January 26, 2021 School Board Meeting

001[Music] okay okay we're live thank you michelle okay wayne we're ready good evening the january 26 2021 regular meeting of the isd 63 roseville area school school board is here by call to order clerk johnson could you please call the role this evening uh yes uh chair bogoszewski here director anderson here treasurer coggins here director chu yeah director shaw here and clerk johnson is here thank you sir uh do we have any agenda adjustments mr superintendent uh there are no agenda adjustments thank you great uh we do have two announcements tonight that i'm aware of so um the first one i'll just say a few words um governor waltz as some of us may know has proclaimed this week as paraprofessional week in the state of minnesota and our own district is fortunate to have

002about 150 paraprofessionals that work in our schools who are among the more than 20 000 across the state and uh as many of us know our paraprofessionals support our students in in so many different ways uh in-class instructional support working with individual students and learning objectives helping organize and manage student activities numerous other things uh it's really true that paraprofessionals are integral to successful effective learning and and just you know extremely needed and uh and a benefit to our whole district so we joined governor waltz in expressing our appreciation for what our paraprofessionals do and so to all of our paras out there uh thank you from the school board and from the district we appreciate your service uh the second announcement is going to be led into us by uh principal kristen smith olson

003principal smithos and i'll let you do the honors of introducing and sharing with everyone what this is about thank you chairmanship rugacheski and school board members and superintendent cycli dr lake dr faber i am so incredibly honored to be here to recognize becky ryan tonight um becky received her national school board certification and i just want to tell you a little bit about that first the overview of national board is that every student deserves to be taught by an accomplished teacher nationals board certification was designed to develop retain and recognize accomplished teachers and to generate ongoing improvement in schools nationwide it is the most respected professional certification available in k-12 education and as a former school nationals board certified teacher i let mine lapse i am just over the moon that becky has done this

004becky is an amazing amazing science teacher at parkview she teaches 7th grade life science and 8th grade earth science she actually has taught many other subjects at parkview but this is truly her passion and i am so thrilled to recognize her tonight with her hard work especially during this time of a pandemic i must say national board certification work is more that work than a master's degree and becky completed it in one year with three little kids and a pandemic going on so she really deserves an amazing giant kudos and uh yay rah-rah becky so congratulations and here's becky ryan awesome thank you kristen uh thank you school board uh superintendent cicolli i couldn't have done it without the support of kristin and this the district we had a little cohort working and it really

005got me started and off the ground and the minnesota national board certified teachers cohort was really helpful as well but i've got a great team at parkview and just an amazing work environment that allowed me to do what i needed to do to show my accomplished teaching so thank you to all of you you're so welcome all right and kristen how many how many certified teachers do we have in the district do we know that offhand about what the number is because it's a pretty rare accomplishment is my understanding yeah i have to say with julie not here anymore i don't know the answer to that i know that i have at least one other one in my building i think there might be a few more around but that's a good good thing to

006find out and i will look into it and let you know because i'm curious too i know i have a number of teachers working on it right now as becky said there's a little cohort that uh uh lit the fire to uh do this because it is quite quite an endeavor and quite a recognition and the one thing i want you to know about um this is that you are really judged by your peers which is an amazing experience to have you know you're you have evaluations by uh by supervisors but it really is a panel of your peers that is um telling you you're amazing well it's quite an accomplishment becky again congratulations from all of us so thank you so much and hopefully and i you know i know this is a fact

007you'll be an inspiration to others too and i'm just also thankful that we have a district where we have teachers who are inspired to do this and and ha and feel the support is there sufficient enough to do it successfully so thank you for for once again taking that pathway it's not an easy one thank you good job becky i'll add in too i i saw a recent list of our board certified teachers and i want to say it's about 10. ah okay so yeah so pretty wow wow tip top there you go well thank you so much all right with that uh will we have do we have no one here do we have any community input this evening not that i know of great then i would entertain a motion to approve the

008consent agenda so moved all second thank you any discussion hearing none curtis could you take the vote on the consent agenda sure uh director shaw hi director chu aye treasurer goggins aye director anderson aye chair brokey aye and clerk johnson says i cool and court johnson i believe you also were going to share the gifts this evening that we've received i i am half moon and i just had it here ah here we go okay a financial gift from the edw pta for you for academic programming and classroom grants and and other student needs um a financial gift from the poland family foundation for a first grade classroom parkview center schools a financial gift from the blackbaud giving fund your cause for principles discretion also parkview summer school and a gift of winter clothing items

009for students in need to roseville area schools from do good roseville so once again we are just so pleased to have a district that has so many uh kind and giving people to education it's so so helpful and so important thank you thank you all with that we'll move into our reports and non-action items and the first first on the docket tonight is uh sherry thompson director of business services with an update on our 2021 budget sherry he sure is muted sorry i want to make sure green um okay so it is that time of year uh right we we've been working the last couple months um we roll from audit to revamping the current year budget the budget that you adopted last june the preliminary budget was based on assumptions of course that we

010that we built uh last last spring um so now we have revised the current year budget um and i just want to just hit some of the highlights on the general fund um again this is just just a summary because when we put things together um in the spring we do make assumptions and probably of any year that's looked a lot different in the uh fall and winter months it would be this year um uh with the ongoing pandemic so ari are we sure yeah were you still resource trying to screen share yeah i'm not seeing anything seeing it i'm not seeing it i don't think we are okay it's black oh interesting see you okay so let's try this again can you see that now there you go there we go there we go

011okay okay um yes i'm working with too many monitors and i can't even see what i'm sure so um okay so looking at then our beginning audited fund balance um for from july 1st of 2020 um we started the year uh with a fund balance an unassigned fund balance of six million six hundred and twenty four thousand dollars again um you know we had some costs from last year um that uh some expenses that weren't realized so we did start our year with a higher fund balance of about 3 million looking then um at the revenue the revenue amount that you adopted on the preliminary budget was a hundred and three million three hundred and eighty two thousand six hundred and forty three dollars sherry may interrupt yes if anyone is not able to view

012the numbers you can go to the top of your screen and hit view options on your computer screen and then fit the increase the ratio of the size sorry no no no no and that's the problem with not being able to see right now like to see how right because i could have adjusted it here as well so thank you um dr lake for for pointing that out um so this year and we've talked about this throughout the fall um this year we have seen a decrease um we've seen a loss in in our students primarily at the elementary level we're down about 200 students from what we had projected when we built the budget aldo and i have talked about this even thinking again of you know as we built the budget um starting

013from when the pandemic started in um in march uh here when we went to distance learning even then looking at our enrollment we look at our enrollment um all of the time we continue to look at that enrollment weekly throughout the summer uh even you know uh in june uh at board or budget adoption time um you know i guess who would have thought even then uh being that uh it is a pandemic that um you know at that time i think at least me personally was thinking gee will school start in september will it start a couple weeks late um so again we continue to deal with the pandemic so we have seen a loss in students and this isn't unlike what other school districts are experiencing as well uh so again we are

014adjusting that revenue down for the loss in um in students um we're adjusting that down by 2.4 million dollars at the same time we are seeing some um some uh one-time dollars that have come to us through the cares funds through the federal government and i'll talk a little bit um more about this i want to touch a little bit on on this because we'll be seeing some additional dollars and we have recognized and the thing is when we're talking about federal dollars um we don't recognize the revenue until the year in which we're incurring an expense because these funds do have targeted uh areas right where we um where we spend these dollars so we did receive and we've talked about this um we presented previously um we did receive about 2.3 million dollars

015um in corona um or coveted relief funds and that was really to help kind of the startup or the reopening uh of schools those dollars had to be spent between july 1st and december 31st of 2020 so um these dollars the the dollars came in to support child care costs um also technology and that would be student devices um as well as staff devices we were not set up to function as a one-to-one um especially with our students in the elementary so we've handed out many devices um also funds to uh for covid coordinator um added nursing costs so that's what really all of this revenue the 2.3 million dollars was directed towards uh in addition to that we have received um some other um uh covet dollars and i'll touch a little bit more

016on that uh as after i work through the summary document um and we re we are using uh we received 364 thousand dollars and we'll see when we get to the expenses below that we're really using those funds um again these are one-time funds and we're using we're going to use these funds to um uh provide like floating substitutes floating teachers uh now that again you know because we are coming back in school so to provide those um added supports and coverage for once uh when staff are out sick or to kind of get that all hands on deck where they're needed and again these funds are used to support that so overall um when you look at the the subtotal of our changes just in a total dollar dollar amount it's um it's an

017it's an additional 250 000 so that takes our revised revenue up to 103 million six hundred and thirty one thousand dollars but now we move to the expenditure side um the board again um adopted a preliminary budget um of 103 million 394 uh thousand dollars in the unassigned so last spring you adopted pretty much a balanced budget um again we build that budget in the spring anticipating you know um of course retirements uh who we're gonna hire there's things that we don't know who's um who will be in what position uh also looking at our um anticipated contracted services costs um so when we actually went through and revised the budget and i would say you know we're doing this in january december january is when we started this work so we still take a

018conservative approach and again bringing looking at bringing kids back to school again our net adjustments from the original budget is an additional 306 thousand dollars so that would be the net um of those increases from preliminary uh to final or to revised rather and we will continue um monitoring all of these i mentioned above this this 2.3 million dollars again that ties into the revenues that i mentioned above as far as reopening the schools and the costs related to that um uh here's the and then the 364 thousand dollars uh for the the floating teachers and substitutes again um with any of these federal dollars we can't recognize that revenue until we have an expense associated with it so that's why you see these uh these funds tie out exactly and these i i will

019mention or i can't stress enough our one-time funds so overall um again looking at this um our changes to our expenses um uh are looking at the subtotal here uh is about 2.975 as far as um added changes so this takes our expenditures up to um a hundred and six million three hundred and seventy thousand six hundred and fifteen dollars uh of course with the um with the revision uh in our revenue with the loss in the pupil units our our net difference rather than a balanced budget we're looking at a um deficit of about 2.7 million dollars so we saw a higher fund balance as of june 30th 2020 much of which was related to the impact of covid because we didn't we weren't hiring substitute teachers in our third in the third trimester

020last year so we saw that fund balance in flight but we're seeing a lot of it then um come down in the in the current year again uh the impact of um of covid and much of it is the lawsons in student revenue so we are anticipating um a general fund unassigned fund balance of about three million eight hundred and eighty five thousand dollars this remains this is about 3.9 or 4 um so we remain above the targeted or the um our fund balance policy of 3 um but again we are uh we will be deficit spending hey sherry yes um and i hate to make you explain the federal funds again but i i think i missed something when you talked about the 2.3 um i i understand that i mean under expenditures i

021mean we actually have defined covered costs correct correct so so can't we use the federally defined federal dollars to cover some of those i mean i guess i missed something i'm understanding the same exact number in revenue and expenditures but i mean aren't we getting help with some of those code costs i missed something sorry no and you you are exactly right that's actually the timing on that was perfect because i'm going to kind of further follow up a little bit uh on on these federal dollars okay so sorry for jumping the gun just no that's a good question you would think we had rehearsed it so can all of you have um these cares funding sources can you see this tab this is the second um uh worksheet that's in in your packet yep

022and so there are different you know there are some different again these are all federal sources so and that's why i say um and that's maybe some of the confusion right i mean overall um right now and we are we are waiting there's a big if on this five point um are on solidifying confirming this 5.6 million dollars that we currently have in 2021 2022 so i hate to jump so far into the presentation i should start at the top i realize that but that's a preliminary estimate and we're waiting for final uh word on that and i'm hoping to get that clarification by the end of next week so overall over a multiple years at this point we are estimating um that uh we will receive about 9.5 million dollars in cares funds right

023um but again uh these are they're directed uh towards to offset the impact of the pandemic much like the other federal programs so um and we do have some flexibility where we spend things going forward so the first thing and hopefully todd this this answers some of your questions we did have um uh right we've added the eight uh long-term subs so um that's an added cost so we've got the 364 000 to cover that added cost okay so so the net impact on our budget then on overall at the end of the day will be zero because we've added the expense but we've also added the ex the revenue um uh this pot of 2.3 million dollars again that had to be spent within um the six month period uh and those were added

024costs the cost of child care was about a half a million dollars um uh technology um covent coordinator so all of these um and again we had to spend those by december 31st so we've got about 2.7 million dollars uh this year that we're looking at um we're bringing the recognizing the revenue but then also the expense we do have some flexibility uh there are some guidelines because then we still have a remaining 6.8 million dollars um the dollars that are are up here uh the 191 000 um and uh and the 973 000 the different cares pots we can use those to offset our continued operating expenses they don't have to be additional expenses um we can um uh supplant our budget on this because there again these dollars much many of these dollars

025are to assist us in getting through the pandemic it doesn't necessarily need to be an added expense it can help offset our deficit spending in the programs that we have and we're looking at a variety of ways to address this again some of these dollars we will use to offset our our costs that are actually already in the budget for next year as we develop that budget so if we have deficit spending we'll um we'll be looking at um offsetting that and in part some of that is um and we'll talk more about this when we talk about budget parameters later in this meeting but um you know getting that enrollment back because our enrollment we anticipate won't be at a hundred percent next year so it helps to get us uh through that period

026and in addition to that we're also looking at some um uh some additional programming whether that be in the summer after school so that's what we're looking that's where we're looking to um invest these dollars this remaining 6.8 million dollars uh we have until um this first like 1.5 million roughly um the first three lines here we um have until september of 20 september 30th of 2022 to spend those dollars and then our most recent award of 5.6 million dollars we can spend those dollars up through september 30th of 2023 so we have some flexibility um um and when we spend those dollars so just how does that okay address some of your questions yeah yeah that helps i'm just um so it's so i so it'd be correct in saying that i i know

027on paper we dropped from we dropped it an unassigned fund balance of six point whatever it was i mean i know yes paper we dropped down to three point nine four which is still better than that than our goal but it is it certainly seems like we we have better than 3.9 if theoretically i guess or i mean depending on the costs that come in just it i just wanted to clarify because i didn't know about the grand total of 9.5 there under column e yes so yeah we just received word on that about a week and a half ago i think but we're waiting for her final word um and and again those dollars are not only the carriage dollars are not only set aside or are out there to help offset increase costs

028and it's also um sustainability right as far as getting through the pandemic they are one time dollars so sherry so the but the 2021 column that adds up to two six six nine one seven seven yes those downloads are already accounted for in the budget adjustments on the previous page so we're at that 2.7 million deficit even with that 2.6 million that is correct but the 20 21 22 isn't because we haven't spent that yet so my question is so 2021 the 2 million do we have it like did it come to us is it in has it been delivered yes it has been delivered and then the 6.8 for 2022 that's not delivered yet right that's more like a line of credit that we can spend up to that correct we can't draw it

029until we spend it that's the way that it works with the federal dollars go ahead i'm sorry go ahead finish up no typically the the federal dollars typically you supplement your existing programs in the case like right now with the cares because of the pandemic um again they're actually used and intended to to supplement your budget got it and then the negative impacts yeah and then my final question in 2122 that the 6.8 million relates to you probably can't answer this question but i'll ask it anyway is that at risk at all politically or is there like is that it like it's promised and done or if you know different kind of packages change at the congressional level or whatever is that at risk or can we pretty much count on that if we can

030spend it appropriately we can count on this this was part of the cares act that was passed in what early just or in december okay so so that has been finalized and i think one other thing that i want to point out is this 2.3 million dollars that's in the current year the 2021 um the majority of those are one-time costs right right they're not they won't carry forward um uh to the next year right because again a lot of it was technology and getting things in the hands and ppe and yep yeah it's one time relief to help us with one time we hope expenses because they're related to we hope a one-time pandemic yes okay thanks jerry i have a question um the the reason that we that our fund balance went down

031this year 2021 is because of lower enrollment are the cares funds at all tied to enrollment what what uh establishes the size of of those um of those numbers so that's that's a great question frank um what actually um they are all based um they they're actually based on kind of what they the formula that they use for title one so these were developed based on our free and reduced uh counts and percentages as excuse me as of october 1st of 2019 because that's the most recent data that the federal government had okay good thanks yes any other questions or comments for sherry it doesn't appear so uh actually i have a question um uh sherry so you were talking about the substitute teachers and now you know we have some funds to to to

032to bring them bring some back what happened then next year with some of the some of the some of the funding that we get continue to fund them or is that a one-time thing so that is really a one-time thing okay um and and our hope is um right that by next fall and all of these things we've learned a lot in this last year um that we will continue to monitor this situation because there again a year ago or even nine months ago um who would have thought that we would still that we would be where we are [Music] now thank you sherry kitty um your update on the budget was really based on what we solidly knew as of last week i mean you're sharing this additional information on dollars but that hasn't

033been baked into the budget update um you talked about potentially doing some additional after school and summer school programming would that then be another adjustment to this budget um or i mean because if that would still be this fiscal year would it not yes so if if um if programming is developed and again so a lot of times what happens prior to june 30th is this year and what happens july one and after is next year so it could impact um like summer school programming or even after school programming as things progress if it happens um if we are planning something for prior to june 30th we will be coming back to you with another budget revision typically we only revise the budget once during the year but this is not a typical year so

034if that's the case we would be coming back um uh with another adjustment thank you why is if it would it were to all go into next year we would obviously build that into the preliminary budget for next year thank you any other questions or comments looks like we're good sherry thank you very much thank you thanks sure thank you uh next up it looks like superintendent sakoli will introduce some of his team um to talk about uh eliminating opportunity gaps uh metrics and strategies around that and the community conversations and student voice presentation dr sokoli yes thank you chair bogoszewski so at the november 10th school board work study session the school board discussed its annual self-evaluation and considerable time was spent on these three topics what are we doing to eliminate opportunity gaps

035how are we connecting with our community and how are we amplifying student voice and so uh we also recognize that with this pandemic it wasn't our uh our normal reporting of different uh measures and strategies was in some cases altered delayed because of the work that had to be done to really reinvent the way we deliver education on short notice so i thought it'd be a good time to present a report so we've been working on this uh for a few months that shows some of that this is not meant to be a comprehensive report of everything we're doing but it is hopefully meant to uh provide an overview and a sense of how things fit together in our efforts in these three areas and i would ask this is a my colleagues and i

036there'll be a number of us presenting at different parts it's a rather lengthy presentation so if possible i would ask the board to hold questions or comments till the end so we can get through this please so um if we could move to the next slide please so we're going to start with the first of those three areas opportunity gap and look at some metrics and strategies so as we move on to the next slide you'll see this is our normal um reporting on some of the measures that we do throughout the school year and some of these got delayed and didn't happen this last year in addition in some recent years we've also not all but we have on at least a couple of occasions presented overall on efforts in our strategic plan so

037that didn't happen in the last year either so if we move on i will hand it off to jake fondo lindy thank you dr scully and school board to start our presentation we want to share some data that we've previously shared with with the board in our monthly school board reports as aldo talked about this first slide focuses on the minnesota comprehensive assessment in math and please note that the data was taken from the previous three years of mca data with the most recent being the 2018-19 school year because we didn't administer the mca's last spring during the pandemic so the top left graph shows math proficiency at harambe elementary and you can see that our black students represented by the red line and multiracial students represented by the light blue line are reducing the

038achievement gap compared to our our white students in the dark blue line notice that all groups continue to improve their proficiency that is what we really want to see in our data all student groups continuing to improve their proficiency however we want to see that accelerated growth for our historically underserved underserved students the top right shows an example at emma d williams elementary between special education students in the orange line and their general education peers in the green line you can see our special education students are showing accelerated growth towards the genera general education students and at the bottom the bottom graph shows multi-racial students increasing math proficiency which is the light blue line compared to our white students that which is the dark blue line at roseville area high school this next graph or

039this next slide i should say shows three graphs that have proficiency progress in mca reading in three different schools than the first slide so the top left graph shows proficiency increases at little canada elementary and reading proficiency we see asian students in the blue line black students in the red line and multi-racial students in that light blue line compared to our white students in that dark blue line you can see these three groups showed increased proficiency that are closing achievement gaps the top right graph provides a look at roseville area middle school where our asian students with that blue line and multi-racial students in the light blue line are making proficiency gains and closing the gap with our white students that are shown by that dark blue the bottom graph shows our black students with

040that red line improving in reading proficiency while our white students also show growth at parkview center school although these these two slides show promising results we know that we still have a lot of work left ahead of us we'll continue on so switching gears to some different data this slide shows our most recent data for office discipline referrals the unduplicated account means that each student is only counted once in the data so this graph provides a look at the representation between that student population that was referred to the office to the percent of that student population overall when we look at this data we look for a representation a representative proportion which would put each student group at that 1.0 line so in this graph white students which are represented in the dark blue line

041and asian students in that just the blue line are underrepresented while our black students that are represented by the red line hispanic students in green and all student groups students of color group which is that orange line are overrepresented however you can see since the 2013-14 school year we've seen a steady decline in the over-representation of black students in our office referrals onto the next slide so this next slide shows over and under representation again but this time we're looking at suspensions by our student groups so in looking at the data you can see that the under representation under representation from our white students which is that dark blue and our asian students in light blue um are underrepresented while hispanic and black students are overrepresented however we do see a general decline for our

042black students over time and we want to acknowledge that the gap is still too large and we're working to see to continue declines with the ultimate goal of having no over or under representation for any group on to this next slide we continue to see over an under representation but this one is actually a focus on our student population for special education students that are served in special ed again we're looking for that um that representation of 1.0 for all of our student groups which would mean that proportionate amount being served for populations of students while in this data line you see in that light blue that our white students are served in a proportionate amount and we see underrepresentation in our asian students which is that red line and we also see a decline

043in that over representation for our black students which is the purple line and hispanic students which is that green line over time going to our next slide this is another incredibly important statistic which is our student graduation percentages you know that this data can be life-changing for students as we know students who receive a high school diploma have a higher expectancy to earn that livable wage in their adult lives so this is our most recent graduation data from the graduating class of 2019. we will receive our 2020 graduation data in february or march of this year and have that information as a part of our graduation and post-secondary report later on this spring but this particular data set looks at our groups of students and their graduation percentages compared to the statewide graduation percentages the

044statewide average is the dark blue bar while the roseville area schools data is in the light blue and as you can see all of our student groups graduate above the state percentages with the exception of our asian student group and our final data slide is the representation of student groups by race in our college credit bearing courses these are college credit bearing courses that are taught at our high schools by our teachers and they include all ap courses college in the schools courses um college articulated and concurrent enrollment courses again these are courses that we are teaching within our our high schools in this slide you can see again that we're looking for that 1.0 proportion from our student representation with most of our student groups um in that school year uh 2018 2019 you'll

045see very close to a representative number for our student groups we still have some under representation from our hispanic group of students in that green line and black students represented in the purple line as well as american indian students when the blue line but we continue to improve in this area so i am done droning on about the data but i want to uh thank you for reviewing that this portion with me um and we wanted to show how that data relates to our continued effort to provide an equitable anti-racist education for our students to close opportunity gaps and in these upcoming slides you'll hear more about the actions that we're taking to put us on the right path and i'm going to turn it over to dr favor thank you director van der lundy

046uh board chair bogoszewski board members superintendent sokoli we're going to spend time today uh this evening looking at what we consider the meat of what we do part of that is how we monitor progress around achievement and the impact of our instruction during this process during this section of the presentation we'll look at instruction instructional practices monitoring progress team consists of the two assistant superintendents director of special ed yell representation foreign guard and title programming and teaching and learning along with that we work closely with the regional centers of excellence regional centers of excellence helps us look at our data helps us review our intentionality around our processes and systems that are in the way that are impacted and moves us towards a greater understanding of how our instruction has impact student achievement next up

047professional learning communities and melissa sonic thank you dr favor good evening everyone to uh support opportunity gap reductions in our professional learning communities i'd like to share two different initiatives that we're working on first we have created common formative assessment data collection system that will allow us to desegregate data by grade school and as a district this data desegregation tool is centered around student growth focusing on academic state standards and math it was created by a teacher leader and this fall was shared across the district this dynamic data collection system has helped teachers view their data in real time for their students and then they can also desegregate it by race by english language learners and students receiving special education this data has a direct impact on that teacher's teaching but more importantly on student

048learning we are also developing a data analysis protocol that incorporates questions for collaborative teams to ensure that race-based data analysis is taking place within our professional learning communities some examples of these questions prompt educators to consider things like what do you notice about the data based on race or as we prepare prepare for interventions and extensions are the instructional methods culturally responsive and inclusive or how will we take responsibility individually and collectively if black indigenous and students of color are not learning these questions will help us live into our value of equity and all we do with that i'll turn it over to florence and christina to talk a little bit more about say improvement plans yeah good evening everyone i'm florence odigan i'll talk about school improvement planning we strive to reduce opportunity gaps

049through the school improvement planning process and implementation of our school improvement plans as dr fever mentioned this past year we have collaborated with the regional centers for excellence to improve our planning process the planning process usually starts in late spring each school uses data analysis protocols to examine various forms of data they have collected throughout the school year as well as trend data such data include non-academic data such as attendance and office referrals perception data such as surveys from families students and staff and academic data such as standardized assessments and common formative assessments school leadership teams desegregate the data by race gender students on free and reduced price meals students receiving special education and english language learners schools identify areas of success as well as areas for growth and prioritize one to three areas to

050focus on then set improvement goals these goals are also known as site goals for example this year brim hall elementary school identified math as an area of focus and set a goal for 68 of students in grades three through six to proficient in math minnesota comprehensive assessments part of the goal involves reducing the achievement gap for blacks students by 20 percent and for latinx students by 30 percent additionally schools identify specific action steps to implement throughout the school year to help them attain their goals schools also have systems in place to monitor their progress towards goal attainment christina so an important part of this work is the continuous improvement cycle which is based on the plan do study act cycle basically whatever the district or sorry the school leadership team decides as an innovation to

051reduce the opportunity gap the teacher teams uh take that innovation and and plan to implement it in their teacher teams they do the implementation they study how it worked what the outcomes were for students and then they revise it or tweak it and and that is their action they also share this information with the school leadership team so that there is a continual cycle of a feedback loop telling the leadership team if their innovations are working and how things are changing over time next slide we continue to strive to align our initiatives in the previous slide i talked about site goals at the beginning of the school year each teacher sets a teacher growth goal and teachers and collaborative teams set student goals this student goals are also called team goals as teachers set their

052goals a concerted effort is made to align their goals with their school's side goals as you may recall from the previous slide brimhall's side goal is focused on math and achievement reduction for black and latinx students in alignment with the site gold first grade collaborative teams at brim hall also focus on math and achievement gap reduction for black and latinx students collaborative teams identify specific steps or action steps to help them achieve their goals building administrators support teachers by providing specific feedback and coaching through formal and informal observations additional support include peer observations and equity focused coaching from lead teachers next slide using our school improvement planning practices that has been advanced and our plcs as a guide we offer ongoing reflection in primary areas around instruction the strategies of inclusive curriculum after narrative aligned

053with our compass our compass as our guide equity pedagogy culturally relevant content social justice and collective knowledge creation where we have set majority of our time this past year around collective knowledge creation so that we are inclusive of members of the community and students can see themselves in the curriculum and the content next slide sorry i just had to unmute so coupled with our our culturally inclusive teaching strategies from the previous slide that dr favor shared the following instructional practices on this slide provide examples of embedded equitable practices we continue to build the we continue to bridge opportunity gaps starting with our youngest learners and have been working as a pre-k to kindergarten committee to align our practices between those two programs at our elementary schools we continue to incorporate best practices in teaching young

054students focused on engagement strategies and inquiry to note harambe elementary received the prestigious turn around arts grant which has brought additional funding for and a focus on how arts education can relate to and engage all students and has brought exciting projects and performances to harambe additionally the dual language immersion program which began with two classes of kindergarten students at little canada and has now grown through eighth grade at rams and our eighth grade students just registered for their dli9 course starting at raz the program provides a two-way immersion experience to improve language learning for our native spanish-speaking students two-way immersion programs have been shown to reduce opportunity gaps between english language speaking and native language speakers also our equitable practices have been have been enhanced and further furthered by our partnership with the national urban

055alliance at central park harambe and rams we've also partnered with hamlin univer university to train classroom teachers on how to improve our practices with english learners in their general education classes through our elm coaches which have which each school has an elm coach finally our staff have worked incredibly hard to continue the excellent education that students deserve while in the distance learning format providing students with their technology needs reaching out to families with support going to students homes to check in with them if they haven't heard from them in a while and distributing food and materials to make sure students and families have what they need during these challenging times has been an effort by our whole staff and continuing on to the next slide we have multi-tiered systems of support and multi-tiered systems of

056support or frequently called mtss are often represented as pyramids you'll see them throughout the literature as a triangle or pyramid with the bottom tier or tier one being the largest section and focused on core instruction of what all students get that second level or tier two applies to less students and provides more focused intervention while the top tier or tier three provides intense usually individual interventions for students the following bullet points are just shared just some of our supports for students in all three of our tiers in all of our elementary schools we we do receive some additional funding through adsis to support school staff to work with students in reading math and behavior to support two tier two and three interventions in reading we do this through our press interventions and in math we

057expanded our staff small group interventions while we continue to support students behavior through behavior interventions throughout the district and specifically central park this year has a student success coordinator to support their professional learning community work and mtss work we've also partnered with the minnesota reading and math corps to provide elementary students with intervention in small groups and as a part of our elementary program review three years ago we implemented the what i need time at each of our sites fairview alternative high school also has adopted this model of what i need the what i need time could be titled differently at each site but the basic tenants is that our schools provide a time for relearning reteaching and extension based on student need this time is built into their schedules and is part of the

058professional learning community process where teachers provide instruction assess their students and then use the data from that that assessment to flexibly group students based on their instructional need another tier of support at the middle level is providing the opportunity for students to participate in advanced options these options provide increased rigor or further exploration of topics that interest our students they're open to all students and teachers look for opportunities to encourage their students to participate in them as we see them as a potential avenue for taking advanced coursework at the high school level we continue to work to expand these to more subject areas which now will be including social studies and math students at rams coming into 7th grade will also see a change next year in their math courses with being able to take

059either math 7 or intermediate algebra which is a change from previous years and that math 7 course will also include advanced options for differentiation and our last point is that some students do receive extra support through our supplemental title and services and on the next slide i'll share the example of what title one supplemental services look at roseville area middle school so rams academy came as a part of the recommendations a few years back to study the middle level schedule and support and the support model for students at the middle level the math academy and literacy learning classes are part of that mtss system at rams these programs and provide students with an additional math or reading course and they build on the instruction provided in their english language arts and math courses they serve

060students in smaller classes and provide individual support for students with a focus on skill building in those areas but also avid like practices in organization building community growth mindset and social emotional learning or sel they're also connecting with families as well hosting specific family nights with different themes we've seen an increase in both our math and reading mca scores since we've expanded these opportunities to our students and i'm going to pass it on to dr lake to talk a little bit more about rams mtss thank you jake and good evening everyone we thought it would be helpful to provide you with some specific examples of a multi-tiered system of support the following two slides represent the ram system the graph represents two tiers of communications from both our star rams advisory teachers and their content

061teachers communicating both with students and families the talking points app is a talk to text app that automatically translates into the language of choice teachers and admin alike have reported that being very very beneficial this slide represents the ramp's tier 2 intervention communication i'd like to add that there is an additional level of accountability as teachers and administrators keep comprehensive contact logs in all of our schools also staff working within tiers 2 and 3 include teachers parents counselors student services and behavior staff among many many others this slide represents the fawz mtss work again you'll note the team approach and continual cycle of support for our students and if you're wondering a student success navigator is a more progressive title for a traditional behavior interventionist [Applause] the next two slides provide examples of our secondary

062mentoring programs our tiered support systems and mentoring programs will continue to evolve and improve as we plan for our return to better the rossi e mentoring program is fairly self-explanatory and the foss home program is their advisory program actually is a credit bearing class within the system of fos here's the rams and perk view programs these advisory classes are built into the school day note the consistent theme of providing social and emotional support to our students thank you and next up is melissa thanks dr lake many of you have heard the african proverb it takes a village to raise a child right meaning an entire community of people must interact with children for those children to grow in a healthy environment well we believe the same is true for developing our educators as learners it

063takes a village therefore we have many partnerships in staff development including partnerships with avid advancement via individual determination cary which is the university of minnesota center for applied research and educational improvement equity alliance the minnesota humanities center msu mankato institute for courageous school and district leadership the pyramid model innovation which focuses more on ecsc and pre-k hamlin university's english learners in the mainstream commonly referred to as elm university of minnesota tech instruction for english language learners and the minneapolis foundation reimagine education grant which is focusing on staff participation specifically educational leaders in upcoming culturally responsive school leadership institute we also know that part of being a culturally responsive educator really means committing to being a lifelong learner so here are some of the ways that we are fostering learning for educators in the roseville area

064schools we are doing some learning around anti-racist schools and classrooms in this last summer 2020 there were book studies led by an anti-racism teacher commit teacher committee leaders the book that they focused on was how to be an anti-racist by ibram kindy we're also doing learning around culturally responsive and competent teaching which you've heard a little bit about already this evening specifically we're focusing this year around story circles and absent narratives we've also focused around elementary and secondary staff circles pd pathways to support teachers and educators in both distance learning and blended learning online instructional best practices for el teachers and professional learning communities that align with our site improvement plans with that i will turn it over to dr faber as you know one of the priorities of the governor as well as our

065strategic priorities are recruitment and retaining teachers of color i'm going to share with you the first three bullets and ask that lisa chang and dr lake continue to share in this area our focus group our focus group stands for future oriented communities of united support we often get calls from other districts around this concept it's completely unique roseville area schools in the way that it's done and our teachers of color are being supported also we have a unique partnership with the minnesota i'm sorry with equity alliance minnesota we are asking equity alliance to interview teachers of color to get a better understanding of exactly what we need to do to to recruit and retain they will be interviewing teachers of color shortly and two in two segments probationary teachers and non-probationary teachers so that we

066can better understand how how teachers found us and what and again what we can do to retain teachers recently we received a grant from pelsey the pillsbury grant that roseville received was larger than any other district in the state and that money on the seventy one thousand dollars roughly i use to support the work of focus and retaining teachers of colors everything from mentoring professional development as as focus seeds fit and collaborating with the minnesota humanities center to best support our teachers lisa yes can you guys hear me great thank you so collaborating with hr um we're and dr dr faber and i talked extensively about this too we would like and desire to work with equity alliance minnesota on state interviews um for probationary staff and current staff stay interviews are just like instead

067of exit interviews we're going to ask them what do we need to stop what do we need to continue and how do we improve in addition to that we will be doing exit interviews i have the questions lined up we just haven't done that and hoping to get my team as well as equity online to help us with that as well and um of course always getting our focus affinity group involved in terms of what kind of questions we should ask for teachers of color um in regards to minnesota equity education partnership manip i'm very excited about this rose and i i met ro with rose's team on um what what minip is about and how they can help us so they will help us with our initiatives to recruit and retain our teachers where

068we would utilize the many tools to reach our goals um one of the tools that we're currently on that i'm looking at working with them on is the objectives objectives measures targets in actions form identifying strategies objectives measurements benchmark info target and what type of actions to take so i'm super happy about that and super eager to get that work started thank you move on to jenny yeah thank you we have applied for and received the mde grow your own grant for the past three years prior to covid as this year mde did not offer the grant we have received over 140 000 to support additional courses at both raws and fos within our education pathways focused on an attempt to recruit interested students of color into education that transitions us into college and career

069readiness it was hard to select just what's a highlight i'll name a few genesis works is a non-profit organization we partner with that allows for students to work in a paid internship and earned credit at the same time also brynne mcconnell is the raw's career navigator and she's implemented a college and career readiness curriculum within our english learner seminar courses at roz finally the multi-single l multilingual seal test allows for students to earn college credit upon passing that exam this opportunity honors our brilliant students where english may not be their first language this slide briefly highlights the exceptional work of avid our 7-12 college readiness program as melissa said avid advancement via individual determination in 2019 97 of the students in the program were students of color 95 of the students had college plans and

070100 of the students in avid were meeting college entrance requirements as met through their course selection our avid directors do a wonderful job of partnering with a variety of community businesses and organizations these partnerships open up extensive opportunities for our students i'll keep the momentum going here in terms of eliminating opportunity gaps we're hitting the mark in the area of scholarships in just four years from 2016 to 2020 the percentage of students of color scholarship recipients rose from 56.6 to 69.5 percent the dollar amount awarded to our students of color increased a dynamic 58.4 percent to 70.8 percent and you can go ahead and review the names of our large scholarships and their respective criteria all grounded in racial equity lastly this overall presentation is aimed at sharing and showing how we are working to

071eliminate shameful gaps alternative education always leads the way in terms of doing education differently both of our high schools have embraced and adopted progressive grading practices such as eliminating the zero and changing d's and f's to a no mark on student transcripts this all happened during covid and we're currently engaged in discussions centered around how and when we will continue these grading practices when we do return to normal and we'll transition back to dr faber the next component really excites me to serve in leadership and also as we're working together with our community to create what we believe and what we continue to talk about as a rose way community conversations and student voice christina robinson and i i'm going to talk a little bit about the community conversations and i ask her to to

072speak to speak to the board around some of the innovative ideas that she has used in the l especially with the facebook live sessions christina thank you dr favor so um this has been a great passion and as most things in the pandemic highlighted some of the gaps that needed addressing one of them was our need to communicate and collaborate effectively with our multilingual families so working with the multilingual cultural liaisons we've been able to establish cultural facebook pages um put facebook live sessions out so families could attend and also share the videos later once they've gotten some information and this was extremely important when we were changing program models having lots of information coming out quickly and a lot of our families really benefit from the oral presentations and so facebook became a very

073popular method for doing that we're also at the buildings doing a lot of uh town halls and there's a very exciting feature that allows us to use language channels within a zoom meeting so different community languages can be in that same meeting and have simultaneous interpreting so we would have karen spanish you know somali all happening at the same time this really benefits our families and allows them to interact in real time in whatever is happening in that time i've also done some work with edgerton staff mara bischoff in particular has really taken some leadership with this and we are piloting some language lines so that families will be able to call in directly to teachers and staff in buildings using their native language and also kind of providing some bilingual training to staff so

074that or sorry to family so that they can be more comfortable entering a zoom call or connecting with teachers in conferences or in the town hall so there's really been a lot uh going on we also started a latinx parent advisory group that meets monthly and just kind of get feedback and and are looking to grow that group uh so that we can continue to have insight into what our families are really looking for and what they need and big shout out to our cultural liaisons who work long hours and um are on the phone constantly trying to help families navigate every single thing in a pandemic really the whole team is is really invaluable so i feel very fortunate to work with them thank you christina building off of that as you know we

075have a number of components that are currently in place around the community conversations one of those components is american indian parent advisory committee i want to thank um director johnson for being a part of that committee we um within that committee some of the wonderful work that's come out is just the dress student address policy which we actually sent out a reminder today based on just that students begin to return just a reminder of the new policy around student address land acknowledgement is a component of of what we do and um again working closely with the american indian parent committee to help us with that smudging putting smudging practices and policies in place uh smudging practices in place in various buildings so that again we can acknowledge and support our students in the buildings one

076of the wonderful things that's happening here in roseville is the collaboration with the municipal humanities center and central park at central park rose mcgee who's connected with the minnesota humanities center has come in and led some family circles where we have taken the time to listen to families in multiple languages takes a little time around what they want what people want for their children as we continue to educate as you know we have a tremendous gift in jamie johnson and his work around parent vibe and the outstanding growth and leadership opportunities he provides for students something really excited about last week we were awarded a grant from through the minneapolis foundation uh reimagining education grants in collaboration again with minnesota humanities center that grant is going to allow us to collaborate with the minnesota humanities

077center to continue our community conversations conversations where we're listening and continuing to exchange and listen and grow capacity in our community around what we deem what we believe as a team the roseville way part of the rosewood way and some of those community-based conversations some of the things that are happening in those community-based and school conversations are morning meetings at grade level some of the town hall meetings that christina talked about distance learning feedback and surveys that we're actively seeking to get information from our customer so that parents we can adjust and adapt and pivot and i do mean pivot in real time monthly town hall meetings we talked about and in our title programming in our title programming parent engagement is a component of schools who are receiving title dollars but also we added

078that to our school improvement plan as an expectation of the work how we engage community i want to backtrack just a bit one of the things i failed to mention in our community conversations and something that happened today is kind of the road map to return advisory committee where we're listening to parents that's led by superintendent sokoli where we're listening to parents and answering questions to better support students as they return and mostly most important provide people with the most accurate information and data that we have around health and services student voice again the component of student voice it's part of what we believe is the roseville way one of the things we've done that i'm not sure that the board is aware of through the funds of achievement and integration we have hired six

079americorps promise fellows six americorps promise fellows who work with sixth grade to twelfth grade their role is to amplify student voice are collaborating with the minnesota alliance with youth for service learning opportunities and projects for our students who can identify these service learning projects based around their interests and we have these mini grants now coming through a collaboration and a grant with the minnesota alliance for youth which is exciting where students can kind of create their own learning and be socially active and engage the community through service everything from environmental education and activism to social justice you name it so we're working closely and our miracle volunteers are working closely in the schools to again as we continue to return we're going to amplify student voice and have inter and intra-district activities where we have

080these clubs and students can lead the clubs and receive funds around whatever project they would like to see part of working with educational alliance it's a youth executive board which is a component of education alliance where we partner with our neighboring distance and one of the exciting things that have happened through student voice the conversations that we had with students in the secondary schools around our sros and because of those conversations we've actually changed some practices as you know with our sros while maintaining them in the school district and ongoing conversations so that we can continue to learn and study the effectiveness of sros within this district like to ask um dr lake help me with the next two i actually think i'll jump in and yeah finish the up the last two so um

081in the department of teaching and learning we have continued to work to expand student voice within our curriculum areas and we've always worked on having that but but wanted to continue to do that and that's what these next two bullets are we continue to have student voice on our district curriculum advisory committee with student representatives on the committee we try to have at least three students um each year however this year i actually had a student volunteer to be my co-chair um so it is a that's a first for me and it's been a fun experience and i get a very different perspective and a very good perspective and it has led to great conversations that we build on and some other some other committee work that we've actually started because of it too so

082the last point is in addition to our dcac student representatives we're also partnering with our avid students who serve on the avid leadership council and we get feedback from them on specific curriculum review areas we've met with them two or three times this year we just started this year and it has provided some great feedback that leads us even more conversations and other areas that we consider and bring that information back to our curriculum review teams so i'm going to pass it on to dr lake to continue our student voice presentation slides thanks jake and michelle you don't have to go backwards in the presentation but i do want to touch on a couple of bullets we didn't get to around community conversations as directed by the superintendent the principal of each of our schools

083developed a learning model school team that is met monthly to help inform building leadership of their feedback specific to our blended and distance learning models during the pandemic membership has consisted of teachers nutrition and custodial staff admin and most importantly our parents and families also another initiative christina and our english learner department partnered with tad and our roseville area learning center to provide critical parent and adult training and outreach and back to student voice i'd like to highlight a few additional student voice opportunities and two specifically that need more definition than simply the name include the third bullet our distinguished gentleman's group this is a leadership program for african american young men led by cultural liaison anthony anderson at roz and also further down on the list our unity programs are after school enrichment opportunities

084offered at rams edgerton central park and harambe and i'd like to thank our community education department and their leadership for establishing our unity programming and back to dr faber as we begin to close out this presentation i just want to remind everyone there's excitement about student voice and how we seek student voice to help guide our practices those practices here are some of the areas using the star program an advisory at pcs and rams student surveys and many of our schools will hear a few that highlight i want to highlight is ra's central park and others staff office hours and cultural liaison teacher and office hours so that we can be intentional about connecting with students simply focus on need as you can see we continue to enhance student voice around focusing on social and

085emotional learning that's what sel is and all the live schools but we continue to uh brim hall central park edgerton focusing on again social emotional learning as a component of what we do here in roseville some of the exciting things that are happening is book studies for sixth graders as you can see book studies and uh reflective journals that are taking place in sixth grade it had to be an anti-racist and got stamped in from kindling book at some of our schools in a few of our schools student conversations and clubs what a wonderful way and opportunity to allow students to lead and guide and direct their work i hope that our americorps vistas and others are involved in this process so that we can continue to amplify the good human club at edw writing

086as a component of student voice at central park and again jamie johnson and his exceptional work with lit leaders and training board members want to thank you for giving us an opportunity to share much of the outstanding work that's happening here in roseville and provide you an opportunity to ask questions that you may have thank you again and on behalf of the team thank you thanks such a favor and everyone wow sometimes you get what you ask for you know i know uh you guys are responding have responded tonight to some of the questions that we on the board have had over the last several months around impact what's happening how are things going uh you certainly answered so i guess i'll just take a breath myself and ask my colleagues if there are any

087questions thoughts comments on any of this and if there are some questions maybe where you want to start and how to dig in curtis got the first hand up okay um um i'm just gonna echo wow that's a lot of stuff um so uh in no particular order um i think jake this one's for you um going back to the uh the mca um reading um slide um one thing that was i didn't quite understand was that in and and some of the um some of the graphs you you had um for for some of the schools um stats for black students and multi-racial students but some that didn't have some that you had one that just had multi-racial students but no multiracial students and white students only i think that was for a little

088canada um and then for and then for another set multiracial just dropped off altogether um so is there yeah i guess um is is there is there is there a reason for that or can we in the future um have that carry through all of the um the stats yeah we we actually do carry those through this was actually a part of our um some data that i had pulled for our achievement gap um closure report that we did um last fall not not this fall but last fall and um these were actually actual just data that we had picked to show some of the areas where we're closing achievement gaps so if they're not on there that group may not have been closing that might not have gap closing but these were just examples

089of that throughout our district to to provide that so you might have seen different groups of students that are represented on each of those different slides but when we do like our mca report and our um our achievement report and our growth reports we definitely put all of our student groups within those slides you can see all those how those are represented cool all right that makes sense thank you okay next question on the graduation slide and i understand that this was a 2000 it was the 2018 2019 um um and under under american indians there we did that we had information for the state but it didn't look like we had any thing for for uh roseville area high school i i know we graduated some good question i probably should have pointed that

090out oversight by me so i apologize for that but it it's really just because we had um fewer than the number of students that we can report um publicly so that's why that one doesn't show up okay all right but yes we did have students graduate and actually i think i think in that year we had like graduations right that's that that's what i was looking for like hey that's the thing of course the reasoning from the state behind that is when you have a relatively small number of students and you're sharing educational data that then the data privacy might not be protected you might be able to figure out who students are that's sort of yeah sure so i get that and [Applause] i want to thank you for working with data on a

091daily basis i know that's not an easy thing and you do a really great job so thank you for that um okay um next question goes to uh christina a um of what you said did not catch me off guard but one thing did um in a good way um and this was the uh the town halls so let me get this straight you have you're you're you're doing town halls where you're having translations done with multiple languages did i did i hear that correctly yes that's correct um so there's uh kind of like when you see uh videos of the united nations those are simultaneous interpreters so that they are able to say things just as they are coming through that is what we were able to do in our zoom town halls so

092at edgerton elementary in particular like the last town hall they did there were like 18 multilingual families in that meeting and i think three languages represented and so it um you know well there's a lot of things about the pandemic that aren't so great this is one thing where i'm like this is a real win because our families are right in the action understanding things as they happen and they can ask their own questions um as things are on you know happening in front of them so it's very exciting yeah and very kudos to all of our buildings who actually um really dove into that in a big way and and figured out a lot of the bugs themselves and just really did it so um i'm very very proud of that work that they've

093done yeah yeah i i am um a pure person i'm i'm beyond impressed i i've attended a a ton of uh zoom meetings as everyone here has i've just never seen that done um so uh that's great that's that's that's make sure to invite you the next time i mean it doesn't look any different for you but for the people who are listening on a language line it it kind of mutes the english and then they can hear um so it's cool that's cool that's cool very cool all right um hang on okay i'll get there um all right um no actually i don't have any other questions okay so other than this by saying this you guys wow you guys do a tremendous amount of work and um i i i know when we

094started this this coming coming into this year there was this idea of okay we want to we don't want to return normal we want the return to better um and [Music] you know you see all of these efforts that are being put into place um and i i just don't see how we don't return to better and i know there's more stuff coming that um that's in the hopper but my kudos to all of you and your staff and the teachers and the paraprofessionals and everybody who that makes this magic happen um you you have my undying gratitude thank you thanks curtis other thoughts or questions specific or general kitty um i just can't say enough following curtis and mike in terms of how exciting is to see how we're applying the equity lens so

095broadly across so many different dimensions of what we do i mean the equity vision you can just hear it breathing living and breathing and all the different work that's being done and that's very exciting i did have a couple of specific questions with our school improvement plans it sounds like every school has an improvement plan um if i understood correctly but do the regional centers actually support all the schools or though that's just available for our title one schools dr fever along with you of course the school improvement planning process although we've done it in the past we went a little deeper this year with our school improvement planning a little more intentionality and focused around how we're looking at data and making sure that we can pivot during the year the regional centers of

096excellence works closely with the title schools and the leadership in the title schools but they are consult across the district to anyone who may look at their plan look at their data and see they need some additional action and support wow anything you'd like to add anything um no just that when we um looked at um at our practices i wanted to improve we had a training for all our administrative staff so at that point all the principals did participate and as dr fever said they really focus on that one schools um however they are also available to other schools if they want and one more thing if i can add the rules that come along with the regional centers of excellence everything from the templates to the guiding questions to work that's been done

097across the state so we don't have to duplicate it's it's pretty powerful it's pretty powerful i had an opportunity to sit in on um the harambe school improvement plan was being shared in one of the town hall meetings and it was impressive about the the breath and thought that had gone into it it was very exciting to hear um yeah next question i'm sorry i was just going to add that as part of taiwan schools they they have a annual meeting where they obligated to share their plan with stakeholders and solicit feedback and get an input and so i think that is part of the process that you that you attended yes it was kind of integrated into the town hall meeting series which was fun to hear my next question is as you were

098talking about all these different activities a lot of these sound like things we've been working on for a number of years but some of them sounded like maybe we've made some progress despite or because of the distance learning certainly um some of the work christina was sharing and was talked about with the facebook meetings etc was one element it sounds like the school improvement plans we've been able to take a step forward even with the distance learning that we've been able to get more regional center support are there any other areas that um we feel like we've been able to make significant progress despite the incredible distractions and and focus that's need to been put on providing education in the current um environment i would add a couple kitty one would be the worker on

099mtss and our models for intervention i think during this time in the pandemic we just have not taken no for an answer and we just continue to pursue interventions to the end of time and we've just so much more depth to that work and that continual cycle and then i see the other piece being just the ability as we've all discussed already those virtual connections and how we've grown community and parent feedback whether it be the learning model teams the rtr work the town halls that are online some schools have experienced growth within those even pta meetings up to 10 times the normal participations i was going to piggyback on that too dr they can say that um some of our connections with our student voice has also grown like we shared about with teaching

100and learning being able to to have and participate in the avid leadership council and all the students being able to be there at the same time um wasn't a possibility that we would have thought about um but doing it being able to do some of those things virtually makes um makes it a lot easier i was going to add that one area that we have done some improvement is alignment with our goals so we have very different programs that require us to have goals we have school improvement goals we have the teacher development and evaluation goals we have https goals we have access so what we've tried to do is to make sure that once we go through the school improvement process we do a needs assessment where we actually really look at data to

101make sure that that our goals are the same goals so that all our energy could go in there we can see marked improvement and one last thing board chair boba chefsky mentioned this event at msbna that we are starting to see some success academic success with some of our students even through the pandemic and he asked a great question around you know how are we looking at that that academic success that we're seeing where we're seeing some growth in learning how we're looking at that as we begin to return students to school as i see some of the information that comes out in other school districts and newspapers and journals etc it feels like a lot of districts are having a larger disconnect with some students and i was just as i was hearing about

102all this work on mtss and heard about in the last many months it just feels like that has really really been something that has helped our district stay and get connected with more more of our student body in these difficult times and i wanted to really uh thank everybody for that because i think that's made a huge difference um when for example in the grade report that we had from the um the secondary school um and how different that looked than some of what you read in the paper and in journals so thank you for all this work i think um it's just amazing and exciting just one additional question that came up during and then i reminded it when you were talking on the on the goals teacher goals individual goals and team goals

103are they are the are our staff okay do they feel okay about progress or being able to make towards their goals during the pandemic i know we've done so many things to help gourd guard our students against kind of you know unfair um you know things that are happening because of remote learning etc with grade structures and all of that i just wondered if the teachers feel like there's been a setback like across the boards to their own individual development and goals and team goals or if they're okay with where things are or just maybe talk about that a little bit whoever i'm gonna attempt to respond to that uh one thing that we did do with our goal setting especially at the teacher level is to make sure that we um we're flexible given

104the guidelines from mde so flexible as much as we can and also to be realistic uh but that said this is very difficult so i don't expect them to to say that it was very easy but i hope they'll respond to you that will be as flexible as we can within the scope of the program and making sure that we're trying to take away the barriers that may impede them from doing that work thank you todd hey thanks uh triple chesskey um again everybody this is uh fantastic work uh this was a great presentation to see all the work and the staff um putting into all this i especially want to draw attention to how intentional this district is staff is around student voice i think that's one of the the better lists i've seen

105one of the more exhaustive lists i've seen about how intentional we are being around student voice i i can personally attest to the students that are on the district curriculum advisory committee and their energy and their passion and especially the questions that the co-chair asks and some of the discussions uh jake knows what i mean some of the discussions and the energy around uh the discussions that we've had um it's just wonderful to see them uh jake i this is more of a question for you i just had kind of a real curious question we have students on the dcac and i'm um i remember that i was like a part of a curriculum review team a while back i think it might have been for k-6 social studies or something or language arts before

106is even on the board have we do do we have actual students on some of the actual review teams have we i'm just wondering under teaching and learning what that history has been like yeah so that's a really good question that's that's one of the things that we have always struggled with because typically as you served on that social studies um review it's typically during the school day and we don't want to pull our students out of their classes and yeah um they're learning time and so that's been the the kind of that beautiful work that we've been able to do with our avid program and um so we are bringing bringing all of that information um to them and being able to get that feedback from them in a different way now and we

107so we we go to their meeting and we bring them here's what our curriculum team is thinking about and what kind of feedback do you have about these specific areas that we're looking for feedback on so they don't necessarily serve on the team but we're getting their feedback into the process in a different way and and zoom has been a really good big help as a part of that and melissa can probably speak a little bit more to that too as she helped make some of those connections yeah i was going to add on to that i think what's really i mean i appreciate what you said because there's part of those meetings that wouldn't necessarily be relevant and it is probably more time than we want them to be away from school that said

108we certainly want their perspective and so what we've done is looked at the different phases of program review and then each phase we engage the the students in that curricular area so for example um phase one is like what are we doing basically in this area and how well is it working and so uh this year it's asking them that about health or social and emotional learning or their experiences in fayette right um what what has your experience been what was positive that we should keep doing and what are we not doing that we should be doing so it's getting their voice around the things that probably are most important right to what they their experiences and how they can help shift our practices in developing curriculum and moving forward but it's also done in

109a way where they don't miss uh learning or access to their own classes as well so so far it's worked pretty well we've met with them a few times and gone over um we've gotten their feedback around social and emotional learning and um phy ed and health and the next step i believe is k-12 art so we're just kind of cycling through based on where we are at in the program review cycle thank you any other dr scoli well i would just like to thank my colleagues district wide you can imagine all these efforts require such commitment from so many people so i'm just very proud to be associated with such dedicated educators who are passionate about equity who are committed to the success and well-being of each and every student thank you very much

110thank you all yeah good morning and thank your people and your teams because i know it wasn't just you either it's all the folks that you work with help you get this thing together rose yeah i i echo what everybody say is amazing i think i think i'm i'm the one being the newbie wanted to know so much about the district well i got it so it's wonderful um is this slight deck available i oh that would be great i i'm not seeing in the packet so it would be great to share that and then i had i did have a question um around the parent advisory i saw um maybe i'm just missing there was african-american uh parent advisory and then that's one for um american indian parent advisory there was a latino one

111is there one with either asian american or par some of the asian american parent group cello just wondering so i'm wondering uh maybe dr faber if you might want to resign because i think that is one bullet point that maybe we didn't touch on was it wasn't an american uh or an african-american parent advisory it was the aalc you want to share about that right there's there's not really an african-american parent advisory it's called what happens at schools the aalc is a partnership that i'm a part of um to represent roseville and saint paul with the minister okay american leadership because we have over a thousand kids roughly coming from saint paul so that that component is there okay so so in that way then i'm just wondering about how do are we engaging other

112parents beside those with with the specific groups that were formed right i'll just say briefly that um when we started the latinx parent advisory this year we also talked about working with some other groups like the karen or you know the bhutanese and um recognizing all that's going on we're like okay why don't we start where we uh kind of have a group already and um get kind of figure out how to do this in a pandemic and with another language but it's definitely something um you know we're interested in and we'll plan to scale up and i would say also that you know just our cultural liaisons are really our most important touch point for a lot of our communities even when i talk about these things for some of our communities they're like

113why would i come to another meeting and you know what am i what am i gonna say like i you know i want my kid to learn and it's all good or whatever you know so so there's a lot of um you know nuances to setting up these kind of advisories and um right now in a pandemic maybe not uh gonna be the best but definitely something we continue um set up our own little united nations here yeah so yeah go ahead i'm just going to say uh you know dr faber mentioned how excited uh he is and we are about uh obtaining an ebony apple's foundation grant and partnership with the minnesota humanities center so we really feel that can be a vehicle moving forward to get greater uh engagement uh with various uh

114parts of our community and we were wrestling for this presentation like which does that which section does that grant go under does it go under community conversations or does it go under student voice because really it's around heavy on both those areas so we're looking forward to what that might bring in the future great thank you thank you for that so my my final question is i've been thinking about how given um you know we we need our community support going forward with with our referendum um expiring uh or a referendum that we need to work on how do we communicate some of this amazing work so that's just a question we don't need to answer it today but i thought a lot about kind of like you know all that was presented today not

115that we need to give that out you know all of it but just thinking about how do we how do we how do we think about um communicate that to the larger community uh the the work that is being done um and and and how we engage community how we engage student voice how we support teachers of color so just just a just a question um that that's in on my mind could i ask a follow-up question to the minneapolis foundation grant will that new funding allow us to continue central park or does it in fact allow us to take it to other schools i think it will allow us to take it to other schools wonderful that is an exciting program any other questions thoughts comments all right well thank everybody again take care

116yep um we'll move on next is the action items for tonight and the first uh is a resolution offering the sales certificates participation um for a facility and i believe sherry thompson is also going to lead us through this agenda item yes thank you i was excited about this agenda item and then i i heard the thought now how do you live up how do you follow up on that um but being a bean counter um i am excited about um to bring this forward to this is i look at this as a puzzle we've been working on this puzzle since on our facilities starting with facility planning the board taking action on a long-term facility maintenance program and plan that you continue to act on annually and then very fortunate uh passage of our

117building bond referendum by our community in november of 2017. um and this is the final piece this is put um securing the final funding piece for the fairview education center uh for replacement of that facility um i've said this before and as all of you know uh after we did pass the bond referendum uh we came to um uh find out that uh after further study that um the fairview education center uh structurally um was not sound so um we worked with ellers and looked at alternatives um and that alternative was shifting a few of the bond uh dollars around so we've got 16.5 million dollars in uh voter approved bonds and then we're looking to um complete that gap on the project with 20.5 million dollars in a 15-year lease levy purchase so we're

118asking uh this evening uh jody zespa and um the eller's crew were at your previous meeting uh tonight we're asking for a resolution that number one authorizes the sale of the certificates the sale will take place on february 9th and then also establishes a pricing committee and this is um i know that um you've taken a similar action in the past um and i don't recall that was ltf m bonds the sale um will occur as i said on february 9th this just basically um allows for like the board chair and myself um to accept a proposal that afternoon because we do need to be available to sign off on those documents prior to you taking final action uh at your meeting that evening and then um also as part of that um we set

119a a ceiling a cap as far as interest rate goes uh the interest rate that is included in this resolution is 3.4 and again that's the ceiling um i think the estimate um on the pre sales certificate was about two and a half percent or 2.66 uh but even at the 3.4 it's still a decent uh true interest rate and um again it uh falls within the amount that we had budgeted and that we've set aside as far as um levy going forward and um what was already placed bookmarked in your levy for the uh taxes that are payable in 2021 um calendar year so that's all i have so share this is something we need to formally approve is that true yes there is yes there is a resolution so um and it's like

120a three-page resolution i think we just refer to the resolution i believe in the motion typically resolutions um curtis we do we do have had the clerk read them in as a motion generally so maybe you could go ahead and move the resolution like it's written on the bottom of that page and we'll get it seconded and then we have any questions we could during a discussion we could have it well i guess first i'll ask you before we move it any questions for sherry it seems pretty straightforward to me but you know any other questions from my colleagues okay curtis okay resolution authorizing sales certificates a participation yes all right um so i don't have a three page oh so at the bottom of the first page oh yeah okay it just said so

121you just say you know i would move that the board okay all right i would move that the that the board adopt there's this resolution authorizing the sale of certificates of participation series 2121a for purposes of facility lease levy second thank you any further discussion hearing none clerk johnson could you take the vote you're getting a lot of action tonight oh yeah director chu hi director shah hi treasurer goggins aye director anderson aye chairman chesky hi and kirk johnson votes i thank you approved let's uh let's go make money thanks sherry yeah thank you very much jerry sherry's still in the hot seat now because our next action item is the 2122 budget parameters and timeline that sherry is going to review with us for our approval tonight jerry thank you and this is some

122again um uh similar action to what you've taken in years past um we are developed we are starting um are well on our way as far as um the budget for next year there's a couple of things that i want to point out um obviously you know we talked about current year budget revisions earlier this evening yes we know we're in uh unprecedented times we are bringing these parameters forward to you um i will go through some of those or point out a few things but also keep in mind um if we need to adjust these throughout the budget cycle we will bring them back to you uh for action also and you know typically you take action on these in january and we just move forward and sometimes we revise them in june because

123we know um if like the legislature has finished their business but um i'm i guess we're just kind of putting on you will notice that if things do change other than what you've approved tonight we will come back to you um as far as our our parameters go yes we know we are in the middle of a pandemic we know that um the money is tight at the state level we also know that recent economic forecasts have been better than anticipated we have a i think the next forecast comes on january or i'm sorry um uh february 26th uh i think is the next forecast um also i know you know the governor has just released his budget we feel as though we are bringing forward a conservative budget in um building in a one

124percent increase uh in the front basic funding formula for next year so i wanted to point that out also then i'm going to move down to enrollment parameters uh looking at our enrollment typically we use enrollment um our the enrollment that we have on february 1st of this year we would roll forward and then add kindergarten in we make a couple of tweaks but we pretty much use that to determine our enrollment for the upcoming school year um as we as i mentioned earlier uh we did uh lose about 200 elementary students um or primarily at elementary um with the pandemic so we are looking at each grade level um of each school and really doing a deeper a deep dive uh we are not making the assumption that a hundred percent of those students

125that um left us will be returning to us next year we know they are in a variety of programs including homeschool non-public schools charter schools online uh programs so we are taking the initiative initiative though to work with families our principals are doing that um we've had a lot of discussion about this so we're taking a very close look and we'll continue to take a close look at enrollment but for right now i would say just on a rough number is we're anticipating that about 60 will return uh and again we will continue to adjust this we monitor enrollment in any given year we monitor enrollment closely throughout the school year and then also throughout the summer months and uh the other thing i guess that i would want to point out that's maybe different

126than um than other years and we touched on this a little bit earlier as well the federal carers funds we will be using those to partially offset operating deficits for next year as as is allowed and also to provide additional remedial and enrichment programming outside of the regular school day or school year so unless there are questions um i don't have any more on that again i just wanted to point out some of those things that um typic haven't been in a typical year any questions for sherry if not then again entertain a motion to improve the budget parameters and timeline as outlined i would like to move um the budget parameters and timeline as presented thank you second at any further more discussion seeing none curtis could you take the vote again please thank

127you director anderson aye treasurer goggins aye chair up we oh we interrupt you sherry go ahead hi guys thank you you're up next sorry i just want to say being a newbie on this i thank you for the clarity on those parameters it's really yeah just kind of my way to learn about this is really great so thank you all right you're welcome thank you so with that we'll move on to the next action item which is approval of the final 21 22 and 22 23 draft calendars and i believe dr lake is leading us through this again yes good evening everyone i brought the first reading forward on january 12th and at that time there were no actually there was no feedback no proposed changes so i'm bringing it back again for final approval

128again final for 2122 and draft for 22.23 any questions i think so so again entertain a motion to approve still moved thank you kitty second second thank you todd any discussion hearing none curtis chair bogusky aye director shaw aye director 2 hi director anderson aye treasurer goggins aye and clerk johnson votes aye thank you thanks jenny thank you yeah thank you um with that i think we finished the action items for tonight and so next up is the report and the last study session we had i know we had i think dual shadowing note takers uh with clerk johnson and richard shus i don't know which one of you wants to kind of go with it yeah a curtis which he and i he and i communicate that and he's going to do it tonight

129okay excellent so um thank you uh so we had a uh a a very good discussion with um peter leatherman and barb nichol regarding our our expiring district taxpayer funded operating lobby and we will uh need to seek approval from voters um in november for um renewal um so um expect to hear more about that in coming months um we all have a role to play and ensuring the accurate information is available to our community and that may so that we can make an informed decision um we also had some committee assignment changes the one that i wrote down was director chu is our new representative for the ramsey county league of local governments and she will do a great job with that um she she takes over for me and i appreciate it's a

130good group um regrettably i can't do that anymore because i have i am double booked at that time so uh you will so you will enjoy that i promise you um and uh lastly we had a um discussion about a um sorry had a discussion um about a proposed bill um that's making its way through the minnesota senate um essentially designed to quote give local authority to school districts um regarding um opening and closing of schools essentially a bill that would allow school districts to ignore the the governor's emergency declaration so we we talked about that and yeah so um and that was it thank you curtis uh also uh fellow board members i have a late um agenda adjustment uh for whatever reason the human resources information for this meeting was not in my

131paper packet that i have here and because i'm using the laptop i wasn't on screen so i did not see uh the the retirements and termination information we usually have so um what i'd like us to do is go back and i can just handle that now um because we typically do it you know separately from the consent agenda anyway so uh with no further ado we do have a couple retirements to announce one is uh gary thought uh retiring as custodian engineer from central park elementary he's worked for the district for seven years uh and he'll be retiring retiring uh effective at the end of a couple months from now so uh gary thank you very much for your service and again i think just at whatever the role whatever the level uh you

132know again exhibits dedication to the kids and the students and families and community of our district and uh we appreciate that um so uh i guess i'd entertain a motion to accept with gratitude the retirement of gary thought so moved we'll give it to kitty second curtis there you go uh any further discussion hearing then uh curtis could you take the role treasurer goggins aye director anderson hi director chu sorry i director shaw hi chair bogoshovsky hi and then there's a second retirement that um we don't need to vote approval on at this point it was part of the consent but um as many of us know and have heard we have received the retirement announcement from our beloved superintendent dr alva socoli and he's going to mention that and talk about a bit in

133his uh superintendent's report that is upcoming uh after board reports this evening but um again just wanted to share that with everyone and um thank dr sokoli for the first time i think that we'll thank him about this for many times to come for his years of service uh six years with the district uh and probably six of the most tumultuous and unpredictably horrible years in the entire history of american education that anyone could ever have imagined and and uh having steered us through it to this point uh uh with with our gratitude and more to come uh his retirement will be effective at the end of june this year so uh we still have him with us at the helm uh through that time period uh but thank you dr sokoli um and like

134i said i will we'll hear more at least briefly from him in a little bit so thank you with that we'll move into the board reports and we want to begin nobody have anything kitty kitty does i do too but i wait yeah yeah i didn't always want to be first [Music] you were always first in every class you've ever met in your life but that's good that's a good thing that's a good fit okay um i we had the um quarterly uh commit meeting of the finance committee last week in preparation for some of what you've received today as always they very provide some very insightful comments and thoughts i think one of the main areas of conversation we had was around the number of students and the assumption around how many are going

135to be coming back that we lost and um the group was um very much thinking about you know how do we do reduce the risk to the budget um you know how conservatively do we need to budget to ensure that we um don't go through quite a lot as large a reduction in our um fund balance as we did this last year how can we build in flexibility so that if we have to you know if we get a two percent cut and reduced in in number of students that we can cut the expenses um somewhat and so there was discussion around that but also around how do we budget more conservatively how do we get a more precision around our estimate on on how many students will return thinking about ways to mitigate some

136of it if it occurs such as you know filling how quickly we fill slots for retirees do we wait until we have to some of those kinds of questions but trying to to make us help us think through how do we manage some of those financial risks the other key message we got is when we talked about the referendum is to keep it simple yes we have to answer misunderstandings and barriers but the simpler we can keep the message um the more effective it will be particularly in the current environment where there's an awful lot of competing messages and competing concerns so that was um two of the key messages we got from that group wanted to let the group know that i am part of the msba leaf group folks could have applied and

137there were 16 of us who were selected from across the state and will be working together to think critically and creatively about the future and to apply a future oriented lens to policy development and analysis that's a quote from their program there's a lot of effort within it to try to help us think through how to engage a network of thought partners in our community across different stakeholders and to really examine our assumptions about the future and better understand how the changes that are happening today could affect our community years from now i will report back as as there are things that i think would be beneficial for others to understand and the third thing which i know three of us have been at um is the minnesota school board association conference it's spread across

138um three different thursday mornings and this thursday is our last one and there will be a presentation from the roseville school district at this thursday's meeting um which is really a little bit about what we got to hear some about um which is the um curriculum and instructional compass from an equity lens and the presentation is about how does that really um get translated to on the ground what's being done and we've got we had gosh we had two principles and three teachers representing different ages across our school district in the presentation and i know i forwarded it to board members since we did have to pre-record it not the question answer session but the presentation itself because it's occurring during school time and some staff was unable to make that time so that's it

139for me thank you kitty todd you kind of signaled you were next there you go um thanks uh chair brokerschevsky i just wanted to mention that um last week i had an opportunity along with chair boguszewski and director chu uh the quarterly local government officials uh meeting and i i just want to um i want to thank superintendent sikoli and staff michelle for um continuing these meetings with our local um elected officials our stakeholders it's an opportunity to hear we heard from senator marty what's happening in the state legislature we heard from a couple ramsey county commissioners cities of roseville maplewood little canada peter lindstrom from the met council was there but a great way to exchange ideas what's happening and a great way for us as a school district to to share again with

140these community partners what's happening we had a great discussion around fairview and what was going on there um and answered a lot of good questions but just i i thank again superintendent sokoli for continuing to make those uh focus uh they're really i'm helpful and everyone loves attending them uh they keep saying you know i know everyone keeps saying that they love this exchange of ideas and reports of what's happening at the various levels so thank you anyone else next curtis okay um kitty already talked about the msba leadership conference and uh it's been great um um actually um it's a little worth having it spread out over three weeks but it it kind of works just just as an aside the the cohort the msba cohort that that kitty is as joined it's kind

141of a big gym and and and she she really underplayed it um yes there were 16 people that were chosen but it is 16 people across the state and a lot of people did apply for it so um great great job kitty um uh i had to uh i was able to attend the little canada pta meeting um which i don't always get to do because i i i i usually work late um but i was able to sneak out this time and it was a um a great great meeting obviously looking at it as the dli so there was translation going on uh the meeting basically uh centered around uh preparing you know what the plans were for return to school so um today the kindergartners and first graders got to return to school

142and um everyone's very excited and it was a great session because um parents were able to express you know their concerns that they had um um i got to answer some questions from regarding um what we're about um uh the uh the rtr group and some of the changes that are there are coming forward so um including the four day a week and then eventually five days a week return to schools finally a small report on the minnesota social studies standards group we did request a extension for the review process that has been granted we've also been granted a delay in the release of the second draft so we don't i regrettably i have no more information regarding when that second draft will be coming out but um as soon as i do i'll tell

143you and again i will just say if their the first draft is out it was incomplete but um you need to you know please feel free to um contact the group if you have any um questions concerns comments things you want ads things you want to subtract you know now that was a good time so um and that's it thank you frank rose um oh hi i'll just add that curtis and i were part of the annual meeting of the minnesota school board directors of color meeting within the msba conference leadership conference so it was a great chance to kind of meet new board members who just got elected or re-elected and then um and then there were a couple of awards that we give out and i'm trying to remember uh who got i

144know one of them was abdi and i can't remember the other one right now um yeah so one of them was was the founder of this group and so we really honor him for him pioneering this group and and that he will stay connected as an alumni uh school board member of the of the uh formerly from mankato and i'm i cannot remember the other one oh oh what's the superintendent uh from uh saint louis st louis park that's it yeah uh austin yes yeah yeah yeah so um and then the the last thing yeah the last thing is i um i'm tony who was there um mai right me and sh and frank we were the three board members attended a the teacher leadership project program yeah so they they had a they were

145they were asking lots of great questions um about the role of being a school board member and um i think what was interesting i don't know whether my you got this email after the meeting they had a little debrief and they basically say major takeaway our school board is really about equity and now school board really support teachers so so it's great that they got that from the three of us that we are passionate about the equity work and also about our teachers yeah that's all i got thanks frank anything from you tonight i'm fine great i just have a few things uh i did attend the uh recent virtual gifted and talented advisory council meeting and um uh trina here continues to kind of lead that uh vigorously and and it's pretty well attended

146uh at the most recent one um she actually shared with us uh a uh a tool uh um like it's called a mood meter and it's just basically a grid with different colors but it's a tool that was developed by yale university to help people kids adults anybody kind of figure out where you are recognize and regulate your emotional state etc so she said they started using that in some of their meetings and some of their classes and things so it's kind of neat mike schrader was there to share that we are expecting the summer academy to happen again this summer uh so registration i think that opens up in february that again for those who don't know is a series or a set of of classes and workshops and things that kids can participate

147in um you know kind of in the in that the gate spectrum they're doing a lot of work around uh identifying gate students in the coming year both informally and formally i think there's there's a tool change this year there's a new cognitive ability test that's going to be put into place so i think the intent is to again be more equitable and across the boards but identifying kids who uh who who are are kind of you know in that in that in that gate spectrum um there's also a lot of enrichment clubs that are starting up uh that are being done virtually again for kids who are interested i think registration for that started this week it's things like um a foodie club uh 3d printing club these are like fourth fifth graders sixth

148graders that kind of thing third graders there's a fourth grade club on uh the stock market and uh investing you know if i had started that when i was in fourth grade maybe i'd be able to retire today but myself but i didn't anyway just a lot of good work going on i think we're going to hear more from them if i'm not mistaken at our next study session at our next meeting um uh trina is coming to report on the work that they're doing uh let's see secondly i also attended some of the msba annual conference workshops one in particular was co-hosted and co-led by um dr faber our assistant superintendent and um sebastian witherspoon who's the executive director of equity alliance minnesota on um how to to what they called it how to

149lean into racial equity work um with grace uh and it was really well done well put together had a lot of involvement had some breakout rooms it was focused a lot on just raising awareness of the current status of equity across the schools in minnesota which is not as good as anyone wants it to be or it needs to be and then even you know little ways to increase our self-awareness and encourage ourselves to step in and act or say something or intervene if we see something going on or if we see something that is is racist or in some way inequitable happening and how we how do we model that to others and then it was a presentation of school board members obviously and so you know really encouraging school board members across the

150state to be careful and thoughtful about how they prioritize their resources their budgets all of that how they remove barriers however they need to start with policies that support the right kind of work and right kind of efforts it was really well done so kudos to mike and sebastian from equity alliance and then lastly speaking of equity alliance had the most recent equity alliance minnesota board meeting uh had the audit report um frankly again i think the finances there are perilous i've talked about that before there was a little glimmer of positivity this time around there have been a couple of contracts that have been signed for audit work and other work from some non-member school districts so that was a little encouraging so the the eating into the fund balance that it's been living

151on for the last couple years had slowed at least momentarily uh but there's still going to be a lot of redouble effort around you know grants uh really kind of marketing their services etc to to stay afloat be able to continue to do what they do they did have an exciting inquiry from the university of mata the university of wisconsin at madison to potentially do some equity auditing and other work there at the university level and i think the the question was do they have the resources on board to do it so i think sebastian was going to try to if he needed to bring in some folks uh but it was at the time of the of the board meeting uh last week it was unclear if they'd be able to respond to that

152but uh the other the good part of that is word is getting out when people are looking for help in understanding their equity situation and what to do about it equity alliance minnesota is rising to the top is being discovered in google searches or whatever the right term is uh so that's a good thing too that's my report for tonight with that uh i think we're at superintendent's report dr ciccoli take it away so um continue to be pleased with the facilities projects and want to thank the community for passing the bond referendum in 2017 we are on budget and then our time frame for all the projects and really the remaining projects left of course are the uh some of the phase three work at roseville area high school and the construction of the

153new facility at the fairview site now um we also need to have the resources to return to back to better after the pandemic and as was mentioned earlier in this meeting we have a voter approved operating levy that if the board and community did nothing would expire so there are plans to go out in november of 2021 and i just want to remind people because some people aren't aware that you know the bond referendum of 2017 that money can only be used for those facility projects it can't be used for operation of the schools and that's where an operating levy comes into play and we know that to have more stable funding that our students need more revenue than they have now for our schools and we think we've been good stewards in making the

154necessary budget reductions in recent years and we also know that this pandemic has been hard on everyone it has increased the financial challenges within our community so we do look forward to continuing to work with our community to find out how we meet those these challenges and get back to better on the other side of this pandemic and speaking of the pandemic there is hope is at the end may not be too far off as we have some vaccinations being administered and they have found their way to uh starting to find their way to school staff so on this uh the state has this pilot program and last week had nine pilot sites two in the metro and seven in greater minnesota and our district was allocated uh 18 slots 18 vaccinations for staff and

155um as far as we know we had 18 people get vaccinated because if they hadn't we would have been they would have told us according to the description they had well you have x number of slots go to your next people um now this week it's a little different uh so they've separated the age 65 and over in terms of location from the from the educators and so they're going to have this event from thursday through monday at the excel energy center and we were told our district the good news is 384 slots so that is a definite increase from 15 slots last week i think one thing that appears to be different though is it seems like they have allocated their allocations are more than the number of doses they have so we likely

156will not get 384 people vaccinated but we're certainly going to get much more than 18 so we look forward to there is hope that those numbers will continue to increase the vaccination numbers and that is just a good thing for everyone so we look forward to that um this saturday is a special day uh i think we had reference to the the three morning sessions virtually this year of the msba conference leadership conference well in the past um they would have the award ceremony during the one and a half day conference and it will be done this saturday january 30th i believe it's at noon but we have a number of our board members being recognized this saturday so curtis johnson will be recognized for his rising star award and also for receiving the msba

157director's award for his numerous hours participating in msba activities todd anderson and dr rose chu will be recognized for completing the msba phases one through four training so i do want to congratulate rose curtis and todd and their accomplishments and also want to congratulate a kitty as she mentioned in her report and serving in that capacity that you were selected for um and then finally as was uh chair bogoszewski mentioned earlier i will retire at the end of june and serving on the isd 623 team really has been quite an honor i've met so many amazing students and dedicated educators our families and community members really are exceptional so i look forward to the next five months we have a lot of good work to do so staying with the roseville area schools family and

158i extend my appreciation to the school board for the opportunity to serve as superintendent so thank you thank you aldo i think we're all feeling uh glad for you that you've been able to decide what you want to do and when you need to do it but we will be very sad to see you go so uh you know i would expect that we'll probably get as much out of you as we can possibly squeeze over the next five months only half jokingly probably but thank you very much uh we do have a study session this evening so why don't we during the regular meeting and let's take a three-minute break knowing that that will really be five minutes and then finally back in five minutes and reconvene at the study session uh and i

159was informed earlier we can just stick keep the same links and everything just stay on and we'll just continue with social media so with that we'll see you all in three