July 13, 2020 Regular Meeting of the Board of Education

001okay i'd like to call this meeting to order um thank you all for coming this evening it's good to see everyone here would you please all join us in the pledge of allegiance to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay again thank you for being here um this meeting is being live streamed and on cable tv and recorded all are present this evening and i do not believe i have any [Music] notices or letters from the open forum part from the community is that correct okay um do i have a motion to approve the agenda still mean by stacy second by jonathan um any comments or discussion okay all those in favor say aye aye aye thanks to enrique opposed that motion carries 7-0

002on our consent agenda this evening are the financial of the bank reconciliation statements building bond investment reports the approval of the school board minutes personnel items candidates for employment resignations terminations and non-renewals as listed the district retirements of michelle tyndall of 21 years and kenneth schultz of 17 years and the leaves of absence and memberships for the 2021 school year for the minnesota state high school league the minnesota school board association membership the metro exo membership renewal amsd membership renewal and schools for equity and education membership do i have a motion to accept the consent agenda soulmate by michael not by mary i'll second oh i'm sorry motion made by mary's second by michael um all those in favor say aye aye opposed that motion carries 7-0 um on the resolution of gifts um we

003have donations from the prior lake rotary of eight thousand dollars for student technology needs again from the prior lake rotary for four thousand dollars for kids company scholarships from the ptc um for twelve thousand twelve hundred forty eight dollars for student planners for westwood elementary um forty dollars from best buy for westwood um students materials and from fox nine one thousand dollars for the tom darius top teacher of the year award for his classroom um do i have a motion to accept the donations by stacy second second by enrique um anybody any other comments okay this is a roll call vote um melissa i'm michael hi mary hi stacy aye aye jonathan aye enrique hi hey that motion carries 7-0 um and we do have a laker pride this evening oftentimes during the summer we

004don't get an opportunity to have students with us and we are so excited this evening to have several students joining us who are going to share a little bit about some very important community service work in which they've been engaged over the last couple of weeks so to start things off i'm going to ask the students to introduce themselves and then i believe nana and allison are going to be sharing a little update with us uh mark paulson is also here he's uh one of the assistant superintendent or one of the assistant principals at prior lake high school so first girls i'm going to hand this off and maybe why don't i just hold it i'll hold it i'll hold it then we'll be safe okay um i'm sophia um i do the social media

005for vsu and you are going to be a we're i'm going to be a senior okay i'm nana sam brew i'm the president of bsu and i'll be a senior this year i'm rosalyn a monqua i'm the treasurer of bsu and i'm going to be a senior i'm alyssia jaycox i'm the secretary of bsu and i'll be a senior i'm alison chetty i'm going to be a senior and i'm vice president of the vsu i handle the communication we are delighted to have you and we're delighted to learn more from you right now so with that i'm going to hand it over to mark who is then going to hand it over to allison antana thank you dr stahlo board members community so i have the distinct pleasure of getting to introduce our leadership team

006here the bsu or black student union was formed in 2016 and the initial focus was they've always been focused on creating a positive welcoming experience for our students all of our students initially when it first got off the ground it we really focused on creating a safe space where students of color could come together share and talk about common experiences challenges celebrate successes and and that sort of thing with this new leadership that has come in they've expanded their focus to include education and advocacy which i think is a really important next step and i'm i'm so proud of them for where they've taken it so they are here tonight to share kind of what bsu is uh the work that they've already accomplished what their plans are uh specifically i think around also engaging

007in partnership with the prior lake and savage community to learn about and address issues of systemic racism and equity in partnership so i just wanted to introduce them they have the most important things to say so nana do you want to take over from here um and now i'm going to ask you to go to the podium just so we can hear you and and see you from there okay thank you try and see if i can run this for you so nana there's just a mouse here that we've wiped off for you okay and you can just scroll down and uh your presentation will slide up so just scroll that down okay and i'll stay just sounds good hi everyone i'm nana sambre president of the black student union and today we are here

008to talk about what the black student union is what we do also our very successful juneteenth food drive that we had a couple weeks ago and future plans and events that we have for this group for the next couple of months um so as you saw before we introduced ourselves i'm allison chetty i am the vice president um for bsu we just our mission statement is that we pledge to dedicate time to a unified body that maintains responsibility and and is com committed to quality social development and that just means for us that we want to educate students at the school about black issues and also include them and also like include ourselves into the community better so that we can all work together just to be comfortable and just to you know be stronger

009as a community probably savage community so and adding on to that i'm going back to being committed and having responsibility for ourselves not just people in our group but just everyone at our school um being committed and responsible to educating ourselves on issues that go around us in our community in our schools or even around the us as well and as group members we hold ourselves to high standards as to making sure we can be the best versions of ourselves that we can be okay so on june 19 2020 we had our juneteenth food drive um we had that um to help out with the minutes or with the minneapolis community after what had happened down in minneapolis so we raised 6819 pounds of food it was a very successful food drive we met so

010many cool people we saw some of our old teachers that we missed so dearly um and this was just very important for us to have uh because it was on juneteenth which was when like the last of the slaves were um that's the word freed yes and um it was important for us to have it on that day but it was also very important for us to have to for prior lake and savage to come together to raise food for another community in minnesota we're all tight-knit and you know minnesota nice so we're out here donating food and just to show that we do care about our black communities in minneapolis st paul and just our black community in general yes adding on to that as well um this was my personal experience i was

011surprised with the amount of people that showed up donated food we shared our post online donated money um it was just super heartwarming to see people who i didn't expect to see there just show up and support such a great cause all right future plans of the bsu as you can see here coming up soon on july 24th we'll be having a blackout cinema so we're planning on having a movie being shown on the football field with up to 100 people social distancing guidelines but the movie we'll be showing is the hate you give the hate you give is an amazing movie especially for times during this um with police brutality being the talk in the world right now um we're also planning on having a live conversation going on during the movie so people

012are able to ask questions learn from other people i'm a big believer in learning from your peers um so a way for people to come together learn ask questions in a judgment-free zone um hopefully in the near future planning a cultural night to have people from the community and people from different backgrounds and countries come together show their different music foods and dances from their different communities and backgrounds that they have and also having some fundraising events in the future like our food drive or even fundraising for our group as a whole something that we wanted to focus on this year was educating our peers our teachers and just the community in general so we do plan on having more panel discussions where we have a topic and we talk about it similar to caring

013conversations that we have at the high school but we just want everyone to feel heard and we want everyone to listen to one another especially during times like this during a pandemic and also with racial tensions going on as well yes that's all we have well ivana thank you for being here thank you for elevating your voices thank you for six thousand eight hundred and nineteen pounds what i what yes believe i heard was that that was to the shelter that you took the six trucks that was the single largest donation they had ever received um so thank you on behalf of our community for helping us as a community do something to help others and for getting that going and um the outreach from our community was absolutely amazing thank you for your leadership

014and we look forward to more from you um in the days and weeks to come thank you thank you very much thank you so much thank you so much thank you thanks very much oh god you're welcome thanks okay we'll move on now to um personnel items the plsc a grievance appeal and i believe jim has some words to say first enrique's right there looking at me [Laughter] sorry i take my glasses off they fog up and i can't see anything well good good evening everybody um we had requested that i talk through some of the process related to this and how we got to where we are today related to this grievance so i want to do that so before i turn it over to her just a few a few notes um this

015was a language dispute that arose out of the action taken by the recommendation from administration and the action taken by the board around the school closure and the non-scheduling or ula or whatever term you want to use in this case it was non-scheduling of work hours related to ecfe teachers and ecfe teachers are in the teacher contract but they have some language related to this grievance that is very specific only to them okay and it revolves around when classes are canceled that they cannot be reduced more than twenty percent um compensation for their for uh let's see it i'll read it a teacher shall not see their compensation reduced by more than 20 percent as a result of cancellations excuse me so uh from the district's perspective um as i as i looked at all

016this information um the district's perspective is that that is based upon the yearly fte that's the guaranteed fte for the year okay so this is about a calculation right um and the plsca's perspective is it's about no more than 20 percent of only the canceled classes so that there's a difference there and that's the nature of where this all started so related to process um in the plsca bargaining a contract the first place we take concerns related to the contract is lines of communication committee and so we met and we talked and no resolution was had there so you move on to the next step and step one once the grievance is filed is to go to the building level so since in this case we looked at all the factors and we're not talking

017about the building principle per se we just requested just go right to step two which is myself okay so and they agreed with that so we went to step two we sat down and talked again and again my perspective was to look at all the information that i had look at whatever emails or programmatic information excuse me what's been done in the past had some conversation with folks and made a decision that based upon the evidence in front of me that i denied the grievance as well i might need some water this mask on for two hours sorry about that um and so i did the same i denied the grievance and then at that time then it comes before the board that's the next step and contract language says that a subcommittee of the

018board of at least two members then would hear the grievance from the plca and then at that point um i turned that over to lee and she took over from there so i just wanted to give you that up to this point right now thank you very much lee anything else you wanted me to yes i wanted to make sure you were dead um so i believe everyone received the letter from the plsea that they had filed the grievance and explained the grievance in them as jim explained with the non-scheduling of work hours and the difference in opinion on how the compensation would happen for cancelled classes um shortly after receiving the letter as i looked at the appointment of board members that would be dealing with this grievance it comes to the executive board

019group of the board to hear the grievance if you look at our committee structure so that meant myself stacy and jonathan plan to meet with them so we did is we met both with the plsea and administration was jim and terry and i think becca was there for one of the meetings we had two pretty lively meetings listen to both sides of the documentation that they presented those days and then they also went back and had more documentation that they sent to us by email which we reviewed jonathan stacy and myself had numerous meetings to discuss the evidence that was presented to us and in the end what we what we decided or realized is that um there was the evidence was there to support the district's position and there was no evidence to support

020the teacher's interpretation or the plsca's interpretation of the cancellations so with that with that decision made we have a recommendation coming for before the board tonight to deny the grievance we followed the guidelines of the grievance procedure and we have feel that we have done our due diligence through our many discussions we gave extra time to make sure that everybody had all of the information that they could possibly gather most of it based on emails some verbal communication and that's why we're here tonight so with that i would um like to take a motion to um approve the recommendation um of the board subcommittee to deny the plsea grievance domain by jonathan and then i'll open it up to the board for any discussion melissa thanks sleep um okay so first of all jim you

021talked about process um what i didn't hear was some of the background as to what exactly occurred uh in the in the process on april 6. um these employees were notified after work hours and is effective immediately for the next day walk us through why that decision was made and what we've done in the past um well the first thing i would say is we've done nothing like this in the past with a pandemic right so this um the one thing that we've been clear about is there's never been a time that i'm aware of that we've canceled classes in the middle of a class and cancelled all of them so um related to that there was no we've never done it before so this was this was new i'm sorry this just doesn't work

022um and again i think there's a lot of things here that we could discuss and talk about related to the process but where we're at now is in relation to the specific grievance there's a lot of things we have to talk about and discuss especially as we move forward there's still a lot of individual issues that we can look at and improve upon but in this case we're talking specifically about the grievance so i'm not sure what your question is but well it's my understanding that previously when we had situations like this outside of coved um that these folks were reassigned or shifted to other places to utilize their time sure that's that's mainly the bronx the crux of the of the grievance in part right um i think it's a related discussion uh i

023think what you're referring to is um when this language one of the con went into the contract in 2009 most of the time these people often they were not reassigned they just they lost some of those hours i think there was a shift when becca took over to try to find more value-added work for them to do if a class was canceled i don't think the process ever changed i think the amount of reassignment increased she's not here to talk to that but as i understand it that's um that's what happens that when we talk about making them whole she's trying to make up for the hours that they're missing and it says in the contract that you may assign additional classes it doesn't say you must and i think she tried to help them

024be as whole as they could based upon the funding that she had and that was possible most of the time okay but i don't think in in the things that i reviewed uh and the three that looked at this stuff i don't think i ever saw where we said we're changing the practice uh in in in practice or in policy uh to say that we are always going to because then i think you would have saw that in the contract but right now it's it talks about 20 percent as the maximum based on cancellation of classes okay well speaking of the budget so this was all because of you say about covid and the budget that the classes were eliminated correct well it was an issue well yeah i think the fund won i get

025that right four thank you one's a general right i know that um just to talk to that and you know terry was there too we sat down and we talked about uh what um what we could do and what we couldn't do and i think there was a consensus at the the decision makers at the table that this was the right call right now based upon the fact that um the fee based classes were not gaining fees okay can i yeah well whatever what i'm looking at is the budget the community had budget i i understand that let me explain something once here the grievance has to do with them getting um how they get paid the extra 20 or not extra but the 20 when a class is cancelled the issue is the plsca

026feels that they should have been paid per class and the district is saying their interpretation is that it was for the full full yearly full-time equivalent the yearly equivalent so that's the issue of the grievance right now any other discussion with what past practice has been or how things were handled are not part of this grievance and as i said um earlier those those items need to be dealt with um at either the loc loc yeah um or memorandum in the contract or further discussion after this grievance so i kind of want to stick to the the the subject of the actual grievance okay so the grievance you said it was because of covid this is the first time we've done this this is how it was handled and we didn't have classes so it

027was a budget issue correct i mean when we look at the budget on april 20th we showed in the community at budget we had seven hundred thousand and then now we have minus a hundred thousand i mean what happened to that money if if we're not paying them and i i can't i can't answer to that i'm i i don't have the answer to that i'm again that's all that's agreement right i think a lot of information my point is there seems to be a lot of information that a minority number of the board members have have seen i haven't seen everything right but that's the process that's the process that we have to go through again i haven't seen everything but the pro the board has the three no three people to the board

028and then nothing and the process that's laid out is that they represent the board and bring a recommendation to them i understand the process but i'm just saying that there are four members of the board that haven't seen everything so that's all i have okay any other questions i do um we were talking about 13 teachers right correct from the total amount was any effort made when the mass layoff occurred to single out those 13 teachers to understand that they were subject to this particular language and talk to them or try to work out something before this happened or before they were told i think there was a discussion about some trying to get some online learning going the week prior but once the decision was made i don't believe there was discussion about what

029could be done differently okay so basically there was there was no discussion with the coordinator to see if those particular 13 that were that were kind of a carve out from the community ed group because they were they were the only 13 as i understand it that were subject to these particular uh this particular contract language they're the only ones that yes that's correct they're the only ones with this contract teachers that are in the teacher's country right that's what i meant that's correct handled the community ad when we kind of abruptly sent them a message after 5 pm after one full day work i believe on april 3 april 6 there wasn't an effort to say okay these 13 teachers were then a car voucher a separate group within that larger group that that

030were subject to different requirements within the contract there wasn't that thought ahead before they were uh before they were uh their classes were canceled and they were terminated that's what i'm getting at i'm wondering if there was anything done in the conversations with the what is it the plsca is it it was what you consider a bargaining unit i think is what it's called or the group itself to actually um understand how they were subject to this contract whereas the rest of them were not those 13 were our teachers so they are under the teachers bargaining unit contract that's why we're talking about 13. the other community ed employees are not part of that contract right were they treated differently when the email went out on monday night because they were part of a different

031bargaining unit and therefore their terms of employment were different than than the general populace that were also laid off with them my understanding is that community ed is fee-based and it was getting to the point where we couldn't afford to keep paying people without any kind of income coming in and fee base so it was coming out of our general fund okay well that you're going off topic obviously well you're off topic right now because we're talking about agreements we're not talking about how they were laid off or who was laid off this is about how they get compensated well their contract states how they're going to get compensated and front of my understanding is they're the only 13 of everyone that was laid off that would have been subject to this particular contract that's

032because they're part of the teacher's contract that's a fact so when the mass layoff occurred was that taken into consideration i'm not talking about whether we had funding or anything like that i'm just saying that you know because they were subject to a separate contract versus a lot most of the others i think all of the others were part of an hourly rate that were not based on this contract or any other contract therefore were they treated differently or was that even a consideration before they were laid off i don't know i'm not sure what you mean by treated differently they're treated under the contract that they work under and the and they're different they work under different scenarios one is under a teacher's contract the other is not well that's what i'm saying was

033that considered before the layoff notice occurred were they given a separate message were they given a separate email than everybody else to con i guess i can't answer that i don't know that well i can talk to that um it wasn't there were like four different groups involved in this right so you had some people that are part of the msca bargaining unit you had some folks that are terms and conditions of community ed you had some that were the secretarial bargaining unit and you had some in the teacher bargaining unit and we looked at all of those individually now if they they probably got very similar and i can't remember now it was exactly the same but that was all generated based upon from hr based upon a spreadsheet and the bargaining unit they

034were in and did a i can't really name a term right now but it's kind of like mail merge right but in google and and in order that we didn't miss anybody and we had all names accounted for and everything was right it was generated out of there so everybody once we we sort of uh did all the communication and we said okay it's time to go then my office generated those letters electronically so that they went out but yes we looked at all four bargaining excuse me bargaining units or groups of people differently to make sure that we took in account all the contract language lori i can't see people i'm blind as a bat so if i'm looking any other questions or comments michael um if i'm understanding correctly too the way this

035language is interpreted will also be a precedent center going forward in terms of how we might consider how you would consider scheduling classes for early childhood for example if depending which way you interpret that language it's going to kind of constrain how much they're willing to schedule if they're still going to have to pay 80 of that salary if a class doesn't fill so that looking backwards we also have to look forward to how that how that wording works am i interpreting that correctly that that would have an impact if we looked at it per class instead of per full year on what we're able to offer we'd have to be more conservative is that correct do you know what i'm saying a question with regards to that if i may okay how did other

036school districts handle this is fairly common language from what i understand actually it's not it's not as common as you might think there's some comparisons of other districts and some of them have no compensation when a class is cancelled so it really varies it's not real consistent on that if you're talking about what we should be talking about with the grievance and that is how they handled layoffs with early childhood i'm not that familiar with but there is contract language in a number of districts that say classes cancel that's it there's no other compensation so we're offering we're settled or whatever the word is i'm losing i don't know what i want here but they get 80 of that class of the yearly total in the class cancellations yeah this doesn't say anything with regards

037to per class either i don't think that's a i don't think that was part of the language dispute but um yeah there there are other school districts um and and i don't think this just applies to early childhood because this is just the teacher subject to this particular contract that we're in early childhood right it's only the early childhood teacher yes no but i meant this this particular grievance only has to do with early childhood right pursuant to what michael said this could set a precedent for any teacher part of this particular overriding teacher contract this wasn't one no no no no no i don't believe that's what no i was talking about early childhood scheduling and offerings so this is the general teacher contract i'm sure yes it the teachers contract and early childhood

038a number of years ago um became part of the teacher's contract they have a section um whatever one it is deals with early childhood teachers specifically early childhood teachers it does not deal with other teachers in the district this is language that does apply to the overall teacher no right it does not it applies to the early childhood teachers yeah the article is just for early childhood i just i read over the whole contract multiple times and i i just remember language like this and other areas and i understand the the community ed the funds and all this kind of stuff but again whether the classes were funded or not is not a consideration within this that it is it is the basically the 80 20 that they have to be and a teacher should

039not see their compensation reduced for more than 20 as a result of cancellations and that's for early childhood teachers this is an unprecedented time um and they don't seem to be carved out again um to have any conversation with them to let them understand the situation so that work assignments if any existed or not or any communication with the community or anything else whether there would have been funding so it's uh again without you know and for what melissa said without seeing the the evidence that was presented and not really understanding how the evidence would apply anyways just because this is an unprecedented event um the language in the contract seems pretty clear it clean there isn't a lot of wiggle room here mary it's what seemed what portion of the language in the contract

040are you saying seems clear and and and what is your what are you reading when a cl i'm reading the contract when class cancellations make it impossible for a teacher to work they allowed a contracted time the coordinator may assign additional classes and work assignments after consultation with the teacher if the consultation didn't occur and then it which it didn't seem like it did a teacher shall not see their compensation reduced by more than 20 percent as a result of class of results of cancellations that's it a teacher shall not see their compensation reduced so when i see that there's two words there's after consultation with the teacher and then the teacher shall not see their compensation reduced by more than 20 as a result of cancellations that seems pretty direct and so my first

041question was was did the consultation or did those 13 teachers that were subject to this provision get carved out for that consultation was there any evidence to show that that actually happened because i didn't get a chance to see the evidence and then it doesn't say percentage of classes it just say compensation reduced by more than 20 percent so if their net was reduced by more than 20 percent for their allocated contract time that's the number that i don't even have in front of me i mean i haven't been given anything other than the grievance and the fact that um and the fact that the executive committee said that it didn't back it up but did the consultation with the teacher happen before it was again that's not part of the grievance the grievance is

042how they're they're compensated due to class cancellation and i'm i'm gonna enrique's waving like crazy here so i want to get his um thank you i know i actually just wanted to add on that and say that there's one additional word in there that is overweight and that's the word may that's permissive it's not required it's not mandatory it's optional so the coordinator may do this but they're not required to do this before moving forward with cancellation i think that's one of the sticking points that is creating some additional concentration and mary i would just say that i think you hit the last part right on the head when you talked about the 20 number because that's the nature that is the specific nature of the grievance and that is is it 20 of their

043total fte for the year or is it 20 of only the classes that are canceled that's the interpretation difference right there right and that's the that's the that's the language dispute right there that's it and i'm stuck on that too i i but again i i you know it's uh it's um um and i i do understand i mean through the whole process we had concerns the whole time of being able to talk to the rest of the board and having them kept updated um just within league you know asking the questions to the district attorney you know we would be in in meeting violation open meeting law violation if we would have done that so you know we kept trying to figure out a way to do that there wasn't a way to do

044that there wasn't a way to have a closed session we asked that question so i i do feel the pain of the other board members because i understand what what you're saying but we also tried um and without breaking rules and breaking laws we couldn't do that so i think the the main part of the conversation of what we had with trying to get information from both parties was showing us some type of evidence of how your of how the fde was calculated and anything that we saw as in form of emails or calculations was always yearly that was always a yearly calculation so and anything we asked in the contract itself was there any point in in the teacher contract as a whole where we ever talked about compensation not being yearly and that

045was never it was always yearly compensation so from what we could tell and what we gathered as evidence everything we saw was a yearly the interpretation was yearly that's basically i mean we tried i mean i do i do i do feel for the other board members because there was nothing we could do i think we all agree with that it's frustrating but we had to follow a process and that's the process that we were given melissa um from what i understand there seems to be a question about some documents um and the plsea leadership team sites um that the gym had indicated there multiple times when the district had reduced yearly saturday salary by 20 but when asked to provide the payroll he could not so can you tell us more about that um

046i don't think yeah it's not that i couldn't i was continuing to review documentation and having discussions with folks but this is a language dispute and in a language dispute i mean i i began to gather evidence and i continued there were thousands of emails that i went through but in a language dispute the burden of proof is on the grievant and i was waiting for some proof issue with one thing because i did ask for an update during the data retreat and was there wasn't one to give and that was before the last meeting so i i wish we could have gotten an update or at least we couldn't talk about it you weren't allowed to talk about anybody else yeah no that would have been more than no we couldn't have done that

047we were at the data retreat we were there all together but um we were in the middle of an ongoing discussion with uh in the middle of it i mean you know well i i gotta admit that the without seeing the payroll numbers and and all that kind of stuff um this language is pretty stark and we don't have a precedented event so i'm it's it's and again not seeing any of the evidence um and and and i do understand that the the notice came out fairly rapid um and you know did not go over very well obviously with also parents and everything else i just um i i actually have some doubts as to whether it was actually thought about that these 13 teachers would have been or should have been treated differently or

048should have been considered differently and if any calculation had been had occurred ahead of time to make sure that whether it's annual or per class and there's nothing really here that says either way but um that that they that you weren't dropping below that 80 percent so i and that's that's i you know however it happened or whatever happened or whatever it's it's done in past but that's one of the the biggest concerns that i have here is is uh is you know is this is this kind of an afterthought and and you know and maybe we should look at this a little bit more i don't know what the what the rules are i think liu said that you have to vote on it now that the executive committee came to it but i'm

049not convinced of i'm not convinced of either side right now and i and i and i understand that we could be going into some very tumultuous times coming up where we could see this again and if the language is still out there you know is there a way to come to a better resolution rather than just denying the grievance outright well i would hope that there will be a better resolution when they come into negotiations to clarify that language going forward um and and know that the teachers receive their 80 percent i don't think any teacher went below the 80 percent i mean you i wasn't sure what you meant by that but they never their grievance isn't that they got less than 80 percent they got their 80 percent it's how the compensation was

050based on for the canceled classes in their full-time equivalent with the 20 and that's confusing to me too um how they got their 80 percent with classes being cancelled and then being immediately laid off as of april 6th you know the the what was the 80 percent based upon what was the payroll based upon et cetera i haven't seen any of those numbers and and i and we're not hearing from their side here either and so that's i mean we're everything here is one-sided that's another thing i mean i don't know if i'm even getting the full picture it's it's kind it's really confusing in the in the emergency the emergency need for an all of a sudden vote is also very confusing with so little time to kind of discuss this that's also a

051little part of the process we are required to bring it to the next board it's not us saying they're just happy we're just happy that the next morning was until the 13th which gave us more time right i mean we got the email on friday afternoon for our evening and that was after we heard we waited to get as much information as we possibly could from the administration and from the teachers before plsca before we made any decision and i apologize that it was friday but that was how much time it took to get all the information that they needed and to get back to us i had asked for it the week before and they felt that they would not be able to do that the plsc8 because they weren't hadn't they hadn't received

052all the information or had they had a chance to go through all of it what do you mean they hadn't received it they had asked for some information i think for some emails and things did a data request and so we got on the information the district now well we whatever got them the information back from the data request and how much time did it take between the data requests from them and the decision by the executive committee wait so they were waiting on a data request yes okay and when did that come in um i don't know when did they come in yeah when did they teach when did they is when we were done with it they might have picked it up on tuesday okay tuesday or wednesday actually i think you told

053them on tuesday that was available okay yep that's probably right that there was information that was shared with them before that weeks prior it's just that part of that data request was all information from 2009 to 2020 right and so i think the first flush of emails that rush did for me was like 30 000 emails that had the query names and so on the search criteria yeah yeah and and you're right there we did get information before that we had two meetings before that with both groups so i mean we did have some information we were waiting for the very last whatever they had is the process normally that the opposing group does not present here also we only hear from one side well i don't know i asked jim to present the process

054leading up to this so that we'd all have a better understanding of what the district did this isn't really a presentation by the district he's helping fill in some holes for things that you guys are asking about but we it's about the board we were in the middle basically the board's in the middle now it's like this side and this side and we're in the middle listening so jim's not presenting his evidence no tonight jim's not making his i'm trying to provide context of what happened and then related to the contract where according to the the the plsca contract the board is a representative group of at least two that hears the grievance once they hear the grievance and then they come back to the next board meeting this meeting and provide their findings and

055recommendations so that's my responsibility as a hr person make sure that process is followed jonathan lee i if um if everybody humored me a little bit this might this might get a little long but i just i kind of want to review how this process worked from my perspective at the front end of this i like all of us i think had a lot of empathy for everybody not just these 13 teachers but everybody that the district had to had to lay off or whatever it was non-scheduled work hours whatever it was a difficult situation as a human being you know my first inclination is to support people when they have a concern something like this i tried to approach this as a board member and say what's my job and and so step one

056for me was define the issue and defining the issue of the grievance was about the definition of the word compensation in the contract and ultimately it is that the union the bargaining units definition is they would their understanding is that in the statement a teacher shall not see compensation reduced by more than 20 as a result of cancellations they would say that means from the day the cancellations happen going forward which would have meant we would have continued to pay those folks of their compensation through the balance of the year that is their position i don't think that's been clearly stated out here tonight the district's position is that in the contract throughout the contract and whenever compensation is discussed compensation is being talked about as an annual figure and so when the statement is

057made shall not see a reduction of more than 20 percent shall not see compensation reduced by more than 20 percent as a result of cancellation the district's position is that it is not more than 20 of your annual compensation which some of those folks had been pretty close to reaching which is why they didn't get paid a whole lot for the balance of the year so step one for me was define the issue and the def for me the issue was compensation how do we define it the second one was what's my role okay what was our role the three of us and we were essentially jurors i mean we were hearing both sides and needed to come to a conclusion as to what was correct and it's important as jim mentioned this once it

058is important to understand in a labor grievance like this it is a language interpretation question and in that situation and the the union the plsea folks agreed with this that the burden of proof does fall on the grievance so they needed i s i very clearly said to them in one of our meetings all i need to find in your favor is i need somewhere that you can show me that compensation means something other than annual if if there had been an email if there had been a document in which compensation was referred to any other way they would have had a chance for me to find in their favor so from a process standpoint we've heard about that we had several meetings we've reviewed lots of documents to me the basis of this decision

059is did the union meet the burden of proof and for me the burden of proof wasn't really high i wasn't looking for you know a criminal beyond a reasonable doubt i wasn't even looking really for a civil preponderance of the evidence i was looking for can you show me an example where that's how compensation was employed and i didn't see it i did on the other hand i did see examples produced from the district of situations where there was a teacher one of those teachers i think it was in 2016. i might be wrong about that that we saw that there were class cancellations and there was a very specific note that at this time there wasn't other work to be assigned it had been past practice that we would try to keep them i

060would say as a courtesy that's the reason the word may is in there and i think becca did an amazing job of keeping those folks busy and giving them work and and helping them to get their hours if glance classes got cancelled this was just different and so my conclusion was just very simply i have great empathy for the situation and it was difficult and it was messy and it wasn't perfect but for me this grievance as a board member detaching the emotion from a rational argument did we do i see evidence that supports the contract requires us to pay them for the balance of the year and i don't and quite frankly i want to see it because as a human as a as a person i wish we could i'd like to my

061job as a board member is to be detached and right and and look at this fact based and so that's what i see and i think that's um what all three of us saw it was a hard position to be in jonathan first of all anytime you have an agreements or an appeal uh the burden of proof is always on the plaintiff that's that's that's common sense whether it's an insurance grievance or an or a an employment grievance so that's that's fine it doesn't need to be uh detailed there that's normal however the con the the the it does say the coordinator may assign additional classes may but what doesn't say me is after consultation with the teacher nobody denies this was a whatever but if you look at the actual words and what you

062actually said in your defense of of of the of the evidence that you saw is there was a conversation or a consultation with the teacher or teachers involved and again i haven't seen the compensation i haven't seen any of the numbers i don't know what that is but if if i'm sitting here if if this goes to quite frankly if it goes to the next step that after consultation with the teacher is going to hold a lot of water and that's what i'm trying to get at is was there a conversation and and if any of the evidence that was produced didn't include a member of plsea when they were talking about the definition then usually that type of evidence would not be included because that would not include all parties so you can't i

063can't have a conversation with you about this about a for instance about the definition of this but not include the teacher not include a member of the bargaining unit in order to have that definition hold water as as far as being a precedent definition so my concern is after consultation with the teacher which is why i'm wondering what type of conversations occurred with these 13 teachers prior to that email that went out on april 6th because that doesn't have may before it the coordinator may assign after consultation with the teacher and that is i understand what you're saying and that that probably needs to be worked out most likely needs to be worked out to make sure that that happens if it did happen great if it didn't we need to make sure it happens

064because it's stated that way that's not what this grievance is about that would be a different grievance is about how we interpret the language on the 80 20. at no point it qualifies the definition here of when that actually comes into play also which is why the whole paragraph is included if i if i could respond two meetings four and five i think members of the bargaining unit present over the course of i don't know total of about three hours um each and a lot of emails and i don't believe unless i missed it i don't believe they ever brought up a concern about a consultation they never brought up this concern about automatic calculation and funds being available not being available they talked about funds being available or not being available yes that was

065discussed right but i don't i don't recall never talked about alternatives to the automatic layoff that being considered as part of the consultation there was as as if i looked at if i look at contractual language and i think about the the grievance itself and the conversations with the teachers at no point did i feel anybody expressed that part of their grievance was a lack of a consultation i did did anybody no no but what the agreement what i would say is that they had concerns that did not involve the grievance and those concerns need to be addressed but not with this grievance the grievance is specifically about paying people and how they get paid so i agree again it was a difficult circumstance things had to happen boom boom boom and were they perfect

066probably not um i again for me i wanted to find it's not a minimum it's a matter of what we're setting ourselves up for next steps it's also a matter of creating some sort of a of a of a settlement or something to come to an amicable solution agreed uh rather than an all-out denial because there's i can't see where any party is 100 right or wrong on this that's the problem and without that consultation or at least advisory or something in there which is normally done then this is not a cut and dried just boom deny it and that's and i haven't seen any other alternatives presented either in this mary neither have we all of each of us said i wish we had a third door we don't at this point we have

067to make a decision on the grievance after that there can be discussion there can be discussion about the issues that were part of the grievance and try to reach some sort of an agreement but door number three isn't isn't available to us unfortunately you're referring to can be addressed this isn't a negotiation separate from this grievance it's not part of the grievance and and i believe it will be and as i said it can be through the lines of communication there can be a memorandum that's all more negotiation type things we are not the negotiators here we are our task was to determine the grievance on the on how they were compensated and i get that um but we are the board and and there was communications and i'm still i'm still stuck on the

068exact language because if if this if i'm sitting here as a totally unbiased person i look at the exact language i'm going to just ask for the compensation dollars and proof of consultation based upon the exact language in article 10 section 3 sub sub section 6. that's what i'm going to look at and that's where i am totally at a loss uh with with with the data and with the proof and and i have sat through grievance and arbitrations and all that kind of stuff in a legal setting with the judge thankfully not with me on one party but me as an expert coming in with the data so that's where i look at this it's very to me it's very fact based and that's where i'm struggling here also quite frankly the entire contract

069in the language that i read is um it's not what i'm typical it's not what i'm used to seeing of an attorney-created contract either it's it's kind of all over the board so a little bit more difficult to to get into this um but uh yeah i'm just i'm still on the fence especially not seeing the the evidence i'm still on the fence well due to the process i guess we're asking with constraints we have that you would trust the board members that were assigned to do this ask um and i don't know if anyone else has any other comments i believe that the other issues the way things are handled or whatever if we have to do something in the future that that will be discussed between the administration and the plsea and have

070that resolution of those things but tonight it's about a grievance on how the ecfe teachers are compensated due to the class cancellations and as jonathan said we saw support for the annual compensation we did not see support for the per class con compensation so um does anyone have any other last comments oh my god i would just reiterate what you said and that is you had a very specific grievance in front of you that's what we asked you to spend the time researching and although like i'm on the early childhood committee i work with becca i know those teachers i go to their family nights i feel for them and there's a lot we have to address but we ask you were serving the role of the representatives of the board to look at one

071specific question it wasn't you against the teachers you were the jurors you weighed the evidence and you didn't get the evidence you needed for the grievance to make the case yes we need to look at wording what you know what does it mean to have a discussion or or whatever with those people in the contract i think becca goes to extraordinary lengths to put people into positions in normal circumstances and put them to work and find creative ways for them to be involved in curriculum or scheduling or planning out when there's a you know that opportunity but everything stopped and the main question is do they get paid 80 of their yearly salary or 80 of every class even if it's cancelled is that correct like do we look at compensation as a year or

072as a class period they will get their eighty percent they will get their eighty percent of the year so we don't even yep yeah they did i'm sorry not will um i honor the emotion and the the extra issues we have to talk about and the personal connection to these teachers and relationships matter and i feel like you did the job we asked you to do by your role to do all spend all of those hours listening and researching and legally do it so you could report back to us and make a recommendation now it's up to us to vote i have a motion and a second pardon me i don't know if this has to be roll call we can do roll call it doesn't matter okay all those in favor say aye aye

073opposed nay that motion carries what was he thinking did you say enriquez enrique would you say hi that motion carries five two thank you um we have no unfinished business this evening so we'll move into new business with a construction update good evening dr stella and trishimek members of the board um going to do a facilities construction update well we presented this at our facilities committee um a couple of weeks ago things change at a rapid pace especially at the stage our construction projects are at right now so this material is a little dated i'll just verbally update this presentation so we'll start with five hawks which is a at the tail end of its um updates which is a set of lower level windows which will bring um direct lighting into our lower level

074kindergarten classrooms those were remodeled a couple of years ago at the beginning of our project our bond projects and these windows have now been installed the photos only show the openings and re-breaking of the openings once they were cut and waiting for the windows this last photo but they are currently installed we had to move the lockers in the lower level to install them those are being reinstalled and then the area will be cleaned and ready to roll it's amazing how much more light it brings into that lower level this is a great addition to this space i'm moving on to the lola delago at greenwood photos of the demolition i know we did a board tour some of you got to see this first hand it is really amazing to see the insides of

075these spaces just concrete floors completely dug up and new mechanical rough-ins in in the kitchen and the restroom areas in the ceilings also really amazing to see the beams the wood ceilings and the wood posts and beams that support this structure so aptly named greenwood and very fun to find some old relics in there as well so this fold in particular i love of the chimney which is such a landmark for many many years coming down i was took some photos before and after it's quite a drastic change to the site but it was an amazing process to watch it come down in this photo you're looking at right now you can see the dumpster in this photo is now a new wall of the new addition so this area has been completely changed from

076this photo it's just a picture of some of the protection of the roof as the chimney came down these photos show you the removal of our last steam boiler in the district so that we are all hot water systems which is just a great update but kind of sad to see those old beautiful pieces of equipment um gone demolition of the space is shown right here for our new addition which is going to be that a new serving area and expansion of the cafeteria and kitchen moving on to to pulling out the old fuel tanks so that fuel tank was sitting right in the space where the new addition is going with the change over to our new boilers um and um we are are no longer doing dual fuel there that was uh center

077point granted us permission to go to single fuel source which is just firm gas and so we are no longer doing both fuel oil and gas but only gas at this site so we pulled the fuel tank and are able to use that space for our audition here's a show a photo that shows some of those beams and in that space just amazing it was and it's really changed drastically since then um part of the the project that this shows are the old lockers so the original lockers that were in these spaces were the because it was a high school were very tall and very narrow and not appropriate for um grade school so what we're doing in conjunction with a locker project at the high school is pulling out some of the lockers at

078the high school repurposing them here at grainwood so the picture on the right shows the lockers were pulling from the high school and the picture on the left shows the space where we pulled those old lockers out and the next picture shows you one of the little treasures we found in the wall which is a um a ticket to the prior lake junior high high school band and cor chorus concert on thursday may 8th 1975 tickets a dollar so this is very fun to find in there so um this is the walls of that edition going on going up for the serving area and cafeteria and then we're on to hamilton ridge um which is uh just flying along um we the photos that were at the beginning of this slideshow that you saw were

079some of the tours that we did with the staff it was the last day i believe it was june 3rd that staff were on site and um so all the staff members came through in groups of 10 and toured their new building which was very fun to do it was five hours of tours um with a total in group but it was very fun to go through particularly fun was our kids company coordinator at that site showing being very excited about her new office space and her storage space and vicki sanchez who is the new lead custodian at that site just very excited about the new building so those were two highlights for me on that tour as you can see the pictures of the exterior just beautiful brick work the um the site is

080work has come a long way since these photos um the front of the building is now done so the if you drive up you can see the the parent drop off loop in the front entrance all of that is great is to grade all of the blacktop is in so it's really looking ready to go so coming right along the last photo here is of the road 157th is that yes 156th street excuse me um on the back on the north side of the building so that was part of the project that the school had to do and as i like to say we had to build it we don't have to plow it so this will be for the city to block that fire lake high school field house kitchen commons and tower d

081so this is the the last phases of the project um first pictures of the field house which is just just a beautiful space it's going to be such a great facility it is done um and you can see there's some things staged in it in this photo but um we are ready to roll that facility with a couple of mechanical pieces to wrap up um in some of the lower level areas but the equipment is installed the floor is done and now it's just a really amazing space these are some photos of the restroom the weight room we are our students are just so lucky to have this facility to use the next photo shows the back side of the building back of house the it's as you can see in this photo where the

082generator was moved to which is right by the boiler room and the new receiving area that is being built so this is one of the last phases of the we have that you can see the tower in the background that is the very last phase to be for completion and i believe that is um november um i'd have checked that date for sure but the um the receiving area is september so we are moving along with that area just an interesting detail from looking on the roof down to some of the deck you can see the new building being tied into the old building here the the amount of coordination and oversight that the h u contractors has had on this project is just really pretty stunning um when you look at what they've had

083to do they're adding 143 000 some square feet in all on all the whole perimeter of the building it's an amazing feat and i um they should be really proud of their job what they're doing and we're very lucky to have them as a contractor on this project they're doing a great job this is the picture of the front of the um the new serving area it looks very different from now but one of the really interesting things to me in this photo is if you take a look at that horizontal beam you can just see the size of it to support that cast ceiling above it above that whole serving areas it was quite an engineering feat to get it in there and the next photo shows the kitchen which is the floor completely

084dug up and the following photo shows all of the mechanical rough rough-ins um installed in the kitchen that floor was poured this week so we um our kitchen is is well on the way so that's this is a really big milestone for us in this space uh next photo are both from looking um if you're standing in front of the kitchen looking to your left you will see the wall where the that will that wall will eventually be opened up into the new common space and looking to the right you can look into the existing common space where you see the learning stairs and with just the the corner of the new serving area right there um a little close-up of the learning stairs those are being finished they're doing one more grinding on that

085before they install the surfaces on the finished surfaces on those site work is getting done i just love this photo with the new sod being laid on the bus loop new sidewalks in just you know it's really coming together finished look there moving to twin oaks upper level classroom edition just a really old photo on the right where you can see with that the existing building with the tie-in of the beams tying the new block work to the existing roof and then there's the new roof decking on again a complex project with some real significant challenges but just kind of those detailed photos showing you some of the challenges that are involved in tying those old buildings to the new floor being poured in there again this space looks very different all the windows are

086in the brickwork is done you know finishes are going in and again i think we toured many of these spaces beautiful brickwork on this building it's just a really stunning addition some details of the brickwork on there that was a quick tour but questions yes and it's changed a lot from these photos as it does every day at this stage with these projects so any questions about that not a question but we were lucky enough to get a tour of most of what you showed us and um it's changed a lot i'm sure so it was exciting to see and um almost overwhelming it was it was so cool how much has been done or some of the changes there's a lot going on in high school yeah right i think that's one of the

087things for every single yeah hundred and some at hamilton hundreds some at the high school all right good thank you very much thank you okay we'll move on to long-term facility maintenance approval good evening chair simek dr sallo members of the board can i get it um so tonight i am looking for approval for the 10-year updated ltfm plan this is an annual update that requires board approval i went over some of the major changes with the fleur committee we are under construction we always plan on leveraging ltfm for um some of the construction projects um and um julie the dollars work out right so there are some changes to the plan but it fits within our budget does anybody have any questions stacy um i just see some over budgeting on the first what

08821 22 and 23. um on page four um is that the uh the financial sheet on there yeah yep so julie can you help explain that so this is a very good good evening again this is a very fluid document as we've been working through our construction process this sometimes um things are we are not able to do them in the in the time that we think that we are able to and this is what's happened and so we have some carryover and as you well are probably well aware when you look at our budget we have long-term facility maintenance we have a fund balance in there and so we're doing is we're reallocating that fund balance to be spent in that year so we'll be spending some of those monies down in our fund

089balance for long for simply for long-term facility maintenance so we are looking it does look as if we're overspending but it's just because some of those projects have been delayed we need to show them on this report this way thank you are there any other questions yeah before julie goes away what did you mean could you just elaborate on your comments because some of these projects were delayed just so i understand how to put that in context well when we we don't exactly know when they fit perfectly into our construction so that's kind of what happens okay i didn't know if you meant they were delayed already from okay good any other questions okay this did come before flirp um do i have a motion to approve the long-term facility maintenance schedule homemade jonathan second

090second by mary any comments or questions okay all those in favor say aye all right that motion carries 7-0 thank you thank you um next we have childhood our child nutrition update and overview with emily malone dr sallo board shimmick uh board chair shimak and board members how are you um so i wanted to start my presentation with a really incredible number we served 370 702 meals during the covid shutdown we had to reinvent the way that we do that and i just want to in this board presentation kind of explain how we did that because it was a pretty incredible feat and i am extremely proud of my team and the operations team and teachers and kids co relationships really do matter and that's how we got this done the next two slides are

091just pictures of the way that we reinvented school food service for this period of time we had assembly lines basically at our schools and had to come up with a bunch of tables and do social distancing and wear masks and it was just it was an incredibly big challenge but all of our teams came together and overcame it and that it was just really neat um this picture on the top left is how we did senior refunds these are just a couple of the lunch rooms where we're doing our assembly lines again more assembly line pictures uh the bottom left there is bus pickup um the top left there is we put food safety sheets in every single one of our meal packages along with reheating instructions because we figured that students may be reheating

092meals at home alone maybe so i wanted to make sure that they were eating good hot food the way that i want to explain it is basically in a timeline because really everything changed hour by hour at that in that beginning period of time and we changed our food service three different times so march 16th to 18th is when we knew we were not going to school anymore kids were not going to be in in schools anymore so i met with the child nutrition staff we established a chain of command i really relied on that training that we did for the um the crisis management management training that we had started a year prior we decided that we wanted to distribute the perishable foods that we had in each of our kitchens and because parents

093were coming to schools on march 18th i believe it was we repackaged those perishable foods into family size packages and delivered those when parents came to pick up ipads and student materials we split into two teams at this point and decided that one team would be working for one week and one team would be at home for a week so that we wouldn't be cross-contaminating at all myself and then jamie anderson the assistant director split into each team two different teams as well so we didn't have any contact after march 16th we met with the bus company during that first week we established a bus route with 15 stops and we focused on the lower income areas starting on march 30th we began curbside and bus delivery from westwood we added three bus stops right

094away that first week because of community members calling us and asking for that at that point we were still really in limbo from the usda hearing from the usda minnesota department of ed and whether or not we're gonna have these regulatory waivers and actually be able to serve food um so it was a really sticky time at that point um as it was for everybody i know at that point we were averaging about 1100 meals and then within a week right around april 8th we realized that because our meals went up a ton i'm not going to do math on the fly and pretend like i can um anyways we were averaging like 6 500 meals a week later so decided that we would open two kitchens and now nobody was nobody ended up being

095home because of the way that the timing worked so um the one team was at westwood we opened up the twin oaks kitchen and had the other team there we did the bus deliveries there and the curbside pickup at westwood so that we didn't have so much traffic crossing um so during that first week in april we opened the second kitchen we established a covid food safety point person and then a backup point person at each at each team and came up with standard operating procedures for covered food safety which was cleaning and sanitation um you know what to do if somebody got sick what to do if you were exposed to somebody who got sick what to do if you're traveling um based on all the cdc and minnesota department of health uh recommendations

096um then uh we made screening of all staff every day and masks mandatory as well so we had we started with a check-in every day that april 8th um and again we were averaging about 6 500 meals per day in that first week of april um then the second week of april we decided that we actually had to split into three teams so we again when we were splitting into these teams too we were considering even things like if we had neighbors that were near each other or kids that were in the same classes or something because we didn't want to cross-contaminate so it was pretty tricky but but we figured it out we opened up the hidden oaks middle school kitchen as a production kitchen another part of the reason why we did it

097is because we were serving a bunch of meals and we needed more more space to produce them but the other thing that it allowed us to do was to use the food that we had in house a lot of manufacturers were like hey we've got this great new packaged ham sandwich and a turkey sandwich they were coming up with all these new products that were pre-packaged and easy but that's not who we are you know we don't like to serve that kind of food so we um we really wanted to continue with um what our values are and what we want kids to be eating so um and the other thing is we we have you know commodities coming in house whether or not we want them or not we order those 15 to 18

098months prior to when they're being delivered so they were coming no matter what and they're expensive to store and so um opening up that third kitchen allowed us to start making some of our homemade meals we served our homemade meat sauces and our homemade chicken alfredo and um we were able to do brown taco meat and make taco salads and just kind of showcase and show parents some of the things that their kids eat every day it was a it was kind of a dual thing because we were able to get our school lunch right into a right in front of parents so that they could see what their kids were eating every day and by then we were serving like 8 500 meals per day so and that's kind of where we i guess

0998 900 was where we topped out but we we were in a pretty good groove by this point so then we had um by the end of april all through may uh we were in a really good groove like i said and we were able to um kind of breathe a lot of the regulatory waivers had been put in place now and we knew that they were going to go through the end of they were going to go in through june 10th once i had my april or my march claim in i knew that we were going to be okay you know one of the things on top of all the other things that i was not sleeping for during the beginning of covid was about our budget you know i just didn't know how

100we were gonna do this if these regulatory waivers didn't go through so they went through and that was um like i said a budget breather for us um and we ended the year strong and on the next couple slides i'll kind of show you a little bit more about the budget but um right now of course we're into our fall planning time we're thinking about those three scenarios of course we're waiting for regulatory waivers when i submitted this we didn't have any yet we currently just last week usda extended the regulatory waivers for the school breakfast program and the national school lunch program through august 31st of 2021 doesn't exactly help us because the way that we served meals was the summer food service program and summer food service program allows you to bundle meals

101together it allows you to serve meals to anybody no matter what their qualifications are you don't need to identify anybody it's just a tally so it was a very easy way to serve meals to kids that were distance learning um the national school lunch program is a little trickier with the meal pattern and it's a little trickier with um you know paid students have to pay and you know reduced kids have to get to eat for free so um so that's a little tricky it doesn't mean that they're not going to extend that summer food service program um and that we won't be able to do that in the in the fall but for now we just are sitting and waiting and hoping that we're able to do that um we we put out our

102milk bid last year and added into the contract that we would be able to renew it for two years so we're just renewing our milk contract and then our bread bid we decided we will not be going out to bid because it's expensive and time consuming to go out to bid and then we haven't gotten a bid for four years so um we use the one and only bread company right now and they're not raising our prices so we're going with them again we don't really have a choice but um all right so i mentioned a little bit you know national school lunch program national school breakfast program opposes summer food service program this is just a real quick comparison during the national school lunch program which is our normal way that we serve meals

103our breakfast participation is about 12 percent our lunch participation is about 64 and then it shows you what the reimbursement per meal is during covid when we ran the summer food service program our average meal participation was 56 for both because they were bundled meal they were served breakfast and lunch at the same time and then the reimbursement and it was all free for the students and so the real and the reimbursement is much higher um so even seeing this i still was not sleeping at night because i wasn't sure and then when i was able to put this together unfortunately i flip-flopped these numbers so my spectacular end screwed up because they're supposed to be flip-flop so the average sale pre-covered is supposed to be 290 000. postcode it was 401 000. so we

104did fine did great um anyways let's just kind of split listed up you know from the beginning of the school year um you know most of our funding or our revenue comes in from the national school lunch program or a la carte and so um then of course right in march is where we ended up having that weird month where we had national school lunch program summer food service program a little bit of a la carte and where we ended up and we had spring break in there you know there's spring break and breaks and stuff like that which is why there's a flux in some of those numbers but then april and may where we had those solid months with very few days off and those really high numbers of participation um we had

105great reimbursement so i did okay yay and kids ate and loved it so any questions does anyone have any questions stacy i just wanted to have a comment um i think just from the feedback i got from people um and i had people asking me like should we be doing this does this help the district yeah like yeah it does so i kept having that because i think you guys did a good job getting it out there just and um i just want to commend the staff and you guys um in administration just for doing a fabulous job i think it reminded kids of school and being able to see their buddies in line when they're picking things up and things like that i just heard a really lot of positive things from parents not

106having to have one more thing to worry about so it really filled i think a big need um at a time when families could really use it so thank you i think you did a great job thanks thanks any other comments johnson um your enthusiasm and your pride in your people shows and that was um just fun to see and my favorite part of your entire presentation was that's not us we wanted to stay true to our values i just think you're in a role that i don't think people expect someone to be driven by those sorts of things and i just think such an asset to us as a district so i appreciate that thank you i love my job i was actually going to say the exact same thing that jonathan talk about

107a mission-driven leader um you know what what you and your staff did was absolutely amazing and you know we've always said that we you and your staff on the entire department serve much more than food and you continued to serve love so thank you let me do it michael i would add pr to your title now too because i have to say with all the uncertainty and stress the the buzz among parents and on social media was so positive and the excitement of checking the menu every morning and getting you know we we check our kids and got in line yeah um and saw and people planned their day around this yeah they really hated when the meals stopped [Laughter] everybody i want to add very comments that i received was that just coming to

108the school to pick up the lunches kind of gave them the break from the social distancing allowed them to see the volunteers the teachers et cetera it uh and of course the food service people being so ecstatic to see the kids come in despite the stress and despite the numbers and stuff like that i think um i think it was just a really good um you know uh reacquaint just each reacquaintance each day with the school district with what they stand for and just socializing the the the comments and the conversations even in the transfer the meals to the cars was uh commented on quite a bit and people really enjoyed it yeah thank you it was fun we we really enjoyed being able to be curbside i i wasn't at westwood so i didn't

109get to do that jamie and i would kind of banter about that because i wanted to see the kids too but it was fun to see the bus drivers too so we we at one point we were cooking 35 000 pounds of ground beef at hidden oaks middle school and how many 55 gallon drums did we fill four four with fat it was just which you know it's 85 15 or 90 10 i mean it's not fatty meat but it's just when you have 35 000 pounds of it it's kind of insane and so it was a lot of meat it was like three days of meat terry the only other thing i'd like to add and i just you mentioned it earlier but um not only huge kudos to your staff but the collaboration

110with jim's jim and marine staff and the operations staff and our our transportation partners absolutely really amazing could not have done it without the entire team so so and i just want to also say one thing that i love about school lunch is that it supports farmers and local farmers and so by us still buying milk and still buying all this produce and still participating and feeding all of these kids we were definitely supporting agriculture too which was really important at this time so um that's my the other reason why i love school lunch i just want to echo what everyone else has said but um yeah you're what you did went far beyond what the basic serving lunch does so and i was i was amazed at how fast you could get it all

111coordinated with everybody with busing and everywhere else and get everyone going so it was amazing it's a great thing relationships matter that's for sure so thank you thank you thank you um next on our agenda is the fall planning update awesome well um emily has done a great job setting it up um you know the past hundred days really have been challenging and i think sometimes i forget how challenging some of that time in march and april was and then tonight as i hear emily and julie and marcus and jim and maureen and jim speaking about all the work that has been happening um i have so much gratitude to my team and to our staff across the district the partnership with parents as emily just talked about on the partnership with all of you

112with our community members has has been amazing i think it's really important it it's been important to me to be really positive and highlight the amazing work that has been done but i think it and i think it's really important to remember we were and still in are in a health pandemic and i think that that looking at that we have had to change a lot and there's a lot more that we're going to have to change but what we haven't changed in the next slide martha is our commitment to our students and our commitment to our mission and we know that graduation looked different for our seniors this year with a virtual graduation and with all of that but the commitment that we have and that our teachers and all staff have for our

113kids is something that was absolutely unwavering and it's a promise we'll continue with whatever the fall looks like i think during this global pandemic um you know as emily just shared school districts were asked to transform everything that they have done over the last many years we had to totally go to online teaching and then as we also had a transition in our country and in our state and the wide range of emotion with the death of george floyd and continued questions that we've looked at with our work around racial equity and our achievement gap we know that our challenges moving forward are going to be really great and that we've learned a lot that's going to help us one of the studies that came out was a report on how well mde minnesota department

114of education responded and you can see here the four areas of concern that were shared that they the the concern about really having equitable access of everything that you see there of materials internet meals and instruction the communication and the timeliness of some of their communication talking about instruction and the daily interaction with teachers how we're going to track attendance we talked about that a little bit moving forward even with a hybrid model during the study session and then concerns about some of those supports we also collected data on the next slide martha we also collected data and held did a couple different surveys throughout the time to try to be responsive but then held focus groups with 200 of our parents and emily just said it but the biggest lesson and it wasn't something

115we learned but was reinforced is the importance of relationships connections and social emotional learning so we know that as we plan forward that is the absolute rock that we have to figure out um how to do really really well um if you just go back for just a second because i think it's cute um i don't think that i ever thought that there would be a time in my career where i heard so many or teachers or so many parents say my student just wants to get back to school and i know that wasn't everyone i know that but uh pretty cool um we also really learned and you got a chance during our study session you know to hear more from marcus on our technology but we really learned the importance of equitable access

116to technology and to internet service and that's something moving forward we'll we're going to need to continue to pay attention to we were reminded of the importance of a viable and guaranteed curriculum you know our goal in regular school always is that students have a similar experience and i think there were challenges with that in distance learning but we really leveraged not only our awesome teachers but some of our technology to ensure that our standards work was continuing our common assessments and ways to assess student learning was continuing and just that virtual connection with adults we know was so important for our kids we also um through that communication just some data there to to highlight some of the increases in csun you know our elementary teachers have done a fantastic job communicating with families

117with see-saw over the years so there's so much that i'm grateful to and that's one of the things is that that really was a groundswell from our teachers a couple years ago to use seesaw at the elementary level and you can also see the schoology some standardization there and really head or not having our teachers work um through google meets we've always known that a one size doesn't fit all and our work on personalized learning will we we've been reminded that that only has to continue to deepen as we look to learning that is personalized is purposeful and is empowering for our students we're also continuing to um to recognize you know during distance learning there's a difference in levels of adult support that was available to kids parents were still working there was a

118lot of stress on them so as we think about moving into either a distance learning 2.0 or a hybrid model we've really got to think about what does that mean for the burden that is putting on on our families we know through all of this that we've got to continue to deepen our educational and equity and excellence work and we know that is through listening to our stakeholders through relationships and continuing to to reach the needs of each individual student um i just wanted to remind us as we as we look at our our work around racial equity and all kinds of equity i just sometimes i think it's really important because i think this is a surprise to some of our our community members as we look at the changing demographics in our school

119district is that and this was last year's data but we're about just under 80 percent of our students being white students and the rest are are students of different races and ethnicities and moving forward we know that we've got to keep listening to our students our staff and to our families as we as we move forward and we've been collecting some data and we'll be collecting more data as we plan for for the next steps um and recognizing that just as we have gaps that we want to continue to close and students who sometimes are more engaged than others that we've got some urgency the sleepless nights i think are around an urgency of not knowing what fall looks like as well as ensuring that we really do make sure that that mission comes to

120life for each one of our students um and the good news in all of this for me is that we have a really solid strategic plan and our priority work um that that we have been most of that has been work that has been evolving over the years it really does align with those lessons that i just shared with you as we continue to deepen our personalized learning as we continue to deepen our outreach to our stakeholders so we've we don't have new work we have worker on social emotional learning and relationships and connections we're just going to continue to work on really deepening that work you heard a little bit the students talking about the caring and committed conversations as part of our our student voice our personalized learning and our equity work and

121we also um heard in a in a presentation in may i believe the next slide please martha um just just how are we continuing to ensure you know through personalized learning i think one of the the most important lessons for us is oftentimes in education learning has been the variable and time has been the constant and as we continue to get better with personalized learning and really meet kids where they are learning needs to be the constant and time the variable and i think during distance learning that was that was another really great lesson that we learned that we need to continue to hang on to we've talked before about working with other districts as we continue to deepen our work and these are the nine strategies of reimagine minnesota that we've been working on

122as a metro and you can metro area 42 districts and you can see lots of the things that we've already talked about tonight with with student voice and personalized learning that we'll continue to work on so as we look to next year you all know that we received guidance at the end of june or mid-june from mde which talked about the three different versions that they expect us to be planning for right now in-person learning hybrid learning and distance learning for next year i think there's a distinction when i think about some of the distance learning that we pulled off this spring i think it was more emergency distance learning so to me distance learning is even different and within again during the study session we talked a little bit about this but that hybrid

123learning option really is the one that's got a lot more questions than answers around it right now but we've got teams that are working on planning for all of those some information that we've collected from families right now and none of this is binding but as we've been planning for and are looking at what we need to plan for we just wanted to get a sense with where families were right now so we asked them we said what would be your preference in starting the school year and you can see here about eight percent said regardless they'd like to stay with distance learning 19 said that hybrid model and then about said in person that data ironically aligns uh lines up with the mde just did a survey with 130 000 respondents that they got

124across the state and our data lines up fairly closely to that the second question that we asked families was if they would be needing and using district transportation we know especially if the requirement is going to be around social distancing if we're able to transport that transportation is going to look very different it's going to cost more we're going to need you know different different ways of doing things so we might have to you know seek some different help from our parents and we wanted to just get a sense how many people would need transportation or not and we did get some input back from that question and and some families reached out and they said you know if if that comes down to something that you really need more carpooling more things like that

125let us know so i think that's one of the things with our community as we know more about what we'll do we'll continue to reach out to them we also wanted to get a sense of where staff are right now and you can see here that really great response rate 936 respondents and you could see in that first bullet area if in person 85 reported the ability to return to work and 15 were uncertain that's a really high number as i talk to superintendents colleagues across the state that is really a high number of our staff saying yep there might be some concerns but they are willing to return to work you could see that 90 of them would be willing to wear masks and it was interesting because the concerns that our staff had

126were things that we can control making sure that that cleaning is done and sans things are sanitized and having the supplies that they need so that was also really good to hear that those are things that are in our control and the concerns as you can see here is not having some of those public health regulations being being followed you know so that will be on us that not only do we need to have all the protocols in place but then we have to be sure that we monitor those to make sure that our students and our staff are safe so as we move forward uh you know we're looking at this as um let's let's come back better in everything that we do let's just make sure that we're continuing to deepen our work

127and and meet the needs of our students in whatever format that is go ahead um as you can see on the left side this is the infograph that we are using internally to just we needed to get a sense of what our planning process was so you can see on the left side is where we i did the focus groups early on and the five themes that really emerged from those focus groups the things that staff students and parents said pay deep attention to thinking about adult learning and professional learning so making sure that parents have the support that they need as well as we move forward our district support and logistics so the transportation the child nutrition services all of those things health and safety you can see that from the the staff survey

128how important that that's going to be to our staff and to our families as we come back social and emotional well-being really was probably it's it's in alphabetical order but that was probably the most important in those focus groups as we saw is that was the the most important thing that that parents students and staff want to make sure that we're paying attention to and we know how important that's going to be you know one of the things if you think about what happened in march we staff and students had established relationships already which will be one of the huge challenges if we aren't able to come back in person and you know there'll be ways that we are thinking already about how to solve for that but that will definitely be a challenge and

129then certainly you know ensuring that we just have a quality rigorous teaching and learning and instruction regardless of that format so what where we've been working right now is our departments and our programs have been doing a lot of planning around the three scenarios and we're at the point where tomorrow actually we're going to be meeting in our district strategy team and then later with our full admin team and really begin to integrate that even more really make sure that we've got teams that are coming together and talking to each other as we're planning around instruction health and safety all of the logistics community engagement and communication resources and financials so we'll be taking a look at that and the goal is you know we just kind of have talked a lot about the dial

130of that has been used that governor walsh uses and we have to be ready to turn that dial what i heard on the mde host a call with superintendents weekly and what i heard last week was we really have to be ready in a 12-hour time period to change what we're doing and we're starting to learn some of that because as some situations have come up whether in our athletic practices that we're having or things like that we're starting to have to react and make some changes really really quickly so as we plan for the three scenarios we also have to be planning to say hey something could happen in one building that would make us turn back a dial and the rest of the district looks a different way which just further has complexities

131on top of some of these complexities so finally just some of those considerations and challenges that we have is is you know really ensuring the safety of our students and our our families ensuring that transportation and all the other services that we have looking at it from a budget implication you know what are things going to look like in terms of how we use staff and and some of those kinds of things as well so we have um you know two more weeks to plan uh before we hear we continue to hear that on july 27th we'll hear from md and the governor how we can start the year i want you to know i am on weekly calls with probably 15 neighborhood superintendents we had a metro group of probably 30 superintendents meet last

132week just sharing what are you doing with hybrid models what are you doing with this today i was on a a meeting with the mayors and superintendents across the metro and it really was about superintendents talking about some of the common challenges that they have as they're planning forward so we kind of said that we're all in this together you know we're trying to help each other and you know each of our leaders is contacting and working with their networks and sharing resources and protocols and processes so ultimately we can all do what's what's best for students knowing that that varies greatly from people's perspectives and that's going to be part of the challenge as well so happy to take questions i know i don't have a lot of details about our plans right now

133but i wanted you to have confidence and i want our community to have confidence in our planning in our process and in our commitment to ensuring that we're listening to needs and we're going to try to make a flexible seamless plans moving forward gary my my immediate question is right now the cdc says that if you come in contact with somebody or somebody has been infected that there's a two-week quarantine when i think about the classes getting together that's one of the first things i think of us how is that going to how's that gonna be handled if a kid from a family who becomes infected a teacher a whole classroom does the whole classroom have to go on has that ever been has that yet been directly addressed by the mde well yes yes

134and we're getting practice on that because that's what we set up when we you know started our athletic practices we said if if somebody is you know exposed then either the whole pod leaves or more leave and we've had a couple incidents already where that's been the case so i think i think that we have to continue to go deeper into right what is that mean an entire school right goes distance learning then yeah classes so i mean the high school is totally different i mean it you could somewhat you know isolate sometimes different grade levels or elementary classrooms or something like that but as they get i mean right yeah that's a huge planning conundrum i can imagine and the rotating effect of that uh could be huge also as far as contact tracing

135within the school and who actually has to be quarantined and how you would rotate them back in and what do you do if the teacher has to be and you got to get a sub in and what are the protocols for that so that's that's what i think about when i when i think about this and and i'm hoping that there's going to be some sort of pressure on the governor to to modify uh or the mte to modify their adm model for that hybrid because it doesn't make any sense that that they're going to punish the hybrid model of all things for the adm counts and the funding to the schools thanks for your question mary i mean all of us i'm sure are up at night not sleeping as emily talked about just

136thinking of all of these things and you know wanting our kids back wanting our kids with with our staff and and learning and enjoying each other and wanting things to be really safe you have any other comments questions yeah should know something yeah we will and and we will hopefully be you know well on our way with communication by then and letting families know what's happening and what we need and what they need and moving forward yeah i will ask one okay quick question after we get after you get that guidance from mde yeah um when do you when when's your plan for notifying kind of and how are we going to let families know what our plans are i think that's maybe the biggest question we're getting of course is what are we going

137to do yeah and when will we know yeah and you know i think for us you know our goal is on the 27th we've got really solid plans in place i think the question will be and it kind of is you know mary's question even if the announcement is we're starting out hybrid there's still a thousand additional decisions and scenarios within that so i mean i would hope that once once we hear that you know and communicating with parents along the way as well because i can't imagine then the 28th we're going to turn around and say here's exactly what we're doing but you know i would hope by that first week of august we're pretty clear and then there's still going to be a ton of work to do you know we're going to

138be leaning on our building instructional leadership teams we've talked about using our mert teams or our um are building crisis response teams differently to help us with some things so yeah enrique enrique enrique thank you for that presentation a lot of details a lot of information to unpack for sure thing that i'm curious about is you know we're hearing a lot about the general education just kind of a general return to the classroom and what that could look like with the three different options hybrid distance or in classroom and i'm curious what conversations are happening around special education or those that receive services directly from the school district and what kinds of considerations there will be for that yeah enrique actually tomorrow we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about um with

139our leaders and our district strategy team talking about the hybrid model because we've you know there's a lot of different ways you can look at this you can do kind of that alternate day model where you've got half the kids monday tuesday everybody's distant learning on wednesday the other half in person thursday friday we've also had conversations about more of a needs-based approach you know do we need to have our younger students in school more do we need to have students with special needs or el students or other students who struggle in school more so that's some of what we're talking about right now and i know that deb anderson and her team you know have been working on that the specific to your question around students with special needs and how that looks and

140what can we do to ensure safety but kids get kids with with their teachers more so i don't have a direct answer but uh we're committed to figuring out how to do better than we did during emergency distance learning all right thank you any other questions i have one additional question if that's okay and that's um when the guidance comes out from the governor are they going to give actual implementation guidance to or is it just here are the rules that is an excellent question that is that that is an excellent question stay tuned i i don't know mary that's a great question and i'll let you know on the 27th i appreciate uh appreciate all of your support in this um and and your grace and understanding and helping to communicate with our community

141um you know i also want people to know we're not just sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting until july 27th uh teams are are really digging in and examining the data they need to in order for us to be ready to make the best decisions for kids so thank you okay thank you we're moving on to the school board three-year agenda this is something we reviewed during our board retreat and i just was going to highlight a couple of things in district policy we had the first bullet point is new um and i believe that this if we approve this for this coming year it would be more about just figuring out what our role is and having some more discussion centered around that to determine create and implement board action through policy resolution agreements

142to support and lead district-wide educational equity and excellence centered on the needs of all students i think we all agree that's what we want to do it's just what our role is actually going to be so that we'll probably need more discussion and then under board self-governance i'm going to skip to the next page we have the school board evaluation which we did one last year and this year we were unable to follow up with that so we may want to consider that for the spring of 21 to do that again with or without msba guidance if we want to just do it and make that determination if we want them to come and guide us through and then in the superintendent relations the annual evaluation there was some discussion of changing that up a

143little bit um and that needs to be discussed before um before too long actually because the evaluation will be coming based on this coming year so um that needs to be looked at and reminding everyone to please meet with the superintendent on a one-on-one monthly basis and then contract negotiations as well and then in public engagement this is already a little bit in process expanding our public engagement and legislative platform and i know the public engagement committee has been very busy with listening sessions and is going to continue a sum and there was some interest i believe indicated that other board members would like to be involved in some of those listening sessions and i don't remember what this was i had a note about curriculum committee i'm not sure what we were referring to

144with that except that i think the connection was that we want to make sure that we have community enough community members involved in the curriculum committee as that's part of the big purpose of having that committee and students yes um so that those are my highlights of the three-year board agenda um and actually mostly in the first year coming up um i don't know if anyone else said anything else they wanted to add um hopefully we can get emotion and approval on this this evening so um maybe i'd take a motion first i'll make the motion by stacy second i'll second by jonathan um you had a comment this is on the public engagement um we met not too long ago i can't remember now it seemed like a little bit ago um and we

145are going to be putting out the minutes that we've had from the last couple and you do have a pledge from us that that will be coming on a regular basis um and it's kind of scheduling some meetings out into the future so that we can get um notice out there we just haven't talked about exactly but we're just kind of in this kind of fact-finding like figuring out exactly where our role is with these certain agendas kind of things so that's kind of where we're at we have a meeting coming up on the 20th i think so but continuing kind of the work that we started this last winter spring time okay any other comments on the uh michael i was just wondering if um under 2023 underboard governance if we wanted to add

146new board member onboarding as a bullet point there too because that would be two years out from just to stay consistent does that make sense so i would add it to 22-23 yeah because that would be another new election yep is everyone all right with that yes okay not getting big not head nods at all either way but okay good um yep that makes sense since we'll be doing the same thing again um okay if there's no other questions um i'll take a vote then is all those in favor say aye aye oppose opposed that motion carries 7-0 okay thank you we'll move on to policy this is the first reading of policies that were presented um earlier policy 201 is school board vacancies that is these are all policy these two policies are ones

147that govern us so um the school board vacancy one is a state statute but um i think the general feeling was that we wanted to leave it in our policies so that it's more easily accessible to the public if they so choose to find out how that works did anyone have any other comments about school board vacancies okay seeing none we'll move on to policy 215 school board use of electronic communications and i believe this is a policy that um msba does not have um but they re they reference it during their training sessions and again it's a policy um that we've already have so there's no harm in keeping it and again for easier access so any other comments or questions on that one okay um then move on to the next section um

148these are the second reading of policies um before board approval at the next reading the first one is the policy 514 on student wellness this also happens to be an annual mandatory policy and is not in that listing for um tonight because we're in the process of working on it and that was presented a while ago um does anyone have any questions or concerns about the student wellness policy okay uh then policy 531 memorials for disease students or staff i believe this was presented partially for more clarification on how those are handled and there was a timely issue with graduation that we were looking at it so does anyone have any comments or questions on that one okay finally we get to approve one possibly um you received i believe it was one of the

149last meetings we had a huge packet on our school board annual and mandatory policies and those need to be approved annually and we can do that i believe tonight and the listing is in our board packet but the actual policies i think you already got so i would take a motion to approve the annual and mandatory policies homemade by melissa second second is that my name stacy um any comments or questions mary just a clarification the whole group here were we're approving those that are not currently under review the rest of the group just to clarify the language yes all the policies all the mandatory annual policies are being um potentially approved except for policy 603 and 616. okay any other comments or questions all those in favor say aye aye oppose shoot that motion

150carries seven zero delay um okay then the the last policy um is um policy 208 it's the development adoption and implementation of policies so basically how we make our policy policy policy the policy on policies um and the only reason this is coming back is because there's a section on there to address the annual policies that we we all agreed in the work session that we did not need to have them to retreat that we did not need have them come back four times so that little caveat was added to it um so it's a minor change in the policy but it's a clarification so um i would take a motion to approve um policy 208 with them secondly stacy second by jonathan any comments or questions all those in favor say aye aye opposed

151that motion carries 7-0 thank you um superintendent report you know what i think i gave a long enough report so i don't have anything else thank you any of the administrators in the room i don't see any head saying yes so are there any board reports okay all i want to do is say thanks to the staff for everybody that's working around the clock it seems like this year especially through the summer it's a busier summer probably for everybody than they normally would have but future events we have a regular school board meeting on august 10th but we are going to have an additional work session um on august 3rd and then a study session again on august 24th um i will take a motion to adjourn by everybody melissa bye melissa ii did pretty

152well invited ac yeah all those in favor say aye aye opposed that motion carries 7-0 thank you