Richfield School Board Meeting April 19th , 2021

001seven six five four three two and one good evening it is 7 01 p.m on monday april 19 2021 and i called to order this regular meeting of the richfield school board attending this evening's board meeting live and in the boardroom our board members paula cole peter tensing allegra's meshech christine malek i'm board chair tim paulus joining us remotely is is board member crystal baraki do we have any of our student reps joining us all we have student rep naomi ferguson joining us online as well thank you for being with us naomi joining us up here at the table is superintendent unowski we're also joined by board secretary cassandra quan i'll get the name right finally i think it's taken me three or four meetings sorry cassandra the redfield public school's mission statement is that

002we strive to inspire and empower each individual to learn grow and excel and we will strive to keep that those thoughts at the front of mind and the center of our discussions this evening as well we are here again still persisting in a slight hybrid model where we allow the meeting to um be conducted live and virtually concurrently we want to welcome everyone who's watching us via the live stream and we are fortunate to have at least one guest this evening and we are happy to have you thank you for being here peter the first order of business is review and approval of the agenda i will move i will move the agenda as presented one second oh yeah we have a motion from mr tensing and a second from miss cole is there any

003final discussion a quick suggestion we are not needing the closed session at the end so it'd be suggested that somebody amend to take the closed session off i will amend my motion to strike the closed session from the end of the agenda right so we have a motion by mr tensing now um with amended to strike the closed session and a second from miss cole of the same any additional discussion seeing and hearing none we will as we have members remotely as well as in person i will ask the board clerk miss malek to conduct a roll call vote okay ms cole hi mr tensing hi miss meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes eye and chair paulus i and the agenda is approved i want to know we are we are now also

004joined by student rep tyler jake welcome tyler all right okay we move now into the the the start of the meeting with the the the general part of the meeting and first on the agenda is information and proposals non-action items first up is public comment has anyone received um requests for public comment i have not as board chair as guam no one has no one has requested public comment okay well then we will have no public comment this evening uh the next opportunity for public comment will be the second meeting in may which i believe is the 17th all right since we anticipate that meeting will still be in this hybrid format uh members of the public who wish to address the board can do so live in person here in the boardroom or you

005could submit something in writing or a video or a voice recording that we would be willing to play at be happy to play at the meeting okay we'll move now then to the superintendent update and i'll pass things over to superintendent inosky all right thank you sir um two updates tonight one a board request a review of our work from reimagine richfield and where we stand and also a summary of our equity work and then also an sro presentation just sort of feedback after we have taken a survey and gotten some feedback from our students and just to share where we are in that process with the board and then just as an informational update we did have a student walk out today approximately 200 of our students joined by students from holy angels ended

006up walking up to the government center to share their perspective on issues related to police police violence and other other pieces that they wanted to share and so these these presentations actually align quite well with what's happening right now in our state and also with our students and on our students mind so with that um i'll transition things to our first presentation and dr daniels who is our assistant superintendent and head of all of our teaching and learning work is going to present to us on reimagine and equities take it away dr daniels thank you superintendent yanowski good evening to each one of you i am pleased to be here this evening to present an overview of the work that we've done in response to reimagine richfield and the equity work that we've done to

007date and its impact next slide so by the end of this presentation it is our desire that rps board members will understand the impact of reimagine richfield also understand the equity work that we've done and its impact and understand the next steps that we will take as a leadership team to ensure that richfield public schools become a more equitable and just school district that serves the needs of all of our students next slide so in march of 2016 30 metropolitan superintendents gathered out of concern to discuss the plight of public education within the state of minnesota they engaged in a conversation to talk about the integration issues the equity issues the access issues and how to improve academic excellence for all students in the public schools of minnesota next slide and superintendent yunowski being the

008superintendent he is says this work does not stop at reimagine minnesota we're bringing this work to richfield and so he said daniels we are doing this and so in november 2017 we flipped a school day and we actually allowed our students to be in charge 1100 students approximately to share with us their perspectives as to what we could do to improve their education in their educational experience while in this system yet also preparing them to be exceptional and successful beyond their experience in richfield public schools next slide so there were five major themes that emerged from this day the first theme was building facility and access the second one food health and wellness third school hours and scheduling fourth teaching and learning and fifth of course equity so yes you do see a toilet on

009this slide because what was top of mind for those students on that day regarding building facility and access was we need better bathrooms and the underlying theme there was we would like to have a facility that um we are proud of and again number one was bathrooms and so i'm happy to report that we do have new and improved bathrooms not only at richville high school but also in all of our public schools due to the generosity of our community members to give us the monies um to update all of our buildings and facilities we also have new media centers secured entryways flexible spaces again to help our students learn and we also i'm proud to share have a new gym floor in our high school gym and a new weight room and locker room

010next slide another ask of our students was they wanted more savory foods they wanted a greater selection they wanted more whole foods such as vegetables and fruit to select from and they also wanted us to shine a light on mental health awareness and support and so i'm happy to report that presently we do offer a variety of foods foods that we even as a team enjoy and walk away from our offices and purchase foods from our cafeteria but we have a salad bar we have a taco bar there are various whole food selections our students can make and we've also expanded our support for students around the work of social emotional wellness by adding social workers full-time social workers to each building also expanding our mental health support offering student engagement specialists in buildings and

011also offering school-based mental health in each one of our buildings now the students also requested for us to go back to our original start time of 8 10 and to end at 2 40 p.m however we did not oblige them in that request we remain steady and aligned to the research because the research is very clear in stating that students that are secondary learners perform best when they have a later start time and so we stayed aligned to our start time of 8 30 and we also kept our class periods um as 50-minute class periods but we did offer students more selections and more courses to select from to enrich their experience as students here in richfield on public schools and specifically at the high school next slide teaching and learning one thing that was

012very clear in reviewing the results of reimagine richfield is that all students come to this school to be successful in this school and to be successful beyond their graduation and so they wanted to make it clear that all students should have access to advanced courses and rigorous courses and they also wanted teachers to um see them for who they were and the potential in which they had in order to be exceptional in those classes and so as a result of that we've doubled the advanced courses that we've we offered we doubled those courses because we changed the process to ensure that students had greater access to those courses we also offer greater supports for our students to be successful in those courses we have added a new math curriculum at the secondary as well as

013the elementary level bridges um at the elementary level and cpm at the secondary level we've also brought in a new um literacy curriculum lucy calkins at the elementary level we've expanded our business options we have expanded dli and we've also expanded our counseling model thanks to the generosity of this board and we have a full-time college and career coordinator equity again students requested equity and opportunities they wanted equity to excel so again they could be successful they wanted instruction that would allow each student to shine in their capabilities and not for um teachers to perceive their abilities before actually um digging and supporting them to be exceptional in their classes they also requested that we close the achievement gap and to eliminate systemic racism within richville public schools so in these next few slides i'm

014going to share some of the work that we've done and um i've kind of grouped them according to the letter p so i've kind of run with some alliteration to share the work that we have done in response to students request a reimagine rich feel and also the work that we've done as a district just overall in equity and so one thing we've done is we have addressed at a governance level many many policies as you see policies that were antiquated policies that were punitive in some ways policies that were continuing to oppress and marginalize students who already struggle within our system and we shifted to policies that are better aligned to research better aligned to best practices also engaging student and parent voices through our safe and supportive schools committee and also policies that

015provide support for our students to be successful within our system next slide we've also engaged in professional development to address our thoughts and the mental models that we bring to this work which we know our thinking our um and how we go about doing the work that implicit work has a significant impact on the outcome and the experiences of our students and so some of the work that we've done around pd um happens to be innocent classroom in which all of our new teachers who become hired in richfield public schools they go through innocent classroom training all of our staff have been innocent classroom trained we also offer conscious discipline and we've also engaged our leaders or provided an opportunity for them to go through the courageous leadership institute offered through minnesota state university and

016we've engaged at engaged in conversations at the management team level talking about critical race theory and how it centers racism as something that is ubiquitously permeated throughout our system throughout the fabric of our society and so we've done that work as well next slide we we've also done significant work around our processes practices and procedures in richfield public schools we brought in the danielson framework for teaching we've added structures to support learning teaching and learning by bringing in professional learning communities and collaborative planning time for teachers to make adjustments to their curriculum in real time make adjustments to their lessons in real time in response to student data we've also brought in research-based grading practices change the course registration process the bullying reporting process the suspension re-entry process all again to ensure that we are

017supporting our students most equitably programs that we brought in richfield health resource center opened in january of 2016 and the resource center serves the needs of all of our community members and students as requested school-based mental health in our buildings the spartan food shelf clothing shove we have a partnership with beacons boys and girls club and we've also expanded ap and cis course offerings and people superintendent yunowski under his leadership we have diversified our um staff and faculty um we have also increased the percentage of our leaders of color we have structures that elevate the voice of our parents and students that is under the leadership of dr clarkson and that is safe and supportive schools we have richfield latino family association in which christina gonzalez also works to support that along with safe and

018supportive schools we've also added affinity groups at our secondary schools and again we have increased teacher support through our instructional coaches our literacy coaches and our peer reviewers and outcomes as a result of all of those ps these are the outcomes we've increased our act scores across all student demographics in our um high school we have increased the percentage of students of color in our college credit earning classes we've increased the college credits earned and we've also increased our graduation rates so we're right now at the eve of starting or if you all vote to approve our new equity policy and so we see this this next season as an opportunity to improve upon the results that i just shared with you and so with the adoption of a new equity policy and the development

019of the guidelines we are excited about the possibilities to improve student outcomes next slide we also have a new strategic plan that is entitled richfield realized which implies that we do not just want strategic actions we also want strategic results and so we are excited to align the equity policy along with the strategic plan to actualize and actually realize success for our students in richville public schools next slide and also in doing that we realize that as a team we need to look at how we work and so we looked at how much work we accomplished with the last strategic plan and all of the work that we've done to date with our equity um within the equity work that we've done and we realized that we need to be more strategic in how we

020work and so our goal is to work in alignment using the theory of aligned contribution making sure that we're working in high action high alignment and high accountability which is something we've added in order to see population level results with the students that we are underserving as a school district as next steps we hope that the equity policy is adopted soon also we are working dr clarkson um christina gonzalez and i are working with a consultant to see if we can partner with her to draft guidelines that will be vetted by students that will be vetted by parents as well as by the board and approved and we will develop an implementation plan to strategically plan how we will carefully implement and actualize the new equity policy during the 2021 school year and so in

021closing i've shared an image of amanda gorman who was the young lady who spoke at president um biden's inauguration and i will share this that the new dawn blooms as we free it for there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it if only we're brave enough to be it and i would just like to leave with you all that as a leadership team dr clarkson craig um dr yanowski mr hoji dr yunowski and i as one team along with our directors and the principals here in richfield public schools and of course our teachers we are brave enough to see the light and we are brave enough to be the light and we're also brave enough to engage the voices of our students and parents to actually reimagine and build the

022richville public schools that our students desire and so with that said are there any questions thank you i think um if if everyone will humor me i will actually ask miss brocky since she's the first one alphabetically and she happens to be joining us remotely if she wants to jump in with with questions or comments sure absolutely um and i don't know maybe this is a question if naomi and or tyler want to chime in and share their thoughts here as well i think it's so helpful to get a sense of over the span of multiple years now what the efforts have been and what really has been prioritized in response to what we were hearing from our students you know in in those years that you described where we did some of these really

023significant efforts and my question is to what extent you feel like students are aware that these changes have been made to what extent do students know like these are some of the very specific steps that have been taken or policies that have been changed fortunately the bathrooms and the food are quite obvious but what about the other things are they aware of what is different now and that it was their contributions that supported making it so and that we hope that reinforces that we want a need to continue hearing from them to keep doing more and more of this great question director brackie and in response to that i would like to share i wanted i believe in student voice and i wanted students to know how powerful their voices were and not just their

024voice but just to know that their voice leads to actions and and changes and so while i was principal of the high school i would meet with students twice a year at the beginning of the school year as well as um at semester so i could share with them what they had requested and what was um the actual outcome as a result of their request and so i tried to keep the work alive um by sharing that information with them i never will forget when i shared the rendering and a video of someone walking through the new um ridgefield high school um at the beginning of the school year and i said you all requested this and this is what you all are receiving in response to your request and they were so excited and

025so um in in during my tenure that's how i tried to keep this work in front of them to know how to share with them how impactful their voices were and this is something we can definitely share with on principal collins so she can also keep this work alive so students truly know the impact that they've made in richville in richville public schools similarly dr clarkson brings this work in with her team with safe and supportive schools it would be interesting to hear as you point out the feedback from the students themselves to sort of get that perspective but we try and as we know with communications there are many things we often try and we never or we don't always know the full impact until we hear it again from our students as we

026keep that circle going it if it's okay i wouldn't mind going to our students first and seeing seeing how what their experience or or their understanding of the the presentation was that's all right mr ferguson would you name me should have been a friend you have questions or comments um i think that's like really spot on that you said that because two of the questions that i had the first one was how were students continuously involved in the planning as changes were made and then my second one was that i don't think as many students know about the amount of mental support they can actually get from school and that you guys are putting in the work to make this all possible for them and with all that's going on like in today's world i

027know like that it's really important right now that people know that they have access to that so i was wondering how do students get access to their new mental health support staff and like how are they kind of like marketing themselves or how are these new things like i don't know like put out there so people know about them naomi um great questions um i'll start with your latter question um first i know that um miss gonzalez has been doing work with the social workers um also with dr dr clarkson to make sure students are aware i think that the information has been going out been going out through um social workers as well as through counselors as to the opportunities that are available to students for social emotional support at this time also airpod

028teachers should be aware of this support and actually pointing students in the direction if that additional support is needed um that is the information i have regarding the structure that exists right now for students to be aware i know that students bodies are back in buildings right now and i just walk through the high school and i see um signage up and i see signage up in bathrooms and so i'm sure that there is an opportunity since you're raising the question to put up more signage around where students can go for support instead of you know depending on word of mouth and so that is something that we can improve upon but i do know right now that those modes of communication and as far as getting the information out about the support they actually

029exist with counselors and with social workers and airpods teachers presently at the high school and your first question how do we keep students um continually involved i think that we've kept students continually involved through the structure that superintendent yunowski highlighted and underscored and that is the safe and supportive schools structure we have a representative student body or represented representative student group that is a part of that committee that um dr clarkson and ms gonzalez as well as rosa work with in order to get information from right now this team will be reacting and responding to our new equity policy guidelines and each policy that has been approved by this board has been vetted by a safe and supportive safe and supportive schools student committee as well as parent committee also in changing our um policy

030around health and wellness we also vetted that policy with our student government and so we would leverage student government and also leverage safe and supportive schools to get insight and input from students and so those are smaller groups within our schools and so what i also hear in that question is again to director brackie's question how do we continue to share with students the impact that they're making and driving decisions that are being made to best serve them in richville public schools and so i hear that in your question and that's something that we can continue to work on as a school district okay thank you you're welcome uh mr jay do you have questions or comments about the presentation for dr daniels uh no uh well i have like an answer to like this

031um like we've noticed um well i i don't care say we but i noticed like you guys didn't when we went back into school you didn't make it hard on us we uh we have like free time every friday and tuesday you know we have time during our advisory so that helps with our mental you know health and like make it really noticeable like even with today um the superintendent sent out emails you know about today's protest and was totally fine with it and that type of stuff shows us that the school cool yeah all right thanks tyler all right so um i'll i'll just offer it to those who are in the room uh our usual organized free-for-all for if anyone would like to step forward and ask questions or comments for dr daniels

032i have questions about professional development i'm familiar with these things are listed here but they feel very theoretical to me and i'm curious to know what's the plan for implementation and the role that families are going to have because i also see or feel a disconnect like we do have all of the spaces for families to collaborate in their affinity group and not everyone is able to join and so i'm curious to know how are they the information i know christina is doing a really good job with that but how is that information from those groups then connected to the teaching uh stuff because i think a lot of the a lot of the inequities that well i don't know i'm not gonna go there but really there's a there's a perception that is wrong

033about communities of color there's a bias that's inherent that we don't even know we have it and that is true and i say we because i'm from one community but i may have it against another community right so i'm not even claiming innocence here but the way that we're gonna break up that is to really getting to know uh in addition to the theory and and i'm sure these are really great workshops but how we're gonna make that a reality and really engaging our families and partnering with them into seeing their kids you know how we're going to avoid parents being surprised in high school like my kids missing credits like and i didn't know that um because of a lack of understanding of how the u.s school system works as compared to other places

034in the world so that's that's my question great question and so one thing that we discussed as a cabinet when we stepped back and we looked at all of the work that we've done is you know ask that question and and why have we not made the impact that we had hoped to make um we made progress and we acknowledge the progress that we've made yet we also see opportunity for more pro progress to be made also you heard um dr mobley a couple of weeks ago talk about how proud she was to work in a school district in which the mayor the school board chair the school board the superintendent and the superintendent's cabinet as well as the principals to all be in alignment around this work and so you you wonder like why

035have we not made the impact that we've made and and we've discussed this as a cabinet and i'm going to offer to you what my um thoughts are personally i think that we have done a great deal of work of building the infrastructure and build making structural changes around practices around policies around also resources and resource flows to make the impact that we have made i see that the next leg of the work is to do the more transformational work the work that you're speaking to director called that gets to the mental models and the relationships that need to be in place in order to truly impact the work so we've been talking about as a team as a cabinet how do we move from transactional to transformational work so how do we move our

036teachers and even ourselves from you know these are the tasks that we need to complete and check the box that we've completed the task and ask an additional question we've completed the task yet what is the impact to what end and that question needs to be answered asked and answered at all levels of the organization but especially at the classroom level of the organization because that is where the greatest impact is in the classroom and so a teacher needs to shift from i taught the lesson to i taught the lesson and what was the impact and once you look at your results and determine what the impact is how do you reteach and support in real time so students are able to be successful again in real time um within our system and so in

037development of the guidelines within our equity policy which is talks about us addressing the um the education debt that is owed to marginalized communities within this district when you think about that that a lot of unpacking has to be done to get to that and there are commitments within our policy and we are excited to get to the guidelines because we believe that the guidelines will get us to the actionable items that we are hopeful will make an impact um on achievement to address the thoughts that people have around which our students talked about in the um in reimagine rich field the thoughts the preceded notions the perceptions the biases that people may bring into the classroom and into the work and then we can talk about the action plan because parents are a stakeholder

038within the equity policy how do we engage our parents how do we engage our students and supporting them to best understand our system and dismantle what we need to dismantle because we know that what we walked away from pre-pandemic was not working and i remember director bracky said if we come back and continue to do the same thing i'm going to look at you all like you all are not leaders and i don't want to be perceived as not a leader i want our team to be perceived as leaders who again see the light and are willing to be the light to make the changes that we need to make in our system so thanks thanks a lot i mean i i was the person who asked for this presentation and i really appreciate it

039um i think this is some great information um and um a fabulous update um the reason the reason that i asked for this uh this information was primarily to keep the focus kind of squarely on the importance of this work and i certainly hear um from you dr daniels that that you know that that's part of sort of baked into kind of the work that you're doing and that the whole leadership team is doing um i am pleased to hear about some of the structures that are in place i guess that my my primary um concern was to um was to basically bake in structures and processes and expectations such that this work is not dependent upon the goodwill or effort of any one individual or even a group of individuals but that we have

040essentially institutionalized the commitments that we made in terms of these sort of reimagined commitments and institutionalized centering student voice as really the number one driver of organizational kind of direction and priority so i guess that i think i mean i'm encouraged by i'm encouraged by what we are sort of hearing in terms of all of the progress that we've made in that regard i mean i agree that returning to business as usual would be an abandonment of that commitment and i am curious i guess i would love to hear from whether it be naomi naomi has maybe a little bit more of a lens but tyler as well do either of you if you think about your career as students in richfield public schools do either of you perceive a change in terms of your

041your sense of empowerment as students to be leaders and to have an impact on the organization that's the question number one and the second question is what more work is needed to kind of further empower you so i'll put the put the put the spotlight on our students it may or may not have been fair naomi and tyler did did you hear the question from from dr dancing uh yeah i did okay uh i was thinking um i think that like one thing i've always enjoyed about ridgefield is that they actually care about hearing from their students and you know they take action on our words that we can't take you know what i mean and they're always listening to us and so i think that that's always my thing throughout my like full four

042years and i think it's getting just even stronger like i think the grades after me are gonna have even more of a say and really see themselves in every day in their everyday school life so mr j did you have do you have something to do you have a response as well or uh yeah okay thank you well i think i mean thanks thanks a lot naomi for for you know being willing to uh sort of be johnny on the spot and um and give that give that experience um yeah i think i think it'll just be important um you know for i think i guess i just i just want to make sure that we are keeping this focused square and that we have also accountability systems built in um so that that's i

043think my primary primary hope and objective and i mean doing a reimagine event you know it may not be that sort of event needs to be repeated but you know hoping again that we really have institutionalized the commitment to centering that student voice yeah and i think i don't want to be like negative or anything but i also want to be real and i think the only you know problem that i've seen or like think that i do like think about a lot is like i like i hope that you guys are able to hear more in the future from students who aren't in student government students who aren't student board rep students who are just you know may not be the loudest person may not always be the person to speak up but because

044i think sometimes we don't hear their voices as much and we get same voices all the time and that's hard but i don't know i don't know there's just work to be done there to hear more people thank you so much for making that statement naomi i mean that resonates a lot um that we do need to be very active as we're seeking out that input it's our job to find them not not for them merely to be heard we may have to find them to give them the chance to be heard thank you naomi so i just oh sorry i just want to thank pete for having for making this request because it really did bring back kind of a lot of thoughts on a lot of work that went in and it was

045really nice to see it all put in one place how much work has been done in the past few years and then thank you to dr daniels for putting this all together it's kind of amazing to see how much has happened and and really everything just spread out and explained um and um i do want to recognize the students that were engaged in that first reimagine rich field because that was kind of a i mean a bunch of us were there it was a really neat event and just like naomi said everybody was talking every kid was talking it wasn't just a popular kid or a kid that normally talks and is in student government the quiet students the way it was everyone was spread out into small groups and in something they were interested

046in talking about i think was really effective and i don't know how you bring that back in but you know that was 2017 2018 2017 2017. so those you know those students are a ways out and so there might be different things now and these students a lot of these students haven't experienced a lot of some of the challenges that those students had so things are going to ebb and flow and change so i think something similar maybe in a different format so that we can get all of the voices like naomi said i think that is really important um a couple other things um the one comment about expansion of curriculum that reflects our diversity is that something you can expand on or is that one of the things where that's in progress i

047would say it's in progress i feel like in fact i know that um strides have been made to ensure that we have texts and novels in front of our students that look like our students even just recently our new elementary director took our um literacy coaches to a um i want to say a bookstore that's that's what comes to mind right now but just you know selectively choose text look like our students and selectively choose texts that are more relevant and most relevant to our students that was just done a couple of weeks ago with dollars that we had from the clsd grant that we received at the beginning of this school year but also under dr roby as well as with tia clayson also curriculum was purchased to look more like our students we're

048going to talk more about it at our d-cac committee meeting but what we've talked about and what we feel like is important is that we bring the curriculum review cycle and that process back to surface because as social studies standards are being revised we need to make sure that we are intentionally purposely and process doing this in a very process oriented way thinking about everything through a lens of equity as we introduce new curricula to our students and faculty and so to make sure that that is done consistently we need to engage in that process and so i would say that of course there is more work to be done but there has been some intentional work done around that and i have seen evidence in our curriculum advisory committee meetings of other books that

049were brought in in other grade levels that were like similar to what you just talked about that was done um weeks ago another thing i'm curious about and this kind of goes along with um what crystal was saying about how we're getting information out the comp information in here about affinity groups and clubs how are those groups because i looked around on the website to kind of see what i could find and i don't know how that gets out to students i know there's more than the five that i saw on there just because i've heard about them but what what do we do to get that information out to kids is that like another airpods thing do we have a systematic way to get that information out so that kids don't have to go

050look for it but that it's kind of presented to them so that they know what's available i think that um at the beginning of the school year which this year has not been you know typical there would be opportunities for students to know about clubs and activities i mean at some schools they have what we what they call first fridays in which they you know all of the clubs and activities that are offered um to students are um advertised and revealed to students and they get a chance just like reimagine richfield to walk around and explore all of the different clubs and activities and so um that used to happen once upon a time i think we can bring it back again this opportunity um to improve that and i'm sorry you could not find

051more clubs and activities but again there's opportunity to leverage our um website leverage airpods leverage our walls beautiful walls in the building and yet have other activities and events to market our activities to students at the beginning of the year and at mid-year and so again that's something we will note and share with our teams and there could have been many things that happened to the students that didn't get to me you know as a board member i that was just the first place i looked students might look elsewhere and i'm going based on my own experience as the former principal so yeah um and then the comments about communicating the changes and improvements to the students you know i i totally agree with that but i also think it would be really good to

052also share that with the students that were involved but that are no longer in the district and i don't know like technically how you do that but a lot of the students that put in that initial work are no longer students in our district and just kind of how we were talking about how that empowers students to use their voice in this in in richfield public schools i think those students hearing about the impact they had for their students following them could empower them to continue to speak up and wherever they are whatever school they're in whatever workplace they're in wherever they are that they would feel more likely to bring things up when they see that people do listen to them so like an alumni newsletter something this could be an emotional video promotional

053video yeah so i think those were the main things i was thinking about but thank you again very much thank you very much very nice it's misha uh it's been a really hard week and um i've spent a lot of time in my feeling brain and i appreciated your presentation for so many reasons but one of them it kind of like shifted me into my thinking brain a little and i think i've needed that so i appreciate that and the uh reimagine richfield that you did with the students predates me so it was so helpful to have that context i didn't know about that like at all so it really were really remarkable to see that impact in such specific ways so i agree with everyone else that as much as we can share that

054with our community so they can see that i also really liked in terms of the the sort of multi-pronged approach with equity i think a lot you were talking about how it's theoretical and i was laughing because i was getting really theoretical like there's a you know spectrum and should you focus on policy or changing hearts and minds and it's like well you got to do both and so i heard both and what you were saying and so that i think is is really smart um and it's clearly resulting in some positive outcomes and one thing in thinking about that sort of next leg and as you work with the consultants i'm kind of spinning in the space of thinking about some alternative success metrics like i will want to know how the equity policy

055impacts our act scores and our graduation rates and i'm also i've also been thinking a lot about all the language around learning loss right now and i think it's to be frank like potentially kind of violent to our students that it's so deficit focused right now for really obvious and good intended reasons but i also think there's been a lot of learning gains and as the students were talking today like it's like what if one metric was how many students participate like participated as an activist from last year today like we'd probably see an increase how many books in our classrooms represent a wide demographic of our students probably seen you know so i'm just thinking of some of those metrics too that matters so much and now might be an opportunity to collect some

056of that baseline data prior to the equity policy uh guidelines and implementation how many students have participated in an affinity group or understand what systemic racism is i just think there's there's so many gains we've had this year and and we'll have hopefully continue to have after this equity policy is implemented and i'd i'd love to capture those two somehow thank you all right i i don't have much that wasn't really said i i do appreciate mr tensing asking for this to be here i thought this was excellent and and the presentation was was really good it's it's tremendous progress we aren't done um i think that's that's really perhaps the the two things that are most important we recognize progress and we recognize we're not done and there there are all manner of things

057i mean from things as uh as simplistic as you know you know naomi asked like do students know where the resources are and and that's interesting right like i'm an adult and i i've read say the high school principles newsletter and i know you know my wife was tremendously impressed with all the resources that are available but that doesn't mean they're commonly known and that's that's been a thing we've we've seen for years and this in the senior social studies presentations about ways to improve and and so we you know there's still things small and large where we can improve it's nice to hear about the curricular improvements and and making the courses relevant you know to the extent that we run into um you know you'd mention the social studies standards changing their their

058standards that aren't within our control that if we can't do what we want within those standards you know one of the exciting things about the seven period day is we can create our own that would be more relevant you know yes we would have a requirement to take you know we we want our students to meet state standards but we have the opportunity to offer things um that would be more more directly relevant and and we could we could stock those courses with whatever we see fit and so there are opportunities you know but you know within the mainstream system perhaps parallel to it in all manner of ways to to make the the experience as relevant for the students as possible so thank you very much it was that was excellent thank you [Applause]

059does anyone last comments before before we move on i i just want to add not necessarily to the presentation but it came up in the conversation but the information that dr yanowski sent out before the demonstrations and everything today how clear and simple that was for people to follow and that compared to the last time our students wanted to to express themselves it was very clear what the expectations were it was very clear that we supported them in that and i really appreciated how nicely that came together and how easy it was for the students to be able to do what they wanted to do so i just wanted to kind of point that out that was a great thing to see in action and happen we have i'd say learned from past communication and

060continued to evolve in our ability to express ourselves and our expectations clearly and each time we have these situations we received feedback on what was clear and what was not and so we continue to try to do that and then of course i will just say we i'm not sure a couple years ago in the previous protests we have had a communications professional like jennifer valley on our team so i'm very thankful for the communication support because it is it is very important not just for our team of adults but it is important obviously for our students and their ability to to understand and express themselves effectively so thank you all right all right so moving on the next item on the agenda is uh also in superintendent update the sro presentation that's right two

061items both in the superintendent update um both directed to topics that are very very um significant in our society at at this time and so uh school resource officers and um this is a continuation of a conversation we had in the fall um and just to update us and review with us um where we are richfield is in the final year of a four-year contract however we did update that contract with some clarified expectations clarified measurements and clarified roles we do have a half-time officer that we partner with in the high school and a half-time officer in the middle school that contract does expire on june 30th of this year and so we went out to try to gather feedback from students in our airpods and so we had an airpod lesson and advisory lesson

062and then had our students give feedback on both our equity policy overall something we'll be hopefully again passing later on this evening and also perspectives on sros and police presence in our school and we've done this in the past but we haven't done anything quite so comprehensive and so we wanted to uh we wanted to pick the ball up there as we think about where to go with those next steps in the future um so as we think about the revised contract we really wanted to clarify what are those proactive measures and let let's be really transparent with our with each other uh we haven't had students in our school to the same level that they have in the past and so the main amount of our policing and our support from our sros and

063our police has been in that proactive community community policing component working to build positive relationships supporting kids and engaging in classrooms online and also in person they also partner and they have guests spoken in classrooms they help to support our overall climate and culture and then obviously um and you could see it today they they work towards safety and so they were actually partnering with our students to help block traffic to make sure that the pathway to city hall today during the protest was safe and so they do a number of things in that in that proactive area that has been the main main component of their work thus far this year additionally as we laid things out in the contract we talked about some of things that were important to us we need them

064trained in our policies and our practices we've clarified that we very strongly prefer plain clothes with a concealed weapon we actually asked for no weapon and that was identified us as a required part of the police uniform that i am a part and our our leadership is part of selection of the sros and also giving feedback and evaluation it's also important to note that they are completely separate from all school disciplines so if students are doing anything in school related to specific discipline that is not a role of an sro and that's not what they're here for um and then we also completely maintain separate data within schools and within the sro and so those are kept separate and so a students discipline connections within schools should they have them does not relate or does

065not connect to a record with the city or with the sros right now with our contract we do have a financial component to it we pay for some of this partnership out of our safe schools levy it's about 75 000 of an overall 340 000 budget um they are restricted funds on school safety but it is important it doesn't have to be on sros it can be on security cameras our own security school counselors and proactive things like social workers so there's a wide range of areas that we can use these funds for um and those are things that are up to the school and the district to to make those decisions they are one piece of a large school safety team one of the things that is important to know is that every school

066in ridgefield public schools has their own safety team they include school administrators social workers psychologists mental health team members special ed and teacher team members building and ground staff and other staff is appropriate so it is a large multi-faceted multi-voice team um and we have different extra people on those teams depending on what school so our secondary seven sro our secondaries have activities directors they also have hall monitors and school security and so there's different components and they're larger teams that are larger schools so as we look to coming back to have that next conversation about sros as we go into the decision of what to do in the future we had an airpod lesson for our secondary students connected as i talked about a little bit earlier about talking about equity our equity policy

067gathering feedback and also on sros and so between our middle school and our high school we had over 750 students respond to a set of questions that also give comments and feedback overall survey responses of our students i like having an sro in my school um we ended up with a number uh neutral somewhere in the 35 to 64 range depending on the question but 61 of our students strongly preferred having a school resource officer at their school and 3.7 percent did not um 52.6 agreed or strongly agreed that they feel safer and 7 disagreed and we just wanted to see just we use this as the level to which we uh support this idea or don't 34.2 percent will probably attend regardless 64 are not affected either way in regard to whether or not

068they're enrolled in richfield and 1.6 of our students are suggesting that if there is an sro present they will not be in our schools next year so there are some of our students with pretty significant strong feelings we also wanted to disaggregate by grade to see are there patterns by grade and are there patterns as we also break down demographics and so we saw we saw results across the board in regard to how people felt in grades and so i'll just let the numbers speak to themselves in regard to grades i did not see any specific pattern that that jumped out feeling safer with a school resource officer in my school again middle school to high school those numbers were also kind of split across the board and continuing on that third question and taking

069a look at how people felt whether or not they would return to our schools we also wanted to look based on racial identity and we allowed our students to identify their race or also preferring not to respond because we wanted to determine is there a racial component we found in terms of i like having a school resource officer at my school those who disagreed was actually overrepresented um six percent of white students responding uh suggested that they do not prefer and that was by far the highest group um with actually our black students um disagreeing at the lowest percentage in regard to um suggesting that they don't like having a school resource officer in our school and then i feel safer with a school resource officer in my school a little bit higher numbers in

070this area where people were again split across the board determining and there really were not racial patterns that were obvious or easy to see in this number um and then similarly um whether or not people would attend or would not attend based on based on having a school resource officer in the data overall um i was frankly given that we had a walkout today for example and this was taken a couple of months ago or a month ago and given the headlines that have been in the press i was actually a little bit surprised about the positive response to sros from our students and their perspective on having the presence in the school um and then we also had some comments um and so we we put in a list of the comments and sample

071comments for you to be able to see on some of the things that people said and again there are some people who feel very significantly unsafe in our schools and sort of one of the things that we would need to reflect on is what is a number and what is that critical number of how many students feeling very uncomfortable with police means we should we should um look at other options or what does that mean overall overall it's also important to note that having an sro in our school or having an sro presence can take a wide range of forms and they do across the metro and so i also took a look at what are other school districts doing and much like most of the things happening in schools things are all over the

072board i don't usually read off slides but i do want to say out loud each of the models that are there because it really illustrates just the wide range and they're we'll call them the sro model and the non-sro model having an sro could be a full-time or part-time uniformed police officer or a full-time or part-time plainclothes police officer and those do exist in different schools in minnesota there is also no an sro model with no specific police presence but they do have one main point of contact when police are needed and so it's sort of an informal sro relationship with the police department and then even though i left this in the sro models there is one with no police presence and absolutely no formal relationship with police and then there's also on non-sro

073safety models that exist with no police presence also in the school that includes added trained safety or security officers a safety team with staff from multiple bargaining units responsible for safety or there are schools that actually have no formal safety or security staff as as part of their team and so there isn't really a clear model that is the recommended or the one that exists in schools um but there is a wide range of things that are utilized in different places and so next steps are to reflect on based on the student feedback what those next steps might be for us as we consider over the coming months what to do as we move into the 2122 school year and so i wanted to pause and gather feedback from the board as i reflect on

074what are the next steps um and what our board perspectives and the next steps for administration all right thank you um i'll offer it to those in the room first to see if anyone has questions or comments for the superintendent please share them so i mean a slide line and i don't know if you want to put it is there one with the overall survey responses was that is your microphone oh yes sorry okay my mic was off uh i want what i'm going to say has a lot to do with a slide that says overall survey responses and i don't know i have this open i don't know which one there it is okay couple things i want to pre-face by saying that i think richfield police is a really uh community engaged uh

075for especially as we look around us minneapolis is like sad to drive by nowadays my thing is i don't believe that police officers belong in schools i think is and this is obviously i'm speaking for myself the things that a lot of the things that i've read from the students and from the reflections i made from last year when we were going going over this a lot of the feedback was based in specific great offices that we have had not overall the ideology right of having one or not when i think of these questions you know do i like having a lot of people say that they do and what's not to like the things that steve mentioned about the officer that we know that they really like and appreciate is doing a lot of

076things that are really uh you know on the counseling side on the talking side and you know that that will get you know it's a different profession uh in a different capacity so when i go to the other question a little bit over half either agree or strongly 40 were neutral uh as how safe do they feel and the most important one is that 64 of students say that they really you know the further down you go the more detached they they they came from you know so when i think again about yes 61 like having the officer because the office is doing really good things right now but it doesn't mean that that's going to be uh i just don't understand what an officer is going to resolve that have calling the research police

077and the driving around town at all times like that's why we'd have yellow coat and red coat so that we can ensure safety that way until a police officer shows up if needed and so i'm really having and i guess this is a strange way to have this conversation because i know my emotions are getting in their way in a way that they would not have happened maybe three months ago but really do they belong in schools i don't think they do i think that there are ways that we can the the really nice things that the offices right now are doing can be passed to a different professional uh those programs are great like let's continue like you know students have someone to talk to that's important uh but i just don't really feel

078that i really possess my peace i'm done all right thank you so i really appreciate you saying all of that because i i personally am really conflicted like i a part of me want someone there to protect our students if something really bad goes wrong and you need someone i don't like to say the things that happen because it it's just too hard to think about but if there's someone there with a gun that could stop someone else with a gun and they're right there as opposed to five minutes away i want that and i get what i totally get what you're saying paula and um and that i think that's why i'm conflicted because i don't know that it's the best thing for our students to have these really nice police officers that they

079build relationships with but when they go out in the world and they're not all like that so you worry about what are we telling our students what messages are we sending by that so i'm nervous about that i um yeah so that i mean that's a big thing for me also when you look at the numbers there are a lot that are neutral but i feel like we need to listen to this student voice that's the whole point of this and i feel like it's the adults that are wanting one thing and the students are leaning another way not necessarily definitively from what i from how i'm looking at it but the other thing is when we talked abou i think what they were presented with was do you like having an sro or do

080you not want to have an sro and i think when we talked about this last year steve we talked about something in between like what could we offer what combination of supports could we offer that included that safety aspect but perhaps spending a certain amount of money on social workers or all of the other supports that we could give to our students but i think re-assessing how we would we would provide the safety of an sro and how we would provide the different things and the needs that they're meeting right now how else could we do it how could we be creative in figuring out a better way to present that like you i've been listening to some stuff on the news about having a having a different group of people who are in charge

081of traffic safety that aren't police officers and all they deal with is traffic safety not other stuff i'm just thinking kind of like that how can we approach it in a completely different way i'd like to see different options besides those two presented to our students and maybe engage them in some ideas of what they think different options might be than an sro or not an sro so the only other question i had was in the responses by racial identity and i sorry for not asking this in advance but can we so if you look at the racial identity what percent of each that responded are are of that race so if 99 if 99 students uh african-american students responded or 99 african-american students responded what percent of all of the african-american american students in

082our secondary level is that like i i can't get a picture of how much of each group actually responded am i unless i'm missing it in there 40 of our students overall in secondary schools um couple of responses to respondus we're talking um so we got we got about 40 percent of our of our airpods responded to the survey um we feel that it was representative overall um and it shows you um it was a higher percentage response and and cassandra put up the slide on slide eight which shows the sheer numbers on and it's small and you have it in the board packet so page eight of the board or of the packet of the presentation shows uh both percentage overall uh but then sheer specific numbers um within each category so i see

083percentages of the grades i don't see how many students you have to guess the numbers based on where those bars are yeah i mean you could numbers but but so so if you estimated 99 black or african american students responded what percent of what percentage of black and african american students is that of our the students in our secondary 14 that's about 40 of the african-american students in our secondary okay so that i think that's important information to look at too okay um and then oh i had one more thing [Music] it'll come to me as soon as somebody so as you're reflecting a couple things i would point out i want to go one slide up to senator to slide seven um so one of the things for us to reflect on as we

084think about what are we providing in terms of proactive supports and then also safety we do have safety teams but this slide was left in so that everybody could see the staffing we are supporting these areas in um that are located at every school so we don't have we have a school administrator um who is part of their program has school safety uh proactive and reactive social worker uh there's a school psychologist that works across buildings and works on all teams we have a grant with mental health therapists and they're looking at individual students and students mental health needs and also serving caseloads a special ed team lead is responsible for the entire special ed team and all students identified with special ed we have a teacher on the team to represent the teacher group

085every building has at least one social emotional staff member perhaps more building and grounds are trained in addition to their roles but also in terms of the physical safety of our physical plant and location and then any other staff that might be appropriate and then again going back to secondary we also have hull monitors and school security that also provides some of those same interventions and supports in addition to the sro and then we also have the activities director and then in the afternoon we also sometimes have site supervisors so the reality is there is a very small window of things that are provided by nsro that are not already provided by our team and there are things that do connect us to the police department so something is happening in the community or in

086the area that is a point of contact that we have that we wouldn't necessarily have our officers yes they do a wide range of proactive things and as you point out there are things that an officer with a badge an armed officer is the only thing that is significantly different than any of our own actual staff members and so they are trained and supervised we don't directly supervise we participate and partner in giving evaluation and feedback but they are specifically contracted and supervised outside of our of our district um i can't remember the other thing i was gonna say we'll go on to someone else yeah i will uh i will say that to me again honoring the student voice is the most important uh sort of my most important takeaway on this um and

087listening to what our students are telling us and i can recognize that there may be nuance in terms of interpreting what our students are telling us um it's it's a thorny it's certainly a thorny question and um for i guess for me one of the one of the pieces that i struggle with is understanding how and again this is probably a personal struggle and probably just reflects maybe my own deficit but i i struggled to understand how [Music] discontinuing a relationship uh helps to heal that relationship so that that's my that's my own i guess sort of peace enter in terms of understanding um you know for thinking about what do we want to do with sros and that's where i've generally been in favor of managing the relationship effectively and defining the goals and

088trying to manage to the goals of our goals of what that relationship are so that's that's sort of been my general position i mean i've i've heard feedback from other my peers tonight that lead me to sort of step back and and think about that um so yeah i i don't know i'm straddling the fence a little bit i think it's very challenging slide 18 please so i think as the reason i put up a wide range of sro models is because um there are there are ways to have sros that are not just a significant financial investment or might not have a an officer on site that doesn't necessarily sever the relationship and so that's one of the things that is there um i also want to say that um and and i think

089listening and hearing voice and obeying voice are two very different things um and so and i say that very clearly because i do believe that it is absolutely our duty and our responsibility to engage and hear all voices and i think it is our our responsibility to reflect on all voices i think it is our responsibility to consider all voices um but then decisions are made one of the reasons i'm asking for input today is i'm wanting to hear all voices from this board um to have more for our team to reflect on as we consider those next steps um and i mean it's hard to say on a microphone but i recall in the last five or six years decisions that have occurred that are very challenging that would suggest that the current assistant

090superintendent and superintendent shouldn't necessarily be in richville public schools anymore there were some voices that suggested that and i think it's one thing to listen reflect and i think it's another thing to obey and i think there is lots of input we put into decisions as we reflect on what is the best course of action to take and so i think it's important for us again to note we take our students voices very seriously we go out and actively engage them as you heard in our reimagined conversation and then what do we do next that is that is the hard choice and that is the thing for us to spend nights away trying to reflect on and figure out what to do yep i mean and i think that the more clarity um at least

091what would presumably help me um with my own thinking is the more clarity that i can have on what we are aiming to accomplish you know what the aims are of the uh of the program and um yeah i mean so then we can sort of have that have that discussion on um you know is this the best way to sort of meet those to sort of meet those aims um that's it yep and i think you know i'm just uh grateful to paula for you know sort of acknowledging that um this is allegra acknowledged it as well that this isn't one where segregating that emotion mind and the reason mind or not so you're eating them but blending them to get to some sort of balanced state of state of mind on this is

092important um i will admit that i when it comes to feedback have a huge bias towards qualitative feedback so for me in um this data set i'm most drawn to the sample comments i feel like that's providing me with more of the data i was looking for um i think quantitative data is really helpful when it's like a yes or yes or no question or choosing from a bunch of options and i just think this is more complex kind of like christine was mentioning um so for me when i look at the sample comments i'm like oh that's like stuff i would get out of a focus group and um feels more helpful to me so i appreciate comments of my colleagues and for me like the survey data feels like a data point that

093we now have and i agree that's very complex [Music] about a month ago um how many students we have now in the high school um well there are about 1050 students in the high school and 850 so we have somewhere in the 1900 secondary students and we have 750 that responded yeah i mean i think we don't have any reason to believe that that was a but i mean it's biased because you were asking students like how do you feel i don't know how different more than 50 percent of them do fear and from the ones i do know i do know that a lot many are ambivalent and yes like this is quantity and it's just a data point so i appreciate that we get to uh you know publicly uh you know share

094how you know we're thinking about this and it's good that we don't need to make a decision today so put your mic was on so yeah okay so yeah that's that's all i have i just wanted to get that uh better understanding of like how many students with the high school in the middle school and had a chance to uh who took the time to to take the survey thank you mr rocky do you have comments or questions i do and i also just want to sort of share a reflection which is how difficult it is to be um not in the room when the other board members are in the room and it's giving me tremendous empathy for naomi and tyler who are doing this pretty much at every meeting it's a really challenging

095dynamic um and i say that to say i'm also really eager to hear what they have to say and hopefully just a moment um i appreciate the 700 plus students who took the survey last month and gave us um some of those quantitative and qualitative data i also appreciate the richfield police department for revisiting the last year of the contract and working with us to revise it um and making some of the changes that we felt were pretty important to make in just the immediate short term and so want to acknowledge that that is appreciated um i think to one of the things that steve said like i certainly understand the difference between hearing students and obeying students and i don't think any of us are particularly confused on that point but i think what

096i am feeling and it sounds like hearing from a number of other people is that um the way that this survey is being presented is to me feels like it's still within binary of yes we have sros or no we don't have sros and are asking students very either or type questions as opposed to i think gathering things that are more about values and priorities and interests that i think could help illuminate other possibilities or opportunities which yes could still include having a resource officer in the building but that's that's the type of thinking that i'm interested in and and i think hoped to see so i think i'm i'm looking for a deeper level of understanding of what our students are feeling and why and i believe very very deeply that our students are

097capable of having those conversations um on their own and with us and thinking about the costs and the benefits of these issues and i just don't feel like i'm getting that yet um this survey feels pretty similar to what we got last summer we just got more responses which is great and important um but it feels insufficient on on its own to really for me have what feels like a deeper and more authentic understanding of where our student community is so that i can feel better informed as a board member who is in a position of power to make this decision chris crystal just this is tim just to clarify are you saying that better questions would be aligned with finding out what the the goals and needs of the students are and then we

098determine if an sro model fits it or accomplishes those goals and needs or are you saying something else actually operating within kind of the traditional model as well i i think part of what i'm saying is a survey in itself feels like an insufficient way to have the conversation at this point i feel like we have a lot of survey data i want to hear more about like what are the things that help students feel more safe having an sro in the building like what are other ways that maybe they could feel that level of safety like i don't know the answers to those questions um and i from what i can tell we're not asking those questions um and we're not going to a deeper level of i think synthesis and um comprehension that

099i like i deeply believe that our students do and are capable of on a daily basis thank you yeah responding to that and also pairing that with what uh miss malek had to say yes they're um obviously this has been a very non-traditional year and we had talked about looking at some different models um and obviously we're in an odd time um i will just transparently say i had not expected the survey data to look like it did um i actually expected our students to say they felt very uncomfortable with police in the schools um and looking at a non-sro safety model and then developing from there um and so um given the non-traditional school year and the situation we find ourselves in which is there is some form of something that seems supported by

100students it seems like we are in a place administratively to try to figure out more information um and what is what is that safety component and what is that all about and how do we make sure our students feel safe um and and to take those next steps from there mr jake do you have questions or comments no no i do not thank you miss ferguson uh i do um so i kind of wrote something out so i'd be prepared but um i personally have not had any negative interactions with them i've got used to having the officer at school ever since i moved to ridgefield in middle school and it's been fine but i also totally understand people who think it's wrong because some people have had life-changing and perspective changing interactions with police

101whether that was before last year or um feelings that have been developed now after what's been playing out in front of all our faces since last may um but in my opinion i think the big difference between police officers being appropriate at school versus not literally relationships like that they know that they are not working in the streets that they're working with people's kids and that the officers we choose find value in that and understand the shifts they have to make to serve in that position which sounds like a requirement as workfield but at the same time i think there's a lot more levels to it um so i don't know it's hard to fully speak on i think i could honestly probably talk with all you guys about it for hours it's like a

102really hard decision which leads to my question is like when does this decision have to be made and like what if there are any plans to hear like for more people before then because like um miss bracky and other people said i think um the surveys we have like they're too broad yeah so timeline wise the contract expires june 30th and we're under no obligation to do anything on that timeline because schools don't start back up until day after labor day and so i'd say our biggest timeline to work with our students and dr clarkson does this through safe and supportive schools and we have a bunch of other methods by which we can gather some some feedback from students um is kind of those next month and a half of which we're in school

103and so we kind of had that time frame to gather feedback and info and then i'd say early summer is around which we should be making some decisions administratively to bring to the board for recommendation as far as plans my goal is to have gathered some input feedback from the board and i think if i'm understanding and i always like to restate out loud my understanding to make sure we're all on the same page is that um i should go out and gather some additional feedbacks more qualitative try to figure out what is it that makes us feel safe try to figure out um some more nuanced data around sros and sros in our school and also talk about some possible models um we haven't the slide you see up slide 18 we have not

104walked through that with students to be clear that this is a set of different models that are out there and then there are ideas that might not be on that slide to have that conversation and so i believe there's a safe and supportive schools meeting coming up might even be later this week coming up in may and so we certainly can gather that information and are certainly under no no deadline to make any quick decisions my goal here was to get those next steps and i feel like i do have the information to guide me into leading our team to gather that more information that'll help help us take next steps okay thank you and then this is totally just a thought and i don't know if you guys are able to do this but

105have you guys ever like as a board went into classrooms and like could you guys do that on this topic because i think um hearing directly like face to face from students before we end school could be really important um on making this decision i love that idea i do too and naomi thank you as always for just saying everything i think that all of us are feeling you are really really deeply appreciated of course no i i i have almost nothing left to add i think they only covered my main concerns and and that the whole the whole thing is built around the individuals that are assigned as sros right we have input but it really depends on on you know when we have good ones it's gone well um and we have to

106manage it the relationship is really you know as naomi had said the relationship is key and if the officers have value and serving within our buildings within the setting with the young people that we have then then they can go very favorably and anything short of that can go just disastrously right we've had enormous frustrations in the past for things where the the officer assigned to the role did not seem to be a fit and i've talked about the numbers and before like if we have 50 officers in richfield and they we have two that we're using two of them and they turn over every 12 to 18 months and rotate out of this sro role because it's not really career building is rpd really changing how they hire with us as a focus if

107we need a constant infusion of two officers really every year every year and a half who are perfect for this role and if they have that mindset and that's how they hire then it could go really well perhaps but that doesn't seem to be what what the driving force behind the the applicant pool and and how historically i i don't believe how law enforcement is hired and so it's not with relationship building within schools as as the primary focus well but it is i mean most places go do look for people that are interested in relationship building that is it is an important part of being a police officer but also um the la the last sro that we have that is wrapping up has been with us for four years so that they aren't

108all necessarily but we went through two or three in the middle school in the span of 18 months some of them after 18 months some of that was due to concerns but yes correct i'm just saying it doesn't always have to be it doesn't but i mean you know no i know but i'm an optimist sorry we rotate through it we rotate through a person and and so it's um the good ones have been great you know and and though short of great have perhaps been a source of frustration and and that's that's where where the options on slide 18 and the input of students and and and hearing what they said steve said you know like when a decision is ultimately made like there are definitely decisions and nearly all of them can't satisfy

109everyone we hear them but we can't obey them all at the same time a single decision cannot meet all of the inputs provided and so we have that to look forward to when i i think putting a little focus on the work that we did to um renegotiate how we our contract was set up for this past year and how willing the richfield police department was to work with us on that i don't see them changing i really feel like that they'd be more than willing to to continue to work with us on whatever whatever model we kind of come up with with our student input and and all of ours but i because i think that changes that were made for this last year were were very strong and i i think were really

110good for our students and good for richfield or for the police department so right so i will push back a little bit to say well the contract that we have is more explicit the behaviors of officer hoym and officer docks who have been wonderful sros has not hugely changed they have been highly proactive highly positive members um and so i think the conversation when we go back to students um will be that that larger qualitative conversation um and i'd like us to remember there is that large safety team and so even though we are getting relationship building from police we have many staff that are actually our team members that are our staff that were specifically hired for that that they are not hired for policing-based roles they're hard for relational roles and as i

111have heard from a couple of people giving input if we were to be hiring staff for relational roles they may not overlap with the exact same people who are our high-quality police officers and so i think we have to get that that information but we also have to remember we have many of the roles filled by sro that we're describing by our own staff member and so that separate component of the sro itself is about a police officer with uh that brings what a police officer brings positively and negatively and so i'll take that out with our team and we will figure out how to gather the input um so we can make a recommendation for next steps to this group yep so quick question um obviously um you know thinking about this in the

112context of school safety and the the our students experience of feeling safe when they're inside our buildings you know has been i think at least for me that's been primarily the mental model that i've been using just dawned on me that really the sro uh role is a little i believe it's kind of broader than that um than just the the experience of students within the buildings but is actually really part of the uh of our rpd's job to maintain public safety across the entire community is that would that be correct in that belief um yes i believe that is the goal of community policing as i've met with the city i think it's really important to separate and our hard part is to reflect on what is the school district role and responsibility and

113then what is the city and sro and police department role and responsibility right so there's a very significant investment and officer hoiman docs do a great job of building strong community partnerships relationships to keep everybody safe from a policing perspective that may or may not be a district goal that is absolutely a police department goal and so we meet you know if you think of a venn diagram there's police goals there are rich field goals and then there is some overlap um and our goal is to as we get that feedback from students think about that overlap component um of what what that would be connected to the police force to try to try to get that deeper understanding yeah i mean at least hypothetically um were we to were we to learn that this

114particular role is extremely important to the ability of the police department to fulfill its job i mean that that feels like information that would be pertinent um we don't we don't know that we don't know that one way or the other right okay these are the things that i'm gonna be thinking these are the things i'm going to be thinking about and to ask you back when you bring these plans so my first question was uh things i'm thinking big picture maybe rhetorical question do they belong in schools uh who else can do the good actions that the sros we have now are performing these are in for police officers from the students as we think about deeper questions that i agree with from both naomi and miss bracky uh why does he feel to

115i think when some when you're putting uh a police officer in a building it's kind of like when you put a lock in your house or is that your with the expectation that you don't want a stranger to come in right so you're kind of like predisposed so are we telling do they feel that by having an officer there are we thinking that that our students are going to commit and i know there's like strangers coming in too but there's a lot of things that how do they feel about that i i mean when i was a teacher i really try not to think about uh strangers coming in the building because if i did i wouldn't go to work like uh ever but i also know that i don't know i just i'm trying

116to weigh the the potential benefit as stated by students and staff and people who are in these buildings versus the negative consequences and the messages that we're sharing and like how inconsistent or consistent we are showing up in front of our students as we talk about equity but then we also talk about this so i think you outline why it is very complex and why there is a great deal of data for us to gather so we will we will work on that all right well thank you everyone for the questions and comments um very appreciated i think we will move now to the last part of the superintendent update which is commendations that's right i'm going for the world record for longest superintendent update ever although i have we have been longer than that

117in the past i just want to shout out to jonathan heyer jonathan heyer helped us with this survey and he actually created the airpod advisory lessons and because of his attention to detail um we were able to get over 750 student responses to the survey he actually created a powerpoint created a lesson plan for our 612 advisory and airpod teachers to be able to present um and advisory teachers didn't have to craft their own lessons so we had some standardization and some training about what this looked like and so we appreciate and want to throw a positive shout out to jonathan heyer way to go jonathan and thank you for your work all right thank you okay we've made it through the superintendent update we are now at the consent agenda that the consent agenda

118is a collection of routine matters that we consent to pass in bulk with no real questions comments or discussion around before seeking a motion to approve the consent agenda i'll pause for a minute to see if there's any items on the consent agenda a board member wishes to remove for additional conversation seeing and hearing none will entertain a motion i will move that the consent agenda as presented a second we have a motion by miss malik in a second by ms smieshak any final discussion excellent i'll ask miss malik to conduct a role call vote um ms cole aye mr tensing aye ms meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes i and chair paulus aye and the consent agenda is approved excellent moving forward we we enter the old business first item before us

119is i believe policy 107 electronic use and communications and administrative guidelines 107.1 and 107.2 that is correct um and after um again we are on our third reads we've gotten board input we also have taken them to dk dtac um and also the technology department and the communications department and dtac i hate when i do that um his district technology advisory committee um and so we have updated policies and guidelines to come along with best practices we also have had our social media policy double checked um and reviewed by legal counsel along with other areas of this policy and so we present this to you tonight in hopes of a possible pass all right um i'll offer to those who are in the room the opportunity for questions or comments feedback on policy and the

120guidelines miss brocky questions comments feedback on policy 107. i just wanted to say i appreciated the new language around social media uh in that guideline i think it is very logical clear and helpful so thank you all right uh miss ferguson questions comments on policy 107 no thank you mr jake no thank you all right i have none as well so just um at this stage this is a third read it is we could move the item if we wished considering there aren't a lot of questions and everybody seemed satisfied i would be willing to move board policy 107 as presented second all right we have a motion from miss malek in a second by ms cole last chance for discussion seeing and hearing none i will pull the board ms cole hi mr tensing

121hi miss meshach aye ms brocky hi the clerk votes i and chair paulus i and policy 107 and administrative guidelines 107.1 and 2 are approved thank you everyone next up is equity policy 115 also a third or fourth read and for passage fourth and that's right possibly final read which will certainly not bring this to an end because then our team which has already done some informal beginning work on guidelines we'll go to work on guidelines to make this policy a reality um and so we are pushing forward tonight equity policy of which it has had multiple reads it has gone through airpod advisory with feedback from a large number of students multiple reads and safe and supportive schools admin and teachers have seen it and so we have gotten a wide range of input

122and feedback on this policy and then we'll really begin digging in to work on guidelines once passed um and then sorry to answer a question from from last meeting um the goal as we begin to get guidelines is to advertise that we do have the equity policy out and now we are working on guidelines and so we'll use that sort of as the informal communications and launch of our equity policy um and as with all policies we will launch it in full force in the fall with full training but the communication around it will begin in haste once passed as we begin to engage people in that guideline work thank you for that clarification um does anyone have questions or comments on policy 115 as presented just a huge thank you to the team of

123people that managed to put this together and have hit vetted through so many groups of people it's well done promise malik said thank you yeah so one of one of the items that um has been i think discussed in in previous reviews and um i think is addressed is the um so the much of the policy is defining equity from a racial perspective however we know and the policy also defines equity broader more broadly um than just simply um marginalizing groups on the basis of racial characteristics or racial identity i don't even want to say that there's such a thing as racial characteristics because we know that race is such a screwed up concept in a social construct that is impossible to define um so at any rate we do talk about intersectionality and then

124which i think is trying to get at that particular um uh you know sort of breadth of the definition of equity at the same time we also um we also specifically talk about you know making some definition of terms for example weaponization is specifically defined [Music] when it's directed against communities of color um i don't know if that is specific to that term or if weaponization could be used um against other marginalized groups rather than if if not on the basis of color or if that is important i mean i think that you know this could be just simply picking nits and it's not a reason to delay the policy but we can probably um be more broad in terms of the guidelines um we do have areas of broadness i think weaponization is a

125term that is generally used specifically how it has been used to marginalize communities of color there are definitely areas of i'll just call them ism at the moment that have occurred to all marginalized communities within schools and within society i just love you john yeah i mean tyler um however some of the things that have specifically occurred in education have been very targeted towards communities of color um and so i think it is in there very specifically to call that piece out um whereas other areas um i'll do that expansiveness of what you're talking about yeah so it's a both and yep yep gotcha thanks mr rocky questions for comments um yeah i would say briefly you know i am i'm proud of this i'm proud of the work i'm proud of the language i'm

126proud of the boldness of the language and i think to what steve has already said obviously the work of implementation and accountability is yet to come and that's something that i'm really eager for us to continue talking about and that includes holding ourselves accountable as a board and then i would say it also just feels um really fitting that we are passing this tonight given what is currently taking place as naomi mentioned a while ago in our world right now um and it it has been a long time coming um but i am glad that we are here and look forward to the work to come thank you crystal um miss ferguson questions or comments uh no thank you but i love everything that you just said miss mr j questions or comments no no

127thank you all right and don't worry about the the prior thing that happens on one of my work calls probably six times a day yeah i apologize it happens to all of us um last chance for comments otherwise we could entertain a motion on policy 115 the equity policy i just wanted to say that um reiterate what crystal said in terms of language and just being proud of it i think when it comes to equity sometimes especially around policy things gets it are defined so broadly and it's so watered down that it's meaningless and i think that we are setting a bold policy for our district and i look forward to the next steps all right if there are no more questions or comments um and and people are satisfied we could move the item

128i would move approval of the equity policy i'll second we have a motion from ms malek in a second by ms meshech last call for questions or comments seeing and hearing none i will pull the board ms cole aye mr tensing hi miss meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes eye and chair paulus aye and equity policy 115 is approved excellent all right moving forward we have policy 521 graduation requirements um this is recommended for passage upon the second read although it's maybe our third view of the language itself because we did view it first as a possible as a guideline correct and finalizing and tightening it up just to clarify the temporary change to graduation requirements based on coba 19 and this is one of the areas where we did hear student voice

129and it did make a lot of sense to make some changes in regard to elective credits or some of the credits that are required above and beyond the state we have some of those expectations because of our commitment to pe and health but also to our commitment to the seven period day and providing all those options for students which provide them electives that are many opportunities beyond what the state and some other schools are able to provide at this time however we are looking to waive that make the credit adjustments um temporary on a four-year basis for students impacted by covets so 9th or 12th graders so you will see this in front of you with the temporary waiver integrated into the policy as section 3 and having checked with the msba this was their

130best suggestion we go to how to integrate it effectively into our policies and practices all right thank you does anyone in the room have questions or comments um on this and we talked about it previously looking around miss baracki questions comments mr jake all right miss ferguson no all right thank you i have nothing additional to add i think we've talked about it the last couple meetings and and the the reason for it and why it was necessary and also that i appreciate the student input on it um and understanding you know i think someone had brought up last time one of the the hallmarks of or one of the first warning signs of someone's uh positive progress towards graduation is a single failure or being a credit deficient as a ninth grader i think

131it was allegra you brought that up and so thank you for reminding us of that and just as as a as we complete um our first full year in the in the horribleness of dealing with with covet you know we're going to need some some grace and some grace period here so i will move the policy as presented a second we have a motion for mr tensing in the second by miss meshach last call for discussion seeing him hearing none i will pull the board ms cole hi mr tensing hi miss meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes i and chair paulus aye and policy 520 and graduation requirements is approved thank you everyone um last item of old business is policy 406 professional learn professional learning a second read easy everyone breathe easy

132really easy that's right and so this is just presented for that uh refamiliarization um to show you updates um to show you that we're including in person and virtual experiences um and also sharing out and doing some updating in regard to our language and so there's just some minor changes uh projected into this policy and so we wanted those before you tonight um so that you will have full familiarity when we bring it back for uh recommendation for passage hopefully at our next meeting all right does anyone in the room have questions or comments on the proposed revisions to policy 406 and guideline 406.1 crystal questions or comments i'm good thank you all right um miss ferguson questions and comments on policy 406 no thank you mr jake no all right thank you everyone that

133is a second read so we can bring it back at our next meeting um if anyone realizes that the next meeting if they they do have concerns or edits or other things please feel free to bring those forward at that time or you could email them to the administration before the next meeting perhaps we could get them included before we convene again all right we are into new business man now we're flying new business policy 651 interscholastic athletics and activity program and administrative guidelines 651.1 all right and so we have two activity policies these actually will go later this week um between the first read of us and second read to the activities advisory um and this is just a reminder of why we have our interscholastic athletic and activity programs um what they're for

134why we do them and also what do we do in regard to participation and and how do we make some of those decisions and so that is up in front of you for a first read tonight and you will see it revised at our next meeting all right so if if people have edits um that are minor or please feel free to email those you can email them to the superintendent otherwise if you have comments that you'd like to share with the group at large at this time please feel free mr hockey anything to share i was just gonna say i'm looking forward to the conversation with the activities advisory council and plan to be there for that so um eager to hear what they have to say right i think it's probably premature for

135us to start word smithing until we get that feedback isn't it yeah miss ferguson any questions or comments no thank you and mr jay no thank you all right thank you all right that will move forward then um and look at the next item which is addition and deletion of interscholastic activity offerings uh this is a first read of policy 652 yes and so this is a relative ditto of my earlier comments this will go to activities advisory and this is really how we decide to add or delete activities in relation to participation and in relation to how and why we have uh viable programs and how do we make sure of that and so again we're going to talk about this later this week in activities advisory um and we'll get feedback at that

136time or from board members at any point like an important clarification for people who pay attention to us only intermittently this is a a regular review of standard policies it's just in the cycle it has nothing to do with any any programs that are that that we're being requested to consider for addition or deletion thank you for clarifying yes yes this is just the review services this is just regular review cycle um mr hockey questions and comments no the one thing i was gonna just make sure that people also know is that as part of this review cycle language is going to be updated that is you know outdated with respect to our gender inclusion policy for example like there there were some examples in this that i know we're going to need to change

137so that is also built into the process which is why none of us are explicitly talking about that level of detail right now either a lot has changed since 2013. yes thank you um miss ferguson questions or comments no mr jake no all right thank you all right so this brings us to the the the collection of change orders for the the construction project in various buildings and we are joined at the table hold on craig give me a moment here by the chief human resources and administrative officer of the district mr craig holsey very good thank you very much um i have two or four buildings that have change orders um requested and we'll review each one of those and then respond to any questions and vote on them separately uh the first building

138is sheridan hills facilities project change order number for a total of six hundred forty nine dollars for some painting and cocking of some existing window wood windows and adjustments to door floor transitions uh that project is now at nine million nine hundred sixty thousand one hundred twenty three dollars at the richfield high school we have change orders 58 59 and 60 for a net increase of sixty thousand nine hundred fourteen dollars and ninety nine cents change order fifty eight is twenty two thousand three hundred four dollars for some rerouting of the plumbing and gas lines as well as the credit for some damaged gymnasium micro microphone wiring uh we also have change order 59 for a total of a total edition of 19 622 dollars and 33 cents for various mechanical work including fireproofing and

139uh sewage ejectors and exhaust fans and then change order number 60 is for eighteen thousand nine hundred eighty eight dollars and six cents um which has to do with some structural steel revisions to the trash and closure gates as well as some exterior doors on the north end uh that project is now is now at 37 million thousand nine hundred fifty six dollars and thirty three cents and [Music] at richfield middle school we have change orders 16 and 17 for a net increase of 53 263 and 21 cents change order 16 is for 34 275 dollars for the replacement of piping to the auditorium air handling unit um and change order 17 is 1888.6 for minor architectural and existing finish modifications in the band and choir spaces that project is now at 17 million 376

140759.89 and our final change order is at central facilities project change order number two for a net increase of 5 873.94 for modifications to the toilet heights as well as in the restrooms as well as door and hardware editions that project is now at four million three hundred sixteen thousand sixty three dollars and four cents and just a quick summary of our contingency balances across all buildings and kind of a status of that financial update um right now we have three buildings centennial ritual dual language school and stem that are considered complete on the financial status at 100 percent we have richfield high school which is projected to be about 99 percent complete in the financial status and then we have um the middle school which is at 80 percent complete sheridan at 70 percent

141complete in central at 20 complete we have a remaining current contingency balance of 939 186 dollars and 70 cents across those three buildings and so we are on track we also are starting to recognize some of the rebates that are associated with some of the mechanical mechanical work and funding in those areas as well so with that if there are questions i will work to respond to those otherwise we ask your approval of those for sets of change orders all right all i can think of on the central school is in the movie elf the the early scene where buddy the elf is in the restroom says have you seen these toilets they're ginormous so we're getting larger toilets for more adults adulthood restaurants great yeah and that that's the building that we're working because

142it's cross-functional both as adult space as well as early childhood space and kind of working to make sure the right restrooms are in the right spaces and stuff super um does anyone in the room have questions about any of the change orders as presented ms barack questions about any of the change orders no questions thank you mr j questions about the change orders as presented no no thank you and ms ferguson questions about the change orders as presented no thank you i myself have none um and so the ask is that we would approve them in order by building and so the first on the list if if someone would move the item is sheridan hills change order number 21. i would move approval of sheridan hills change order number 21. second we have a

143motion by ms malik in a second for mr tensing final discussion on that item seeing and hearing none i will pull the board ms cole aye mr tensing aye ms meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk boats eye and chair palace aye and change order 21 at sheridan hills is approved next item up is the high school change order number 58 through 60. i'll move the change order 58 through 60 for ritual high school a second a motion by mr tensing in the second by miss meshach last call for discussion on that item seeing seeing and hearing nano will pull the board ms cole aye mr tensing aye ms meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes eye and chair paulus aye and all right change orders 58 through 60 are approved for the rich

144at the richfield high school project bridgefield middle school change orders number 16 and 17. i move to approve the rms change orders 16 and 17 as presented i'll second we have a motion by ms meshech in a second by ms malek any final discussion on those uh on the change order 16 and 17 at rms scene and hearing none i will pull the board ms cole hi mr tensing aye ms meshach aye ms brocky i the clerk votes i and chairpolis hi and richfield middle school change order 16 and 17 are approved last change order is the central school change order number two i will move central school change order 2. a second motion by mr tensing and a second by miss malik any final discussion i just want to thank you for the elf

145reference you're welcome in light of that single comment i will pull the board ms cole aye mr tensing aye ms meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes i and chair paulus aye all right central change order number two is approved at long last to satisfy our loyal attendee we are moving to the facilities and transportation collective bargaining agreement for years 2020 21 and 2021-22 very good thank you very much uh yes i do have for your approval tonight the collective bargaining agreement with our facilities and transportation group represented by seiu local 284 before i miss my opportunity i do want to thank the union stewards peter fitzpatrick bob gorski as well as the negotiations team on this group for the work in this area as well as the broad facilities and transportation team for

146their work in the district um this has obviously been a different year for this group um as it has been for a lot of different people and just that support that they have had working through this so with this just kind of to highlight those changes it represents a two percent increase on the pay rate schedule for specialist positions um and really across the board we did do market adjustments for school bus drivers and building cleaners as part of this um when we did an analysis of others in similar positions um we also worked to align the laundry worker in this contract with the building cleaner group for consistency across that group and we added five cents to sep to step six of the specialist positions um this was a step six that we added

147in the last collective bargaining group with a small differential and so we just added a nickel to that differential this time we increased boiler license stipends adjusted the uniform allowance and established some minimum uniform inventory expectations provided flexibility for the district in the initial placement of staff had a variety of clarifying languages regarding eligibility for benefits and part paid time off eligibility and opportunities for our bus drivers in that area we revised language throughout to move building cleaners and laundry worker sections into the main agreement of the section i'm really contract cleanup i would say that helped create better understanding of that contract specifically updating language in the medical benefits section and also provided inclusion of a memorandum of agreement for a collaborative work group to address scheduling and staff assignments uniform guidelines time and

148hour monitoring and other items so really working together outside of negotiations with this team to improve our work and efforts for the district in the second year of a contract we had another two percent increase for all specialist positions uh did an additional market adjustment over that two-year period for bus drivers and building cleaners and we also adjusted the longevity steps with some increase in that area as well so with that we ask for your approval and again thanks to the negotiations team for seiu local 284 peter fitzpatrick who's in the room and has managed through this whole board reading as well as that team for their efforts thank you mr holty does anyone on the board have questions or comments from mr holtgy yeah once again i think just to sort of second craig's

149recognition of you know sort of what good partners we've had you know with seiu and uh just thank you guys for your work miss brocky questions comments i would just echo that thank you and and thank you peter for being with us for this entire time in the boardroom miss ferguson questions or comments no thank you and mr jay questions and no all right so i i would i would echo all the thanks to everyone involved in the steady leadership and and just the groundedness in it um you know it's hard to imagine what we do without the people within this contract and and really just the past years has been probably insane for them and so i'm very very appreciative of everything they've done it is probably perhaps our most diverse in terms of

150role contract you know like the yes the teachers have a very diverse collection of teachers but they're all teachers that this one spans really a wide array of roles and so there's a lot of personalities and a lot of wants to to manage and so thank you to everyone involved for um moving the ball forward with that we will entertain with that i will move that we approve the uh master agreement with seiu local 284 as presented oh second we have motioned by mr tensing in the second by miss meshech last call for discussion scene and hearing none i will follow the board ms cole aye mr tensing hi miss meshach aye ms brocky aye the clerk votes i and chair paulus hi and we have approved the contract with facilities and transportation collective bargaining

151agreement for 20 20 21 to 20 21 22. thank you all right we move forward to advance planning um the first up on the advanced planning typically is is a legislative update apparently there are things going on at the legislature and various other places so we'll look to the superintendent and and mr tensing to see if there's anything that they wish to share with us my understanding uh from the latest uh news from the capitol is that budget bills you know have been mocked up amsd has shared with us some of the projections on budget bills the reality is is that we are still a long ways apart between the house and the senate in terms of what they're looking to do for k-12 budget and so it's i guess premature for us to really

152have any sense of where we're going to end up it seems that this is uh you know presumably going to need to go i mean obviously we'll go to a conference committee and reconciliation and i mean we'll see kind of how that process plays i don't know steve if you have any other insight to add but it seems to me that it's really a bunch of numbers that may not mean a whole lot right it's just important to note the house governor um are unified in approximately 750 million dollar 750 yeah million dollar education budget um of new funding and the senate is around 150 million and so there are very differing perspectives on the funds that should be available to schools um and so it will be important for us to watch because those

153could be very significantly different in regard to the impact on our schools and our school system all right thank you does anyone else have any items on the legislative front all right with that we'll move to information and questions from the board does anyone have items they wish to share or discuss so i will i will share a physical planning advisory met this past monday and the fiscal planning advisory committee group had wanted to review our enrollment report um which mr holdey shared with them the there was then discussion around some of the trends that are present in that enrollment report specifically around the market share trend which we are seeing you know if you use that particular metric we do tend to see a decline well we are seeing and i tend to we

154are seeing a pretty steady decline in market share um over the last eight years or so which is the span of time that for which we have this particular data being reported um i think the other element is that we also know uh you know when this board has reviewed those reports that our total numbers in terms of enrollment are showing some some decline and that also is appears to be as a trend um as opposed to a um you know sort of ups and downs so just from the standpoint of reporting back to the board i can let you know that the members of that committee did share some concerns around those particular trends and uh we had some discussion and some dialogue around how to try to interpret them which is a whole

155nother issue um and then some dialogue around uh are these actionable numbers uh you know what does this mean and you know sort of how do we kind of put all this into perspective obviously at some point in time i mean the observation was made by members of fiscal planning that at some point in time if we're continuing to see declining enrollment we you know cross a threshold where our capacity to continue to mean to sort of continue to operate with the various fixed costs that are not necessarily pupil dependent costs would become less sustainable and so that was brought up as a concern i think that one of our challenges is that we don't know what that number looks like you know is this something that we're staring at um right over the horizon

156or is it actually a ways further off than that so um given the uncertainties around a number of pieces with you know with that enrollment report i mean the things that are not uncertain you know the declining enrollment is i think pretty clear that's not uncertain um the uncertainty i think really is around the interpretation and the response and so members of the fiscal planning advisory committee had requested to have some conversation and some dialogue about this at the board level and so that was something that i told them that i'd bring back to this group whether we wanted to consider a study session or some other um open meeting format um to sort of facilitate that dialogue yeah no i that that that's good feedback i know that we have discussed that pretty much

157every year when the where we are in enrollment um report comes out and it's it's it's it's a i would call it a problem and it's a problem that we don't have a clear solution for obviously otherwise we'd be implementing it it is true though that we've recognized it as a problem i believe that is part of the vision card uh one of the vision cards for operational side or whichever vision card it landed on but market share was certainly one of the the figures to track and and of course the goal is to make it is to is to arrest the you know the pat the path that it's on and turn it around um it is tough i mean i know we we surveyed extensively we got a hundreds of responses from people

158who've left us voluntarily two years ago and i can't say i can point to anything about it that that suggested actionable it was a lot of feeling and yeah we just left you know we love we loved our experience and we we took our experience somewhere else and um that's it that alone is is not the the end the end of the discussion and so i'd be happy to hear more about it um in terms of the timing of when we would have that discussion are you suggesting i mean uh i guess we could talk about when when we would have it and how much time the administration needs to to pull certain bits of information together it's it's probably a pretty data heavy yeah i think it could be a data heavy and and

159i think that so my understanding and craig steve go ahead and jump in if i'm wrong on this but my understanding is that we could certainly gather information from pure districts in terms of the absolute enrollment numbers the the market share number is one that many districts we don't know of any other districts that necessarily calculate that that value and that's a value that's maybe unique to richfield in terms of this is something that dr slaughterbach had been interested in so many years back you know as far as a way of sort of that was kind of perhaps how that originated in our own data collecting so we may not really be able to understand um you know have apple's apples comparisons on some of that stuff but it could be useful to understand um

160you know one of the one of the pieces that you know as we were having this conversation with fiscal planning one of the pieces that became evident is it seems to me that there could be really a lot of if we think of just high level drivers of the um of the enrollment choices of families there certainly could be as many individual drivers just like you mentioned tim as there are families making choices some of those drivers are directly under our control some of those so they may have to do with policies or strategic choices that we're making as a district and are things that actually would be actionable some of them perhaps have to do with essentially faithful implementation of our policies because we all know that it only can sometimes take one experience

161for a particular family or student you know to sort of turn them off or lead them to make a different choice and then some of those drivers could very well be macro level sort of social drivers that really are well outside of our control and are kind of functioning across our entire community across society um on the whole and so to the extent that we could think of or kind of brainstorm what are ways that we can try to understand a little bit better what some of those different drivers might be whether it's just simply reviewing with our other community members in fiscal planning the results of the morris leatherman survey that was done whether it's gathering additional data looking at comparison districts or some of our peers out there in sort of the metro

162it's all stuff that it's i think it seems like it could you know to give the administration a couple of months of lead maybe seems reasonable when does that mean again uh well we're meeting you must be meeting me soon we're doing a happy budget thanksgiving second monday so there are so couple of quick comments so there are twice a year where we do have this conversation in relation to vision cards and where we are in enrollment i guess the question i would have because um chief holgie shared with me the conversation that had with that pack and so did you mr tensing and the question i would ask is is around the level of priority and prioritization the board would suggest um i would suggest that if i was given the directive to spend

163an expansive amount of money on advertising if i was directed to transport every child from door to door and pick them up at their house we could increase enrollment by spending an incredible amount of money um as one option so we are doing a huge amount of strategies in this area and so one of the things before we do entertain a larger conversation i would ask the board to reflect on what level of priority this is and what types of sacrifices financially or staffing or otherwise one would want us to make um based on the level of priority um that this may be um or may not be um i would also point out there you know in my doctoral study there are 329 districts in the state of minnesota we are approximately the 50th

164largest meaning that there are 279 districts that are functioning with fewer students than us and so i think we have a quite a ways to go obviously we want to maintain enrollment we want students to be attracted to our district we want to provide the best possible academic educational and social emotional service that we can to every student that chooses to be here but then the question becomes what level of priority is that other component um that you would want to guide administration with right i i i should see though how a concern might be there right with if we fall back on we just want you know we we just just want to provide the best educational opportunity and experience for for those who choose us i mean there is a level at which

165if we dip below we become dissociated from the broader community in general and the broader community is the one that that provides us through the you know through the through their kindness at the at the at the voting booth with the various levies and things that we that we rely on and so there i mean there's a level of responsiveness to it and and i appreciate the idea that it is i mean like all of our decisions there they all come with a budgetary constraint and would have to know what the priorities are of the board and would have to know what the priorities are of the community and would have to have dollar figures around that to make sensible decisions can i just jump in and say i'm frustrated because i feel like we

166are de facto having the conversation right now in a way that feels unhelpful because this is this is a huge conversation and i feel like it's one that we should we should talk about how we want to talk about it instead of i feel like we're jumping into the conversation already that's fair enough so we should schedule something so we should schedule something there you go yeah whatever right and we have to schedule it in in such a way that gives the administration enough time to prepare what how they would like to present to us and and if we have ideas on it and perhaps give them some more direction about what we're asking yeah i agree with that i feel like this is for me hearing what has been shared thus far i think

167a responsible first step would be to go back to that survey that we invested in two years ago and have the conversation at the next fpac meeting about that survey what it shares what we learned what we've done as a result i'm i am hesitant to invest time resource and energy until i feel like i have a better sense of what the problem is we're trying to solve that's different from the problem we're already talking about related to this which i feel like is a board we do talk about and have been pretty clear about so i i don't feel like i have a good sense of the problem we're trying to solve and am reluctant when we have limited staff capacity and energy to be putting a lot more into this when i feel

168like we we all in previous conversations have been fairly aligned i i think i agree with you it's not fair to guess and pick a path we we should present what we already have and see what people would like what direction i mean if if the fact brings additional concerns that's fine um what what what do they see is the problem and what do they see as a possible solution i i think that would be that would be fair especially since the data for the prior survey is probably already assembled and compiled and in a presentation format that would be most fair and respectful of the administrative time so does that seem reasonable peter to bring something like that back to that it certainly seems like a first step okay for sure um that way

169we can we can that that'll get us all on the same page that'll get us all operating from the same baseline set of information right um and then we can see if there are uh it seems quite reasonable to see it then there are additional uh needs for additional asks or if there would be some other mechanism for um yeah thank you crystal for for giving us that focus yes i'm sorry it's really hard to not be there and feel like i don't know how to interject productively so i appreciate your time just just do it as if you were here which is the great story i am here and i'm having a hard time too so don't feel it's not the distance experience uh one thing i want to uh for the for the

170research before we talk about this again i i since last december when the school association met and we talked about priorities the top priority was anticipation of this enrollment uh challenge because of the pandemic and i know that this is not a rich feel only problem so i think it's kind of hard to compare apples to apples when we have a completely different environment like how many people are homeschooling how many people we all know that the the truancy is not really happening right now like well it wasn't until last time i checked so i i don't think that i have a hard time thinking about this you know thinking only about richfield and not really how this is actually a very spread out a statewide problem where this is asking for more funding to

171overcome enrollment because with the anticipation that enrollment is going to increase once this is said and done and then what are they going to do so that's all yeah thank you paul does anyone else have questions or comments or things to bring forward share with the board hi i am christine actually already shared what i was going to share which is just gratitude for the communication um leading up to the student activism today but also just want to share appreciation for i think the communication that the district has been doing more broadly with staff with students with families in recent weeks i think it has been thoughtful and intentional and from the heart in a way that i personally really appreciate so just wanted to acknowledge that all right thank you naomi do you have

172something you'd like to share with us that not an agenda item but just feedback or questions comments no thank you tyler questions comments anything you'd like to share with us no okay thank you i i just have one i had a parent um approached me recently and i didn't really have a i couldn't answer because it was a board sort of thing i'm just just looking for feedback and so as you know as we're in what our whatever month of school this is with um with the the covert restrictions and the quarantining you know as things unfold someone had asked you know it had recently become aware that that the department of health allows for shorter than the 14-day quarantining and we've maintained consistently from the beginning that our plan is to use the 14-day

173quarantine and i believe the rationale is that you know the department of health and the cdc would both say that is the the best one to use um and so you know they had asked like what would it take for us as a board or as a district to be willing to consider the the shorter ones and in what you know circumstances how you know can we do it can we roll it out is it consistently and and however that might be and so i i had a conversation with the superintendent about it and i think correctly he said look we the 14 day is what the board collectively strongly approved at the outset and it would take really a collective strongly approved by the board direction to vary from that because it is listed

174you know when the cdc and the department of health and the bloomington public health and our regional health centers tell us this is a best practice it's a struggle to deviate from it willfully so i just want to give the superintendent an opportunity to help us talk about that and see if anyone has a different different opinion so we chose 14 days in consultation with basically every health professional with whom we collaborate it is the safest and most effective way to ensure that you don't have outbreaks of covet in your school when you start looking at things like 10 days and 7 days there are a set of logistics that would have to be in place and you'd have to have very concrete information that you knew was factual to be able to consider some

175of those other dates like the start time and the end time and the finite amount of possible exposure a person had to covet so they'd have to know who had coveted uh who they came in contact with kovad was the start time when was the end time they also would need to take a test um for us to consider um and so there are a wide range of components that we would really need to have some very in-depth details about that um i did push back initially on our health team about okay so walk me through this why shouldn't we do those things and the reality is looking through each of the details the consistent answer of every single health professional is that just isn't the best decision for the safety of the community and

176it is the reason at least in my mind why even though we have had larger community outbreak even though we have had larger county outbreak we have not had as much school-based outbreak as many of our other school colleagues have had in terms of passing in schools because we are being safe and cautious and following the recommendations of the health professionals i mean as as i say in many areas and i say in this one i am an education professional i am not a health professional so my job is to bring us the best recommendations of health professionals and in my opinion it's to follow them um which is completely fair i mean this this could be a case where it's um you know what's lousy for the few who are affected is just in

177terms of enduring it because it's not easy to be told not to attend things or take part in things but it is for the the collective of the other thousand students who are in the building say at ridgefield high or or the community at large and so um i said you mentioned health professional i'll glance over it at pete and see if he has has anything he could share um yeah so i mean i think that to me this is this is actually something that can be re that is relatively quantitative because it really is a matter of risk um and um the sort of the thing that we can rely upon is that the longer duration quarantine is a quantitatively lower risk that's just that that i think is going to be a fact

178that will hold true when you apply that across a population of people and that shorter duration quarantines um will increase risk and there are these you know as you mentioned some efforts to try and mitigate that but this is just you know it's a it's a linear curve in terms of the probability of shedding virus um that's a linear curve that decreases over time and so you know you're either at point a or point b on that curve and um none of you know if you look at any one individual case you're gonna have all kinds of scatter but if you look at these cases across a population then it's gonna it's gonna become consistent and predictable and so this is the hard thing with public health overall is it's it's totally predictable across a

179population and totally unpredictable for any one given individual and we all tend to make decisions as individuals but that doesn't work in a pandemic you have to make a decision as a population i appreciate hearing that thank you okay so i'm going to add as since it is medical laboratory professionals week the greatest week of the year right and um and that's where my medical experience is is in the laboratory it is really key to consider like pete said that we're protecting everyone so if we have a known exposure a known positive you absolutely have to quarantine the people that were exposed to that known positive patient for 14 days if you want to slow any kind of spread if if you want to decrease that time like steve said you would need to have

180a test to make sure someone wasn't positive you would also need to have that test five days after the exposure so like you said you would need to know when the exposure was a lot of work has gone into figuring out this 14-day realization and as a board and as a district it's our responsibility to protect all of the students and as we all know many people may be inconvenienced by having to protect these other students or other people we've all been doing that for over a year and i don't think i would be very opposed to decreasing that 14 days so i appreciate that no ms cool you said you're okay um you know this isn't an agenda item it's not up for a vote i it's hard for me you know when someone

181asks you a question you get you can't answer for the board i think i've gotten enough input from the board and i understand it and support it it's it's it's um it's well reasoned and so that's where we are and it's you know there's nothing about this year that hasn't been frustrating for everyone and this is this is one where you know the frustration perhaps feels more localized for some than others but there's other frustration that that could come if we if we were to change practice so i i don't want to dwell anymore on it but i appreciate the the commentary last call for uh board comments or questions all right future meeting dates the next meeting is monday may 3rd we are looking at may soon 7 pm right here in the boardroom

182following that is monday may 17th regular board meeting with public comment so for those who are in attendance if you'd like to share comments you gotta come back may 17th it would be wonderful to have you there and to hear what you're thinking about may may uh looking at the calendar seeing that monday the 17th is is a monday may is going to be one of those those very special months where we get five mondays which means we will not have a board meeting the fourth monday or the fifth monday and then we get into june where we have just the one meeting and i think it's the second in june so we'll one set for the 14th but then also a tentative on the 28th oh wonderful just for budgetary reasons we have to

183approve something to make sure that we've approved it okay anyway that's it um if anyone has any items that they wish to request for an upcoming uh agenda item please share it at this time please feel free to blurt it out if you're thinking of one otherwise i will move forward in in the meeting um item eight was removed which was a closed session we we do not need one tonight which means we don't need to reopen the meeting which means we are now at the stage where we will adjourn the meeting it is 9 40 p.m and i will adjourn this meeting with school board thank you very much good night everyone hi crystal bye