001i'd like to welcome everyone this evening um we have a work session um and i'm glad that everyone was able to make it even though it snowed a little bit but i guess that won't keep us away it's not that much yet right i'll turn the agenda over to dr stella thank you chair good evening everyone the purpose of study sessions is for us to share information to build trust and to ensure that we understand all of the information that's being shared and have a chance to ask questions and have have discussion so that efficient and effective decision making can happen at the board table this evening we will be presented with a preliminary audit review that will be followed by an enrollment update as well as a budget update for all of us we'll
002follow that up by a discussion around the district's response to the american indian parent advisory council and from there we will go through some policy work under the superintendent's relations i do want to spend some time just updating folks a little bit we don't have a formal ready to learn update for everyone but we would like to just talk a little bit about some of the information that's coming our way regarding the covid numbers and some of the other things that we're working on and that should take us to the end of this study session thank you okay moving on to the board agenda working document this is presented at every work session basically our goals and our direction as we progress through the year tonight as dr sallo referred we'll be looking at operational
003oversight more of a focus on the budget and audit and then also the self-governance with some of our policies so with that we'll move on to the school board legislative and community engagement committee report by the group or enrique is going to enrique right he's just pulling it up okay thank you finally i'm muted you did uh thank you very much so one of the things that we've done we've met three times over the um over the course of the past month all with an intention and focus around adopting or creating a a resolution on inclusion equity and a safe school space so we've been working and preparing that effort leading up towards a pair of community engagement sessions more so listening sessions so we had those this past week wednesday evening and thursday evening
004with cross-section of members from the community who are students parents teachers administrators and community members and what we're we're continuing to revise that work and we'll come forward most likely with a proposal to the school board at the next study session so we're targeting november 23rd for that to come forward okay did anyone did you have anything else to add anyone else in the committee any questions on the board okay yeah i have a question this is melissa oh hi melissa um looks like there were three different uh revisions and different sorts of uh agendas that from notes that were shared with us over the last month question that i've received from community members is this committee is called public engagement and legislative action committee and i guess the questions are why is there focus
005on inclusion and equity now in this camp in this committee um that would be the question the first question i have i'll take the first step at that we work with engaging different stakeholders in the community and in our meetings in the last uh 12 to 18 months i would say it became more evident that there were certain populations we weren't engaging as actively with and so you might recall we talked about this a little bit at our board retreat when we had a listening session after the murder of george floyd to reach out to our community and then um we had talked prior to covid setting us back about the possibility of as we look at different stakeholder groups providing more community input more stakeholder input we need to make sure that we're getting
006a nice representation of different voices and this is an audience that we haven't i think had a lot of stakeholder involvement with at the board level the district administrators and teachers have certainly been working on this over the past several years but the board hasn't really done much and the reason we brought it up at the retreat was that when we had our listening session the two common themes from the stakeholders at that point was one the school board has yet to make a statement about where we stand on equity and inclusion especially in light of growing unrest so they want to know what the district is and they want to see that the board is directing the administration and therefore the teachers and staff in this work rather than just getting updates on it
007in other words let's make this a priority so we have been updating the entire board at almost every meeting letting you know what we're doing and the board did provide majority direction to us to pursue this work going forward so we only did so with the support of the board uh yeah i know that we had discussed it a little bit but as i'm looking through some of the notes um it looks like there's there was a plan to invite dr shiraki holly back for board development um i know that he did when michael i know you and i attended the august 22nd 9th 2019 mandatory staff uh cultural uh responsive training workshop and um i know that at that workshop he's dated to all the teachers that he wanted a seat on the board
008that he wanted to review our policies for cultural or responsiveness he said that he wanted to teach students to reject academically the word academically and at that session he used he said profanity is pretty effing good for us and he said that this last year that we'd be moving forward toward family engagement and he's openly promoted books with white privilege i guess i would push back that we would entertain having someone like that who repetitively said the n word over and over and over again at that mandatory all staff meeting it was quite it was unacceptable it was abrasive and i heard so much feedback from the teachers and the community that um i would question any more funds we've already donated 500 000 or more to this person and his team and i guess
009i would question and encourage more questions why we would entertain someone like that in our district when um we just can't we can't have anything like that happen in our district lee may i respond yes okay so melissa i did sit next to you at that training session it was clear throughout that session that you and i were hearing the information differently i took copious notes i'd be happy to share them um he was talking about how to i understand i see them on your paper but you and i had some disagreements sitting there about how that information was being portrayed um he i don't even need to get into that session but what you're doing is he was talking about how to use vocabulary and let's see if i can say it right academize
010um take it when people use terms like that for example in the hallways in the classroom how do you break it down with consideration for the students in your classroom and look at the history of that word and what you're really saying when you call a friend the n-word or something else and so he was being really careful to give teachers the tools to handle what may be just playful banter that's actually hurtful to microaggressions to blatant racist comments he talked about implicit bias and helped us understand that i'd be happy to discuss that at greater length what i will say is the reason we're looking at dr holly he didn't ask for a seat at our board he asked if we'd like him to do one sample because one sample policy with us to
011help us learn to use an equity lens as we read through a policy so that we would have a model for going forward the reason he's on one of our minutes that we're trying to be very careful to get to you regularly is that we think there may be a need down the road here for the board to have some diversity and equity training because we haven't done any for ourselves and we're supposed to be leading the district and if he's under a contract and that would be part of that work why would we go to an outside source to pay if that's something he would be doing as part of the work he's already been contracted to do with us so it was actually a fiscal move to look into that first which is
012why it's documented um i know that's a hotbed name or a hot topic name um and i know that teachers have it trained by him are actually asking for more in-depth to go beyond that um but this was not trying to sneak in a multi-thousand dollar board training or anything like that it was a an attempt to be fiscally responsible so that we as board could examine where we stand and um do a better job directing in terms of governance when it comes to race equity and safety for all our students is that helpful uh well there were several hundred teachers in the room and i have my notes and and it's pretty obvious it's obvious from his materials that he's trained with with us uh with other districts and um you know it goes
013along with with a very very um unsettling uh tilt that is starting to happen uh when you get go down this this area and you start encouraging civil unrest with their kids some of the other equity things that we have on there equity alliance minnesota west metro education program the wnep there are things also that fall in line with things that this just just cannot tolerate uh when i hear from teachers um riot training basically you can see things that where their kids are encouraged to do this sort of thing uh melissa melissa it seems we're getting melissa melissa excuse me melissa it seems we're getting a little off topic here this was a report from a committee that's been working on um what we've told them to do so i believe that having a
014discussion about whether or not we'd have schrocky holly come back or how we want to address racism and rioting isn't quite appropriate at this time i think it would be a future discussion unless someone has something else they would like to say well it does say equity alliance and the other topics on this piece that was sent to us that's the only reason i brought it up okay your point is taken and i guess my only point i think i just for reference too is just based on the work itself and the direction given by the board is you know two of our strategic directions are increasing measurable student learning and reduce achievement gap as we provide equitable student opportunities through personalized learning and student engagement and then also engage students parents families and community
015to strengthen a culture of respect and inclusion so those are out of out of six strategic directions that's two of them and this work specifically hits those areas so i think that's why the emphasis of it from the board standpoint but i guess to summarize it it would be that we don't look at we don't group people in certain segments and say we're going to educate them differently we educate all learners we never look at their their gender or their sexual orientation or the color of their skin we educate everyone and we trust our teachers and our teachers are excelled in in offering the best education they're our greatest asset and and they're doing a great job terry if you'd like to see excuse me excuse me um dr stahl is gonna speak right now
016just gonna um i was just gonna uh applaud the board uh committee because the work that they've been doing is is learning and one of the things that they did talk about and one of their um intents is to to provide opportunities for the board to engage in some shared learning as our staff has so some of the the names that melissa referenced where it was just a re research process about what other districts have used in some of the organizations that have helped other boards and other districts on their racial equity journey as well so that was the context of some of that as the board members were engaging in research and talking to to others about the work that they've been engaging in okay i think then we'll move on oversight of operations
017the preliminary audit review julie as julie's making her way to the podium i just want to start by thank you to julie and her staff for the many hours of preparation that they spent preparing for the audit and in the various stages of the audit so i just want to thank her and her staff for that it's a lot of work a lot of time and very important part of our financial processes thanks julie thank you dr stahlo good evening chair shimake and board members tonight we will have a preliminary draft of our audit presented and then at the november 9th board meeting will be the final audit summary presented tonight we have jim miketon he's a partner with mmkr he was a big part of our audit this year helping us through this transition
018into a different auditing firm and with covet and the different things going on and trying to do things a little bit more remotely than we have in the past and so it was a great opportunity for us to learn from them we did have a very excellent process and we hope to continue to improve upon it in the future and so i will let jim explain the audit and if you have any questions i will be available thanks julie for the introduction my name is jim miketon with mmkr cpas i'm here this evening to provide a report on the audit for the year ended june 30th to 2020. as julie mentioned this is our first year doing the audit of the of the district um so just before i start i'll try to give you
019some background in who i am in in my background a little bit um our firm is mmkr cpas malloy montague karnowski radasovich it's for four individuals that we go by mmkr this is my 31st year doing audits of local governments in school districts and and city and municipalities we audit about 100 local governments about 40 school districts in and around the metropolitan area annually this is our first year and our first opportunity to do the audit of this district and i'm here to to provide some insight on the results for the year just to kind of start it off there was documents provided this evening there are four documents that were provided the first of which is the comprehensive annual financial report that particular document is about oh 125 pages long it is a very
020thorough document really is a document that is not only following recommended requirements of the governmental accounting standards board but also is a document that is being submitted to the association of school business officials for achievement in financial reporting so as a result of that it has a a broader in-depth discussion it has an added transmittal letter there's a number of areas that have enhancements that are beyond the standards that you have typically for a school district financial report including multiple statistical data that provides 10 years of information the other documents you have in front of you the first which is the special purpose audit reports those particular reports provide opinions that i'll go through in a little bit as well as your schedule of federal awards as i'll talk about an audit of this nature
021uh does require us to audit the revenues and expenditures of the uh the districts receives from the u.s government and it's called the single audit of federal awards and you'll see some data in that particular document the third document you have is a corrective action plan as i get into the details of the audit you'll see we had some findings to report and there is this very specific correct corrective action plan that's provided as part of the documents that you'll see as part that was provided the last document which is on the screen uh is a is what's called the management report the management report is my document that i provide that is written by us as our firm to provide information in a document that really gives you an idea on how the audit
022went uh by reading it without actually being here presenting it it does follow a number of guidelines specific to required communications it also provides information on audit results and financial trends and really just some guidelines and information for you in a variety of areas and i'll cover those uh in my presentation so i'm going to go through that particular document you can see in the e on the document there are five bullet points as i mentioned it summarizes the audit provides an update on the funding of public education in the state of minnesota some financial trends of the district that i'll get into and then lastly i won't get into a lot of this information on legislative summaries and accounting and auditing updates but it does provide a nice summary of those particular data data
023points as well so continuing on uh in the audit summary section it is required the first part that we talk about here is is talking about the responsibilities of the parties that are involved it is a responsibility of the district to prepare its financial report you have an annual requirement by the state of minnesota to provide and prepare an annual financial report that is the comprehensive annual report that you're providing and has been presented this evening it is my responsibility to provide an opinion on those documents and on those particular uh financial statements and this particular audit process as it's guided by the aicpa the american institute of certified public accountants we provide the opinions as are required in standard and i'll go through those individually middle of that page you'll see that uh the
024first thing is the scope and timing of the audit the the state of minnesota requires your annual audit to be completed by december 31st and as as as julie mentioned uh i'll be here i think it's a couple weeks to provide the actual final audit report what you have in front of you tonight is preliminary drafts we will we will present in a couple weeks the final audit documents what you have here in front of you albeit preliminary there will not be any changes unless something comes up in the next couple weeks they are pretty much final they've been approved by my office and all the quality standards that i have back at my office um uh so continuing on didn't cover this we are required to report to you if there was a change
025in the scope of our audit meaning i plan to do an audit in a certain way in a certain process that looks at an audit in a certain manner if it changed along the way i'm required to report that to you i didn't change the audit process at all probably the best example of that would be if there were potential fraud some irregularity that i ran into or something like that that i would have to report to you and i would do that that isn't the case here but it is important to know that i would that i would communicate that if it were to have happened so the first bullet point on that under the audit opinions and findings relates to uh the my opinion on the district's financial statements you'll see that i
026issued an unmodified opinion an unmodified opinion is actually the opinion you were looking for it is a clean opinion it is the opinion that really again you were looking for a clean opinion on that financial statements that particular opinion does have what's called an emphasis of a matter paragraph in it we did implement a new accounting standard governmental accounting standards board statement 84 on fiduciary activities that particular standard was changed or implemented specifically to student activities the the the gatsby 84 and the standards that were put in front of us and that particular standard required that to be pulled into in what's called you're shaking your head you probably heard this before but uh is required to be under what's called board control in the past it could be accounted for separately and have its
027own financial statement gasby 84 does not allow that uh in the standards so it was incorporated into your uh your comprehensive annual financial report it's included in your general fund and really there is any separate reporting of those student activity accounts any longer and as such we kind of emphasize that in our opinion to say hey reader of this financial statement understand this happened we changed this as a result so really nothing to be concerned about there the second pull-up point is our opinion on your internal controls over specifically over financial reporting we only issue an opinion on items that relate to financial reporting there are lots of controls in a school district of this nature but we're giving an opinion specifically on internal controls you'll see there we issued an opinion on the financial
028statement adjustments and really that was a material weakness i'll try to explain it a little bit uh as best i can in layman's terms if you go back to last year's audit uh the the district had one finding and that particular finding related to a finding on the preparation of the financial statements um what the auditor was saying or i'm not the auditor i wasn't the auditor but get if i were to be issuing that particular finding i'm issuing an opinion that says hey hey district i i prepared or i assisted in the preparation of your financial statement to the degree that that uh you need to be aware of that this was extensive uh oversight probably beyond what is recommended for a school district for a school district of your nature you're you're you're
029a pretty vibrant organization you're very vibrant organization to the degree of you should have the individuals in place that they can prepare or oversee the preparation of the audit process such that they have the expertise and knowledge to do that that was the finding that was issued last year we went into this process in this financial statement into this particular audit saying you know we can eliminate that finding the the knowledge and expertise of the individuals that are on staff here at the district have the ability to prepare their own financial statements they have the ability to oversee the preparation of the financial statements and identify hey here is this financial element that's not right you should change that okay so if you you'll note as i go through this i didn't issue that finding
030this year that finding is gone we we said yep the the individuals at the district have the ability to do this so that finding is eliminated um so into into what we did find however as we went through the preparation of the financial statements and we went through the audit we did find a number of adjustments so what does that mean to the board and what does that mean actually okay so uh when you look at financial statement preparation the staff the the individuals that work in the district should be able to uh prepare a financial statement such that an auditor didn't make any adjustments an auditor didn't come in and say well i looked at that number and now i came up with a different number um they should be able to to be
031able to close their books and identify their own adjustments without an auditor telling them such right what we noted here is a number of adjustments in going through that process that that we identified as auditors we said hey this this doesn't look right why is it not right or why is it different from what we're seeing and they ultimately came to conclusion yeah i think you're right we'll have to adjust that so when you look at these particular adjustments all of them almost all of them or i would say all of them other than one exception relate to items in the financial statements that are outside of the fund-based accounting that you do so that's complicated i understand you report all of your information using a fund based accounting uniform financial accounting reporting standards you
032fires right in those particular uh financial statement standards are what's called modified cash basis you're in essence reporting on almost a cash basis and those fighting in those fund-based statements the actual kaffir that you're doing incorporates a lot of things that are outside of that including the accounting for debt the accounting for capital assets the accounting for the amortization of bond discounts the accounting for opeb accounting for pension obligations uh there is 115 pages of financial statement items that are specific to one time a year an auditor comes in and the staff does these on a one-time basis otherwise they don't really do it every day what that means is in this financial statement adjustment point that i'm making is we found some errors in those areas but it really didn't have a lot of
033impact on the day-to-day operations of of the district because most of them were just financial reporting related okay so what does that mean to the board you know where should you take this you know what should you do with this information okay this is my philosophy this has always been my philosophy 30 years doing this this is an audit this is intended to be a learning experience that's why we're here we're intended to help you get better we're intended to make you better and it and findings occur in an audit they just do that's what we're here to do what you should focus on as a district and as a board is well how are we going to correct it as a board the one thing that shouldn't happen it should not happen is for
034me to stand up here and give you a list of findings and then next year come back in and tell you the same ones happen again that's not what we want we want here's the findings how are we going to correct it so that next year when jim miketon comes up here again i didn't talk about the same finding that's the perspective that i will always say and you'll hear me if i get the opportunity to come back here again you'll hear me say that hey by the way those findings that we had last year they're gone we corrected those we assisted we helped get there from here so these financial statement adjustments when we went through these we we went through them in great detail with the staff here here's what happened here's the
035adjustment here's how you're going to have to fix it so that it doesn't happen again the staff here are really engaged in this audit process they were engaged in great detail with us to determine why we're making the adjustments why these things were happening i can't speak to past a lot of processes i wasn't here for that but from my observations of these particular transactions this was not happening in the past there wasn't a lot of engagement to the accountants to say here's why you have adjustments and part of the reason for that goes back to my opening comments which is the auditor prepared the financial statements they gave you they gave you a finding on that right said here we prepared it and voila we we don't need to engage any more beyond that
036well that's not really what are that what we're about at mmcare we're here to teach you how to do this so that we don't have these findings so that being said when you look at all kind of back to my point on these financial statements uh changes there were one element when you look at this well there's two elements i want to dive into there are two there's two two areas of weakness here probably half of these adjustments actually were adjusting last year's audit we had probably three to four prior period adjustments meaning we looked at your financial statements and identified things that were wrong in last year's financial statement why that is i don't know we we got to the point where that number's not right we were clearly they weren't right so we
037did a prior pre-adjustment um those things happen yeah i'm not here again to judge the prior auditor we do we do need to report that hey we did make adjustments to last year the other there were adjustments that related to this year and probably the one that stands out the most in this area was the was in the area of the reconciliation of i'll call them payroll payroll withholdings there is a there is accounts within your general ledger that when you do payroll um you put the accounts in as withholdings and ultimately they get paid out to the vendors be at the irs to the state of minnesota to any withholdings there's lots of withholdings in a school district so they they get withheld from payroll they get paid out to the vendor well these
038general ledger accounts typically are at zero one's paid money go the money gets held cash gets out they go to zero well that these accounts typically are reconciled every month you would go and reconcile these accounts make sure the general ledger the system is zeroing itself out well that wasn't happening that particular reconciliation process was not happening so when we came in we asked about that and they said well that that doesn't wasn't happening well so let's have that happen so you'll see that one of the prior period adjustments is that i can't the the wiping out and basically making that account zero to verify yep we didn't didn't necessarily find that withholdings were paid or that that anybody was unpaid or that the payroll was being processed at all the fact of the matter
039was that they just weren't good taking to the step of reconciling those those in and out accounts so that was probably uh in the financial statement adjustment area so i said a lot anybody got any questions before i move on to the next area keep going keep rolling excellent i love that i do have one question are we set up to automatically pay out of our out of our accounting system for those things like the payroll withholding or is that something we still manually do on a quarterly basis is it that's a question for julie okay i wasn't sure if that was part of the issue with it zeroing out that is that is not the issue that i had okay thank you all right so um continuing on the second bullet point you have
040in front of you is the second opinion uh the second opinion relates to my opinion on governmental auditing standards so governmental auditing standards is a pretty broad opinion but really it's me auditing your compliance with with i will call them grants or aids that you're getting this school district obviously is funded by a multitude of agencies and with those aids comes compliance requirements the federal government gives it has compliance requirements the state of minnesota special education aid is filled with required required elements title one i mean i go on and on and on save schools grant all kinds of you know aiden categories so we audit the verify that you have systems and procedures in place to account for those and making sure you're complying with all those government regulations so as you can see
041i didn't had i didn't have any findings in that particular area third bullet we issued an opinion on your schedule of federal awards uh the district as i mentioned previously receives a significant amount of federal aids the the federal government provides uh us with the list of audit standards or audit requirements uh in this particular area these auto requirements do rotate depending on the program so at a school district typically typically you audit the food service program you audit the title one program and the special ed programs and they typically rotate depending on the federal standards can be based on findings this year the grant that stands out is food service the the food service program we audited in particular because of covet there was a lot of money coming into the program the program
042changed frankly the federal government sent out alerts that said hey audit this you know there's money coming into school districts for summer food schools program and thus we audited that as a risk mostly a risk-based approach um so this so we reported on the schedule of federal awards which means we gave an opinion that you were able to provide that schedule appropriately and again i don't have any findings regarding the schedule that was put together so continuing on uh the fourth bullet point you see there is is is my opinion on your compliance with the major federal programs so we are required to again issue an opinion on your compliance with these programs um not so much that on the schedule uh the of the awards but mostly did you comply with the programs um
043so with the first final note there is a finding related to the internal controls over the in this case the child nutrition program so the the the one of the requirements in the child nutrition program is related to procurement um procurement relates to the if you will the buying if you will of of supplies and materials and anything really that's running through your food service program needs to comply with uniform guidance uniform guidance is a standard issue by the federal government for uh for running a food service program or really any federal program so in the uniform guidance area it is required to follow one of five paths to procure something and you have a well-written policy if you haven't read it you might want to it it's adopted every year as part of the
044annual adoption and in there it lists out the five ways you can procure something in a federal program so we tested 18 vendors if you will in our food service program to determine that you did appropriate uh testing or you did appropriate procuring and we noted that four of these particular vendors you didn't comply with the requirements that are in in the federal program this is a really challenging area this year mainly because there was a lot going on there was a lot of changes going on and everything was moving pretty fast if you will and and and some of what was planned in this particular area changed midstream you might have you know there's an example here where you expected to use a certain vendor for bread and also you went to coben and
045your whole food service program was different than it was um three months ago so so one of the requirements in this particular area is if if if a one vendor exceeds ten thousand dollars in purchases you need to go through a different procurement process well i'm sure well i know for sure that that particular vendor there wasn't an expectation that we're going to spend more than ten thousand dollars with this vendor well also in our program change and now we did well that wasn't anticipated that particular vendor if if they were to know i'm assuming if they would have known of it over 10 they would have done it differently and how do you you know do you go you stop buying from that vendor and then go back and well we got to stop
046we got to go through a bidding process well this is cobit wow you know we need to get some more breath so there's so i would caution certainly when you look at these findings yes their findings what are we how are we going to correct this well there needs to be an improvement in the area of these vendors to verify or to make sure that who's ever procuring within the food service department that is that they're documenting it and putting it in a vendor file so that when jim miketon or whoever auditor comes along and says hey here's the vendor how did you procure this it's readily available there are instances here certainly where we asked and they said i have that it's over here it's in this file i'll get that for you well
047that's not really best practice best practices it's sitting in the vendor file over in accounts payable i don't have to ask it's sitting right there everything is right readily available there are other instances here where it was just an emergency purchase we now we need to get that done but let's let's do that well there's there's procurement in an emergency situation there are procedures to follow um that wasn't happening um mainly because it's a whole different process so there so this particular finding albeit something that needs to be corrected i feel it's more of a record-keeping requirement than it is a you know a major issue that you should be concerned about all right any questions about that one quick question um most federal providers whether it be food or health care have to disclose
048whether they've been disbarred from any one of the programs yeah is is it okay for the school district to put that responsibility onto them through just a general questionnaire first or is there something more more formal that has to be put in for school district uh nutrition programs or something similar okay can i answer your question and in two minutes meaning the next findings actually great this is a great question all right so next finding uh if you look at the page it talks about internal controls over uh again over this is the food service program so it is a requirement of the uniform guidance as you said very well that you're required to verify that every vendor is not suspended or to borrowed by the federal government and as a result of the uniform
049guidance they require the district to document that hey we're going to use this vendor and we need to document that we looked it up we looked it up to verify this vendor is not suspended or debarred it's easily done by a website the the federal government keeps a website you can log into it there's the vendor yep they're not listed okay that was not happening we we we tested for that they they're not they weren't doing that that that was not happening at least for the ones we tested um it is a challenging requirement though because even if you looked it up um and you let's see you might have already you did look it up but if you didn't write it down that you looked it up or did a print screen or wrote
050a memo to the file that says yep i looked this up uh it isn't something that because the list obviously changes so there are some added elements that we we recommend that somebody whoever it is look it up print screen document i wrote i looked this up put it in the vendor file for the suspension suspended environment requirement i think that answered your question my question was can that responsibility be just sent in a questionnaire to the vendor so the responsibility isn't adding a resource constraint onto the school district to be looking that up constantly because otherwise without that in writing they could get disbarred after we make an agreement with them so you can't have somebody constantly looking it up so how is that recommended to be done yeah great question uh the uniform
051guidance requires you do it once a year okay it requires when you you when you open the vendor file that particular fiscal year once you look it up and the vendor files opened and you have documentation you can use that vendor throughout the fiscal year so it does need to be done once a year though every year great question and again it's really kind of back to your can you put the responsibility on the vendor you really can't it is the responsibility of the district to verify that but again it isn't a time consuming process because there is a website you just log into the website type their name and wow you've done it it's less than a five minute process i would think maybe not for me i'm a little slow on the typing
052but all right all right all right so continuing on um so the the last opinion that i provided relates to your compliance with minnesota specific laws and regulations we are issu we issue as part of this process an opinion on your compliance with minnesota specific laws and regulations the laws that we test as part of this opinion are issued by the office of the state auditor here in the state of minnesota they provide us with a list of the laws we do not test every law only laws that are on their list their list changes it changes based on concerns they have if they find some school district is doing something unusual in a particular law or area while odd ends up on a list you wouldn't believe how many uh times laws add on
053the list and you wonder why it got there and you look at the office of state auditors website and while they would have done an investigation in the school district and found something unusual and voila now they're testing we're having us test these laws so you'll see here that that we issued two findings in this area the first one relates to ufars you are required to follow uniform financial accounting and reporting standards it's a very detailed uh coding structure it's actually guided by the minnesota department of education creates this coding structure we tested roughly well we tested 31 disbursements in this case we tested 25 receipts we actually tested 25 payroll transactions as well and found some coding errors typically you'll see five of 31 disbursements in one of 25 receipts and these coding errors
054albeit you know a small portion of the sample when you look at it could be a big problem if you extrapolate it over the number of transactions but ultimately we're able to give an opinion that yeah you followed you fires you you followed it in general but we found some coding errors when diving into this a little bit um you know and talking to the staff here um and giving them our set of transactions it typically when you look at the the receipts of the excuse me this is disbursements it really goes beyond the people in the business office to the people in the departments who who are filling out and coding these things and maybe miscoding or maybe using a code they've always used or really maybe not being as informed as they should
055be about coding or maybe maybe it could be just i don't really i don't find this to be important so what does that mean again to your board we wrote a corrective action plan that says hey we need to train people on on proper coding what is you far so what is the coding they used to be doing um who in the accounts payable department who are paying these invoices do they look at this coding and take it seriously and if the if it's miscoded do they say um mr misses or whomever this code doesn't seem right um send it back to them to say hey this this is this should be this code i don't know if that's happening the corrective action plan says that it will going forward somebody's going to look closer
056especially in the accounts payable department at these coatings or even in the business office to say hey we want to get this right we don't want to have this finding going forward we need to get these coding accurate so second item on the on the list is a withholding affidavit requirement the state of minnesota and its minnesota statutes requires you before making final payments it's important to say final payments to contractors that you verify that that they're in good standing with the state of minnesota when it comes to withholdings what does that mean it means their your contractors are paying their taxes is what that means so the state of minnesota is requiring you to get a withholding certificate from this data from the contractor in this case to say yeah we're in good standing
057with the state of minnesota and you're required to get that particular certificate or withholding affidavit before you make final payment so we noted if you'll read there i think there's one of the five contracts that we tested that we that that particular withholding affidavit was actually received after the final payment you made the payment to the contractor and then got the withholding affidavit really it kind of defeats the purpose of the of the rule or the statute if you knew if you if you found out later that they couldn't provide a withholding affidavit you'd already paid them your leverage is completely gone uh you you've got to hold off you get you can't give them that check so that they so that you know for sure that they're getting their withholdings are paid um so
058again what's the what's the you know corrective action here well make sure the person that's making those final payments doesn't approve a final payment until they get the withholding app and it's on file so so we had five findings overall again i'll just kind of summarize um you know overall all of these are correctable all of these are taken very seriously by the staff and the and off of the business office here and in terms of written corrective action you'll see that the business manager julie in this case uh has uh signed off as the the owner of the corrective action plan she's taking responsibility to make sure that those corrective actions uh happen um going forward so uh any questions one more um did you make a statement whether we're following the separation of
059duties and concerns overall or is that kind of not an issue anymore right so that's a good question the question relates to internal controls so in our opinion on internal controls or financial reporting one of the requirements is that you properly segregate responsibilities so the way to think about it is that a transaction that goes through the system has to be has to be separated by individuals so you don't have one person able to to to control a payroll trax transaction from beginning to end or accounts payable from beginning to end audits like ours one of the very first questions we ask my auditors would ask okay i'm going to test internal controls do you have segregation of duties or not they don't even start their testing without answering that question and the answer that
060we got is yeah we do that okay well now i'm going to test your controls under the knowledge that i'm going to find segregation of duties than properly segregated so yes we did test that we we don't have any finding that area so yeah we gave the opinion that it was properly segregated are there any other questions i think we'll see you again in two weeks i got more oh you have more oh i thought you were done keep going all right also i'm sorry that's okay uh so i'm gonna okay so there's two parts of the audit uh the first part of the audit is the compliance and i just covered all that the second part is the financial results how you do financially right so i'm going to just kind of cover some
061of the financial results there's a lot of information here but for the purposes of time i will cover that i won't cover every little detail but i'm going to go right here all right so this is page 9 of the management report so the financial results to me start with some benchmarking how how does the district compare to to others and and we'll get into a little bit on the details around your financial results but right here i'm going to start with some benchmarking so this is a graph showing the operating fund balances of this of the state as a comparison to expenditures most school districts use this ratio commonly you use it commonly um in in your operating your fund balance policies uh the fund balance percentage of expenditures this particular percentage is the
062statewide the state's percentage this is not your percentage there's different ways to use this percentage based on depending on the the categories within fund balance that you're using the state uses a percentage in law which is statutory operating debt that that's their percentage and that that is the percentage you're seeing right here okay so you can see on this graph that that fund balances statewide are pretty flat meaning they're roughly leveling out at about 20 percent most school districts statewide have about 20 fund balance probably higher percentages in greater minnesota and lower percentages in the metropolitan area mainly why oh they're just bigger you know you have a bigger operation so you can function on smaller percentages greater minnesota has smaller operations need more bigger number just to operate you can see the blue line
063is your your particular fund balance percentage and my first observation there is wow that's very stable uh it it doesn't waver much most of our clients you'll see it kind of going up and down and up and down and and this shows a lot of stability to me the management of the fund balance is very stable over time right now it's at 16.2 percent which again isn't the percentage i'll show your internal percentage later but you're slightly below average which is actually what i would almost anticipate um you're you know again within the metropolitan area maybe a little bit outside of it it's a pretty much consistent what i would have expected coming in without even looking at it all right continuing on hopefully you can see this one maybe you can't maybe i can
064dive in oh look at that i can um so this particular graph you'll see here is a comparison of general or governmental funds revenues per student it uses statewide profiles data to come up with revenues on a per student basis you can see overall in this particular presentation that the total revenues per student were 14 662 per student and it includes all your funds including the general fund debt funds food service funds based on the most readily available data which is last year 2019 the seven county metro area was 16 274 per resident so you're roughly what is that about 1500 i don't have the math in my head but uh almost 2 000 per student less than the average everybody's shaking their head yeah i knew that i knew that uh um and you
065can see it right up in the general fund you can see uh um the general fund's property taxes below average your state aids is below average why is that well mostly it has to do with referendum dollars mostly the makeup of of your district and the referendum is happening so you're really operating as a district on significantly less dollars than the average statewide district as well as the average metropolitan district i'm not going to stand here and give anything other than factual data and and are you doing a good job i don't i i'm not here to give that opinion i'm really just here to give you the data but you're definitely operating on less dollars than uh than in the in the general fund in the debt service fund you're actually higher than average
066now that would be pretty typical to me of a district like prior lake and based on its on its status or where you are in the in the growth factor your growing district you got lots of families coming in and growth you would expect that to be the case so again that that is not a concern but you can see that it does you can even see where it increased um the last year or so so what does that mean uh when i look at this is the it goes into then showing expenditures um we we provide the same data when it comes to this particular category in the in the expenditure side of the equation so expenditures per student uh in various categories so what i what would you expect well you're going to
067have less expenditures you're getting less revenue you would hope you'd have less expenditures or you're just going to run out of money and you're seeing that's validated you spent in your general fund you spent roughly eleven thousand seven hundred twenty nine dollars per per student uh when on average a school district in the metropolitan area spends about thirteen thousand four hundred dollars uh again most of that uh is in the is in the regular instruction book categories you can kind of see you know over here we have regular instruction first elementary and secondary and that's below average you have special education that's below average so it's mostly in the instructional areas that this is happening it is not in the administrative categories so if you look at administrative and district support which is mainly administration
068those are actually below average when it comes to that particular area sites and buildings and other are pretty close to the average as you would see in the debt service fund you're seeing again above averages right here 1774 1308 and again that really goes back to the growth factor you have the referendum building referendum that was passed and that's causing that debt to be higher than average and again not really a concern for me all right so where do we stand uh in individual funds so the the management report does provide information on your general fund in particular you can see this graph shows uh your your the blue is the cash and investments of the district i believe let's make sure you got the right color there we go the the blue is the
069cash investments the yellow is the fund balance i mentioned previously you have very consistent fund balance percentages the overall fund balance of the district went down about 500 000 this particular year your budget reflected a decline of about 3.8 million so you're significantly better than what was projected uh for the year in in financial results now that that is a combination of revenues being better than projected and expenditures being lower than projected frankly music to an auditor's years if i can stand up here every year and say revenues are better than projected expenditures were lower lower than projected we all want to hear that that means you can you have a conservative budget is what i'm getting at it doesn't always happen but so certainly budget the financial results were meeting expectations that are you
070know better than what was projected so we have a table in this particular graph in this in this management report again if people are trying to follow along this is page 13. um here we show the components of fund balance we have non-spendable which is really just inventory and prepaid items that you can't spend you have restricted categorical fund balances that the state doesn't allow you to spend they have to set aside probably the best example of operating capital you have items that are assigned and the assigned categories are assignments that you personally some are you personally assigning them and there's other assignments in one particular that is required and i'll get into that in a second and then you have unassigned which is basically available for use so the district has a fund balance
071policy on the bottom of this page it talks about that it says the policy states that the district will strive to maintain a minimum unassigned and signed general fund balance of eight to 12 percent of the annual budget that's your policy that's your guide as a school board if you get outside those parameters or i guess outside that policy then action would take place right so at the end of the year the total is 14.2 percent so you're certainly within the guidelines of your policy at the end of the year fund balance is looking looking good so one item of note you see a signed fund balance up in that table when you look at the last five years that assigned amount was was is pretty consistent it's pretty much the same number until you
072get to 2020. there's an added assignment this year called the assigned for subsequent year's budget what that means to you is if you adopt a budget for the following fiscal year that was a deficit you're required to assign that balance so the the negative if you will the the deficit that was adopted is in assigned and if it isn't assigned it falls to unassigned so you're seeing a little bit of a flip-flop there in those two numbers for 2020 specifically related to the deficit that was adopted so i think that's a pretty important distinction when you look at that so just a couple of more graphs i'm not going to cover that one for sake of time we do provide information on the the revenues and expenditures we as auditors love to make sure that
073budget budgets uh are sound and that the identification of of why you know you these were the actual results why isn't the budget match it and and do you know why can you can you stand up and say this is what happened uh we look for that um you know as auditors and i i look at a category and say so you know what's it what's going on here and the response is well that's because this oh okay well that makes sense um so you if you read if you look at the data points you'll see that revenues were were about 1.7 percent over budget mostly in aid categories special education aid there was a safe schools grant that you received that wasn't budgeted property taxes came in better than budget there were some other
074revenue sources specifically in the student activity accounts that were really frankly hard to budget federal revenues were over budget again can be for a variety of reasons and you can see all the various reasons when you look at the particular grant for display general fund expenditures are also provided here you'll see that expenditures were under budget by about 700 000 almost all of that goes back to covid in the pandemic purchase services supplies and materials in a lot of cases i won't say they went away but certainly they weren't at the level that they were when you had a building that was operating um it just they just went away um things um just didn't happen uh the same and due to the closures you had significantly less expenditures in the general fund as a
075result the district does have two you know other other funds you can see the food service fund here that we provide has had a very positive year i would say the community service fund did not the community service fund is going to struggle and did ultimately in a coveted environment um the programming that they have consistently just isn't going to be the same um given given you know the pandemic that we're having we also provide information on the capital project building construction fund 67 million dollars was i won't say spent but went down in this particular year all of those breakdown won't say every we audited that 67 million to verify that we went through the right bidding requirements and and that the invoices were processed appropriately all of those things you have also a
076couple of unique funds that are maybe not unique to school districts but unique to government one of which is the self-insurance fund this is an area that school districts probably in the last we'll go with five seven five to seven years have gone to more of a health insurance under self-insured models the self-insurance fund ended the year with an increase of roughly 900 almost a million dollars uh increase in fund balance or up to 4.2 million dollars in fund balance this particular number is consistent with what your worst all districts are experiencing there was a lot of non-doctor visits you think about it people weren't going to the doctor they they they may have gone for a covet if they were to have that but just your general doctor visits were way down and thus
077claims were significantly lower thus increasing the fund balance in that particular area this district also has what's called the post employment benefits revocable trust fund it funds your opeb other post-employment benefits this particular fund is a full accrual fund that's actually accounted for differently than your fund balance in your general fund and we do report a deficit in this particular fund of about 3.3 million and i did want to talk about that only because it shouldn't be a concern to you mainly because you issued bonds if you will years ago for these this opeb trust and those money went into a trust and that and those monies typically per school district are are available until used if you will um you're pretty much pulling the money out to the tune of what the cost you
078have until it's run runs out after that you're going to ultimately now use your general fund so be it what you see here is a deficit i wouldn't be concerned about it other than know how much money you have left because once it runs out then the general fund will have to incorporate that back in so that's uh the removable trust fund and i think that was it i wanted to make sure i covered what i needed to cover yeah so overall from the the secondary uh uh part of my audit the financial results certainly are very consistent uh with my expectations uh certainly the budget that you have met expectations in terms of the knowledge and experience needed to understand the budget and certainly the financial results are very solid when it comes to
079the district overall so and that was really the end of my presentation there's some more information in in there tons of more information if you see it there's probably the highlight if you get on is the future accounting and auditing updates there's all kinds of additional gatsby's if you want to dive into those we julie and i dived into one today that you wanted to know more information about but that's what we that's why we put in there so it's mainly for the staff here but uh so i'll open it up uh to to you um for any questions questions so overall i mean you're for a first time since you've been doing this for 30 years um well done i mean as far as i mean that's what i'm hearing yeah because i mean
080you're new we relative i mean we've had the previous auditor for a number of years so i know with change there's always a little yeah unsettledness which is good you know especially when you're checking your finances um but it sounds to me like our staff and our processes are solid very solid and um we're making the appropriate changes right on the findings that you found um i do have one question on the opeb just to go a little bit more in detail since i've been on the board initially for a number of years we used to fund that rather substantially because of that risk of that liability out there and i know the guidance has changed a little bit on that i guess my concern and then i think right now and julie can clarify
081i mean as far as anything we take out now we just put in we're basically replacing is that right replacing what we oh you didn't no sorry so we we are on a pay-as-you-go right op-ed open funding so we have levied for that in the past years and so most districts bonded for it so that's why jim's problem we aren't any longer loving so i'm sure he's saying this must have been how you gained your money but no our district did love you for that for several years but we have hit our um our liability in our opeb fund we um what's missing is we are not hitting our implicit rate liability which um so i don't expect that we will ever need to get to that point so what what actually is happening in
082i don't know maybe you can explain this better than i can but he flip-flopped the numbers where we're showing in the past we have showed a positive in our fund balance and now it's showing a negative in that fund balance because he's actually flipping it and saying we're not fully funded which we know we're not right but that's why saying it's not an issue because we have hit that actual liability for those costs that we anticipate for those costs for the future oh we have hit it yes my clarity is on that yes and so it's about currently about three hundred thousand dollars that we spend in the open fund that we are spending down every year right that number will change as we have retirements and that kind of thing but as far as
083our actuarial study that was one of the things that we do monitor as a part of our actuarial study is what that actual liability for that cost is and we know that we are not funding the implicit portion of that at this point that's the 3.3 whatever okay all right that's it for me any other questions yeah go ahead your earlier point yeah you asked about um maybe expectations of the audit and it went well i'll get i want to answer or provide some info because i think this is very important there's two two aspects of that that i would say different term expectations the level of of interest and and how how do you want to put energy that the staff put into this audit was beyond my expectations the the the staff here
084were i'm trying to use the right word were we want this audit to go well we want this audit to be completed is another good word uh and we want this uh to move forward let's go let's get this out of done and a lot of the audit it's a challenging thing it is not something that's simple and so they were all over that so that was a bit outside of even my expectations like okay well that's good now let's go let's do this the other piece of this is they didn't uh we didn't expect to have this many findings nor did they uh this is not what they wanted and that is certainly right off the bat like this is not what we want um so that is not that's outside of expectations and
085i wanted to share kind of give that perspective to you thank you any other questions um jonathan um i i just wanted to ask you you mentioned i'm assuming from from the auditor a lot of times when you mention things that get audited if you have nothing to say about it that's always a good news thing because i like you you mentioned that you guys audited every transaction in the 67 or not everything yeah you audited the 67 million dollars of construction yeah budget with no findings right of note so that's i mean i think that's just good for there's a little time here probably the biggest piece of that is the bidding required requirements that go with all that that's a lot when you're spending that kind of money yeah and julie um since
086we brought up the fact that we do have a few findings i'm just wondering if you can briefly speak to some of the corrective measures or what you know what we will be doing as a result of what we found yes i can certainly do that i'm not really sure which one to start so i think for the federal findings um that did have a lot to do with the covet um in the past we haven't bid out the bread with the first year we didn't bid out bread bids and we should have bit out bread bits because it eliminated that finding or some you know one of the issues that we have um you know it's a learning experience for us for that and so we know now either if we don't bid it
087out we have to comply with one of the five pieces of that federal um policy that we have and then beyond that is like six more pieces that we have to comply with so some of those things that we're implementing um so we're looking at that very closely what's what's the best way to do it with the staffing we that we have and how do we do that so that we can be efficient without overburdening our staff too because some of that stuff is a lot of information to be checking every time or you know so we're looking at what's the best way to do that so maybe it is spending a little extra money to bid it so that we just know it's correct and it's done that right way for we're implementing a
088new procedure for the department portion of that so that will be something that we've been implementing um as far as the corrected the coding um one of the things that we struggled with this year is staffing in my office we were without a staff for about four months and in the accounting portion and plus we have new accounts payable staff and so some of that is some of that training that we have to do plus it happened during covet so some of that was even more difficult for us to work through that process and the other portion of that was a lot of it had to do with p cards so when we process those peak cards a lot of those transactions just flow through if you just let them go through and and if
089the principal or whoever the department head isn't checking those they kind of flow through into our accounting system and so for us to kind of come back on the back end and check them is something that we have to kind of go through and say how do we do that and so we've really eliminated a lot of rp cards at this point and so to try and eliminate some of that there's a lot of other reasons why we've kind of really limited the number of p cards with people working from home and that kind of thing it just is more difficult and so we've done some of that hoping to alleviate some of that plus my staff just need a little more training and a little more time to you know just develop some of
090those skills and so we've definitely been working on it i have to say that they are excellent staff i'm very happy with the work they're doing we weren't happy either and jim knows this with some of these findings we worked really hard to you know how do we improve this and what do we make better but some of it just simply is have new staff and it just is going to be a learning experience and and we just have to go and work through that and hopefully next year we'll work really hard and we won't have those findings in the future and um that's the best i can tell you at this point okay that's thank you that's what i'm looking for um last thing i guess i will just comment on is i'm michael
091and i and enrique first couple of years on this board so we haven't been through this process as many times as others but i will give some credit to the folks on the board who suggested that we bid the audit again and and have a different set of eyes look at this um i i think that that it's a different style than we heard the past couple of times and i appreciate that and i think for the folks who who suggested that that was something we ought to be doing i think they'd deserve some credit publicly i think it's a good thing any other comments or questions mary i do have a question and that's on the um p card um usage and stuff like that i and also in general these audits don't do
092a cash reconciliation at all correct or yeah no the cash reconciliation is it's not the responsibility of julian her staff okay um with regards to let's say p cards the only thing we see is you know like a let's say they purchase something on amazon or they do the bank card and then we see the vendors the bank card the description is the bank card the amount and the ufar's accounting code i assume that what's happening in the financial state and the financial system because we're getting a summary that they're actually the detailed numbers are the detailed description of each use of those was that looked at or how does that happen you're going to have to answer that one yes we do review that as part of um so as part of our whole
093process we have a whole p-card manual that people have to follow we make them sign off on their p-card that they will use it appropriately and they will you know and there's a whole list of things that they have to do as part of the p-card but on our end we do monitor that and make sure which is why when i said earlier we not finding anything that was people have done incorrectly but when when covet hit people were working from home and so what naturally happened is i have a p card i need this stuff i'm sending it to my house and so we quickly ended that because of course and you know a lot of people don't understand what's the problem with that and they don't you know they're they're teachers and they
094they're saying hey i need this and i need it for my class and i and i and i get that and i understand that but the fact that they sent it to their home that's a liability we just can't have so that's why we really put a limit on the number of peak cards that we have in the district because we're still continuing on in covet and we still have a lot of our staff working from home and so we've done that but we do monitor quite closely what they do with that one of the areas that we're really working on is making sure that the coding now is quite correct but we do monitor exactly what they're spending it on and make sure that it follows the you know the expectations of the district
095thank you i would assume that there's probably an easier way since we've moved so much from checks to purchasing cards and credit cards more so over the years that it's it's it's less it's it's it's got to be more resource constrained to try and get to that try to get to that oversight okay the only other question that i had was um you know did you have any suggest you see a lot of different school districts maybe automate something use a different feature within the financial accounting software or something like that did you have any suggestions for maybe greater efficiencies uh for our district that that helped or something that we could benefit from nothing stands out to me in terms of you know a wow moment or anything um we do spend uh quite
096a bit of time early on in terms of the control internal control processes and spending diving deep into those and probably spent more time because we had to build it from scratch typically an audit we already have last year's stuff so you're you're kind of rolling it forward and you're not diving as deep but our auditors would have provided those recommendations verbally you know as part of those individual processes thank you any other questions thank you didn't mean to cut you off earlier i appreciate it i appreciate your report thank you thank you thank you thanks um we'll move on then to the enrollment and final update budget update i'm just going to stay up here for this portion of this um for the revised budget discussion and i think i'll go ahead and kick
097it off thanks julie um good evening board members tonight i will share with you some updates and discuss the work we are doing on the current year uh revised budget that you approved on june 8th we know that in the world around us and certainly regarding our budget with the school district a lot has changed since june 8th and we want to provide you an update tonight and let you know our continued work as we seek approval of the revised budget in april or i'm sorry in december um as you can see and you know this that our our budget aligns with our priorities around our strategic plan and we want to make sure that the resources that we use do ensure that those strategic directions and the work that we have to support those
098strategic directions is in place so that we can achieve our mission for all of our students so we kind of want wanted to really look at you know what is driving some of our changes in our budget and so for the enrollment budget um you can see it's the 2021 this is what in june what we knew back then is we thought we would have another 125 students over the previous year and so and even as we went into july and we were looking back as of july 30th we were actually well over that by about 80 students what we had predicted at the end of july and so in a normal year i would have said we probably would have even exceeded the 80 students and probably would have been back into our range
099of about 250 students but of course with everything that's happened as of september 1 we certainly lost students in that month of august and as of october 1 you can see the further decline of those number of students so we went from nine a little over 9 000 students at the end of july to 88 43 at the end of august and again on october 1 we're at 8763 know and typically we lose about 70 students to 75 students at our secondary level from october 1 to the end of the year so if we want to continue on that trend which is hard because we know that things change and as we not we don't know and it's hard to look at that crystal ball for the future to win with the situation with the
100covet 19 pandemic if we continue with that our numbers would look somewhat like 8690 which is about as 235 students less than our budgeted numbers from june so that's what i wanted you to see these numbers i want you to think about these numbers if this is the direction that the board agrees with us going we would revise our budget based on that's 8690 students if you have other ideas or different opinion on that would you like to hear that we've had quite a bit of discussion about it in the administrative level about what we see and that's why we have that listed the next couple of slides we wanted to share some context into the the numbers and the information that julie just shared the association of metropolitan school districts collected data and information
101from their 43 metro districts and regarding this first slide talks about the overall decline in enrollment from what was budgeted and as julie said we for we what we are forecasting is that decline of 235 fewer students than what we had budgeted which is a decrease of 2.6 percent all other neighboring districts and other metro districts are experiencing these similar trends in varying numbers of decreased enrollment three of the districts of the 43 surveys surveyed indicated a zero decline but every other district has a decline of that and again that varies widely the next slide talks specifically because one of the other trends that i'm sure you've read about in our state and nationally is what's happening at the kindergarten level and you can see here that again many of the districts i didn't count
102it out to the extent that i did with the overall but many of our of the districts in the metro also are losing kindergarten students one of the things that i did also want to point out here i know that we've we've had a lot of questions you know why where are people going all of those kinds of things we know some of those answers but we don't know them all but one of the things that i wanted to speak to is i know one of the things that we've heard in our community or we've gotten questions about is did we lose so many kindergarten students because they're going to neighboring schools that have kindergarten four days a week when we're in that hybrid model of two days a week and i can't answer that
103question necessarily but i did want to point out that even in a couple of our neighboring districts that do have kindergarten um four days a week they also have lost a significant number of kindergartners so i'm you know not not saying that there's causation in any of that but i just know that one of the questions we've gotten in the questions we've talked about is would we have lost as many if we had had a different model um and well you know we can't go back to that i did want to point out that even in those those neighboring districts that are offering kindergarten more days they are also seeing a decline in kindergarten numbers terry can i ask a question about that when you say lost are we talking about kindergarteners who registered no
104i'm sorry in the budgeted numbers oh in the budget my hair yep that's my heir these are all uh fewer kindergarten students than we had budgeted for okay thank you nope thank you for asking the question so what i try to do as we work through this revenue budget we've had a lot of discussions again about uh where are we at we kind of did a little that was then this is now situation because it's hard to go back and forth and flip through these slides and kind of keep things in in order and so you know back in june we anticipated another 125 students 2 percent on the basic formula an increase in special ed as you know we get four percent of special ed revenue every year but we also get additional revenue
105for growth and so we are planning on growth in special ed again and so there are some additional funds there achievement integration and mencaps students coming from farmington so you can see we had 3.8 million dollars of additional revenue and if we look at updating our budget based on losing 235 students we'd only receive about 141 000 of additional revenue from the state and our increase in special ed revenue kind of gets cut in half simply because we're losing the students we only really have a four percent increase plus we did some adjusting and how we done some special ed reporting and so we're expecting a little bit more money there so that's why that's showing only as 400 the other two pieces would remain the same and so we're really looking at it only
106an increase of 1.1 million dollars that's a loss of 2.7 million dollars in revenue and then again this is now some other things that aren't included as part of our original but we will be looking at as part of your revised is you know we have loss of gait receipts we can only have x amount of kids or parents or participator spectators really is better word for that at our events sports and all of all of the events that we really have parking fees have been reduced um we did get additional revenue from for the coronavirus relief funds but if you recall those have to be utilized for things outside our budget and so those will also be um we'll increase our budget a little bit i know there's a lot of people out there
107that think well we got 2.8 million dollars that should cover our losses over here that should offset and we should be great but that's not the case because we by law aren't able to use those funds for anything that's in our current budget and then again our approved expenditures an increase of 2.6 million dollars that was then um nothing really changed there and unfortunately we still have the same expenditures due to how we're required to deliver our instruction um we can't reduce buses we actually needed more teachers because of distance learning we needed additional staff to help us so there weren't any real decreases in expenditures anywhere plus we had some additional increases in expenses so cost for tier one child care we're trying to cover as much of that under the coronavirus relief funds
108but as you remember those only go through december 30th so we have another six months of a child care tier one that we have to provide um and so that's about a hundred thousand dollars a month that we're providing for tier one child care that has to come from the general fund additional expenditures covered by the coronavirus who are trying to show that offset there of that 2.8 million dollars and then i've had it on here the cost of borrowing money for cash flow when you have that much of a flip in revenue versus expenditures we will definitely be looking at a cash flow shortage especially looking forward we're probably the month of april and so we will be looking at and coming to the board with some options for borrowing money to hit our
109expenditures and we haven't done that in 11 years and so definitely this is something new for the board and so we'll be coming back to the board just discussing that borrowing option and then also some cost containments that we're looking at for the current year supply budgets we're definitely reviewing the needs for our supply budgets and we can reduce if we can and where how much and where possible personnel we're reviewing and evaluating all positions that become open from resignations or retirements and making sure that do we need to fill them or what kind of position do we need for those for our personnel we're monitoring enrollment and making sure that maybe we aren't losing students or maybe we're kind looking at gaining some back that would be a great option there too we're looking
110at utilities and energy savings and then transportation we talked a little bit in the past about transportation we know that we probably with losing 235 students we probably would have reduced a couple bus routes but we can't because of the hybrid and how we have to transport students in this environment and so we haven't done that and we can't do that however we are going to ask the board to look at an amendment for our special ed costs for transportation um how it's set up in our current contract is that we pay them every day but we're not transporting every day we're transporting at different times but we still have the exact same cost for transporting every day and so what we're looking to do is not spend any more than we did in special
111ed transportation in the past but the same amount so that we're covering our costs for transportation we do get 100 reimbursement for special ed transportation just needs to be in our agreement so that we make sure that we're covering those costs and so that we can get reimbursed for that and then we're also paying that to our transportation company as well so that's why that's out here as far as cost containment and then terry if you want to talk about next steps that sounds great thanks julie um we will continue and julie just pointed out some of those cost containment measures that we're continuing to study and have conversations about so we'll continue to look at that and determine what else we can do as we bring back and continue to work on that revised
112budget so we'll come back to you in november with more information we'll also as we look at the detail around the revised budget begin to um seek approval and look at the parameters as we you know we're kind of in this place than when we're dealing with multiple budgets so we'll be looking at that as we get into november and december as well and really getting to that place of you looking at the assumptions and the parameters as we build that 21 budget in the near future also with the with the legislative session starting to ramp up and us continuing to learn together what we think is on the horizon which i'm sure none of us have a whole lot of hope for but that's all information that helps us in some of the updates
113and decision making as we move forward so we have a lot more to share but we wanted to to set the stage right now with what we know we knew that after those enrollment or october one enrollment numbers came we promised we'd come back to you with an update on that and it certainly isn't the news we wanted to share i think we all recall you know when julie presented in july and felt very hopeful about where that enrollment trend would go and then we've seen something very different from that and again not that we're unique but we uniquely have to deal with our budget and that's the work that we're doing right now any of you have any comments or questions stacy um i had a question um as far as enrollment i don't
114know if you can speak to this but um i see october 1st are we i mean i know we have a three weeks in here is it continuing to drop do you know these coming weeks it is okay at a normal rate or pretty much okay the piece that's hard to know is where it is i know yeah i'm just wondering the pace as to which it is i mean i didn't give you that that's right i'm answering that and making sure that we're not underestimating that decline right as well yeah that was my concern so when we talk about this thing in november you're gonna have a november number okay perfect um about the child care tier one um refresh my memory on this can we use corona dollars for that since it wasn't
115necessarily we are using coronado okay i just want to confirm that so we are using it but as you know those coronavirus funds and december 30th right so we can only do it for the first half of the year which to me seems a little ridiculous in my opinion um because like we're not just going to turn it off in the middle of the year we still have to operate we're required to service that right so i guess it kind of goes to the legislative part of this like is there feedback going back to legislators or i know you're like you're massive and that kind of stuff like on that level to like say is there any extension happening i mean i mean these are federal funds right so the federal funds coming to the
116states and the states distributing them to the school districts and other organizations as well and so um as you know there isn't any funding coming right now and i'm sure and the reason that they end december 30th is because our current you know when once the election happens things could change and so we will be that's why everything ends on december 30th and so we have to have everything to them and inputted so really it's about the 15th of december our spending pretty much has to end so that we have time to implement all of that and we will utilize as much as we can and we will try to get as much as we can in there but we can't make a payment for salaries and benefits on december 30th and think that we
117can get reimbursed on december 30th either so we're really working hard to make sure that we can maximize that as well okay does it have to match exactly for us to get the funding for that um okay and then as far as um parameters and that so the plan i just want to make sure i have this so you'll have updated numbers on november's board work session is that when we're going to talk about parameters or we'll be bringing back some information at the board meeting as well we're going to try as much as we can to continue this process and bring back as much information it might not be all of it but as much as we can at the board meeting in november and then also the work session in november so and
118my um yeah and my hope is you know once we have some of those scenarios we're going to get like a five-year peak based on that or something like that okay that's our intent okay that's it for me i have a question um you know when i first got on the board i remember sitting down with you and asking you you know do we take advantage of you know the federal food program some of the stuff for let's say medicine disbursement reimbursement on sped etc and some of that didn't really apply to us at that time so we've always had third-party billing and we've always been except for the high school been part of the federal lunch program okay i know there were some things that we talked about that that didn't apply to us
119or it was maybe i don't know cost benefit i don't know what it was but i was just wondering you know when i look at the list of stuff that maybe we could be sending back for federal reimbursement i'm not sure if we've gone back and taken a look to make sure we're maximizing every opportunity we have to try and uh you know get some any any funding or declare anything or recategorize something that would comply with a federal program funding no no no in general i'm just i'm asking this as a as far as i know um this probably would have been a question you could have asked our auditors but we are maximizing every revenue opportunity that we have the only thing that we struggle revenue-wise getting revenue for is grants and it's
120mainly because we don't have a high enough reduced lunch participation in order to qualify for so many federal grants we have a 12 free reduce price our free reduced lunch um i'm not saying this quite right but our applications for free those who qualify it's only about 12 and you really need about 30 to qualify in order to really get a grant from the federal government and so that's where we do struggle as a school district because we just don't have high enough percentage of those students who qualify for free and reduced lunch other than that i do believe that we as much as we can maximize our revenues and expenditures that's why we made some of those changes in special ed funding because we saw that we could really maximize those special ed revenues
121as much as we could um to the maximum that we could we actually had as we went through the audit we made sure that those numbers were correct and they are and so we do feel like we are maximizing the most that we can for all those programs as you see our food service program actually made more money this year because of the federal program and the number of meals served during the coved march through june so as far as i know we get the you know such small little bits of money for title and we just don't get a lot of money for compensatory revenue and el revenue simply because we just don't have the numbers to generate those that revenue that we need and so many times the general fund offsets those programs
122because it's so small however we still have a need in those areas so we're utilizing the general fund to actually implement those programs so we can provide a robust program for intervention and el services title services we're actually supplementing that with general fund revenue any other questions your discussions thank you thank you um then i believe we're moving on to the transportation amendment this is just and i kind of explained it earlier and jim and i have been working with our transportation contractors on this piece um this is this is an amendment to our current year only because we only know what's happening this year and it's only during distance learning or a district imposed or only during hybrid learning or district imposed distance learning that we would be paying this different amount for special
123ed transportation like i said earlier we get 100 reimbursed for special ed transportation we just need to make sure that we're covering our costs for special ed transportation and our contractor isn't losing money we need our contractor to be in business so we can transport our students right now they're losing quite a bit of money in special ed and i know that we're not the only school district in the state of minnesota doing this there are quite a few oh i'm sorry steve no that's right um so i know this has been going on since we've been in i mean obviously hybrid they've been at a deficit so what happened is last year they were held harmless okay so but that's not the case this year so everybody was assuming that the state would say
124well if you're in hybrid learning you'd be held harmless that is not true and so which is why we need the amendment for special education so that we're covering those costs so we're going to this is going to go back on special whose dollars where is this coming the xps dollars transportation but special transportation is but it's part of our our reimbursement for special education federal dollars they're state dollars eight dollars and so can we make this retroactive yeah okay so and we're planning on doing that yes that's what i want to make sure it would be it would be for the whole year okay all right and it's not so it okay so it's special a dollar is not corona dollars because right okay perfect any questions about that well this will come back
125to the board it'll come back to the board for approval at the dc at the november board meeting okay okay and this is this isn't contractual with the with the bus company it is that's right and you've already had that discussion yes okay i just want a clarification okay any other questions okay thank you all right thank you um we'll move on to the american indian parent action committee the district response good evening board members dr stella um i'm here with the district's draft response of our uh response to the american indian parent advisor committee's letter of non-concurrence just a quick word on the timeline the letter uh from the pac to the board and to the department of education was originally due march 1st there was a delay uh due to kovid granted by
126mde to june 1st we received the letter from the board or from the pac on september 17th and we have 60 days as a board and as a district to respond and so this will after discussion tonight come to the board meeting on november 9th for action uh the pack in their letter of non-concurrence in the explanation listed seven statements or recommendations for the school district i'll kind of go through them one by one outlining the statement and the recommendation outlining our response there are a few points of discussion for us to have and i'm happy to answer any questions along the way as well uh statement number one was about educating ourselves as a district and as administrators and teachers in the district about uh the intricacies of the american indian education act and
127our response to that is there is always learning to be done and we are more than happy to learn more we've worked with members of the department of education in the past we've had them in administrative meetings we've had them at our pac meetings themselves and we're happy to invite another member of the american indian education at the department of ed to come and visit our admin uh group again so we'll plan to do that this sorry this um this year for sure statement two was is about a formal count of the number of american indian students in the district um as the pac believes there may be more students than are reported um and this is a tiny bit complicated student demographic data is self-reported by parents and families when they enroll in the
128district we don't choose how students are categorized so when parents self-select that when they enroll there are complications that can happen if a parent chooses more than one category and that's when a student can be categorized in the mars system as two or more races versus native americans so that can cause some what can be seen as maybe miscounts or i know we have more students than perhaps are being reported so one of the things we're doing actually we had already planned this uh this week on wednesday is a member of the business department uh korean alliance our american media education coordinator and i will be sitting in on a webinar from the department of mde about how to correctly categorize and collect this data and so karina is going to be working after that
129with families if they need to correct any information just letting them know more about the categories they select and how that can impact funding and how that can impact our demographic and mars data so that will happen very soon karina is also working directly with families and uh students on 506 forms and 506 forms are required to receive federal funding from uh the federal department of indian education they're an indicator of being a member of a federally recognized tribe and that also is a source of funding and support for our programs he's working with families who have not filled that out yet to fill that out it's a one-time thing once they fill it out it's good for their entire time in the district statement number three ask that the native american liaison position would
130be made into a full-time salary district position with the same benefits package that teachers receive without using any funds from the indian education grant for the salary so i've outlined the budget that we use to fund korean alliance salary um and and some of the additions we've made to the position in the past multiple years uh over the past five years we've added hours to the position every year it's now a full-time position that is in action every day of the students are in action and present and we've also added benefits to it this year uh starting in july so as you can see we use three different funding sources two specific to american indian education the first is title seven our easy grant and that's about twenty one percent of our coordinator salary and
131we use all of that for for salary we also use about fifty one percent of our state funding which is gained through the american indian education aid and the iep that we plan and submit every year and then we also use about 26 or about 26 to 27 percent of karina's salary comes from non-american indian specific funding our achievement integration funding so we currently budget twenty thousand dollars from uh achievement integration funding for her salary and we've increased that from past years so this is a potential discussion point if you'd like to ask any questions or discuss any as a board this um has been in the the letter for multiple years so she is full-time not 0.8 yes she's full-time okay um a very flexible schedule as you'd imagine you know she doesn't follow
132the student contact dave by any means she works with parents and families all throughout the day but and throughout the summer too we we flex her time a bit but she's full-time well she is full-time so um just our district then what's that she just worked for just our district yes yes because i think initially didn't she have another district to go doing that no she was finishing out she was a um a housing or mental health worker at her tribe up north and she was finishing that out but that's that's finished i know i've heard her speak of travel so that's yep no she works fully for us okay so that's a different okay i didn't know it was okay perfect i just wanted to mm-hmm kevin i had a question about that um
133now that she's full-time will we have a more stable curriculum for her because before she was really all over the board um will there be i know you're going into maybe a class next or something like that but it's also there a language component or anything like that she's going to be taking on you know this year i would say covet has complicated that as well i mean she's so that is an aspiration of ours perhaps to integrate an ojibwe language program um in the future right now she's really working on helping intervene with families if if students are struggling with hybrid or distance learning if they're not connecting with their teachers she's really working non-stop with that to support teachers as they and counselors and administrators as they reach out to families to support
134our students in the building with everything they need from being connected to tutoring that we have at the secondary level to connected with other community resources to continuing the work in native nations so that's she's done a tremendous amount of work in updating the native nations curriculum but something like a language program is something we may aspire to kevin help me out with the um with the funding portion so one of one of their requests is they're not we are not using indian education aid grant fund funds for that just not knowing the language is are when i look at the sources that you're listing are those part of that are those separate so what they're requesting is that you see that that title seven that's a federal american indian education dollars basically and then
135the um the second number two there is state dollars basically state funding and so what they're requesting is that we don't use any of that funding from either the federal or state portion for salary okay so that we take the salary completely out of other funds and use those to the title seven in the state funding specifically for other programming within american indian education um so is there a specific i'm trying to remember um specific dollars around budget as far as i mean it would be just general curriculum that we would be using is there a dedicated portion of that that has to be not necessarily no um you know we i think we've we've done quite a bit of work recently with supplementing the position with achievement integration funding um and there are you
136know lots of ways to use that money uh but we've really worked to enhance and strengthen the position so there's no other requirement or i mean i guess that's the discussion i guess we could have is do we want to pursue funding this position out of another fund but the reclassification of being able to because i think there's more students that may be identifying dollars would follow with that absolutely okay so karina and i just kind of on some um napkin math we're looking at some of the outstanding 506 forms that we think are out there and that could amount to somewhere around 50 000 if we really get all those nailed down is it a fairly easy process for parents i mean like once you're identified i mean is it just like you have
137to self-identify each year once you do it and you recognize there there are some complicating factors with lineage you know you have to be a certain percentage and recognized in that federally uh recognized tribe so there are some complications there but once it's it's filled out and recognized that's good for being so if a family fills it out for a kindergartner it's good until 12th grade so there's an initial kind of hindrance exactly well i mean just i'm just thinking of the renewal process and how much it is but there isn't once it's ongoing it's fairly okay no pretty straightforward oh michael did you have a question i don't know if it's appropriate to ask in this spot and i'm trying to remember if this is from conversation or in that original letter um some
138concern about how the time is spent between going into other classrooms and bringing that curriculum and versus working with our families and and i don't i don't know if this is the place to address her to ask that um but is that continuing will we continue to explore and to discuss that we certainly will i mean karina is an amazing systems builder i will say and and she is coming in and building systems both for you know monitoring our students achievement for connecting with families for seeing if they have a 506 form entered i mean you enter her office and you see systems like that is very clear and so some of that work is sort of foundational work that she's helping to to build that will make some of her time more available there's
139no question she's a single liaison for our entire district including early childhood and so that by its very nature does spread her out across every building in our district we have native students in every building in our district so by that nature certainly she is spread across all of our levels all over buildings well and i was just gonna say on the compounding if we find more students and she's still a single resource that's not necessarily i mean it's a good thing don't get me wrong but i mean we also have to think about the capacity to be there um going forward as if that's sustainable you know i think that's something we need to you know talk about i mean if the numbers greatly increase i think there's first of all we need a
140before it was kind of an ad hoc and one of the things i'd like to see is a more standardized curriculum which i think you're kind of also addressing an ongoing issue we've had in statement four about that uh the integration of the curriculum in general and then developing um because i mean from like you said from early childhood all the way through 12th grade you it you you could hire 20 people right now if you don't have a curriculum behind that to tell them what to do and how to do it and what's going to happen it's not going to really help but i know that there's been a huge a huge desire over the many years to have some sort of language curriculum i think there's other districts that have that and therefore
141they do enjoy a much larger percentage of even our local uh native population going to those districts that have those so there's definitely a um there's there's a there's somewhat of a template in place but we are starting from ground zero still kind of we've done a lot of work but yeah but i mean you know i mean i don't know if she's like got an ever-ready battery in her whatever but what she was able to do in just one week was astounding but she was also very ad hoc in in that process and now that she's truly full time and here getting that system in place so that it's embedded in the curriculum i think would be the the the first step and then figuring out what the resource needs would be based upon
142that absolutely and i will say since karine alliance has been hired she's been full-time so she has been full-time for since we heard her i don't want to say but it was at the beginning of the year last year okay yep um any other questions right here okay statement four is uh as you alluded to about designing and implementing curriculum relating to indigenous peoples and tribes were appropriate there's also a piece about avoiding the use of outdated and inappropriate materials in plsa schools eliminating assignments field trips and teaching that cause unintentional harm to native students so we have crean has been a part of our curriculum review committee since she started that was very intentional from the get-go both our english ela and social studies curricular areas are in curriculum review right now we've had
143our pac actually present to our social studies team in addition to karina being involved in order to share what their experiences has been like and so that has been pretty transformative for social studies and they are working really diligently now to make sure to free their resources from biases and to make sure that any resources we do choose are free from biases or that we're addressing them one of the challenges with any textbook is that there are hidden biases and any textbook often has absent narratives and one of the things we're working with social studies to do is incorporate those absent narratives intentionally and that doesn't necessarily come from a single textbook it never will uh but how do we really reach out to and find those primary sources to integrate those absent narratives and
144to show multiple perspectives which is what social studies is all about so our social studies team is is very gung-ho and adamant in this work our ela committee has also already done quite a bit of work in diversifying our techs and our resources and making some changes even over the summer and heading into this year we have challenges with moving curriculum review forward at the pace we would like to with covet this year i i have to admit that we do but we're working to get those up and going against them we also have karina as you've heard before works with dozens and dozens of teachers on projects and presentations for students she recently presented in our tech head high school classrooms about canoe building and the native traditions involved in that so it's just
145a little example she's you know presented in elementary classrooms and high school facts classrooms you name it she's there she's in on every iep meeting absolutely possible with every native family in the district and so some of those she's also done dozens and dozens of pd sessions for teachers around supporting native students around native culture she's presented to our admin team around similar things too and we'll continue that without a question she's an incredible resource we also had and we always have had a native american history course at our high school that's a social studies elective that ran last year and karina was working really closely with the teacher in that to really update make sure the the curriculum presents natives as thriving in our current society in our current world rather than just relegated
146to history kevin has has there been any uh coordination at all between what karine is doing and our local smsc absolutely she works with their education department pretty closely she also works he's in a network with other south metro liaisons as well but when we were preparing way back in march which seems like a while ago we had ongoing dialogue with the smsc and their education department to consult with what they need and how they need and that resulted in some changes and some adaptations of what we were doing okay what about let's say the bedote language learning or the university of minnesota that's starting a whole new curriculum based upon this with the master's degree associated with that she i know she she's done a lot she's connected with the u um and takes
147students on um college visits there i don't know if she's specifically involved in that project but i can certainly inquire sorry statement 5 is about requiring annual training for staff and teachers at every grade level on the indian education act and one of the changes that's uh you'll see in this letter is that pelsby the um what used to be sort of the licensing arm of the department of ed has changed the requirements for teachers gaining or renewing their license to require a cultural competency requirement and so what we have done a part of that is a specific learning around supporting native and indigenous students and so what we have done internally is created an internal course for our staff modeled after a be approved course from st thomas um and that has some really
148great learning focused on supporting and students from indigenous nations and so you'll see that as teachers begin to renew their licenses they will be required to complete that or a similar and a complimentary course like i said korean is presented at many many administrative meetings and will continue to provide professional development for teachers at any professional opportunity development or professional development opportunities we have and that will continue uh statement six uh is a relatively simple one providing mid-quarterly updates to the liaison and the pac on the following essentially student achievement data some of the interventions we're doing to help and support students and families and how they're going and that's a simple one we will the department of education has recently released a a native american student specific dashboard in their data center so that
149makes it a little easier for us but we provided that basically twice each year and we can provide that mid-quarterly that's an easy thing statement seven is also another relatively easy one starting two years ago i worked with our our then our former coordinator on a project to procure and hang try our flags from all of our tribes represented in the state in the prior lake high school commons i wrote a letter to each one of the tribal leaders and so far we've received four of the flags and i believe or three or four i forget and we're working with the other tribal leaders to either ask for a flag or to purchase one or to get one to hang in the commons we have some of them we didn't want to hang them last
150year because of the construction in the commons but that will be done this year any other questions we enjoy i mean i enjoy a really positive relationship with sarah wheelock our chair we meet monthly as a leadership committee that's with carina the secretary of the pac and sarah and myself we meet monthly to keep ourselves connected and abreast um it's been challenging during covet and different but everything else any other questions okay thank you very much thanks kevin thank you uh moving on to board governance policy um the first policy review will be policy 521 and i believe jeff is presenting tonight good evening chair shimik members of the board dr stallow i'm here tonight to present policy 501 on behalf of deb anderson um we are a little out of sequence with 521 so
151forgive the the fact that sort of seems to be coming out of nowhere but the reason for that is is we've been working with our legal counsel on this policy in particular our current one is considerably out of date and so as you see what's indicated there the one that we currently have in place is totally and completely struck through and so to bring the policy into alignment with our procedures you see the new proposed 521 which is drafted from our legal put into our policy format so that better matches are are the procedures for families following this policy as well as as well as the safeguards and parental student rights of section 504 so again this is tonight for a first read the re as i mentioned the reason why we're bringing it forward
152is it's at the recommendation of our legal that we update this policy jeff do you have any specific changes to this policy i mean it is a lot more involved policy but um pretty much what the disconnect was is that the verbiage from the policy wasn't matching the procedures and so the new policy better matches and better brings into alignment how we would respond and follow through our procedures within the policy so a couple things safeguards the i think current safeguards with a 20-day timeline for having a sec section 504 hearing um it would be difficult if not impossible to meet that deadline of the 20 days is one of the things that we need to correct here current safeguards state that parent uh might be able or may be able to recover attorney fees
153if the parent prevails but that's unlike ide idea and again there's no provision in section 504 that you would that parents would be able to recover that and then we've also just cleaned up some um like the headers uh for reading and and locating those relevant provisions for statute yep do you have a question yeah just um this is the annual right this is the annual policy i believe isn't it didn't we just do this in july i think all of the policies are yes okay i just wanted to make sure um jeff when you guys did this did you start with the standard policy that's that's currently in place with other school districts and then make adjustments to it or how did that we started with our currency we started with our current policy
154realizing that it was there were some changes that were coming relative to to this one in particular and so that's why we rely so heavily on our legal counsel in working through this one so i can't um i know that was a conversation that deb was having with our legal counsel and i think we deferred to her expertise in going through making sure that this policy was was written the way it was supposed to be written okay okay this is a first read so um it'll come back yes thank you very much we have no first reading of policies this evening moving on to second readings policy 204 school board member violation of policy if you recall we've had this on discussion at a number of meetings a subcommittee was formed to formulate a new
155revised policy and this is what's being presented tonight so i'm going to turn it over to that subcommittee to present feel free to type in guys um so the first one the first um 204 what's in our format um the general statement of policy is our draft version of um the collaboration of enrique mary and myself we kind of looked at different you know policies around and then some of the stuff that we were able to gather on our own and um we had a lot of discussion about it a couple things to highlight i think that we liked you know is listing the potential remedies not in a step format just because you know there is you can't really think of every situation but the fact that there are so many different situations um
156that any of those could be used as a corrective action i think was kind of important to us because we started just talking amongst ourselves just as well what could these situations look like and they're all varied so and then really sticking with the theme of you know kind of coming out of the last board meeting of having it be an education tool and something that you know we don't want to have to go down very often but if we do that there is corrective action in the sense that the member can you know redeem themselves basically and where it's um can be a more casual um like as you see in in the first one one point private conversation um i think that you know is in almost all the policies that we saw
157that was kind of like a first conversation and so um that was kind of important to us um as well and then um i think we just kind of stated you know the removal of the board member piece was is basically statute and as we have talked about in the past that's just on here as a note that that is a law i mean there isn't really anything um particular in that other than that that is the law and so i think with that just being the law and there's no steps around it or any type of thing i think that this kind of provided some type of conversation point in a way for um that learning piece and i think the one thing too we wanted to say was that this isn't anything that
158is a first time for anybody like not a new board member or anything like this this is after willful and repeated violations so it's not like oh i misspoke or you know and then we're going to take you down it's not like that that's not what this is for and this is purely for us board members um no one else i mean obviously staff and other things have their own policies and things but um and i think it's just kind of a gray area where we tried to have it be a learning tool and i'll give it up to the other two if they want to make any comments enrique do you want to say anything add to what stacy said or it was a lot of fun working with this crew yeah i think
159stacey did a very nice job of articulating that this is not at all really meant to be punitive it's more about education and bringing a board member back into compliance we talked a little bit about a mentor mentee type of a situation but ultimately it's it's about what do we need to do as a board to collectively bring another individual back online that might have stepped out of line and it's not just a single instance it's repetitive patterns of behavior so hopefully what you read here aligns with the spirit of add overall message well i know one thing that hit me was enrique's follow-up because we made him the scribe and he did a great job during the meetings um and the the most impressive thing was he actually came back and after i don't
160know two hours on a sunday and then another almost four hours on a wednesday or thursday night that we met he actually came back and said it was fun so i was i was like oh good so um no but i i agree with what everyone said and i think the most important statements are those first three paragraphs because they kind of basically and the reason why we moved so much information up into those three is they're kind of the preamble to say okay here's how everything's kind of going along but if we need to go then then here's a more formal procedure so it's consistent and then like like stacy said the potential remedies were not assigned to any one area it's basically here are the options available and that was really important for
161us to be able to get across and bullet them and specifically not number them so it didn't appear that it was in any type of way hierarchical or in a procedural format and the same thing went with the way that the complaints and the investigation language goes it wasn't bulleted or numbered or anything like that it was more or less to be able to use that as a reference point knowing that if anything became serious then it probably would be out of the board's control anyways it would be more of a legal situation so i thought that it it came it came it came together uh with the three of us very very well and i'm kind of i'm very happy with the result um and i just want to clarify um so the 5c1
162that 204 okay 5c1204 that policy is i mean we basically got through that that's where we had discussed everything and kind of ended the second 5c2 was information that mary had brought forward we didn't really get to discuss that as far as a little bit i mean i would say we didn't like go into detail about any of that kind of thing so as far as to speak to that i mean i guess i wouldn't speak to this as much as i'm speaking to the previous part i'm just saying consensus was gained on the five c one the five c two we kind of determined was very procedural um and we didn't really get that far in that discussion so i kind of put it out there as other considerations i didn't know um you
163know mary can speak to it more since she brought that information forward but where we wanted to go with that i think we just put it out there if that's something that we want to see with or any type of language like that that would be additional work as far as i'm concerned as far as committee because that we didn't really go into this so you're referring to the first two pages of this policy as the policy correct i just i just wanted to clarify that yes and i didn't we didn't go we had a you know without that we had a different opinion it was like hour four right and we just we were just we didn't get to the point where we and i just said let's bring it back and see where
164we wanted to go with it what we kind of did was talk through it we focused more on the first two pages and then the areas that we that were more procedural like stacy said we grouped them underneath and then kind of cleaned them up i think the most important thing we did was when we read through them is we want to make sure that we weren't contradicting anything that was the biggest concern because the language was all kind of all over the place at first so we went through and read through it in and each one of us kind of said well we have to take at least the sentence out because we already handled it up here or uh or it kind of contradicts the general flow of the top part to try
165and be more or less punitive in nature and and more um based upon the circumstance and the options and then the rest of it um kind of fell into the actual procedures but again they're not you know the more prescriptive portion but on purpose they were not numbered or anything like that just so it would be more open and and have the ability to be used if we needed it to be um so that's kind of i think that's that's kind of what we came to a conclusion and and that's why it's it wasn't like you see the top one two three four and that's as far as we got with an actual step process the rest of it uh was more or less let's see what applies based upon the circumstances so it'll leave
166it a more open because there's no way you can come up with every possible scenario right michael i was just going to make sure that i'm hearing you correctly you feel like that additional material that you gave us is incorporated well enough into these this two-page proposed policy that you're asking us to approve is that correct you feel like that input is included in those bullet points enough for what we need um no the the stuff on the bottom under under the underlying piece is is supplementary it's not included and the top um it the top is supposed to be the more apply it as you need it and one of the things that we did do when we looked over the language at the bottom was to make sure it wasn't contradicting any any
167uh the the the the kind of general sense now the bottom half we we didn't talk about it nearly in depth as as as the top simply because of those reasons in general and we did kind of talk about the fact that it would be potentially beneficial to have council look over it to make sure that there wasn't anything in there that should be taken out there's a couple things i think that we did talk about is if a complaint is frivolous yes maybe it's you know put in there formally but we wanted some language in there we don't know if that language is is appropriate from a legal perspective of how you would actually do something like this in a procedure but but it was it was worth leaving in here but really the
168idea was to for for us as a board because we wanted to go into more of the educational is to focus on the top piece like you said the first two and then the the the last two were supplementary and if there's things in there that should be taken out because we shouldn't be putting them in there or whatever then that's that's something that we kind of throughout to say okay should we have a legal counsel look at that you know can we say this can we talk about the process of the investigation or is that something that would be then that would then go to something else out of our hands anyways yeah just as i'm saying i'm a little confused here page documentary it is it's a four-page it's a two-page document with
169a two-page supplement too would that have to be approved as part of our policy well that's something we need to discuss yeah i think that's where the discussion procedure i mean because the only thing after i feel like yeah i mean i think this is where we got into hour four and we were kind of like okay we can't we can only go so far we have really good consensus on these first two pages and then let's bring it to the board on where we're at with this and so was that about right for everybody enrique does that does that seem right enrique yeah so um i got the head nod for those of you listening and so yeah so i think that's where we're at discussion is like oh sorry that's where we're at
170right now for discussion is is this something you know you know mary's point of do we need to bring this to legal counsel you know and have them look at this part in this procedural part is this something that we want in there um i think that's kind of weird right yeah well i see this i see the part after i'm looking at a hard copy so that maybe is making it more confusing but at the end of after potential remedies we have school board adoption and then another page starts with complaints when it starts with complaints that appears to be fairly procedural to me right and right that's listening to that policy well right and that's kind of what we were saying right what i would like to see is looking at the policy
171part yeah the first two that's what we would be approving in november or up for a vote i mean yeah i think we look for consensus but i mean that's i think what we would plan on bringing forward for the most part is those first two pages unless people want to go jonathan did you have something um i will just thank each of you for uh what sounds like uh five or six hours of pure fun um i mean i would agree with enrique it was pretty fun i would submit that each of us owe you a debt of um a beverage of choice at a later date for taking this on um what i my favorite part of this whole thing that i see here is number one it's it basically says be an
172adult and have a conversation with somebody you think has committed a violation um it doesn't require you to uh go tell the chair and so i just i think that's a really good first step when somebody has a concern i appreciate your work and i'd echo that um this was a hard policy to get through with all of us so i do appreciate the work of the subcommittee um and it looks good to me um and i'd like to see it come back at our meeting in november for a vote so and so let's just clarify with that the two pages or the two pages well we do want you to at least look at the other two for the supplementary because some of those are are procedures but they are embedded and we did
173take some we did go through there to make sure that there wasn't any contradictions with the the high-level policy uh so um and there is you know we've you know there were other uh considerations when you look at uh some of the emails we do receive and things like that i mean there's a you know what people believe and what's going on i mean we've had some you know some you know comments here that are not any even in the jurisdiction at all of the board and people want to do a complaint or something like that so we need to consider those of how we handle those consistently and fairly and that's why these are just kind of listed down here and they were cleaned up and they were like i said not decoupled but
174definitely not contradictory so we did have a couple of discussions about some of these i know we removed quite a few um so i think that it is worth everyone looking at that to see if there's anything they want to bring up to the top or if the procedure should be you know again supplementary but maybe not the policy policy that sort of thing i think for each of us well to spend a little time in the review yeah and homework i think i mean right and i think you know i don't know how detailed we're going to get into it but i mean you know i think we had differences of the companion i you know myself personally i think um i see the point of this but then i also see reality um
175and i think this is a little too prescriptive but i mean it just depends on the level that i think that was our thought about having legal counsel right look at it was just to have a view of okay like you guys deal with the scenarios way more often than we do um what's your opinion on this if this is something that should be long in policy or not so i mean i'd be supportive of having that looked at you know at least before the next you know it's possible through the next meeting just to have an opinion on that i think it i don't know that's just my opinion just the whole thing as a whole right that there isn't a liability that we're making because i mean we're not lawyers well you know
176this last page you're referring to different ways of complaints come in yeah and there is you're right there's no way you can hit on all the complaints that might come in and the way they're going to come in this is more about school board members than it is about community members making complaints about people right and i don't believe that we you know if we want to put a procedure about how we go about it i think we've already outlined that in the policy these complaints are all samples and it's very prescriptive and it still can't cover everything um so i would not want this in the policy and i am not in support of taking a lawyer getting a lawyer to look at a policy that governs ourselves in the end is all dictated
177by a statute and we want this to be a learning process not a punitive process so i don't see a purpose in having a lawyer come in and spending the money on a lawyer that we don't have the money to spend to be praying so well i would suggest then that the the rest of the board look at this and see if there's anything down there uh on the on the last two pages that you want to bring up to clarify uh because again the top two pages were meant to be somewhat nebulous for that reason in particular and there may be and we and i'm not going to say that this was kind of our parking lot but in a kind of way it was so so there may be some things you read
178in there that should be brought up into the because they are it's not just the complaint you know frivolous or non-fluids there's three or four separate sections in here that ended up as the parking lot so looking through that i think is pretty important particularly if you think anything up above needs to be clarified and that's exactly where we where we ended up with some of these statements and that's why they're not bulleted or numbered either but we did take some work to look through there and make sure we at least weren't um again and we did take some stuff out that was duplicative as we started to move things up right and i respect the work that you've done and if the board wants to continue looking at the this last part to see
179if there's something that they should be incorporating the policy that'd be fine but i guess i also have an expectation that we will be able to take this to a vote at our next meeting this policy has been you know on the agenda for months it's a policy that we hardly ever have to execute and we have a lot more important things that are going on right now that we need to focus on educating our students so i really would like to move forward on this policy and if you know if everyone's more comfortable or feels in agreement that they want to look at these complaints and see if we can incorporate if something's missing into the policy i'm all for it that'd be great but i would like to have come with the expectation
180that we will be voting on the policy at our next meeting am i well king jonathan i was just going to say i think i think the the group the group on the committee did the did the initial work created the initial policy they're asking what i hear is they're sort of asking us to also review the other pieces and i think that that's reasonable and so i i'm with you lee i'd like us to be able to move forward with this i think everybody would like to be able to move forward with this i also think that it's if if it if it winds up on one two more agendas instead of one more agenda before a final approval if we can work in between or if we can have conversations in between with
181the folks on the committee to if we have concerns i do think we should respect their work by reviewing what they've given us to see if there's anything we think should be incorporated also into the policy and if if that creates some some changes before the next meeting that's great hopefully we can send that and get it approved um if it if it delays for one more meeting yeah technically this is a first reading of a brand new policy anyways because we did rewrite it well but our process is that they can the policy can change through the four times that we presented and this has been presented at minimum of four times yeah so it does change as we go through the policy and part of the big change that was done is because
182i asked for a subcommittee because we were getting nowhere as we discussed the policy so michael could i just get some clarification going forward the policies written so we can self-govern correct we have ethics procedures in our self-governance and if we violate those we want to involve as few people as possible and correcting that action where i got confused and i did go through this and thank you for all this work mary i did spend time with it is this felt more to me like an outside complaint gets filed against a board member from an outside person and what procedure do we take and it's a little different than the first two pages in that it means a report complaint goes in writing it goes to every board member that feels a little different than
183the spirit of um hey did you know you're we already went to a vote on that we're not speaking in bored voice or you know that sort of a conversation so that's why i'm getting a little confused in um that the self-governance part is how do we navigate the policies we've established for ourselves and hold each other accountable is that correct as opposed to someone complains to the board share that someone violated it's actually kind of bold is that yeah it is both yeah it's both really both yeah um and that's the thing about the scenarios right it's both in that it's a governance policy right but well because we love it ourselves yeah because there isn't anyone right in the school district administration that's going to do anything with that it's all at our
184table even if it's outside whatever it has to be us doing it on ourselves as school board members okay so it can involve everyone but we have to be the ones that hold ourselves accountable okay thank you okay everyone's good we'll move on policy 603 curriculum development is that jeff i guess we have both of them jeff good evening again again this is these two policies are before you this evening based on the feedback from the last meeting we made an adjustment to make on the last page of each policy the meeting time component exactly the same they were different and so it was pointed out i think by director nelson that we needed to get those uh to match so we did so those have been the only updates for our conversation the last
185couple meetings okay and this is also a second reading coming to the board for potential vote in november does anyone have any other questions or comments yeah i thought it was a third reading actually but that's just i think you're right yeah i think it is the third reading and i don't know well changes on it the way it's being done right now this is the third reading yes and the fourth reading will be when we take a vote yes did i say that wrong i think he says the second reading i don't know because the way this is being is it's a little bit confusing board policy review is actually truly the first time it's presented right then it's a first reading then it's a second reading and then it's approval so that is
186the fourth time it's presented to the board so it does appear confusing the way we're doing these numbers yeah but that's that's making sense to our policy expert so we're going with that okay and i whatever reading it is i think nothing has changed and i think we discussed this and we're in my opinion i thought we were all good with it so yeah it will come to a vote on in november so on to 16 6 16. thank you uh 6 16 uh very similar we changed the the verbiage from the um on the fourth page to match the meeting time on 603 so they both were consistent okay any questions nope okay thank you thank you very much superintendent relations dr styler great i just wanted to take some time i want to
187express again my incredible gratitude to our staff for the amazing work that they continue to do to our students who continue to show a resiliency and to our families who you know are navigating a lot of things during this public health crisis and i think that's the piece of it as we share some updates with you this evening that we continue to focus on this is a public health crisis no one has chosen this path no one wants this path everyone is making decisions and doing the best that they can for the health and safety of our students and as i go around the district i continue to see our staff do unbelievable things from our custodian that i talked to last week who really is spending his days wiping railings with hundreds of steps
188in buildings again i'm sure there's other things that need to be done and he would like to be doing but that's what it's taking right now to keep our staff safe a first grade teacher who was doing a direct instruction lesson in math and had her students at home her home hybrid students with a white board and her kids in the classroom with a white board and she would do a piece of lesson and say show me your work and was immediately able to assess the students in front of her and the students at home in hybrid amazing an art teacher who is teaching from home with a classroom monitor supporting the students that are in the classroom and then again other students on a google meet at home and we got a chance to
189see some of the incredible artwork that the students have displayed and lastly a high school choir classroom with entirely synchronous singing and teaching and learning where kids you know we asked the question we said a kid's actually singing at home and they are so again i just cannot say enough thank yous to our staff in every corner of this district and every department and in every school i know this isn't that much fun it's really not been a lot of fun since march it's really hard work and it's really serious work and again we're in a public health crisis so i just want us to remember that as we talk tonight about some of the changes that were seen in our state and in the metro around covet case numbers and the position that that
190puts our public health experts in as they give recommended direction to school districts and the next couple weeks the next couple of months are going to be difficult and we're going to be making decisions and listening to our health experts all along the way so i just want to be sure that that our community understands that while there's some flexibility that districts have been given in terms of how we approach a hybrid learning model we really will continue to hear the recommended directions from our scott county experts and partners and then our minnesota department of health and minnesota department of education experts and what i'm going to explain to you in a little bit is some of the the um things that we're seeing coming out of different counties and why and i'm hoping that
191that brings some clarity this evening but the thing that i'd like to start with this evening we've gotten a couple questions on redtail ridge being a polling place and some concerns about that happening with kovid so red tail ridge is a is the only school that's a polling place for us and it is because in that precinct there simply is not another building a public building that can be used and red tail's been a polling place for us for for years and i just i asked jim to share a little bit tonight of some of the additional precautions we always have safety precautions at our schools when there's an election but the additional precautions that are put in place so thanks jim all right um good evening chair shimmick school board dr sallo um so
192we are cognizant that we are in a pandemic right now so we marine mullen and i were out at red tail today typically we would have a half gem for elections this year to accommodate social distance we're going to have the whole gym open we also a couple years ago we installed a a door pole so that we can separate um voters from entering the school building proper so and we've been through this before i think we had the primary this year and our election judges are former teachers or they were at that time and we were highly complimented on our work and i think we'll be in great shape that is my polling place so on um over the years there's very little going into the building and now now at the primary it
193was we didn't i didn't even go into the building it was correct right in the gym the gym door right in right out feel very good about that thank you thank you thanks jim very much i'm going to invite uh joe to come up um and as he's coming up i just want to share with you a little bit and and i know you're all following numbers both the scott county numbers and you're following what's happening across the metro and a couple things that we might be hearing some different recommended direction that different counties are getting and i just want to share my knowledge of that right now as i talk and work daily with other superintendents so we know some of the counties and i'm going to say anoka county right now is is
194adding over 30. and they are as a county the the school districts in that county because there was not an identifiable outbreak in a particular area but rather the spread is community-wide the the recommended direction that mde and the minnesota department of health gave the schools in that county was to transition into distance learning differently other counties whose numbers might be similar because they were able to identify an outbreak in a particular facility or location they might be having a different recommended direction to school districts in that county but at the end of the day with the superintendents that i've spoken with they still are getting recommended direction from the minnesota department of health and minnesota department of education so while there appears that that some folks in throughout the state believe that it is
195really this local control and you as a board and i as a superintendent can make some decisions when it comes to what the minnesota department of health and the minnesota department of education recommend and give us direction on i need you to know board members and community members that i am going to follow the direction of our public health experts and and it the decisions that we want are for our kids to be able to be in school in a safe way and unfortunately if the numbers continue to climb we will have to be looking at a learning trend transitional model for our secondary students and i'm not saying that to say that we're doing that right now but i put out the email on friday and i will continue to do that when there's
196something that looks like there's potential change that's what i'm trying to do to be transparent to our community so that they know the information that we know we've been clear with the data that we review every week so in addition to that county data we're always looking at our staff absences and our student absences we're looking at in our departments you know if we've got any other concerns that we're unable to to operate with but i just want folks to know that we are taking this incredibly seriously and we are meeting constantly to review where we're at and if we have to transition um we will be prepared and solidify those plans and be ready for that and we'll communicate it as quickly as we're able to as we watch the data so with that
197i did ask joe this evening to just share with you all some updated number and data so that folks have a little bit more of a sense of what we as a district are dealing with and how it impacts our staffing and the other work that we're doing thanks joe appreciate it good evening board chair schemic dr stylo board members as she shared dr stylo asked me to share kind of an update of where we are at with our numbers when i stood here two weeks ago i shared with you that at that time we had 10 positive cases and that was actually through the first six weeks that we had had staff and students with us in the last two weeks we have added 14 more so we are now at a total of
19824 cases as i look at that we have approximately 60 a little more than 60 percent of those cases are student cases pretty evenly divided between elementary and secondary one or two more cases in the secondary but for the most part they're pretty similar a couple different things that we're starting to see you may not have heard but the cdc did make a change within the last week or so around their definition of close contact the change that they made was the fact that the 15 minute time frame is now cumulative over a 24 hour period it's not 15 minutes at one time now because of that we have started to have a couple situations recently where we've had to quarantine both staff or students when there has been a positive case and i applaud
199our staff for really making sure that they pay attention to that to be able to say you know what this is someone that i was with and worked closely with multiple times within that day and so it's something actually that i'm been working on a communication that's going to be going to staff to make sure that we continue to be very cognizant of that 15-minute time frame and that distancing that we have so that we can make sure that first of all we can identify close contacts if there are going to be any but also make sure that we can protect ourselves and protect each other in that situation yeah yes questions yes um is there a clarification on the quarantine and when the quarantine time is supposed to start is it starting when symptoms
200appear when you think you were or when you get the test so two different terms that sometimes get mixed up quarantine and isolation so isolation refers to someone who has officially tested positive and so for that person isolation begins at the start of their symptoms so they may not get tested till day two of their symptoms then we all know that test results can take anywhere from 24 hours to three days depending on where you get those tests taken care of but the actual isolation for that person who tested positive begins on day one of their symptoms quarantine refers to someone who was in contact with a person who tested positive and that's a 14 day time period and that begins when they last had contact with them so we have situations where someone tests
201positive we have to first figure out when were they in our building if it's a student if it's a staff member we know that a little bit more but when were they last in our building we know that they were contagious for a 48-hour time period before those symptoms began then we have to determine who did they potentially have that close contact with during those 48 hours because of our hybrid schedule and the fact that students are in the building and then not in the building for at least two days in many cases that does help us out with that 48-hour period so we're really only looking at one day when we're talking about a group of students now staff members we have to talk a little bit more about that because those colleagues may
202be together on a daily basis do we know anybody who contacted or became a positive test because of contact in the school or were the originating sources so great question so like i said two weeks ago when i shared with you at that point all of our cases had been contracted outside of our school building we have now had for sure one potentially two that we're still looking into cases where there were contracted within our building okay i was just thinking the numbers any other questions right now okay thank you so we'll continue so that we've got a couple things just to remind the board that we've got a couple things happening right now we're continuing um to work through the request change for learning model and we had about again over 500 i think
203of those we're continuing to work on that i think the the original date that we had given parents was that we would communicate that by i think november 6th is that right christy um which we're still on tag for right we're still on track to do that and then we'll just continue to as i said we'll continue to monitor those numbers you all know that we meet weekly with scott county public health and then included in that meeting are the the area superintendents as well as one of our represent representatives from our regional support team who's also on that and then we always follow up those meetings with our incident command team where we get more data around our staff and student absences and get reports from all the buildings as well as all the
204departments in terms of of what they're seeing what they're needing so that we can be sure to to support them as i said uh because right now we know where the trend is we're going to continue to deepen and solidify plans should we have to make a learning model change with our secondary students to distance learning and again we will communicate that as as soon as we possibly can right now we're going to monitor we'll see what the numbers look like this week and then we'll see what our public health advisors say and then we'll see what they look like next week as well but again i just i want you to know we are looking at this at all times sharing the information that we know as soon as we know it and really
205doing the best we can to ensure that our kids and our staff are safe and we provide quality learning in whatever format that looks like stacy just one question and i know this is getting the cart before the horse but i i i do think just um from a preparation standpoint and a transition standpoint if we go to distance learning at the secondary um you know it's not going to be necessarily i mean there's going to be a little transition right i mean there will be somewhat of a transition and um and i think i know the answer to this but i just want to clarify it for the public is the a b goes away correct thank you for saying that yeah the the you're exactly right if we if we are no longer
206in the hybrid model then we've got all students learning in a distance learning model but you're correct the a b would go away at that point and just to clarify too because we're having um this change go on after quarter one where there can be a transition of some kids that are going either way but if we go to distance then everyone's secondary at the secondary i'm just talking specifically secondary then if we come out in the future let's just say scenario when we come out they're going to go back to how they would have been scheduled for the beginning of second quarter right so at the at and you know if you recall board when we when we designed the ready to learn plan you know one of the things that that we were
207directed to do is is to be able to build a plan that we could seamlessly go between models and i don't know that there's anything as seamless but that we could do it with uh with as much or as little disruption to the learning and teaching as possible but but stacy you're exactly right if we were to go into distance learning then then right now as we know in a hybrid model we have students that are at school hybrid home hybrid and dla distance learning academy but all those secondary students would be distance learning and again as you said when we then would go back into a hybrid model folks would would go into the model that it has been communicated to them that they will be in for second quarter okay um and i'll
208just um clarify i appreciate your comments regarding um you know the comments about meeting with minnesota department of health the minnesota department of ed i know you and joe meet on that weekly basis and they have the recommendation from a health and safety standpoint and i would i mean in my opinion i i consider you a education expert not a health expert so i do have comfort in knowing that you know the recommendation from a health standpoint which i am not one either we rely heavily on the experts in that area and so um i would think it'd be pretty difficult for myself to not follow what's what that guidance is from a health and safety family and i know that's difficult you know i know i know people want their kids in school but
209yeah so do i think we're in a right we're in a health pandemic and so um i think we just have to kind of keep obviously keep that at the forefront and i i know the uncertainty is difficult for everyone right it's it's difficult for the senior son that i have at home it's difficult for every one of our staff and our parents who are are trying to plan it's difficult then when we're in a routine and we think we kind of have the flow and now we start hearing this oh goodness are we going to have to change and switch and so we have to talk about it that it could happen without you know the last thing i want to do is get people um you know fearful or in an uproar about
210a change but i also to your point i know families have to plan and i also don't want it to appear that we didn't know that that the cases across the metro are rising so it's uh it's not an easy position for anyone to be in in any role and as i've said multiple times the way we'll get through this is together and staying together and recognizing that we're all on the same team and that team is to ensure that we do everything we can to help our students to make sure that mission comes to life and again the reality is there are different perspectives and how that's done so i appreciate our staff board members i appreciate the continued learning and and watching and monitoring and question answering that you're doing and and our
211families for the the support and the questions that they ask that help us get better because that's what we want this experience to be for our learners thanks thank you moving on informational items on november 16th to the 20th is american education week i'm looking for feedback as to how we'd like to proceed with that we usually go into the schools that week i'm not sure whether what our comfort level is about doing that if you know we want to continue with that or not i don't have a suggestion at this point um but if you want to if you have some great ideas about what we could do um that'd be awesome um and i'm not sure i know that it's limited as to how many people can go into a school but at
212the same time it also is awesome when the board can go in to a school and visit with the teachers a little bit so kind of balance that and we could go with status quo of what we've done in the past we could make some wonderful video and send it out to all the teachers um i guess if you'd um give it some thought and get back to me if you have a thought on it and i'll work with terry and martha's scheduling wise if we just whatever with whatever we decide to do so but kind of a heads up that it's the 16th or the 20th of november and then i have no comments from anyone from public forum or for the public forum those notes or comments should have been given to martha
213by noon today with the notation that it was to be read tonight so that it's it's clear um so if there's no other business i would adjourn thank you all thank you