001indivisible with liberty and justice for all right good evening welcome back everybody first meeting of the new school year all right we'll start with agenda approval i do not know any of any changes to the agenda anybody else all right can i get a motion to approve the agenda as presented motion by forsberg second second by easter any discussion all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed motion passes moving on to some future events please check the district calendar and resource guide or the district website for a complete list of monthly events tuesday august 23rd school board work session 6 pm tuesday august 30th welcome back staff breakfast and all staff meeting monday september 5th labor day all buildings closed and tuesday september 13th school board regular meeting at 7 pm with
002communication to the board administration at 6 45. moving on to the consent agenda is there a motion motion by skelly second second bible to approve the following items the consent agenda minutes of the june 7 regular school board meeting minutes of the june 21 school board work session bills paid for may 2022 and june 2022 in amounts totaling 10 million 572 thousand 13 dollars and personnel items all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed motion passes moving on to discussion reports and information items we'll start with the 2022-2023 district operational plan overview projects to advance our vision dr ronneberg and dr ron all right well that comes up all right so you're familiar with this as a school board this is our strategic plan it's a one-page plan that really provides the
003road map um for our school district this was developed and approved by the school board number of years ago and it provides the overall direction for all that we do as we look at our district operational plan one of the things we do is we talk about our vision all the time it's part of our day-to-day conversation and then we ultimately what we're trying to get at is um in the center of that triangle there was how do we raise our highest levels of learning for each of our students and what we do is identify projects within our three strategic anchors to improve those and that's what we're going to do is provide an overview tonight because we do that within our district operational plan this is our um just a one-page district operational plan
004that we have here in each of these projects has an ongoing focus with the vast majority of the projects being on our district operational plan for multiple years as they move from study to implementation and then ultimately to what we call standard work or our data to work and they identify our continuous improvement and innovation efforts throughout the system in each one of those anchors each project and the plan is either directly or indirectly connected to that district vision and at the center of raising our highest levels of learning as you know from last year we report on these throughout the year so at some point during the year we'll provide a report on each one of these projects so that yourself and the community get some more information on this in addition what we
005do that you received in june as we provide in addition to this one-page document a more detailed document with all of the milestones deliverables the timeline for each one of these projects and that's provided and that's available online so anybody watching tonight can go to go online and see what the key achievement points are for each one of these projects throughout the school year then at the middle of the year we'll update that and just provide kind of a status update what's been accomplished to that point and then we do that again at the end of the year so again people can go online get more information about our district operational plan for the current year as well as it goes back a number of years so they can kind of see those key achievement
006points what was accomplished with each of those projects to kind of see the history of how some of these projects over multiple years have moved from a study to implementation so i'm going to provide a high level overview um in each one of these strategic anchors first is effective operations and effective operations is about continuously improving our effective management of human fiscal and physical resources there's all kinds of day-to-day standard work that we engage in around operations as we manage our budget our facilities etc and as we educate over 6200 students over 800 staff in the system however there are five key projects that we're looking at this year in our district operational plan um in areas we'd like to improve i'm just going to highlight a couple of these as we've talked with you
007as a board about this in the past first is that choosing an alternative learning approach this is kind of a big one we saw a great deal of success with our alternative learning teams last year at our high school as well as throughout the summer so you'll hear a little bit more later this evening about the number of credits the students regained just this summer at our high school in addition to working with our partner over at metro metro heights this project involves continuing to support and assess the progress of our alternative learning team at the high school as well as we scale supports to grades 9 and 10 this year as we bring what we call the aim team implementing team at the high school in addition we've talked with you as a board
008about our partnership with metro heights and looking at alternatives potentially to provide alternative learning supports for those students who want or need this programming as our intent to have a recommendation still our intent to have that recommendation for you by january of what direction we look to go in the future with our partnership around alternative learning program the second project i'd like to highlight is the study around demographic trends this is important is revenue is driven by enrollment that's how schools are funded number of kids we have coming through our doors the last demographic study we completed was in 2012. we wanted to do another one here a couple of years ago but um obviously with some of the challenges we had this past past two years it wasn't a good time to do that
009demographic study so we intend to do that this year um and after years of growth i think it's important we've maintained enrollment the last three years so we're pretty much right at where we've been consistent the last three years but this study will help us look to the future projecting enrollment and insights into trends five to ten years out to guide our planet into the future the next one is around communications and connections so this is the second anchor this is about always increasing our connections and gains and engagement with our families and community it's something i think we really leveraged the past couple years as we uh navigated the challenges that we've faced um and we put in numerous improvements so despite the challenges we were faced i think this gave us an opportunity
010to really look at ways we could improve um communication and put a number of different things in place there's three as you can see particular uh three key areas we're going to be looking at this year first off we want to enhance partnerships with families continuing to strengthen school and home partnerships to support student learning and involved in really involves within that one project three different areas first we want to ensure that parents know what their children are learning and how they are progressing at school two we want to provide continuous communication throughout the year and three we want to continue to improve our counseling connections in grades 712. so those are the three areas we'll really focus on with that project the second project in this anchor is building on a project from last
011year continuing to enhance our community and industry partners local businesses non-profits and government organizations have been our partners as we've scaled the work in areas particularly in career and college pathways so we re-engaged those partners last year as we came out of the pandemic and we want to continue to build on that and deepen those partnerships this year so we'll be doing that and a little bit later we'll be able to show you kind of a map of where one of our partners are leading to being able to scale our construction trades program so we're excited about that and then finally student attendance nationally one in six students miss 15 or more days of school and student absenteeism really impacts both student learning and student engagement in the school community so this project is how
012do we look at how we can enhance our systems for both tracking and responding to student absences to make sure we'll keep keeping students engaged at school so that's that in a nutshell and i'm going to hand it over to hope ron who's been waiting patiently over here so she can talk about the third anchor and our strategic initiative so they're all yours as a reminder to both the board and the community we've been in a minnesota department of education approved public online school for grades nine through 12 since 2008 and we've added grades came through eighth um which is last year in we weren't able to fully implement our vision for slp sports online elementary this past year due to this here is to really implement that original design all while assessing the feasibility
013second project listed is to complete a study for people of science and we are in the midst of implementing the revisions the state standards and science that were developed in the department of education it's a multi-year process during the school year we'll scale professional learning to all of our teachers of science uh we are starting a sequence of science courses beginning with that grade six cohort and we're also connecting science resources uh third project listed is to continue to strengthen student supports and interventions and we continually act literally every day work to strengthen the continuum of student supports and interventions in order to match them to our student academic social emotional and behavioral needs over the summer we've worked on a number of toolkits and resources to support teachers in meeting the needs of each
014of our students and we continue to provide professional learning for our staff to support old school implementation and then individual small groups and then finally a deepen innovative and personalized learning and this continues to be a forward priority for the 22 school year and spans our core components which you see on the internet of catholic cities learning learner profiles personal learners and flexibility we continue to make progress in scaling this work it's been obviously a multi-year project and while we haven't yet fully arrived at our vision it is good to be reminded of the progress we've made most recently as you know we have other districts coming to visit us to learn about our work and to see our schools uh just recently cedar rapids iowa um as we look to some specific milestones within
015this project we have that first one we have and we'll continue to provide support for our teachers in designing engaging learning experiences for our students that are aligned with their academic competencies uh you'll also complete a k-12 curriculum maps to ensure that those unit designs that we're supporting the teacher's bed are aligned to both state standards and benchmarks as well as there's also a fair amount of infrastructure or behind the scenes work that we continue to do in our innovative and personalized learning project for example we're putting final touches on our competency framework and we're choosing a platform that will support all of the core components that we have so with confidence-based learning profiles and then finally this milestone is around the last milestone you see is from designing a senior capstone project that will
016be optional for students it will really serve as the culminating showcase of students who they are as learners and will be aligned to the measures within our portrait of the graduates again this year is just all about the design and development of that then to hopefully offer that as an optional um course or for a course or experience for the kids to take becoming school so those are the big milestones so a couple things we just need to share is for the world's best workforce plan for the department of education we need to uh provide an overview of our district operational plan um i forget what they call it in their uh legislation what we call district operational plans so this presentation along with the presentation coming in september where we'll hit provide an overview
017of results but then we'll also get into a couple projects in a little more depth such as for example continue to strengthen student supports and interventions we talked about that at the work session we shared we give more information on that we'll be doing that september but again as i mentioned earlier this district operational can be operational plan can be found online including a multitude of ways for community members and parents to be involved throughout our district so people can go there to find that information so again tonight was to kind of reorient ourselves as we had august with a broad overview kind of just hitting on what we talked providing for the community the overview that we provided for you in june the work session and then we'll continue to go a little bit
018deeper on each of these projects as we make progress with them too that's it awesome thank you anybody have questions or comments just just a quick comment looking through the district operational plan it feels good to finally return to where we kind of left off pre-pandemic really focusing on educating our kids and opening up those opportunities instead of trying to address all the issues from the pandemic so i'm excited to see the plan and to really start moving forward on it not that we ever stopped but i mean this is now i feel like our focus we're back to where we started yeah the last two years had multiple projects that spoke to uh either managing or transitioning out of or whatever will depend on so it's nice not to have that language anymore right
019it is anybody else um so you touched on it briefly in the presentation but it's kind of sprinkled throughout the document that we had but i've been hearing lately about social and emotional learning um it's something that it seems like we're increasing in our district operational plan i don't know if that's a pure statement or not but um you know i've heard so i've heard some negative things about it out in the in the community uh just in general not specific to our district um and so i've kind of you know looked into a little bit and it seems like on one hand it's kind of uh repurposing what teachers have been doing all along in a more intentional way but that there may be some let's say nascent criticism out there that it's it
020calls for less focus on academics and knowledge and i'm just kind of curious what you know how you would describe how we're implementing in our district and whether it does take away from academics at all i'll jump in first and then hope you can correct me um no this isn't we're not taking any time away from academics as we do this so for example we've always done things like morning meetings so um one of those things is that kids come with varied experiences as they come to school about like so for example just incoming kindergartners some kids have gone to multiple years of preschool some had no preschool so when we talked about this this is like how do we help those kids develop the skills to be successful in school that aren't those academic
021skills about just how do you interact with other students how do you ask for help it's those social emotional skills about just how we do school how we go about engaging with other humans other kids adults within the school so they can be successful and then when students struggle with that what are the supports we have in place for those kids who may need some skill development in you know how do i get the attention of a teacher in an appropriate way so how do i work with my peers effectively so that's what it's really about so when we talk about it's really that's social emotional behavioral side yeah i mean i just want to be clear that none of the criticism i've been hearing has been specific to our district it's just um you
022know and maybe other districts are doing other things under that label yeah well i think that you know there's a lot of things and that's why we one of those projects that we have in here is just to also make sure that we give parents the opportunities to hear about the work we're doing because i think there's a lot of um there's a lot of questions about what's what's happening in schools and uh social emotional is one of those phrases that some people have had concerns with we've always called it social emotional behavior so it's how do we help kids be effective socially with other people how do we help how do they manage their emotional um ups and downs day to day and then how do we have to make sure that we have
023appropriate behavior in our classrooms so that's how we go about looking at it and um so it's when as we look at this year just how do we strength continue to strengthen that where we need to and how do we capitalize on things where it's going well yeah thank you and i think at a time when students are struggling with more mental health issues than they ever have um i'm glad we've always done it and i'm glad we're continuing to to try and improve on it because kids need that too in order to be successful in academics in every other area of their lives anybody else i'm excited hope about this capstone project opportunity that's a great opportunity for kids even just as a culminating what have i done the last four years oh i've
024come really far and that's a great skill for them to take to college too to be able to kind of look back and reflect and then kind of create a culminating project maybe in a couple years too to do it so i don't remember hearing about that before yeah it was a milestone that we had hoped to get moving on this past year and then with the various changes based on that it's one that we just decided to more better diligence yeah and just what a great way for the kids to reflect because sometimes they might think i don't know what i've even done it's been so stressful or their senior year comes and it's all the stuff going on so just to be able to stop and create like an entire project or a
025class i couldn't i don't know exactly what it would be to be able to just look back and go i've come really far that's really exciting yeah it is fun even um pieces of evidence of learning both on academic and then on some of our careers so they actually have already started uploading kind of portfolio efforts between fourth and fifth grade so i think as we continue to scale this you had mentioned the past four years but yeah as a high schooler and i think we're going to have the opportunity for reflect even prior to that um it takes me back a few years ago there was a book i think it was everything i need to know i learned in kindergarten and it really talked about the social side of life so i think
026it's something we've been doing for a long time but haven't identified it as such all right anybody else okay thank you guys all right moving on to starting the 2022 2023 school year dr ronaberg all right so as we kick off the school year we thought i thought we'd give you a quick glimpse into what we've been doing as a staff to get ready for the year as well as just where's some of those key dates coming up for our students and their families so first off one of the things that i always feel like is a little bit funny is i get asked that question of you know if i see somebody in june or july and they say so what are you what do you do all summer you know and i know
027principals get out you know and i kind of laugh because the lights don't go on and the buses don't magically run and the food there and have staffed in each of our classrooms and so on that first day after labor day that doesn't magically happen there's all kinds of planning that goes on throughout the summer and since last may we've been having staff working to get ready for the upcoming year we've had teachers in we've had principals district coordinators custodial staff tech staff i could go on and on with the staff who've been working hard but rather than go all the way back to the last day of school last year and highlight all the things that happened in june and july i just thought we started august you can kind of see a picture
028of how we kind of scaffold this um this month to get to that first day of school on september 6th so it's just last week we had a district leadership team retreat so that was our school leaders district leaders from all aspects of our system from early childhood to high school custodial food service et cetera and we came together and did some learning leadership development and planning for the upcoming school year tomorrow and the following two days we'll have our school leadership team retreats and planning so that's where our principals um their leader their key leaders on the side of teaching two on each side is teaching and learning one more on the curriculum and instruction side one of more of the special education student services site and then the principal principal's assistant at each
029of our schools will come together again for three days of planning getting ready to kick off the year they'll be role alike groups as well as in their teams and a lot of what they're doing is prepping them for the next week on august 16th 17th and 18th where our school teams learning equity teams that's where our teacher teams or it's primarily teachers principals working with those teachers who are in those leadership teams and really look at their school improvement plans get things ready for look at professional learning throughout the year look at student learning needs etc they did a lot of that last week so last spring so now there's they'll just be updating their plans um things like that so they're ready for uh it's all staff return on august 29th um so
030that's kind of all hands on deck getting ready for that in between that we bring in all of our new employees we have a welcome and orientation for a number of days four different days the week of august 22nd um during that all-staff return we have that kickoff that you'll be a part of on august 30th and we have that first day of school so that's the staff timeline um what's it look like for families well we've had summer school throughout the summer on august 10th district-wide school year kickoff message will launch so this wednesday that will get out to all families welcome letters are sent home from schools on august 15th versus via mail and email we have kinder camp in august as well as our wednesday school newsletters will launch so beginning august
03124th all the way until the end of the school year each wednesday we'll have newsletters that go home throughout the system august 29th to 31st we have meet and greet events at each one of our schools so those specific dates and times can be found online for those then september 6th you can see the first day of school for grades k-8 lighthouse in grade nine september seventh is the first day of school for grades ten to twelve and then as we talked about with our um one project around uh the partnership with families in september and october we'll have various family curriculum experiences to learn more about what the children are learning so that's different than parent-teacher conferences this is just the opportunities for those parents who want to hear more about what you know
032what's going to be happening in classrooms and how i can access information about assignments things like that will be happening in september and october if you can click can we open the link magic being back um people watching they can't type at all to school there you go so if you scroll down so you can scroll down let's see there we go all right so down here all the information that families need we have the general preparation when's the first day how do they find supply lists etc transportation how do they get transportation there's a simple people can print out this back-to-school checklist that you can see on the right breakfast and lunch services but it's kind of uh eric and her team have done a great job that's why i wanted to be able
033to show this where it's kind of a one-stop shop where people can kind of get all the information they need for the start of school and so if you get asked any questions as a school board from people about back to school you can just say springlikeparkschools.org backslash back to school and if they go there most likely their questions will be answered right there and a few of you had some different questions but with all the different schools and different programs um it's difficult for anybody to memorize all of those so i think this is a great place for people to come to get all their questions answered awesome so that's it any questions you have about the timeline or start of the year is it august 30th he says that tuesday is yep steph
034could talk at 8 30 we'll give the timeout but we'll get that to you so you guys know there's a back to school a day that the boys august 16 through 18 the school learning and equity team retreat um who's on the equity team and is the material they're using are developing substantively different than the campbell jokes yeah so that's not a complete training it's just a learning equity team it's basically we could call it their school leadership team so this is like at uh park terrace is probably one k one kindergarten teacher a first grade teacher second grade teacher third grade teacher fourth grade the principal you're innovative and personalized learning lead student service book so that's a different category than the campbell jones stuff yeah this isn't that well the campbell jones some
035of those things that they may learn may that will be that's part of it but this is what they're really working on is their school improvement plans so they're looking how do we improve reading how to improve math how are we implementing like the elementary they'll look at so we've got different measures for them where they'll assess like how are we doing what the implementation of our reading framework planning and training yeah so there's this isn't professional learning this will be those schools coming in and planning for the year um probably in those areas reading math so is there going to be any cultural proficiency training as part of this not that one when does that happen over winter break um where we're at the point right now is that we're that's not something that
036we're doing within the schools with all staff we've a staff have gone through that first round of training with the campbell jones and so then now what they do with this like the learning equity team is when appropriate they would look at and say for example if they're looking at achievement if we see that a group of students is that the achievement is drastically different that's where they would look at and take that learning and say is there something in our system that might be impacting that is there a shift we need to make that kind of thing so it's more application of their learning at this point okay i mean i guess my comment would be that if if the tools that they're using from that regardless of when and where they're using it
037were to be subsequently different than what was previously presented at the board would give notice of that because obviously this is like a pretty potentially controversial yeah but it's nothing that when it comes to that it's just how do we make sure that we've got an equitable engaging learning environment for our kids so what they're they're working on though is if it's uh at our if it's uh north point elementary school they're going to be really working they're going to be going through and looking at what our student learning results from last year how our kids are doing whether that's like so they're looking at their scorecard and dashboard and identifying improvement efforts much like we do with our district operational plan so i guess i yeah i misunderstood that term then sorry about that
038thanks no problem anybody else okay moving on thank you for that moving on to effective operations improve our effective management of human financial and physical resources amy schultz monthly financial report forgive so it's been a few me reports um [Music] uh may is a really big month for receipts for the school district um with that we're not usually gonna have a 11.4 million dollar range so with that we have six million dollars june that's another big month for tax resources it's kind of a cleanup foreign on the other side of that was we move into the months of july dividing a very low month as far as post statement taxes so really what we're seeing in the new balance in of revenues this is our revenue for the month of may year-to-date our budget for
039the school year and then where we sat in the meantime so with it you can see a lot of ours we're right in line that general fund on death on the cause food service is ahead a combination um we had also lowered our budget um expecting kind of not sure what was going to happen and so with that and the additional revenues that came in a percentage in students on the community ed side it's a combination of child on the expenditure side the report is laid out in the same way within the general funding that we're actually um so with that event i have one quick question can you remind me what construction is going on this summer construction right now so there's nothing going on within that okay that fund is closed because that
040was um um okay and so that's just an exterior project yeah somebody asked me if they were doing anything anything interior i don't think so okay great thank you anybody else questions or comments thank you very much all right moving on to the superintendent's report so i'll let him get that pulled up so i just want to provide a brief overview of some of the things going on throughout the summer so first time i referenced some of this earlier but our k8 uh kind of catching up some of the summer learning that we had in cage you can see our academic program serve over 380 students over a five-week program so a lot of kids great to see them get here our high school program served 270 students and more than 100 students earned missing
041credits and 81 fully completed credit recovery and are back on track for graduation so to see the progress they made was great there's been just a real focused effort the last year plus um over at high school and we're really seeing a payoff for kids which is great more than 50 students participated in our k readiness program and learning ventures child care was the place for summer learning all right colleen had nothing to do summer skills and drills there were 925 participants and 24 different offerings this summer so as you remember some of the presentations that you had and how we have increased opportunities and so on for kids in a variety of different ways it's just fun to always look at how we can get more kids involved community ed is one of those
042youth enrichment programs served 135 students in 18 different programs let's see some of the pictures of the things going on there and then this is i've given you updates verbally on this uh through voicemail but i just wanted to leave you provide a picture so you can see where it will be and uh the upper left of that picture um you can see that's where the construction trace house will be uh placed and so um students will be building a house there so you people uh have a chance to see the house come from nothing here in august to uh by may we'll be able to uh sell that and our partner will be able to move that to a lot in the community so it's great to see get that in place we need
043a little tour right i'd love to see it yeah it'd be really fun to go see it april meeting outside if they have like a time when i don't know if they're going to do a little presentation of it oh yeah later on here yeah definitely we'll definitely work that out so scott wicklund who's going to be the teacher of it some of you know scott either as a social studies teacher over the years or he's coached football and track and other things but he's super excited to be involved with this construction trades program so he'll do a great job with it great questions or comments i i yeah i'm happy that the construction trades thing is going forward i'm hearing lots of the positivity whenever i talk to people about that concept and it
044seems like we're doing it in a way that is attracting students to wanna to go try that so that's encouraging before we move on to action items speaking of superintendents i just want to mention that we did our superintendent's annual review uh in july and just want to make a note publicly that we did that and that our superintendent has our whole heart and support once again this year and that we're very grateful for your leadership and your service and uh i would go on and on but i won't embarrass anybody thank you for everything you do so i just wanted to say that all right moving on to action items we will start with the second reading to adopt proposed policy changes is there a motion motion by forsberg second second bible to approve
045and the adoption of the following policies with proposed changes uh policies five thirty four four zero six five fifteen and five twenty four with that one small change uh with that strikeout that we talked about is there uh any discussion all those in favor please say aye all right all those opposed motion passes moving on to board form and reports uh anybody have anything to share i attended uh my first panther foundation board meeting tonight and i just have to say helene you do a lot of work so that people don't always see but that is a really it was really good to be there it was really nice to just be a part of it and see all the hard work that those board members do that is a very working group of people
046they're very diligent they give a lot of money back to our schools so i was very impressed thank you awesome thank you anybody else it's kind of quiet marilyn you got stuff for us we're coming from this side that's right well i went to the amsd meeting virtually the guest speaker was dr rose choo who is on the pelspie and please don't ask me what that board is but they she spoke on teacher recruitment and marketing campaign to try to get individuals into the profession of teaching and it was a very interesting and quite impressive presentation i also went to some summer seminar there were three speakers each approximately an hour in length and one was on diversity equity and inclusion a person from mclennan agency and talked about that everyone has bias and she
047showed the picture i would love to have that cartoon of the three kids on the three boxes i'm sure all of you have seen that that was basically her equity stand um the last person to speak this topic was let's talk about mental health and she also was from that same agency very impressive and talked a great deal about what could be done change and do you matter and gave lots of resources for mental health which i have a copy of and we'll give to the superintendent um it was impressive to me that there is a program for mental health aids and i don't think we have any of those people right now i don't know but that would be an interesting program to could have someone trained for that um then 9 16 three
048things it was mostly routine meeting although we did superintendent evaluation and that would be public at the september meeting but it was very favorable we had two closed sessions one to talk about negotiations with the educational assistants and that's the largest group in 916 and after the minneapolis strike they have become a little more assertive so that contract is a whole year behind that is the largest group of 916. then we had another one to talk about the superintendent evaluation and the third thing was an announcement and it was only made that day so i don't have good details there was monies that had not been allocated that were designated now for the four intermediate districts and divided for mental health and it's based on student population and 916 will give approximately 1.2 million dollars
049from that grant so it's pretty exciting yeah okay so thank you anybody down here go to three things all right i think that's all we have anything else all right let's move on to adjournment can i get a motion please so moved in by skelly second by forsberg to adjourn the meeting all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed motion passes we are adjourned at 7 45. jim would be so impressed