November 23, 2021 Regular School Board Meeting

001[Music] don't stop believing [Music] how you doing out there you ever seem to have one of those days where it just seems like everybody's getting on your case from your teacher all the way down to your best girlfriend well you know i used to have them just about all the time but i found a way to get out of it let me tell you about it sitting in the classroom [Music] smoking in the boy's room [Music] making sure in the stalls no there ain't nobody here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] but everybody [Music] right knows [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow good evening the november 23rd 2021 regular meeting of the isd 623 roseville area schools board is hereby called to order acting clerk goggins could you please take the role this evening

002certainly um director anderson here director chu here chair bogashevsky here uh director goggins here so absent our director shah and director johnson thank you do we have any agenda adjustments this evening no agenda thank you thank you do we have any announcements or comments tonight all right with that we will proceed then into the community input section of our meeting uh let's see first we will invite mr alan holasick who is a community member to come forward sir the podium is yours can you hear me clearly three three minutes that are it's time there you go okay thank you sir okay okay well hello good evening everyone um so i actually had a chance to look through the presentation the slideshow that you showed earlier today about your achievement and integration plan and there was

003one slide that i really wanted to talk about that i seemed kind of problematic it was goal number three which states quote a goal number three is to quote increase students access to the number of racially and ethnically diverse teachers from 11 percent in 2019 to 17 in 2023 now this struck me as pretty problematic because the thing is is that the only way you're going to be able to achieve this type of goal is basically through discrimination because you're basically making the per the job applicant's most important aspect is the color of their skin whenever you try to put in racial quotas like this it's inevitably going to lead to discrimination and we've constantly heard from this board that critical race theory is not being implemented here however i would like to point out

004that earlier this spring at falcon heights elementary school the staff participated in a book study of the book how to be an anti-racist by amber x candy now ever makes candy is a very big critical race theory proponent and one of the quotations from that book and i'd like to quote you from this is this quote the only remedy to pass discrimination is present discrimination the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination so i just wanted to sink in for a minute the falcon heights elementary school staff did a book study on a book that openly states that the only remedy to pass discrimination is present discrimination now again and on this slide here you have said openly that you want to increase the number of racially and ethnically diverse teachers from 11 percent

005to 17 we all know that basically means non-white kids and i also do i basically my question to the board is basically how do you square this slide with the non-discrimination policy because would it not be a violation of the discrimination policy to make uh to basically say oh right we want to have this many white teachers this many black teachers this many hispanic teachers that i mean i would like a response from the board on that because i think you could be opening yourselves up to a potential discrimination lawsuit i would also like to know when i walked in here it stated that the staff members at roseville area schools are going to be part of a reading program for staff i would like to know is the book how to be an anti-racist

006going to be a part of that reading study it's again how to be an anti-racist by amber max kenny i would like to know if that book is going to be a part of that and in the little bit of remain time that i have here i would also just like to point out that throughout this presentation i saw the term latinx being used latinx i would like to point out to the sport that the proper spanish terminology for that is latino not latinx and basically uh kind of going by the own your standard rationale it's not a very good idea to try to colonize the spanish language i'm just saying that right now a bunch of non-hispanics trying to impose western uh terminology onto the spanish language i mean that basically does fall under

007the category of colonization so i just wanted to point that out but thank you very much for your time guys thank you mr lasik and you did indicate that you would like a response so the board will get back to you within two weeks thank you very much next up uh again revisiting us mr bruce owner mr owner take the podium and mr owen is also a community member within the district my daughter graduated through roseville schools also and um i'd like to say thanks for not sending out the fbi or the homeland security on us parents because we know that was a threat with the national school board i think we can all agree that keeping the students safe from bodily harm from teaching unhealthy behaviors from predatory staff is vital to continuing this

008public education and i think the school board is misdirected in emphasizing masks and vaccines when our children are being exposed to far worse dangers it's said you strain out a nat and swallow a camel for children coronavirus is a nat it rarely hurts children in 2019 roseville school employee meda mohammed ali who is described as a woman engaged in sex with a 15 year old student and also introduced the student to narcotics several students witnessed the sexual contact this employee's phone had pornographic videos on it so called she admitted to sexual intercourse i'm not sure if it's a she or he at this point but roseville seems to have forgotten what martin luther king stated about the importance of character when hiring staff persons they're not being very careful about who you're hiring leona robinson

009durden submitted 6500 in fake invoices to steal money she was a director of equity and elementary education hired by district 623 roseville school district this person is mentoring our children in equity and she's stealing what kind of children are going to come out of this sort of mentoring [Music] students at st paul highland park high school had a walkout over a sexual assault culture i think what they asked was reasonable all authority figures that have displayed predator behavior or has a history of sexual assault be disciplined appropriately because it's not happening in the schools the only way these predators are being exposed is the children have to tell their parents which takes a lot of courage the parents have to contact the police because the schools are covering it up um in the name of

010equity and lgbt platforms so yeah i would like a response yep thank you mr jonah you have indicated so the board will get a response back to you within a couple of weeks thank you next up is miss angela byrne who is a parent of roseville students good evening uh and i will leave my mask on even though i'm vaccinated and boosted because that is what we do that is the right thing to keep everyone safe speaking is the only parent of a child currently in the district tonight a couple of things that i want to address first latinx is a term created by the youth that are changing language in real time because the institutions that have unduly codified gender in a way that that does not represent them and their experiences is actual

011cultural evolution that we should encourage and uh continue to uh uh just encourage in the schools um i'd also like to point out that um if we're going to pick on individual uh groups to uh demonize them that i could probably find records of cis men that have perpetuated uh violence with certain first names that would be probably in higher numbers than we have of individuals that are the trans experience that have perpetuated violence um i'd also like to say that if you are a parent or child in this district listening to these meetings know that i personally am here for you i also have many other parents women and friends in my life that support you and are here to validate you as you are and in your experience and not try to tell

012you who you are or what you should be by based on our expectations of you please reach out to me if you have uh if you need a safe space to be because i will make sure you have a safe space i will feed you i will hug you i will love you i'd like to spend the remaining of my time reading a definition of critical race theory that is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old the core idea is that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but also something embedded in legal systems and policies the basic tenets of critical race theory emerged out of a framework from a legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by

013legal scholars derek bell kimberly crenshaw and richard delegato among others a good example is when in the 1930s government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to black people in those areas today those same patterns of discrimination live on through uh facially race blind policies like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantage majority white neighborhoods and thus stymies racial desegregation efforts so again please continue your equity work i am here to support you and any parents and children in the district that need it thank you thank you very much and that concludes our speakers who asked for time this evening uh thank you all um so we now move to the next item

014i would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda so moved thank you second thank you uh any further discussion hearing that all in favor say aye agenda passed we did have gifts again and i believe uh rose is going to share this with us this evening my honor absolutely so um we have um james foley who donated a monetary gift for meals on wheels at the apple teacher education center i'll get galley say right as i practice more and we have blackboard on behalf of benjamin ben tour donated for the school needs at bremer bremer elementary school we have another monetary contribution by nora kelly and carlos vela pento for classroom needs for etching elementary school we have a donation from your course for school needs little canada elementary school gabby curtis donated a

015trumpet to parkview center school for students in need caf america cyber grants on behalf of whole holly anderson donated for school needs to roseville area high school andrew darling donated to the weight room for roseville area high school so this got the crease donated to the weight room for rose behavior high school and we have brooke and maureen lindstedt donated to the volleyball program at roseville harriet high school and we have john brenderberg donated to the stage for state shirts for volleyball program at the roseville area high school we have a monetary donation for the robotics program from falcon heights lauderdale lions club and we have some school supplies and winter clothing items for students in need donated by edward jones lee anne morris for rosewood area schools and finally we have a donation to

016the weight room by james and beth and shida for the rosaria area high school as usual this is an amazing list that um just so appreciate the community supporting us thank you thank you director chu for sharing those with us this evening uh with that we'll move into our reports and non-action items and first up it looks like director of equity and innovation delon smith will be reporting out on the achievement integration plan to us welcome director smith [Music] all right greetings bart um good evening good evening this is my first time presenting to you by myself so we'll see how this goes um but i'm reporting out on the achievement and integration plan uh which is always a part of our um world's best workforce meeting um so just sharing out on this on

017this plan and i'm just getting myself to the right page all right so the achievement and integration plan um is the purpose of the achievement integration for mental health program is to pursue racial and ethnic integration increase student achievement create equitable educational opportunities and reduce academic disparities based on students diverse racial ethnic and economic backgrounds in minnesota public schools so like i said we this is shared every year at the annual workforce world excuse me world's best workforce meeting and today i'm going to share with you the goals of the plan uh the strategies that have been chosen to obtain those goals and just some updates on on our progress so this slide just shows the budget that uh rose various schools received uh for the achievement and integration plan you can see in two

018three-year increments there's this 2017-2020 what we received in 2020 to 2023 which is the plan we're currently in the midst of and what do we receive there uh what i want to talk about a little bit is you know how how do you get a part of this program how do you become a part of this program so the primary education determines which school districts participate in this program by comparing to adjoining districts and their percentage of enrolled protected class students it also compares the percentage of an enrolled protected class students of schools within the district so you can be a part of this program as a district or you can be a part of this problem because your school meets a criteria i protected class that i just spoke about are students who self-report

019as being in one of the racial ethnic categories is used by school districts and mdes in be excuse me to track student enrollment and those categories are african-american students asian pacific american chicano latino students american indian alaskan native and multi-racial so those are the students that i looked at in order to determine whether schools are part of this program or not and now the two ways you can do that um when the difference between a district's percentage of enrolled protected students is more than 20 percent higher than in adjoining the district in comparison um then that district can apply for uh excuse me um not apply but um is a part of this program yeah i'm missing the word i want to set but i think you get the um participate that might be what

020i was looking for all right so if our enrollment protected class is 20 higher than our joining districts we can be a part of the program and then as a school you want to look at the enrollment of the protected classes in your schools and if there is a 20 percentage point higher than the average for the entire district then you are part of this program as well and those schools are identified are called racially identifiable schools or racially identifiable districts and if you get that designation you are required to be a part of the a i program director yes um so just a clarification um this 1.7 million dollars uh we receive specifically for this program to be executed correct and it is incremental funds that we receive yes in order to do this

021work right over a three year period it's like a release of funds every every year every fiscal year thank you yeah absolutely okay um so let's go into the goals so goal number one is to increase the graduation rate of our hispanic students from 75 and 34 hundredths of a percent that's my math teacher coming out in 2019 to 90 we can't say and as a math teacher sorry so to 90 by 2023 and what you'll see on there are the percentages the first that you see is um the entire district um you know of graduating seniors and you'll see from 73.5 percent 2018 to 78.2 percent in 2020 um and i just decided to parcel out uh rosewood area high school as you can see the numbers are a little bit higher as far

022as the percentage of hispanic students who are graduating this past year's data is not yet available for comparison uh strategies for this is to increase latinx students participation in avid and ap courses so these are strategies to to increase their graduation rate for hispanic students cultural liaisons and dual language immersion teachers working closely with building support staff to provide culturally responsive academic interventions intervention activities to enhance students awareness cultural liaisons working with families to help remove barriers so you can see our cultural reasons have a major role in this and the differentiation differentiating instruction um to include student voice and continue our our absent narrative work let's go number one goal number two is rover a school students will self-report a 10 increase from 2020 baseline their data to uh 2023 data and their comfort

023level of initiating maintaining a positive relationship with students from diverse backgrounds keep in mind it's it's achievement integration is about our students integrating and and and experiencing other cultures and so this goal definitely addresses that what um the report on on that so far is that we do have a draft of a survey so i know that this says you know 2020 baseline data we don't actually have 2020 baseline data what happened in 2020 from what i was able to grasp was that we came up with a draft of a survey um and so my office the office of educational equity we will um we'll continue that work we'll take that draft formulate that into an actual survey that we can give to our students so that we can gather some baseline data this year

024on this particular go strategies cross-district integration activities that are avid focused you know um one example is we have our average summer classes for uh for fayette so that students are able to still participate in avid classes and not miss out on some of the electives that that avid class would um take the space for we want to continue the youth executive board and a multi-district group of high school students um a group of young people right now currently rosewood has five seats on that youth executive board and they need weekly we want to utilize americorps promise fellows and vista volunteers in collaboration with minnesota lives with youth and just want to give that difference the promised fellows are of those that will work actually directly with students they'll have a caseload of about 30

025students that they work with and it's all about improving their academic achievement there's different things they do with them the vista works more on the administrative level um and so that would be someone that would most likely work at the district office could work with my office whether it's pulling data or or things like that um would be the vista and then also in the plan is the civil rights and native american tour and that still needs to be formulated um as far as what that tool looks like but that's another cross district integration activity that we're looking to have um in that civil rights and native american tour goal three is to increase students access to the number of racially and ethnically diverse teachers from 11 percent 2019 to 17 2023 so currently in

0262021 we still sit around 11 of our teaching staff um being racially or ethnically diverse it's no secret um that um by diversifying our teaching staff we can actually do a better job of reaching our students helping our students achieve there's there's no secret about that um let me see yeah i do want to say this so what we want to ensure um is that we have great teachers we always want to ensure that but the impact that a teacher of color has on students of color is is immeasurable the impact that the staff of staff of color and administrative colors and students seeing of people that look like them in those roles is immeasurable and so that is definitely a part of this particular goal strategies to achieve this is the recruitment and retention

027of racially and i think diverse teachers and and administrators also we want to continue to try to see if we can diversify our our teaching staff we want to enhance our focus program um for our racially ethnic diverse staff and so the focus program um is uh uh is uh funded by the pilgrimage grant by apelsby grant you put it like that um and it is to um increase the um it really is around the retention of our our staff by by having a group that is supportive um made up of staff of color supported uh supporting staff of color so we want to you want to increase that in the amount of participation that's in our our focus programs um the minnesota humanities center professional development programs is also in that goal and the

028minnesota humanities center is is an organization that we have worked with for a long time we continue to value that partnership but we will be shifting um some focus with minnesota um humanity center from professional development which they did do last year they did um and and and implement our professional development last year but we now have a brand new shiny office of educational equity um and we have some very very talented individuals there and we are just um um go in a slightly different direction as far as how we develop and and how we just distribute pd um but our relationship with minnesota humanity center i look for that taking to continue just in a different fashion um and then collaborating with metro state in the urban teacher program once again trying to have

029a uh trying to have a i don't know if you want to call it a theater school or but some connection to teachers of color who are who are newly licensed or close to that and and and having a connection so that they come work in roseville um and then in addition to that they didn't make this slide because it's fairly new um is our uh is to come teach in minnesota grant which mde is distributing to schools and the purpose of this is to once again diversify the the teaching staff in minnesota and so they are giving um hiring bonuses um and uh an additional bonus i can't think of the exact name of it now but the hiring bonus is if you come to minnesota and you work in one of our districts

030um you can get a bonus and it varies from 2500 of a bonus or 4 000 if you work in an area that's of high need um a subject area of high need and then if you stay on you enter with a tier 2 license if you stay on and get your tier 3 license then you earn the other half of that bonus so another 2500 or another 4 000. so this is something i just learned about last thursday but it falls in line with our efforts um and it is something we'll be applying for um by december 10th we right now all we have to do is apply that we have interest in this and we have from january of this coming year 2022 to october 2022 to actually fill those spots with staff

031and roseville is um one of the things they did was they kind of parceled out based on enrollment how many spots each district could have so we didn't have certain districts just snatching up all the spots and so roseville based on our enrollment will have four spots so if we hire people from out of state um ethnically and culturally diverse people from out of state will be able to give those bonuses to four different people so that will support this strategy as well okay um so just want to talk a little bit about our racially identifiable schools remember these schools are identified because their population excuse me of students of color basically is 20 higher than the district average and so that would be harambe edgerton and central park so we'll talk a little bit

032about what we're doing at those schools in this plan so goal one is to increase overall reading proficiency rates as measured by the mca three reading tests while also reducing academic achievement gap between white students and students of color and reading achievement on that same test and you can see there the achievement gap and reading uh interesting harambee and central park is reduced from 28.6 2019 to 14.3 percent so we want to cut that in half um the duration of this plan is the goal now i don't have data to report out on that because of how wonky the mcas have been in the last couple years as you know we did take it last year but there was a um you've always been able to opt out of this test there was a big

033rate of opting out on this particular last year's test and the year before we didn't we didn't take it at all so we hope to get back on track this year with some with with some measurable data uh strategies to support this is individual student learning plans um culturally culturally fluency instruction progress monitoring standards based on common affordable assessments so all of our schools um all of our grade levels create these assessments together that's where the comment comes from they're formative because it's more of a checkpoint it's not the end point and so we use these assessments to help monitor progress how our students are doing on standards and then we adjust based off of what these these assessments tell us um and we want to develop a report excuse me and support recruitment strategies

034to affect enrollment that eliminates racial isolation goal two and these are once again for the three identified racial identifiable schools is to reduce racial and economic enrollment disparities in central park education and harambe by increasing the arrangement of white students from 18 2019 to 23 percent and 2020 and we currently sit um at a little over 17 about 17.4 percent um and so we're kind of going backwards on that particular piece um and so we'll have to make sure we get these strategies in in order to hopefully increase the amount by 2023 and those strategies are basically market in our schools so we have some we we have some awesome programming at all three of these schools as you know harambe is a year-round school and i can talk a lot here about that um

035but it's it's it's amazing a multicultural culture centered environmental science center art center educational facility i put it like that and then we also central park we have a spark lab there in our stem programming which we're going to highlight um at entertainment we have the 20 we code 21 excuse me 21st century skills program um and then interdistrict uh integration activities as well um to to help and and increase the visibility of our of those three schools goal three is to increase virtually identifiable school students access to teachers with an understanding of racial equity and skills and culturally responsive strategies from 96 percent in 2021 excuse me 2019 to 100 and uh 2023 and so this has to do with what are we doing with our adults in the district um what are we

036doing to ensure that our adults their their capacity around being culture responsive teachers and instructors is high um and so pd plays a lot into that and and and what we do with our our staff so that we are critically reflecting on the things that we do in the classroom and our impact um in the classroom uh oops strategies around that is culturally responsive teaching professional development and so we talked a lot about cultural responsive teaching about how do you know your students about how do you make relationships with students about how do you bring culture into the classroom so that students can commit the connection between what they're trying to teach and what they already know and so we continue to do uh professional development around those things we have co-created book studies we

037definitely encourage book studies to do all our stuff we don't necessarily say what books to use but we do encourage that and we would and we do support that and for these schools there's funds to support that for those three schools and then principals working with building leaders to co-create professional development based on student voice we want to continue to amplify student voice we want to continue to ask the question where is the student voice in this where is the student voicing your schedule where is the student voice in your school day we want to continue to ask those questions and push towards that and then finally um just our equity compass this is the center of what we do when it comes to instruction and working with teachers and and whatnot we want to

038make sure that we have a strong pedagogy that's all about equity and pedagogy is how you teach so we want to make sure that the way we teach our equitable ways which means we have to be able to understand our students and know how they learn so that we can teach them in a way that will make that connection not just make the connection hopefully make it swifter and make it more concrete for students um closely relevant teaching we continue this to want to focus on our students culture and the one thing i want to dispel about culture is not it isn't always a race um i tell people all the time fidget spinners is a culture okay so understanding those things and the only way you get there is you got to know your

039students and you got to know your families um so understanding those things so we can bring things into the classroom that students can make an easy easy connection to the example one examples are used is like if if all of us took a test and the test was a multiple choice test or maybe it was a right written test i haven't thought this through but it was a test and the test was on mama's cooking okay if i gave this test a guarantee you some of you would probably fail that test because you don't know my mom was cooking you haven't experienced my mama's cooking and so i have to be able to bring things into my classroom that's going to help you connect to that because maybe my mom made sweet potatoes and your

040mom made sweet potatoes let's start there let's make a connection so that when i give you this test on my mama's cooking you can pass this test so that's kind of like closely relevant content collective knowledge creation is how do we work with our students how to work with our families to create curriculum that's going to reach them that's going to help them understand and how we do this together um and the social justice orientation is really just about being aware of what's happening in our community being aware of what's happening around us being aware of the times that we're in and how it's affecting our educational system and allowing our students to time to process those things and to become critical thinkers about the things that are happening around them in the communities so

041that is my presentation um on our grant and where it stands right now or the achievement and integration funds and program aware stands right now so i'll open up for any questions on the board thank you very much fellow wardrobers any questions thoughts comments kitty well i was just going to ask a minor question thank you for the report and the work um in your um second goal around reporting a 10 increase in comfort initiating and maintaining positive relationships with students from diverse backgrounds it looked like there were a number of specific items listed are those the things specifically that the grant pays for that supplements our ability to achieve that goal because we're obviously there's a lot of broader work occurring to help students be comfortable with interacting with their with their peers um

042in a way that is productive and positive absolutely so would that be the way to think about that yeah you can think about that right exactly because there's there's many ways that we can do that that doesn't cost us anything right by just setting up opportunities for students to to to to interact on a regular basis but but there are some other opportunities the ones that listen to strategies that are supported by funds from this grant in addition to the things that we should already be doing to ensure that our students are everything going in mixing thank you absolutely clear stick with you thanks again for the presentation all and all the work that goes into this i know that besides tonight the community and the public can link to the presentation um we do

043have the achievement integration plan we always have this i think on the website is that correct we do have a section that any member of the community can go to and i believe right yes yeah yeah that's a requirement for this one great thank you girls thank you for your work and i really appreciate your final comment about clarifying that culture is beyond race and ethnicity um i mean i think for someone like me who didn't grow up here you talk about some of the cultural references that i had you know did i struggle with and i still remember when i was teaching i still remember like talking to students around like baseball right a math problem and i'm a math teacher and i'm going okay i don't even understand what that means right because

044it's about the culture it wasn't about you know whether it's just about the race so i really appreciate that distinction absolutely um it could be the background that you brought up how you were raised and what good you ate and what music you listened to so so i really appreciate that so the question i had was um a few of them is um when you talk about kind of making sure that all our staff have the training they need i'm just curious how are we tracking that how are you tracking that you know that you went from this many steps of daily versus this many staff hopefully yeah that's a that's that's that's that's a good question so we we made a strong push this year to ensure that um our district staff development days

045so we have about three hours a year where we bring the entire district together and do our thing um ensuring that we had we touched everybody with those okay um so in the past there's it's been more like licensed staff are required to be there on these days and then the other staff um non-licensed staff will will kind of get this stuff through their buildings you know so buildings bring back the pd you get it through that way we want to ensure that the message was was clear and that we were giving it to everyone at the same time and so that's uh our our um that's how we want to do things moving forward now how to measure that that's a great question that's a like how do you get 96 and so where's

046those four percent they didn't get this right that's a that's a great question um but one of the ways we can do that is of course through attendance at our at our uh pd staff development days and to ensure that we have and we've put some of these things in place that we have a consistent um message around pd or consistent direction around pd that is for sure going to get back to all schools and so we began um not just doing those three big pd days which you know those are great but they're not sticky um to how do we have pd on a regular basis and so we begin to have pd with our instructional leaders throughout the district monthly also with our lead teachers um we have those monthly as well and

047we do the same thing with both groups because we we want the principal and our lead teachers and we also have what we call our crct culturally responsive competent teaching leaders we want all of them to experience the same pd to go back to their building and to formulate how it works for their building and to deliver that and so we've we've got a good start going where excuse me for the last two months the pdw delivered um every month is is going to our buildings and hitting everybody so i don't believe we're going to have a hard time at least reaching 100 um with the pd the question that that we're going to have to answer and continue to answer is can we get impact from all of 100 of those professionals from the

048pd that we deliver director smith could you also please comment on how the district has adopted the system you implemented at harambe where principals leave pd for all licensed and non-licensed staff absolutely yep so at harambe um my philosophy was so i okay i have a different timeline on things i i move i i want things to move a little bit faster i have a different sense of urgency when it comes to education and so to me to me the best way to move fast is for everybody to be there and not have to vicariously get this information and so what i did at harambe is the the funds that we were allowed for for pd and if i had to dig into it my any discretionary funds i had i would use that to

049time card my staff to come on days that they weren't supposed to be there or times that they weren't supposed to be there and so like our staff meetings were every other friday um and those started at 8 10 trying to remember wasn't that long ago they started 8 10 and then my support staff who we usually didn't start to like 9 or 9 30 i would time caught them to show up to that staff meeting because in that staff meeting is where we were really pushing um our equity work on our pd um and so having all of them and that's everybody and i and i will put the message out that everybody that's our kitchen staff that's our engineers everybody in that building if you're going to touch a student i need you

050to be on the same page and so that's how i spent my professional development dollars was ensuring that those individuals were there to be a part of the pd and that's and we've since are trying to market a system like that district-wide i have another question sorry please clearly we can talk about this all day um on your goal number two strategies you know we we talked about how um how do we market uh those two three schools um i i wonder have there been effort to really understand why there is a decrease in our families in terms of the percent of our white families and what do we know about kind of like why right why why is there a decrease just wondering about that that's a good question i don't necessarily have the

051full answer to that question my thought and i won't put anybody on spot well my thought would be um okay i won't put nobody as so this there could be a stretch there's probably that information here somewhere is what i would say um as far as that goes um and keeping in mind that like you know harambe and um central park are some of our open and enrolled schools and so yeah we do get students from um other parts of our um um county or whatever you want to call it other other cities and things like that so that those are things that could be contributing to some of those numbers as well okay great thank you thank you for your work absolutely thank you any other questions or thoughts dr smith thank you all

052right in-depth report as always thank you very much and uh we look forward to hearing how things progress as we move through the rest of the year thank you with that our next uh reported on action item is our monthly financial report with director business services sherry thompson i assume sherry how are you tonight good good evening good evening so um i'm gonna sound like a commercial tonight um because our the monthly financial report is really a um an overview of things to come right we are currently in the process of finishing up our audit so we're drafting those financial statements for the fiscal year that ended june 30th of 2021 uh we are also in the process as we finish that audit were in the process of revising the current year budget because we

053now we know i mean when we build that budget in the spring it's based on a lot of assumptions and now we know our staffing and our enrollment so um we are in the process of revising that budget um and that comes to you in january and then we'll start parameters for the next year as far as building the budget some of the things of course you know we've seen with the ongoing pandemic some of the changes some of the trends have been broken the things that we've used for years are enrollment projections for one and we've talked about discuss this at the board table you know we have been under enrolled i would say the last we haven't met those projections last year and even this year although i do have some good news

054to report that since vaccinations have become available especially for five to 11 year olds we're not seeing it in leaps and bounds but we're getting a fairly steady we're seeing kids returning to schools so we'll continue to monitor that as well so um so that that is good news the other thing that i want to say and again this is why i'm going to sound like a commercial next month we have our on december 14th prior to the regular school board meeting at six o'clock we have our truth and taxation hearing i also want to be very transparent in the fact that property tax notices did go out to homeowners everyone should have received those a couple of weeks ago and that is was the proposed property tax based on the preliminary levy so that

055does not include and it's stated on the statement but i want to point out that does not include the operating uh levies that were approved on the november 2nd election so um so we will be sharing that information um as well at the truth and taxation hearing so uh again you know we are like two months well when i say two months into the school year as far as full operations because we're just looking now at like the october financial statements so not anything you know um concerning or really out of the ordinary like uh other than the fact that what we were comfortable in as far as our trends we need to look at that differently um um which is fine so that's all i have unless there are questions again it's just an

056update it's my teaser for next month okay um if residents want to know what their taxes will be with the passage of the referendum where would they go to find that information well um let's see you know we had the we had the information out as far as the impact the additional impact on the website i mean so they could look at they could look at their home their assessed value and i believe that's still on the website which says yes yeah it should be yeah the tax calculator that would show the addition that would show the impact of just the levees but we will touch on that um as well in the truth and taxation other questions and the timing of that sherry was simply because the county in their timing of when they

057had to actually prepare those statements that it was it was too close to the actual election day they just it was there it was their timing basically yeah that's a that's a really good point mike so you know you're required we're required to prove that preliminary levy by september 30th so the county has all the numbers because they have to print all of those notices and send them out okay so that's what it is is the timing but again dr lake and i have discussed it and we want to be very transparent in that um with our public sure thank you okay all right well thanks very much thank you next next up under non-action items is uh assistant superintendent melissa sonic will be presenting a recommendation for an amendment to policy 556. all right

058which which looks very brief it is very brief yes take it away consistent superintendent all right thank you so we recently reviewed our minnesota statute about school admission more specifically birth certificates as they relate to our current policy we are proposing a policy change which would align our policy more closely with statute and take a more inclusive stance the policy so really we're talking about changing two words the policy currently reads an official document birth certificate passport visa shall be required we would like to change required to requested the other change would be um to note at this time would be a change of using the verbiage um changing from registration to enrollment this aligns to just our current practice languages we enroll students versus um register them and pre-k kindergarten first grade we would

059also still request a birth certificate at the time of enrollment and we would send an additional letter probably like mid-summer or august but it's important to note that most families really do produce a birth certificate and for those who do not we would then after the reminder letter we would verify a student's age using the minnesota immunization information connection it's called mick instead of repeated outreach this would only apply to a small number of students who have not turned in a birth certificate it would also save time in our enrollment and our school offices as it would be a more efficient method of age verification thank you questions or comments any questions and so just just to clarify this is obviously one of the changes that was caught as staff do their rolling review of

060the hundreds of policies through a multi-year cycle and someone recognized that this language was not in alignment with the statute and so we're just making a small change to make sure it comes in an audience yeah and i would say it's it's it's more than not aligning to it's just about working smarter versus harder like we start to feel a little bit like the collectors in the sense of like calling families repeatedly and repeatedly for a birth certificate whereas we could really do the same work a little bit more efficiently just by checking with mick now we couldn't do that for every student right the the staff capacity and time it would take to verify every single student's age would just not be an efficient use of of time but shifting from required to requested

061is just a a similar way to get the same our different path to get the same information sure thank you any further comments from the board i think the sense of the board is when we get the second reading it looks like we'll probably approve it so we'll see you next time around all right i'll do that thanks very much thanks everyone thanks make sense uh let's see that finishes our non-action items we're into our action items and first up will be the provisional appointment of our northeast metro 916 representative at this point i would like to invite board elect mannix clark to come up to the table and join us here and just by way of introduction and explanation district 916 is one of three i think joint districts that serve a broad metro

062area our district roseville area schools is one of 14 who utilize 916 to provide shared services particularly around special education some career development and other things but largely centered on special ad and it's a way to deliver those services in a shared way so that's more cost effective more efficient and really delivered i think more uniformly and and of higher quality for for the kids and the families that need that and so as a member of 916 each of those 14 school districts that are members elect one of our board to sit on their board and in the past it's been a two-year term our board representative has been director frank shaw dr shaw who's retiring off of the board at the end of this year and there's a bit of a glimp or what

063a great word would be because we typically well not typically we are mandated to elect our own officers on this board and who our representatives are at our first meeting in january however the 916 board elects their officers in their organizational meeting in the first meet the first meeting in january our first meeting in january is the second one second tuesday theirs is the first wednesday and so there's a there's a gap and so um in in asking and then also exceeding to the new uh rewritten and approved joint powers agreement uh we're looking for board members now this 42 districts not to have two-year terms but four-year terms and so that would suggest that it would be someone who was just elected or re-elected uh uh with frank retiring um and or has the

064interest and so tonight the thought was that uh soon to be seated director clark has expressed a strong interest in being our board rep on 916. and so uh the thought was we can provisionally uh appoint uh soon-to-be director clark our representative 916 this evening contingent upon is actually taking the oath of office and being seated in january then dr shaw could bring soon to be seated director clark with him to the december meeting of 1916. and then frank is off and then mannix could go himself to the january meeting of 9 16 and then we can formalize the finalization of the appointment in january at our january 11th so a lot of words welcome uh i think that you're interested too maybe just just you know share obviously you shared with some of us

065already mannix maybe just let folks know your interests and why you're interested in doing this sure thank you very much i appreciate you all having me tonight you know part of my passion is special education i have a son who is part of the roseville special education program and has thrived with that program so for me it's important to see other students have that opportunity so when it was mentioned there that that was a possibility i clearly would be interested in that and doing what i can to get back to that they're saying as well as bring back whatever i can for roseville and representative well thank you any other questions or thoughts from annex we're good to go almost welcome aboard okay yeah almost one more that's right and congratulations yes oh yes sure

066congratulations on winning the season during the uh uh in uh in the election earlier this month so welcome we'll look forward to working with you okay so given that i guess i would entertain a motion as written to appoint provisionally soon to be seated director clark as our representative of the 916 contingent upon his taking oath of office uh for final seating in january and so that would also follow provisionally and alternate ah well right there's a question because we do have an alternate now for whoever yeah for the um current term the alternate was director johnson curtis that's right so i guess my thought would be that since the important thing is to enable mannix to attend the december and january meetings we could hold off on the alternate selection until january okay and

067for both 916 and for uh equity alliance we have a member and an alternate in case the primary can't make it so great time for bringing that up i'd say let's not worry about that let's just do the motion tonight so motion so the motion that stated i move uh approval of a board member well i guess uh provisional board member clark to be elected to a serve a four-year term on northeast metro 916 board i'll second thank you uh any further discussion hearing none uh all in favor say yeah hi the most welcome mannix thank you thank you very much we look forward to seeing you here again officially in january to take your your oath and maybe even share with us at some point how things are going at 916 as they move

068so thank you very much right away thank you next up is the annual world's best workforce report and our potential acceptance of that report and joining us is director of achievement uh jake fondalee yes and this is jake i think a a maybe a little summary version of i know earlier this evening was the publicly uh broadcast formal long presentation of world specs workforce and for those who've forgotten that the world's best workforce is an effort that was mandated by the minnesota legislature a number of years ago in which all schools in minnesota are tasked to work towards and deliver a report annually that shares how we are doing in that effort so exactly thank you and yes we did uh do like a 30 minute uh presentation so i'm going to hope to cut

069that down by at least half and go through the slides here and then and for those who are heartbroken that they missed that i believe that was recorded right and so the the video and also the documents themselves are available or will be available shortly on the website so if you if you had hoped to make that and miss the longer 30 minute presentation you can still do that as a recorded video and or then get the documents on site thank you correct thank you and thank you for having me here at the board meeting this evening we did do that public meeting earlier so like you said i will provide more of a summary of this report this evening but we do believe that through our strategic plan areas and interwoven with our world's

070best workforce areas we will improve education that experience for our students and families and there's many people who work together every day to make the items on this document happen and i want to thank our staff who continue to support these efforts for our students and families and i also want to thank our our students and families for continuing continuing to work with us to help to create those safe conditions for in-person learning it's great to have our students back in person but we know we're continuing to face many challenges as this pandemic keeps evolving with us so there is five areas identified on oh great i have clickers so i can change it five areas identified in our strategic planning and we intervene those interweave those with our five areas of the world's best

071workforce to drive the direction of the district and the initiatives that we move forward these areas bring our focus to our school improvement plans at schools and our goals as our professional development areas in this report we focus on the five areas of the world's best workforce and our improvement efforts district-wide with our covid 19 impacts you know that last year we had to shift through many different learning models including distance learning blended learning with some students in person and some in distance and some of our elementaries by the end of the year we're back in full-time in-person learning and we know that shifting learning models was challenging for our students for our families and our educators which is why we were really glad this year to be able to start in in-person learning and

072as you know typically much of this report relies on the outcomes from our minnesota comprehensive assessments or mcas however these tests were canceled in the spring of 2020 and were significantly interrupted last year due to the continued pandemic we still provided our students with opportunities to take the mcas and access tests but participation was very limited um we even had some grade levels that were below 25 or almost a quarter of our students participating the first area of our world's best workforce report is around closing achievement gaps two areas just to highlight were providing last year we're providing equity training for all of our staff in collaboration and partnership with the minnesota humanities center we had a focus on absent narratives and inclusive of indigenous cultures we also increased student engagement by providing professional development

073that focused on creating positive school climates and using distance learning platforms centered around engagement and social emotional learning continuing this year and looking forward we continue our equity training for all staff through our newly div newly formed office of educational equity and our professional development has been focused around critical self-reflection culturally responsive content and pedagogy and inclusive communities we also are working to refine our cognitive abilities test or cogat test and the program that goes along with that to not only identify students that are in need of advanced academics but to identify the strengths in all of our students and moving on to our kindergarten readiness um we in last year just some areas to highlight from last year we increased our family involvement and engagement especially with the use of online formats um including

074seesaw and zoom a lot of our educators were meeting with each family before they started in pre-k they were meeting at parks in driveways and front yards just any way that they could do to engage with our families and especially zoom as well and those families that have just the infants is that was a great way for them to connect with those families another area was the partnerships that our early childhood created with other area early childhood programs and they did some collaboration and partnerships with their toy lending library and just some child care home visits and things like that this year they are continuing to work through the pyramid model project that was put on hold during some of the pandemic years but now that they're back in person there the focus on that

075is around training around social emotional initiatives for for students so training staff how they can then work with their students they're also working with supporting families with their transition to kindergarten to make that that next step as they move to arcade with just different parent education and outreach especially with our multilingual families continuing on to our other areas of our world's best workforce the next one is our reading well by third grade last year we continued our work with our press initiatives our interventions and other research-based interventions as well press stands for path to reading excellence in school sites it's been a program that we've used for many years for reading intervention we also have implemented and have implemented our what i need time or win time for students it was a little bit um

076different last year and we tried to get as much as possible within that pandemic and those different learning models um but just uh we were able to do some of that and um we are able to do that this year more so looking forward to to this year we continue to expand our english our k-6 english language arts program review really looking at what our practices are and how do we design that program for our next steps and then also using our data analysis protocol to look for to help us to pause and reflect on the patterns that we're seeing in our data and who is achieving in our in which classes was the instruction different and how can we learn from each other or questions that we ask that those and another area of

077our world's best workforce is um is graduation and i'm pleased once again and i brought this report to you just to say that we're still progressing positively in our graduation rate uh and that as a district increased from 85.7 to 88.1 in 2020. last year we continued to work on alignment between our our seven through 12 grades especially in the areas of program um credit recovery and all alternative programs which helped to work on some alignment of standards and really improved our experience in summer school over this past year really had positive impact on the credits earned both by raz and students additionally in in last year we we sustained some of our support structures that we continue to offer to our students including college possible avid and our unity centers and this year we

078continue to implement our well we're starting to implement i would say our new bell schedule at raz which provides time during the day for students to to have support with their teachers also continuing to sustain and maintain some of those equitable grading practices that we began during the pandemic in the area of career and college readiness some areas to highlight from last year include our monthly career and technical education newsletter and you probably receive that as board members as well and our avid 623 newsletter both are filled with information on partnerships student engagement and upcoming events the other area to highlight is our career navigator providing support for all of our students which included our el career seminar class our avid electives and some of our cte classes and she was also meeting one-to-one with

079all of our graduating el students to explore careers and firm up some of their career plans for post high school and moving into continuing another strategy from from last year just using technology differently to support our students i talked about that with our early learning as well but just using schoology and zoom and just different platforms to disseminate that information and doing some of those through our virtual college tours and career fairs this year for college and career readiness just some areas to highlight um continuing to maintain those strong avid partnerships which include and not limited to medtronic the society of women engineers and 3m at the middle level we continue to provide our advanced options which will prepare students for rigorous courses in grades 9 through 12. and at fawz working on our work

080based learning teaching which is connected with our some local employers to align the skills that we teach to the skills that are needed in the field and more areas of focus for this year just continuing um with our efforts and events that are underway to support our families with our fafsa our college applications and scholarships and then students with special education who are engaging with some exciting opportunities such as the ra's coffee shop the work experience classes and learning about our social skills for work continuing on with our another area of our of our world's best workforce report that we include in there is our curriculum and program review system which has three phases in which includes the program evaluation program design and implementation planning and purchase within those review cycles we have 17 subject

081areas that we transitioned into those high phases to review the instruction delivery and materials and outcomes this past year we were able to maintain some work with groups but it was difficult to pull teachers as we pull them from their work with so many different learning models and also having a shortage of substitute teachers that shortage does continue this year and we had planned to meet with our groups regularly as we we usually do but we needed to shift that based on some of those sub shortages and we're refiguring or reconfiguring i guess how we're going to meet with some of those groups in january through zoom and before and after work times to do that our district curriculum advisory committee continues to meet and we met through last year through zoom and this year

082we're meeting in person at our new building and batuta and it's been really great the next area is our staff development goals and we do have seven different areas that are focused and identified through our strategic plan as well as just informed by our research and the work that we do in our schools the first goal that we have is based on our strategic plan which is to improve instruction for our students of color american indian students english learners students receiving special education services and pre-k learners we had multiple goals for our staff development programs over the last year however we had to shift and adapt them due to the learning models we were in last year which included obviously our distance learning blended learning and in-person learning but we did provide professional development via

083some online courses which were organized into pd pathways our second goal for staff development areas is to improve communication and genuine engagement with families and communities especially our underrepresented communities and this is an area that really changed due to the pandemic in really positive ways as we connected with our students and families in virtual formats which some of the examples included automatic automated calling and texts dialog 1 and talking points for translation facebook live groups for specific language groups and community tone halls and forums and conferences that that teachers connected with via zoom our third goal is to strengthen support for the social emotional development of students and just some areas to highlight in this are the hiring of district-wide and building support team members in the area of our sel our social emotional learning

084and additionally to continue looking at our sel curriculum review in this year goal four is to expand the support for college and career readiness and we talked about many of those in our previous slide and goal five is using advanced advancement via individual determination or avid strategies to support student learning we continue to provide our avid strategies and opportunities for students at rams raws and fawz and those areas that we work in in wicker are writing inquiry collaboration organization and reading implementing those strategies school-wide our sixth goal was to strengthen writing as a means to increase reading achievement and we really focused on writing on strengthening writing as a means to increase in the area where we were continue where we offered our units of study program which expanded from our elementaries to some piloting

085at the middle level and our last goal was to improve professional learning community practices and implementation we've been focusing on improving our professional learning community work and focus last year on school culture setting our plc vision providing those tight and loose expectations and implementing some of that what i need time as well the other part of our world's best workforce report that we need to include is atps or um qcomp atps stands for the alternative teacher professional pay system and it's always a mouthful um it's also known as um quality compensation or q-comp which was started many years ago it's a voluntary program that allows districts and teachers unions to work together in a and a plan around these different areas career advancement options for teachers job embedded professional development teacher evaluation and performance pay

086and an alternative salary schedule and um for this florence odegaard provided um an overview of our atps report but our our focus for atps continues to be on that implementation of professional learning communities which brings forward some focused teacher conversations on student learning and teacher practices the two questions that we were focused on as essential questions for plcs in 2020 or 2021 was what do we expect our students to learn and how do we know if they've learned it and then looking ahead to to this year we're focused on those third and fourth plc essential questions which are how will we respond when our students don't learn and how will we respond if students already have learned the next part of our report is our budget and sherry thompson talked about this area for us

087but this slide provides our fund expenditures that are listed out in this pie graph as you can see the largest portion of this is 84 which is spent on students which includes teaching transportation supervising and counseling services for our students so lastly i want to thank and by thanking our students our families our staff and our community for their continued support of our district these have been some of the most challenging years that we've faced in education and our focus has been to make sure that the learning continues no matter what as a district we continue to use our strategic plan and our world's best workforce areas to move us through this school year and beyond so thank you for allowing me to summarize that briefly for you and once again there will be a

088copy of the full world's best workforce report and the nice formatting that goes along with that on our district website so i am ready for questions and comments yeah fellow board members questions thoughts comments thanks again i want to thank you and the staff everyone who uh presented earlier i always look forward to this report it's it's so comprehensive it's thorough it's so full of good information well information for not only us but um members of the community i just had a question in the more detailed report reading by third grade something that i wanted to better understand you know looking forward in in the strategies it mentions um you know you know we will also accelerate learning due to possible learning loss uh consulting mdes compass for support no what is what does that

089mean just what's what's that compass again is it strictly uh covet related or what is that so it's a long-term plan from mde and they are just rolling that out i've actually been to just a few webinars about the compass and it's really around how are we creating a multi-tiered system of support or mtss and they have they had last year done some work around identifying areas of focus to design what kind of a framework for mtss that they can provide to schools so that schools can learn what the different there's like basically five different areas of that of an mtss system they want to educate and teach all of our districts within the state how to do that what they expect from that and then it's a matter of our own implementation of how

090do we implement that and work through that it's basically how do we intervene for students that that already learned and who have all that still need some more support it's it goes along really well with our with our professional learning community work but again it's supporting students and it's not just in academics it's also in um social emotional behavior all those types of things as well so with the questions yeah i i have a wondering um so the qcom do we actually have any data and especially on impact of their program on our on our staff on our teaching population you know i wish i had my colleague florence odegaard up here that could talk through that a little bit um i think that some of the things that we um recalling back to some

091of the reports that she has talked about the things that we have really seen is just the teacher collaboration work that happens and the focused areas that they're able to work on as a team and they set goals um within their team and really working towards those goals and that they have they have a a specific targeted group that they're working on and they they do see the impact within that oftentimes and their goal areas as a larger impact we we continue to want to see more progress with that i would say in some of our achievement tests and things but but i think that's all a part of that bigger system of how do we work together aligning our professional learning communities along with the goals that we're setting um as a as a

092whole school district and other individual schools as well so we're continuing to work on that and this is actually tied to additional compensation right so i've been thinking about how do we connect that to when we talk about salary can we talk about recruitment that i think oftentimes the general public i know that they don't know right that they are those opportunities for teachers as a career to actually expand how they see themselves to collaborate and to earn extra pay right as part of being doing this work so i'm always thinking about like you know talk with the marketing right i think understanding that that the the the the teaching profession is about salary about benefits it's also about what happened once you are in in the profession like with the qcom there are opportunities

093to continue to to increase your um your compensation so i'm just just a thought about that yeah and some of that comes along with the coaching that we have too that gives kind of a clear career ladder model so teachers are working with other teachers providing feedback and a chance for for them to do some observations um with teachers and just helping each other get better and i would say the the one thing about atps is we're getting compensated for the things that we are planning on doing as well um and working in collaborative teams and really assessing our students um and how they're how they're doing you know all those four questions that we ask as a plc are those things that we are doing anyway so it's very supportive of of the actions

094that we take so yeah yeah i'm just trying to tie that to you know the goals of the integration right around attracting more more teachers or retaining teachers especially of color who want to be in the district knowing that those all these things are happening it's actually a great point to to uh to highlight so thank you thank you any questions uh i have a couple so graduation rate that's the four-year graduation rate yes it only includes a four-year rate yes so kids who maybe got a little behind the progress that roz go to the alternative high school they may take five years or a little past four and so it's almost it's ironic because if we have a very strong alternative high school program that could attract kids even open enrolled then it kind

095of mitigates against the four-year graduation rate do we know what the ultimate graduation rate is you know like those kids that take more than four do we even track that does it yes we do we actually track five six and seven year graduation data at some point it'd be you know i have that spot you do oh i do but not not like that or share it with the superintendent and uh she could just say hey at a previous meeting this was asked she just because i'm curious what the overall overall graduation rate is and i'm just curious it looks like the um career and college readiness program particularly in the career readiness aspect where we're making partnerships with local businesses and groups and trades and all that that was going very well did that

096did all those relationships then survive covet are they are we still maintaining that i mean that involved things like shadowing and all that maybe how is that looking right now this year what's the prognosis so some of those needed to be paused obviously because of just work restrictions and those things that went along with with covid but as as far as i know yes and they're only looking to expand those as well i think some of the work that bryn mcconnell has done who is our career native navigator at raz is just to expand and to continue to message and inform students as well as our businesses and our families of what exists within roseville um and the surrounding areas as well and she is a go-getter that is just really spreading that message around

097so i only ex i only expect to see more and and greater partnerships sorry i'd add too that the relationship is so mutually beneficial between businesses and schools right they need the workforce and we certainly need their partnership as well especially now with all these shortages they're just they had been just asking and asking and asking i mean that was five six seven years ago and now especially the students with that with a diploma are very attractive so thank you yeah i i think that's it thank you very much again thank you have a good rest of your night thank you yep uh to accept it oh i'm sorry yes i i would entertain a motion to accept the world's best workforce thank you all right we're first uh report so second thank you any

098further debate among ourselves hearing that all in favor say aye aye god thank you i didn't ask you i forgot to thank you the final action item is uh uh we we have asked ourselves if we want to set a study a new an additional study session for december 14th uh with two agenda items one would be our final sharing out of our self-evaluation that we do annually and the other would be director goggins reporting out on her work with the future future thinkers future thinking future thinking group which was a statewide effort i believe well um what we'd be talking about is specific to roseville there's been an initiative with um variety people involved and they hopefully will have at least a few of them here great for that presentation participating in there great

099that we just entertain a motion to add that study session with those agenda items on the 14th i i move that we recommend well i moved and we we study we schedule a work study session tuesday number 14 following our regular school board meeting thank you second thank you any discussion hearing on all papers say aye aye opposed it's on the books next is the study session report given tonight for a previous study session and director shaw actually uh took notes but then he was unable to attend this evening and there's only one item that we discussed it was really us just deciding what the process would be for our annual self-evaluation which in the past we're following the same process there are five areas of of effort uh community engagement things like that that

100will each be drafting our thoughts on what we've done what we can do better based on our interpretations and then sharing those with each other on the 14th during the study session for kind of a final report so that's all we did at the last study session was decide to follow that process i asked what does that do okay so well if we're going to do it on the 14th then if you get this tomorrow well it's totally 8 o'clock you know what are you doing tonight rose yeah so the thought was yes if you can draft out your thoughts and get them to me whenever you can but with you know like the 13th would be bad yes great yeah well if i get the stuff then yeah i can send you when i

101you know okay we'll have my health center reminder yeah oh i have it on the calendar that says december 10 is the latest latest thank you uh with that into board reports anybody have anything that they'd like to share sure okay i'd like to share on two topics one is they had an opportunity to spend the special education advisory council and that was a really excellent session the group got to hear from special olympics which is developing a new program called unified school and it's really about inclusion and trying to you know promoting social inclusion of people across the students certainly special education students but along with other groups of students to really be more inclusive environment and you know they have a variety of things that they try to help provide support like unified

102activities unified sports unified classroom etc and that was something the group had some interest in thinking about and possibly trying to identify champion in a building or multiple buildings to think about how to do that then the group was really spent a significant amount of time trying to think about what are the values and doing a values exercise and there were kind of four values that really rose high to the group in in um as they thought about their purpose and one was justice um you know having a purpose contribution and cooperation and and then they started to frame and kind of made a draft a mission statement and they were going to refine that at the next meeting and then there were some updates about uh kind of what's happening in special education they

103mentioned the sensory friendly vaccine clinics if that's something of interest to people they um they had some great information on that um i also forgot to mention they had some great information on mental health resources available in our community since clearly that's a need this year for students even more than normal with the pandemic etcetera and the additional challenges and they have some great documents that i have a copy of if anybody should wish them but clearly the special education office had various information on that so that was that group i had an opportunity along with uh todd and and mike and curtis and dr lake and assistant superintendent melissa sonic and our director of student services to get to the association of metropolitan school districts annual conference which this year was entitled reimagine minnesota

1042.0 and i have to say that this was probably the best conference i've always found amnesty conferences to be particularly good but i just thought that the workshops this year were providing more guidance on some really some leading edge activities that were particularly valuable i think to our school district more so than sometimes past ones have been and i just want to highlight one that i found really good and i don't know if the others want to highlight any different ones but um that was st louis park public schools had a presentation on student voice and they have done some kind of innovative thinking about how to engage student voice and they hired uh youth in a paid research position called youth data analysts and so they had in essence six of these students and

105they provided them some course work in the summer that really got them some depth of understanding and background particularly and uh and then they um the students kind of gathered quantitative data about the school and participation and really gained engaged and personal reflection to come up with a research question that they could mutually agree upon to come forward with and the one that the students who were the present uh shared with us that was their year's question was how do we increase the number of students of bipac students in accelerated classes because they were underrepresented and just some really innovative way of thinking about that and collecting information new information from their peers and surveys etc to support that effort i just thought that was really kind of exciting then the other thing they shared

106is a parallel process to the student analyst one which was really engaging student voice in reviewing curriculum and particularly in the areas where is the greatest discrepancy in terms of participation of students of different races such as mathematics and gt and a gifted and talented and how to try to think about those differently and again they had some very interesting ideas that they were proposing but that was just one of the sessions there the powerpoints for all the sessions are online and definitely worth going to and i know rosie had some interest in this and hope to go so if you want any more information i'd be happy to talk to you about that um but it was really really valuable thank you thank you anything else that's it todd rose anything for you guys

107um i think a nice segue from dr gargan's presentation or reporting on amsd uh i'll leap into um yeah i have to agree that the reimagine minnesota conference i was fascinated by all the breakout sessions i think we all went to the same breakout sessions uh really done well um really well planned uh one of the highlights for me is that this year and what they did in the afternoon is i think there was one breakout session right after lunch but then amnesty wanted to try something different called the unconference excuse me so it it could be um you didn't have to be a subject matter expert on on maybe the particular topic or discussion but you could uh they were seeking volunteers to just talk about it could be anything facing school districts it

108could be coveted 19 mitigation strategies it could be school board safety just just whatever and um i actually led uh one of the on conferences i don't know how i got the courage to do it that day but i thought hey i want to talk about mental health supports for students and staff and so there were about five or six of us at uh at my table and again it's just uh just had to be more of a facilitator someone to host but just a wonderful discussion with some edina school board members school board member from st cloud just about this whole topic of what can we do for our students and also the importance of staff during these times making sure that staff have time you know make making sure that we as school

109district leaders school board you know our staff checking in with other staff members during um not just maybe professional development but with everything going around the world today and out the state today just uh things happening in our communities just making sure that you know we're taking care of our students but we're taking care of our staff so it was just it was a fascinating um on conference and i was glad to be a part of it thank you so much and then one final thing uh the dcac meeting that jake alluded to um we were able to meet at abet deutsche and that was great there were several new um members of the dcac who never stepped foot inside that do touch us so jake was willing um we kind of a smaller group

110that that evening but we took a fabulous tour of the vet to techa it was great to see some of the folks who had never been in the building just the market uh seeing all of the new spaces that we have for everything at that uh brand new building wonderful building we went over the graduation and post-secondary report and then we thought a little bit about thinking to the future with the passage of the operating levy just trying to kind of survey some of the dcac members what are some ways that we can um come back better uh from clove at 19 and so i just started to have a really good discussion around that so yep that's it thank you and dcac is district curriculum industry in the community bro is anything from you

111today no this was the two weeks wow there you go two major deadlines so i don't have anything i i just have two things uh one todd and i know at least and i don't know if rose or curtis got a chance to we did attend the prep session for the delegate assembly which is where on december 3rd and 4th the 4 of us will be representing our district with other school board members from across the state to approve or not approve the the lobbying the legislation the proposals for laws legislation etc that we collectively want to bring to the state legislature for their consideration and passage so we walk through all those in greater detail so we'll be more prepared to think about them and either vote yes we do think that's something we

112want to push for or no we don't we get together on the third the only sour note was we learned that instead of being in person out in st louis park it's going to be back to a virtual like it was last year just outside so looking forward to me too i was too but i think it's just given the concern of the fact that as we've all been hearing in the last week or so minnesota is the new hot spot of the country um for for cobin infection rate uh they felt it was the wise thing to do it was right after thanksgiving yeah and the other thing i think uh uh also coming up in early december is the ramsey county league of local government annual meeting and i know if you're going

113to be able to go to that or not going to that i might try to and uh and i'm asked about uh covert mitigation so the room is a hundred people and they probably you know they're gonna try to maybe possibly cap it at the most 30 40 which i don't think there will be that many yeah yeah so and that it's interesting because that's all it's ramsey county league of governments so it's cities school districts water districts it's every jurisdiction commissioners yeah but the um the focus of the annual meeting is going to be ex-supreme court associate justice alan page who was on the supreme court for 22 years minnesota an ex-viking defensive player the first and only one of two to ever win the mvp as a defensive player so there you go

114um but he'll be talking about sharing his support for the so-called page amendment to the minnesota constitution that would alter wording around guaranteeing all all children uh a a a good education strong education so i'll be sharing his perspective on that that evening so i'm sure that at least one of us will report on it after the fact too when we come together that's all i had with that i think we now turn to the superintendent's reports thank you dr take it away yes i'd like to start this evening's report by again thanking our generous community for their overwhelmingly supporting the district's operating levy increase during our most recent election on november 2nd with these additional funds the district continues to be committed to lowering class size providing additional mental health supports increasing college and

115career readiness opportunities and stabilizing the financial health of the district as we approach thanksgiving break i'd like to acknowledge the additional stress placed upon our families and staff during the ongoing and ever-present covid19 pandemic i acknowledge the hardship placed on our families when students move in and out of quarantine thank you for your understanding and support of the important need to make the difficult decision when we have to send students home due to covet 19 exposure i'd like to honor and acknowledge the great work of our school staff that continues each day during our pen during this pandemic our nurses and health office staff continue to be inundated with intense covid related work that requires a high level of expertise and care you absolutely continue to be our heroes in the health office thank you

116to our teachers support staff paraprofessionals and all community education staff who arrive to school each day prepared to welcome in teach and love every single student to the best of their ability finally i'd like to honor all of our staff who often aren't recognized for their behind the scenes work our bus drivers technology nutrition and custodial staff work hard to ensure that our students are transported to and from school that they have technology access that they are fed meals multiple times a day and have a clean and safe place to learn i'm incredibly grateful for the dedicated staff of roseville area schools and with that we also all have so much to continue to be grateful for and i hope everyone in district 623 is able to enjoy a peaceful and restful thanksgiving thank you

117thank you with that it's a perfect segue also call out and thank the talented mr wayne powers our supervisor of infrastructure and cable support who is behind the scenes tonight and has insured and managed our broadcast recording of all the various meetings we've had tonight so thank you wayne again for your help and service to us with that we're returned thank you thank you