001good evening it is 7 02 p.m on monday august 3rd 2020 and i call to order this regular meeting of the richfield school board attending this evening's virtual board meeting are board members paula cole christine malik tim paulus allegra's meshech and i am crystal brackey board member peter tensing is unable to attend tonight's meeting we are also so happy to be joined by superintendent unofsky and many district staff members who you will be able to hear from later in the agenda this meeting is taking place virtually as allowed by minnesota state statute 13d .021 in light of the peacetime state of emergency declared by governor walls due to the covet 19 pandemic i want to make sure that i publicly share up front that it is likely uh that our next meeting on monday august
00217th will actually have an in-person option for board members staff and public um and we are going to continue to have a virtual option for board members staff and public so we are finalizing those details but absolutely are aiming to ensure that we have a consistent approach across all of our district work from our student instructional program to our board meetings that enables people to participate in a way that feels safe and right for them so with that of course we also want to start by sharing richfield public schools mission statement that we strive to inspire and empower each individual to learn grow and excel and just how important it is for us to keep that at the center of our meeting this evening as we're talking about some really important topics um and looking
003ahead to the 20 20 2021 school year so thanks to those of you who are watching this meeting live or in the future on youtube we really appreciate you for being with us and with that we are going to move to our first item of business this evening which is to approve the agenda before us and as approval of the agenda is a routine business item i'm not going to individually call on board members for questions or comments but rather just pause and do an open ask if there are any comments or questions related to tonight's agenda okay seeing and hearing none is anyone prepared to move the agenda as presented i will move the agenda as presented a second thank you we have a motion by mr paulus in a second by ms malik
004uh christine malik as our board clerk will conduct the roll call vote for this and all other action items this evening okay so we'll start with ms cole aye mr paulus i miss misha hi the clerk votes i and chair brocky aye the agenda is approved so we now move into the information and proposals non-action items section of the agenda and i just want to note here that there will be opportunity for public comment at our august 17th board meeting so anyone who is interested in participating in that meeting can contact me to discuss the different options that will exist for addressing the board at that time and we will make sure that that information is available on the website in advance as well the superintendent update tonight contains three really important items for discussion
005so i will now turn things right over to superintendent yunowski all right thank you chair breakfast so we are going to be talking about um in order a fall planning update a summer school update and then also a school resource officer recommendation uh for those listening we're going to be having an open conversation about the planning process and where we are in terms of planning for launching school in the fall we are not recommending or making any decisions today but that will be a public sharing and announcement by august 17th to put that in perspective there are districts that have already announced plans uh there are districts that are announcing plans next week and then their districts announcing plans as late as approximately 24th uh or the week of the 24th of august so we
006are launching a survey which has actually gone out just today and are really aggressively pursuing information and voice as we continue our fall planning and so with that i am waiting now for scott to pop up play to hear myself in superintendent here to talk to you about planning for fall 2020. on thursday the governor shared the plan for a safe return to school and school programming for the upcoming school year tonight i will update you on our richfield work and our next steps to make sure that we are fully prepared for our students and staff to arrive in june all schools were asked to prepare for three possible learning models distance learning in-person learning with distance learning available for all of those opting to stay at home and a hybrid model including a mix
007of in-person and distance learning for all students again still providing all distance programming for those opting to stay at home the governor further clarified expectations to five possible options based on the current infection rate in hennepin county in addition to distance in person and hybrid we also need to be ready to provide different options for elementary students from our secondary students prioritizing elementary student presence in school all through the summer we have been working together over 80 of us in teams planning for all of these models a core team including leaders of 15 teams examining and planning for our best learning options each of those leaders had their own planning team with a wide range of members for bargaining units and representation across our district it involved all the instructional and operational components of our
008school and our teams have been working towards providing our students and families the most effective student learning environment and activity programs in a structured safe both at school and distance environment a little more about distance learning first it's important to note that distance learning will be offered as a choice to all students and families distance learning will occur regardless of in-person or hybrid programming it is also important to discuss the ways that distance learning will be different and better from the spring as superintendent i am very proud of the work our staff did this past spring all that work from spring was planned and implemented in eight days and on very short notice this year we have spent all summer with our team members planning for improved distance programming new distance learning will have all
009students in live interaction with their teachers small group instruction occurring more often and in more classes and we will also still be providing recorded options in cases where students need to learn and have their learning occur at different times in person means our districts driving towards 50 capacity or half the amount of students they're able to fill a room and a building also with social distancing regular cleaning and hand washing hand sanitizer along with face masks ppe or face shields for everyone with current rules richfield classrooms can accommodate at least 17 students social distance and buses right now could accommodate 23. one thing to note is these numbers continue to evolve have changed over the past month and we anticipate continuing to change as time goes by as with all areas we will be working
010with the state recommendations and guidelines and to be clear the state is also requiring some of the same things that we are planning for in distancing cleaning ppe masks 50 capacity along with a wide range of other structural supports to ensure the safest possible environment a hybrid program adds the greatest complexity the all students in person model again while still offering distance learning for those choosing occurs if the cova 19 case rate is between zero and nine cases per ten thousand residents of hennepin county distance for all model occurs in a case rate of 50 or more coveted cases per 10 000 residents of hennepin county but between 10 and 49 cases per 10 000 there are three hybrid type models 10 to 19 cases means in person for elementary and hybrid secondary 20 to
01129 means hybrid for all and 30 to 49 means hybrid elementary and distance learning for all based on infection rates prioritizing elementary students creates a wider range of options to consider and honestly three different types of hybrid models we are surveying families and staff to gather information so that we can get the best possible information on how to finalize our plans while i will describe general hybrid options tonight our survey gets much more specific detail and choice in gathering their feedback we're asking for individual information by student and by family about if they want their students in school and how often our goal is to have 100 survey participation from our students families and staff so that we can plan programming transportation and staffing it also allows us to consider the plans of our surrounding
012districts and provides time to consult with experts our goal is to bring a final school start recommendation to the board august 17th some might wonder why we wait for three weeks to finalize we believe that it's best for students to be in school our state guidance suggests that monitoring infection rates is the best way to decide our current date is from july 18th based on the timing of the governor announcement we will have full family and staff input along with more current updated case rate data and know how to best start the school year in the coming weeks for those wanting decisions earlier i want to share that given the governor's plan for our state we are working to be set up to use all models depending on current case rates even if we begin
013in hybrid which is what the data today suggests the model can and will shift as case rates change i want to remind however that if a family wants distance learning they can plan for that model and stay in it throughout the year that makes the survey extremely important it helps us plan for food transportation support learning models and learning location preferences so again i want to repeat some of the main points tonight we are a district that will follow state guidelines to the best of our ability given all of the data right now if the year were to start we would launch a full hybrid program we will examine the plans of surrounding districts we will gather input from all staff and families and we will bring back in the superintendent report august 17th our
014plan to start the school year remember however changing case rates mean that we may not be in the same learning model all school year we also may not be in the same learning model all calendar year planning case rates and input will help us with those decisions with that i open it up for questions or comments all right so i am just going to reiterate one or two things before we go to questions and comments so our survey went out to staff and to families today and we are working with outreach members special ed team leads school secretaries and principals to try to get 100 of our families participating um we are we'll plan then transportation food supports and also the specific model of hybrid that we end up implementing based on a lot of
015that input and our hope is and our plan is to be able to announce that to the board august 17th which is at our next board meeting the other thing to keep in mind and i don't think i could say it enough is for people who select distance learning they're able to select that and remain in distance learning regardless of whether or not the district is in hybrid or in person so for those who are concerned or contacting us to say that we don't want our kids in school we do have full program programming that's been designed and continues to be designed and improved over the course of the entire summer to make sure that we have the strongest most vital business programs possible so with that i will stop and turn it to crystal
016to lead board members through questions or comments great thank you so yes board members um now each have time for questions and our comments and in these virtual meetings um to try to make that go as smoothly as possible what we do is go in alphabetical order and board members will pass it to each other once they are done so with that paula cole is up first thank you um thank you for the reports if i'm every time i hear the number of teams working i feel so proud of our district and so thankful for all of the uh continued uh organized and thoughtful management through this very very difficult time um to clarify did you say that the service went out to families already or are they going to or what's going on with
017that uh yes the survey to staff went out uh late morning and then the survey to families went out i believe around 6 30 6 45 today okay thank you yeah i got the yeah all right thank you and so you just keep up the good work i i i've been sheltering in place high time i i've been working hard too but um uh i look forward to knowing more details later of what things are really going to look like because uh my as a mom i i'm thinking a lot about just kids and teachers and really wondering how this is going to look like to ensure that everyone can be safe in our in our buildings and i'm very thankful for the uh opportunities for families to to have this choice uh so i
018think that's that for now uh christine thank you paula um i would also agree this is it is an amazing amount of information but also just how everything was put together when this report just came out or our guidelines just came out on thursday so this is really um an impressive amount of information and some really good planning and i know going into the fall there's a lot more to figure out but i think the survey will help answer a lot of questions for us i'm a couple things that i would point out um from the presentation that there's a guideline from the governor about face shields and or masks and from what i know about cdc guidelines face shields alone aren't aren't adequate or don't really aren't known to offer or proven to offer
019any protection so i think it kind of brings to my mind as i look through all of this that um that we need someone with kind of that medical knowledge on this plant fall planning team and i learned today that um pete tensing our board member who is a doctor is on that team and we also have some other people so that is good to know um just making sure that once we get this all together that we kind of correlate with best practices and recommendations by cdc and mdh um and then the other thing that i was a little that i didn't get initially until steve explained it to me so i'm going to ask if he'll maybe elaborate on it a little more about what the hybrid learning means and how it helps
020to decrease the number of students in the classroom and how it why that's the next step if your um your rate of infection is increasing sounds good all right so there's a couple things to respond to there so i will start with talking a little bit more about hybrid when we talked about hybrid early in the year hybrid has many ways of defining and there really is no specific definition of hybrid so i'm going to give a few examples of what hybrids could be and some of the things that we are taking input on a hybrid could be a teacher teaching in their classroom in front of 10 kids uh they could be live streaming themselves to another 10 kids in their homes who are participating in the classroom and that same teacher could be
021live streamed to another five students who are in an auditorium let's say socially distant supervised so that one teacher with some in the classroom some in an auditorium and some in their homes um all of them getting live teaching some in person some on a live stream that would be one example of a hybrid a hybrid example could include some students coming monday tuesday while the other ones are participating at home and then it could switch that group of people so nine students or ten students for a teacher in the classroom on monday tuesday and that teacher has ten other students who are at home um participating at monday tuesday from home then switching so that those ten students who are in the classroom are now at home um during the days after the other
022thing that could happen in a hybrid is that there are teachers who then become full distance teachers and they are teaching distance while others are teaching in person and then any form of mix that goes in there one of the things that we learned when the governor announced is that we should be prioritizing younger students and so as you look at the models um where they have elementary for example in person and secondary hybrid during some case rates what that means is is that as we look at our hybrid it doesn't mean everyone would necessarily come the same amount of days so it is possible that elementary students come five days and secondary students come three days possible elementary students come three days and secondary students come one day it's also possible that within a
023middle school or high school and these are some preliminary conversations we'll have with our planning teams and i'm going to talk about that next uh that we decide that sixth graders and ninth graders entering their building should have more days than the other older students in the building so it's possible that sixth grade is three days a week and seventh and eighth graders each come one or two days a week it's possible that ninth graders come four days a week and the other students come one or two days and so as we look at and build over the next couple of weeks that hybrid we're really going to be looking at that parent feedback but also the planning team feedback in regard to what's best for kids and what is best for learning so that
024hybrid component is something that could be all over the place in the way it lands and what it does is if you have 10 kids in a classroom on one day and a different 10 on a different day the only way those ten could possibly pass covet in that situation is between the adult so there's one point of contact and it was actually dr tensing that explained this to me however if all the students are in a class at the same time they can all pass it to one another um and so by by staggering the number of students it provides less less interaction between the groups or less ways to do or fewer ways to do that um the other thing that we're doing um and this isn't just obviously the superintendent doing all
025this planning is that there are core teams there have been 15 teams planning throughout the course of the summer with 15 leaders from across our organization there's an elementary group a secondary group an ell group a special ed group an operations group a transportation group um and they all have really been looking at two specific problems how do we create the most effective distance learning program for our students because that is what's new to us and how would we create the most safe in person program so you take the most improved distance learning and the safest in person and those teams come together to plan that to create the hybrid which is essentially mixing and creating the safest in person at the same time as the most effective distance and so we have 15 teams
026including those as as christine pointed out some expertise from the medical fields are looking at operations and some of those technical components and then our expertise instructionally are looking at how do we create that that best programming for all of our kids i think i have responded to each of those comments so i'm going to pause again and turn things back thank you um the other couple things i have are um have we is it too early to think about this or have we contemplated anything about um fall sports so uh fall sports have begun from a planning phase and so um new new activities director jared ellerson has already been meeting with coaches and setting structures up uh similar to the spring we are anticipating having fall sports whether there is a large set
027of sports um on-site or not um coaches will be working with their students um it will work in terms of making sure they are physically fit and so there are training plans that will happen virtually and then they will also be doing academic support based work depending on the level of workload of that physicality um if we are able to begin sports on the 17th of august which is the typical start date for some of our sports we anticipate them beginning and if we're not um they will begin doing that work they'll begin doing that work to make sure that our athletes are physically ready and our activities team members are are prepared and rehearsed and ready to begin whenever they are able to begin i believe also that the minnesota state high school league
028is having a board meeting a board meeting soon and so i believe that they will also be giving us some information in regard to do we start on the 17th do we start earlier do we start later and what are some of those state guidelines that they'll be providing to us okay thanks um and i'll save that one for summer school um and something else that kind of came to my mind is how would how do we deal with the potential of open enrollment when if we are one of the few districts that are doing in person like we know minneapolis is doing all distance but we need to keep space in our building for our students for richfield students so how do you do you just not have open enrollment do you happen do
029you limit it it seems like that could be a challenge to figure out right so the law um and this is an important conversation though i have not brought the policy back at this meeting i anticipate us taking a look at the policy on august 17th um which is we can only technically cap enrollment based on a board action at a grade level or at a site level um and so what i would see us doing is we're gathering the information from our students and families over the next two weeks and we're going to have a better idea about our ability and our capacity to host our students in person and our ability to transport our students if 50 of our families say they aren't coming we actually will not have a building capacity problem
030nor a transportation problem and if 90 of our students and our families say they are every day or would like to then we are going to stretch the edge of our ability to combine things and so some of that information is going to help us determine what programs to offer and how to do it i'm from a hybrid but that is also going to inform us as a board and leadership about what level of open enrollment can we have should that happen i don't anticipate us being the only hybrid programs um and so one of the things and you all know how this works but similar to a snow day when there are challenging decisions to be made superintendents call each other and so we are all talking about what is happening and there are
031actually now facilitated conversations at a state level that are happening about hybrids i would say in my in my conversations hybrids are much more likely than all distance at this point from the districts that i'm hearing of um and there are a wide range of hybrids happening in a in a large amount of places i would not anticipate us standing alone um at the end of the day in terms of having students come in okay that is very helpful thank you and that is all i have um mr paulus thank you christine um just to follow up some of your questions the state high school league has their board meeting tomorrow my prediction is is that they they allow that they are not going to be more restrictive than what the governor has allowed for
032schools and so that would signal to me that they will when you combine with the the governor's order for youth sports through the summer that was pretty permissive allowing with with masks distancing and other other constraints i imagine they they will keep the the dream alive so to speak um and wait and see how schools react to that pretty much leave it to local rules my guess and that's just a guess there are some reasons for that one is they actually want all the members to pay their their fall activities fees in full because they desperately need the money um and second you know it's supportive of the coaches and supportive of the kids uh to to to leave open the idea of of activities um on open enrollment um so i participated in the
033msba uh webinar that they had over the weekend and one and that was a question that was asked how how are districts planning to manage they had no they offered no guidance at the msba level it really was this is statute the statute says this and and uh superintendent said the only way for us to change where we are is to change our board policy or vote vote ourselves close i mean our board policy stands we would it's it's we would have to vote closed at either grade by grade building by building or or district wide and that's a problem we won't know but that that the idea of this is like a snow day but a gazillion times more significant um if if i i do think for the health of the district long
034term if we were more restrictive than say our our immediate neighbors that would be bad for us we would see we would likely see families opt out of us and perhaps not come back and then we would have we would be dealing with that for a while and so that is while that is a motivation that is not steep in public health as a concern um it is it is a an angle of district health and it would in in while we work within the guidelines the governor has given us and so um i i don't know i i just i worry that that if you were the last district on the line and and went to lean one way while your neighbors leaned the other um such districts will see enroll you know without
035action by those neighboring boards would see enrollment dips uh my only my only question was um there were things that came up within the presentation i think the the capacity per classroom was listed as around 17 and i was i thought we had talked about this at previous meetings that that with the six foot bubble that we that we think the rooms could hold more than that i thought it was uh low to mid 20s am i misremembering or am i thinking of something different um so depending on how we measure so what we ended up doing is yes physically you can fit 21 22 when you look at actual realistic spacing um there's a bunch of different models that we're using and so we haven't really finalized um and so we believe 17 we
036might be able to get it higher than that but we needed to leave some space to move around for the teacher and to allow them to do more than they might do otherwise okay and so i i don't have other um questions for for the superintendent i do have comments i can make them at the end when we when we talk about you know reports from board members more summary from that msba note i i just it was more like you know pop like for example while we were here we got an email saying that they have um draft resolution for our you know whatever model we go with and so that was one of the things they said they were coming up with and and so um you know i'm interested to see what
037the other i i went to the friday session i'm interested to see what the saturday session had for questions from the audience when we get to that um i have no i have nothing else to ask of the superintendent so i will pass it to miss meshach thank you mr paulus um one question i have related to the sort of snow day-esque nature this um will we be able to offer child care options to our rps staff who um maybe say live in minneapolis and are doing distance learning with their children but want to work in person in a hybrid or in-person model for ridgefield so we are there's a few things we're trying to gain clarification on um the first thing we don't know is um whether or not the child care that we
038are expected to provide is paid or if it is a free service we are not aware of that um and so we are currently in negotiations and trying to figure out what that might look like um it also depends on the level of hybrid that we offer if we are offering more in person or if we're able to bring in our elementary kids on a daily basis based on our hybrid we would not be providing to our own community child care because the children would be in school and so that that's one permutation that we're going to know in terms of the survey and then the other question we don't have an answer yet but i'm going to say it out loud so it doesn't come as a shock would be minneapolis is actually legally
039required to provide child care to their teachers under this model as tier 1 people and so our my first statement would be minneapolis folk who live in minneapolis and have their kids in richfield or work in work in ridgefield and have their kids in minneapolis schools i apologize so work in richfield but kids are in minneapolis schools they should be looking to minneapolis public to provide the child care we are however as a service looking at the possibility of doing that um that would absolutely most likely be for fee in that situation um so that they would be paying for the service if that is what we end up doing okay that makes sense thank you um in the survey well i guess it might not be in the survey but in the next sort
040of commitment phase what do you anticipate being the amount of time families will need to opt into a choice will be so if they say um opt into a hybrid is that a year-long commitment a semester-long commitment or is that still being determined so we are working on that it is generally recommended that people are choosing it and the only thing we need them to actually sign into is the distance no matter what so we are assuming that we're looking for a grading period which would typically be approximately nine weeks but we haven't made that as a final decision at this point and honestly some of it matters all of this becomes this sort of odd art and science of the numbers and what we're able to offer based on based on the percent that
041say yes so the the numbers are really gonna going to tell in that regard um this next question is kind of a three-part question which might be too many parts but i'm wondering in your planning teams how you're determining what the learning needs for staff are before school starts time and um if you anticipate being able to work within the calendar we currently have to meet those needs or if there's been any discussion about school start date needing to shift in richfield so in terms of professional development we have a team working on what pd do our teams need to provide effective distance learning um in terms of calendar shifts um i do not anticipate us pushing back the start date i just can't in good conscience suggest that we have had all summer to
042plan and we can't start on the 8th of september um that said it is certainly possible that we are if we are in a hybrid and we are doing distance learning it is certainly possible that there is a cleaning day professional development day integrated in as part of that work similar to what occurred in the spring but i i can't actually answer that definitively because i don't know what our parents and what our staff are going to give back in terms of the feedback i would also say it is possible that we shift around some of the pd days and the conference days because in this model our conferences might be different and so we might not need the same days or the same methodology that would be used in those ways so i can
043see some internal calendar shifts but probably not that larger picture calendar shifts at all okay i think i caught all your stuff did i miss anything you did that was impressive with a three-part question and um i was really impressed with the number of planning groups that you have and the fact that you have um representatives from all collective bargaining groups in that planning i think that um leads to the strongest possible model to have all those perspectives and um is just really important for inclusivity um and i didn't see like an equity or anti-racist group specifically listed so i was curious if there was one um or if those perspectives and those questions are kind of being integrated into all of the groups we've been deliberate about integrating diverse leadership and equity equity strong
044voices into each of those teams we also come back as a core planning team and so we have a core planning team which is the large group of 15 and then some other leaders and then those teams go off and one of the activities we have when we bring everybody together each week is to begin that dialogue around centering ourselves on what is our actual task and so we talk a lot about serving our most underserved students uh bringing things together to make sure that we are not losing the best of what we're providing in distance or the best of what we're providing in our in-person programming and making sure that all our conversations around serving every single student in richfield which obviously means making sure to take that extra focus on the most marginalized
045underserved students that we have awesome um thank you and my last question is other than approving or voting on uh whatever plan the district comes up with for august 17th for finalized version is there anything the board can be doing to support in terms of policy or any obstacles you've run into that maybe are beyond a district level that we could be advocating for in our city or state bodies uh that is a very good question um so one of the interesting so everybody received from msba today sample resolution i think one of you all brought that up it's an interesting question is whether or not it is a board approved learning model or not um i don't actually know the answer to that um what i do know is and this is as much
046for you all because you all know how i i work as it is for everybody listening i'm going to be gathering a lot of feedback on my thoughts over the next two weeks as i integrate and synthesize feedback so i do that with our team and i also do that with board members and so the best thing i can ask board members to do is really think about what are the things that you want to make sure are integrated into the plan and you each have your areas of expertise so for example as a science professor and somebody who is looking at the cdc guidelines christine immediately honed in on hey steve we really need to look at face masks versus face shields because even though there seems to be a choice the guidelines don't
047suggest that shields are a good thing um and so if there are areas within your expertise um and you as a district leader in another district who does a lot of work in equity and anti-racism would be looking at some of the work that we're doing and see if there's something we are missing um and so things to point out because even as we go on the 17th we're not going to have all the details perfected at that time and so that's also that ongoing look um so that that's one piece and then the other thing from a policy perspective you see that we're going to be talking again about transportation and boundaries and those pieces um we are going to be talking about and i didn't come up with the open enrollment myself i'm
048basically launching into that because you all re reminded me essentially is that we need to look at open enrollment and possibly be ready to close if that's the case if there are board policies that you can think of that are weirdly um impacted by covet and what happens um bringing those to our attention as a team back to the full board and examine do we need to make a change or two based on what we have coming up so it's a great question that's good thank you very much that i'll pass it on to chair brackey all right thank you um the benefit of going last in the order is that i get to cross things off the downside to that is it probably is gonna make mine feel even more random in terms of
049the things that i'm thinking about uh i would say one overarching umbrella and and this um i know is also shared by pete tence who can't be here tonight but we spoke yesterday is the importance of communication and expectation setting over the next several weeks and i think all of us uh are so profoundly grateful for jennifer valley and her work in leading communications efforts for our district and i think the next few weeks are going to be a really significant test of how we can stay in close contact how we can help people understand what we are hearing and why we are making the decisions that we are making and that people feel heard even if what their preference was ends up not being an option for fall um and i think just continuing
050to push actually having a definition of hybrid that makes sense to people um i think it's confusing i think the fact that actual full-time virtual is an option and hybrid whatever we determine it to be in richfield public schools is an option is something we are going to have to keep talking about over and over and over again um so i just think i'm really going to be focused on that piece about how are we communicating with our community um and that includes staff um it includes folks who care deeply about richfield public schools but might not have a child in our system at the moment um so just really wanting to make sure we're focusing on that and i believe we are but it feels important to say out loud um the second thing
051and this um connects to allegra's question about um racial equity and how to ensure that that is really being embedded within the planning groups um i both appreciate that that is the role of the core team and would also just like to say that i think there should be guiding questions for each one of the planning teams so that as they are having conversations and coming up with recommendations they can be having these conversations and asking these questions and we can ensure that there is some consistency across these 15 15 different teams who are sort of sitting with very different and very complex issues um i promise i'll pause and actually let you respond steve at some point um related to planning teams i think we've referenced a number of points in time in this
052conversation that there are 15 of them but i actually think it'd be really helpful to be specific about what they are um who is on them and actually let people into the process and who is doing this work i'm getting close closer um i think that um [Music] one final update and then i'll close with two questions the final update is intermediate district 287 which we are obviously a member of and and some of our students and community members are part of that district um through us um obviously has their own set of decisions to make we had a 287 board meeting last thursday so the same day that the guidance came out so incredible kudos to those staff members who were able to present on that same day i think they are likely going
053to be starting in more of a distance model but have defined uh i think it's four different tiers of distance versus sort of hybrid and in person so just wanted people to know that that's sort of where our 287 partner is at the moment that brings me to the two questions one um steve i think it it might be helpful for people to be able to hear from you why um your current point of view is that we should have some in-person options and offerings to the extent we feel able to do so safely because it is different from minneapolis and st paul who have already taken a pretty public stance that they are going to start the year all distance and then i think the second question um is what are we doing to
054really hear from our staff what their preferences are and what degree of choice are our staff going to have in terms of the different models and where they fit in given whatever their role in the district is and now i'm done all right so that's a lot so i know um so august 17th i will in my overall report um i will add a slide in regard to teams the teams that we've had who is participating um in each of those pieces um and so we'll also talk about racial equity some of the conversations and guiding questions that we've used to center people and i'll bring that in the overall report so i'll make sure that that is present i'm gonna actually take your second question first which is about staff and their preferences and
055then i will go on to why we are having a conversation around some in person so in terms of staff um and board members will receive a pdf of the questions asked to families um but it is important to note that we gave a survey similarly to staff and so staff are having the option of sharing their information with us um about what they would prefer um why and what they would sign into um and so we are directly asking that to staff but i would also say that while staff have a choice um there is one component that came out both where the presentation in the governor's speech then got a real clear clarification which is that staff should be able to have that choice in relation to distance learning to the fullest extent
056possible and so if we for example were in a full distance program then obviously everybody can teach from home if however we are in a full in-person program and we need our full teaching staff to do that then there is a decision tree in hr about immunocompromised staff or staff that follow the specific guidelines of coba 19 that might not be able to work in that circumstance but then it is no longer a preference it is a health-based component so those are some of the conversations that are going to happen over the next month i don't participate knows in any way shape or form nor do i gather information what i know in the end is the staff who are working in whatever programs and hr does that conversation in the appropriate and professional and
057legal ways so that's what i would say from a staff perspective and that that survey went out literally around noonish today then you asked me a question about why we should have some in-person programming when a couple other districts have already announced distance and so i think this is a really emotional challenging time we're living at in our country and in our states and we all have some very strong feelings about what should be happening and what shouldn't be happening the reality is i am a professional educator i have been trained as an educator my entire life and everything i have is in that category i am not a trained health expert and i'm going to push the community to acknowledge the same thing that they are not in many cases trained health experts either
058now that doesn't change that i have some strong feelings but what it changes is that i am not the foremost expert in this particular subject theory what i do feel good about however is that there are experts in these areas so they have determined where cases passed more frequently where cases are more dangerous and along with the governor have created some guidelines and those guidelines tell us when it is most likely appropriate to be in person and when it is most likely appropriate to be in distance and while it's certainly possible for us to be part of the sports metaphor monday morning quarterback the cdc and the department of health and the governor um i'm going to sit back and i'm going to let the experts be the experts and so if the case rates
059are such that we are able to bring students in we know from an equity perspective that our students do a better job of learning and we are more successful with students when they are in front of us in many cases we also know that there are some things in distance learning that really benefited kids and so we want to take each of those pieces too and as you and i had this conversation before because obviously we have covert spreading one of the things that i think about is there are hot spots in the country we are not actually currently one of those and so while covet is certainly significant in our community based on the numbers there are areas with more and there are areas with less outbreaks of cobalt and so i don't know
060what the exact rate for how much we should have students in i do know their experts and my plan at least to run with the board and and push you all on is for us to listen to those experts rather than make that decision ourselves and i'm going to try to stay right in that spot for as long as i can so with that i hope that answered that question yes and i i um i asked because i think it's important for people to hear that that that is your point of view and the lens through which you are approaching the decisions that you are charged with as superintendent um and bringing the recommendations to us so thank you i appreciate it um i am going to do a final open call for comments or
061questions from board members that may have arisen since they had their turn because it has been a long discussion and i see a hand from mr paulus go ahead hi thank you crystal i i was going to do this later but i guess i'll summarize some of the msba call notes because they they came up in individual comments from the board and and from the superintendent um on the on the employees who requested work remotely it was it was we you know the governor first made it sound like it was we we have to accommodate and then that was further clarified too to the extent possible like steve said and that could we could run into um resource constraints and how do we handle that will be something you know how how we we prioritize
062one request over another will be tricky and there and then they then the msba discussion got into all the various types of leave if a person um you know didn't feel comfortable performing in their role uh at this time on the the the provided guidance on the learning plan and whether it's not whether or not we need to approve it or have a resolution supporting it it was strongly suggested that we talk about it openly and have it even if we don't vote on it given how how publicly um criticized it's going to be we we have to give full you know it was strongly recommended that the board vote on it or or at least have open discussion and appear supportive of it or you know majority supportive of it at least before enacting
063given how how how um exciting the decision will be uh on masking one of the things that the the the msba had hoped to get away with the governor's executive order on requiring masks as carrying the day but then within the the governor's announcement or the the back to learning it listed boards will have to have a policy on masking and so the msba is scrambling to come up with language for a masking policy and they do they already recognized it will be difficult for us to implement it in time given the deliberate nature that we adopt policy first read second read and adoption and so that is something they are working on um and one of the other things that that we didn't come up but um when we talk about scheduling for hybrid
064and in purpose in person we are within our we we can have different you know it doesn't have to be cookie cutter that everyone in this grade is monday tuesday we can factor in things like a student's individual needs if it's an iep or a different kind of plan um and have students on campus or off campus more or less than what what some of their peers are based on their individual plans or needs and i think that's that's really it um in terms of what the msba had but some of those comments did come up earlier and i i wanted to circle back on those thanks tim he did a great job of sharing some of the big conversation at core planning tomorrow which is the conversation is really around who do we prioritize
065in the buildings and why um and from an anti-racist equity perspective how do we make sure that we are acting equitably in how we structure this overall hybrid schedule any other final comments or questions from board members all right we are now going to turn to our second topic thank you for all of our staff who hung on um through this one though i'm guessing this is of real interest to all of you since it affects your day-to-day lives so much we are now going to turn to our summer school presentation good evening my name is sarah egberg and i'm the richfield summer school coordinator thank you for the opportunity to share some information with you about our summer programming we actually had seven different programs running this summer both on site and distance learning
066here we have our enrollment and attendance data broken down by ethnicity for our on-site programming as you can imagine we had to implement quite a few health and safety protocols to keep our staff and our students safe we had the support of dan kretzinger and phoebe anderson who provided an extensive staff training for us for our on-site staff around the protocols that we would be putting in place we also found that communication with our families was very important we did have on-site nurses at both central and at rdls and they really helped us determine when a student had to stay at home if they were experiencing symptoms when we had to call parents and ask them to come get a student we use the minnesota department of health decision tree to help guide our our
067decisions about that and did ask students to stay home for 10 days if they were experiencing certain symptoms here are some of our protocols in action breakfast and lunch were delivered to the classroom and students ate at their desks we had lots of signage and stickers around the building reminding staff and students about social distancing wearing masks just some good health practices here are some more protocols in action each student had their own supplies they each received a backpack with supplies so nothing was shared within the classroom and we did have a lot of students wearing masks um before governor wall's mass mandate i would say about 50 chose to wear masks and then after the mandate of course 100 all adults staff and teachers wore masks 100 of the time we also had health
068and safety protocols on the bus um students were spaced out we had staggered arrival and dismissal and they were cleaned after every route so we had a lot of takeaways from our on-site programs one big takeaway was the need for a backup plan for staffing because of that recommendation to stay home for 10 days if you are experiencing symptoms um we had some staff that were out for an extended period of time and we needed substitute teachers also that attendance of our students did kind of fall off because of that 10-day period to stay home when when your program is only three weeks long that's that's a big chunk of the time moving on to our distance learning program we provided both synchronous or live and asynchronous learning experiences for our students and here are
069some examples of schedules we found that both students and families really liked the synchronous model the live teaching they found it more engaging and they felt more successful as students with that model we got some feedback from our middle school students and here are some direct quotes from our middle school students our special education extended school year program also ran both on-site and distance learning program programming and they had a lot of the same takeaways um that the other programs did the importance of the family communication a little bit of the challenges around attendance one one thing that was different with special education for the on-site program they found their students had a harder time with the protocols around not touching not having that physical touch so that was a little bit challenging for those
070students in that program but other than that a lot of those same takeaways and here are some pictures from our extended school year program um at central um both our dls staff and central staff utilized a lot of the outdoor spaces for the on-site program um we had beautiful weather and we were able to get outside and really space the kids out and do some activities um in the outdoors which but the kids enjoyed and you know as part of the the health recommendations um to prevent the spread of covit so it was a win-win and now is the opportunity for you to ask us any questions that you may have thank you superintendent unowski is there anything that you would like to add before i turn it over to board members i would just
071say i just want to be as board members frame questions i'm very proud and impressed with the work that our team did for summer school um we thought it was important given the case rate the guidance from the state for us to begin examining some of the things that we would be doing in the fall and so we did have a by choice for both staff and student summer school and a bi-choice distance programming we did implement methodologies that fit as hybrid and so we really wanted to make sure that our team was prepared and our summer team did a great job of working with their teachers gathering feedback and continuing to improve the program and so even though it was three weeks um this team you see in front of you this evening did
072a great job of just continuously improving what we were offering our kids to make sure that not only were we serving our kids very well in the summer but we were really set to serve our kids even more effectively in the fall and so i'm thankful to this team and i'm thankful to the work of the larger summer team because they did a great job um from a larger richfield perspective so i'm just thankful and wanted it wanted everyone to hear me say it out loud with that crystal i'll turn it to you for questions with the board great thank you and thank you for kicking it off with that appreciation it's very important um paula you're up first um i just i'm very impressed with all of the work uh that you have done
073and is if it weren't for like the the things that had to change no one would even know that this happened in the middle of a pandemic when there was so many things unknown uh and you were able to pull it off successfully and i'm just very thankful for for providing that that space that i know felt uh special for children especially when we were all called for isolation and so many different things were were happening and and and and it really must have felt like heaven for them and it sounds that way so i just wanna i just wanna say thank you for that christine so i would second what paula said i was able to visit um the summer school at rdls while it was going on and it was just heartwarming to
074see kids you know they were following the rules and they were separated but they were clearly happy to be there as well as the staff everybody looked like they were exactly where they wanted to be and it was just nice to see real classroom learning and teaching going on and a lot of happy people and i um i the one thing i have been thinking about is the experience of that staff being the first ones to come back and teach in a mask in that environment and i'm hoping that they will share tips and suggestions to the teachers coming in the fall because they have um an experience that most other people don't and i think if you haven't um if you haven't yet worked eight hours or more in a mask it's really hard
075to imagine what it would be like so um hopefully they'll share all their tips and we'll have good information from them but again it is it was a huge benefit to our students to have that option to be able to go and i am very grateful for the teachers that volunteered to go in and teach in the classrooms when things are so uncertain it couldn't have been easy but you could tell they were very happy when i went in and got to tour so thank you guys and thank you for being here to present with us tonight the one thing i want to respond to and so the team members you see before you organize the method by gathering voice input and recommendations from their team members and so they created google surveys and they
076created in-person staff lounges for lack of a better description where people could come in share the things that were happening and then they did an incredible job of documenting so our core teams and our study teams can look at that and we can continue to improve from their recommendations so ladies in front of you tonight actually created those plans and moved us forward in that work thank you i'll hand it off to tim all right thank you just um just to reiterate just just how impressive it seems to have got impressively well it seems to have gone great uh enormous amount of gratitude for those who went through it because i know you're going to take that knowledge and information and experience and share it with with so many of your peers and we will
077we will certainly need it in the upcoming year or year i wish it was less um i did the on the attendance and and that this is something that might might translate into the fall as well is is the drop-off and you know i think one of them seemed like i i think it was spartan academy seemed relatively low and i don't didn't have a comparison point for how that compared to prior years but my guess is if that's lower than typical and and we have to acknowledge how strange a year and summer this has been and so um i guess so when understanding that as a number for those who were present engagement was at its usual level i trust okay well that's good to hear and so and i know i know theresa
078do you have something well i was just gonna respond to that yeah um so numbers were low due to um you know not being able to recruit the way we would we weren't in the buildings we didn't have the information we needed when we could have gotten to the most of our families the other piece you may have seen in the slide is luckily for our students there were athletic options happening and so given the choice of go be around people and outside and moving or be online we did have some families who were enrolled prior to the start date that chose that um which completely makes sense um and so we did have lower numbers because of that but the students who were enrolled were very very engaged if you have a chance to
079check in with rhs's principal and vice principal they the ap they on the last day he had a meet and greet and asked questions with them and the students talked about all the the things that they enjoyed about spartan camp and what they learned and they asked all kinds of questions of what to be prepared for so the kids who were in it really did walk away with um feeling that they were ready for what's to come whatever that looks like if it's online or if they're in the building all right that's great thank you very much i'll pass it to ms meshech thank you i want to reiterate what some board members have already said in gratitude and also um just recognizing your bravery i think i have a lot of colleagues who don't
080have health risks and are usually pretty big risk takers in their day-to-day life and and they're still pretty scared for the start of the school year so i think you must have had some of those feelings too um so thank you for being brave um i'm just impressed by that and i also want to thank you for the gift of being able to see what this might look like i think that's what i've been wondering what other people have been wondering and both in this presentation and also in the um video that um i can't remember which news station but that ridgefield was highlighted in that was kind of a gift you came to everybody in minnesota to see what this might look like and um i'm just very impressed with how well you documented
081it and as i was going through the board packet earlier like all the questions i had um like i wonder how students felt about it compared to spring well you asked and you had feedback so um that was just really really helpful to look through and my only question for you i'm just curious if there's anything um kind of like christine mentions like having to wear a mask for eight hours a day or um like any tips positive or negative or things that surprise you that you would want to tell your colleagues or families or board members as we kind of continue to plan football um you know i think and again i was not in the classroom um but just supporting teachers and being out in the hallways and seeing how everything was going
082it actually kind of surprised me how well everyone adapted to the new protocols um you know by the first week it was kind of like okay yeah everybody wears a mask and students knew to stay you know six feet apart and you know i think students are incredibly resilient and i was impressed how quickly they just kind of rolled with it i think they will do better than we think that that was kind of my big takeaway um meg and amber i know you were also on the on-site program i don't know if you have anything to add about esy on-site yeah thank you i'll just add that um we and i know i'm happy that as a district we're planning a lot of social emotional learning for the first few weeks of school um
083what i saw is kids were adaptable but i think when kids have special needs sometimes those feelings kind of come pouring out a little more readily in a little more verbal or physical way than would be typical and so we saw especially on the first day a few kids really having a hard time there was one little boy in tears and another one who um is verbal but less verbal than maybe you or i kind of having some trouble getting out his words and screaming and yelling at first and um but with the kind of caretaking of staff and a slow start and intentional work on the part of staff i would say in particular by date by the end of the first day and certainly by day two it was like different it was
084a very different feel for those little kiddos so that wasn't everybody um but in a small group of 18 they really stood out you know and um they just for me reiterated that importance of easing kiddos back into the school year since they've been out of school since mid-march thank you i'm trying to have good google meet right time it's so painful i'm gonna give a chance for other thoughts too so if you want to pass it over to me people can keep thinking because i'm awesome chair bracky with an opening um so yes for our our staff on the line i'll i'll share just sort of the very open prompt and that in a couple minutes i'm just going to see if there's anything else that you want to share with us um because
085you have been here with us for over an hour now and i want to make sure that we give you time and space to actually share anything that you want us to hear and and folks who are also watching this meeting so i'm gonna open it up to that uh momentarily i think the two things i wanted to share first one i was also able to visit summer school programs in person at rdls and also make a virtual visit to the middle school program which both of which were just phenomenal experiences to actually be able to visualize for the first time um what you all as our staff have been doing and what our students have been experiencing not just this summer but also through the spring and so it was incredibly helpful and i
086also described it as inspiring because i think it helped me see what was possible in a way that was really hard for me to imagine um without seeing it for myself and to see the ways um and hear the ways that staff are coming together and are experiencing this and then to be able to see and interact with our kids too so it was wonderful and i'm excited to be able to do some of those same visits in the fall whatever our models are going to be um i really am hopeful that as we get preferences from staff through the survey and as we get preferences from parents and guardians and students through the survey that we might be able to find a way to meet people's preferences and needs where they are the way
087that we were able to this summer um that is that is sort of a deep hope and priority of mine so that everybody gets a chance to be in a model that feels safe and right for them the way that you all were able to do this summer so again thank you for leading the way on that front um and then meg just to what you were saying um this is probably just a connection to the the fall planning conversation but how important it's going to be for us in the fall to to really have space and skill in supporting students through some real trauma that they have been experiencing over the last few months whether it is things that they have personally experienced or just what they are seeing by watching the world outside
088um on so many different fronts not just the pandemic but also the long overdue reckoning that we are facing in our society around race around disparities around a lot of different pain um that has been caused and that people are experiencing and so i just appreciate you for saying that and um really want to take it to heart and make sure that we are supporting our students and our staff in that as we come back together in the fall so with that i'll stop and as promised open it up if there's anything else that any of you would like to share with us i just would like to you know quickly recognize the team um aaron burgraph um headed up our middle school program teresa statum who you heard from our high school our two
089high school programs um and that meg hayne our esy we also had some fabulous um administrative interns um jenna way is here with us this evening hi jenna and then rhoda mo allen jonathan heyer we're at the elementary program uh mike harris was also an admin intern at the middle school program um that in addition to really just a district-wide coming together from every department to make this possible so i just would like to um throw out an appreciation that this was truly a team effort that began way back um in march when we tried to figure out what summer school could look like thank you yeah i'll just go that and say that um that the team feeling of this really made a big difference to i'll just speak personally to me as a
090staff member trying to put together a program and um then even just in some of our meetings here at the end and our debriefing of the programs it was a neat opportunity to learn from others within other school buildings like erin's idea to have the digital teachers lounge i was like oh violin went away you know so just little tips and tricks that i picked up from others and then of course the big huge ask of planning was made much easier by everyone we see here and then many many other people coming together and tackling things from pretty much every angle and i will also say that the staff that i talked with just in the distance learning program also felt like their program for special ed summer school was very successful and some of
091them got kind of excited about how this might open up some opportunities for students who are homebound or other students in the future and i'll just kind of jump in on that i'm erin burgraph i do have to give credit to the teacher's lounge to jenna way who is one of our interns she had a great idea to just have a place where teachers could drop in and ask us questions and it was really a helpful tool but i want to say too in terms of the team effort some feedback that we got from our teachers was that they really appreciated that they not only had some professional development and planning time prior to the start but really ongoing weekly sessions where we came together as a staff and we could collaborate and share ideas
092about what was working and really pivot as our program evolves and i think that will be a really important thing to consider as we jump into fall that we you know and we all know that that we'll need to pivot and do that but teachers enjoyed and appreciated having that input throughout and i think they really they not only learned from each other but they learned from the students and i think that really made it a vibrant program from start to finish i will just add for the middle school um so i would be first it was such a pleasure so thank you for letting me be here and then also it was lovely to work with aaron but um i got to work with our middle school math teachers and we knew that the
093curriculum we needed to try using the curriculum that we used during the school year so we actually had each teacher do at least two cpm lessons and the biggest takeaway was that we definitely need the breakout rooms that google meets is adding onto this fall um it was a huge request across all subject areas but particularly because i worked with closely with math we talked about it nearly every day i'm like man it would just be so much easier if i could pull this kid into a breakout room discuss with them real quick and then send them back just like you would in a classroom for intervention um and then one more thing to add with erin as we were leading these pd's every thursday i think part of the reason that it was very
094well received by staff is yes it was reflective of what they said that they needed but it was also given in the same format as we asked them to make their lesson plans so the accountability that we put on teachers was also the accountability that we as an admin team did we were always modeling what we expected and i think the ask then became much easier because we were really on the same team and then i actually wanted it to talk about credit recovery a little bit just in that the switch to membership hours and kind of how we account for that and attendance was very different than what we've done in the past and it made me very um i was a little i'm not gonna lie i was very scared when they told
095me i was like how are we gonna get attendance this is not gonna work high schoolers aren't gonna get online in the summer i don't know and we really were able to come up with um so what we decided to do was use goguardian and require our students to test online and by kind of forcing them to meet us online for that piece where we could watch them in chat while they were taking a test they saw how much help they were getting in that process and it actually expanded into just they were then working during the hours that we kind of wanted them to work and then they were reaching out more and we actually got a lot more interaction with our students and i was expecting for a credit recovery and it also
096had to do a lot with the staff i had they were on it you know reaching out to students every way that they could offering all kinds of help sending videos on to teach different concepts so credit recovery usually is not my worry in the summer because it's kind of you know they show up they sit down they work on what they got to work on and then they go home this summer was a little bit more of a worry for me but it actually worked out really well and i it made me happy because i saw some things that we were kind of already doing at our set but i think that we could do better and things that i saw that we could pull into our high school program for students who maybe
097aren't ready to make that jump to ourselves but need some additional credit recovery options and so that um that was a really good learning moment we had and i'll just jump in one and say one thing this is the model that we used for core planning for developing our core planning process because we started planning for summer school and we knew we had to bring in all of these critical stakeholders to be able to roll out a in-person distance model um and we needed all the voices together and um as you see the majority of this was led by our teaching staff and that just is a huge shout out to the commitment and skills of our teachers and so they were the model that we brought forward to core planning so as administrators we
098um we might facilitate it but it was really um it was really modeled after this group here thank you um really appreciate all of you for sharing just some additional insights and thoughts with us um board members i'll do one final call for any additional questions or comments that came up i had just one quick question that came up for me so you talked about students with symptoms and then they weren't they didn't come back did those students who had to be out for 10 days did they have the option of moving into distance learning during that time um unfortunately given that it was a three-week program and uh just most of our distance learning classes were full we could not offer that we weren't quite that nimble um but if we have a similar
099model next summer i think that we will then definitely with our learning this summer and throughout the year be able to offer that but that was not a possibility this summer unfortunately okay thanks that's great all right thank you so much um we appreciate all of you for spending your monday night with us with that we will move on to our third topic in the superintendent update go ahead superintendent unowski so as that's getting queued up obviously you all are welcome to stay you all are also welcome to check out at any point um the conversation and the third of our presentations about school resource officers and our school resolve resource officer program is on its way now you now speak back to discuss our relationship with school resource officers in ritual public schools school
100districts across the state and country are conducting similar analyses as this is an important time to review our relationships the school board tasked me with this analysis and i will be making a recommendation this evening as a reminder the program began nearly 30 years ago designed to increase safety in schools and create fast access to police with an officer assigned both at the middle school and high school creates positive relationships with students and uses a methodology called community-based policing currently we are in the final year of a four-year contract expiring on june 30th 2021. this contract also provides an option for a 30-day cancellation at any time funds used in this contract approximate 75 000 yearly and come from our safe schools library which provide a wide number of supports of school-based safety our resource
101officers are a trained police presence in our schools training our policies and expectations and they are designed mainly to build relationships and support community-based policing while also supporting our larger safety and security programs school resource officers are one piece of a large safety team at the school and district level at the building it includes the principal social worker therapist and a number of other appropriate staff members in our secondary schools there are also richfield public schools staff security are an activities director and our school resource officers as part of my review i also noted that there are statutes and rules that govern this work they make sure that the sro remains separate from both student data and school discipline i also examined our policies research and also formal police actions taken by our school resources
102richfield schools has 14 policies mentioning police but there are three all mandatory in the state of minnesota that move into my recommendation components they define cooperation in the use of officers while clear clearly stating that they are separate and will remain separate from all data in examining research i noted studies that are split in both analysis and impact there are studies claiming that school resource officers increase the likelihood of student involvement in the penal system and thus add to the school-to-prison pipeline other studies suggest just the opposite that school resource officers in schools help students stay out of this penal system and thus reduce this likelihood in regard to our research resource officers we found 16 tickets or police citations written over the past three years six assault-based events two theft two drug sales and
103six vaping most likely the illegal substance of thc after a warning in a first incident our officer meets with the student and family and works together towards restitution and warns of a ticket in a repeat offense as these incidences are minors we do not receive any identifying data based on the police work with the student as a district we are also very deliberate in keeping police information out of student files we requested data from the police compared their citation dates to our discipline dates and were able to report demographics in most cases based on our data seven citations were of african american students five lesson x one two or more races and in three cases we were unable to identify the race of the students while 16 incidences is a relatively small number it is
104also important to note that in every incident we could identify the ticket went to a student of color i also examined perception data of students related to having sros in school the state conducted a survey in spring 2019 about school climate it was taken by over a thousand richfield students including 733 secondary students and one of the questions was about the presence of school resource officers including about whether or not it is a good idea to have a police officer present in school well the data was relatively split about the comfort of students reporting illegal activities and problems to the police officers showing between 53 and 80 or 78 positive responses students in all age groups and genders reported 90 percent or higher approval of police officer presence in school it's important to note that
105this survey occurred before significant local experiences including the killings of brian kenonias and george floyd at the hands of police both these events may have had an impact on the feelings and perceptions of our students we decided to survey secondary students this summer to help our analysis we can contacted all students and also followed up to make sure that there was data representing all of our student democrats 362 secondary students took our survey representing 17 percent of our student population while our responses are not perfect in their representation of our full demographics they were spread well across grade level and also had over 50 students of color in their response including almost 18 african-american students and 27 percent latinx there were five questions asked including i like having an sro at my school and i
106feel safer with an sro at my school open comment section and also wanting an opportunity to discuss this further overall there were two areas with small statistically significant relationships in the question i like having an sro of my school 40 of the students were positive 13 were negative and the rest were neutral there was a difference in perspectives with students showing a great deal of support after their first year in each school grade six and nine with support being reduced as students remained in the school there was no statistical significance by racial demographics but only by age when asked if students feel safer with an sro in school there was a small statistically significant relationship between ethnicity and feelings of safety with an sro overall 46 percent of the students reported feeling safer while 13.89
107reported feeling less safe additionally there was a statistically significant difference with asian and latinx students feeling safer in total 166 students reported feeling safer versus 50 feeling less safe we also had a number of adults reach out to us and we reached out to education richfield administrators and to our students you already heard about the students but both administrators and education richfield showed positive feedback on the sro program and shared statements of general support in our student feedback i would also analyze as being generally supportive though clearly asking for further conversation adults from the community were more split in their support with a number of statements being sent to us asking us to discontinue program and a similar number of statements asking us to continue given this feedback i'm recommending the following i recommend that
108we continue our relationship however i believe that we need to take a number of significant steps to support greater quality control oversight and long-term analysis of this program our current contract that we have i don't believe has the language that fits the current goals of richfield schools and our constituents i suggest that we rewrite the contract thus ending the old one and create a one-year contract expiring on the same date june 30th of 2021 in this contract we write clear and rigorous details of the program outlining very deliberately roles and responsibilities including structured supports and expectations for each role i believe the contract should be shared publicly and brought before the board to ensure this always occurs i suggest we revise board policy 715 on purchasing currently 715 allows all contracts to be signed by
109cabinet team members our processes have had us bring higher priced and possibly controversial contract proposals to the board the reality is that in 2017 sros and police officers in school was not controversial in richfield schools by changing policy 715 we can ensure that there is greater oversight and examination of contracts and allows us to change contracts based on changing demographic ideas and changing ideas within our schools i believe that given student interests we need to work with our student leadership to empower them to create a larger conversation among students related to the presence of sros in school i was overwhelmed in reading that over 100 students want to have further conversation i think it's imperative on our school leadership and district leadership that we follow up on this request and engage in dialogue throughout the
110school year on this subject finally i believe that our leadership team should begin a study of other programs that support and would continue to support student safety either real or perceived that is supported by our sros there are districts that currently have police partnerships that are not financial there are also districts that have trained staff members who serve in similar roles without a police officer present as this is part of the superintendent report and not an action item i'm hoping for feedback on recommendations so that i proceed with next steps at this time i will open it for questions or comments all right so since that was longer than my typical presentation uh because of the amount of things i'm just gonna pause and open up for questions and comments and also be able to
111respond to anything from board members uh and we're gonna just do alphabetical order as usual um so we'll start off with paula i'm ready uh i have one question steve uh the seven and i have a few questions i don't know if you want them one at a time however you want to do it a lot of the time if you ask a question i'll respond and you ask another question awesome i'll okay the 75 000 is upper building or total i'm guessing okay and the reason i asked is because of um with the limited opportunities for using the funds that that's really not a lot for school counsellor then so a school counselor on a spreadsheet and we do average salaries would actually be more expensive than the 75 000. that includes um benefits
112and it also includes again the average salary across the entire district and all benefits included okay and this question is for the public to know to hear it and your answer uh uniformed officers the accounts they're armed so that's a really interesting question and i guess as i look towards some of the feedback that we got from students that that is a question i don't actually have the answer to i would say that i am concerned um and i am not sure i fully understand what officers should be wearing and or if they should be armed within our schools obviously we are a no guns allowed school as all schools are and so it does seem like a point of conflict in regard to why we have an armed officer in this school um and
113so i have had feedback from board members i know that i also i'm not a big gun fan myself having never literally held one in my life um and so i guess in my conversation um should we move forward with my recommendations i think that is part of the conversation with the police as we renegotiate and talk about what a one-year contract would be really having that open question about what is needed and what is needed in our schools and frankly again much like i am not an expert on coronavirus or public health i am not an expert on policing i have very little background or knowledge in my role of education and so i'm not sure what is needed from a police perspective and larger picture i'm not sure what we as a schools
114because we might have a different perspective are going to be okay from a police perspective being present in the school's larger picture i think that absolutely should come up and i think i absolutely will be asking that question thank you i think that definitely this should be a a question that's clear when we uh write up the new contract and the clothing as well i think if we can make it less i don't know less policy that's another word never mind um so i understand i actually want to respond to that so i do know there are different feelings in different uniforms worn by the different officers and i know that there is a window of what they can wear and i have seen them in different uniforms so you can go all um complete
115in police blue top to bottom uniform um i have also seen uniforms as casual as um i'm gonna do my best to describe this so i hope i don't say this awkwardly khaki pants and a blue police polo shirt similar to the tuxedo t-shirt we have all seen it is sort of a police equivalent thereof sort of a designed polo shirt that looks like that and so there is a very wide range that they are able to wear within within our buildings and do thank you i am going to save the question about the tuxedo teacher for another time when we're not discussing serious manners but i really want to know one question and then one recommendation so my last question will be i like to hear clarification of what it means when the data
116is separated from school discipline versus uh separated from student data like i wanna know in these interactions where does that paperwork get filed is that is that something gets filed like a i don't know an sro system for the school the student file the police file got it okay so the police and the schools are completely separate entities in regard to their data and so for us we have a student information system that is accessible by students there's school employees by level of their rights a principal would have rights to all discipline a teacher would not have rights to all discipline so in the student file we would have a set of pieces and then our admin administration is very very deliberate about not putting police information in there so if a student is involved
117in a violent incident that includes a a fight or an assault that most likely would not suggest police were called and police came and wrote a ticket to the student that would probably not be in the school's database okay the other thing to note is that police do not have access to that database in the disciplinary files so all of that is kept by by the school district and it relates to the student from an sro perspective similarly there is complete separation of the police-based files from these school-based files and those things do not cross and so if a police officer has been called and is here to handle an assault for example at one of our schools they would then have a case number we may or may not have that information we would
118not know or be privy to the private data in regard to that citation so the only way for us to find that out for example and that's what we did for this was to create a specific data request asking for it and and trying to gather that specific information and so one of the hard parts of tracking some of this down is our goal of separating out police information from a student file because student discipline can follow a student and there could be implications based on a student file and police interactions that happen thank you steve ah so one of the things uh in in this role about when you're on the school board is that as a servant of the community and richfield voters i i cannot rule on things just from my personal
119view which is why i asked uh the first time we had this conversation for surveys from the students who are really uh the ones who you know they're we're here for them so i want to thank you for collecting uh the the information i'm very pleasantly surprised at the higher uh response that we got from from our students i was going i was worried that we will have a hard time like you know finding them or getting them to access the survey um and really their opinion is is is overwhelmingly positive for how they feel i do think they deserve uh that we review the contract and that we make sure that all the points are going to ensure that we have a positive uh you know continue to have positive outcomes and even improve
120them going forward um and then the only one thing is that when we are doing i know that when we're reviewing policy we do a few reads and i'm assuming this one's gonna take a while but what i really hope is that we make this process as open to the community as pa you know the most that we can uh to really allow for our community students teachers uh staff members parents community members to really weigh in uh because obviously there are experiences that we won't know about and it's important to hear everyone so that we we come up with a policy that's really going to uh be offer the best for our kids so i'll pass it to miss malek now thank you thank you thank you paula um so i i really appreciate
121the depth and all of the information that was in that presentation i think you covered pretty much almost everything that we asked for and i think that is very helpful as we try to move forward um i i pretty much agree with the recommendation of keeping of redoing the contract and not just bluntly ending the partnership but really investigating what that partnership is what it means how it is a partnership between the city and ridgefield public schools and incorporating the information that we got from our students through these surveys and not just i mean incorporating what we know now in this but over this next year really using this time and our student voice that we've already got some of but that i think will be even more meaningful when they're in school or when
122school is at least back in session to continue to work with our students on what they think the best way to um build community relationships and um keep our schools a safe place what what do we need to do that what other things do they think might be more more helpful or as helpful as having an sro in our school buildings some of the things in the presentation include one of their main responsibilities is building that those community relationships so i would think one thing we could do is to ask is to address how they do this what work do they do to build those community relationships what do we do as a district to measure their success and see how well they're doing in the in meeting those goals that we have um and
123um also how they work within our school safety team so we have a school safety team i envision them myself as being more a part of that team like an integral part of it but not as a so much as a separate entity we also in the presentation it also discusses training in our expectations and policies i think that's an area where we probably need to add more detail and do some more work on what specific training we are going to provide for them and what our specific expectations are and how we hold them to those expectations and including i think the other thing including that should be included is some type of equity training i don't know what they experience as police officers but if we're providing training and what our expectations are i
124think that that is a key part of what our expectations would include um and then just really the other things are about keep making them part of that school safety team and also kind of the idea that in the research that i've read and i've discussed with steve also most of the studies show that the success of sro programs is very dependent on the individual officer and that makes it a challenge for us to keep um a strong program when it's when your officer can change over time and you have some control over who it's going to be but it's hard to know until they're in the role exactly how how they will handle things so i think that's a challenge that we will have to address um and to what paula said about um
125about the police officers being armed i noted in the surveys that that was something that was mentioned by multiple students that they would be more comfortable if they if there wasn't a gun so i think that's something we should um consider so i think we just need to really be very mindful and careful about how we move forward how we set up this initial one-year contract and then how we work with our students to figure out what the best way is to move forward might also want to just take a moment to express appreciation for all of the emails and things that we've gotten from community members and other people um helping us kind of figure our way through this because i think hearing what other people's perspectives are are really helpful but especially our
126student perspective so so thank you for the presentation for gathering that information and we'll move on to mr paulus a couple things real quick tim before you start so christine i know my team members were frantically typing notes based on what you're saying but could you also email that to us so we make sure we capture all of those pieces as we create that new contract or that new contract draft um and then i also want to acknowledge yes we were able to get some information from our students but absolutely um and you can see that within my recommendations the most important part is to really empower our students to be in that dialogue to really get a lot more information from them that we can't actually get from a survey um that we can
127really understand how to make this most effective all right i will put myself on newton send it right to tim thanks thank you um thank you to paul and christine for covering much of of what i might have brought up um i would start with the recommendation from the administration i understand and i think it makes sense for now um part of my motivation or one of my requirements for undoing the program is having a firm understanding of what we would replace it with and and while the data was you know while the student data was overwhelmingly positive in terms of or not was mostly positive and you know significantly neutral as well on how they are how they feel with an sro in the building it was not necessarily a full we didn't you
128know the the true question would have had more to it and that we are obligated to provide a safe and secure campus and would have you know what replaced some of that function with other things and without being able to articulate what those are someone's saying oh i want this but we have we've suggested we've said presented it as if there's a vacuum in its absence and i don't think that's the case and that's okay i'm not i'm not criticizing it but but at the same time it was favorable that the students largely felt positive or neutral about it um that said we we still had you know 13 percent of the students with with with negative feelings and that is a big number um from a survey and you know we there are things
129that we are obligated to to react to in in at some point and so like any of our contracts in any of our agreements we we review them on an ongoing basis and this is one where the the diverging or divergence of what the goals are for the respective organizations or we've broken down in our ability to communicate to them and them to hear what we want and them to deliver on it has has perhaps led to some problems because you know if this was a different vendor like the milk vendor where they were on campus all the time and we had administrative level problems like we like we have discussed as a board right things that create headaches that just shouldn't be we would survey our our alternatives whether it was the milk vendor
130a transportation vendor or in this case the sro but for the sro we don't have obvious alternatives there's not a there's not a competing law enforcement official that we could we could bring in and so you know one of the one of the great things about our community is is it is so small like as a district we're small enough to get our arms around it and really work on things and our community is exactly the same size and so i think with some dialogue and some understanding of where we where we want it to be we perhaps could fix this um if if we have partners who are willing to fix it with us and help us get over the perception that this is really a a so individual dependent and so we don't
131create the law enforcement officers who become sros if they come to us from rpd and so what is rpd doing to generate an infinite supply of you know high high you know like like like the officer we have at the high school very high functioning sros how do we go about doing that and so that's something perhaps we can work in in together on or if not we can agree at some future date to to walk away but not you know but at which time we would also have a replacement plan um in mind one of the things as i look through the data you know or the other parts of the presentation you know it is it is difficult when you know we we have talked numerous times about that the officers are not
132involved in student discipline at all yet we can find 16 tickets and i know that's not a lot it's possible some of them are for after school events and where where the responsibilities are very different um that said we find 16 tickets all of the ones identifying race are students of color you know it's statistically significant um that's not good that's not that's not good for perpetuating the the program i think and so i would like to know how that goes how that comes about how the officer decides what level of discretion is is occurring in these conversations where students are screened and meeting set up with families to intervene do the families believe that this is school sanctioned like we're not aware of it these are problem spots and if and if the officers
133don't understand how those could create problems for us then we really are going to end up talking past each other quite a bit and so i just like to know more about about those things but for now i the data well i appreciated seeing it i appreciate it seeing vastly positive or neutral um but it is it is the fact that you know the negative views are large enough to certainly give us pause as a group and and i'm thrilled to hear some of the students are interested in having further dialogue because i want to hear what they want i want to hear what we can do i want to hear what we can accomplish if we work more openly with with rpd and figure out you know what it would look like if it
134has a high functioning thriving program because from as we sit here i don't think i would say it's been a thriving successful program um based on the challenges it's presented it's had some successes it's had some misses of some missteps and you know we have to a level where i think we have to evaluate it critically so we'll do that in the next year and i will pass it to ms mayshek uh thank you for all the work that went into gathering all of this data and um for being so transparent in the data that you collected um i know tim just said this but i just feel that it bears repeating that um a hundred percent of the tickets that we've been able to identify the race of students where students of color i
135think we kind of just need to sit with that for a second systems are designed to get the results that they get and to me that percentage is illustrative of a broken system um you know looking at the servers results i agree that to a large extent they're inconclusive um and sometimes with surveys uh like majority rules and how we make our decisions but i think sometimes that's not um what you walk away with and even a small number um in a given situation might be what guides your thinking because that holds the moral imperative um so that's kind of what i'm wrestling with right now with with the results from our our survey but i um i don't disagree with the recommendation i think that having a student-led work group or task force on
136this issue would be really important to build what comes next which could be sros if if students come together and determine that that's what they think is the best model moving forward then that's the model that i'll support um but it is really important to me that that work be um not only inclusive of student voice but truly led by students and at a minimum inclusive of students that maybe don't always pop up as what we think of as student leaders um and i'm i don't know who could take this charge maybe it's uc maybe somebody else um who some of those young people might be that are passionate about racial justice issues i was thinking about the the project that students do in social studies like seniors i believe it's seniors only with uh
137my care harris had some students present jess this year um like maybe that's a topic that students are interested in that they could work on for that project and you know also lead part of the work or be involved i don't know but i think there's a lot of different um leadership within ridgefield schools that might be interested in collaborating um so i think there's a lot of opportunity there um one of the questions i have that i have i don't know the answer to is um is ticketing required by sro so for example if i'm an sro in a school and i'm investigating a drug sale and i do find in fact that illicit drugs have been sold by a student and i like required to take it so there is some complexity to
138that answer um so the answer is to the best again to the best of my understanding i am not a policing expert but i will tell you i had some very direct and uncomfortable conversations with our partners with the city to the best of my understanding what i would say is police are not and will not um look the other way so that is the first thing so they will take some form of action or they are expected to or they could lose their badges what said action is is then where the judgment comes in um and so i guess i would ask you as a board member and i'm not actually i'm gonna ask this rhetorically um but at what point would you suggest that things go from a school-based student or child-based behavior
139issue to a police-based issue i don't know that line and i'm not sure when that is but that is some of the judgment that is then made in some regards and then to the greatest extent we have possible um within our schools the only way that would become a police action is if an administrator had referred that to the police officer for support or if the police officer in their own supporting community policing had come across it themselves and so there are several quality controller safeguards and that in regard anyways um in some ways that are connected to that situation i hope that makes sense it does um connected to that question i know you you answered this a little bit um in talking about like having to do the data request for those um
140particular citations and i'm just um i'm feeling a little discomfort around having unknown citations happening within ridgefield schools um also and there's a lot of complexity to that also and so here's what i would say um one way for us to track to the best of our ability would be for us to put it in the student record and now a police citation or calling police is in a student's record for honestly the rest of their academic career that would be the actual cleanest way in terms of student discipline for us to do that i can tell you that our administrators were very deliberate and very clear in telling me that they did not want to do that they did not feel like that was appropriate um the second way to do that is what's
141called desk drawer notes however those are accessible and can be gotten from a court of law which would mean that they would create a record and a note-taking methodology which while it would not follow the students would allow us to track that information those are all now if ever recorded or requested part of a record and that record could then be used in public and so what we have already begun a dialogue about administratively as we think about what a one year next year contract would look like i don't like that i don't have that information and that we had to make a couple of data requests to try to figure that out and we're trying to find that spot where we can have the information for sure but then it cannot be connected to
142students so that we don't put policing in that student's record um and i assume um that doctors clarkson and daniels as they coordinate and as we continue to coordinate we're going to be working with colleague districts to see what they do in those cases my belief honestly is that most districts just put it in the file of a student um that you refer to police and you just document because from an overall aboveboard perspective that is the cleanest way even though i would not necessarily suggest that is the best way for the student way to do that but we are certainly open to looking for creative ways that people do that that's really helpful context thank you um i can pass to chair bracky again i feel like i'm gonna make a little bit of
143a mess of things with thoughts all over the place so just manage your expectations accordingly um because i do have thoughts on the revisions of the contract for one year and i have thoughts on just the broader conversations that we have been having and i think need to continue to have and so uh well we'll just start by saying that i too am sitting in the discomfort um with uh some of the results that we have seen um in terms of citations by race and not knowing if there were other students who could have been cited but were not um that to me is one of the difficult questions with this um i think the uh what you were just talking about with respect to records and not wanting police citation to be put in
144academic records is in many ways a superficial distinction because if they are getting a citation they are then part of the system moving forward whether or not it's reflected in their academic record um and so i think we're still participating in that um by having that citation be something that takes place on our grounds in some way shape or form so i just i felt like that was important for me to to share philosophically or theoretically um i also think it's important to just place in context how significantly student opinion has changed in the span of one year from the results of the minnesota student survey to the results that we got this summer which i think again puts all the more importance on the work that i think we're saying we support taking place
145this coming school year to really have a student-centered process that helps us better understand the lived experiences of our students and what they want to be true as far as their school experience um and that feels especially important to me because um we do not have all of the data from the surveys this summer disaggregated in all of the ways that we should um because it was something that we were doing um you know over the summer while at the same time trying to figure out how to build a new school system from scratch in the middle of a global pandemic um but really wanting to be able to see what is some of the intersectionality of how our black male students experience this for example how students with disabilities i mean i think there
146are multiple different levels that we want to make sure we're really looking at here as we sit with these questions for the long term um as far as for this coming specific year um the question about weapons has already been raised so i will move on from that i think the two things that i feel pretty strongly about one is getting very clear and direct language around our expectations of what happens in buildings when police are present and i think that gets a little bit to what you were saying steve about where those judgment lines are and actually talking through some of those situations um in terms of how we as a district would want things to be handled and making sure that we're actually looking at things through a similar lens the second thing
147that feels really important for this year is also what does an sro program look like in a virtual schooling model and in a hybrid schooling model whatever hybrid model we end up coming um to actually implement so i have a lot of questions about what this role looks like in that context and what that means for our students and for us as a district um financially and otherwise honestly i would say the last things around just sort of the broader question um you know i i think that this is the responsible path for this year even though i am conflicted about it um because we and this gets to some of what tim was saying do not have i think what feels like a viable or responsible solution for the long term that would not
148just potentially be replicating the exact same model which we have seen from some of our neighboring districts um i don't think that's what we want to do i think we want to give ourselves the time and space to like really think expansively and think big about what our students and and what our community deserves and doing that in deep partnership um with our students at the center and with our community involved in a rigorous way that really centers racial equity uh so i would say the final summary statement for me no questions just thoughts um is i hope what people are hearing is a commitment from us as a district to really be thoughtful and to to do the time to to get this as right as we can get it and acknowledging that that
149is not something that we can do for the 2020 2021 school year we're going to make some some important tweaks um and we are going to give ourselves the time and we as a school board are going to be deeply involved and hold the superintendent accountable to doing the in-depth work for the future so i think i would leave it at that um steve i don't know if there's anything you want to respond to me directly before i just do the final i'll call for any um additional board member comments or questions yeah just kind of two statement comments in relation to that um i would agree that we are definitely culpable in scenarios where we would contact the police but i do want to be very deliberate in saying there's a very big difference
150between a police record and a school record because a school if a student was going on to college may judge police presence as something that would disqualify them from getting into college um and so well if the police are involved with our students it does not keep them from a police record if that happened on a ticket but it would not get in a student record that a college would get and so i just wanted to make that statement i um the other thing that i have not addressed or none of us have sort of acknowledged is is that what we are also talking about is the district or administration taking those steps every single adult in our building and also students are residents of richfield and they have the right and entitlements to call
151the police or press charges and so the other thing for us to be aware of is is that some of these things um and in some of these cases may have had nothing to do with an administrator suggesting police should be involved this could have been a staff member a parent or another student and those are something we'll have to figure out the nuances of as we sort of look to how do we handle this for the next year thank you both important points that i hear and take seriously and i think are appropriate to have shared as well i will look to see if there are any final board member comments or questions on this topic okay i do not see or hear any so we are now at the ripe hour of 9
15208 pm going to move on to the consent agenda containing routine business items um this meetings consent agenda also includes a number of items that are before us for annual approval as this is the first meeting of the new fiscal year so just wanted to call that out since this is a routine business item i won't individually call on board members but rather just pause to see if there are any questions about the consent agenda seeing and hearing none is there a motion to approve the consent agenda i move approval of the consent agenda i will second thank you we have a motion by ms malek in a second by mr paulus any discussion hearing and seeing none i will pull the board ms cole aye mr paulus aye ms misha aye the clerk votes
153eye and chair brocky aye the consent agenda is approved we have four items of old business before us this evening all of which are existing board policies that we have begun the process of reviewing and updating um so the first of these is local and out of city travel all right so we have a few that are going to go relatively quickly and then one that might take a touch longer um and so in our second read um local and out of state travel unless mr holgi is wanting to tap in although i just saw him no he's letting me run with it uh so what you'll see in our second read is the updated policy based on new updated state guidelines um and then also the new and updated travel reimbursement forms um so
154if you take just a quick look you'll see some small changes in regard to reimbursement a lot of this does have to do with school board travel of which we frankly do not have a lot um within richfield schools because we do have practices within our district for pre-approval and things of that nature for any travel that would happen by staff um and then you also see the employee approve approval form and also the reimbursement form which works for anybody including school board members and so you have that for your perusal tonight um and then we'll take any other feedback since it has been brought up to speed which you can provide now or on email before we do our final or third read at our next meeting great thank you we will do the
155round of board member comments and questions starting with paula she's on mute but i think i can read lips and said she didn't have any comments or questions is that right just not if i yep okay we're going to move on to christine craig your thing didn't work or i must have pressed a different letter other than d but no comments or questions from me either so we will go to mr paulus um just just my my one question is um on school board travel and that it's approved or within the budget it's it i think i saw it was to be reviewed by the superintendent or designee um i would suggest that that we further have it be part of a explicit in a consent agenda or something so that it was public so
156that if if one of us went on um what something something a trip that was meaningful to work but someone else might accuse it of being um frivolous we were at least public about what that trip was that it took place and what what the reimbursement was i i don't know where that would go uh but i i think we should be explicit about funds spent on the board for travel on behalf of the district especially since the board especially if it's being approved by staff and not necessarily the board directly got it so as our notetakers are taking notes what you would like to see is us add a public report or putting this within a consent agenda so it is at least shared publicly um for any board travel that might occur yes
157i think so thank you so if i can jump in just with a comment the way it reads right now is it looks like regional meetings or sba meetings are assumed to be approved and all other meetings would need to be approved by this poor board it's letter a under the appropriate travel okay um and i'm sorry can you point to where that is in the so it's policy 411 it's in the re it's in the revised version um item three letter a that specifically talks about how the school board is approved and then b is employee travel expenses and c is specific to travel outside the u.s the last two sentences on that address what is generally approved as those school board conferences and right other travel would be approved by the school board
158as a whole uh and so i think still um since the so we if the board can travel and sort of with this pre-approved policy of what it is i think we owe a report on how much the expense was if it's um above some threshold you know for example we've all gone to msba meetings and maybe submitted mileage that's about it but um i i just against instance there there must be a threshold where or perhaps we could find a threshold where it it would make um where travel maybe if it was out of state or something or required overnight stay was something we reported back because right now the we we have this blanket allowance for certain types of meetings and it the the approval of it is through the superintendent and or
159designee which creates i i think uh um you know it it could put unease on the superintendent or designee if the board were we're traveling in a way within a certain guideline and um and the trip was expensive so i don't i don't know what the threshold is i'm open to suggestions but that that's i understand the idea that there's this sort of blanket allowance for certain types of meetings and others would require pre-approval but if i went to a regional or national meeting that's that meets the guideline and that could be in a great place that maybe is um you know we'd want to know what the expenses are i think and report them back so i could be alone on that i'm i'm this is open to discussion that you'd revise if you
160looked at that yeah well i think we add the 3a just a statement around um some form of so travel in 3a it says travel to other meetings for reimbursement the school district should be pre-approved by the school board um and then we should just add something about the amount in regard to travel and have it be publicly so we'll talk about that offline afterwards thank you i don't have any questions uh cheer bro i don't have any questions either um so we'll just pause to see if there's anything else that anyone would like to share not seeing any we will go on to the second uh policy under old business which is petty cash all right so again small red line changes bringing them up to speed the main component is adding a statement
161called purchases in violation of district policies and guidelines and or not authorized by minnesota state laws um and so that is added in a couple of places and then some of the wordier parts are removed um a statement how we oversee petty cash in those funds and also within community ad and so this just sort of updates those components nothing major but brings them up to speed thank you hello you're hitting the wrong key again it's okay ctrl d i'll come back to you in a minute we'll go to christine i have no questions or comments mr paulus um my my question is that the i noticed that some of the some of the schools the only schools that are that are listed in our high school administrative office high school athletic office and community
162ed and is it does that match like does that match the current state of the world are the other are the other schools um operating you know if they have a petty fund amount that they're that they're using right now we would want to match have policy match that unless we want to specifically remove it so that they do not have one correct we've worked hard to reduce the number of petty cash boxes the p cards have helped support some of that so the ones that are listed were cleaned up to the ones that are actually in place okay thank you yeah i have nothing else missed me no questions from me uh chair becky no question for me either and paula has confirmed that she does not have any comments or questions as well
163so thank you everyone uh we will move on to the third policy credit card usage all right so again bringing this up to speed policy 712 credit card usage with no significant edits and then guidelines with some edits to bring things up to speed um just as a reminder schools have ap card there are multiple quality controls to make sure that there are multiple sign-offs in regard to that that does come up on a yearly basis in our audit and you'll see just some clarifications put in there like changing accounts payable clerk to finance department so that it's not following a specific title or a specific person and so then just putting things in to clarify in this area so with that i will pause and go for any questions or you can just mouth
164no questions and i'll okay she's good we're going to move on to christine no questions or comments thank you mr paulus now you just just the the same question i had last time i asked it we say here on three a nine the card homeless credit rating is not affected by having a p card have we confirmed that can we can we say that with full complete confidence i will confirm their social security numbers are not connected to that credit card it's a district business account so confirm again that no that that that should okay so that's is it important to us to have that within the guideline in the event that somehow these super computers that know everything about us connected the two i don't believe there's anything essential i think this when i
165was originally drafted came out of um as well guidelines and what was put in there but we can review right okay i'd just hate to have it come back to us that someone said this was flagged on a report they're about of course it's when they're buying a house or something and it's a problem and this policy somehow has that so okay thank you mr paycheck no question uh chair no questions for me either but i appreciated the uh brief cameo from christine malik's mother in the background hello hello hello nice to have you with us all right um just pausing to make sure we've got nothing else on this one we will move to the fourth um and and the one that i think the superintendent previewed is likely to have a bit more
166conversation behind it around student transportation absolutely so this is the other policy and just as a reminder we brought this one up because we knew there might need to be some changes in regard to this school year and so we will be looking to have a finalized policy um or a temporary finalized policy perhaps at our next meeting and so i just want to walk through a couple of components we began examining this policy due to covet 19 and the possibilities of significantly changed capacities of our buses just as a reminder we have approximately 22 buses that can fit within our bus garage right now we only have 17 bus drivers who are hired for the school year and we continue to pursue more so we do not have a huge capacity to add more
167bus drivers and we do not have a huge capacity to add more buses at the same time as you heard in my earlier presentation at present we can fit approximately 23 students per bus based on state guidelines state guidelines and minnesota law requires school districts to transport students if they live more than two miles from the school and they live within the school district so i'm going to say that again because then i'm going to talk about what our actual rules are so minnesota state law only requires us to transport students living two miles or more from the school yet also within the school district as of 1920 richfield schools provides a great deal more transportation and busing to our students than would be required by law at all levels we have something called hazardous
168crossings and students having to go across hazardous crossings and those are listed in this policy at the moment are providing transportation at the elementary level students living more than one mile from their school are also receiving transportation and so we are providing additional transportation that is current law in our policy in two different ways um we are looking at state data which would suggest somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of our students will be choosing distance learning however when i present on this in two weeks we should have a more realistic estimation of our own students um the other thing to keep in mind and i'm just going to say it really directly out loud today we are absolutely going to have to do some kind of changing of start times to start the school
169year so we have 30 minute routes at this point and with cleaning that occurs we need to absolutely have 40 minutes so regardless of what happens we're going to have a small shift of start times of at least 20 minutes in the end or at least some of our schools turn into the next page um so the considerations for us to think about one removal of hazardous walk zones so if we are to look at providing legal transportation one of the questions for us to look at is removal of hazardous walk zones that would require us as a district and we have already had safe routes to schools planning out where would school patrols go our safe schools coordinator has looked at all the sites and locations that would we would want to provide to
170make sure that patrols were in those locations to ensure safe crossing we also need to examine our bus boundaries at two miles and elementary students are the ones that currently get those additional rules if we went to two miles with no hazardous cross zones 1333 of our current students would lose transportation so i'm going to say that in a more positive way for a second to say that board policy is providing transportation to 1 33 richfield students who do not legally um based on the guidelines meet the qualifications for that requirement we are providing extraordinary service to our community at present if we remove hazardous wax zones and cut down to one and a half miles 974 students lose transportation again most of these are elementary and then one mile for elementary 416 students lose
171transportation and so that is something for us to know that any action we take there will be a set of students who will be losing transportation now those numbers assumptions are based on 100 of our students returning and so if some are choosing distance those those numbers reduce but that's where we sit at the moment then similarly as we think about what our start times are going to be for next year it's going to play out kind of like this the number of students choosing to come back and the number of students we have to provide transportation is going to dictate when when school starts and how many start times we have right now we have what's called three-tier busing which means three sets of start times in school tier one is the rdls stem
172which has one start time tier two is centennial sheridan which has one start time and tier three has the high school and the middle school which also has one start time if we were to be able to retain those we already would have to move to 7 40 8 20 and 9 o'clock which changes the two later start times back because of the added times in regard to cleaning our business so you'll see some projections in regard to three-tier four-tier five-tier and six-tier busing and so in our survey we are gathering information about transportation versus start time from some of our families and trying to gather information about what they value more but for this board to be aware of the larger service we provide in regard to transportation to the higher number of students
173means the more start times if we win in one category we are going to be losing in another so we're trying to find that best fit for the least disruption of start times yet also um providing providing as much transportation is likely then the last thing as we heard from the governor is is that we should not necessarily anticipate that if elementary kids are in three days a week that high school kids are in three days a week and so as we plan our hybrid model this is also going to come together at the same time because we do have some opportunities if younger students attend more often than older or if some are depending on the percentages of in person while others are distance learning we might have some opportunities in regard to what
174those start times and what our transportation looks like so what you're going to see in the policy starting on page 116 first is you are going to see some additions in regard to what safe routes to schools resources would be used in regard to crossing guards regarding to add a policy or amend a policy to include crossing guards and have them have training and then some of the work that we would do to provide some of those safe routes to schools the next component would be around us considering removing all hazardous boundaries one of the very challenging components and this is on page 122 you'll see what all of those hazardous crossings are most of the assumptions of us being able to provide transportation involves us using crossing guards instead of recognizing hazardous crossings i'm
175just keeping rules as is there are 416 students that would then need the support of crossing guards and and the safe routes to schools components we have done a couple of other updates in regard to the redline components um with how we are with how we would address transportation but what we do not have yet in here is that overall recommendation in regard to what we need to do for bus boundaries and that piece um but i do need board members aware um that two weeks from now we will likely be coming back with a recommendation um and so board members says miss smith asked how can board members support us give some very serious thought um to this really challenging situation no matter what we do we are going to provide probably lesser service
176um in regard to start times or in regard to the amount of students providing transportation and we need to really think about how we're going to have to to work on this to be successful this is honestly one of the biggest challenges of the entire process um and a lot of the calculus in the math um maybe mr paulus can help us with this in the end is figuring out when our hybrid appears what students go on what day um if we do a staggered day model or how we stagger the days that students are in it's certainly possible we have for example middle school in monday wednesday friday and high school in on tuesday thursday and that can then become one set of bussing in that situation that is just an example not a
177decision by any stretch of the imagination but i wanted to say that out loud to illustrate um and so those are the things we are working on and i just wanted to make sure we were having that conversation and board members were fully aware so i'm going to stop and open it up for any questions i have a feeling there will be many uh we'll start with paula my mikey song thanks craig yay uh i don't have questions and also i feel about that i always go first and then i take away all the pleasure in you all from asking the question so i'm going to take this time to say that now that the summer school people left i realized that cassandra's here because i hover over her name and i haven't say hello
178to her and welcome so hi cassandra nice to meet you and i hope you're enjoying your first meeting they're not so long usually so miss malek okay thank you paula um i first just want to start by saying my head is just like spinning with the number of wheels turning with this but i really want to just take a minute to point out where we think about where we were a month ago in our july meeting when we were first contemplating this and it was it just seemed impossible in my mind and i think that's what i heard from everybody else and the team came together and i think i even predicted that they would come together with some really good and creative ideas to help us figure this out but the report the presentation
179for this is really impressive there are some really good ideas it is really complex but i just want to say thank you to the whole team for putting together such a detailed group of information to help guide us as we figure this out a couple things i love are the walking bus and the bike train those are really great ideas for elementary um and i'd also like to point out you know changing start times is kind of a small thing if we're able to get our kids into face-to-face learning so i think we should be able to adjust reasonably to a some variations in start times the big concern i have as far as making these changes and balancing this is an increase in distance for walking for elementary students because i feel like two
180miles for elementary students in minnesota in the winter is a challenge and if you think about rdls and stem students starting at 7 40 it could be dark when they have to leave their house in the winter so that's that was kind of the thing that jumped out to me the most through this was making sure that we are very thoughtful and maybe being that be an area that we don't want to bump up is our elementary school walk times um otherwise um i think it's a lot to think about and i will probably go through that presentation a few more times before i kind of pull it all together and make some comments about what i might recommend and i will probably reach out to other people i know with especially elementary kids but
181other age kids in the schools right now um and i think that is all i have all right so quick response that i just want to say out loud so none of us want to expand the walk zones um one of us wants to um take away hazardous crossings um as evidenced by the board policy and practice um that we are providing transportation way beyond the expectations of the state of minnesota and you're right almost all of those numbers um are areas we wouldn't want them to impact which is our elementary kits and so we also um and this is not in here because these are part of the core team conversations are looking at the possibilities of child care before and after school as needed so that if people have to drop their kids
182we are looking with the state and we're still waiting on a response about whether we can provide stipends to families for doing their own transportation um for the year if they're doing that and just looking at different ways that we can support this really awkward situation the thing i'm going to push you on and the whole board is to say i know we don't want to do any of these things but it is absolutely required that within our policy and the law we provide legal transportation and so we're probably no matter what we do any sort of adjustment is not what we want to do and we have to because this is the most complex component legally provide within our policy transportation to our kids and families which means we're probably going to have to
183cut some form of service in some way shape or form so so i guess my what i was saying is i would prioritize not i would prioritize the distance for kid elementary kids over start times the idea of my priorities i definitely don't have the answer to all of this yeah no i hear you i hear you and i appreciate that and then we're all we're all gonna absolutely have to reflect on this in the coming weeks because it is a sacrifice of some of the service we believe our kids and families need just to try to have our schools running thanks mr paulus thank you um i'll start with the just one of the some of the red line stuff the the school bus driver duties and responsibilities is a lot of redline added
184in the guideline 742.1 and what drove is is that new msba guidance is that it is okay great um then i'll go back to the yeah the challenging question which we we've talked about and said this we we knew this was going to come and that this this logistic hurdle that that's critical to what we do and and it was when we talked about school start times when we changed them a few years ago how do we how do we get the kids there on time for what we do and i don't i don't i mean i'm willing to do whatever it takes to get the kids on site safely and as many of them safely as possible we um we won't know how many we have until we we hear parent surveys and find
185out how many are up how many are opting out how many are will are willing you know are willing to drive on their own or would list that as their primary view of their own transportation um and so that's going to be an important part of our consideration we we don't have an answer here um if we start talking about high school uh changes in start time we start talking about changes in end time for high school and then we get into students with jobs students with after-school activities to the extent those are allowed but certainly you know if students who work will will still probably work if they have a job and so if we if we went to the six tier model and they started at 11 they don't have time to work
186if we do the same length school day even if it's only two days a week or three days a week and so there's some some real considerations that that we're going to run into um and we won't know until we see it so i look forward to getting some data absolutely the good thing is and we're going to get a lot of information from our parents is um the sixth tier is one of those hybrids or the in-person based model um well we're still social distancing and so the more staggered our days are for students the more likely we are to be able to transport them and so as you know doing the math if 70 of our students don't come i'm or if 30 percent of the students don't come which is sort of
187the state data that means we're only working with of our students and if they're in school every other day then we're only transporting 35 of our students every other day and so now we've really reduced that and we actually have fewer things to worry about with start time so it's gonna be really important hybrid wise we hear from our parents and families what their top priorities are but then again um and this is again saying this out loud we are one point above a case level from the state right now that would have everyday elementary and hybrid secondary and so we also have to build routes and models because we have to build to transition that um we might have to have we might anticipate elementary every day because that is where the case rate
188was july 18th or darn close to it right right one of the models the easiest model to for us to figure out transportation is no one's on site um and so we we're starting in the 20s we have to be ready for the 30s and theoretically we we could be ready for the teens um i don't know if anyone's proposing we need to be ready for the single digits so right although as you point out the 30s 40s and 50s are the easiest from a transportation perspective it's craig is craig's headache sir if it drops into the teens or below the teens in some way shape or form and it continues to increase the number and percentage of students they're in school that said if it drops if we're sitting at 20 and we we
189propose something in the 20s i guess you getting we we could be more restrictive than the state allows um and and we could just say that's what it is and and plan on adjusting it in second semester or something like that i mean so yes we do need we could build in all this stuff but i mean it moving by one in any one of these reports doesn't mean we we have to um scuttle the whole plan and and roll out a new one so it but flexibility will it is important to consider it so okay i don't anticipate as flopping models by week that's not what we're looking for in planning i think it would take planning and transformation to change from one level to the next yes um i think what we've talked
190about in our core planning is we have to be ready to shift to a more restrictive model on a moment's notice we don't have to be ready to shift to a less restrictive model on a moment's notice right yes i think consistency would be appreciated if if we can manage it and so there it is i'll pass to allegra um one time i was in a brainstorming session where the facilitator said there are no bad ideas and to test that theory someone came up with the idea of stuber student uber so short of us considering that i have enough questions or further comments share brackie would would the stooper promise to be six feet apart from the non-household member while in the stuber limo limo super windows down masks on you can do it i
191appreciate the challenge to find the maybe not great idea but i still believe in the maxim there are no bad ideas um so i would uh just a couple thoughts one i want to appreciate will who is our safe routes to school coordinator i am so grateful that we were the recipient of that grant from the state of minnesota that enabled him to come to our district and do this work at this moment in time so thank you will um and everybody else on the transportation team who is spending a lot of time and hours on this i think um the two things that i guess i'm most sitting with um the reality of us making a decision on august 17th and how short notice that could feel like for a lot of people um
192and i know that the survey went out today and i was able to briefly peek at it and see that we're asking questions and trying to get people's preferences and acknowledging that none of these are good options and i'm still really concerned that we could be somewhat radically affecting people's plans by making changes at this point in time or the financial implications if people feel like we're not comfortable or are not able to provide transportation but nor can we pay um for the cost of district transportation so i think that that issue of how does pay to ride fit into this is something that i would like to know a little bit more about in the coming weeks and then i think the second thing is just um trying to figure out how do we
193how do we have plans given the fluidity of like we we don't know when students families might decide to actually go back and forth from a virtual option to a hybrid slash in-person option and how to account for that in our system because yes we can ask people to commit to being virtual for nine weeks which to be honest is significantly better than what i'm hearing about from a lot of places where they're asking people to commit to a whole year in advance in a way that i find unrealistic but we these are not binding decisions we can't force or require people to commit and not allow them to change and so especially how that affects these transportation decisions is something that um i'm curious and concerned about so first you are doing a great
194job of saying out loud why we are spinning in in these conversations so yes we are trying to get people to commit to distance if that is what they are choosing and understand that it is just not going to be a blank decision that they can that they can go back and forth on as you point out the level to which it's binding i don't know um obviously that is that provides a challenge um we don't know um we are gonna have to do our best um and yes it is it might feel late in the game we are somewhat at the mid later point um the reality is is and and i'll say this out loud also i had done the math and you know you and i were talking on the phone when
195when they were talking i had done the math based on more recent case data and so had craig and our math was higher than the current case rate from july 18. and so it is certainly possible that our math is wrong and we don't know their methodology um or it is possible that the case rates are going up we we don't know for sure and so it would be one thing to make a decision based on july 18th but that's almost two months and so we wanted to make it as early as we felt was responsible and left that extra week where i don't see us changing that that is going to be hard on the start of school and that's going to be hard overall yes it is absolutely a challenge in regard to
196whether or not we're going to be in distance learning or what level we're going to be in and yep it is an absolute inconvenience to do it at this time um we have stuck with the philosophical priority of we believe that teachers are essential classrooms are essential and having kids in front of teachers to the best extent we possibly can while being safe is what we wanted to try to accomplish um we also wanted to gather as much input as to what our parents and families wanted um we actually already i got a text we have over 250 staff surveys and over 500 parent surveys completed already in the first few hours and so we are gathering information fast and furious and our communications team led by craig and jennifer is really pushing really hard
197in this regard we also have people set to start on the phones tomorrow and so well well we do have some concerns about getting enough information we know we're not gonna have perfect information at the end of this week we know we're gonna have enough information to have a very good best guess and that's what just like everybody we're gonna have to go with um and so i echo your concerns i echo the tough spot that we're in and yet this is the world we're living in we gotta try to keep on keep on moving ourselves forward to the best of our abilities so yeah one of the things we don't know is the extent to which boundary changes could or would influence somebody to say i'm going to choose this hybrid model or i'm
198going to choose the virtual model we don't know that we don't know the different calculations that individuals are going to make but the best we can do is be open about our constraints um and our obligations and help people understand what we're sitting with why we're sitting with it and ask them how it affects them go ahead tim on the on the idea of someone trying to someone switching from distance to to more on site we we do have physical constraints on that right we are not we cannot promise such a person that the classroom they want to get into has room and and for older students the schedule the student is currently holding on a distance learning model might not have a comparable sequence or even if a possible one in an on-site model
199and so there are there are real things i mean that we're not saying no but there are challenges to to allowing someone to opt-in opt-out whatever or whatever phrasing we want to choose for that model switching yeah you certainly have an actuary spinning for days on end looking at stuff like this too yep i got spreadsheets absolutely um and this is why it's i would say extra hard crystal which is because we don't know how many of our families are going to say distance learning no matter what i can't tell you today what the best fit boundary is i have some guesses um and it might change based on that but it really matters how many of our families are saying we want distance regardless because again if half of our families say distance our
200transportation problem becomes a big big big change from where we were already and if 90 of our families want in person then we have to figure out a hybrid that has some different methodologies to it and so a lot of information is coming this week it's already probably sitting there on the surveys i have yet to look at so thank you um last call for any additional comments or questions on student transportation i just want to add on about the question i asked about summer school it isn't necessarily transportation but it's all intertwined so do we have a plan if our student one of our students that is hybrid or in person learning and has symptoms and then is out for 10 days do we have an option of distance learning for those kids or
201can we have something for them so they're not just sitting at home because they can't physically come to the building sorry i was having trouble with the microphone so distance learning is the easy part of this we can shift kids into distance learning relatively easily one of the things um that that our academics team and craig were talking about today was we plan for distance we make sure we are ready for distance because again we have to be ready to change the distance on a moment's notice we don't have to be ready to change to in person on a moment's notice so based on possible covert outbreak or any of those types of things we could significantly increase at any point um the number of kids in distance that have to be ready to make
202those transportation okay thanks seeing and hearing no other comments we will move into the only item of new business on the agenda which um are generous donations that have been made to the district all right so i'm recommending that the board of education accept the following donations with gratitude the sunshine fund received a donation of one hundred dollars to give minnesota from emily stevens of ridgefield so thank you to emily richfield public schools general fund received monthly donations totaling 75 from give minnesota since 5 14 20 from michelle burnside at richfield thank you michelle burnside and the rps general fund received monthly donations totaling 30 through give minnesota since 5 14 20 from lisa ferreira of freehold new jersey so thank you to lisa great uh do we have a motion to approve the donations
203i move approval of the donations with gratitude i'll second any final discussion seeing and hearing none i will pull the board ms cole hi mr paulus hi miss meshach hi the clerk votes eye and chair brocky aye the donations are accepted with deep gratitude we next move into the advanced planning section of the agenda um which as regular viewers know begins with the legislative update so i'll look to superintendent yunowski to see if there is anything else to share here in addition to the very lengthy conversations we've had about fall planning that's rare i'm going to be quiet so i'm going to turn it back to the board um are there any other comments specifically about legislative items otherwise we will just move uh right into the rest of our advanced planning agenda okay uh
204our let me see here i think i missed a step into my notes um we're gonna go with time for information or comments from board members to one another we'll start with paula i have nothing i'm just glad to be here spend the last three hours with you and i really mean it because this could have been really bad okay thank you christine um i have nothing to share mr paulus i am also glad to have spent the last three hours in everyone's company and i have nothing else to add miss meshech that was my first like belly laugh in the last like 24 hours so thank you you didn't hear it because my mic was off um but i i cannot top that thank you ah likewise um and i would say yes this
205has been a long meeting and we have covered a lot of really important work and there is so much still to do so i just want to appreciate the board members but especially appreciate the staff who are doing this day in and day out um thank you we are grateful for you and know that this is an incredible responsibility um that is on your shoulders so thank you can i say thank you to scott because these concurrent viewers things once in a while have been really nice to see so thank you scott what paulo is referring to in case you can't see it is every once in a while we see how many people are actually watching us um so shout out to the nine of you who are with us right now so our
206next meeting will be on monday august 17th at 7 pm um please look for additional detail in the next two weeks about the logistics of that meeting as we tentatively plan to have some people together in person but to continue to offer virtual participation options for board members staff and the public finally are there any items that board members would like to request for discussion on an upcoming agenda if so please come off mute and share at this time okay uh superintendent yunowski i will as always give you an opportunity for any final words um just super quickly obviously as paula noted um new secretary to the board and assistant to me cassandra kwame is joining us tonight and you will find her in the consent agenda at next board meeting as the official secretary
207to the board so that will be a consent consent to jenna item at your next meeting and we're excited to have her join our team fantastic it's quite a meeting to start with uh welcome we're so excited that you're here so with that the final item of business is to adjourn um and since that does not require a full vote i will officially adjourn the meeting at 9 54 p.m have a good night everyone and we'll see you again on august 17th good evening you