might be able to come back. She works with the family and the student in 287 to make sure those are the things they're working on so our students are coming back and staying back. They're staying. So Brita is probably our number one reason for that happening. Can you just clarify for me, we serve 850. but we have 950 total. It's not added together, right? No, and

088I apologize for not having exact numbers for you. It's such a floating number. So that other 100 is the net of students who are open enrolling elsewhere or maybe in a group home or in a day treatment or whatever. On the day when we had the count, the student wasn't on our rolls. They were enrolled elsewhere, but they were still a Hopkins student. Thank you. So it's a net. Any other questions, comments? Thank you very much. This is the first of many budget issues. Do you need my computer? No. And now we'll go to the Minnesota Student Survey. Yes, I want to give some background to the Minnesota Student Survey. So we give this once every, Holly, three years? Yep. And every time we give this, it's always, what do you report? So you... The

089survey is a very rich set of data. It has a lot of information and to share every last piece of information would be impossible. At the other end, if you just give the basics of it, then sometimes we get accused of not sharing really what's happening with our students. And you have a right to know this. The survey takes... is used in other settings, the information is used in other settings, so the important part of this is really having the knowledge of what we're going to be releasing with regards to the survey. So Holly has really done an incredible amount of work, in fact, this is her second iteration of the data report. The challenge with this is really communicating data. So you could put this into a report and you can imagine how long

090the report would be. So then it's really how do you communicate this to the public. So Holly's really taken, spent a lot of time working with the leadership, Catherine O'Garman, she's worked with epidemiologists to put together this PowerPoint. It is a long PowerPoint, but she's gonna go through this. efficiently, quickly, so that you have a chance. And what I would recommend, if it's all right with you, Chair Donovan, is we just hold our questions to the end and just keep track of the questions that you have so we can let Holly go through this efficiently so that we don't get hung up on every slide because there would be a lot of slides. But she's presented this before. It flows really well. It is really important information. We use that in some of our reports.

091Integration report, for example, is used and we have it. It's also accessed by other individuals across the metropolitan area. I know the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department's always interested in this. So this stuff gets put out there in the public about Hopkins kids and you really deserve to have the information about it because they're your kids as school board leaders. So with that, Holly, thank you for ahead of time for all your work. So I'm going to turn it over to you. Katie? Oh, Katie, I'm sorry. It's Katie Williams. She's the Director of Community Education. That's who she is. Nice to meet you. Well, Chair Donovan, Superintendent Schultz, and members of the board. Hopkins Public Schools has chosen to administer the Minnesota Student Survey since it began in the 90s. The data has been used not

092only by Hopkins School District, by community members to inform practice, to initiate programming, and to do some really cool things in the community to provide a healthy environment for kids. So last winter and spring, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 11th graders participated in the student survey. Students responded to questions on a variety of topics that included substance use, school climate, safety, healthy eating, out-of-school activities, and their feelings of connection to school, community, and family. And although the results of the survey are returned to us in the school district, Our district has had a long-held belief that this data really belongs to the community and we have a responsibility to share the data so that we as a school community and a community at large and families are aware and can take measures to support their kids.

093In this particular set of data we saw some very promising increases in some protective factors for kids. And there are reasons for cause and concern. Holly, as the one voice coordinator, was asked to administer the survey last spring and work with all the schools and then to put together the analysis of the data for you. So with that, Holly Magnus. Great, thank you for the introduction. I'll just move forward here. So tonight I'm going to give you a report of really some of the survey highlights, as Dr. Schultz mentioned. First, I'm just going to give you some basics on the Minnesota Student Survey, especially the 2016 version. And then we're really just going to get into the results and look at what are our kids telling us. I think it's a really important moment to

094take a step back and just really hear. what our kids are telling us in an anonymous fashion. We're going to specifically focus on school and learning indicators, some general health and wellness indicators, mental health, and then substance use and non-use. And then we'll have some time at the end to look at some areas for school, family, and community response. As Katie mentioned, the Minnesota Student Survey really is an extremely rich data source and it really is best utilized for action. So I'll give you the data now, but we will be working with this and doing program planning across the district, ideally increasing our student support. And I'm just going to kind of launch into the basics here. So the Minnesota Student Survey is administered every three years across the state of Minnesota. It is one

095of the most comprehensive student surveillance instruments that the country has. Every state has their own version of a survey like this. Minnesota's is particularly strong. We have a census design, so all students are invited to take the survey. if student may not choose to take the survey or their parent may choose to opt them out or a school district may choose to not participate. The survey is voluntary and anonymous. It's very important to know that the student's privacy is protected. There is no way to identify any particular student in the survey and they are given informed consent and the parents are given consent as well. And just as a reminder, as with any survey, it has limitations. It's not a perfect data source. It's a very good data source. We have to look at those

096limitations as well. This here just gives you an idea of the wide range of topics that's covered in the survey. Only the older grades, grades nine and 11, are asked certain topics such as sexual health. But you can just see here how big of a survey it is. It covers over 100 questions in the older grades. I want to just remind everyone that there are some really big changes that happened to the survey in 2013, so three years ago. Prior to 2013, students in grades six, nine, and 12 took the survey. The state made a really big decision in 2013 to change the grades that were surveyed. So starting in 2013 and moving forward, students in grades five, eight, nine, and 11 take the survey. And so right now in 2016, we actually have two

097data points to look at now with those grades, so 2013 and 2016. The state did keep that ninth grade in there to look back as a trend data set. And we actually are gonna look back at some earlier years tonight for the ninth graders. Every three years some of the questions change as well, which impacts our ability to look at trend data. And a big change that happened in 2016 is that the vast majority of the school districts took the survey online. The state was really pushing to make a change from the paper copies. Hopkins did take the online survey as well. And this gives you an idea just how many school districts and how many students took the survey. So across Minnesota, 85% of public school districts participated in the 2016 survey. So that

098was almost 170,000 students across the state of Minnesota. So very, very high participation. In Hopkins, we had very high participation in grades five, eight, and nine. We had over 90% of students enrolled in those grades take the survey. You notice like grade 11 we had 52% That lower number is because there was a technical disruption the morning of the survey administration at the high school it was unfortunate, but we still had 52% of the 11th graders complete the survey and the Minnesota State Survey leadership team actually looked at our data quite a bit right after that happened and Found that actually that data set was pretty representative of our student demographics in that grade. They felt comfortable including that 11th grade data set in our trend data and will be Moving forward with that, just

099know that there are a few limitations there with that grade 11. So we wanted to just make sure that the self-reported student demographics matched our Hopkins enrolled demographics for those grades. And we found that overall, the self-reported student demographics for biological sex, race, and ethnicity, and students reporting if they received free or reduced lunch very well mirrored our district demographics. So here we're gonna just kind of launch into some of the findings. So we're gonna start with some school indicators. So the first graph here looks at how often students cared about doing well in school. That was how the question was worded. So this graph here shows Hopkins students in 2013 and 2016 caring about doing well in school. So you can see our numbers are quite high. Overall, we were higher than the state

100average for this question as well. And again, I'm gonna move through these a little quickly just for the sake of time, but you can certainly go back to any that you'd like. This question was, if something interests me, I try to learn more about it. Hopkins 2013 was in blue, 2016 in red for grades five, eight, nine, and 11. And here students at Hopkins reported whether they felt that teachers cared about students at their school, very similar between 2013 and 2016. And this looks at post high school plans. So students in grades eight, nine, and 11 were asked, what do you plan to do immediately after high school? So you can see in 2013 and 2016, the blue and red, the Hopkins numbers did go down a little bit. And then the kind of yellowish

101greenish bar is actually the state data. We wanted to put that in to show that we are still higher than the state average here. So the survey does ask a couple different questions on harassment and bullying. So there's a lot of information here. This question specifically, or this graph kind of summarizes different reasons students reported being bullied or harassed. And they were not given a definition of bullying or harassment. But this just kind of gives you a sense of the general distribution. The scale is at 50%, not 100%. for grades 5, 8, 9, and 11, so the changes across the grades and the different reasons that students reported being bullied. This was actually almost identical to the state numbers, so it was interesting to see the kind of commonalities in the distribution and the reasons,

102more common reasons students reported being bullied. So in 2013, the Minnesota Student Survey included cyberbullying for the first time. And we looked here at Hopkins students and the question was worded whether they were bullied through email, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites, or texting. So you can see we did have a change between 2013 and 2016 in some of the grades. The scale is at 50%. Overall, we were pretty much in line with the state averages as well. The state was very consistent over the last three years as far as their numbers and ours just happened to change. So I wanted to look at a couple different questions on sexual orientation and gender identity and these were only asked of 9th and 11th graders. So for the first time in 2013, the Minnesota Student Survey asked

103a question on sexual orientation. So students across the state were asked whether they identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning not sure, or heterosexual. So you can see here we actually graphed out Hopkins on the left compared to Minnesota on the right. The blue bar is 2013, the red bar is 2016, and you can see that both at Hopkins and Minnesota, there was an increase in students reporting identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning not sure about their sexual orientation. And again, this scale is at 50%. And for the first time in 2016, the state asked a question about gender identity. So one of the questions on the survey was whether students identified as transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure about their gender identity. They were not given a definition of any of those terms. So

104they were asked to, or they would interpret that question as they, to their discretion. And you can see here the numbers for Hopkins and Minnesota of ninth and 11th graders identifying in one of those ways. So we wanted to move on and just look at some general safety, health and wellness topics. So safety is obviously a really big concern that we wanted to look at. So there's kind of a lot going on in this graph, but basically there's four different safety questions that students were asked. Students were asked whether they felt safe going to and from school, whether they felt safe at school, they felt safe in their neighborhood, and if they felt safe at home. And our numbers were very similar to the state numbers on this as well. We wanted to specifically pull

105out safety at school to show you. This is Hopkins students reporting they strongly agree or agree that they feel safe at school. We did notice increases from 2013 and 2016, between 2013 and 2016. So distracted driving is obviously a big issue and we wanted to just take a moment and look at that. So here we just looked at 11th graders knowing that the younger grades probably don't drive. And one thing that we just wanted to mention is that actually 26% of Hopkins 11th graders responded to this question that they do not drive. So it may be surprising, may not be surprising to you. It's a trend nationally that we're seeing fewer teens driving. But for the Hopkins 11th graders who do drive, we graphed out on the pie charts how often they read or send

106text messages or emails when driving. on the left and then how often they make or answer calls on the right. And we did, the student health and wellness group at the high school did implement a distracted driving awareness week this fall, which is a start. So we noticed some changes, both positive and negative for students reporting being physically active. This is students reporting being physically active at Hopkins at least 60 minutes per day on three or more days in the past seven days. Kind of a confusing category there. And this is 2013 to 2016, just for Hopkins. So the next slide, I want to spend just a little bit of time looking at it because there's a lot there. So students were asked, both in 2013 and 2016, whether they had a long-term physical disability

107or health problem. And that's on the left. And this is just Hopkins students. And then on a separate question, they were asked whether they had a long-term mental health, behavioral, or emotional health problem. And we did, and students were left to their own, I guess, definition of what those meant. But they were, in the question, they were given that this problem lasted six months or more. In the long-term physical disability or health problem problem they were given some prompts such as examples that being diabetes epilepsy asthma For the mental health and behavioral or emotional health problem question. They were not given any prompts for that So you can see that we did see increases Particularly for the the long-term mental health behavioral or emotional health problem for Hopkins students in the last three years and

108the state did notice increases as well. So for ninth and 11th graders, they were asked a couple questions on sexual activity. So the first question they were asked if they'd ever had sexual intercourse and then in parentheses had sex. So students were in ninth and 11th grade that the answer to this question were really given, left to their own interpretation of what that meant, what sexual intercourse or had sex meant. But we graphed here ninth graders compared to Hopkins and Minnesota and then 11th graders, Hopkins and Minnesota. Again, 2013 was the first year that 11th graders took the survey, so we don't have a lot of trend data on that. But we did notice decreases both at Hopkins and Minnesota. Across the last 15 years there have been decreases in ninth graders reporting being sexually

109active. And then at the 11th grade, we're a little bit lower than the state average. And then if a student did report that yes, I have had sexual intercourse, they were asked a couple follow-up questions on Condom use and contraceptive use if students had answered no I've not had sexual intercourse they skipped those questions the survey automatically skipped them So first we wanted to just look at for the sexually active students again This is just a small subset of the whole students that took the survey what The question was really getting at pregnancy prevention. So The question is worded in italics here the last time you had sexual intercourse What is the one method you or your partner used to prevent pregnancy? Again, including only those who've had sexual intercourse. So we looked at Hopkins

1102013 compared to 2016. We did notice a little bit of an increase in hormonal birth control use for sexually active students. And then there's a separate question on condom use. So the question is worded, the last time you had sexual intercourse, did you or your partner use a condom? Again, this is only students who reported that they... had had sexual intercourse and you can see we did have decreases in condom use in both ninth and eleventh grade at Hopkins. In 2016 we were actually right in line with the state average. We were much higher than the state average in 2013. So just as a reminder, the survey is very comprehensive topics that we aren't talking about tonight that are very important related to health. Included in the survey include nutrition and meals, sleep, self-reported weight,

111healthcare access, and indoor tanning. So we're gonna move forward to the student mental health questions. In 2016, the state did change the two questions kind of addressing depression. So we can't look back at data comparing 2013 and 2016 to those. One thing that we did want to note is that across both Hopkins and Minnesota in 2016, for every grade surveyed and every mental health indicator in the survey, girls were reporting much higher rates of mental health concerns. both at Hopkins and the state and you'll notice that in in the graphs. So again, we can't look back at the 2013 data for depression. And this question, the survey included two new questions on depression in 2016. And really, it's sort of a depression scale that's commonly used in mental health practice. But it's really looking at

112signs of depression. It's not saying the student reporting that, yes, I'm clinically depressed. It's students reporting on symptoms. So this question here, students reported being bothered by little interest. or pleasure in doing things at least several days or more in the past two weeks. So you can see we graphed here Hopkins compared to Minnesota and males compared to females. Fifth graders were asked a couple separate questions on emotional well-being that we'll talk about in a few minutes. So this is the second question on signs of depression. This is students reporting being bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless several days or more in the past two weeks. And then there wasn't a question specifically on anxiety. Self-harm is one indicator we can look at as a potential indicator of anxiety, but this graph here looks

113at the gender differences and the rates of students at Hopkins in Minnesota reporting that they engaged in self-harm in the past year. So purposely hurting or injuring themselves without wanting to die, such as cutting, burning, or bruising themselves. And again, the scale here is 50%. And here we're looking at students who seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. And the emotional wellbeing fifth graders were asked two separate questions on emotional wellbeing. They were asked whether they worry a lot. And this is fifth graders indicating that they, in blue, that they worry a lot. They strongly agree or agree to that. And in the red, they sometimes feel bad without knowing why, strongly agree or agree. So those gender differences we're seeing at the fifth grade level as well. And now we're gonna shift gears

114a little bit and look at substance use and non-use. I'll talk a little bit at the end about our coalition and some of the strategies we've been implementing. But in 2016 for Hopkins 11th graders, we wanna just start by talking about non-use. It's been a big part of our coalition work and the fact is is that most students are not using alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, other drugs. For Hopkins, this is just for 11th graders knowing that they probably have the higher rates of substance use. The students surveyed simply because they're older. 56% of Hopkins 11th graders did not drink any alcohol in the past year and 49% have never had a drink of alcohol. And for marijuana, 82% of 11th graders at Hopkins did not use any marijuana in the past year and 73% have never

115used marijuana. So this slide has kind of a lot going on, but we wanted to pull out the skills at 50%. But one of the big strategies we work with with our students is what we call social norming, because teens tend to really overestimate the amount of substance use they think that their peers are doing. So we want to kind of get that information out to them. We did a big one reason campaign over the last two years specific to alcohol. And a goal of that campaign was to really showcase the realities of alcohol use and rates of alcohol use. And what we saw here is that there was kind of a big change between 2013 and 2016. This question is, how often do you think most of the students at your school use alcohol?

116So you can see the blue is 2013, red is 2016. So there was a shift, an increase in the amount of students in 2016 that thought most of the students at their school either never use alcohol or have used it very infrequently. You can see in 2013, 16% of 11th graders thought most students drank every day. And we know from the data that that is as far from the truth as it could be, but you can get a sense here on kind of what our teens are thinking. helpful information. So for the first time in 2016 students were asked e-cigarettes were included in the survey. So it kind of gives you a sense of just how fast things are changing that the e-cigarettes weren't even on the survey in 2013. So this is really actually

117a comprehensive look at any tobacco use. So any tobacco use including e-cigarettes or hookah which is a tobacco type pipe. It says Hopkins compared to Minnesota. This is just, we wanted to include this because it really does give us our first sense of what the e-cigarette use is. The state of Minnesota is very clear and confident that e-cigarettes are the number one way that our teens are getting nicotine now. We do see a pretty big difference, gender difference with our Hopkins 11th graders as well. So this is all new information for us to work with. We did not have any information on e-cigarettes until now. Now this this slide here just looks at conventional tobacco use and cigarettes. The left hand is just cigarette use. And we graphed out here ninth grade trend data. Again,

118we can look back at that ninth grade data because they kept that ninth grade in. So this is going back to 2001, which is the earliest data we had. And you can see the very significant decrease in Hopkins cigarette use. from 2001 to 2016. And then on the right, we just wanted to look at Hopkins compared to Minnesota for conventional tobacco use. This includes cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco, or two. And we're lower than the state average there with the lower grades. I do just want to note that the state noticed some very large decreases in tobacco use in the last three year survey cycle. So really positive information there. So again on the left, and the scale is at 50% on these as well, but we graphed out Hopkins ninth graders and the changes

119in any alcohol use. So this is not binge drinking, it's just have you had any alcohol in the past 30 days. So you can see our numbers have gone down quite a bit. Again, just for the ninth grade on the left, then we looked at Hopkins compared to Minnesota on the right. And Minnesota again is kind of the yellow-green bar. So binge drinking, students were asked a separate question on binge drinking and the question is whether they've had five or more drinks in a row within a couple of hours. So obviously a riskier question than any alcohol use. So you can look here again at our Hopkins data. We could not include the ninth grade trend data from earlier years because the question actually changed. And then marijuana use. Again, ninth grade, we were able

120to graph that one out back to 2001. We did notice a decrease from 2013. And then on the right, our marijuana use compared to the state. It's typical for the metro to be higher than the state average for marijuana use. Prescription drug misuse is a very serious and important topic. The question here, students were asked, have you used a prescription drug not prescribed for you in the past 30 days? And that's how the question was worded. Skills 50% so you can see here the differences between Hopkins and Minnesota. We didn't graph out gender for most of these but we did notice a gender difference when we looked at the data. So girls at Hopkins are reporting using alcohol, binge drinking and misusing prescription drugs at higher rates than the boys. And boys were using marijuana

121and e-cigarettes at higher rates than the girls. So some people are surprised that there's a question on fifth grade substance use. But we do know at the state and at Hopkins, these numbers are very similar to the state, that there is a little bit of substance use that starts happening even at that fifth grade level. This question here, our fifth graders were just asked in the past 12 months, have you had any alcohol more than a few sips? Have you used marijuana or have you, we included the sniffing glue, Huffinger inhalants, because that's more common with the younger students. This points to the need for obviously early prevention, that elementary school is not too early. There's kind of a lot going on in this slide, and we had the same slide in 2013. This is

122perceived risk of harm for substance use. So this here shows Hopkins students in grades five, eight, nine, and 11, and they're asked, how harmful do you feel? these various substances are. So this graph shows that students feel that there's either a great risk or moderate risk from using various substances. looking probably at the marijuana, so you can see that the perception of harm for marijuana using marijuana one or two times per week is quite lower and it drops quite a bit as the students get older. We noticed a pretty big decrease in perception of harm from three years ago. We went down in 11th grade about 10 percentage points. This is mirrors the national and state data as well. It's not specific to Hopkins, but it's something that we know is happening and there's a

123change in attitude. And I think one of the most important things about this survey is that we can really look at some of the risk and protective factors that our students are telling us. So we actually went in and cross tabulated the data to look for some different associations. And we found in 2016, just like we did in 2013, that parent disapproval is a really strong protective factor against substance use. Hopkins students who thought their parents would feel it was very wrong or wrong for them to use marijuana were actually five times less likely to report past 30-day marijuana use. You can see the similar pattern for the other substances as well. And something that we wanted to look at that was kind of new to us in 2016 is that the state has a

124really what they call a teacher-student relationship index. So these questions were all asked separately on the survey, but you can put them together and actually analyze how students responded to them in an index form. So we wanted to see how... If a student has a higher teacher-student relationship, so if they think that teachers care, if they think that adults at their school treat them fairly, that teachers are interested in them as a person, does that have any kind of a protective factor in other areas of their lives? we just pulled out substance use just to see if that was a protective factor or not. And we found that it was. So this is for all students, eighth, ninth, and 11th grade. We looked at students who had a higher teacher-student relationship index at Hopkins, and

125we did see that protective factor against alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drug use. This is, I think, important information to get out to our school staff that they might think that... The work they do is not necessarily relating to some of these other issues, but you can see here that it is. And on the topic of risk factors, we do know from our 2013 data and from state data that there is certainly an association between mental health and substance use. So we wanted to look at that for Hopkins students, and we did find, we certainly found risk factors, again, in 2016 between mental health concerns and increased risk of substance use. big priority area for our coalition. So another kind of new piece of information we wanted to share tonight, as we looked at, we wanted

126to look at actually adverse childhood experiences. So kind of fits in with the earlier talk today by Linda Gardner, but the survey actually has some kind of rich information that we can look at in terms of adverse childhood experiences. Adverse childhood experiences or ACEs are stressful or traumatic experiences that a young person may be experiencing. And there's a lot of state research, a lot of national research on this, but the survey does really have some important information. These seven questions that are on the survey all are considered adverse childhood experiences. So whether a young person has an incarcerated parent or caregiver, whether they live with someone who drinks too much alcohol, whether they live with someone who uses legal drugs or abuses prescription drugs, whether they've experienced verbal abuse, physical abuse, they're witness of household

127domestic abuse, or if they've experienced sexual abuse. So obviously these are all really challenging situations that a young person may be living with. At the state level, they looked at adverse childhood experiences and substance use and found a very strong correlation between the more adverse childhood experiences a young person has, the more likely they are to abuse substances. Probably not surprising. And we wanted to look at our own data just to see. And you can see here that we graphed out, this is just for marijuana use, but for Hopkins 8th, 9th, and 11th graders. who reported using marijuana in the past 30 days. We graphed this out by number of adverse childhood experience and you can see that really cumulative effect of the more adverse childhood experiences the young person may have, the more likely

128they are to use. So something, and just to kind of take a step back, the survey has a lot of power. We can do a lot of different analysis, slice and dice things different ways. But just as kind of a starting point, we wanted to look at teacher-student relationships, which I just mentioned, and what kind of relationship might that actually have as a protective factor for students experiencing adverse childhood experiences. So we looked here, this is just for Hopkins students, 8th, 9th, and 11th grade. So we looked at those who had two or more adverse childhood experiences. Again, this survey is completely anonymous. And for those students with two or more ACEs, if they had a higher teacher-student relationship index, so if they thought the teachers cared about them, if they thought the teachers were

129interested in them as a person, we actually did see a little bit of a protective factor against substance use. So this is just one piece of information as a starting point. We could do at least a two-hour presentation on adverse childhood experiences. But I think this gives us some ammunition to look at. Even there's a lot of things in our students lives we can't control in terms of maybe traumatic experiences that they're going through but the school does provide a protective place for those students and looking at that I think is really important. So we're gonna wrap up here. Just to summarize some key findings overall Hopkins students in 2016 felt safe. They cared about doing well in school, curious to learn and felt that teachers cared about them. We did notice an increase in

130students identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning of their sexual orientation. Again, as a reminder, the survey did show that most students are not using substances. We want to get this information out. We did notice some positive changes in substance use, particularly cigarette use and ninth grade trend data across the different... We definitely noticed some positive change there. Also some concerns that we need to absolutely address. I think it absolutely is noteworthy to remind everyone that the mental health concerns were very significant and both at the state level and at Hopkins. And it's something that we need to be looking at and responding to. And again, really considering the importance of protective factors, I think this survey, this is just again, just one way of looking at it, but there's a lot of, I think,

131a value of this information and different ways that we could continue to look at it. I'm just gonna quickly wrap up and then we'll have time for questions and discussion. Again, I coordinate the Hopkins One Voice Coalition. Our mission is to unite and empower the Hopkins Schools community to promote healthy youth development and reduce substance use. Some of our recent and current strategies kind of in this survey cycle have been the One Reason campaign kicked off two years ago and that was specific to alcohol. We are currently just piloting a Real Talk Marijuana campaign at the high school and that's really looking at addressing student misperceptions on marijuana. Our coalition has a strong desire to focus on mental health, knowing the relationship between substance use and mental health, and also just mental health broadly, how

132concerning and important it is to be looking at. supporting students at high risk times so students entering junior high and students entering high school we have some different strategies to support students to ease that transition currently implementing a prescription drug misuse community level initiative and then I can't highlight enough the parent education and outreach how important that is and how strongly we value working with parents and getting this information to them and I will conclude now with discussion and questions I welcome Any of your thoughts? Great job, Holly. Thank you. Anyone have any questions for Holly? A lot of information there. Yeah, it's a lot. I've got a comment and a question. Overall, I think it was good news. I think that we're seeing the substance abuse rates go down. I'm not troubled by the

133increased numbers on mental health and kids identifying as LGBT. because I think kids feel they can be more honest now. I think that's just my take on it. But I was wondering, when was this survey conducted? What month? Yeah, so we conducted this survey at the high school in January. Okay. And then at the junior highs and the junior highs were on the same day in the beginning of March and the elementary schools, most of them had a separate day, but all kind of the end of February, early March. And how was it administered? Was it in the classroom or? Yeah. So the surveys were administered in the classroom on, I'm trying to remember actually, I think all of them were on, they were on Chromebooks in the, Fifth grade and in the high school

134and then iPads in the eighth and ninth grade. Okay, but they did it in a classroom They didn't go to lab. Nope. Nope. Yeah, and the the teacher The classroom teacher read their informed consent. There's a pretty long script that they have to read At one point I didn't mention is that at the high school we actually also surveyed the 10th and 12th graders. So we didn't include them in this presentation because we just wanted to look at that state comparison. We can't include the 10th and 12th graders in the Minnesota Student Survey data for the state, but with the web... the state gave us the option of inviting additional grades to participate. So it was the decision of the principal, Patty Johnson, to survey the entire school. So they all took the survey at

135exactly the same time during it. Were there higher participation rates in 10th and 11th? It was actually very similar. The technical disruption happened across the whole school. So we noticed about 52% of students, 50 to 52% in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. Excuse me. I will be completely honest, we haven't really looked at them. There was so much information just right here. But we'll be looking at that with our coalition and that's kind of an example too where depending on the audience, if we're working with high school teachers or parents, obviously they'd want to know that information. So we'll be putting that out there for sure. Being the only high school student in the room, it's kind of interesting to hear this stuff. I bet. Because they're all probably looking at me. you know people

136I know people that are doing this but I think the my take on it is that the mental health part disturbed me a little with the high rates of depression and self-harm yeah that bothered me a little but when it came to the tobacco like you said That going down is a sign of our time. It's so different than 2001 and 1370. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Where all the schools had to be hit. Absolutely. It's just a really interesting presentation. Thank you. Laura? From the survey, have you had a chance to think about where you might... dig deeper into some of it. I think as Ian was talking about, when you think that over 50% of the females in 11th grade see or exhibit signs of depression, it certainly would seem to me that that would

137be an area where it might be very interesting to find out what are some of the feelings and then this is really the first time that level of information has come out or are we able to it looks to me like it has gone up from 2013 to 2016 yeah you know what the the series complicated because There's sort of an intense review process at the state for why they would make a decision to change a question. The depression questions did change from 2013. I know we noticed in 2013 we had a separate set of questions on depression and we had one on anxiety as well that was very specific to anxiety and our rates were high and we saw the same gender divide. At the state level they noticed a bigger increase in concern

138I think. between 2013 and 2016 overall with the mental health. When this data came out, they did a big, the Minnesota Department of Health did a big press release and the mental health was their kind of primary area of concern. But it would be interesting to know. if that were issues related to personal safety, if it was issues related to stress from their activities at school, or if it was concerns about care. an example where we really could do a completely separate presentation just on mental health. We could really dig into, look for associations on all those things you mentioned, safety, we could look at bullying, does that play a role, cyber bullying? I mean, there's so many different ways. Are certain things protective factors? We could really, really learn a lot more. This is

139just a start. And then also, you know, the seriousness of... the depression, whether or not it would be, how close it would be getting to a more clinical definition of depression. And then another area that I was wondering about in terms of digging deeper is obviously there was a dip related to feeling safe. at home or other places, but the dip was feeling safe at school. And I think that also is something that seemed like it struck across different grades, particularly 9th and 8th, 9th and 11th. And I'd like to know if that means that they don't feel physically safe or if that means that they don't feel safe from bullying or if they, from... Yeah, there's definitely a lot there. We could absolutely dig deeper into that. Again, we can cross-tabulate anything in the

140survey. So we have the... Dr. Schultz released the raw data to myself. So basically we can look at how a certain student answered every question. Again, totally anonymously, it's an automatically generated ID number, but we can look to see what those relationships are. And we did notice an increase, on a positive note, we did notice an increase in students reporting that they felt safe at school. Yeah, I mean that was an increase but still it was the lowest, tended to be the lowest although in grade five it's interesting to see that in my neighborhood. But overall I mean they're certainly in their 90s. Yes. I just have kind of a general question. I think, you know, there was a tobacco settlement. Minnesota gets a lot of money. Yep. Does that money ever trickle down? Most

141of the legislative people use that money to balance the budget. They haven't been doing that. There is a correlation because that money was supposed to be used for education. When it was used for education, the smoking rates went down. When it wasn't used that way, it went up. I don't know if it correlates that way. But does that money ever get down to you at any level? No. It's all supposed to be done at a big umbrella stage. I know like Clearway Minnesota is a non-profit that was founded out of those settlement dollars that actually has an expiration time. It's time limited and they do a lot of smoking cessation, a lot of statewide quit campaigns and things like that but we don't as a school district see those dollars. So no help from that?

142No. Any other questions? Well, thank you. Overall, again, a good survey. And I just, I wonder too, with what Steve said, you know, we've tried to take the stigma away from mental illness. And I wonder if you can report it now and say how you feel and it's okay. Yeah. So I wonder if it's more that the change in how we report it and not that it's not, of course it's an issue. Yeah. But I think it's an issue that people talk about now. Yeah, from our work we're seeing that the students are a lot more open talking about it than adults. We did a couple different initiatives last year specific to mental health at the high school and students were very open to talk to us about it. Yeah, I think that's a really

143important point. It could be a change in culture that makes it easier to report that and then to get help. Hopefully, yeah. It's such a negative thing. So I think the survey results are overall, you know. great results and we're definitely making positive changes. So thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you. I know it's late. Holly, can you talk just real briefly about the sheriff's request? Yeah, the most recent request. The Sheriff's Office, they like us a lot. They want you coming in for fingerprinting, Jen. So last, the Sheriff's Office has done a really, I think, important and good job about drawing education and awareness to different topics around. Drug use in Hennepin County, emerging drug trends, prescription drug abuse, heroin, opiates. And they really feel strongly about getting the

144message to all communities that it's not just a certain community in Minneapolis or a certain community in Minnetonka, it's everywhere across our county and across our state and across our nation. They've really been looking to partner with schools. So last year, Hopkins schools partnered with the Sheriff's Office on a Drugs and Teens Town Hall back last April. And that was well attended, about 250 people attended at Hopkins Center for the Arts. This year they've put out another request to work with us, which is great. They're actually going to be starting a campaign in 2017, so they're just kicking it off, called Noverdose. So Hennepin County is projecting final toxicology reports are still coming in, but 2016 was a record-breaking year for... opiate overdoses in Hennepin County. So they're really wanting to do some more prevention

145work every single one of those deaths being preventable. So looking to partner with schools across the county and do some different work. Kind of the plans are still being developed, but they're gonna have a kickoff next week. And yeah, we'll be there. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Now we'll go to community meetings and grade reconfiguration. So we just had a workshop on this. So I guess this is about having a community conversation on grade reconfiguration. That's February 6th and 16th at the high school cafeteria. And if anyone has any, do we need more background to that? What do you expect we need to move to approve to do this? Yes, that would share. Okay. There's a change in the language that you wanted Right, I won't strike Jerry highs I would strike would be named

146Renamed middle schools. I would just take that take that take that apart out We can move to approve it with with that change which is a minute. Yeah, and then we'll use that moving forward Everyone's all right with that Okay, I move to approve with the change Second. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Motion carries. Thank you so much. That was easy. Now we'll go to board member reports. Anyone have anything they'd like to share? Betsy? I'll do my last MSBA report. So, yeah, last week I wrapped up my six-year term on the MSBA board. And we were blessed to have Cheryl Pozzine put her name forward from Wayzata. I think she would be a great representative for District 4 and she was unanimously approved as the next

147District 4 rep. So she started her term then that Friday of Leadership Conference. During the MSPA Leadership Conference we had the National School Board Association President Miranda Beard visit us. She was with us on Wednesday and Thursday of that week actually to kick off the conference. So that was quite the coup I thought to have the National President at our conference in January in Minnesota and she's from Mississippi. So bless her heart for doing that. While we were visiting with her, actually during lunch on Thursday, we got talking about our student school board representative program. And they're looking to implement a program similar to that in her home district in Mississippi, Laurel, Mississippi I think is where she's from. So she said, send me your information. So I was able to send her our brochure

148and also talk to her a little bit about the Minnesota School Board Association student board representative scholarship. and how the state association supports those students. So she got all that information, she's excited to learn more. So fun to be able to share our Hopkins information with her. Friday during the session, I did a breakout session on social media advocacy, similar to the one I had done during the statewide advocacy tour here. I haven't even been in this room, actually. And a nice turnout for that, so that was fun, and all the technology worked, so thank you to John, and thank you to Ivor for supplying me with a projector and a wireless speaker so that that would go out without a hitch. Over this past weekend I was able to have some conversations with community

149members around our LAC and encourage them to get involved with their local public school advocacy groups. And in conjunction with that I've also done some updating on our Facebook and Twitter so we've got articles from the Sun Paper that when we did our presentation that's on there. Our platform is on there just trying to keep those touch points fresh. so that it looks like we are doing stuff because we are doing stuff. And then as soon as we have, I know that the LAC is thinking about doing some trips to the Capitol in February, so as soon as we have those dates, we'll get those out to people too. Excellent. That's all I got. Thank you. Thank you. Steve? Yeah. Well, besides the MSBA conference. Well, I did see a fascinating presentation there about issuing

150library cards to kids. I thought that was terrific. We had a really tough audience. Four of us were. But we did have the LAC legislative breakfast last week, and we had five of our, well, three senators and two representatives of 10. And good discussion. And we had sent out an invitation to Hopkins All. We had some people show up that would not have otherwise been there, I think. And two of them expressed interest in joining the LAC. So hopefully we'll get some more attendance based on that. On, was it Wednesday night, Thursday night, I drove over to the DNR. and sat in on a teleconference with the advocates for school trust lands. It was very interesting. There are 45 million acres of land in the U.S. that are set aside to support education. And all

151the revenue from that, whether it's from mining, whether it's from oil and gas, whether it's from logging. grazing, whatever goes to support education in the various states where it's located. It used to be that every state in the union had some school trust lands. I think we're down to about 30, maybe 25 states now that still have any left. It started out over 100 million acres and we're down to 45 million now. And of those states that have a school trust land fund, that represents $35 billion in assets that they have. In Minnesota, we've got $1.2 billion, and that generates a minimal amount of revenue right now because most of the revenue for the Minnesota School Trust lands comes from the sale of mining rights for iron ore. And iron ore prices have dropped about

15250% over the last three years. So needless to say, the fund is... you know, doesn't generate quite the revenue it used to. But it does generate $31 per student in the state currently. So Aaron Vandalindi, who is the administrator for the Minnesota School Trust lands. Denise Dietrich from MSBA who's been very passionate about this both as a member of MSBA but as a former legislator too was there. And we participated in a teleconference with representatives from I would say about eight or nine states, mostly western states. Utah has a lot, Arizona has a lot of land. There's some western states that have substantial land in their trust. So it was very interesting to hear what other states are experiencing. Aaron Vandalini pointed out that last year he had worked out a deal with the US

153Forest Service to sell some of our trust lands that are in the, sell or exchange trust lands that are in the BWCA that we can't touch in exchange. for some lands that are outside of the EWCA where we could generate some revenue. And he had gotten an appropriate, it takes an act of Congress to do that. And he had gotten a preliminary approval for that. And then the $45 million that was being allocated for that was used to buy a 640-acre ranch in Wyoming. So we lost out on our federal appropriation too. to acquire that land. So he'll try again this year, but it's an interesting dilemma that we're in with these school trust lands that are not generating any revenue for kids in Minnesota. Oh, and I just want to also point out that

154I think Director Goodroad noticed that... I mentioned it earlier, the Hopkins State of the City Address is on January 26th at 5 p.m. The Minnetonka State of the City Address is on February 8th at 7.30. In the morning. In the morning. And on February 23rd, the Golden Valley State of the City Address is also at 7.30 in the morning. So if anyone's interested in attending those, those are the dates. Thank you. Anyone else? Just that the Intermediate Treaty 7 Board has not met so far. They're meeting on Thursday night for their organizational meeting. And I know we'll have a new chair and so there will be a number of new board members. Thank you. Anyone? Yeah, I too attended that Minnesota School Boards Association conference. The closing speaker was Alan Page. Basically, he was talking

155about leadership. You don't necessarily have to be a Hall of Famer in professional football and a Minnesota Supreme Court justice to make a mark in the world. It was really a message to all of us, specifically at the younger people going through their educational. do your best and you can make a difference. Very, very good motivational speaker. Plus, my son-in-law said he also plays the tuba when you run in the Minnesota Twin City Marathons. He said he's a pretty good tuba player besides. That he didn't talk about. Thanks, Dave. All right, I attended all the same things you all did so you already hit that like So I would look for a motion to adjourn So move where we have to accept it. I don't have any incidental reports That's right I move adjournment second

156motion a second all in favor, please say aye This meeting is adjourned at 922 Thank you so much.