001all right everybody if you could be seated please we're going to get started so thank you for uh coming tonight and um attending our february 22nd regular school board meeting if you have an agenda if you have one in front of you our first topic or item number one on the agenda is our strategies covers all five of them number two covers our face coverings policy number three um is information where you can find this meeting viewed live and also it will be linked to our website casey before we get going i just want to make sure that cassie is on and cassie can you hear us yes okay more to come on that but i just want to make sure you could hear us so far so with that said this brings us to
002item number four call to order and since miss steves who is our uh generally acting clerk since she is out of town and participating it's just not the greatest through technology this piece of it uh mr uh mr bellingham is going to act as our clerk here tonight so uh mr bellingham will you please determine if we have a quorum present mr chair we do have a a quorum of the number of members in the board present okay thank you with that we'd ask that everybody stand for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay thank you mr bellingham thank you for leading us in the pledge you're welcome the
003next thing on item number four is i need to read this due to policy uh clerk cassie steves who is joining us online she is currently located in florida in a public location at starbucks north old lake wilson road kissimmee florida 34747 is the zip code she will be a fully participating member tonight as a voting member in the school board meeting via google hangouts or skype so there she is so welcome ms steves with that it brings us to item number five the approval of the agenda once again if you have the agenda in front of you we have a couple updates to make on here and the first item that i want to call out is item 7a which deals with the 8th grade orchestra performance and item 7c which is the roosevelt
004presentation we have moved those to a meeting in the future we didn't know what the weather was going to be like and so we didn't want to have uh kids and families on the road for the presentation if uh not knowing what that was going to be so essentially what that means is item 7b the no child hungry grant will now become 7a on the agenda the other item that i would like to point out is that we are going to flip flop items 13 and 14. so item 13 on the agenda currently is other items of information that's where the school board members and the superintendent speak we will move that to item 14 and item 14 which is the student survey will move to item 13. so i just want to uh point
005all that out with that said i would entertain a motion to approve the agenda so moved how second we have a motion by mr olson in a second by mr bellingham any further discussion on this mr chair if i could have a point of clarification so um due to the remote viewing by board member steve's do we do a roll call with every vote even like that okay yes yep great question and yes we will do a roll call with every vote any other discussion on the approval of the agenda all right hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying aye hi i believe we do the rules call okay that's right sorry thank you okay shawn billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair
006motion passes five zero okay thank you for that this brings us to item number six the school board public comment guidelines i will just read this briefly and then we'll get into the community comments section this is an opportunity for residents business and property owners parents students and employees of the farewell public school district to address the board you must sign up in person at the board meeting and address the board from the podium members of the public will address the remarks with civility and respect after being recognized by the chair each individual will identify themselves and the group they represent if any please state your reason for addressing the board this is not a time to debate an issue but for the board to hear your comments public comment is not available at work
007sessions closed sessions or special board meetings of the school board the minnesota government data practices act prohibits comment about specific student or staff matters even without naming them in open session this includes the public comment portion of our meeting the board respects and values input but when it relates to a specific student staff or to a specific matter such input must be heard by the appropriate personnel such as the building principal or superintendent and not during an open meeting of the school board anyone interested in making a public comment will be asked to complete an information card before the meeting starts providing their name address and topic of their comment all comments must conform to school board policy 206 which is available for review on the district website at www.fairboat.k12.mn.us each speaker will have three
008minutes to make comments on one specific topic each topic will have a total of 15 minutes allowed for comments with that said mrs avril do you have comments and we will stay consistent with what we've done in the in the past if we have more than five speakers that want to speak on a certain topic we will randomly draw them out of this bucket here and i'll hold them up higher you can hold them up high whatever it is so that nobody sees names and anything like that so we'll go from there i do know that miss everell we do have one community comment that a community member submitted last week i believe by email and mr bellingham is going to read that tonight and that is regarding uh the mask uh policy okay these
009are the survey okay these are the surveys there's more than five okay why don't you okay thank you can you reach that hi that's why okay um okay why don't we do this we'll read them we'll pull all five and we'll read them shari anderson you will be first uh on regarding the topic of survey okay second will be julie baines if i pronounce that properly hopefully i did third will be sarah coulter on the survey fourth will be k keller is that is that correct is k here ron or the ron slash k keller that will be number four okay and natalie ginter on the survey at the same token when we asked you to come up and comment we do have a somali interpreter here um and so we will be having it
010interpreted as well okay so why don't we do this we will start with the survey we'll do all five of those and then we'll have miss lilliquist come forward regarding the budget reductions and then we'll have mr bellingham wrap up regarding the letter regarding the mask policy okay so with that char would you please come forward once again we will uh time everybody to three minutes we'll be consistent with that and we'll we'll do our very best so we ask you to do your very best chad does the mask stay on don't be fine you're fine yeah you can take it off if you want optional after school now yep this is for sharks okay thank you here we go okay i'm just going to read this hi everybody thanks for thanks for having me
011giving me up from giving me the opportunity to speak i'm speaking on the survey you probably knew that i believe that the whole survey itself is an invasion of privacy and totally inappropriate but right now i want to concentrate on the questions that deal with gender okay and maybe give char a little bit more time jack just shows the interpretation we're going to extend this for more than three minutes okay okay yep we want to be fair um what we'll try to do is keep all of this to five minutes if we can okay okay so we'll do our very best all right okay you want to start again please okay stella's heavy i've got this so we're good okay go ahead and start okay are you done should i continue to start over okay
012now i don't know where you are in your spiritual life but it really doesn't matter god is god whether a person believes it or not and he says what he says and he means what he says and this is what he has to say about gender god said let us make man in our image in our likeness let him have dominion over the fish the sea the birds the air the cattle over all the earth god created humans in his own image in the image of god he created them male and female he created them and then god blessed them and again he created them male and female and he blessed them and called them mankind in the day that they were created and again and jesus answered and he said have you not read
013he who made them at the beginning made them male and female and again from the beginning of creation god made them male and female god has made it clear as you can tell he says it numbers of times that he created them male and female and god is not the author of confusion but of peace as in all churches god says you were formed we were formed in our inward hearts he covered us in our mother's womb we are fearfully and wonderfully made we are marvelous works and every soul knows foreign god says that his eyes saw our substance as yet being unformed and in his book they are all written the fact the days fashioned for us while there was still none of them god also says this and i quote the wrath of
014god is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness who suppresses the truth in unrighteous because what may be known of god is manifest and god has shown it to them in the since the creation of the world god's invisible attributes are clearly seen and understood by the things that he made in his eternal power and godhead so that they are without excuse excuse me and one final thing the things that god created the way that he created him the things that he says are not meant to just be read in a private place but be but to be lived out in the world including our school system and our children is the world at dunkin so i ask you to take heed because god also says this and i quote do not be deceived
015god is not mocked and whatever a person sows that person will also reap that's all i got thanks for listening everybody thank you miss anderson appreciate it okay the next person is julie baines miss baines and if you don't mind again pausing at times for awesome thank you appreciate it good evening my name is julie baines and i reside here in the district although my children no longer attend the fair bolt public school system the minnesota student survey as i'm about to speak about as i understand is to be given to 9th and 11th grade for those that haven't seen this questionnaire let me sum it up for you it is 113 multi-tiered questions questions about what you eat drink how you take care of your teeth physical conditions like asthma or mental problems you
016may have what you do outside of school hours if you make safe decisions like wearing a seat belt or not texting and driving because these questions and i quote help your community and school learn more about the lives and feelings of young people like you there are also seven questions on identifying your race nine on stealing or gambling 19 on various forms of tobacco use and devices identifying your gender 14 on sexual related questions 34 on various forms of drug use and three on self-harm or suicide a patient may or may not feel comfortable answering when asked by their physician what business does this district have with the answers is the data going to improve learning i question what is being taught in this school parents perhaps students can opt out of taking this test
017well what's the student who refuses the test learning while the others are taking this monstrosity survey options foreign perhaps playing more games on school issued electronic devices i wonder you should disclose how much funding you will get by cooperating with the state more most parents are clueless about the funding that was received for following cdc's coveted safety measures we know this district was paid to fall in line with them stop selling our children this survey is another form of indoctrination to wedge our children between us as parents and their impressionable minds either promote teaching not data collection or resign your spot immediately oh one more thing masks child abuse shame on you for what you have done thank you for your time my name is thank you uh next person is miss sarah coulter if
018you would please yes thank you thank you for the opportunity to be here welcome to an opportunity my name is sarah colter i'm a parent in the district and an employee at rice county public health i'm here to address the board regarding rice county public health support of district participation in the minnesota student survey as well as our support for the regular course of process for individuals or their families to opt out skip questions or skip entire sections county public health we use this data to better understand student risk behaviors and the previous speaker did an excellent job recapping the content of the survey uh which does include those positive behaviors such as connections to our families our schools our religious communities and our community itself we look at the data over time to build
019programming around mental health mental health to shift the focus of our services for example this is the survey that showed us the rapid increase in e-cigarette use among our youth uh also use the data from this survey and targeting funding for healthy eating and active living some of us in the room have probably taken the survey ourselves i remember being uncomfortable with some of the questions being asked when i took the survey in fifth grade in bryceland just to paint a picture of what life was like in fifth grade in braceland minnesota what count is it bracelet or bracelet okay we have about 500 people okay so i can still smell my pink pet eraser and i can still see my double tongue sneakers that i wore on my feet i was concerned about looking
020cool and when answering the questions i was wondering if i should answer the questions differently than what my lived experience actually was but i understood that i could skip questions and likely i did skip some of the questions i understood that caring adults wanted to hear from me and my peers across the state was that i understood that caring adults wanted to hear from me and my peers across the state little did i know how much the world would shift when almost 30 years later 30 years later i would be speaking up for the value of the survey in my own community so that caring adults could better understand the world of the youth in our schools today thank you for your time and all your efforts that go into enabling our students voices to
021be heard on a large variety of issues so that they can speak to or skip over those issues on the minnesota student survey the survey informs the work of a large number of partners in our county to further support the districts of the ideal of every falcon every day every falcon every day thank you the next person is miss k keller are you in here got some water yeah can we can we check to see if she's in one of the other rooms looking for k keller okay thank you come on up if you would please thank you can i just ask if somebody has their phone going or something would you please mute it is that possible thank you thank you am i supposed to sign in if you would yes thank you and
022then just introduce yourself if you would please i'm ron keller of fairbill i'm not nearly as prepared as these previous speakers they did an excellent job but i'm here to voice my concerns about the questionnaire and would request that you do not run that survey because i guess one of my questions i have is what's the benefit that the school district is getting out of this survey how much money are they getting out of it what benefits are they getting out of it mr keller i don't want to interrupt you if you don't mind pausing so that he can interpret for you i i just don't want you to go too long how do you know so i the question of what the benefit of the school district is what they are getting out of
023this can anybody answer that we don't engage in the community comment but we will have superintendent sesker follow up with you via email or phone call okay yeah do you have my information because one of my concerns you know with spending time on these social programs there's i've read the questions or some of them myself i didn't read the whole thing but they are very presumptive questions in there and for an impressionable 9th or 11th grader they might think well maybe i'm not what i should be great so it's just planting ideas in their heads another thing is you've had a lot of levees in the past and they haven't gone so well and i would concur that maybe the reason for that is because of the uh horrible academic numbers that we're getting out
024of the district where kids can't read and write and don't know their math because you're spending so and i would also like to know how do you decide whose survey that you do because there's a lot of organizations around that would probably like to speak to the kids have their survey done so just how do you decide that you know how and if you want honest answers out of it maybe you should send the survey home with kids and let them work on the survey with their parents and i guess the one last thing would be maybe better yet give it to your teachers and staff so and then let the public and parents know what the outcome of that is so they know what their what kind of teachers we have here i know
025there's a lot of great teachers but just throwing it out there or so thank you for your time thank you mr keller next up is miss natalie ginter hello my name is natalie ginter and i am a parent of a fairvo high school student as well as a local health professional when i saw that the minnesota student survey was on the agenda for tonight's meeting i decided to attend and speak briefly in support of the district continuing to offer this survey as i know it is a large undertaking can i interpret that yes natalie ginter go ahead i also know firsthand as to the importance it has to help informing not only our educational system but also local public health before and after school enrichment programs community-based nonprofits and health care system initiatives for those
026who were not aware the minnesota student survey has been administered every three years to students between 5th and 12th grades since 1989. the minnesota student survey includes questions about a wide variety of youth behaviors such as alcohol tobacco and other drug use violence and sexual activity as well as positive behaviors and their connection to family school and the community questions on some of these more sensitive topics are only asked of high school age students the minnesota student survey is optional not only on part of school districts but also on part of parents who can opt their child out of participating and also optional on the part of the student students can also take the survey and skip any question or stop at any point the majority of schools offer the minnesota student survey with over
02780 percent of districts participating across the state reports on findings are publicly available on the minnesota department of health and the minnesota department of education website so anyone can view results down to the county level the survey is anonymous and answers cannot be traced to an individual a few aspects of the minnesota student survey that i believe are most valuable is that it not only provides a longitudinal view of change in adolescent behavior over time on things like seat belt use and underage drinking but it is also responsive to how quickly our society is changing and our youth along with it uh questions about cyberbullying were added in 2013. questions about gender identity and expression were added six years ago in 2016 and questions about vaping and e-cigarette use were added in 2019 what is
028also valuable is that responses to the survey and the information it provides comes directly from youth not from adults who better to inform what youth need than the students themselves the minnesota student survey provides our youth a voice and gives adults a real look into the issues and needs of youth in our community i strongly encourage the fairville school district to continue offering the minnesota student survey across all available grade levels and communicating with parents and students as to their rights to opt out if they so choose thank you miss ruth lil quist come up and her topic is on budget reduction issues i also want to make a note that we have two other speakers um one other speaker and mr bellingham is going to read a letter and i aired when we did
029the agenda um it was my intention to mention that we're going to take a 10 minute recess from 6 15 to 6 25 we have a board member that needs to do something at that time for 10 minutes and so we're going to take a 10 minute recess so at that time since it's not on our board agenda i would look for a board member to make a motion um as soon as we're done with these next two letters okay okay thank you my apologies for that mr lillaquist the floor is expect an yours for this one or not just english if he wants it'd be wonderful miss leland would you mind asking if they want to interpret yes they needed a break oh okay okay is mr muhammad still here i think so okay
030um do we know if if mr muhammad is coming in and anthony okay why don't well it doesn't matter because that's going to be interpreted too if he would like to so um while we're waiting for them to come in can i just point out that i am reading a letter from myself and a letter from catherine schultz do you [Music] is [Music] has not been an easy task thank you for your continued commitment to and support of our verbal scholars and educators you can read yours ms schultz was not submitted to us prior and she's not here um so typically we would not allow somebody else to read that letter and nothing against the letter i have no idea what it states if you want to have it submitted to all the board members
031that's wonderful could you submit this for the record okay thank you thank you we just want to be consistent with our three minutes yes thank you should i go ahead yes i'm sorry i apologize okay um greetings members of the school board colleagues families students and community members my name is ruth lopez and i've been a teacher of multilingual learners also described as english language learners with farewell public schools for 24 years the information shared by katie schultz regarding the number of multilingual learners in faribault public schools you're also aware that the eliminating that eliminating a coordinator for the el program would be exceptional in a district such as ours where el programming directly impacts 29 of all students and 83 percent of all students of colorado [Music] now let me share with you a
032bit about my journey as a teacher of multilingual students over nearly a quarter of a century here in faribault and i'm alexander in 1995 i was a student teacher in the district at that time there were only three el teachers managing k through 12 el instruction yeah 19 you say 1995 95 1995 haha due to an anonymous complaint on behalf of the language learners in this district fair book schools was cited for numerous civil rights violations by the united states office for civil rights like a simple my current position was created in 1997 as a direct response to this federal investigation the areas in which farewell public schools failed to comply with title six of the civil rights act of 1964 included eight key program changes which are districts thereafter implemented hello many fees had
033to do with equity specifically adequate english language programming comparable classroom spaces reasonable teacher caseloads adequate educational materials and careful oversight of el student identification record-keeping and exit procedures the consequence of our failure to provide adequately for the multilingual learners of fairvote resulted in a fine of ten thousand dollars and that was over 25 years ago uh over the many years since then our program has grown to become a successful robust source of support for multilingual learners we are highly sought out by other districts who wish to model their programming after ours we hold a good reputation and have partnerships with nearby colleges and universities who wish for their future teachers to experience best practices in language instruction members of our department have held key positions of leadership and have served as presenters at mini tesol
034the professional organization for teachers of english to speakers of other languages a coordinator's position dedicated el equity coordinator is responsible are you really close to being done i know this is here one bit left thank you careful supervision of elk's loads adherence to title iii guidelines and maintaining the highest integrity in our student record-keeping system yes and i'm going to edit just a little bit as you make your challenging decisions regarding the budget this spring please consider thoughtfully the impact which eliminating the student success coordinator position would have on students who are guaranteed protection and adequate services foreign remember that this ssc coordinator is their voice at the table in district level discussions and let our past mistakes serve as a powerful reminder that there are also grave legal ramifications for failure to maintain a
035high quality ell program task thank you miss loquis um since we've gone a little long here i'm gonna ask mr billingham to read that last letter regarding the mask policy after our recess so um i'd entertain a motion for a ten minute recess also move mr chair second uh any further discussion where are we taking the recess we have a board member that has needs to attend to something important i really don't want that individual to miss the rest of the meeting so i guess we need a roll call mr billingham john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye uh cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero thank you so we will re-adjourn at 6 30 in 10 minutes thank you thank you you so meaning back
036to session uh mr b are you do your pin i will entertain a motion to move back into our meeting and convene our recess do we have a motion to do that some move second we have a motion by miss cavalier a second by mr bellingham any further discussion hearing none all those in favor oh i'm sorry we need a roll call sorry john billingham i courtney cavalier richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero okay thank you for that uh so this we are still on community comment and mr bellingham is now going to read a letter um do we know is this going to be interpreted wait no it will it will not be interpreted okay so mr billingham you when you start i'll
037i'll start timing you okay thank you uh to the farewell school board my name is jenna botham and i am a lifelong farewell community member and a 17-year business owner i own studio of stars dance studio in faribault i'm writing today to express my concerns about lifting the mass requirements for the schools after much discussion with my son's pediatrician and following cdc guidelines regarding masks we as a business have required have we as a business have required mass in september for all of our dancers during practice as you have probably experienced this hasn't been the most popular decision for some families but it is the safest decision we have seen our studio numbers go down this year due to families not wanting to wear masks as we have always said we follow the science and
038we want to protect all our dancers and their families this has come at a cost for my business which is my sole income but we have not had an outbreak at the studio and we have not and we have done what we have set out to do provide a safe and fun learning environment for dancers and their families had we not put a mass requirement in place we would have been in we would have been on zoom for the whole year again and we did as we did when the pandemic started because so many families have had the virus and would have been exposed to the to have been exposed all of the dance families as my illini health pediatrician has explained masks along with dancing and vaccines i'm sorry mess along with distancing and
039vaccines are key to keeping the numbers going down staying in school and keeping whole families healthy with not everyone being able to distance at school and not everyone being eligible for yet for vaccines or being able to get one mass are what is keeping children in schools safe and healthy now why risk it for the last three months of school the case numbers in minnesota and rice county have declined recently which i understand is why so many places are looking to lift their mass requirements i however question why they would be lifted and lifted when they are at or above the rates they were when you put the requirements in place you as a school board the school district teachers staff parents and children have put the time and effort into keeping the children teachers
040staff and families safe for six months of the year please consider keeping them safe for three more months there are families who have who have young children like i do who are not eligible to get vaccinated yet many families have elderly family members who who immunocompromise family members who may be vaccinated but it would still pose a life-threatening risk too by not requiring masks let's get through this year safely and help all families by wearing a simple mask a few more months spring break is coming up and many families will be traveling if you lift the mass requirements now and many families come back where there are outbreaks at schools it will be hard to put back a requirement that you have already taken away cdc is advising not to travel to over 100 different
041places with some of them being popular travel destinations mass will help keep everyone safe when travelers return and set next and sit next to each other in class and bring back the virus mr billingham i apologize interrupt i know that's not your letter you're reading it from a community member are you close or i'll give you another about 15 20 seconds i'm not close but i'll just finish the last paragraph okay go from there okay thank you for taking the time to read my letter and taking and taking my concerns into consideration again this would be a good time to show the children that we as a community can work together for everyone the children teachers staff and everyone's family keep mask in school a requirement for three more months keep everyone's family safe and
042healthy keep us all alive and ready for summer another school year in the faribault school district thank you jenna batman thank you mr billingham so um with that said we are going to make one deviation here in the student i'm sorry in the community comment and when we've had if you will issues that have had people for and against the topic we have alternated between for and against or whatever we have a large contingent here that was unable to speak on the student survey how we randomly drew them we had i believe three individuals speak if i if i would say likely against the student survey and two individuals in favor of the survey and all of you that have been here before and seen these i think you would attest that we're being consistent
043how we're operating so i will give two individuals an opportunity to speak and then we will be done and move into our regular agenda do we have the two individuals and we need to if we can know who they are and have them sign up one of the speakers can you if you would um provide a name if you will uh a name of the speaker [Music] mohammed yeah okay and is i'm sorry the topic is student survey or no okay thank you it's a chair we can get translated the other way then yeah right okay yeah yes abby will yeah yep thank you good question thank you um and we will time just like we have everybody else okay uh will you move that mic closer just because we're recording on tv and i
044want to make sure yeah thanks everyone who attended uh i'm just sending a thank you message to the members of the board parents teachers and everyone available [Music] i don't have prepared not but i'll speak out of [Music] foreign [Music] the difference between you know getting education and foreign [Music] i think out of our perspectives as a somali community and also as muslims the issue of including gender end in the survey should be something which is which will be ruled out it's not an option foreign [Music] foreign if this is uh taken into consideration in the school board then it is like a loss of trust in the system that you are under and at we didn't have much information about the survey uh which school was taking you know [Music] foreign we really like
045all developmental issues we like our students to get good education we support teachers we do come to conferences but we wouldn't welcome the issue of the survey having agenda yeah we really don't want this to be you know taken into consideration and asking our students to take the survey thank you very much for giving us this opportunity obviously welcome back thank you appreciate it do we have one more speaker is that correct mr abdi would you just pull that microphone a little closer to you when you speak sorry i just don't thank you thank you can you introduce her [Music] i know it's giving us this opportunity but in the survey if any survey that needs to be done i know it's optional but in any case we wouldn't like our students to take that
046survey i would like to be informed if any survey that is to be taken by our students in the school we need to be informed though we the issue of asking students genders is not something we accept so we know everyone everyone knows who they are they know the agendas and we don't want students to be asked about the agenda and how they feel about it [Applause] thank you appreciate it thank you thank you for translating for us yes we appreciate it okay that concludes our community comment we will now move to first of all i want to thank everybody for their comments and for attending we do appreciate it this brings us to item 7 and 7a which is the no child hungry grant becky ford brenda blame and scott gerdes please come forward
047and do you have something to share on the computer do we have somebody running that casey is okay thank you so good evening uh chairwolf and the board um with me tonight i have brenda bain with uh sodexo to my left and since i'm in the middle i have becky ford with um healthy community initiatives um with me as well and we're just briefly going to talk about the no kid hungry grant and um bringing up the speed on a little bit of that so i could start in response to the the pandemic you know we had all the issues around how we are going to feed our kids when everybody is distance learning and so as many of you are aware fairville school stepped up we did with sodexo and we delivered all kinds
048of food out to all the kids that drop off points with the use of favorable transportation and buses and all kinds of different things shortly thereafter we started you know the school again with the pandemic and so there was a need to figure out how we were going to continue to serve kids food when the learning models kept moving up and down and back and forth so school personnel worked with hci to pursue some funding to to continue that process of being able to deliver foods as a key initiative to try and keep kids fed so spearheaded by brenda and andrew my predecessor the school district applied for and was awarded this new kids sundry hungry grant in the amount of 50 000 back in january of 21 just over a year ago and really
049the key purpose of that grant was to address barriers in food accessibility mainly transportation increased family engagement and outreach increased school participation which we continue to do in all of our programming and really work with those kids to make sure that they had food during the school day and even on weekends so the collaborative oh over here um as you can see on the slide with sodexo community action center uh the school district growing up healthy hci and the farewell youth investment all of them came together as a partnership to develop this initiative to really feed feed kids so i'm going to briefly just kind of go through some of what each one of the partners did the community action council really worked with translation and was able to speak to some of the grant
050questions and things for those families that don't speak english they also went door to door helped with neighborhood sharing and scheduling and all those things to deliver food growing up hungry they employ a coordinator to help spearhead outreach including free and reduced lunch applications snap and wic applications as well hci along with verbal youth worked with strategic planning i know becky did a lot of applications and a lot of writing and helped me complete a lot of reports as i took this project over as well as worked with the school district and really as a coordinated collaborative effort amongst all of the partners sodexo in the school we coordinated the grant um coordinated purchasing of the van that delays we'll talk about in a little bit purchasing the food worked with all the different groups
051here at the school district to really make sure that everybody knew about this and all the opportunities around the grand initiative all right so during the calendar year of 2021 obviously it overlapped two different school years um which had drastically different meal services last year at this time we were in and out of hybrid learning and we were offering seven day meal packs at the high school once a week well in conjunction with this grant we were able to use that van to bring meals to the community not only during the seven day meal packs but during our summer feeding program we were able to bring lunches and breakfast out to the students so total meals that we served in calendar year of 2021 was just over 723 000 meals that's the number of meals
052that sodexo made for the school district to distribute to their students either in school or outside of school based on what the model learning model was and because of this grant we were able to serve 22 448 meals strictly to those people who could not get to the school so during the school year last year in addition to the fairville high school and jefferson elementary where we handed out meal packs the van was able to also bring meals to evergreen estates cannon river mobile home park and the millstone creek mobile home park on chester court we found that those were places where they were in need to get the food but didn't necessarily have the transportation to come and get it and then this past summer in conjunction with our summer food service program served
053at jefferson elementary again with the van we were able to bring food to evergreen estates the cannon river mobile home park and then the millstone creek mobile home park on chester court so in addition to actually you know feeding kids and bringing food to the neighborhoods most in need we also really organized around some systems work as well we made a concerted effort to um to get as many families as possible to fill out the free and reduced price lunch form the education benefits applica applications that was important because um the school district does uh raise a significant amount of money um base we we get you all know this we get a certain allocation for p for families that qualify for free to reduce lunch and so it was advantageous to continue to ask
054families to do that even though nobody had to pay for meals last year and so it was important to the health of the district to and and it was really important to make that process easier um and so we talked a lot as a group just about how to um explain it to everybody because it can be kind of uh cumbersome and confusing and so we developed some flyers and also recorded oral explanations in three languages and so we really worked intensely with the faces staff with the growing up healthy staff with the community action center to be able to push out these videos so that everybody had a good understanding of how to apply for these benefits i think it was in i don't know if it was in february of last year the
055pandemic ebt support program came out and so basically what that meant is that all families who qualify for free and reduced price lunch through the school district also automatically qualified for snap benefits and so families that qualify were able to get us a snap card and electronic benefits card and so they were able to supplement their family's food budget by being a part of this pebt program and that was just really important during the pandemic to make sure that we were leveraging every resource we could for faribault's families to be able to keep putting food on the table i guess that's a little less exciting maybe than actually going on the neighborhood and feeding people but nonetheless we were leveraging that system and then one of my colleagues fatima ponciano who couldn't be here tonight
056also did a lot of outreach to the latinx community and helped connect families with children 0-5 to again snap benefits but also to wick as well and then we really wanted to not reinvent the wheel adding the van was really important that was a huge way to bring food to the community but there were already other kinds of programs happening already some projects and initiatives that were addressing food insecurity in faribault and so we just really wanted to lift them up and be able to support them so we were able to provide a significant amount of food to the community action center for their backpack program the backpack program had actually ceased during the first part of the pandemic it was initially run by reliance bank and over the months they just realized they couldn't
057maintain it and so they've uh since handed that over to the community action center and since the beginning of the year the cac has begun working with these schools to food to feed kids over the weekend so kids can get a handful of meals that they can take home in a backpack that will sustain them over the weekend so we were really proud to be able to support that and then we also worked with a school district to identify families that were in need right around the holidays and so 40 farable public schools families were referred and so brenda was able to source a lot of those special meals through sodexo and then we were able to deliver them right to the homes and um and just make an impact that way over the longer
058break too it was good to to give families a little bit more food and then also we were just happy to support some existing or emerging initiatives with school-based pantries the farewell middle school has been running kind of a pantry clothes closet hybrid for a number of years now and so we were able to purchase some additional shelving and then also stack those shelves for them to kind of help them expand their reach and then similarly at jefferson they also with the community school there are really excited about starting a pantry of their own and so we were able to work with the social workers at both of those buildings to order shelves help them think through what kinds of food that they wanted to provide and have on hand for kids and families yeah
059so that's kind of oh and then i also have to say that the cac did provide some food to the verbal high school nest recently as well they wanted to make sure that uh that was mentioned also so just a great partnership um and supporting the good work that's already being done by faribault schools so when we got this grant we had three goals in mind first goal was to feed the kids and that's exactly what we did check check the other one was just that that impacting systems it's one thing to feed kids you know temporarily but it was really important that we come up with something that was sustainable and something that would um that would leave a lasting impact and i can say that i feel like we've done that brenda now
060has a van and this district has a van to be able to do more summer delivery of meals the the um the free and reduced price lunch that system has been um really um institutionalized i would say those videos are now available forever and ever and they're posted on the educational benefits website and again just being able to support and facilitate some of that school and community partnership will last into the future and to talk a little bit about sustainability for those of you that aren't aware fiscal year 22 brings an end to our five-year contract with our food service vendor so i am working on adding some things to the current rfp so that we can try and work on some of the sustainability issues and incorporate them into our operational food service program
061when we renew our contract for food service vendors in um for 23 and beyond there'll be more information to come around that here maybe the next morning wonderful thank you any other questions or comments that you might have for the at least the two ladies here where did the money come from great question it came from a grant called no kid hungry and it's a non-profit actually the nonprofit is called share our strength and they are a nonprofit organization nationwide that is working to address poverty and hunger across the united states so one of their projects is called no kid hungry and where do they get their money from i don't know is it from the government or corporations they do a lot of um donations people will donate money to no kid hungry so
062they can do these types of grants and projects other questions or comments well i know we've talked about this before but it is just incredible to see the numbers up there of how many meals we've served during the pandemic and just can't help but thank you enough for all of that um and i'm sure i'm speaking on behalf of many people in our community who appreciate all the work that the school district did during that time to keep our families fed so it's nice to see the numbers again i really appreciate that thank you any other questions or comments ms steve's any questions or comments no the numbers are really compelling so thank you for all the wonderful work mr bellingham yeah yeah thank you um thank you to the three of you and thank
063you to the teams of people you worked with i think it's pretty remarkable to think we live in a town of approximately 23 24 000 people and nearly three quarters of a million meals were served that's a herculean task and obviously it's helping to reduce hunger in our in our community so thank you for that and we greatly appreciate it thank you thank you very much i'm just going to ask the members of the audience if you would please try to hold your talking to a minimum certainly you can go out in the hallways and converse i would ask that you please mute your phones if you would we're trying our best to keep this meeting moving forward and just the distractions don't help so thank you very much we appreciate it okay that brings
064us to item eight the consent agenda i will entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda second we have a motion by mr olson a second by miss cavaliere on the consent agenda we do not have discussions so mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye jesse steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero thank you for that this brings us to item number nine which is retirements mary herzog is retiring after five and a half years with the farewell school district and so we would just like to thank her for her service we greatly appreciate it and if any board members want to comment or superintendent session otherwise i will entertain a motion to approve mr chair also move
065for approval we have a motion by mr bellingham do we have a second second any further discussion just a quick comment um we use ms herzog and we'll replace this too as a school district responsible for all the different schools and so we actually use our nursing services to help the the other parochial schools in town okay thank you for that any other discussion hearing none mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair the motion passes five zero thank you for that that brings us to item number ten the finance uh piece of the agenda item 10a is the minutes from our january 18th meeting um those are there and mr curtis maybe i'll ask you to
066come on up i'm sure we'll may have some questions for you so if you don't mind um in the minutes it's simply there for everybody to see you can ask questions at any time on these if you would like the next item is uh 10b the budget and mr gerdes i'll turn that over to you for the enrollment and financial reports so just a couple things to point out on the investment report the first attachment there one thing to look at is our cash balances you know dropped again by a couple million dollars the one thing to note uh the reason for that is we pay our first annual first calendar year debt payments which are due february 1st so typically they get paid on the 28th of the month to make sure that they
067land on time with the respective banks so that's the big reason for the cash drop which then eventually we build up over time again and uh get back to uh to a better a better figure uh the other thing to note is we did receive i believe it was 12 650 some dollars of interest for one of the renewals of the cd that we renewed at the end of december that we received in january so just wanted to point that out there on the investment report as well looking at the forecast 5 report um again you guys have uh the first page up here that looks something like this um again that really shows the uh the the continuum dip there um compared to what the projection is again the prediction was last year we
068didn't have a full payment last year so you can see that's down a little bit lower than the prior year's numbers as i mentioned last month we now for the for the most part have all of our budgets and everything approved with the department of education and so that we've been continually in the month of february here receiving a lot of that esther dollars that i mentioned last month that we hadn't had approval on as at that point in time so those are so some of the things that will you'll see an increase on this chart at the end of february looking through on the next page again kind of the same charts still the same story that our actual revenue projected to be 41 we're at about 38 and you can see that trend
069on most of the revenue reports as well even though you might have to blow them up and see the numbers a little bit um on the next page we look a little bit at expenditures again salary and benefits up year over year that's to be expected with how all the contracts work um and again we're pretty much right on point as has been stated numerous times in the past um our expenditure percentages don't really change a whole lot right on the last page i wanted to point out one of the things that you'll see in the comparative financial report in the last attachment if you look at our internal service fund as i mentioned at the end of december we were in the hole about four hundred 88 some dollars um at the end of
070december we have turned around and if you look at the right side of the report where it says enter internal service fund we are now in positive territory by seven thousand two hundred and ten dollars so we made about a ninety five thousand dollar comeback just in the month of january so any questions on the financial reports the graphs the numbers anything as it relates to that mr gerdes i believe um when you're done with the financial reports i think you skipped over the enrollment reports i'm not sure if you were mr cesker want to speak to that at all it's certainly in front of us we've had it we have an opportunity to review it but i thank you chad um so yeah again the report report the enrollment reports went from 79 last
071month down to 69 again as i mentioned last month that number will continue to drop every month based on pseo numbers that we are trying to account for you'll hear in my budget revised budget presentation shortly that we're hoping that we can end the calendar year 38 adm higher than what we budgeted for last june so that's kind of our targeted goal and that'll be what the rebuys budget is based on here shortly yeah so to emphasize that 69 that you see that's higher than what we had projected so that's actually good news okay board members any questions or comments from mr gerdes on these reports all right hearing on thank you we appreciate it this brings us to item 10 b3 donation gifts and donations excuse me this is resolution 22-15 accepting gifts and
072donations here on february 22nd 2022 number one donations for the nest at the faribault high school um craig johnson a bag of falcon gear clothing and number two uh once again donation for the nest at firm high school is from goodwill two bins of falcon gear clothing number two on this uh list is matching donations with the farewell booster club for the nest at the fairville high school first one is farable wrestling club a donation of 250 the second one is pat clark for fifty dollars next is dan and betsy carlin for fifty dollars next is chad and courtney wolf for two hundred fifty dollars next is farable rotary for one thousand dollars next is richard and marianne peterson for fifty dollars next on this list is mike and connie hart for fifty dollars next
073is gary and patricia bleichner for fifty dollars and lastly the farewell booster club for twenty five hundred dollars so once again um we thank all of these uh individuals and community members for their support uh in this case all of these donations being approved here tonight are for the nest and so with that um we'll entertain a motion to approve this and then do a roll call so is there a motion to approve gifts and donations resolution 22-15 so moved second we have a motion by mr olson in a second by ms cavaliere any further discussion hearing none mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves hi chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes 5-0 thank you for that um just
074one item here real quick mrs avril would you mind um i know we had a lot of people in each of the other rooms certainly this main room has cleared out if those people want to join us they're more than welcome to i don't know what the attendance out there still looks like thank you this brings us to item 10c items reviewed by the finance committee and are suggested for board approval 10c one is considered approval of the proposed rate increase for kids world for fiscal year 23. do i have a motion to approve uh this item so moved for a second we have a motion by mr i'm sorry we have a motion by miss cavaliere a second by mr bellingham um superintendent sesker is there anything you'd like to add to this that's
075not already on here nope everything is right there in front of you okay thank you do we have any further discussion yes mr olsen yeah i don't think it's the right time to increase fees in this program where we're not in good economic times inflation is high and then we're charging more for kids world so i'll be voting now on this okay thank you any other comments or discussion unfortunately i think my understanding is that as numbers go down in kids world we have still have the same infrastructure we need to run to be able to run the program kids world runs an incredibly important service for our community my own family my children went to kids world until they were old enough to stay home alone super grateful for this opportunity that we have
076it and unfortunately i think we need the funding to help continue to support running it so okay thank you any other comments or questions mr chairper for transparency those who don't have board book in front of their web but you can see the the increases uh 2021 22 say for the am is five dollars and sixty-five cents and the proposed fiscal year 23 is five dollars and eighty cents so 15 cents which comes to 2.7 percent increase as you go down the whole line there you're looking at anywhere from 15 cents to a quarter i guess three dollars for weekly uh half day so again with inflation costs rising et cetera i don't think i support the motion okay any other comments or questions okay um we do have a motion by ms cavalier a
077second by mr bellingham and mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson no cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye motion passes mr chairmotion passes four one okay thank you for that brings us to 10c 2 consider approval of the request for program slash budget edition once again this is in front of us and i will start with entertaining a motion to approve this do we have a motion i can move to i can start us off so moved okay thank you we have a motion by ms cavalier do we have a second i'll second we have a second by mr billingham um at this time further discussions or mr sesker would you like to explain a little more about this yeah it's just simply changing um
078the status of our op2 that does an outstanding job there to give her more responsibilities this does not affect the general fund and it's used the reserve funds in an appropriate way taking some of those ltfm dollars to offset some of that money to actually adequately provide her a salary that she deserves okay any other questions or comments board members we met and discussed this in facilities meeting first and unfortunately i couldn't be in finance on monday apologize for that um so this uh seemed like a logical step to make sure that um the team that's managing facilities is able to uh so that the um the op1 is that what it's called op2 op2 accurately reflects the work that actually needs to be done and is being done correct yep okay thank you for
079that miss cavalier any other comments or questions during this discussion time okay hearing none uh we have a motion on the floor by ms cavalier second by mr billingham mr billingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves hi chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero okay thank you for that this brings us to item 10c 3. consider approval of fiscal year 2021-2022 revised budget once again i will entertain a motion to approve this so second we have a motion by mr olson in a second by ms cavaliere are there other discussion or questions or comments during this discussion time and mr gerdes would you like to walk us through anything here somebody stole my mic so yeah just a couple
080highlights on the revised budget if we want to uh flip through to uh the fourth page where it says highlights from the 2122 um budget we'll just highlight a few mr gertie sorry i'm going to ask is there any way that anybody can pull this up online while we're doing this or or does that not work sorry we just have a fair crowd here in the audience and some people online that might be able to help track this conversation yeah can you do both or it's one or the other thank you it's a good thing you're here tonight the technology guy i think i got it casey what's that there it is i don't know if it's big enough casey i got up there no i'm sorry scream yeah how about these other screens in
081the back because these people can't see this for sure up here all right i don't know if i can do that that's that's asking a lot okay sorry i get two of them but i can't mr gersch i apologize for interrupting it's just good for people to be able to see this once again this is linked online to the website anybody can see it no she's got it on casey as we go through these tonight we'll likely have a little bit more of this if possible so um yeah but we lost it up here i took it off because he's got control over him now okay yeah even if we can get it on those three mr olsen you got in yours you got them yeah okay yeah i think that's good that's good right
082there thank you appreciate it and maybe i don't know if you want to want mine driving because there's thank you so um again if we turn to page four i just just want to highlight just a couple of the changes to the to the revised budget as as you can see uh in this list there's a lot of different esr funds that have been either modified or added to the revised budget i'm just going to briefly go through some of those because some of those you have heard mentioned and i just want to make sure you're all aware of that we have a hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars for mental health needs that came out of the sr3 budget 191 thousand dollars for testing covet testing rob was fortunate to get a couple buckets
083of money out of the sr3 to the tune of about 165 thousand dollars when we approved the adopted budget back in june we didn't know about the 2.45 increase that the state legislature gave us to the formula so again that amounts to just over 520 dollars um as we fine-tune the special ed budget we added about two hundred thousand dollars in the special ed budget and as i mentioned earlier in my presentation when we were talking about enrollment numbers um we added 38 adm that we're projecting to be above budget at the end of june so that roughly is 260 thousand dollars what we see in the next three lines are just really adjustments um the sr2 and the sr3 buckets we had the adopted budget but they've been fine-tuned multiple times between june and
084as i sit here today so because they were already in the budget you will see um additional dollars on both sides of that so that you will um notice that there whatever we changed in revenue obviously gets changed in expenses for a net of zero okay as we move down to the bottom on some of the expenditures we had roughly six hundred and fifty one thousand dollars above and beyond the existing budget between all of the salary compensation packages that that had were approved this year earlier this year by the board and so those split out into obviously all the different bargaining groups that settled in 22. we have just some minor salary and benefit changes from restricted to unrestricted so they move out of a specific restricted bucket or grant and end up in
085the unrestricted budget some of those were admin costs that came out of the grant as well as the faces position that we took out of the general fund and then the uh the one at the bottom was a restricted revenue of 91 187 for operating capital um and that was approved by the board uh a couple months ago um as we look down um out of our irrevocable trust so for fun 45 again nothing really changed there just want to point out that we are going to take out the expenses which is about 148 to 150 000 annually and the balance of that is the implicit rate that we use to take out of the budget moving down to the food service fund not a lot of changes there we are operating on the seamless
086summer option and so really we knew that going into the calendar year so there's not a lot of changes with the food service at least at this point in time community education they've got a couple grants that were renewed so you grow your own grant that you've heard them talk about the no kid hungry grant that we just presented on a little while ago was in fund for and and that brought a little bit of extra revenue and expense again because it was a grant into fund for and then um preschool was awarded a hundred thousand almost a hundred and one thousand dollars in additional or funds that went directly for preschool programming in for the summer and that went again into community education if you look down the building construction fund as you recall
087last year we recorded all the the cop revenue in fiscal year 21. so all we're doing is continuing to spend down the expenses as most of you have seen the the building looks really really nice and and be a great great addition to roosevelt and we'll continue to spend those funds down for the rest of the project we should have some leftover funds in excess of probably 500 000 and one of the things that they're looking at doing is upgrading the hvac system i believe wasn't that right a new boiler boiler thank you richard boiler and then a couple other smaller maintenance things that we're going to do with the balance of those funds internal service fund and the irrevocable trust fund that no big changes with those in the revised budget if you flip
088to the next page where's my driver again this chart just really shows that it's really obviously hard to see up there but it shows where we ended last year at um i can't really read this 3102 i think it's 33 over 302 thank you and then where we're down to is 32.69 in the revised budget on the next page again just really uh some summary documents and you've seen these spreadsheets before this one is a recap of the adopted budget um that was approved in june and you can see that we were projecting at that point in time in the unreserved or unrestricted budget uh 335 000 net loss that's what was approved back in june if you flip over a couple pages you'll see the revised budget which brings us up a couple hundred
089thousand dollars with a loss of about 88 362 as it stands today with all of those items as i mentioned earlier taking into account the other details back here are just some summary pages for the different funds you can take a look at those as you wish they all really just tie back out to the summary sheet that's on the screen right now but if you have any questions in any of this i would welcome those now try and answer them board members any comments miss steve's any comments superintendent sesker is there anything you would like to add to this just a big thank you to scott to put this all together it's again good news we're going the right direction with the budget this year okay so we have a motion by mr olson
090in a second by miss cavalier last call for any questions or comments okay mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero thank you for that this brings us to item 10 c4 consider approval of the fiscal year 2022-2023 enrollment projections i will entertain a motion to approve so mood second we have a motion by mr olson the second by miss cavalier mr gerdes or mr cesker would you like to address this yeah i can just talk about it first and then certainly ask for details from scott but we did our enrollment projections you can see that from where we are currently we are averaging out at about three thousand one hundred
091forty four point five students which is a a drop of enrollment i didn't do the math scott uh if you look at the previous page or the next page from 22 revenue to 23 adopted uh you do 32.69 minus 31.45 124. thank you 124 students less because of the graduation rate we're graduating 300 kids we're getting about 200 kindergarteners so then you obviously have a reduction of students so that's the the reason why the reduction mr sesser and mr gerdes to get to this enrollment projection just um you know the short version if you will how do you get there you you use many different models and you kind of sum them together and figure out an average is that correct so yeah i can i can go maybe a little bit farther into detail
092without without taking too much time so if you flip to the front page i believe it's the top page in the in your document that you're looking at you'll see a one two three and four across the top uh the number one model is a model that is developed by ailers i mean you are familiar with them as our financial representative and so they have a tool that we can use and so on their tool we have four different options both straight averages weighted averages and their model really is based on a kindergarten enrollment kind of where we're at today moving forward right so that's how they base their their model section two is a model that is used out of our analytical software and again they base theirs based on birth rates and so
093they pull those that data off the department of education website and that's kind of how they start their model very similar yeah a little bit different models three and four so model three is something that is based right directly from the department of education pull it right off their website and and what their best guess is for fiscal year 23 and fiscal year excuse me and number four is based off of our accounting software that we use smart finance and they have a model that they use and that projection when i calculated that i used a different method for calculating kindergarten is based on capture rate so historically what percent of of kindergarten kindergartners do we use here so kind of three different models of calculating kindergarten and then you throw out the high and
094the low and you take the average of the of the the balance so again looking at the two ways take out the high and low you get 13 or 31.45 you take all the averages you get 31 44 and a half pretty close you're less than one off so that's how we got it now if you go out further years if you look at the last page uh you can see that that number varies you get a little bit off um we're off by for the fiscal year 24 and 7 and again 11 for the subsequent years so that's why we only do this one year at a time thank you mr olsen so in other words a good guess i've said that before pretty much yes yeah you go through it's a good gift
095right right now you're talking about kindergarten but is there a reason why we're losing kids is it because of less birth rate or they're not bringing their kids in at second grade fourth grade eighth grade eleventh grade are they going someplace else homeschooling so so the one thing i can say to your question if you look at kindergartner birth rates they've been pretty steady you're over the last i went back six years okay and our capture rate of those kindergarteners varies between i think it was 68.3 percent and just south of 72 over the last six years with the i think it was 71.7 percent being uh fiscal year 22 so the highest year you know that we have with the big kindergarten class so that richard has been pretty consistent over the last like
096i say six years so birth rates are consistent our capturing are consistent i think we're just getting this year a few more kindergartners to come to farable schools than we have in the past and that's why you see that increase of 38 40 you know for the kindergartners over what we projected this time when andrew spoke last year so 28 is going someplace else right where are they going and why are they going well a lot of them go to non-public schools a lot of them open and roll out as to why i can't intelligently speak to that you know maybe they're on the on the boundary side i know todd if you have any yeah we've got that data and we can get that print out to you but we can't explain all those
097tonight we're going to have i mean we'll be here for three more hours we can talk about where they're going open and rolling we offer there's six different high schools in the community there's a successful stem program nurse tran does a great job so i would prefer to get that data to you later i don't i just don't have any do some type of marketing we talked about it before we want to market ourselves yeah we've been doing that for the last probably three years i believe i don't i mean we've seen matt steichen has done just an outstanding job of doing online yeah and it's helped we've gotten some more even the the seven period day and the pathways that we created in the middle school to help with the high school all those
098have been very very successful so we're making we're making inroads and just one other thing too is we we did hire that outreach individual that works out at mckinley oh that's right and she's been agreeing with esther funds and she's really been phenomenal trying to do a district-wide coordination of kindergarten enrollment processes and and some additional marketing richard to your to your point too so okay you got 28 out there in our community and why are they go like i said where are they going why that's well we can pull that report off of the the mde website it's like six pages or seven pages you know fine print so there's there's probably a hundred different schools now whether they're all kindergartners i don't know that off top my head but there's a lot of
099different places where people are going for various reasons right because other districts are at the same time they're meeting they're saying is it 28 is going someplace else like northfield no we're we lose more kids going out than coming in and that's what we have to stop we have been yep we've been correcting it with this pr and all the things that you guys have been approving lately it's been actually very positive for some of the things that you guys have done mr billy mr chair i have a point of order we have a motion and a second to approve the enrollment projections uh with i believe a few of these points are not germane to the motion even though well noted and it has been noted that that discussion can continue down the road
100or at another work session or another meeting but i i would like to again point out that we do have a motion in a second to approve the enrollment projections okay thank you any further comments or questions good way to cut off debate mr chair point of order oh jesus christ this isn't a time for miss debate mr olson we just need to vote on that motion and mr saskar heard you we talk about this topic frequently and it would be great to see updated numbers and information so um okay so we do have a motion we do have a second uh mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves hi chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes 5-0 thank you
101for that that brings us to item number 11 the policy committee minutes from february 1st 2022. thank you mr gers would anybody on that policy committee like to briefly touch on on what took place i can start in anybody else feel free to chime in these are basically policies that have changed as a result of msba reviewing them and their legal teams reviewing them to match the statutes that coincide with each of these different policies okay board members on there any would you like to add anything or we'll move on it's pretty normal business pretty pretty normal just updates yep numbers and yeah exactly some of the terminology very okay pretty basic so that brings us and once again that the the policy minutes are attached for anybody that wants to see that that brings
102us to item i'm sorry 11a excuse me 11a which is the consider approval of the following policies typically we do all of these in one motion and i will be consistent with that unless somebody asked to pull one policy out but consider approval of the following policies 413 harassment and violence policy 507 corporal punishment policy 515 protection and privacy of pupil records and policy 612.2 education of homeless children i will entertain a motion to approve the four of those so moved we have a motion by ms cavalier do we have a second we have motion by ms cavalier a second by mr olson any further discussion on these policies hearing none mr uh bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavalier aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe
103aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero thank you for that that brings us to item number 11b the following policies are presented for the first reading policy 534 is the school meals policy and policy 404.1 is the staff admission to school events it's just a report so i would just open this up once again these are attached and i'd open up for any questions or comments by any board members once again this is the first reading they'll come back if there's no issues or requests and next month we will look for an action item okay hearing none we will move on to policy i'm sorry to item 11 c which is the consider approval for rescission of the following policies this is an action item and once again we will take all of
104these with one action unless anybody wants to pull out one policy first one is policy 304.11 severance pay the second one is policy 401.4 vacancies within the system policy 402.9 is evaluation policy 404.7 is leave of absence policy 405.6 is in-service education administration administrative procedures policy 405.7 is employee assistance program policy 454.2 is holidays vacations and sick leave and policy 454.5 is workers compensation compensation insurance i apologize um with that said i will entertain a motion for approval for all of those policies also move second we have a motion for the approval of the rescission by mr billingham and a second by ms cavalier any further discussion on these yeah just real quickly these are old 1970s policies outdated they're all in the contract so there's no reason to have them thank you for that
105clarification mr sesqui any other comments or questions anyone hearing none we have a motion by mr bellingham a second by ms cavalier mr bellingham will you please do a role john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves i'm chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero okay thank you for that that brings us to item 12 12 a uh 12 is other matters and 12 a is considered approval of resolution 22-16 [Music] which is the filling school board vacancy by appointment i will entertain a motion to approve so mood second we have a motion by mr olson in a second by ms cavalier further discussion on this as everybody can see the the person selected is miss leanne lechtenberg who is here in the audience with us and so
106we appreciate your willingness to serve and you joining us tonight so thank you um would any of the uh board members that were on that committee like to say anything or or not um i open it up to you if you would like to mr chair i would if i so may so first of all i'd like to thank uh mrs averall for the organization of uh the applications and the sending out of the questionnaire of the questions and getting the data to us uh second i'd like to thank there's three there's a subcommittee it was three of us mr olsen mrs cavalier and myself and so we met via zoom after reviewing we had quite about a week or so i think to review the applications and things that we met via zoom and
107talked and went over strengths and weaknesses etc and came to a unanimous [Music] decision consensus if you would with that lastly i'd like to thank all of them all of the those who applied your your application was valued in great answers it's interesting to see the depth of knowledge and interest within the district so i thank you for that uh very much so that okay thank you for that yes mr leanne come up she sure can she sure can you have a couple words maybe well richard i wasn't ready for that but um i didn't realize you guys were as popular as you were tonight i pulled up into the parking lot expecting to come right in and um i'm impressed with how this was all handled and our community for coming out and and
108sharing their concerns and i look forward to serving with with all of you and for serving this community wonderful thank you that's awesome we're glad to have you on board thanks for that we're almost on board yes almost and then you'll be at the next voting meeting to be sworn in right yes um no not necessarily she will be at the march 28th meeting so right yes so if we have a special meeting in between now and then which we do on march 7th she cannot participate in that until the 30-day window elapses due to state law but yes march 28th and i think that's what you meant yeah that's what i do yeah all right yes i just wanted to say a couple more comments um i think it's just important i say out
109loud while we're in a public meeting it was really important to mr bellingham mr olsen and i that we followed exactly the same process that we followed when we had our last opening and when we ended up with mr robicheaux on the school board i think given how complex times have been it was particularly important that we followed the same precedent we had set that time and i wanted to make sure everybody heard that kind of publicly i have to just echo mr bellingham we were incredibly oppressed that we had so many applicants and people care so deeply about this work a variety of people and it's just really nice to see people engaged including like you're saying people coming here tonight so and i also would like to say publicly that i think mr
110bellingham mr olsen and i surprised ourselves that we came to consensus uh together uh to bring forth a unanimous recommendation um regarding this so that was a very enjoyable uh meeting for us for me i won't speak for everybody yeah it didn't take too long about 20 minutes you did a good job i guess it was time yeah no it went well went well it was good but it's nice to have candidates some districts can't fill positions no one steps up at all but here we had i think seven yes seven so that's great which is good so thank you and welcome and and uh we hope to see you at the meetings in between and then on the 28th um we'll go from there so thank you thank you and once again i would
111just like to thank uh miss cavalier mr bellingham and mr olsen for leading that charge and taking care of that subcommittee greatly appreciated and to echo their thoughts to thank all seven uh people that were willing to serve on the board and express interest and with that this november we obviously have election and we have four seats that will be up for election and so i would encourage everybody if they still have an interest to run at that time and consider running so okay um what's that we need to vote emotions yup yup yup yup we're getting there um we have a motion by mr olson we have a second by miss cavaliere um any further comments on this okay hearing none uh mr billingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye
112courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes 5-0 thank you miss steves if you have anything you want to add please unmute and chime uh chime in if you're by any chance raising your hand physically or a zoom raise your hand i apologize is i'm not seeing it so please just make sure you chime in if you have something you would like to say okay thank you this brings us to item 12 b consider approval of boys golf and girls golf cooperative sponsorship with bethlehem academy i will entertain hang on a second here yes i did say that right i'm sorry i saw an extra attachment so i thought i was wrong there but yes this is the consider approval of boys golf and girls
113golf cooperative sponsorship with bethlehem academy um i will entertain a motion to approve this so would second we have a motion by mr olsen in a second by ms cavaliere um superintendent sesker or i believe mr kleiner might be on is there anything that either of you would like to add that is not in front of us um it certainly appears this is numbers based on our program but i'll i'll leave it up to you mr kleiner or mr sesker yeah yeah it's just strictly numbers go ahead kevin you go okay try to be brief uh thanks for considering this uh school board members uh the school board appreciation week thank you for all the work with you um this is yeah it's clearly uh numbers based to offer the program at the level it
114should be at um our conference schedules varsity and j development the letter indicators we haven't been filling out all the spots you know minimums you can each fully would be 12 golfers and we have not been anywhere close to that in last few years so this is to sustain our current program and hopefully grow it in the long run versus going in a slower downward spiral like it has been so this is rejuvenated hopefully uh to grow participation uh and hopefully someday we have a separate middle school health program versus being a seventh through fall currently as for that kids are with and can be against the appropriate ability and features any questions or comments sure love to answer uh i have a question i'm hearing the right things uh but did we follow our
115tree that we established the yeah the protocol that we had yep yep followed it mr million well that's the question i was going to ask so for the members of the public who weren't aware this there is a procedure practice as we said with this as to how we determine if the if we co-op with everyone and within that practice my understanding is we look at our numbers and we don't have enough participation numbers then we seek out other schools within the area if they wish to co-op or participate in that sport and it sounds like that procedure and that practice was followed awesome thank you for clarifying for me mr billingham mr kleiner um yeah i don't want to bird walk too far on this but this does play into this however it doesn't
116necessarily deal with bethlehem academy uh does this preclude us from potentially co-opting in this sport in these sports with any other schools if they were to reach out no no just the high school process for that is to dissolve the current one and then add a reform a new one with whoever that may be it's not exclusive [Music] okay thank you any other questions or comments anyone all right we have a motion by mr olson a second by miss cavalier hearing no further discussion mr bellingham will you please will roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves hi chad wolfe aye mr chair the motion passes five zero okay thank you for that that brings us to item number 12c consider approval of strength finders proposal for school board professional
117development i will entertain a motion to approve this i'm so so moved i was going to say a second we have a motion by miss cavalier do we have a second oh second we have a second by mr bellingham um superintendent sesker would you like to add anything to this other than what's in front of us i know miss salmon was here [Music] two weeks ago two weeks ago thank you i think the biggest difference here is potentially doing a four-hour session versus spread out over four meetings and um anyway i'll turn it over to you yeah and she also included the cost of fifteen hundred dollars there so that is also included okay um the the one other thing that i would like to add uh if this passes is i would make a
118recommendation that we do this in april um and we do it then uh for the primary reason that uh miss lechtenberg will then be um part of our board and i think it'd be very um important that she be part of those conversations to um just a great learning environment and you know with all of us other board members and in in you know mutually so with that other comments or questions any other discussion i was i was pretty anxious about the cost of this and sort of approving it tonight and so i was really relieved to see how low the costs are for us to do um some professional professional development for the year which i think is is really important that we we participated so i was really relieved to see the price
119so i appreciate that um from from lisa um so thank you mr billy mr chair family so mr cesco would you remind us so the funding for this the board has professional development funds within the budget set aside correct yeah and i haven't looked at it kathy do you have any we'd have to go back and check but you're right we do have professional development through msba all the different things that you do through the phase one phase two phase three phase four meetings things like that i haven't looked at it to see where it is right now but it's it's in your budget it's with when and we have it et cetera yep yeah you have it it's part of it great thank you are there comments or okay um we have a motion
120by mrs cavalier in a second by mr bellingham um no further discussion mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham i courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves i'm chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero uh okay thank you that was item 12c we are now on to 12d consider approval to change the mask procedure from required to strongly recommend it i will entertain a motion to approve this so mood second we have a whoop sorry cassie we're gonna give it to cassie sure give it to cassie okay i'm impressed she can do it from the from the other location uh we uh mr olsen made the motion miss uh i'm sorry i have to change this mr olsen yeah mr olson made the motion miss steve's
121uh made the second um superintendent cesar would you like to talk a little bit more about this again pretty self-explanatory when you read it our numbers have gone down they're not as low as what we'd really like them to be but we feel that right now it's an appropriate time to to lift the mass mandate any other further discussion but the trend is going down i mean it's a yeah yeah it's election rapidly right last week it was at 550 or so per 100 000 i think today it was 250 per 100 000 something like that there's there's actually a little link that i've i've sent you guys this before that you can just jump on there and you can actually track it yeah we'd like to get it down below 50. that's ideal and
122hopefully that trend is going to continue that way any other comments or questions mr chair if i may so also i believe in the resolution what we're voting on it does say um if the numbers if this were to spike again go back up then we would go back could would or should could go back to yeah there's two big criteria in there if our ili so it's not just colbit we use influenza like illnesses and that's pretty standard if it hits five percent or higher then we have the option of going back to masking or the other thing is if we see a significant number of staff that are gone that we can't have school then we also have the option of going to distance learning we just don't if we don't have humans
123there then we obviously can't teach kids yep there are some caveats in there any other yes what was the opinion of the icc committee oh good question thank you icc team was i would say the sense i got they didn't vote on it because they want you guys to vote on this but the sense i had is that the ic team icc team was also supportive of doing this to the majority not everybody but the majority of the staff with with that what were the negative comments if there was any like why keep them i mean yeah the main one was that the we had set a threshold of 50 per 100 000 and that was one of the things that similar to what the letter was that mr bellingham just read is that why
124can't we just hang on for another three weeks um why would we do this now so those were some of the the if you i don't know if they're negative comments those were the other the other side of the comments that people had very very justifiable people were they're still people concerned that their kids are not getting um vaccinated uh the vaccine's not out for all kids and they're also concerned that not all the adults have been vaccinated yet either and they could therefore then carry the care of the virus so there's a really good discussion i'd say but overwhelmingly i think most of it was pretty positive in that it's time for a change and we're we're ready to to make this optional for staff and students yep any other comments i think it's
125pretty clear how i felt about this in the fall it has been incredibly difficult to know that the number was 50 and to watch the numbers all winter and to feel like there was no end in sight was there movement uh was there a recommendation from anyone on the was there a group from the ict who wanted us to keep masks until the end of the year or was most of it about till spring break like you said no i think most of it was i'm just trying to recap i have it recorded too so you can you're certainly welcome to the recording but i would say i mean we we really respect rice county mt mdh and the tremendous work that they do to help us out i would say that was the scientific
126angle was to look at the data and illustrate the reasons why it's still important to mask and keep the mask mandated the other side of it i think there's just been a frustration with staff and students that they're still wearing the mask and let's make it optional and then also the other p piece that somebody pointed out was you know we've we've the people who have done who have had the shots who have have done who have boosted they can still mask and um at now it's it's the person who's not vaccinated and not wearing the master at risk even though the other ones are still at risk too but they just felt that there was a a sway now to the people who have had the vax vaccinations and the masking and then why
127are they being put in this situation because everybody else is not doing that same thing but like i said a lot of conversation went all over when i asked the comment about how do you feel about masking the majority of the people said we're ready to let it go now and and then make it optional mr chair yeah recently in the news that people are saying that cdc they're with holding data from the nation and so we weren't like the counties were not getting the correct information is that what you're hearing out there too no you know about that yeah they're not telling us the truth yeah i've worked with you know the the people we work with at the county have i mean all the way from sarah at the county but they get
128the information from cdc but we also do our own analysis county-wide and city-wide and even the school if you look at our data school-wide that has gone down dramatically too so as far as the politics i don't i don't get into that whole piece of it i just listen to what our county workers are telling us and giving us the great advice that they're getting and i have no reason not to trust them they're they're just tremendous people but they're based their information on cdc guidelines well they're they're professionals they can it's like if you go to a house i mean if somebody said the house is okay and you go in there and you inspect it find something different you're going to probably change that opinion i'd say the same thing happens with our
129rice county workers if they're going through data and it's not correct they're going to make that change and and respectfully um illustrate that to us so i i really do trust that what rice county's telling us i'm incredibly grateful for all of their work over the last several years been really tough time appreciate the conversation um i i would just like to briefly thank the students and the staff for um going through with the the mass policy the way it was and and you know obviously it's not the the most convenient and the most comfortable but uh they did it in what i would say flying colors so thank you very much to all the students and staff um with that said we do have a motion by mr olson in a second by mrs
130steves uh mr bellingham will you please do a role john bellingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motions passes five zero thank you uh just on that front superintendent sessor since that was approved there will be a communication sent out tomorrow morning later tonight depends what time we get out of here if it's morning or night so let's see if matt's online uh matt will be oh here are he is online he's in person online he's right there yeah thanks man you had already notified families that this was coming though mr cesca right we got an email last week about that yeah we sent that out thank you um we just want to make sure uh the next item is 12e consider approval of
131resolution 22-14 in support of the congressional idea or idea full funding act i will entertain a motion to approve this so moved yes second yes yes yes second thank you uh we have a motion by mr bellingham i think that was a second by miss cavaliere a lot of seconds superintendent sesker would you just briefly touch on this yeah since 1972 the federal government passed a law called individual with disabilities act where all students with all disabilities should be equally served in our school district and thanks to rob dana and his team of our special education staff they just do an outstanding job with these kids and they deserve every single kid deserves a right to have an education the only the only difficulty is that there's a huge gap between the funding and every
132year it's gotten worse and worse and worse so to educate the students in our school district with special needs we have what's called a cross subsidy and what that means is i have to take money out of the general fund in order to provide services for for these great kids and 20 years ago the cross substitute might have been maybe a hundred thousand dollars and it was pretty easy to supplant some of the general fund money this year alone it's 5.3 million dollars so i have to take 5.3 million dollars out of our general fund and we have to send that over to our our special education department so we can educate all of our kids in farewell and if you noticed um when when uh scott pointed out the changes in the budget did
133you see the 2.45 percent number do you remember what that was 529 thousand dollars that was a revenue that we received from the state guess where it went it didn't go to general ed didn't go to regular programs didn't go to anything like that it went to help offset the cross subsidy for special education so this resolution would put the federal government's feet to the fire and have them come up with that money for us so we don't have to go out and continually try to pass operating levies so this is a great resolution msba supports it they'd like us to approve it in order to show a strong stance that this is really really important for all school districts in minnesota not just not just fairville so just to add on a little of
134the history and it's written in this resolution so anyone who can see this is um can read about this online but when idea was first enacted as federal legislation um i believe the federal government was supposed to fund 40 percent of special education programs and this resolution says that 45 years later the current federal investment in idea is less than 14 which means for 45 years after saying the federal government would fund up to 40 percent of the national um of the costs we're only funded at 14 and it's never been 40 correct no no you laugh at me i'm just clarifying that um so one more question can you explain what happens when you make a resolution like this to some what does msba or the state do with it yeah it's very similar
135to when we did the ltfm thing the msba will bring it they'll bring it to the lobbyist and show see all these school districts have approved this resolution we should really consider funding at least a partial part of the cross subsidy for all schools in minnesota it would be a really i mean it would just be the greatest thing since sly spread if this could be the last thing that i got through yes yeah i brought this up as a delegate many years ago yep as a and everybody of course agreed so i didn't i don't know where it went that's what every when you talk to politicians too they all agree it's a great idea to fully fund it but when it gets into the you know the legislation you start putting the dollars
136together then then nobody seems to support it but you shouldn't have to vote on it should be a permanent yes yeah it should be should be here and these kids i mean the kids that we educate we're doing a great job with with our students special needs and again i just want to emphasize that we we will educate these kids no matter what so okay any other items of discussion on this thank you for that information in the conversation we do have a motion by mr billingham in a second by ms cavalier mr billingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes 5-0 thank you for that that brings us to item 12 f consider
137approval of the 2021-2023 fea memorandum of agreement we'll entertain a motion to approve this also move i can second we have a motion by mr bellingham a second by miss cavaliere um superintendent sesker would you share a little more on this please yeah actually john did a good job of summarizing it the last time you just want to summarize it it's a mutual agreement with both fe fea and administration and boards it's it's an agreement so if a teacher well this one back in the used to be the rule 90 but if a teacher reaches retirement a retirement qualifications or criteria i guess what i'm trying to say is the district would contribute their portion in the teachers portion of the tra and 400 a month toward insurance uh so the teacher can retire and
138with that so say if a teacher need wants to retire in november january uh april for the end of the school year what it does is it allows to fill that position at the beginning at the beginning of june july august the beginning before that uh crunch the numbers it probably saves the district money by the time we're done that it's not a replacement and provides continuity within the classroom of having the same teacher throughout which is it was very crucial there yeah it's a benefit for both fba and for the for the district any other comments or questions regarding this ms joachim did i do okay on that explanation okay thank you yeah i we should thank nicole for yeah he's gonna say she's doing all this so thanks thank you uh okay we
139have a motion by mr bellingham in a second by ms cavaliere hearing no further discussion mr bellingham will you please do a real call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero thank you for that uh the next item is item 12g consider approval of the esser reductions that's in front of us and i would entertain a motion to approve so moved i'm having as excited about that one as i was the last one we have a motion by miss cavalier do we have a second i'll second we have a second by mr bellingham uh superintendent session would you like to walk us through this yeah so and i don't know if you want to put that on the big
140screen too yeah i think that'd be great yeah so people can see that um yeah thanks casey i know we have um for the for the community and the the people here in the room we have reviewed this um we saw it for the first time i believe a couple weeks ago at the work session so i can while casey is putting that up there i can explain briefly basically esther is a grant and whenever the grant goes away then we take away those services for it the main reason for the grant was to increase student learning and we saw from the last presentation from tracy and others that that is working and then also we had to help support some of our mental health social emotional pieces and things like that from the district
141for this this year there's also some one-time expenditures that we had in the esther amount that would that helped us with some of our our spaces and so when you have those expenditures and then when those that revenue goes away like the sr will go away in a couple of years then we have to take away those expenditures and so our suggestions were on there you can see the elementary reductions for the staff these were the teachers that were added last year and then so we would pull those back now so the class sizes will go up a bit and then also we had a social worker in that esser dollar amount and then we would take that piece out we still have about five million dollars worth of esser expenditures in next year and
142then you guys will have to address that that following spring so again it's part of the grant and so when the grant starts going away then you have to start pulling those expenditures away it's an apples-to-apples comparison but i will say that the investments that we did make we are seeing some good gains in our students it's going to take a while that pandemic and the distance learning that we did for about a year that had a lot of effects on students not only academically but also mental mentally and socially so these are our recommendations you guys have seen this if you have any specific questions i i'm sure we can bring any of the cabinet members to help explain some of those but those would be the recommendations to to make those adjustments for
143next fall thank you for that superintendent sesker board members questions mr chair so these employees knew exactly what was coming right yeah and likewise the follow-up the five million that would have expenses for next year and the year after they also know that those are part of the esr grant other questions or comments has the team already decided how the nine where the nine teachers are coming from or do we still have are there sort of criteria to figure out where where and who and what schools or is it kind of evenly distributed it is based on the numbers of that we put into esser so we put more money into elementary so likely likewise you have to pull more expenditures out of elementary oh and some of the additions in those is that what
144you're talking about no i understand that it says there's nine elementary reductions so yeah i assume that's going to match sort of how they were allocated into the schools yes exactly yep yep and we give the principals a little bit of leeway to put in if there's a higher class size and one then they can go ahead and ship those things around yep that's correct were these devised by the cabinet or you or the principals it was all we started with leadership and then we brought in the principals and the building leads and they all had feedback and gave us input on this so it is one big team and we all left out of the room agreeing on did it go down to the staff level or not well it does that's kind of
145where you guys are getting some that'll be the next option because these are grants and there's really not much wiggle room for the grants uh the next one would be that question that would come up and we can talk a little bit about that but these are basically tied to the grant right other questions comments okay hearing none we do have a motion by ms cavaliere in a second by mr bellingham to consider the approval of the esser reductions with that mr bellingham will you please do a roll call john billingham aye courtney cavaliere aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair the motion passes five zero thank you um the next item on here is going to be item 12h general fund reductions and uh to be honest with you
146i think we should maybe take about a five or six minute break before that just to stretch and refresh if you need to um i think just to that's a going to be some really good hard difficult conversation and so i would entertain a motion for about a five six minute recess we'll reconvene at 8 20. so moved second john sorry sorry that was miss cavalier and then mr bellingham yeah uh any discussion hearing none uh mr billingham you have to do a roll call oh i'm sorry forget about that okay he's ready to go yeah literally uh john billingham aye courtney cavalier aye richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye mr chair of the motion passes five zero okay so we'll take about a five six minute recess thanks chad for thinking
147of that that's because i had to go that's right he's ready to go i've been sitting here since um we will move back into our regular session and with that i will entertain a motion to convene the recess and move back into session second we have a motion by mr olson a second by ms cavalier any further discussion mr billingham john billing am i courtney cavalier hi richard olson aye cassie steves aye chad wolfe aye motion passes mr chair five zero okay this brings us to item 12h general fund reductions uh this is simply a discussion and with that um superintendent sesker will turn it over to you and you can go from there yeah thank you very much board members this is our first glance at the general fund reductions that we um are
148examining and discussing tonight and i have nicole tracy and scott up here they've prepared a presentation it's involved a lot of time a lot of hours a lot of great feedback from not only you guys but also from our staff so this is discussion uh you will probably see some other uh folks not chiming in but sending you information about where they feel the priorities are and that's great and we like to see those emails too from from staff members if they have other suggestions as we go through this whole process but this is your first glance at it based on the parameters that you gave us we set out to make reductions in the amount of 1.5 million dollars of the 1.9 million deficit and also an option to look at 1 million dollars
149so with that i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to whoever's going to start so and why don't you guys introduce yourselves just so the audience knows who you are and what your positions are so i'm scott curtis the director of finance and operations tracy corcoran the director of teaching and learning and i'm nicole yolk i'm human resources director so we're going to start with just a recap of the last one here just real quick um we just went through and you guys just approved these just wanted to just remind you everybody here that you know half of these reductions roughly are just one time um reductions right so no staffing uh involved with the with the top half of this report so if we move into general fund reductions there is what
150nicole is calling phase two give her the credit um just as a review so last time we were together and we talked about this miss corcoran led you guys through a sticky note exercise is what i call it probably more formal term than that to come up with some ideas right and um the next day i believe miss corcoran led the entire leadership team in in this room of 40 some people through that same exercise and so what we did there is we took your ideas and we took all of the leaderships ideas and we accumulated them into one big list and then from there kind of took out duplicates uh took out the things that were really non-financial related and uh came up with all the ideas that then we we thought uh started
151sorting through so to to todd's point as he mentioned earlier it was a complete group effort on on all of our parts and then again to shoot for that target of the 1.5 million is directed by the board last time we met so again you guys have seen this slide uh probably about an hour ago um again just looking at the enrollment projections um and and our our downward trend um the other that the next slide here just to talk about a little bit is we we showed this slide a couple different iterations at the last board meeting this slide is a very similar layout it assumes a assumption of two percent which we know is real for for this year or for next year excuse me and then zero zero zero moving across um
152and then the top half of that slide shows budget reductions in the amount of one million dollars and then you can see what the deficit would be for uh 23 and beyond and again what the fund balance would be both in terms of dollars and in terms of percentage right below that on the bottom half of the screen we have again the 1.5 million dollars and again you can see what the fund balance would do uh would be both in terms of dollars and percentages again as we travel below the one other thing i did want to point out that todd mentioned earlier um you know when you hear the two percent or 2.5 percent you know that's that's only about two percent on top of about 60 of our revenue in the general fund
153right it's only on the general fund formula it is not on any restricted buckets of money or any grants or anything else where we get usually zeros so that being said i'm going to turn this over to miss nicole and she'll talk about the next couple slides thank you scott so as scott alluded to uh just a few minutes ago we did conduct that same uh that same project with our leadership team that we did with you folks on february 7th and when we did that exercise we found a lot of commonalities between your ideas and also our leadership ideas three of the main things that kind of boiled to the top would be the idea of reconfiguration reconfiguring our elementary schools looking into closing a building also combining our area learning center with our
154falcons online academy program and then adjusting our class sizes there was about a list of 30 to 40 with each different group but those were the things that continued to boil to the top with the same themes so using that information along with all of our other data we we really saw that we know that in the future our enrollment is declining and it will be for at least the next four years just based on the number of kindergartners coming in versus the number of 12th graders that were graduating so there's a there's a big decline within those pieces for the next four years also we're looking at our revenues not keeping up with our expenses inflation and the labor market right now is very unstable and then education is rapidly changing and that happens
155year after year after year for us so we had some out of the box ideas just for our community in general and a few things that have come up a few times over the past few years and the first one is to look into reconfiguring reconfiguring our elementary schools and then also the idea of developing a pre-k k center within our community next we just put together a what if if we did look into reconfiguring what would that look like for us and also trying to combine the idea of a pre-k k center could we do both of those things if we if we were interested in that so this these num this chart that you see up there shows what that would look like now keep in mind this includes taking our fifth graders
156and moving them on to our middle school because our enrollment is also declining at our middle school there's plenty of capacity there to move that additional grade level up there there's also some really cool ideas of offering opportunities to those younger kids in terms of exploratory classes and pathways at a younger age and so forth so looking at this example it really provides because it provides some opportunity for increased time for our staff and our students to collaborate at each grade level it also helps us create more equitable and manageable class sizes if you if you see there it's it's showing a cap if you will of 20 in kindergarten 20 in first grade 22 second grade and 22 third grade and then 23 in fourth grade which are some pretty pretty nice size classes
157for elementary school kids and then also the idea of creating some schools of excellence within this model so right now we have some dominant population populations at each elementary school and so they're really not evenly distributed between our three current traditional models and so this gives us some opportunity to really evenly distribute all of our students okay so moving on from there we did look at what is our uh our what's our reality for next year what's it gonna look like if we continue on with our traditional model so the chart that you see up there shows you each of our three elementary schools and what we're actually projecting um in terms of our enrollment for next year um and so if you look at it most of the class sizes are fairly manageable um
158they're definitely not equally distributed between each grade level um and then we do have one pocket within lincoln at our fourth grade where our class sizes jump up to 27 and so that is concerning for us to have that high of a uh of class or excuse me that that many students within that fourth grade section so looking at those different ideas and our traditional model we are able to look at some adjustments within our elementaries within the traditional model so we have an overall enrollment decline projected for next year of two students within our changes we can see that we could potentially reduce two additional fte at our elementaries along with three specialists three interventionists and one para so that gives us a savings of 590 thousand dollars miss yoakum to just confirm this
159slide is how our existing schools are today correct um as in a k through five at three elementaries yes okay this is what it would look like if we were to continue with this 22-23 traditional model class sizes thank you that incorporates those into that model and that um the previous page nicole reflects those reductions correct yes yes let's just clarify that for a minute this slide 2223 traditional model class sizes already has 2.0 classroom fte pulled out yes can one of you explain how um this results in a the 3.0 specialist is across the district and the 3.0 interventionist is across the district right yes um can you explain a little bit about how with the decline of only two students across the whole elementary district how we can cut into three specialists and
160three interventionists or like just so how do you see that happening so in terms of so i'm gonna talk about those in two different ideas so for our specialists for instance we right now have five specialists per elementary building those five specialists provide a prep period for all of our elementary sections within that schedule when we have five specialists that provides enough prep for 24 teachers 24 sections with one additional hour a week so because one teacher can provide one specialist can provide five preps per day so now if you look at this chart again you can see that roosevelt is going down to 18 sections jefferson is at 20. lincoln is at 19. so they all have less than 20 or less so they can get away with four specialists to provide 20 preps
161per week does that make sense yes but that's not why we have specialists social can you like go in the yeah there's like an educational reason why we have this specialist i understand what you're saying i'm sorry i didn't mean to say it like that so now can you provide this the instructional curriculum services from the specialist from maybe i'll have you tracy yes totally understand the logic you're coming from i'm sorry i said it the way i said it yeah no i think it's important to see both sides of it because what we wanted to do was um respond to the reduction in specialists or reduction in sections so the specialist we would still prioritize pe so students would still have access to two days of physical education in their rotation the conversation right
162now if we move to this reduction we would move to a four day rotation right now students are on a five-day rotation and what we're talking about which actually this conversation started this fall is revisioning our media centers and creating more of a collaborative space that allows for infusion of the digital arts the media arts as well as like more of a steam minded kind of approach and then we'd be able to also offer art and music as a component of that rotation and so that's where again we are waiting kind of on the full picture of what the teaching and learning side is going to be once we know what the reductions will be as well as um what our staffing will be because we really want to play to the strengths of our
163specialists and we have some really great staff in those positions thinking outside the box and really taking more of us integrated and steam approach to our specialist opportunities okay how about the interventionist yep so then the interventionist following a similar thought process when we have reductions in our sections we want to be mindful of the class sizes in addition to that next year we'll have our wind time model and so that's going to allow for targeted instruction and interventions happening 30 minutes every day and that's all kids have access to that and so it actually creates an efficiency for us so we don't need an interventionist per grade level we actually can pool all of those resources into that 30 minute block be more targeted around what the data is telling us kids need which
164hopefully accelerates kids out of the need for intervention back into core as their priority and then offering enrichment as well in that time does a reduction of 3.0 interventionists mean there are still interventionists yes it does okay so the um even with the three interventionist fte every elementary school will still have three full-time interventionists per building thank you good question thanks mr chair for me so ms corcoran when you said um i liked it how you said data so we look at the data and see where we're going to go who gathers that data and then analyzes it and provides the direction in which we're going to bet which they're going at that time so i feel like that's a multi-faceted question we looked at some data just last month so that's really looking at
165the trends of the data district wide looking at it by building but i think the question around who's doing this work is really those plcs and so those are the classroom teachers in conjunction with the interventionists but really trying to empower our classroom teachers to be the decision makers around knowing their students and understanding what interventions they need and then the interventions are there or the interventionists are there to deliver those interventions so data is a flexible and fluid process including all stakeholders so el's involved in that sped's involved in that but we want it to really live with those classroom teachers so that way they can make sure that their students are getting the services that they need so it will be within the plc that the data is gathered by the teacher and
166then shared and a plan come up with within the team that's working on those yes thank you and board members we do have building leadership here as well and we can certainly ask them questions as we go through this presentation if needed or wanted so thank you can i ask another question i'm sorry um so does that mean that three specialists would be the media specialists like is that the plan or it would be because you said prioritize physical education a price prioritize maintaining that number of physical sorry not prioritizing physical education but just tell me a little bit about like what would what does it mean to reduce 3.0 specialists yep and that's um again that's continued conversation with our building leaders and so they would actually have some autonomy around who and or
167which position okay makes the most sense for their building okay thank you i think too tracy i think just i want to follow up on that question because it's a really good question you know for many many years we've been stuck in the in in silos we've got math we have science we have social studies and we've been gradually moving into a standard based type of a school district which is the right direction because i can have my maybe i can have my auto mechanics person teach math or do some of those other standards that are covered but we just talked about um reviewing the standards of each of the specialists and where can those all be located they don't have to be located in a siloed classroom they can be located in some of
168those rooms that you're just talking about we can offer some of those standards and have those covered by by those specials do you prefer specific questions to the elementary budget adjustments now or at the end once you go through this doesn't matter okay i've got a whole host of questions but they run the gamut from elementary to middle school to high school and the entire district so i'll wait you keep going and i'll go from there thank you okay so um so now moving on to our middle school we look at this data as well and we have a pro an overall decline of 30 students is what we're projecting for next year so working again with our middle school administration we have come up with a decrease of one paraprofessional one teacher and also
169a 0.4 in our orchestra area for a total reduction of 138 000. mr chair yes so elementary you're cutting 590 at the middle school 138 000. why here you're hitting pretty hard on the element well that's where it's really critical right yeah and if i can just talk a little bit to that we looked at the class sizes remember those first two slides and we need to be responsible fiscal agents too so i mean we can have small class sizes which is ideal actually found out that sometimes two small class sizes can can also have some negative effects so we're trying to gauge reasonably where you guys would like to be maybe at the elementary classrooms and start thinking about that too when we end these discussions and maybe next week where do you want
170to see your class sizes for elementary school not looking at i know it looks like a distribution that's it's out of proportion and scott's going to show some percentages here in a second with that but um i think that looking at the larger picture you want to look at what what do we envision our schools to look like with class sizes and also the same question with the middle school if you make these reductions what do those class sizes look like in the middle school what are the takeaways what are the disadvantages of making these reductions too so i mean all those kind of go together so it's it's not an exact science and actually when you see the administrative reductions too you'll see those percentages and again you'd ask the same question why are
171we cutting administration so much when when we have all these other pieces in there so if you just if you can hang on for just the end on that and hold that question again mr olsen and then ask it again then it might give you a little bit more perspective so just be patient okay but ask it again write that down i did okay so moving on um we now are looking at our high school and our alc and we combine those two buildings together when we look at our enrollment because a lot of kids do go from one to the other and in this area we are we are projecting a decline of 22 students so with that the high school administration has proposed a 4.0 reduction in their fte at the high school
172for a savings of 280 000. okay so next we look at our administrative adjustments now on here we have um i'll just do a little bit of explaining for this so our first item on here you'll see is a real reallocation of 62 percent of a salary for an individual now this is as a result of mr dana being able to shift some of that salary towards his budget we do have the hopes that we'll have some additional funding coming within the next couple of months because we know that mental health is a priority of the state as well so we kind of have that in the back of our minds but if that doesn't pan out for us mr dana is able to shift some of that salary to that his budget which will
173give us a savings of 84 000. the next item is looking at revising our area learning center and falcons online coordinator dissolving those two positions and creating one new principal position that would oversee both programs together that would realize a savings of ninety five thousand dollars now along with that we have we currently have our structure currently allows for a full-time secretary to support our area learning secretary learning program and a full-time secretary to support our falcons online program we would look at combining those positions a little bit as well to create one full-time secretary and then one part-time op2 secretary so they would have a little bit of a different level of support for those for that building or excuse me for that program as well with a savings of twenty five thousand dollars
174the next item is a a proposal to dissolve our workforce development coordinator of 135 thousand dollars next we have a proposal to dissolve our student success coordinator of 135 000 next we have a proposal to dissolve our middle school activities coordinator of eleven thousand eight hundred dollars and then last we are looking at we have a natural increase to our access budget cap of 7 400 and we would use that as well to offset additional things within our general fund so it gives us a total administrative adjustment of 493 213 dollars okay so next is just a summary again to look at all these different items we did break out the elementary classrooms elementary interventionists and then elementary specialists but combined that is a total of 590 000. middle school is a total of 138
175000 high school and alc a total of 280 000 an administration a total of 493 000 to get to our target of 1.5 million okay and then um the next chart we just put together um to give you a visual of the total adjustments by level to show you that so at the elementary right now in this in all of these just keep in mind exclude anything that we've done with esser this is just our general fund reductions so our elementary levels would realize a 4.32 reduction our middle school a 2.67 percent reduction high school and alc is 3.17 percent reduction and our administration is a 13.41 reduction and then our next slide just shows you that same data on a graph with it for a different visual and so now we talk about next
176steps and also um this would be a really good time to talk through your questions your ideas um and and what our what our plan will be moving forward so just uh get the ball rolling here uh first of all thank you to our cabinet for pulling this together this does meet the needs of the of the school board although it may change we realize that based on some of the feedback and information that you have we made we purposely made the 1.5 target so that if you wanted to go down to the million like was talked about before you can certainly take some of those pieces off that you disagree with understanding that we still have a gap there so just keep that in mind as you have those discussions so please fire away
177we just need your feedback so thank you very much for listening and thank you guys for presenting i thank you for putting this together um anybody in this room and anybody watching online um if seeing this and hearing this doesn't make you feel sick i don't know what does it's uh this is ugly stuff to eliminate somewhere in the ballpark of 1.5 million or give or take on the upside of that or the downside of that i think there is very little meat on the bone excuse me very little fat on the bone if you will to cut and so this is at the meat and the core of instructional stuff and that will without a question impact students so thank you for putting this stuff together board members i'll open it up for all
178of your questions i've got a whole host of them and maybe some of you will will ask some of them but i'll open it up to all of you if you want to start asking questions and once again we do have um building leadership here if you have any pointed questions for anybody they can feel free to please chime in if you would so mr olsen yeah i i'm really not liking the reductions in elements that's so that's so critical i mean for a lot of different reasons reading writing i mean that's where it is you're not going to learn to read in middle school or high school so i i'm not liking them but again i mean there's just so much here so many questions like chad's got a million questions um where there's
179this student success quote did we change that name what was before equity coordinator that was with sam oakley sam now are we eliminating that according to this yep that position is also our el director correct correct so this is that we won't have an el projector or what according to this if the board approves these in a couple of weeks then that is correct we will not have an el corrugator super so i would want to build off of that we would have to reallocate those duties to existing administration because by law we do need an el coordinator um but it would dissolve that position and all of the great work that's being done through that role would have to go to some other leadership so whether that's a building principle cabinets to other people
180didn't they want more money does it change their that's that's a nicole question would that change the job duties and qualifications for the principals if they took these on it wouldn't change it significantly no mr olsen i would counter with if they have time to take these on which i don't believe they do because i think their plates are pretty full does the success we've had in this continue or what gets pushed off the plate because the plate can only be so full right i think that's an important piece whether it's this or anything else that gets added to leadership's plate building leadership's played or other leadership can a board member or whatever on the administrative ad of not a name no names just a position to be cut or dissolve the eventual word right
181can you say it one more time sorry in other words could the board suggest something else i'm administrative yeah i think that yeah that was kind of what that sticky note thing deal is that we put together for that whole piece of it but the answer is yes and then the follow-up will be if you have some other ideas we don't want to name names or positions at this time i would just email them our way because then what we do is we put these together with cabinet then we come back the next week with that that common proposal with this position we could say what's the wages and benefits that's correct yep exactly yep but that'll be my follow-up at the end is if you have suggestions like that they have ideas that maybe
182we haven't thought of send them our way and then we'll we'll take a look at it analyze it is there anything sacred with any position actually that's that's a good question because we have remember we have those five million dollars with the grants the esser so anything that's covered with esser or other grants doesn't do anything for us so we can't really use those as part of reductions we have to just focus on the general fund whatever who whomever or whatever position is covered by the general fund those are the only options we have i jokingly told these guys after they've gone through that remember we only have eight percent of our budget is administration right now it's the lowest in the big nine we spend fewer dollars on administration than all the big nine
183schools that we have out there so when we make those different reductions they're going to be pretty painful and we have to be careful that we don't try to reduce another area because it's going to be covered by a grant quite honestly there really isn't any other administrators out there that you can cut because then what you're doing is you're just cutting a grant and you're not saving any money in the general fund anymore unless you want to cut principles if you want to go to two elementary principles instead of three or if you want to go to the high school principle being 6 12 things like that that you can do that don't make i mean for school our size make it be pretty difficult to do but that's really what you're limited to
184to now in administration but if there's something that we're not thinking about it email me then i can give you that superintendent cesar just following up on that you just mentioned we are the lowest in the big nine in terms of percentage um we're also per our audit we're under the state average by a couple percentage points as well i believe in our administrative spend so just um just be aware of that yeah yeah we are we know how do we know if it's on general fund or grant position in which it doesn't come out of her how would i know him i think that if you have an idea of what position you want just fly it my way then i'll just talk to scott because i don't know all the time either i
185have to talk to these guys and ask if it's covered with the granola's general fund then i'll just send it back to you and let you know because you mentioned um the old sam oak position i think it's okay to mention it yeah that's fine yeah sam was great he did a great job for the district yeah workforce development that's so critical isn't it oh yeah yeah and i mean molly's back there and she's an outstanding staff member yeah yeah i didn't say that they're not going to hurt what's that we had brian coleman what was he same as molly yep same with his first development same thing and that was quite successful it is and it's gaining some great momentum now too and if you talk to uh north uh down at the chamber
186it's been a huge asset for not just us but also our business partners in town because you guys told us to make 1.5 million dollars worth of cuts so it was something like this you threw a dart on them no i'm pretty sure this position was on the cuts last year too on our first two we did talk about it last year yeah but no it would i mean at the end of the day we only have so many administrative positions yeah yeah i i can't justify any of the reductions as being a good thing for the district so anything that you're looking at reductions as you said chad it's there's just not much fat on the ball there you go yeah we asked if you could cut the superintendent i we checked with legal
187and they said no you can't but that's nice to donate that was very nice of them so let's keep moving on with other questions if we can just no no you're fine um mr billingham you have a few questions yes so somewhere along the line i've had a lot going on last month or two years but at one point did we not say we were in deficit of 1.9 million and so but the board came up with a 1.5 so we still have 400 000 let's say out there to kick the can down the road if we could for next year if you want to yes just just i gotta step in here i'm gonna step in for scott whenever we i need to get i need to get this clear first yeah i just
188want to remind you that we kicked the 800 000 down the road last spring yeah and so instead of 1.1 million reductions we're looking at 1.9 so if you do the same thing here you'll have to deal with it and i'm not going to be here so i don't i don't want to use that context you just need to know that that you're again kicking the can down the road unless we were to pass a levy that could help sure correct okay or or the state were to change some funding mechanism of some sort but nothing to be certain of that cross subsidy would help us right oh my gosh we wouldn't we could take one of the levees out it would reduce taxes mr billingham okay so there's still 400 000 out there with
189what's being recommended right now okay so second and i know i'm on finance and scott run this to me for me again please so out of the 1.5 million in cuts where does some of the fund balance come into play so if you look at this slide that we have there if you can actually read that or pull it up on your own i have it here yes on your own device so um projection for 23 so if we if you were to cut 1.5 million so go to the lower part of that chart all right you would lose about 400 000 it would reduce the fund balance to 6.3 right below it there or roughly 10.77 percent which is well above the 9.5 for threshold okay if you move up and only cut a
190hundred thousand dollars so go straight up from that i'll tell you a million billion thank you um you have a fund balance of roughly 5.8 and a percentage of just south of 10 which again is still above the 9.5 okay thank you so that so obviously i'd be advocate i'm advocating for the million dollar reductions and i i believe as i said before we we need to use some of this fund balance for levy purposes whatever but that that's that's down the road there so again and i'm going to preface some questions by by first saying this oh my this is difficult okay if you if you don't think it is general public this this is gut wrenching okay um as i said before i don't believe we have an ounce of fat in this
191district to cut and yet we're looking at 1.9 million okay so [Music] what i hope is board members we do and as community members we do is we need to look at the big picture you need to take the names out of it you need to take our grandkids our kids our neighbors our relatives out of it and do what's good for the common good because otherwise we're going to slide to that's my neighbor i've known that person for a lot of years this is going to impact my grandkids guess what it's going to impact your grandkids and our kids regardless i had to say that because in the questions i ask and things i do here and that's that's the way i am i'm gonna i prided myself i've always looked at the big
192picture and that's what i'm gonna go with here so again i'm concerned about the interventionists and how that elementary piece gets folded together and i'm just and this is hard to do because i don't as board members we're not to micromanage we're trusting cabinet we're trusting leadership we are so in asking these questions i don't want to look like i'm trying to micromanage this piece whatsoever okay so i'm concerned about about that piece their class size is important and this is very difficult for me to say but middle school reductions i'm going to ask mr chair and mr sesquien cabinet that i think we need to take a look at a different model there if we would maybe go back to a sixth period day i've had already conversation with mr sage earlier today just
193to throw it out said i'm gonna throw this out there i don't want anybody be surprised whatever but if if this is what but that would give us numbers that would give us you know what our class size look at what uh electives are going to be missed i think these are all important that we know this and have this information so we can really make a solid decision uh not just on numbers and this but just while we're still doing what's best for our kids here i'm i'm uncomfortable also with the alc foa coordinators in the new principal positions from what i'm hearing come out of both those programs there are rock stars right now alc i'm here i've never heard so many good things coming out of alc in in many many years
194and thank you for that and our online academy i think this is what got us our positive numbers here i think this is it was a great idea and we have great coordinators and facilitators so i'm uncomfortable with that uh as well um same with the workforce i'm uncomfortable with everything here but i know what the bottom line is we something has to be reduced we don't have the money for it so um i mean we talk about opportunities for kids with activities coordinator who's who's going to pick up all these little pieces when plates are full and stress levels are enough the way it is that's my concern so i'll throw that out there i would like many of the things that i think some of the other questions mr chair you'll have and
195and miss cavalier you'll have as well so that i that's what i would just like to say for you can i just i think you bring i mean you guys are all bringing up some great points um is there is there a way that you could settle with a class size at the elementary middle in high school i mean should we have 50 kids in the middle school i don't know what what's the tolerance of the board because that will help us make quality decisions rather than just look at a number in a dollar amount is there is there something that you can think of as a class size that's reasonable for the elementary school i'm not thinking so much middle in high school because those can vary quite a bit but then the other
196question would be what are your values on the pathways at the high school do you want those pathways is that something that we want to keep because if you want to keep that you probably want to think about keeping some of those pathways at the middle school because that's your feeder program for the high school so those are some education parameters that i don't think i don't think you're micromanaging at all i think we want this feedback this positive feedback but those are some good guiding references that we can that we can at least bring back and take a look at to see what those things how those things will will impact you i mean if you're okay with 10 kids in an elementary classroom i mean we found out that there's some disadvantages to
197that we think that the sweet spot is in order between 17 and 24. i think that's pretty good that's still i can guarantee you that's in the lower half of the big nine for elementary class sizes so we're not making it because we want to cut more here and more there we're trying to make logical educational decisions if we can cover the standards which is the way we have to go i'm i've been saying this for many years let's get rid of the silos get rid of the silas and here's an example of hey we can get rid of the silos by teaching the standards by doing this that to me makes more educational progress since then what we've done for the last 80 years and also the interventionists are important but again i don't
198want somebody that's in a school building that has three or four different preps and i'm not saying that this is happening but i do get pressure from other classroom teachers that have been cut that are looking at people and pointing to them and saying why are they having prep when i'm teaching full time with 27 kids it doesn't make any sense so that's what i'm trying to say is that if we can get some good what you would envision this school district to be and still be strong then we can make some of those adjustments my two cents worth i think the administrative cuts are devastating but we'll have to live with them and if you're going to go out for an operating levy next fall i think that the community is going to have
199to see some of that pain too and rationalize why in the world is the school district making reductions at this point are trying to pass on operating levy for more money at this point i mean i can't it's really difficult it's really difficult like you said john to go through some of these processes but i'm just trying to give you some some advice on what could help us out because if we go if i go through the list we cut zero we're zero now you're at 1.9 now you're in sod in two years and now the state takes over and that's you nobody wants to go there you just don't want to go there so so mr chairman i see mrs lewis and and mr peck back there they're elementary principles so elementary teacher retired
200whatever here there's a difference with primary the younger grades and the upper grades correct as far as class size what you would recommend so i'm looking at the experts again if you're looking for a number i would i would assume in the primary 20 20 to 22 22 kindergarten teachers don't send me emails with the 22 whatever four five six four and five three four five is 25 to 27 28. okay if you add one teacher back to lincoln right that lincoln number is at the middle school i know that depends upon classes yeah mr sage i mean i i don't ideally i don't want to go about 30. we look at dropping sections at each grade level just with our essa reductions the 2.0 fte uh that goes from nine sections to eight in
201both our sixth grade and our seventh grade we drop any more sections and we get above thirty three quick i'm literally putting 34 of these kids uh in a room do i need to repeat that yes no i think we all agree that 34 is too many yeah so the the you know the classes coming up at the middle school you know our incoming sixth grade classes is significantly lower than our current seventh and eighth grade class but our current eighth grade class is still quite high so as we reduce sections per grade level that that number is going to get high quick so mr i'm just going i'm trying to get numbers here keep going okay so mr your opinion at the high school numbers size mr sesker miss corker are we giving you
202guys some numbers to yeah yeah for the the middle of high school for elementary as well too so i'm sorry yeah so with the teacher reductions that we have on there it's going to bump a lot of our core classes up into the lower 30s um we're we're hoping that it's not going to cut into any of our pathway programming but it might especially if we have classes that fall too small we might have to just say we're not going to run that that class but i do believe with the reductions that we've put in there that it is manageable to still be able to run a solid comprehensive programming along our pathways in our seventh period today at the high school thank you any other question no miss cavalier i've already asked a lot
203of questions i'm cognizant of the time i think mr bellingham has represented quite a few of my thoughts i was surprised that the alc moved to the high school wasn't listed on here as a possible collapse i know that caused a lot of consternation last year but i am curious about closing that building and closing mckinley and i realize that doesn't add up to a lot of costs so that that's on my mind i don't think cutting the student success coordinator makes sense i don't really like the idea of merging [Music] of emerging growing programs into one principle position that's pretty hard for me but i also don't really believe that administrative adjustments will move the dial on the community in terms of supporting a levy in the future i think when i see i
204agree i think when i see elementary numbers of 25 or higher that starts to give me pause hearing mr sage say middle school mr sage and mr benti say classes could go over 30 at the middle school i don't think we should be running schools with classes over 30. um so i'm having a hard time with this i'm having a hard time with the cutting a 0.4 orchestra that doesn't seem like it adds up to enough that makes sense to be that kind of gutted cut um so um i do see that the reconfiguration of the elementary schools results in four for fte from the elementary schools um which is more than what is listed in the elementary adjustments right actually they're the same so we had the same adjustments that we made budget-wise and
205we put those class sizes for both of them so those those are the same cuts in that configuration as they are in the traditional classroom superintendent setzer the difference would be really not a cost savings but more of a if you will equitable classroom across all three buildings and efficiencies yeah okay wait i don't understand it only says 2.0 fte on the um traditional model and up in the reconfiguration it looks like there's four positions that would be so there's a there's a so you have to look at it as a whole there's a reduction in in kindergarten there's two ads in first grade and then there's a reduction in grade four and so overall it nets zero oh i didn't even understand that there were negative signs in front of the numbers it's all
206right it's getting late and is it safe to say that this is for an example only that this really isn't on the table for this year or is this potentially on the table for this year knowing knowing our tight window i would say again you it's easy for me to say that you need to go out for a levy of some sort next fall you just have to because you can't you can't keep up with the cross-substitute unless i already resolve that you just you just can't you're it's really difficult to manage it financially and then of course inflation hasn't kept up with the dollar amounts with the formula but regardless um you need to talk about something if this doesn't pass what if what's going to happen because you're talking about 1.9 million now
207you're going to be i'll guarantee you if you don't pass the levy you're going to have the same conversation next spring whether i'm here or not well i'm not going to be here let's take that out out of the formula jamie's going to be here but that could be cause and effect i would say the same thing for middle school how serious do you want how serious is this community about keeping those pathways because at that middle school moving the career piece down to sixth grade and seventh grade is huge from the eighth grade curriculum moving it down so those kids get those choices and educating those kids so they have somebody at that level to say hey what pathway are you interested in and the new engineering pathways we're going to be putting in
208by next fall construction engineering and manufacturing and the work that south central has done in the chamber has done for that we could have an eighth grader say hey i want to be an engineer now instead of taking all the ap courses and some of those others they'll have to take maybe some automotive courses and do some hands-on and actually know how to turn a screwdriver so those are things that we're working on for the pathways and there's a direct link on employability and also college ready by the time these kids get out of there so another 1.9 is going to jeopardize the pathways but you also have to understand that the middle school is kind of part of that formula sometimes middle school and i taught middle school for a long time we're always
209a missing link in there we're kind of the mystery of taking care of those wonderful middle school kids we love but it's a huge really important part of the whole educational system so i don't know you do need to think about that as you're moving forward too the because another thing i always go in my mind each year you have a group of students next year you have a group of students and don't you want to give them every single opportunity that you can possibly give within reason right i don't know if you you don't cut for a five-year plan you don't take and gut everything out of a curriculum because now you've got four three or four years of kids who are going to miss out some of these things whereas next year maybe
210you keep some of these programs that are great and these kids get that exposure so it's a it's a tough balance i do know that these guys and the leadership team that we've been working with will take your suggestions whether you're emailing me or not that'd be great i would also say that if you can give us some solid parameters that would also help um i mean that it just does and then we can come back next time around and be a instead of guessing and trying to figure out what you guys are thinking then we can be a little bit more exact based on the educational pieces i think this was excellent like this is you this is a phenomenal job um so we'll now our job is to get more exact yep miss
211steves um i i think you're still with us we can't see you because we've got the uh i the item up on the document but are you still with us did she sign off i'm here for a short time my computer's at like two percent so i can't imagine why it might pop off um so i think we have an opportunity to be creative i mean i wholeheartedly agree with mr bellingham all his points i guess i'd like to see the alc cost savings moving that to the high school we had the discussions last spring i believe the workforce coordinator is there any way we could secure some funding through grants or you know again going to our community um just thinking you know um electives and options that fall through the pathways um is
212there a way that we could offer those hybrid styles so they would be delivered to high school students at the middle school i mean is that doable is that a savings somehow um and the same thing with the interventionalist at the elementary level okay thank you if you're still there and you have more precise questions or whatever please email them the superintendent sesker um you may have fallen off you may not but um that way superintendent sesquient team can can work on those and share all that information bring it back for next next week so mr chair before you begin your list could i ask one more please absolutely okay thank you so does the list change if we decide on how much we use the fund balance it does yep so there would be
213maybe a a footing foundation here decide yes look what kind of money we really talk in here what where are we going with it right if we're going to cut a million or we're going to cut 1.5 we're going to cut 1.9 maybe that needs to be the first thing that's agreed upon and then we can build off that i think that's helpful i think i agree with that so before we leave tonight let's try to refine that number a little bit if we can the best of our abilities i need to do a check-in here um i have young children at home who are alone and it's 9 17 p.m um so i kind of just need to say out loud that i really can't stay much longer um so we'll get through this
214quickly i'll ask a few questions we'll hopefully get some guidance to superintendent sesker and the rest of the team and then we'll move on to the student survey and then okay so just a few questions it's really not that many and i do have my green highlighter here so that i can identify what i've asked first off the reallocation of 62 of the mental health coordinator can that be done yet this year in any retroactive way or not [Laughter] it requires me it requires me to do it when i apply for my federal funds in july so i can only do it in july for next year so is is there something new that we can apply next year or no i'm a lot if i apply i'm allowed to use up to 15 of
215my federal funds to to work similar to access to work with general ed kids to hopefully prevent them from being um referred to special education a lot of the description of that is the same description that that our mental health coordinator has in her job description so i feel comfortable doing that but also federal funds is a bucket of money that ends i mean it disappears too okay so if we get money from the state i'd prefer to use money from the state okay no thank you i appreciate it um next question or comment is uh yeah i'm i'm uh just on a personal level i really really struggle with the the cutting of the workforce development coordinator with all that we have going on with the seven period day the chamber the business community
216i think that poor that that position is really really important as all are all of these don't get me wrong and i also think that um the dissolving the student success coordinator is really really difficult when i look at one of our five core strategies is centered around equity and that person is is very heavily involved in the director of the champion of that so very difficult there just on on a personal level for all of you sitting in the audience tonight at home i mean this is difficult my hands are up here literally sweating on this table and we're not even voting on anything to say this sucks this sucks there's no other way to put it superintendent sesker and building leadership for finance people around the literacy coaches one of the things that
217stuck out in mr benty's superintendent interview if you will was focusing on those youngsters and really trying to get them up to grade level it's more cost effective at a younger level i think all of you would probably agree once again i'm the dumbest person in the room when it comes to this education stuff and i will openly admit that you guys are the experts can you tell us and it doesn't have to be tonight but why literacy coaches versus i'm sorry why interventionists instead of literacy coaches and maybe that's a funding issue maybe not maybe it's a maybe it's a job description issue however i believe those interventionists are the ones going one-on-one with those students that truly need the help and i'm not trying to pick on anyone i just yeah that's a
218question six of one half does the other um you can get back to us in email i i want to be cognizant of uh quickly chat on okay yeah it is funding it's funny it is funding our literacy coaches are funded through grant dollars and we cannot supplant that with any other cost in in our interventionists are all general fund no grant dollars or assists or any of that their stuff their title and ads is funded those are more flexible funding sources so we can reallocate some general fund expenses into those two buckets unlike the clsd grant which is where the literacy coaches come from okay thank you i i asked that so thank you um regarding these administrative adjustments and i've already spoken to both principal sage and both and principal lewis to let
219them know i'm not picking on them or their buildings but granted these are esther dollars if you will that we created a position for a dean of students at the middle school and we created a dean of students at jefferson elementary that we have yet to fulfill or or fill and i don't believe we are yet this year because the persis the person hired to do that position from within the district we could not find a replacement for him in his current role i believe that's the case that's correct so i don't know once again no that's s or funding but i don't know if any of those s or funds if we did put those two positions on the table very difficult conversation but it's real um would that help save any of these
220positions for another year or not i don't know yeah well technically it would uh you just have to be careful that that's creating a larger gap for you to addre address when you get down to the road a little ways we really have the grant already allocated towards esser so if you offset let's say you offset three staff members with s or dollars so that they can stay on board the next year those three staff members will have to go because now they're s or dollars they don't have to disappear because it's a short-term yep it's a band-aid it's a band-aid yep now if we can pass a levy um to help with this the band-aid worked yep right um maybe maybe we do maybe we don't um okay thank you for that um you
221know we talk about the seven period day at the high school and i and i do i want to be very protective of that we have a levy specifically for that we have people that really really worked hard for that that's an important piece do we have once again you can supply this with email to the entire board or whatever do we have classes at the middle school or high school where you pick a number whether it's 15 people or a dozen people or i don't know what that magic number is that is not a core pathway class or a core class and it's below that number and once again i don't understand if you cut one class of one sort what does that really do to an fte i have no idea that's for
222you to figure out but i only i asked that question because we had a home basketball tournament this past weekend and there were plenty of parents there and there were plenty of staff members there talking about some of this and just some of the conversation just kind of goes this way and goes that way and it's well you know there's one class here that's only got this many people i'm just relaying and just simply asking the question so any follow-up on that would be wonderful um is there any potential i know psco it's something we're proud of we're excited to share with our students and whatnot is there any cost avoidance there that can be done by teaching any of that internally versus outsourcing it mr venti shaking and said no so i think we
223can take that off the table miss corcoran's saying no okay easy enough um uh and i just want to mention on this one i get it small dollars add up right um there's a famous saying that small small leaks sink great ships um and so i get it these small dollars add up but i see one on here administrative adjustments in in maybe i'm a little biased to this and i respect mr bellingham's thoughts and comments i won't have a student in middle school anymore after this year but i see on here dissolved middle school activities coordinator for eleven thousand eight hundred dollars quite frankly that's a drop in the bucket when you're talking a million plus i know for a fact that our middle school activities coordinator here recruits kids day in and day
224out in the hallway and in the cafeteria and i would be willing to bet my house that if we don't have that position our middle school activity numbers drop by a third or more we struggle to field teams today we struggle to get kids of color involved in activities today and i really struggle with that i won't be coaching 8th grade middle school basketball next year i am this year it's been an absolute unbelievable two months but i think i just want to point that out that those numbers will drop i think dramatically if we don't have somebody in that position so with that i've said my piece i've asked my questions let's try to gather into a number if you will a little better than 1.5 or 1 million is that fair enough sure
225is that fair enough okay throw something out somebody miss cavalier we got to go sooner than later throw something out i now that i'm seeing the one point i'm the one who asked for the well i'm the one who left the asking for the 1.5 million dollars in cuts and now that i'm seeing the 1.5 million dollars in cuts i feel comfortable coming down closer to the one million dollars in cuts than than insisting i'm staying at 1.5 million dollars worth of cuts i would really love to see the um yeah i'll just leave it at that instead of complicating things but i think now i am would like to move towards the one million dollars cut so um you want me to actually make up a number well that that's fair enough for now
226mr olsen would you be comfortable agreeing with something closer to that one million probably like 1.2 million okay mr bellingham as i said before in the last meeting i would like to go down to 9.5 percent than the fund balance whatever that has i i think all the costs justify that uh remember that's a board policy i know finance people go gasp when we get good thing you got a mask on right you're again oh goodnight yeah andrew's hitting me in the back of the head here somewhere but uh i guess and i know there could be costs or asks next fall but you know people maybe one or two hires but that's where i want to be i want to be at the 9.5 and and obviously levy talk and things like that so
227that's where i'm at so maybe even a little more than the then the uh from the fund balance even with less than a million i guess so okay and i would uh miss steves are you still on or did the the phone die or the computer die well okay we think the power went out um i i would support somewhere in that million million too and mr billingham i think for me the conservative piece of i've been on this board this is my eighth year in every single year we we get throughout the course of the year really really valid requests or needs to hire a staff person and i don't want to make it so tight that we can't have a little bit of flexibility the other thing is there just because we budget
228numbers on enrollment we're never spot on sometimes we're a little above sometimes we're a little bit below and that gives us a little bit of cushion so i i'm totally comfortable in that million to million too um comfortable is the wrong word um i'm supportive of something in that range and so um you know just general consensus here the four of us is that is that safe to say yes for me okay and and you know maybe you throw something on there it's a little less and we can still see that picture but yeah so yeah so we'll probably start at 1.2 and then see where you guys go from there as you go down okay knowing that you do have some flexibility to make a decision if you want to go lower than that
229with the vote and once again board members if you have specific questions or thoughts please send them over to superintendent cesar sooner than later to send them on saturday doesn't give us a whole lot of time for monday as there's a weekend in there so please if you've got them send them tomorrow or the next day sooner than possible so that the entire team can work collectively on can i just i know it's just one asking me but could we see a scenario of 9.5 yeah there are fun bands i think it's for me that's important okay yeah so we'll put two columns say john do the reverse math we will basically yeah then come up with the figure right yep yes whatever money reversal that's correct richard that's where i'm headed if i'm not
230being explaining that well but we got it no i understand yeah we got it i yeah um yeah okay oh i do want to emphasize the dates we have to have this done by march 7th all right just so keep in mind so i know that there's going to be some difficult decisions but eventually you got to make the decision so um we're going to get to it we do not have the 20 february 28th next monday posted we need to get that posted we need a motion for that okay we'll we'll get that that'll be later okay that was the discussion the next item on here is uh as if you remember right um four hours ago we flip-flopped item 13 and 14 and so item 13 on here is the student survey and
231this is discussion only superintendent sesker do you would you like to lead us off in this i we certainly heard from community members that are not in favor of it we've heard from community members why they're in favor of it i'll turn it over to you at the start yeah i don't know if you want more time to discuss this it's getting kind of late that's the only thing i had but i hate to keep these people been waiting for a long time to hear this discussion i you know the advantages that we have from the student survey are pretty evident with the proactive ways that we try to address a lot of these different issues for that i can understand what the parents concerns are too with some of these things when i boil
232it down to i boil it down to it is optional and it is something that kids can can take a look at and and skip a question if they want to the bigger concern would be how do we how do we tell parents that how do we get that communication out there that that these these tests are optional i know that we do it but i don't know how well we do it and how we assure ourselves that each parent is seeing this this document saying that the kids have an option for for either taking it or not taking it so i'll tee it up with that it is test it is optional for the district to offer this test for kids but i will say that it does help tremendously a lot of the
233programs that we have particularly with our mental health chemical health suicide prevention a lot of those different programs that are pretty important that we think actually help kids and they don't hurt kids superintendent sesker i can only speak to this as i have an 8th grader and an eighth grader is one of the students that had the option to take the test i did or my wife or says a family did receive documentation in the mail or sent home or whatever but in the mail and it clearly states on there that students serve minnesota students survey blah blah and this is optional not required you can opt out the question is optional blah blah blah so i just want to speak from that point of view miss cavalier i believe you have fifth grade sons
234i can tell you that my fifth graders came home with the letter they announced that they were coming home with the letter so they knew to tell me about the letter and um yeah very clear letter came home and letter came also came home on schoology not schoology seesaw letter came home on seesaw and the kids came home uh telling me to look at the letter so your teachers did a good job making sure that my family was notified and notified about the survey that that's just on the notification awareness piece notification piece if you will uh mr olsen you have some thoughts or comments yeah because i was one that asked to have this on the agenda that person i i think it's i'm very upset with it i got the letter and my
235grandson me up but yeah you got a letter but what was on the survey people didn't know like any survey you know kind of harmless this is not harmless you know question number nine and i won't take the coordinates to get to her voice what was your sexist sign of birth what was what is why is this song that you know it doesn't promote anything uh what's your gender identity why are they asking that a person's appearance uh describe your sexual orientation why are kids asking it and this is actually going on the middle school this is inappropriate yes most of the survey is okay you know how you feel whatever but this now i don't know i i think a district should not die of this unless it changes unless we change the questions
236have our own take this and you know to the board approval i don't know if this even went for board approval it doesn't go for board approval it should go for board approval each question vote on it yeah well that you have a difference of opinion and you're entitled to that which i respect but i think this is part of those decisions that we make based on a lot of great data that were given by our our health community our our county a lot of people that have a vested interest in in trying to help kids and i would say that if you really want this mental health social emotional piece in your in your plan um this is part of this is a pretty big element as a part of that plan if you
237don't want to if you're not concerned about social emotional health health with our kids if you're not concerned about suicide if you're not concerned about how kids feel about alcohol and drugs those tie directly into those questions that you just read tie directly into some of those issues and now again number one it's anonymous so nobody knows who's saying this it's given its data that's given to our folks within the community and within the state of minnesota to evaluate if we've made any progress with it or not so that's that's the intent of it the district can certainly say by motion and tell the superintendent you can make a motion mr olsen say hey i make a motion not to do the student survey and then i have to abide by that and then we
238can't do the student survey so that's that's how that would work because we've got we had a certain population here really objecting to this because of their culture and they're a large part of our community because they don't believe it and this is i i'm when i got a copy of this i was really offended as a board member this has no place in our district at all are you advocating for higher teenage suicides no that's that's what it sounds like are you advocating for more chemical abuse think about alcohol and tobacco but you don't want to do any preventative i better not get in the debate we can have this discussion we don't need to get in debate we can talk about the pros and cons of these different things but you just have
239to know that there there are advantages of doing the student survey there are advantages of doing that um are the concerns i recognize that but you also have to recognize that there are some advantages of implementing the student survey and this is take and wait teacher student time then you're doing this all of a sudden a student circles whatever but if it's all of a sudden another student walks by and looks at it all of a sudden it's not private i mean that kind of my new detail all of a sudden this person yes okay i'm this but i want to keep it quiet all of a sudden they see somebody circle sometimes you know these classes are deaths are close i mean this is too much of a chance i can chime in here
240um i think it's incredibly important for schools to have the pulse of their students in the community if we don't know that kids are vaping at higher higher percentages and higher frequency than they were five years ago we don't know to respond to vaping concerns if we don't know that a higher percentage of kids are identifying as gay or bisexual and are not comfortable have anywhere else to go we don't know how or even if that's happening in our schools to support those kids we [Music] listen i don't know what else to say except i think this is my 25th year working with teenagers in schools and i have had kids there are many many many times where kids are not ready to work on something or process something with their families and that doesn't
241mean that they're not suffering in the meantime there are many many times where schools have to address smoking drinking drug addiction pregnancy suicide mental health child abuse and if we don't have a sense of the patterns of the things our kids are going through we don't have any way of addressing those and as we heard from some of the speakers today it's not just the teachers in the schools it's our whole county it's our whole social services network it's how the state is going to look at data and know how to allocate funding on issues that we're having it's how we're going to be able to talk about the fact that there are problems with teenagers or problems with you children that they need support with i mean this is how you collect this kind
242of information every kid can opt out of any question every family can opt out if they want to opt out but i wouldn't recommend encouraging your kid to opt out high schoolers know the words transgender they're this is not the first time they've been exposed to it there's violence in our movies there's awful language in like music and videos and the stuff they watch on tik tok this is not going to expose them to the difficult things in life this isn't where they're seeing it for the first time and so i just this is so important to the work we do i if there's a motion that comes like i will not i hope the school district continues to do this as they've been doing it in the state of minnesota since 1989 i believe
243we learned today this is hard talking about these kinds of issues with our children is so hard it's so hard for families it's so hard to watch your kids grow up but the reality is they are growing up and they do have to go live in a world and the stuff is already happening in fifth grade and sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade and when you work in schools for 25 years you know that is a fact so thank you miss gatler mr billingham thought so i want to bring it back to kind of ground zero here so my understanding is notice has gone out thing has the cert but the survey has not been taken yet fifth grade i think i i believe it started today i think it's today and tomorrow
244is that correct or am i wrong my son has already did the service i thought it was the 22nd and 23rd fifth grade middle school if you want to bring katie and janet up i think they're kind of the experts they can probably answer the questions a lot better than i i don't want to put you guys on the spot but if you're comfortable i mean i guess i guess mr seskin my only question would be or my thinking would be so from from what we've heard tonight and etcetera would it help to have another reach to our parents and what it's saying this series going out here your options you may opt out that there might be questions on here go look at this survey at on this before taking that that's just my
245only thought but if so i didn't know what that that's where i'm at that's that's my suggestion and the discussion to to wrap this up there mr chairs real quick does anybody want to step forward and talk about the importance of what this data gives you as a baseline for our district is is there anybody janet would you like to or yeah yeah i can i can just tell you as the mental health coordinator when i arrived the only information that i was able to to get that i still have to understand the mental health of our students is from the last time we did the survey which is 2019 which as we all know was pre-pandemic so we are waiting on a daily basis for the students to take this survey so that we
246can find out truly what impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of our students along with the chemical health along with all of the other things that the survey does but i can just tell you from a mental health perspective only if we don't get the information we we don't have any idea what kind of impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of our students this is where we'll get that information so just from that one data point alone it is absolutely critical for one of the five strategic goals of the district which is to ensure the mental health and safety of our students thank you um mr billingham i i kind of second your thoughts it seems to me that there's some happy middle of the ground medium here i
247i don't know exactly what that is but without question some people can read this and feel very uncomfortable how do we do a better job of educating our entire district and their families in the community that this type of survey is out there from the state how do we do a better job of are they able to pre-see the survey so that families know what's in there and they can have that discussion with their students and they can make that that you know um decision if you will with their students if they want to take this or if they want to opt out there's no doubt that there's valuable information that comes from this that is that that we react to and we base our our decisions off of um i think there's got to
248be some happy medium as mr olsen said without question there's a contingency here i got to be honest with you we've never had even when we talked about these we've never had this many people here at a school board meaning overflowing this right and so it's a real conversation how do we better educate people about this how do we give feedback to the state of minnesota that if there's a large constitution contingency excuse me that doesn't like some of these questions that we give them feedback uh superintendent cesar i have to ask one question is there any fun because this came up tonight is there any funding that our district actually receives for taking this specific survey to your knowledge no i think we pay them just because of staff time i mean we have
249staff that supervises a test so we actually pay i guess but it's pretty minimal it's part of our curriculum so i mean katie is much katie do you want to help out with this a little bit i would just say that the notification process for families is really laid out by the state of what's required and so we did ensure that those letters went out at least two weeks in advance and we also had it translated in somali and in spanish and that's provided by the state in that notification it does say that you can request a copy which is how i believe mr olson got his copy of it um i i emailed back many parents with a copy of the survey anybody who asked for it and really if you dig far enough
250in the internet you can find it anyways but um i think we can talk though about the next time that this is administered how do we prepare our liaison folks who are are within the community and have these conversations on a regular basis how can we ensure that the accurate information is being shared in those conversations yeah sorry mr olson real quick i guess my strong suggestion would be the next time this goes around that we don't just put in there that you can request this i guess my strong suggestion would be here is the survey and here are the questions and we'd be as upfront and forthright as possible and i'm not saying we weren't this time don't get me wrong we're following the state requirements at the same token when there's requirements there
251might be a baseline and we can maybe do more i can't agree with you on that mr wolfe i'm really sorry but that impacts a child's ability to interact with this survey as a like human being who has agency and should be able to take a survey without their parents previewing every single question and if there are parents who really are concerned at that level then those parents should ask for it um but otherwise a 16 year old a 15 year old a 14 year old and i would say even my 10 year old i'd like them to be able to have the agency to engage with this without me telling them ahead of time you cannot answer this question and i don't want to have to read the survey ahead of time i trust
252in the school district i trust in this kind of work i trust in this kind of process and this isn't opt out that is the system for surveys like this and families can opt out um i don't think we need to go over and above but we can talk about that next two years well maybe you and i won't be here to talk about it in two years but um i just have to say i think that would impact the whole point of collecting survey data that's anonymous and it may and children won't feel comfortable talking about their own mental health issues or is things they might not be ready to talk to it but their parents about but aren't safe or they need help and again it's anonymous but we're looking for those trends
253school climate is so important and if we don't know that kids are dealing with like i think we have rising eating disorders right now and if we don't have like patterns to show us that then we can't respond we can't respond mr wilson you were going to say something again i totally disagree with courtney um again too bad a survey like this isn't sent home i mean it should be with the child and the parent and there was a fifth eighth and eleventh grade you know i don't think some of these questions are fifth but right some of these objectionables no there's three different versions of the survey okay yes but i think the parent should sit beside their student talk about it then they'd bring it back in no names on it and somehow
254make it secure put it in a box in a school but then you'll get your survey but again the parents would just say no i'm not going to do it and then you turn that in then i would say we don't do this i would say i would agree with courtney then we don't do the survey i think we just get make a motion say favorable public schools don't do the survey because you're not getting the true input from the kids if you're going to do it that way i think that's a decision yep that is yeah it's kind of too late now but i think that you do need to consider that when you're going yeah in the in the future i do agree with one thing though that a couple both you and
255richard i do agree that we do have to do a better job of somehow getting the message out that this is a student surveyed appearance because you're right there shouldn't have been this many people having those questions about what this all is so there has to be some sort of compromise in there and i do agree with both of you and on that piece that we do have to educate parents a little bit better okay mr seskar i don't mean to be difficult but i think someone someone spread a message to encourage people to come tonight well then we have then we have to be a little bit more collaborative as sure right a district somehow making sure that we're all speaking with the same voice yeah i i don't disagree it's really good i'm
256gonna try and wrap this up but it's good to know to realize here that uh it's on board book now or it's on our website yeah whatever and so fifth graders are not asked those questions there if you look at i read through this since last week but level one's different level two is different so fifth graders eighth graders and juniors are all different there so that's just uh just a point of reference there but but good discussion and i so there's really no way to re-inform parents as we're already in the processor okay so that's that's what was my okay thank you thank you this brings us to item now 14 other items of information we'll wrap this up quickly item 14 a other school board members comments anything to share mr olsen mr
257billingham no miss cavalier um no i just expressed like sadness that the passing of our congressman this past week just want to make sense where since we're elected board maybe say that out loud so wish his family the best of course um okay i just have uh three things um one we're going to be seeing and pushing out sooner than later a new initiative out of the verbal well i don't want to say it's necessarily favorable public schools but it certainly came from the mental health committee that collaborates with the several partners in the community and it's a social media and or doesn't have to be social media but it's a a pledge if you will every connection counts and there's been a whole lot of work and a whole lot of thought that has
258gone into it and basically it's um if you would take the pledge reach out to three people you haven't spoken to in some time and just check in and see how they're doing it ties into mental health it ties into some tragedies and so anyway it's a it's a great thing the second thing is as i mentioned before i'm fortunate enough to coach our 8th grade middle school basketball team boys basketball team and last wednesday 26 of us went to eat at a somali restaurant downtown medina and we had an unbelievable time and we have a very diverse basketball team and it was just a fabulous experience for all of us and so um i just want to say that i don't know if cain is still on or not but also the farewell boys
259basketball association this weekend hosted a two-day tournament at the high school and i just want to say thank you to the district and really hats off to the custodial staff at the high school they do a tremendous job helping make sure everything goes smoothly and kane if you're on i sure hope this message gets to you and uh and the staff up there so that's all i have superintendent sesker yeah i'll be brief too um i also had a great experience our middle school uh ski trip uh i see joe has left joe sage is on there casey was on there too and a bunch of other cases back there still but we had a great time having about 50 middle schoolers learning how to ski and some were obviously a little bit more advanced
260than others and it was fun also attended the state dance tournament last weekend a girl did great didn't place in the top three a top six but they had a great year and they really did a nice comeback making to the state tournament i know that section wrestling i'm probably stealing some of thomas's thunder i see thomas is gone too but state our section wrestling they got second place and then uh a big congratulations to to lauren mcdonough for placing it for gymnastics last weekend so a lot of great things happening not just academically but also within our activities programs too thank you anything else nope uh this brings us to item 15 dates to remember um we do need to make a motion to add february 28th do we really need the motion to
261make it as a as a it's just a workshop yeah you're right you're right we can just post it okay you'll post it so i'm gonna add that on here though february 28th uh 2022 will be a newly created work session march 1st 2022 is a policy meeting march 7th 2022 is another work session um and we will likely have a special board meeting yes before that night should we approve that now that would be good to prove that one have a special meeting march 7th but we don't need an action imsp we can just post that right same thing yep okay okay so we will have a special board meeting on march 7th followed by a work session same time start though right same time start 5 30 the work session will follow you
262know 5-10 minutes afterwards march 21st 2022 is a finance meeting and march 28 2022 is the next regular board meeting if you will okay that leads us to item 16 adjournment i will entertain a motion to approve so vote second uh before we leave i just want to thank all of you that have stayed here for better part of four and a half hours um just thank you for for being engaged and attentive and helping us out and to anybody online as well so i guess we need a roll call mr billingham okay john billingham aye courtney cavaliere hi richard olson cassie steves two percent right now chad wolfe aye motion passes four zero uh we're adjourned thank you have a good night you