001the 28th of july 5 30 i'm going to call the meeting to order eric garten i'm missing uh tim and laurie tonight and lori very good thank you joel please rise and join me in the of the pledge states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right amen first up tonight would be to approve the agenda will entertain a motion to that effect second we have a motion and a second further discussion hearing none all in favor with an eye any opposed that motion carries thank you turn things over to mr ellstad for our mission moment thank you mr chair members of the board i'm going to invite our custodians to come in there outside if they would please come in
002and we'll have them kind of stand in front of the table here if you would please come on in come on in don't be shy come on welcome you're good you're good stand tall mr chair members of the board it is my pleasure tonight um as we talk about our commitments the four commitments we have to our community and our students and staff that i lift up our custodial and maintenance department um over the past 18 months these folks have really committed themselves to our commitment about safe and providing a safe and caring environment the extra hours that were put in to create a environment that was safe from disinfection and things like that second to none and whenever there was a whenever there was a task that needed their attention they moved on it
003quickly and found ways to make it work including washing tables several times during one given lunch period providing all of the materials that were necessary our community should be incredibly proud of the work that these folks put in to keep our students and staff safe throughout the course of the year as you know we had a little surge in illness in november but quite honestly we were one of the lowest school districts around and a lot of it is owed to the fact that these gentlemen representing our custodial maintenance crew tonight provided the leadership and their buildings necessary to create that safe and caring environment i'm going to say your name and if you just want to raise your hand because we have some folks attending tonight corey andreessen is here tonight jeff ayers john
004burning john fuller don cronebush wayne schultz joe williams and i see steve davis is with us as well do we have another others that i didn't mention i think that's it all right very good i'd like to give these folks a round along with the boarded administration i want to offer you our sincerest thank you for a job well done and i know that i work because in the summer you are busy preparing the building for our students to return in person fully in the fall and we look forward to that and thanks again for your hard work really appreciate mr l said thank you up next would be public forum and just to make sure that we have created the best opportunity for everybody that came to speak i have four cards and i'll
005just i'll read these off real quick marlene jamie april and anthony is there anybody else that would like to make a comment during public forum tonight sure there's a card right down here at the end next to sarah if you'd please fill that out we'll gather that up with from you uh before you leave marlene you turned your card in first please come up to the uh the table here and and you have three now just goes here you might have to do a little sheet rearranging if we can because we want to make sure that we get because uh there's a recording for the board meetings as well we want to make sure we can hear their voices so thank you and marlene [Music] i've been giving this critical release there a very awful
006lot of talk and a lot of research and i get an absolutely fantastic magazine it's called the new american best magazine in the entire country and this issue is all about what's going on in our schools and i think if every parent and grandparent could read this they'd be pulling kids out in droves and i understand after the year of online learning a lot of people kind of caught on to what's going on and a lot of them are never sending their kids back into the public they're going to just continue with online and there's lots of options for online and i've been thinking about it if you all really believe this critical race theory stuff everybody up here is white you need to resign because if we are the oppressors and everyone else is
007oppressed by white people then we need to just clear the way and let them take our spots because we don't want to be oppressors any longer but anyway i want to read you what my magazine has to say the exclusive purpose of critical race therapy theory is the disparaging of western culture and the cancelling of western creators thinkers and achievers and the projecting onto the modeling white people the racist burden of inescapable guilt for all the evils of the world going back to the beginning of time and as i have told you before i will never apologize for my skin color nor that of my ancestors this country is so precious 50 of people want to be here so we just cannot be all that all that bad and there's some more things in here
008that i thought were very well the whole magazine was interesting but um there's a merit system i understand and it i'm just going to read it to you also in oregon the state legislature passed a resolution allowing newer teachers to be retained over the senior ones if the newer teachers have more diversity training which of course they would the bill requires the public schools use merit-based systems when making staff reductions unless the system interferes with the school's diversity ratio school districts who plan education staff reductions must retain employees with less seniority if they have more merit there are then senior employees and merit is divine defined as having taken anti-bias and other forms of diversity training and then it talks about the rochester public school system in minnesota voted unanimously that the phrase black lives
009matter and other slogans dear to the critical race theory movement are privileged official government speech which means they are exempt from challenge by dissenting opinion ordinarily protected by the first amendment among the other phrases so designated are all are welcome here indigenous lives matter stop asian hate and brown lives matter simply decreeing speech to be government speech and therefore speech cannot be criticized or challenged is orwellian and not likely to pass the constitutional muster in our court of law another resolution was passed to exclude messaging deemed undesirable by the republic rochester public schools and i know tom is always on board for whatever is the very latest and greatest and whenever i see one of your columns in the paper mr elves did i can see all the buzzwords to all of this critical race
010stuff and i just can't even hardly i i don't read it i can't stand it because i know you're just into it right up to your eyeballs but i want to read you an article here too also about another town in minnesota when minnesota mother anne-marie calgario found out that her underage son had been taken to get sex change surgery by government school officials without her permission she was furious and heartbroken at the same time calgary's outrage resulted in her filing a lawsuit against the saint louis county school district in 2016. not only was i robbed of the opportunity to help my son make good decisions but i also feel he was robbed of a key advocate in his life his mother calgary told reporters about the horrific ordeal i was not consulted or informed
011about this transgender tradition transition in any way unfortunately for kelgo and her son however all the lawsuits in the world will never undo the surgical castration and hormone treatments the child was subjected to by government educators and the crack doctors studies show almost all children tricked into believing their transgender end up perfectly normal in adulthood calgario's sterilized and mutilated sun will not get the chance to find out if this happened to my kid you better believe guns would be blazing i'd be in here and i wouldn't put up with it this is horrible and this whole magazine goes on if you'd spend less time teaching all the garbage and get down to where you're teaching them how to really have skills to get them through life like this common core math two plus two does
012not equal five but you let go if it's a small number you can be off by a small amount it's a big number you can be off by more we're raising a generation that is so dumbed down it's now a national emergency and this is all what we're paying for through public schools and we're paying dearly for this mess with our kids i think it's shameful and i'm just as disgusted as i possibly can be but i would suggest why don't you subscribe to this magazine and learn what you're doing to our kids we're going to animals we need local control and this has gotta go we need our kids to come out so they can read a clock face not just a digital clock i have talked to people that worked and they said
013when the kid got them break they say where does the hands on the clock have to be they can't read a clock face and they're old enough to be working at iv you're in the home stretch here marlene three minutes pitiful pitiful but anyway i could go on and on every article in here is outstanding and to think that two two school districts in minnesota were named in here and orton is always on the cutting edge of everything and i got one more thing to say actually you've used your three minutes thank you though well i got a lot more i could say up next would be jamie jamie welcome we're glad you're here thank you um and thank you all for listening um so i attended the razor standards event in oatana on june
0148th at the iotana country club um because i have some concerns about the resistance of critical release race theory being taught in the autonomous schools at this event deborah bandle spoke she identified herself as a school board member and she informed the audience that she's been told by other school board members to be quiet to go along with a group and that her vote doesn't count when she's voting against crt she also stated that the school board is being controlled by mr ellsted i find that hard to believe i bring this up for a couple of reasons otana high school has experienced three race riots in 10 years in an environment where crt wasn't being discussed or any other related topic related to positive race relations for that matter my son graduated from owatonna high
015school in 2020 and i do need to note my kids are black my son was in the gym my son was treated as less than a person and has been treated as less than a person since he enrolled in autonomous schools that's important since the last race riot he expressed significant reforms to his educational experience since the last race riot including the willingness of other students to engage in discussions of race and culture most of my son's education in black history came from home not from the school and none of his white friends were educated in anything race related other than basic topics of the broad scope of slavery and martin luther king jr ms vandal's comments cause me great concern it makes me question what's really going on behind closed doors at the school
016board it makes me lose trust in those who are making decisions for the school district it makes me wonder why she identifies as a victim of this institution it also makes me question whether or not ms bandel is honest and a fair representative of the owatonna school district that she would so publicly throw the other school board members under the bus and further fuel the divisions and conspiracies which is the thing she reported believes she reportedly believes critical race theory would do crt is a necessity in oatana public schools isn't this awesome ladies and gentlemen she has an opportunity to speak for three minutes the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior unless there is a significant intervention if crt isn't taught in a ton of schools the board should just prevent should just
017prepare for the same past behavior to continue and i must ask how many more race riots are necessary before a significant intervention thank you thank you for your comments up next is april april welcome thank you i welcome this opportunity to speak to all of you um i would also like to talk about why crt is not the answer first of all i'd like to address her concerns um i understand there is racism i do not believe for one second that owatana is systemically racist we have racist people here that we all need to help hold accountable but this school district this this town is not systemically and out and out and above just racist she is right we do need to talk about the race issue that we have and in this town and
018in how it's dealt with and she is right her children were not taken care of and that is on the adults especially these in this room not our children our children do not need to be taught to hate each other okay critical race theory is what divides ohatana it does not bring oh autonomous like her and her family to want to stay here there are plenty of families that are leaving the owatana i love owatana i was not born and bred here but my husband was i've been married for 25 years to that man and i raised three children in this school district in the public school systems okay i love otana and each and every person that is in it okay i love the child that is just born to every adult okay i
019critical race theory is not the answer critical race theory teaches that this country was founded on racism growing to become the successful nation that we are today is only because of racism that is not a true statement so race and today to say that that is the fundamental uh that defines us as a country as obatana i'm not even going to say a country i'm going to say oh tana it does not define us hard work defines us teaching our children that they can be anything that they want to be can and does define our children okay as it doesn't the critical race theory should not be taught okay and it's not critical race theory it's critical theory because critical theory includes a lot of things and this subject is just racism okay and it
020needs to be talked about and it needs to be dealt with but it's not on our children it is on us as adults to teach them how are we reaching out to the adults to make sure that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing to keep this autonomic community not divided crt is not the answer so there you go april thank you up next is anthony yes we didn't get your last name can i get your last name hernandez h-e-r-n-e-n-d-z thank you thank you and thank you got three minutes we're glad you're here thank you yes god bless everyone for being here and thank you for having us um versus sex education um i do not think it should be taught in schools it's something that made myself awkward i went to
021old china high school graduated from there 88. um i never thought it should have been taught when i was learning it made me feel really uncomfortable i think it's a waste of tax dollars for one thing and um the things that i hear now and i haven't delved into that yet but um some of these are coming up you know could be rumors on the internet whatever that it's gonna get worse and worse and that just needs to be stopped what they're going to want to teach um even younger children which i have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old and we homeschool and there's a reason why we do that and i used to um have great faith in public schooling especially in guantanamo i thought orton is one of the best school districts in the
022state and we have got many um teachers of the year awards going out to some other teachers and i just think now i'm turning the other way and i don't like that and i'm from oytano born and raised and i just the things i'm hearing and the things that i think are about to come i hope to god that they don't because it's just um kind of frightening it's gonna be awkward for a lot of children i think people should um think that through um the kids nowadays i mean they're going to learn no matter what they should be learning at home unfortunately it's not going to be every parent going to do that we're going to teach our children like we should the lord first and um and it should follow you know with
023the bible and then from there move on you know to academics but i just really think that um everyone should really take a good closer look at what we're about to teach our children and especially our teenagers and from when they go on and i think it kind of arms them with more ammunition probably to have sex than to not i mean it just i don't know it's really troubling and that's why i came here then to do with um crt too which i think is a joke and last i checked i was brown but and coming for me i just think it's a huge waste of time i think it's ridiculous and just the things i hear like coca-cola which i still enjoy and i still watch the nfl because i'm not going to
024ban things because certain people are doing things and not kneeling for the anthem which i think is lame but i just think that you know this whole thing is going too far and like you know don't be white it's a joke you know it's like you know be whoever you're going to be whatever race you are and i don't think they should be teaching that garbage in the school either i think it's a huge waste of time and coming from someone like me who had grown up in this town where like when the few minorities here i would dealt with a lot of racism and like other people had mentioned on it's certain people and that's everywhere you go it's going to be that way it's not just owatana i still think it's a great
025town i think we have a great chance of them you know making it is one of the best towns i've always said that's why i came back i moved away moved to washington lived in minneapolis went to art school for about four and a half years and that was okay actually i was younger than liked it now i don't want to leave this town i really like you know i feel comfortable here and then to have this stuff you know it's all over the country but especially when it gets to your hometown i just don't really like like hearing about it and this whole thing with the you know black lives matter too i think it's a bunch of garbage too and i'm a minority i think people are just hipping out you know just
026being a bunch of sissies actually just you know man up and just we are who we are things are going to happen but don't just hit me up to things because you know you know just like with george floyd tragic but was he the best guy in the world no now he's got a statue that's like he has with all this money to make a statue for him it was really sad what happened i didn't agree with it i think shavin you know should have got some time for what he did and he did and the thing is i just don't agree with all this stuff and it's just like a kind of like a green card for a lot of people to like get away with a lot of things cops are being abused
027and we support our law enforcement strongly and i wish the rest of the country would do the same and it's just like um a travesty it just all this is going on right now we're living it right now we're living it our kids are seeing it and i just don't want it to be in the schools i'll part with that amen anthony thank you last person tonight is jennifer jennifer welcome we're glad you're here some of you know that i'm jennifer fisher and those of you that don't i have been heavily involved in the community in a lot of different ways my husband along with his siblings have all been born and raised here um where they come from a hard-working farming family with solid christian roots ethics and morals i spent much of the
02826 years that i've lived here probably involved in this community and the schools and some of you may even recognize me from those communities and those committees and that type of thing the bottom line is to work for what's best for us our students and our youth in the educational academic arena excuse me together we currently my husband and i have 40 years of children that have gone through the school system and now we also have our grandchildren also attending at the same time through the attendance schools i believe you would agree that that is a lengthy amount of time and involvement connecting us to the school district