001good evening everyone and welcome we are the owatonna school board this is monday it's the 25th of january 5 30 calling this meeting to order eric our attendance tonight all board members and student rep for present fantastic folks um tonight it's wonderful to see you all back it's wonderful to be back together again and as mr allstate has just helped remind me when you are speaking please feel free to take off your mask just for clarity and articulation it's much easier to hear everybody with that y'all please rise and join me in the pledge pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all most of you will remember that when we had our last meeting which was our organizational meeting it
002just didn't feel like it was the right time to welcome deborah bandel as our newest school board members we've delayed this introductory opportunity to tonight and if i can i'd like to offer some introductory remarks deborah it's an honor that you were elected to guide the education of our community's children your responsibility along with the other members of our school board is for an equitable and quality education of every student in the district as a board we are accountable to the community and must ensure a continuous assessment of student achievement and all conditions affecting the education of the children as board members we serve as education's key advocate on behalf of students to advance the vision of our schools furthermore we must work together with the superintendent and staff to lead the district toward fulfilling
003the vision we have created fostering excellence for every student every day in the areas of 21st century learners safe and caring community equity and high quality teaching and learning deborah we welcome you and look forward to your skills and energy in our shared commitment to the owatonna school district having signed the acceptance of office thereby i publicly affirm my commitment to the oath of office i affirm that i will support the constitution of the united states and the state of minnesota and that i will discharge faithfully the duties of the office of school board member of independent school district number faithfully and to the best of my judgment and abilities thank you deborah thank you and welcome would you care to make just a couple of quick comments who are you and and your desire
004your interest to run for school board and here you are now i asked earlier what did he tell you right well they told me i couldn't do a 10 minute um education has been something that has been very much a forefront in my family's upbringing my grandfather was the county school superintendent of olmsted for about 35 years the only way they could get rid of him was to get rid of the office but i have always had an interest in education and encourage people even as adults to continue trying to learn new things it changes your perspective on current events and just kind of makes you more informed and i look forward to having opportunities to meet with the teachers and students and find out what's on their mind as we move forward thank you
005thank you deborah welcome uh first up tonight would be to approve the agenda as it has been presented to you we'll entertain a motion to that effect we have a motion and a second any further discussion with regard to the agenda okay hearing none all in favor with an eye any opposed motion carries we're going to take us right into the mission moment i'm going to turn things over to mr elstad thank you mr chair members of the board tonight it's my honor during our mission moment to really talk about and this really hits for me and safe and caring community because these two awards that are given out by the state high school league uh certainly recognize the excellence that we inspire within all of our students i'm going to call first on our
006excel award winners and again within this connor ginsky and ava hess are our winners this year these two students again really inspire excellence not only for adults but also for their their peers in the school this is an award given out to juniors in each in each each year excuse me that really exemplify uh their excellence in fine arts and athletic activities as well as how they lead in their leadership qualities just a couple of comments about goner excuse me connor ginsky connor is a member of the national honor society deca and is certainly on the honor roll he is a three sport athlete excelling in cross country basketball and track and field as all of our high school students though and this is something i think that is really special for owatonna he is
007also excels in band choir solo and ensemble competition and pep band so again really rounded out our students the last part is his community service where he's a bible camp leader altar server and many other leadership and and youth opportunities where he has done youth youth receipt leadership youth retreat pardon me leadership as well so congratula congratulations to connor our next student is ava hess that name may seem familiar to his board members because just about a year ago we honored ava and her sisters that were instrumental in being part of a fundraising effort to raise money for a zoo exhibit that supported elephants and so ava of course continues this sort of excellence with her membership and national honors society the student council the honor roll uh students helping others choose or shock link
008crew she's a tutor in our elementary buildings and is also a student representative on many communities committees as i meet with my superintendent's high school advisory uh she excels at soccer but again as well as ban pep band marching band stolen ensemble competition and is also this year going to be in the minnesota band directors association honor band with that her community service includes the carnival fundraiser that i referenced earlier adopt a highway she's a church volunteer boo for food which of course collects food for the steele county food shelf she's worked with the steele county relay for life from the heart and from the otana music boosters congratulations to connor and ava for this year's excel award winners the next two students i would like to lift up for you this evening are two
009seniors that are our 2021 uh aaa award winners for excellence in academics arts and athletics our female winner this year is sydney huntst and sydney is another well-rounded student of course and she's involved in choir orchestra she's on the girls varsity soccer team where she's been a captain this past fall she also has been a varsity hockey player for five years and team captain up for three of those years and all conference for three years in hockey as well as well as her participation in varsity track and field and then lastly is lane verstagg lane is also well-rounded his experience is in choir and solo and ensemble competition participant where last year he received a superior rating he's a section leader within the choir as well as four years in orchestra and a section leader
010there as well you may have read about lane earlier this year he received all-american honors as a sparsity soccer player been a team captain for two years in all conference for two years and this year was named nominated to be an all-state soccer player he also was a kicker for the varsity football team so he spent his fall very busy in those two activities and has been it was a state participant on both for two years with the state with the varsity football team and as well as been a varsity letter winner basketball for two years these are excellent students and just a real quick snapshot of the students that come out of owatonna high school and again i'm very pleased to lift this up tonight because i not only think they cover area of
011safe and caring community but they lift up what it means to be a 21st century learner and certainly high quality teaching and learning has gone in to really help develop these students i would also share this these students are deeply committed to equity and are not afraid to share their convictions about how we serve all of our kids so with that those are our mission moment students of the month that is terrific mr elstead thank you that is really nice to see uh as we move on from mission moment we're going to go to public forum there is one entry that had been submitted for public forum and to turn things over to mr ellstad to report on that thank you again mr sebring members of the board tonight's public comment comes from a gentleman
012named corey harmoning address is 344 broadway street here in oatana his comment reads as such hello first i would like to say thank you for all of your hard work for you and your staff that you and your staff have been doing has been an amazing job my daughter is in the 5th grade distance learning group on 1 21 21 we were working on homework together and she had an assignment on the history of the inauguration i thought that's great after watching the video with my daughter i felt very disappointed in this lesson and what the school decided to put out this video my daughter had to watch had nothing to do with the history of the inauguration and only focused on our current president joe biden and kamala harris and their history when they
013were younger which made no sense to me i request that you please watch this video that these kids had to watch and reply back what your thoughts on the assignment language and what content was put forward by the video thank you corey harmony thank you as we move on now to uh reports our very first and only report tonight comes from the otana high school uh mr kath along with members of the staff i believe are yes they are in fact here and i'm going to turn things over to mr ellstad for some introductions thank you again mr steve bring members of the board um this is actually uh we have some administrative reps i also think we have some staff there other staff that are joining us well tonight to give you an update
014on owatonna senior high school and some of the work that has been going on what i have shared with you many many times is that even though we're in pandemic and perhaps not all of our students are attending every day our staff is still hard at work putting that vision in place for what we currently want oatana high school to be and what we see the vision of that new high school will be as well so i'll turn it over to mr kath and his staff well yes thank you very much for the opportunity to be here this evening we have quite a bit of information to share with you and it kind of bounces around to some different initiatives and work that we're doing at the high school we want to make sure we
015give you a snapshot of a lot of the work that is happening not of course all of the work that is happening but just to make sure that we share many uh different aspects of that uh with that we've got some guests that will come join us and so we'll have some switching out at the tables here tonight but first i'd like to introduce holly jessica who's our one of our assistant principals and she's going to be sharing some information about our coveted response and planning thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here first we want to thank our staff our students our parents our families our nursing staff our teachers it is nothing short of amazing what they have done what our students have learned through this process our teachers and our
016families as well just to kind of keep you guys informed as well our families the communication at the receive once a month we do a ohs communication out to all of our families just about the things that are currently going on our schedule if things have changed which as we know they have frequently and every other month or twice a month sorry our students get a compass connection this comes from our guidance office it gives information for grades 9 through 12 in various stages that they may need some information graduation testing some social emotional pieces compass is replacing what was formerly our tmm our guidance office will talk a little bit more about that and that's happening virtually on wednesdays so they're able to interact with that some live links and some pieces through that
017we also have made a commitment this year to schoology as a platform our students have one platform then that they are able to be able to engage with and learn through this leads into our other part of it there's some synchronous and asynchronous learning going on throughout all classes some kids do a hybrid schedule or they just are in monday tuesday they do distance thursday friday some are in monday tuesday and then they virtually join that class every single day and follow that same schedule so it really gives a lot of opportunity for some different learning first students we know that through best practices that we need to provide a lot of different options for students to learn hands-on materials students have been able to come in and do some things differently our teachers have
018really thought outside the box and how to make sure that they're meeting those students needs interventions and supports this has been amazing through all i mean we identify a few areas in here with our educational assistants reach special ed and our general ed teachers the impact that they're making i think is something that they maybe truly don't really see but it's i mean amazing our students are engaged in connecting they're coming in on days that they're on wednesdays when there's some virtual time our eas and some of our paraprofessionals are making scheduled meetings to connect with students when they're not in the building to help them to continue to engage or support in their classwork through this some of our next steps as you know we just ended a first semester so we're taking a
019look at kind of where some students ended throughout the year if there's some we identify them as nc plans which stands for no credit plan so students will be provided some opportunities to work with a licensed teacher to make up some work to make sure that they're gaining the knowledge and the information they need to meet the standards to receive credit for the course so we have five identified teachers that will work through the rest of this semester the other amazing thing is we have teachers that are not doing this through our nc plan program they're just individually have taken these students on and just said like i'm going to make this plan for the student and these are the things that i need you to complete in order to gain credit for this class
020kind of meeting them where they're at and providing different opera opportunities for them to learn and to meet those standards our next steps as you know with pd and professional development we just need to keep giving as many resources to our teachers and our staff as possible training more training in schoology and ways to engage with technology and just different ways to learn we just had some of those opportunities on mlk day so staff had a lot of time to learn through that as well and now they'll have some time to practice in that kind of through the second semester do you have any questions because i'm in a switch oh i bet there is yeah go ahead yeah you know i appreciate the second to last bullet um i remember when the fall started
021you know we were reflecting on the spring and that experience and how the fall was going to look and feel different both for students and teachers can you just comment a little bit about whether you sort of were able to accomplish what you hoped you know to accomplish in terms of change more rigorous you know content i just remember that absolutely the whole conversation yeah yes absolutely and i think if you asked any one of our students they would tell you like this is different experience and absolutely danielle was shaking her head over here absolutely a different experience i think that was maybe kind of some of the misconception coming in was that this is just going to look like it's spring and you know i can kind of do things differently i think that's
022also what kind of pushed us to add some of these different interventions and supports to meet students where they're at and that distance learning isn't for everybody and we got to help and support and kind of what that that looks like but i absolutely think that some of these things have come from those exact conversations and i think to echo that is also either the number of resources that we added or layered in as supports for students the one-to-one devices of making sure that every student has adequate resources to even uh jump into a schoology platform that wasn't there last spring whereas now that is there that is available along with that then a teacher not just entering into schoology and utilizing an online platform but now actually feeling uh confident about that platform i'm
023feeling as though now i can add layers of uh to that that then are going to add additional rigor or additional supports to students when it comes to how they're going to interact with that online platform well thank you on that note we're going to bring up our two members of our guidance team tammy langlois and sarah craig we're going to share a little bit of uh with you about our career pathways specifically the compass portion of our pathways program hi my name is tammy and i'm one of four of the high school counselors and this year we have implemented our compass program formerly known as tmm as holly mentioned normally that a group of advisees meets about twice a month and we do different things based on the grade level so like i plan
024all of 11th grade um activities throughout the year so a lot of that focuses on what am i going to do after high school how am i going to prepare for the ect that's going to look a little bit different for ninth or 10th grade student um this year we had to get a little bit creative because we're we're in the world we're living in right now so um we have been pushing out through our compass newsletter all of this information so as a school counselor the three domains we kind of focus on heavily is our academic planning and social emotional learning in college and career readiness so those are the areas that we really focus in on during the compass time in november we hosted our very own college and career fair day it
025was all virtual um so that was kind of pushed out again through this encompass newsletter we do other activities based on grade level to help prepare kids be you know help kids be prepared for life after high school and so through that we've we've gotten to implement a new program this year called naviance now let's here i'm sarah craig i'm another one of the counselors at the high school all right so excuse me like tammy said we have implemented naviance this year and this is really exciting because three of the four counselors in our building have worked with this very extensively in previous districts so we already are going into this with a lot of knowledge on how we can use this we are working with admin to come up with the scope and sequence
026that we will be rolling out primarily through compass so we are really excited for the day that we will have students back in the building on wednesdays and we'll be able to do this in person with their compass advisors but there are a number of things that are housed within this program so first of all students can both explore careers colleges things like that they can do local scholarship and internship researches which is really interesting because that's kind of new in naviance's end they are able to apply to colleges and it links up with their common app and as well as they can request their transcripts and request letters of recommendation and it's all sent through there so not only is it very helpful on our end to have everything housed in one place because
027that is not the case currently it's really nice for families because they can log in and see your transcript went to this school on this date this letter of recommendation you're still waiting on but these other two have gone out um so that's one really nice thing in-house that we'll be utilizing it for but another that's more primarily related to compass is the amount of career interest inventories and assessments and things like that that are within naviance so there are a number of them they become more detailed as students get older so every year a kid will be able to take a different interest inventory that gives them real information that is related to what their strengths are where their interests are and how those things intersect so we'll be able to sit down with
028students as well as their compass advisors and analyze the results of these things every year and help them not only plan their post-secondary opportunities but also what elective classes they should be taking and how that relates to the pathways in our building any questions on compass and it's worked one thing i would like to add that they uh shared when they have done this newsletter as well as naviance in general and just sharing that with families this is the first time that the entire curriculum or the content around compass is being shared with parents too so when that email goes out to students and when it goes out to our staff to be able to um engage within that content it also goes out to every parent as well so that they can see and
029and kind of move along with the student through what that content is as well as engage in some of it because many of those questions and those uh interactive components of it are going to be a great need to the parents as well so they're always hard at work doing that i always love seeing it because we have one account that we work through s'more is how we send it out and it's fun to see it um as it comes alive uh every couple weeks here and then sharing it out with students and seeing the thousands of people as well as how many countries we can get it um to connect with we would look to see where where has that tom s'more newsletter gone um so it's been fun is that tool up and
030running is it implemented already or did i okay i misunderstood yeah and we're excited though you know i think the the one uh real push for us this year is that we wanted to protect class time as much as we could so we have not done the um the the abridged daily schedules where we actually meet in person because you'd have to do it twice a week with the group one group two um but we do believe that with the online format and being able to push that out to students there still is a connection that is being made there there are conversations as well as in our core classes for ninth grade they are actually using naviance as a teaching tool within it so students are getting introduced to it utilizing it and engaging
031it uh in a real format we just know though that right now i'm trying to protect that class time as much as possible um that then compass kind of becomes an add-on thank you thank you um so i've got a question yes um so my speculation and i'm just guessing here some of these career interest assessments and some of the stuff you probably did last year and it's generally throughout the year having cut your year short how are you regrouping to make sure that all those interests are basically accomplished for all the people that you missed last year this is new this year um but we i mean we're able to go in and see students that haven't so like in districts that i've worked in before um we would run reports and pull out
032the kids that had not yet done them and then when you would meet with them individually the counselor would prompt them to work on them most of them do not take very long okay as well as one thing that i do appreciate is students can take it multiple times because as they have a unique experience they may take that inventory again um to gather new information about um where they're at because the experience has changed their opportunity as well so it's kind of cool to see that as students evolve as they go through the years too and just to kind of sorry add on to that too when they graduate this program also like follows them and so you can see where our kids going how successful are they how many are transferring are they
033going into the workforce right away so that part is that tool is really neat and exciting because we want to make sure that they're not only prepared for like graduating but like what are you gonna do after after you're done so that's the neat part about it too we'll definitely want to showcase to you at some point in time some of the tools that are within naviance i think you'd really enjoy it on the videos there's just thousands of them they call it road trip nation it is just incredible on what a student can do the search engine on colleges where you can say i really like this section of the country i need an olympic size pool in the college that i go to i love pizza on thursdays but i really love this
034career area and it'll give you all the colleges that would fall underneath that search and it's just amazing how it actually narrows it down for students and allows them to explore it thank you thank you next up major uh portion of our timeline right now or a major portion of our conversation has been around registration and specifically that it looks just very different this year um in the context of we're preparing students and engaging them in their next steps for what they want to take and so i'm going to have our assistant principal phil wykan come up and he'll share a little bit on the water registration process that we're engaging in now thank you members of the board superintendent mel said um i'm really excited to be here talking about registration um partly because
035when i first came here there was an idea uh to start bringing the registration guide into alignment with this idea of career college and career pathways and to be there on the forefront of making um you know this idea into a reality and to see the continued refinement and alignment that we're getting to has just been very exciting so as we continue you can see these pieces of compass and how that's feeding into helping students get to know who they are and what their strengths are and that's leading them to you know choose different courses and now we've taken those courses and we've placed them into career pathways that are starting to and we're starting to refine and define what those careers are within those larger pathways so you can see that this work that
036is is leading toward you know creating greater clarity for our students so it's it's very exciting to see that you know how some of the elements that we've been developing through compass some of the guides that we are looking around for career planning are are becoming a reality so it's very exciting to be a part of that uh one of the things that we've constantly been asking ourselves is you know how do we make this better how do we make this more clear and we've looked at you know some of the materials that we've had and one of the questions that we had was how do we you know how do we make the registration guide something that reaches more people and brings people in and becomes more dynamic than just a you know a
037piece of you know paper or a catalog and so last year we started to embed um you know qr codes so that people could scan you know different course descriptions and see testimonials from students and things like that and as we were kind of thinking and and planning you know we were thinking wow wouldn't it be great some point to get even even more deep into that and and expand what that could mean and looking at you know some of the constraints that we've had from kovid have turned into opportunities i think ms langlois said you know creativity that's a key word you know that we've had to really look at things that we're doing and be creative and sometimes some some really interesting things come out of that and so sometimes we look at
038these situations and say well what will registration look like what have we done in the past and we've had to rethink those um and part of the big rethinking is how do we do this with you know different groups and always virtual students and we said why don't we look at doing this virtually how do we look at creating materials now that students are one-to-one uh that we have hot spots and in the places that we need them how do we get those materials out to students and start turning that into a process where we can even take that further so this year we're looking at and and planning for an all virtual registration the materials themselves the registration guide is a digital document that is live it has links and hyperlinks to things outside
039of the guide itself it has links within the guide to create better clarity one of the things that we really wanted to do was streamline the guide we went from a pretty large booklet um to bring and cut out some of the repetition and redundancies that we were seeing and trying to create elements where all of that could be housed instead of repeating it over and over so now we have um hyperlinks you know within the pathways if you click on a pathway and you're in the um you know the core area and you click on on that it will link you right to that pathway on the course descriptions in the overall directory if you want to look at that course description just click click on a link so we have some of these
040elements that are creating more interactivity we also have teachers that are creating presentations and linking them to their course descriptions just so students get better idea used to walk the halls used to look in those display cases and say i want to do that you know i see that project and now we have you know we've been able to bring in pictures we've been able to bring in testimonials so that students get a better idea of what they're kind of experiencing so along with that we've also created um you know because this is something that is new it has to be well supported so our goal is to support that registration through our compass program so we're going to support students with resources and families with resources there is a registration support website that houses
041the materials that we share out as they get released also tracks some of the the calendar and the dates um so that will be something that will be there for for parents we will have three supported um virtual compass meetings and each one will deepen that discussion and our our final piece that that is going to help uh make things you know i think even even more successful is for the first time we're going to open our registration window for a longer time we used to always open it for one night and say one night only and then the show's over and then we'll catch up with you if we missed you this time we're actually opening the window earlier and we are going to have that open when students meet in their their third
042and final compass for february so that will give them a chance to ask you know those really direct questions um you know to their advisor and get feedback on some of the course selections that that they're making so they will definitely um you know be supported so that was kind of our goal we're making this change but you know in in order for it to be successful we need to put the right supports in place so i guess these are kind of the big words that i think that kind of come up as we're thinking through as we've streamlined we've you know been reflexive to you know the the changes and adapting and then also it it you know being a digital guide it's something that we can immediately update and we don't have to
043we don't have to print it it's something that um we can house all over we can email out um makes things you know saves it's also saves some money as well as you know can reach a lot of a lot of people so it's kind of uh i think you know it's again it's really been exciting just to see this kind of transformation i think we have some really good people um who've put a lot of thought into you know making this successful so we're again big change but i think we have the right pieces in place to make it successful any questions on uh the registration guide i have a registration process i think this is fantastic i like hearing about everything that you're embedding and kind of the commercials for the classes i'm
044the mom of an eighth grader and a february 22nd registration day causes me to panic because i'm not quite ready to send him out how will that how does how does this year look different to incoming freshmen as it has the last handful of years because of covey because of this registration process yeah in the past um we've always had a counselor meeting where parents come in to the building and with you know the code restrictions what we've decided is to um i think again be creative and look at how can we make this um you know a meaningful experience and then also how do we make sure that we're connecting kids so when we looked at how we would do the ninth grade meetings counseling was was key um they're actually going to be
045doing virtual meetings um with their alphabet so our counselors break down into their different alphabets so students will attend a virtual meeting with their parents and they'll be meeting with their counselor the counselor will give a brief and kind of informational you know presentation and then be available for questions and they'll be supported by um you know another staff member just to help you know facilitate the questions not only we will do that for the eighth graders going into ninth grade yeah i'm ninth grade going into tenth grade we felt as though this year's freshmen really need that as well just that they did not have they have not had a normal experience um yet either and so we want to make sure that we um flood them with that additional support that they may
046need um in that conversation too um parents are critical to that um to that that that talk that um ability to understand that process and so we want to ensure that that's uh that's happening so our counselors are going to do a lot of virtual meetings um but we just know that they'll be well attended they'll be i'm well connected and on top of that many will say even better attendant because um people will have the flexibility to connect with it we can record those people can save them and then they can see the presentation at their own time too yeah yeah so it definitely thanks corey for bringing that up because that is one of the things that's that's beautiful about being able to do those presentations that we can bring a lot of
047people in um and then we can also address questions but then we can also record it and house it somewhere if someone wasn't able to to be able to make it of course the the middle school will support that registration process students will you know we've been working with oms to um you know facilitate some of the the changes they'll we'll be sharing resources with them that we've developed um and then they will register there and we will still um have some ability for students to be able to connect with their new compass teachers so we'll send out information about those compass connections so on the registration night is generally going to be used for us to connect with people still have questions still will be it will be virtual but we will have that
048ability to to meet people who have those specific questions and then also provide an opportunity for incoming students to connect with their compass teacher for the next year all right last but not least i want to share with you a little bit about our work around co-teaching one of our major initiatives this year is how can we support within our core classes all of our student learners and especially those learners that might have language acquisition needs as well as specific intervention needs as a student and one of the the philosophies that we have is that students should be able to be engaged in a general education setting with their peers at all times and one way to do that is through a co-teaching model and so we've really pushed instead of separating students into a
049class that is designed for special education that's designed for el how do you flood on the general education classes with good teaching supports that support those students and what we find though is not only is that good for our el learners and our special education learners with interventions um but language acquisition is for all of us as learners and so as a teacher when you can partner with a an instructor that is trained and has great experience around those types of interventions you become better as the content teacher and so this year we were able to create 10 partnerships both in el and in special education around that i've had some really really good conversations about from our content teachers as well as from those specialists about what an incredible opportunity this is to partner
050and create ways in which they push intervention or push support out to students who need that within the classroom what our steps within this though are is that now we're able to impact around 300 students in these 10 classes from first semester we'll echo that again for second semester and then what we'll start to look at is um how are the students faring in those classes because we wanted data to drive how this is actually working in other words are we seeing a higher rate of students being successful in those classes are we seeing also a return on the use of those interventions in the non-partnered time so in other words if i'm teaching algebra one first hour and it's with a co-teacher am i using some of those same strategies in the other two
051hours a day that i'm teaching without a co-teacher and so we want to track all of those so that way we know that those interventions are kind of spreading like wildfire for us so they're impacting all of our learners in our school but we're like i said getting a lot of really positive conversation going a better understanding amongst our peers that are intervening with students to say now i get why we do this or what this aspect of that content is or now i know why we use that intervention because it's going to help drive this standard for that student so really exciting and again it also breaks down silos that can exist within a building when you can bring teachers together across content and with that we thank you so much for all your
052support everything you do for us that we can be successful we know that your work uh you know is oftentimes i'm not thanked enough um so thank you for all the efforts that you put into uh making sure that we are prepared and have the resources um but most important thanks for letting us work with kids every day and any other questions that you might have or members any other questions so i was reading your report and in it you mentioned that you have 80 new students that are now in person as opposed to distance learning um were you i mean did that cause a lot of schedule changes to make sure that people should not have mr lichten up here for that wasn't that it's been stressful um but i think we also then
053had a push back the other way over the last few weeks too but i'll let mr wyken share just because he's he's living in every day and i'm making sure that he's still breathing no i mean i mean ideally we want to have students come back and so it's just a matter of you know looking through and and finding the balances and then you know also just checking classrooms we've been in classrooms moving desks and with tape measures and trying to make sure that you know we can and meet those those guidelines but i it wasn't i would say most of the time we were able to work with with families if we had a you know an issue where the class size was too small i would say kids that i have met with
054and talked with if we did have an issue they were more than glad to you know to to switch and we never were had to change anyone's schedule so they would lose a class well i always looked for connections where we could just make a switch of a class period or something like that or if there was a an ability to change a group versus the other but very limited i think we were we're well positioned to be able to get everyone and i think now we're kind of getting to that point where we you know it's it's things have kind of settled and um you know we're we're i think we're sitting pretty well pretty good now that that first day of um semester two and group one has started so just a couple
055changes today and and i think we're sitting sitting really well that's great again thank you i read it and i was excited to see that 80 more students came and then it's like oh that must be difficult so thank you for what you did to get to accommodate a lot of people somebody else mr elstad probably has a few comments always comments but i'm very proud of our staff so thank you mr cath thank you for lifting up these items tonight obviously there's a very good testimony that a lot of work is still taking place and we're keeping our eye on the prize we're all in pandemic we get that we understand it but we serve a better tomorrow and that's exactly where your staff is focused and thank you for that mr wyken thanks
056for your work on this registration guide as a former assistant principal at owatonna high school that's put that book together and brought it to print every year the stress of that printing is is i can feel that weight has been lifted so thank you for your intuitive work on that um i know that and many of you may not know this about mr awaken he's incredibly creative and gifted when it comes to technology and utilizing those skill sets so as we view this i am assuming i'm going to be able to see your hands all over this especially with links to pictures and things that really bring it to life for students so it isn't just a bunch of words on a page so thank you for empowering your staff mr cath and really letting
057them lead these efforts i couldn't be more proud of the progress that were made and let's hope that there's a day yet this spring when we can bring even more students back to owatonna high school so thank you so much thank you thank you thank you as we move on tonight uh in item eight it's just general information does anybody have any a question or any questions for mr elstad or members of the staff with regard to the enrollment report hearing none the next one would be school board policy revisions and i i would just ask i know that lori nikki joe lane are all a part of this policy committee and um there was a fair amount that was made a part of this particular um first reading so i i just wanted to
058allow or create some opportunity for you to comment on that if you'd like we went through a number of them i'll draw your attention to a few and i we're joined tonight by michelle crowler director of teaching and learning and chris our director of human resources is chris is kind of our legal expert within our team and reviews these policies as per statute and so on and then of course a number of these are dealing with teaching and learning and so michelle reviews these and provides the policy committee some direction as well i'll lift up a few to you that have some significant changes to them one of them is a brand new policy and i want to make sure i lift that up to the board tonight if policy number 110 is a policy
059that was created on equity and diversity we're one of a handful of districts in the state that are actually looking to incorporate this policy and have it ready for board consideration it really reaffirms our commitment around equity and racial equity for our communities that we serve in the owatonna public schools policy is a tobacco-free environment policy this is not a new policy to the board but i want to lift this up because now we have added peace in there around vaping awareness and the prevention of vaping itself and the harmful effect that vaping has on our youth um policy 534 is a policy about unpaid meal charges and what i would share with the board is that we're simply looking at adding a little procedure with this the owatana public schools has always stood firm
060that every student receive a meal every day we don't provide alternative lunches for kids if they have unpaid meal charges we feed our kids every single day the regular meal and we are making sure that we don't ever pen punish or penalize our students for having an unpaid meal balance we work on the other end of course to collect those from parents and work out payment plans and so on so on excuse me but this policy really lifts up some of the pieces that have changed within the minnesota school board association requirement that came out with kind of the shaming policy or lunch shaming that was apparent here a couple years ago but it really just recognizes the work of our student nutrition staff to really lift up the fact that we're going to provide
061those really good meals for our students yet and then i'm going to turn policy 601 and 602 over to michelle because they have very clear direction from our teaching and learning department so policy 601 which is on the school district curriculum instruction policy um the addition that we made to that policy was the adding of dyslexia text testing to that particular policy and that's required by the minnesota department of education we've been um we've been actually doing that for several years now and that actually is included in our literacy plan that we put together and we have available every single school year and then in june we also do a report to the minnesota department of education that indicates how many students what are what our testing procedures are for dyslexia and then the reporting
062the reporting of information of how many students were screened for that within our district along with other testing data for kindergarten first and second grade students and so that's the addition that was added to that but we are in compliance within the school district as we've been doing that for at least the last probably since i've been here the last three years four years so um and then do we just roll into six policies 602 policy 602 is our school calendar policy the addition that we made to the school calendar policy was adding of the e-learning days as you know we got a test run on january 15 to see how that went for us and we had a snow day i'm pleased to report that in talking with the principals that went really really
063well um so you know i think the days in minnesota of snow days are probably gone because now that we yeah i listen to that mom right there yes exactly so um i think that for us because we now have one-to-one devices for our students we've been doing distance learning we have schedules put together of what that should look like in the event that we would have a snow day then we slide into e-learning we didn't necessarily call it e-learning yet but we will moving forward but our families really knew it as a distance learning day like at our elementary level we have schedules put together specific guidelines and information that went to families so they knew we had choice boards for some fun in the afternoon for elementary kids some outdoor fun and things
064like that so we tried to balance that in our middle school high school we've been doing distance learning students know what that looked like so it was pretty similar to a typical distance learning day that students have had since we just came out of that so the addition on policy 602 is for us to be allowed to do elearning days and that's required by the minnesota department of education that we have to have in policy if we're going to do e-learning days in the future beyond this year this year is an exception year of course but moving forward that's available to us now if we have it in policy one thing i'd like to add to that i think this adds a little bit more of the why e-learning is important it seems about every
065three years now we come up on one of those winters where we have more than a few snow days because of inclement weather we always end up in this kind of tug of war between do we need to add days onto the end of the calendar because we are held yet to a number of instructional hours at different levels within the school system the implementation and consideration of this policy really takes away that tug of war because we no longer have to fight about how many instructional days do we have are we getting close if you remember three years ago we had i think 11 snow days uh in a winter i was an unusual winter but maybe the more of those are coming we don't know but this really prevents that entire struggle all
066the way and so we can still enjoy the typical minnesota snow days and we have some activities we're not asking kids to sit in front of a screen for eight hours we're really just trying to find a way to get rid of all of that nuisance quite honestly that we run into uh trying to meet the department of education requirements along with really trying to align the learning that our students will be asked to do so again i think i would just add that that this i think is a needed piece i'm glad the department is allowing us to explore this and certainly lift it up for your considerations and to note too also the department of education allows up to five e-learning days so once you can't go beyond five e-learning days um in
067the future so that's just another note to take for the policy so does that mean if there's a sixth snow day it's going to be a snow day that's right i think it is [Laughter] i would just continue on and let you know that i believe there are eight or nine additional policies that are an annual review item for school board members there are no changes to these policies other than you just have to review them so that they can be lifted up on an annual basis including the way we do this and i'm going to add one other piece of this i think which was is something i think is good for the board to know we've tried to start to look at policies from a different angle and allowing really a racial perspective
068and an equity perspective to look at policies to make sure systemically that we are serving all of our students and so chris pica is working with an affinity group within our district with some of our staff members of color and she's going to be kind of leading them through this process along with dr natalie rasmussen from mankato state that you might remember from our training just really walk through this and chris i don't know if you want to add anything to that as far as the process you'll be using to kind of look through our policies um no natalie was when i um spoke with her last week she was ecstatic that you know we are going to start looking at the policies from a different lens you know knowing that sometimes you know they
069won't be able to do it because it's all legal and um you know that's what the language is uh but we gave her a set of policies and then she's going to invite me in for a particular part of time during their i think their meeting is thursday late afternoon and we'll review them to see if especially the 110 the new policy on equity and get their feedback and then i'll bring that back to the policy thank committee that's it all right board members any questions on this i have one question um jeff in regards to the e-learning calendar and maybe you can answer this as well so my assumption is that in the past the calendar has been built to have a few snow days already built in are those snow days still going
070to be built in uh i'm assuming the answer is yes because i've heard that there's five but just some clarification so we typically schedule our calendars we have typically 180 187 student contact days typically and within that there are a few days built in we really run into that sort of tug of war when we talk about middle school and high school levels because of the instructional hours that are still required now that opens up a whole another discussion about what the legislature might look at this year as providing more flexibility in getting away from carnegie units that have been around for 150 years and so i think there's there's potential that that might be explored but yes we do build in some time our elementary actually has never really gotten close to the threshold
071but middle school was one day away last time from being either having to add additional days or potentially losing funding and that includes the three days that were forgiven by governor walls as a result of the was it called the polar vortex yeah so all right thanks again to um the three of you that are serving on policy that is um that's some heavy lifting right there thank you uh we are going to move on we are going to move on to board forum and i'm going to start daniella i'm going to start with you because i'm going to speak on behalf of the board we're really anxious to hear how that transition from the distance model back to the hybrid has worked for you yeah definitely um i'm very very glad that i decided
072to go back into school because i can definitely tell the difference um between just all virtual and then at least hybrid um just like the hands-on experiences like for example in chemistry are definitely helpful because it's just not the same like although all virtual school is very helpful there's a lot of resources and in person definitely makes a difference i'm definitely glad i came back and i also wanted to talk to you guys about a new class that i'm taking and it's called um intro to critical race theory and it's a class taught by miss katie kudron and dr natalie rasmussen um so it's a class that introduces students to a protocol called courageous conversations and it courageous conversations basically helps facilitate healthy conversations about racism racial equity and social justice so in class we
073just have like big or small group conversations about like current events and we also just read like relevant articles and just talk about like the historical practices behind the united states so like one of our um unique assignments was analyzing and just taking like notes over the poem that natalie gordman recited at the inauguration which i thought was very informative and just like nice to like analyze and just like reflect over and i'm just really glad that this class was provided this year because it's just something new that i don't think many opportunities have been provided like this before in the past and i just think that it's great that we're starting to provide more stuff like this and it also provides college credit so that's a plus too but yeah i thought you guys
074would like to hear about that because i really like that class i think that it's i'm something i'm very passionate about and i've definitely noticed that because i was writing a paper and it's not the easiest thing for me to write a paper in like say english but when i wrote about it in this class it just came so quick to me it was like 15 minutes it was really nice and i just wanted to let you guys know about that yeah daniella thank you julian um yes facilities met today earlier and so we are still on time and under budget which is fantastic um good news plans come out to the world on february 5th for contractors to take a look at pull some numbers together with a bid date of march 9th and
075then bring the approved contracts to the board for approval on the 29th of march and early june they're moving dirt so that's very exciting and then to also kind of look into the future we have to work backwards a little bit with the existing high school and so administration is starting to think about different ways to use technology to gather some initial input from community members and different organizations that might have some ideas as to what to do with the existing building and so we can line up the time frame as best as possible to move into the new school and then have things solidified and work to get done on the existing school so yeah it's good stuff it's all coming together you're doing a great job thank you tim they're too tough to
076follow nothing for me nikki um so as some of you saw we have the minnesota school board association meetings and i am running so hopefully you all got the election and vote for me um well not too much to offer except um just to let you know this whole schoology and when teachers talk about that i always think in my mind what is that and anyway so a couple of us had an opportunity to actually experience that with one of the teachers at the high school um so i really just enjoyed that it was great um to hear kids and to experience that platform and sort of know some of what they're going through right now so enjoy that that's it i have a couple of items for board forum and while i'm beginning my
077introductory remarks michelle is going to make her way back in because there are a couple of items that i'm going to i'm going to pass off to michelle one thing that i wanted to mention to everybody is that nikki has nikki is really embracing this msba relationship and set of responsibilities nikki has completed all four of the the different phases of training and it's been recognized mr mr allstate had received a courtesy copy of the correspondence that nikki was in receipt of i also was in on the meeting the msba virtual meeting where nikki had an opportunity to make some comments with regard to you know what did she see as her role as a board member and what are those things that are happening here in autonomous she did an excellent job of representing
078us uh here in oatana so nikki thank you very much we all completely you know you obviously have our support and we wish you the very best with that um i wanted also to mention that joe lane and laurie and i were on that virtual conversation with the katie kudron grow your own there what there were probably what would you guess 20 students yeah eight o'clock in the morning on that call jumped in and it was i i have to tell you it was rather fascinating just to see how virtual education is happening number one and number two it was it appeared to me as though it was exceedingly participatory it looked to me like the vast majority of the students that were on this were engaged and they were chatting and they were making
079comments it was really very very fun but that then led to the district district curriculum advisory committee that met last thursday again virtually and there were three things that michelle introduced and daniella just laid the most perfect groundwork for you on these three these these are very exciting um initiatives that are coming out of michelle's work take it away well i you know there's a lot of exciting things going on as we start to look at career pathways and what is it we want for high school experience for our students um you know we've really looked at what are the needs of our community well number one education is one of the needs of our community our school district we want to grow our own students and then you know the healthcare field obviously really
080when we think about our pandemic and the work and our health care field is another way another avenue that we need to pursue so the partnership we have a partnership with minnesota state university we have partnership schools and actually chris pico worked with a committee and helped write a grow your own grant and receive that grow your own grant and so what came out of that grow your own grand was the grow your own when we think about our intro to education which the three of you participated in so in the first semester katie kudron taught a course called intro to education and that course students were able then to earn three college credits towards education one of our goals is then to continue to find ways for us to provide our goal really is
081to provide up to nine credits in education in a direct pipeline to minnesota state university mankato where students could pursue an education degree and already have nine credits in the education field so the intro to education course is one of them um and then daniella eloquently spoke about our new critical race theory and we're super excited about this course because we're the only school in the partnership that was able to um pilot this course this year and there were a lot of stipulations um it wasn't that just katie kudron could teach it we also had to have a teacher of color and then we really had to be able to we're teaching in a semester course and so um katie kudron is working on setting the groundwork for the critical race theory courageous conversations talking
082about race the historical perspective all of those things and then dr natalie rasmussen is actually her co-teacher and dr rasmussen you know her as she's worked with you as a board and she's been a great partner for us as a school district and so many different avenues and i can't tell you how elated i was that she said yes to be a co-teacher for this course for our high school students and as daniella said they they're earning three college credits through msu for that course um the other thing that's really unique about this course is that it's all virtual and so you know katie coudren really felt like it was really important you know with our with our model right now we've got you know eight day groups of kids and bd groups and it
083was really imperative that our groups of kids are always together and can have those conversations together because the richness comes from the lived experiences of our students and i'm excited to to say too that there are several students of color within that course and i think they have the lived experiences and then dr rasmussen can also provide that perspective as well so we're very very excited about this grant and just the avenues that it's provided and then even looking at future years being able to provide a human development course potentially we ran that through the dcac that human development course could also could serve as an education course for next year and it could also serve um as we and you're going to learn more about this as we work down the path of our
084nursing program our lpn course that we've been in um pretty significant um work doing um so that was the grow your own grant and then we also um the other exciting thing was we received a cte grant a career in technical ed grant in collaboration with riverland and so i've been working with the dean of nursing laura beasley and our students this year have the opportunity to go to riverland for a pseo course and they're able to get a certified nursing assistant it's a certified nursing assistant course they pass the class and now they are viable employees for our health care system they can work in nursing homes provide home health care aid those kinds of things and so you know our goal really is to find opportunities where it's not just a high school
085diploma for our students but but it's a high school diploma plus one and so here are you know a few examples of the the innovative things that we're doing and we're going to continue to do but i'm thankful for the work that you know it's a team effort as we work through and try to develop courses and opportunities for students but danielle you made my night i love that class and you know and katie kodran texts me right after that first class and she's like it was awesome it was such a great first class and so it was great to hear yourself that you felt that way too all right thank you michelle thanks a lot for sticking around appreciate it and daniella thanks for setting the stage eric ah really nothing to add after
086that and julian covered everything nicely from our facilities meeting and deborah every meeting is like this it's like drinking from a fire hose hang on there's so much information that comes at you hang on i have been enjoying the msba conference on thursdays and the first thursday there was a round table about hidden expenses in construction and i got a lot of good information out of that so i'm ready good uh we're going to move on the administrative report does anybody have a question anything that came up as you read through the administrative report and i'm looking around once yeah um so i noticed that two schools identified the number of students that returned from distance learning too but not all schools did i mean is you know overall how many students we had you
087know that's a good question i think you know i know the high school was real clear because of the schedule changes but we did bring back a number of elementary students as well yeah one school indicated 20 i thought right and part of the the significance is is probably spread out throughout the schools because if you remember we kind of combined our distance learning program because we have full-time distance learning instructors at the elementary level and they're all housed at mckinley but the kids didn't transfer from mckinley to another building they were always students at washington or lincoln or elsewhere and i know michelle if you wanted to add to that as far as the elementary piece about sure we really didn't have that many students that actually came back we had about 20 students
088that came back and it worked out just beautifully because we were able to slide all of our kids back to their neighborhood neighborhood schools even some that we maybe had placed other places because of other things so we were able to slide students back to their neighborhood schools continue to maintain our low class sizes it honestly worked out really beautifully our middle school we brought back a lot of kids we brought back um i feel like it was like 70 or 80 kids from distance learning um our high school not not quite as many it was more like that i feel like it was 20 to 30 but don't quote me on that but um i mean as far as you know we worried about what would happen mid-year when we when students might choose
089to come back um but it really has it was a lot of work i know at the middle school to schedule kids and the shuffle and that at the high school as well but you know as far as the elementary it really worked out beautifully um so it wasn't it wasn't a big deal we did have a few students that went to distance learning as well so you know it really kind of balanced out for the most part i would say in general though a net gain of students coming back versus the ones that were leaving and go to distance learning but the beautiful thing is is that as you're going to hear later in the meeting we want to continue to offer lots of opportunities for our families so michelle i'll be back in
090just a little bit talk about that and i have three and every day they come home guess who's back guess who's back because they see these kids that they haven't seen and then they'll see him at recess or they'll see him passing the hallways and everybody's just so excited to have everybody back yeah yeah see i just had one comment um i saw it it was an interesting story i'll just call it out and maybe we can learn more about it on another evening but the the videos that tom maher is apparently making the stem pieces and being reused i mean the notion of you know reusing teaching lessons and i thought oh my gosh that really gets the wheels spinning in terms of opportunities so would love i know we've covered a lot and
091maybe another night but yeah we'd love to bring dr maher back in and talk about at some point talk about stalin's team and the things that we're continuing to do with that and what our resource for our community and for our staff to have him aboard yeah well right and to reuse those videos right different classrooms right yeah that would be great for sure for another night anybody else questions i just want to make a few brief comments tonight so amidst pandemic and amidst all the other things that we hear about yes the legislature is in session and as i always promise you i'm going to continue to advocate on behalf of our school district and certainly the needs of our staff and students just to give you a couple of updates they've been in
092session for a couple of weeks now obviously the district received some federal covered funding as part of the new stimulus package amanda heilman will provide an update for you in an updated meeting because we're still kind of navigating through how much that is and what the potential limitations that will be on the spending of those dollars is some of them are categorical in nature and so she'll share that with you certainly the legislature is interested to see how that might offset their financial obligations and what i would share with you is in general those funds are going to be utilized to pay for what kovitt has bought for us and so again it's it's not going to be an overage it's going to be something that will certainly keep our school district running but also
093we have a number of expenses that have arisen as a result of covid that we need to cover a couple other things there was some testimony provided by masa members members of the organization that i'm in as well as some other school district about flexibility in learning environments moving forward and i think that's an important topic with every great challenge comes a great opportunity to learn more and i think what we can learn from our lived experience through the pandemic of virtual learning and things like that maybe not living so much within carnegie units anymore maybe looking at the lived experience and what students are expressing is what they've what they've learned in the time that they are because some students learn faster than others maybe scope and sequences change there's lots of flexibility discussions
094happening right now there's been a number of bills that have already been offered to the district excuse me to the committees most of them are just kind of normal what you would see on a typical legislative session grants about or excuse me items around no new mandates coming to school districts which we all applaud to stay away from more mandates or unfunded mandates um certainly there's uh an emphasis within equity is taking place representative hassan uh has put forward a bill in acting uh strengthening our increase to teachers of color uh within that and just a number of others so again a lot more detail coming i do remain in contact with our local legislators of course and they do reach out to me when they have something within their committees that they'd like to
095discuss or just need a perspective from their local districts that they serve i would also just like to lift up a covet update for the board um we're back in school with our elementary kids and all of our met our secondary kids as well uh we still have our 612 students in hybrid our pre-k five students have now been back for a couple of full weeks we're glad to have them and things have been going very well the county itself has been mitigating coveted in a better way moving forward our case counts continue to be kind of in the high 30s and low 40s and if you remember back to mid-november we were nearly 180 cases per 10 000 in steel county so the adults are behaving themselves and we're making sure that masking and
096social distancing is making a difference for us and certainly as a school district we look at that because the more difference we make the more kids we get to start to bring back within our walls and that's where exactly where we want to be a couple of things that are exciting last wednesday our staff took part in the first cove saliva testing we had probably about uh 30 percent of our staff that took part in that coveted saliva testing i did myself it's very easy to do uh you use the scanner on your phone and you scan it in and it gets sent the specimen the saliva specimen gets sent off to a lab and i got my results back in about 18 hours from when it left my desk so it was very well
097done and i applaud amy joe and her staff for doing that because it's an incredible undertaking but it was great to see and i think for some of our staff it was comforting just to know and have one more reassurance that they aren't asymptomatic or something like that and then of course i would be remiss if i didn't talk about vaccines because there's lots of good news on the horizon for our school district and certainly that impacts our community last week we received 12 whole doses for over 880 staff that we have that includes our staff and bus drivers so as you can imagine we were kind of deflated to hear that because it would take a long time for us to move through our staff of those that want to be vaccinated this week
098in fact just this morning uh chris peak and michelle crowley were part of a briefing from the commissioner and it's actually deputy commissioner that they've now increased that threefold for this week so we have 36 doses for our staff this week and the even better news is in our partnership with amy karen as our director of steel county public health she has also asked us to start creating that list but also that it's probably a good probability we're going to receive additional vaccines from steele county public health this week as we're getting close to the end of tier 1a within our county so really encouraging news about the number of staff and those that are choosing to be vaccinated will have that opportunity uh moving forward and then the other thing that i think is
099encouraging is that i serve with seven of my superintendent colleagues from around the state on the minnesota learning model transition team and we continue to have ongoing discussions about when and how we might bring back more of our secondary students we're looking at two ends of the spectrum right now one of them is our sixth grade students we recognize and i think all of the educators could agree this is a really tough pandemic on sixth seventh and eighth grade students in particular because of the need for connection but also the fact that developmentally it's more challenging to navigate a virtual environment when you're 12 or 13. and so we're looking at the ways that we can strategies we can use within our district to safely bring students back make sure that our staff is still
100safe and are there to serve them but i think it's something that we're going to look at sooner than later the other end is on the other end of the spectrum folks these seniors have not been together as a class since last march 15th and so to say their senior year has been different would be not even describe their their feelings they have i've had several senior students reach out to me personally just to advocate to say mr elstad can you find a way for the seniors to come together for at least part of the school year so yes we're going to work on that we want to find a way no matter how it happens mr kath i shared that with him and he was right on board with that comment that we want
101to look at bring our seniors back to spend some time together as a senior class before they exit the halls of otona high school so again lots of exciting things i'm pollyanna i always emanuel it's all you're going to get from me i recognize we're still keeping safety in the health of our staff and students is our number one priority but we also want to start reintroducing students to our buildings as we find it safe to do and we're going to be aggressive in that knowing that we want to make sure that we're providing the best education our students can get within safe limitations so with that the final item i have tonight is to introduce you to a new member of our press corps that's going to be at our meetings mitch brewer is
102a writer for the steele county times and will be joining us during our board meetings uh so mitch welcome to our board meetings and thanks for uh reporting thanks for having me yes that's all i have tonight thank you very good questions for mr alstad okay hearing none we're going to move on item 10 tonight is the consent agenda the quick reminder is we are approving the minutes from december 14th as well as january 4th the disbursement and the personnel reports does anybody have a reason that we would want to separate out or break this up hearing none uh we'll entertain a motion i move it oh sorry i so moved i moved to approve the consent agenda second we have a motion and a second any further discussion hearing none all in favor with
103an eye any opposed emotion carries uh item 11 tonight there are several items that uh would require board action uh item a which is superintendent goals all of you will remember that at the very end of our last meeting at the work session that followed the organizational meeting uh mr ellstad went into a bit of a deeper dive on the goals his goals for this time period and i'm going to turn things back over to him to give you just sort of the bird's eye view and we'll take some action there thank you so as you can see and again there was really only one revision that was made as a result of the last time that we were together where we discussed my goals and that's really an area of 21st century learning and
104it's really looking more strategically at how the board is linked with the classroom and so i'm looking at some potential resources moving forward trying to find how the board which actually owns the strategic roadmap of a district really finds a way to operationalize that for a superintendent furthermore it sets more probably distinct metrics for the board excuse me the superintendent administration to really carry that out so that there's an ongoing kind of dashboard which we've seen before it's called something different called a vision card which actually shows our measurement and using a likert scale of one to five to kind of where we're at what things we're still at a number one which is an okay place to be at times and maybe what things that if we've moved on beyond five it's time to
105move them on and tend to bring in something else that we can spend our focus on so it's really about collecting the daily the desired daily experience from our students and staff and parents to help further inform the school board about the strategic roadmap moving forward we are in year three of our current strategic plan it's a great time to embrace this conversation we're bringing on a new board member as well to really kind of walk through what that experience means to board members and how you as a governance can leave that area of setting policy and budgets and resources around how we measure the progress of a strategic roadmap and the vision card as such so that was one thing that was added we would look for a timeline of completion on this where
106we would actually launch our next review excuse me our operational plan and strategic roadmap sometime in july and august of this coming summer the other items i believe were laid out to you and are certainly there for your review and i would stand for any questions or clarifications you might need in regard to the other areas or goals that were laid out okay hearing none one of you be kind enough to introduce this motion for us i move that the board approved the 2020 2021 goals for the superintendent as presented second we have a motion and a second any further discussion hearing none all in favor with an eye any opposed that motion carries item b online learning option application i'm going to turn things back over to mr allstate thank you and i'm going
107to ask michelle krell to come in um as i mentioned uh just a bit ago in our meeting some of the things that we've learned about flexibility also includes providing a more flexible learning opportunity for our parents as well families and students alike and as we've moved through this one of the things we want to proactively prepare for our community and certainly our families is this ability to know that some families may in fact find distance learning to be their real bailway the thing they really want to do the thing they really want their students because they found some real success with it within that moving beyond this year we sort of lose that ability to offer a fully online program unless we've done an application so michelle and i had some conversation around this
108and of course michelle as she always does said we're going to do this and we're going to do it in the most excellent way possible which is always the work that michelle delivers for our team so michelle do you want to talk a little bit more in detail about our online applications certainly so right now we're preparing an online application to become a supplemental and a comprehensive online school for students so what does that mean with a comprehensive component we would be able to offer online learning for anybody in the state of minnesota they can enroll in our online school and then we would provide that education for for our students and so right now our plan we really know we recognize as mr elsa said that we're going to have families that really have
109enjoyed doing online learning i feel like we've had a structure in place that's been highly successful i think about our elementary structure for instance you know to only have 20 some students at semester break to come back to in person says that they they've been very pleased with the online experience and um so we're looking at framing like our k5 model in very similar to what we're currently doing so our current model right now is very structured our students log on and at 8 30 they have a they have a class meeting with their classroom teacher and then they from 9 to 11 they go into their first morning learning block within that learning block those their students have opportunities for whole group instruction small group instruction as well as independent work time or independent
110instruction and then during that 11 to 12 30 times students would have their lunch and then our specialists were providing lessons for them during that time so and then at 12 30 to 2 30 was our afternoon learning block where again you saw students online with their teacher doing whole group small group or independent individual learning or independent learning and then really being able to support students and the needs that they had that would be the time we also provide special education services for students who have ieps as well as students receiving el services during that time during that day so really when we think about a comprehensive model we are we are providing an education online to students um at that k-5 range when we look at our 6-12 range we're looking at being
111able to have our teachers supporting that but we may use something called edgenuity which we've used a little bit of that now some courses like i think about katie kudron's course the critical race theory course which is completely online that would be a course that a student could take if they're within our online academy or online learning options so you know fleshing that out you know those are things that we would do once we would be approved we would really see how that works but i think we have a really clear framework um for us to really begin the planning if approved for this what i can tell you right now there are currently 39 online schools that are that have been accredited through the state of minnesota so um you know we would join
112those ranks if we were if our application is approved i can tell you right now the narrative right now is 26 pages long so it's really a it's a pretty lengthy you know we have to explain a lot of things our governing boards and and um certainly what does the daily experience look like for the students um that would be participating in our online academy um so you know i feel like we have a we have a good handle of what that could look like and our goal is to have this application um sent off within the next week and i worked i talked to the person from mde that actually is in charge of this it takes about it's a usually about a 90-day process so we're hopeful that you know we'll be able
113to get the read on it and and if we're approved then be able to start to move forward with the planning process of becoming an online school within the state of minnesota questions questions funding how does that work yeah so we would put together a budget so for every student that we have that enrolls within our online online school they get the same per pupil funding that we would get for any person that's any student that's in person and so we would we would take our per pupil funding we would we would figure out staffing and things like that certainly we need to make sure we have enough students to be able to make sure that this cash flows um and things like that but um it's no different than running you know our district
114budget as part of our district budget it's just would be considered actually a separate entity or a separate school within within the otana public schools so you know we have not landed on any names or anything like that for that we went for that we want to be able to decide and know whether or not we're we're approved or not but yeah the funding would be just like an in-person student and we provide technology and things like that is this only available for them for minnesota students it would be just for minnesota students because we're we're governed by the minnesota department of education things like that some other things to note too is we're required to go through all the testing so mca testing we would have to do our students of el status we
115would we would be doing that we would do any kind of special education testing all of that is required for us too so it might be that student we have testing sites set up you know depending on where students are coming from you know certainly we're hoping that our students from the district that that appreciated their experience with distance learning would would maybe you know think about enrolling there but there could be students from other districts across the state too i was going to ask michelle could you comment about our neighboring districts and whether you see opportunity for us to serve maybe students in the region or what that would mean i mean part of it for me as i i think about frankly additional revenue that may be available to our district if we
116can attract or serve students absolutely right in our geography right because i would assume that you know many of the districts around us are you know this is a pretty lengthy and big process and so there could be students within our area that really appreciated the distance learning opportunity and want to enroll in an online opportunity like we have to offer so there is definitely the potential for open enrollment um there's potential also for maybe families that have typically been homeschooled families and maybe they're interested in in trying an opportunity out like this and so really trying to identify how we can provide not just you know one model but maybe even some choices of some models for for families as well um within the framework that we're developing so yes there is definitely opportunity
117for that to piggyback off of that i would think it would be appealing to the surrounding schools if there's a student that wants to participate in a specific athletics or arts opportunity that their smaller school doesn't have and then with homeschooling aren't there some rules and regulations about if you're in a home school you have to hit this criteria in order to participate in the local high school arts and athletic experience or not yeah so thinking about that yeah am i crisscrossing too many well i'm going to start with your your question about participating in activities anybody that's enrolled within our online school could participate in a ton of public schools activities arts activities athletics all of those things if you were a homeschool family and i might need to lean on jeff or sarah
118a little bit but if you're a homeschool family you aren't necessarily afforded the rights to be i'm guessing on the basketball team or things like that because of the homeschool status you're not enrolled within our district am i correct it depends upon the home school that if you're uh if you're an established home school so as many of our families are that have filled out the appropriate paperwork because they're residents of our school district they can still participate and they can also provide a shared time experience so we do have some homeschooled families at times that have participated in banquer orchestra or participated in other activities and things that are put on by the state high school league i think what michelle was getting at is there are some that would be linked to a
119charter or another online academy once they've enrolled out of our district into one of those other academies now they're not a cooperative program anymore so they could not participate in that manner okay this would create an opportunity for those very students very much so very much so to enroll in our online absolutely take advantage of our you know opportunities as well versus going outside of our school district where they lose those eligibility requirements that need to be met and so this really helps us to kind of students that want to be part of those opportunities they can do a shared time experience so they could do entirely in online academy work through us and then if they wanted to participate in choir which is a co-curricular they could participate and get credit for choir towards
120graduation and so on so it's really a unique offering i think one of the pieces that i think michelle has really worked in is the flexibility around what we're willing to do with families to help make it work because sometimes that's hard to come up with your own stuff all the time as a homeschooled family unless you're really subscribing to other resources that are available good thank you that's exciting that's good stuff yeah um do we do you know if any of those 39 online schools are in our southern minnesota area um not that i i so there's houston which is a long ways away and there's you know um worthington has one i don't know of i'm trying to think if there's any within her i know there's one other district in the big
121nine that's making application at the same time there may be other districts yeah but other than that i think we're the only school in our area in this area of the stadium way that is seeking this application any other questions any last thoughts on this no i just think and so this is the first step of the process what you're being asked to review and kind of in and ask for your approval this evening is really the first step which is just making the application and then of course if we are accepted michelle will come back provide a lot more detail around that which will really help kind of drive through your eventual full acceptance of the online academy uh which then we would put into place for the 21 22 school year and start
122really yeah and really start then um you know recruitment of families that are interested so that we can start building that client base yeah and you have staff that have similarly hit their wheelhouse with this online teaching specifically they're like this is absolutely absolutely this is where i want to be i think was part of our plan because i think as michelle was exploring this further that's one of the pieces that was most intriguing about is that we have staff that have demonstrated an interest without their interest i mean i don't know that we're interested in going on recruiting a whole bunch of other teachers i mean we want to use our own folks here when we can and so i think that interest that was coming back and some of the things and innovation
123we've seen with distance learning i think really prompted us to say hey here's an opportunity for us that we think could be a real win for our families and for our staff awesome all right hearing no further questions would one of you be kind enough to introduce this motion for us i move that the board authorizes superintendent or his designee to complete the complete and submit the application to provide online learning second we have a motion on a second all in favor with an eye any opposed that motion carries thank you item c tonight which is ratification of the 761 foundation board members the very brief explanation for you looks something like this back in the early 1990s the 761 foundation came into an existence and at that time the bylaws were written in a
124fashion that said annually or at least regularly the school board would ratify those members that are participants or members of the 761 foundation in the eight or nine years that i've been on the school board i don't know that we have ever done that i don't know that that's not a that it's necessarily a practice that we've engaged fast forward to where we are right now gifts have been making their way into the district and sometimes they make their way into the 761 foundation with the intent that they would be made available to then the school district and in order for us to be fully compliant and fulfilling all of the crossing of teas and dotting of eyes that relate to the bylaws of the 761 foundation tonight i'm asking you to please ratify the
125existing 761 foundation board we members any questions just a quick can you just tell us who they are i was unable to upload my or maybe yeah that's fine do you have it up go ahead just curious i couldn't i couldn't find it lucas aren't mark dietz george dao simona grubish barbara judd paul knutson mary larson sarah mckay bruce paulson our own mark sebring greg stroik and mary larson and maybe one or two others have actually been original founding members of the foundation it's kind of nice be happy to answer any of the questions that i can if not would one of you again be kind enough to introduce this question oh sorry go ahead is this foundation just it is strictly just for the school district actually the 761 foundation supports not only the
126oatana school district but it will support um in some ways uh the other school districts that are in steele county as well okay just a clarification question you need to abstain since you're on the list yes well i'm happy to i in fact i will let the record reflect that i'm going to abstain from recognizing yourself i just want to make sure you're doing it uh thank you nikki that's it those those four layers of scoreboard training have paid off okay julian would you make the most important yep i move that the board ratified the appointment of the board of directors of the isd 761 foundation as listed and reported second we have a motion in a second all in favor with an eye any opposed that motion carries thanks uh item d i'm going
127to turn things back over to mr elstad multi-site mechanical upgrades yeah bob if you want to come and join us please i've asked mr olsen to come and join us these are bids that were led on december 10th for some of our summer work that's being completed this year at various buildings throughout the district and at this point i would turn it over to mr olsen if you want to give a brief review of the bids that are out there and this was discussed by the facilities committee as well as the work for long-term facility maintenance yep thanks for having me as jeff said on december 10th the bids went up or the bids were opened um this first page that you're looking at is uh all of these people or all these companies came
128in and were vetted out by chris anderson so these are mechanical upgrades that we're doing at lincoln at washington and at mckinley starting this summer and these were the low bidders go ahead i was just wondering a couple of things you say they are the low bidders how do you guys go about accepting bids i mean you get references there's not just work or yeah we do ask for past work there are quite there is quite a a list and when you and i meet which we haven't met yet i can show you some of that stuff as well um but in public on public bids um there's quite a scenario that you have to follow so we ask them make sure that they have insurance they have bid bonds they have all this other
129stuff and then what we do is they have a walk-through so all these companies will come in walk through the sites take a look at what they what we're asking them to either fix or to uh install and then they go back they spend about a month putting together some some numbers and then they all come in in sealed bids and we open them in front well now it's virtual so we don't open them in front of everybody but we do it um virtually and then anybody who's part of these companies can sit and listen and they see the bid numbers that come in once we have some that come in that might be a lot lower than some of the others the vetting process means they go through kraus anderson our construction manager will
130go through and make sure that everything that they bid on was correct so we're we're fairly sure and and very we've had really good luck um with our process that we use and i've had good bid days so and these numbers came in great so we're pretty happy with what we have those bids is that what we're expecting to actually pay then for those bids there's no hidden expenses um if they're hidden they're pretty they're hidden pretty well right now because we haven't started so as far as we know um we have not had that those issues i know you uh listen to a a speaker up in the cities or on or virtually and we had a conversation with our construction managers as well after that he also set in on that and we
131are very happy with carl anderson who we picked because when we did our interviews of kraus anderson and the construction managers we made sure that they were legitimate and that we would not have hidden fees so i have not seen any yet so we're very happy with what we have okay thanks any other questions last comments nope uh tim do you have it for me would you mind sure i move that the board approved the contract award recommendation for the 2021 multi-site mechanical upgrades project for a contract total of 626.70 as presented we have a motion in a second any further discussion all in favor with an eye any opposed that motion carries item e multi-site mechanical upgrades uh this is a similar item that was lifted up before we actually separated them out because
132we were concerned about the steel bid and what the pandemic might be doing and so uh this was something that was um sort of separated out from the other contracted bids that were received and so i don't know mr olsen if you want to make any comment on this item as well yeah and give you a little more info on that one when we had our bid day we had some come in for the steel but we did not have any bids come in for steel erection which is taking the steel and putting it up and making what we need done so what we did is we rejected both bids so we didn't get any bids in the second one we had some on the first one we rejected both went to the companies that
133bid on the steel and said can you combine them and put them together and give us a new bid for the steel and the steel erection so this is what came back and red cedar happened i'm kind of glad they got it because they happen to be the one that got the bid for the steel and now they got it to do the erection as well so that's why this one is separated out normally it would have been in with this one we've only would have done this once but we did pull that one out reject it and back on january 8th we asked them to rebid it any questions nikki got it right there i moved that the board approved a contract total of thousand two fifty two red cedar steel erectors inked for
134steel supply and erections second motion and a second any further discussion all in favor with an i i any opposed not resolution to available gifts in excess of three hundred and ten thousand dollars to our school district that is amazing and so a couple of them um certainly all of them are um certainly you know worthy of your review but just a couple that maybe draws to that large amount if you remember there was a press release not too long ago regarding the generous gift and combination and partnership of the owatonna foundation and the isd 761 foundation that are looking to give us a gift of five hundred thousand dollars for the building of a community room within our new high school and so what you're receiving tonight you'll see there's a hundred and fifty
135thousand dollar gift which is the first installment from the owatonna foundation and we'll be accepting the isd 761 foundation uh installments as they come forward as well you'll also see that melanie nelson continues her philanthropic efforts within our school district and has now provided gifts and access not only of the building that we received from her as a gift but also now seventy thousand dollars toward the effort of really trying to upgrade that building and make it usable as our professional development center uh within the school district so again uh just a very very philanthropic uh community and not to say any less about just the the you know 500 here one thousand dollars there the thoughtful people we have in the community that lift up students at our alc that make student baskets for
136over the holiday season uh but also just the angel fund to reverse nutritional services uh you know spending that we need to look at for some of our families so again i'm very pleased to lift up these uh gifts for you to consider accepting this evening my very quick add-on to that you'll notice that there's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the owatana foundation there will be another 100 that that found a gift that will be made and mr allstate is doing a really nice job of spearheading um a joint communication effort between these two foundations in the school district to really get some nice play with this and really looking forward to having you know a unified message coming from all three it's really pretty neat um with that any further questions or
137discussion with regard to gifts deborah i don't want to leave you out you know jump in the deep end of the pool and feel free to make the motion on this very last topic i move that the board approve the contract total of twenty thousand two hundred and twenty one next one the very last one i'd like i move that the board approved the contract no the very bottom one gives the district oh i moved at the board i'm seeing that you just i'm forgetting oh my god i'm just forgetting all my toastmaster training i move that the board approve the resolution for acceptance of gifts as presented okay we have a motion in a second eric's going to do the roll call vote jolene aye tim hi nikki hi laurie hi mark aye deborah
138aye and i myself and i seminole past motion carries cannot begin to tell you folks how nice it is to see all of you in person again it's nice to hear teachers and even we you know we saw the kids um virtually but can't wait to have more presentations from students here as well we'll entertain a motion to adjourn second we have a motion in a second all in favor with an eye opposed ocean carries goodnight folk