001is now called to order it is august 3rd the time is 6 32 p.m um august 3rd 2022 this meeting is being live streamed and recorded and my viewing information can be found on the district website our mission is to provide a safe and caring climate and culture in which we engage inspire educate prepare and empower all learners in partnership with their surrounding community to be successful in today's and tomorrow's society dr green can you please lead us in the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all um okay okay thank you and then dr green can you please call roll scott andreason here natalie copeland here al dahlgren here
002zach dorhold here les screen is here shannon hawes here monica seguir schwartz is not joining us this evening following cabinet members and staff are present in the district administration office dr laurie putnam superintendent of schools assistant superintendent of secondary education kay nelson assistant superintendent of elementary education dr mike rivard director of innovation in instructional technology ryan cox executive director of learning and teaching laurie posh executive director of operations gary ganji executive director of research assessment and enrollment donna roper executive director of student services and special education carol potter media technicians paul novak and gordy scott custodian on site is steve hayne following cabinet members and staff are virtually present director of community engagement and communications tammy deland director of equity services ian omar executive director of community education adam holm executive director of finance and
003business services amy scalarood executive director of human resources and labor relations tracy flynn bow and executive assistant jan mcguire okay thank you next i'm looking for a motion uh to approve tonight's agenda so move i have a motion by scott in a second by zach dr green can you please call roll scott andreason yes natalie copeland yes al dahlgren yep zach dorhold less screen is yes shannon hawes yes thank you next is the consent agenda the consent agenda consists of non-controversial items that the board adopts routinely without debate any single member may remove an item from the consent agenda by requesting removal at the time the consent agenda is moved for adoption on tonight's consent agenda item a approval of personnel staff changes item b approval of monthly treasurer's report for june item c approved
004board policy 504 student dress and appearance as revised third reading item d katherine johnson education center project change orders totaling eight thousand six hundred forty four dollars and sixty three cents item e north canopy improvements change order totaling 25 357.50 item f to lahi hvac project change order totaling one hundred and eighty nine dollars item g clear view controlled entrance project change orders totaling nine thousand one hundred forty two dollars and seventy eight cents i have one request to remove item c from the consent agenda does any other board member want to remove an item from the consent agenda okay so i'm looking for a motion to prove a b and d through g so move i have a motion by scott and a second by l dr green can you please call roll scott
005andreason yes l dahlgren yes natalie copeland yes zach dorhold less screen is yes shannon hawes yes okay and then um now on the concentration item item c uh removed by dr green he is not bringing any comment forward correct no i just wanted an individual vote okay and so looking for a motion to approve item c unless somebody would like a discussion so moved and do i have a second second okay of a motion by natalie and a second by scott dr green can you please call roll natalie copeland yes scott andreasen yes the screen is no al dahlgren yes zach dorhold shannon hawes yes okay thank you okay next we're moving on to the discussion and action items we have three of them on the agenda first up we have a resolution of the
006think cloud minnesota district 742 school board expressing concern for the intentional exclusion of mshsl out state schools minnesota high school league sponsored activities and its willful lack of follow through on efforts to curb racism at league sponsored events in the why we play video presented tonight by board member al dahlgren thank you madam chip in front of you you have a copy of a revised resolution i'm going to once again at this meeting ask for a motion i'm going to put in a motion that it be withdrawn from the agenda a lot of things happened since our last meeting scott cronquist from the msd got a hold of me via email and we went back and forth a little bit on this i did send him a copy of the resolution so that he could
007see exactly what we were asking and and what we're asking for um when he got a hold of me he was kind of giving me some excuses as to why they hadn't moved forward with anything at this point and it had to do mainly with it's really hard to get people together to do something like this during the summer i also had been waiting for a call back from eric it's eric martens correct eric martens eric got back to me finally uh on a via a phone call and talked to me for quite a while um went through all of the things that they are doing made a bunch you know made a lot of commitments and uh to my satisfaction you know i don't know if it's the board satisfaction or not but to
008my satisfaction he addressed pretty much everything that was in the revised uh in my with with revised resolution and so i don't feel at this point that i mean you cannot obviously you saw the letter yesterday i believe dr putnam sent it out to all board members on on the that was from eric correct eric martens on what exactly what they're doing and how they're i mean saint cloud is very involved in this now it sounds like and he's working directly with our athletic directors and how many students from our schools 16 students from our schools are going to be participating and i think we have a really good representation and i and i and i i'm confident that they're moving forward with it at this point i think that the you know if you
009go back two meetings ago when the initial resolution wasn't thrown in there uh i believe that it was a very good thing to do because i really do believe that we got their attention i believe that they are following through on things that they would not have followed necessarily followed through on quite so prudently and quickly but they are doing that right now and one of the things eric promised me is that there would be the the state high school league would come out with some type of a commentary or some type of a direction for schools for this fall so that so it doesn't have to wait until spring or when they finally complete their their work for it to move forward so my recommendation is that we don't act on this resolution at
010this point in time but instead i would like to withdraw it and next spring if we need to we can come forward with another resolution if nothing's been done so i i'm going to move that we withdraw the resolution second dr green just a point and i i i sort of agree with you al now i do agree with you because i don't have a great deal of faith in people who since the time they've had to figure this out has been since 1954. and we've had numerous issues related to it that have nothing to do with what they're doing to resolve it the question is how do those people in saint paul represent the school districts in minnesota represent what they believe and how they think it they should move forward as a as
011a a branding statement as a this is this is who we are statement that has nothing to do with what we're going to do to those other people who don't act like we people we think they should and so um the video itself is offensive it has been and it's 2022. and even i mean it was offensive it would be offensive 20 years ago uh-huh you know it just there's just no there's no excuse for it and i guess that that when when people can sit and explain away their catering to a a community that that exists only in disneyland it troubles me so but i agree with the resolution because i just don't think that uh i think they're going to do something different to uh to get this to to move off so
012but that's my statement and eric did address that video and promised that by next year they would i mean it's too late for this year we've already this year's past we've seen it but he did promise me that by next year they will have another video produced which will address a number of those things also but i i hear what you're saying i think dwight d eisenhower said yeah we need to move a little slower too back in 54 57 so i just think that we we uh i think that if you could address that to him how offensive that is and hurtful not offensive i'm not offended by him hurt which is a different issue and and there are people who who live in minnesota of all races who find leadership people in our
013state doing this kind of thing today and and still and then defending it um to be um typical so i ended with that thanks natalie uh i'm hesitant to pull this for that very reason i think i see in in [Music] the plans anyway that were seemingly quickly put together for addressing not only racism but also just bullying by gender race or other issues you know when involving students in that so that issue seems to be at least they're walking forward in that but and if this was the first time we brought this up then i would be a little bit more understanding like okay we're we came out of nowhere with this this year and let's give them a year to kind of figure it out but we had the same discussion last year
014and from what it sounds like the same discussion has been happening a lot for many years it's not only the city-centric rich centric issue in that video but it's also the fact that it's only sports which furthers issues i think in in schools where certain activities are seen as more important than others and then of course the fact of of it not representing all of us so i'm concerned that if we withdraw all of it that we'll be here again next time next season kind of the full meat fool me once shame on you and full me toy shame on me sort of a thing so that's my concern with pulling it today can i ask a procedural question how long can we table something well we certainly can just if we're tabling we're just
015angling it off but we can bring it back so what so what's the word for there's a there's there's a motion in robert's rules where you can table something indefinitely and that's basically tabling until it would come back you know take the board to remove it from the table bring it back active yes uh natalie i would i mean if we're not going to remove it today i would rather table it until next meeting and decide if at this point if we want to um revise what what we have here postponed is that what you said postponed but to win though well i think we need to give them a chance to let's make a difference in fall sports follow that's that's my feeling is you know i i i feel like moving forward with
016it at this they so they've come forward with some concrete action steps and for us to disregard those actions and just move forward as though they did nothing i'm not sure that's really productive versus but i'm okay with postponing it for a period of time and then coming back and saying okay do we feel like you really did follow through if they so postponing it would be the correct thing to do which would leave it on the table for an indefinite period of time dr green the office of civil rights did not give us an opportunity to take a year and figure out what we would do when when we were challenged on the way we treated students of color i think that i'm going to agree with whatever you want to do now but
017i do think that it should be approved and sent to them and let them figure out how they want to do something about it but i think the video um if it was important to them they'd fix it in a week they've got the technological people to do it if we ryan we have people here that could take to get a team of people together in three or four or five days have that thing changed because i they must have the footage somewhere that they cut out of it if they don't they're really in bad shape and i hope they're not listening i don't feel that bad about them but i just it's because it's the behavior that troubles me you know so my response to that is simply that we didn't if the office
018of civil rights didn't give us opportunity to say well we're going to try and do better and so i don't you know i'm i've been in this work for too long and watched it go over it you know they just keep doing it because they didn't give us a chance and they held us accountable to it for an indefinite period of time scott um this has given us some leverage maybe we don't want to if we push it through right now we've lost our leverage and we should sit on it for six months then we can push it through natalie and then dr green yeah i don't agree with that i mean we sat on it for a whole year because i mean i remember super clearly some of the phrases that superintendent jed used
019when we talked about this last year and how adamant he was about this isn't okay and we're here at the same place again and so we did give them a chance and now if we give them another chance then i feel like we're doing a disservice to the fact that we actually have called them on this before and now we've called them again what are we going to do call them on it again like when is there some actual action um for some of this it's it's unacceptable to me and we are part of a governing body that can hold them accountable how many thousands of dollars do we pay them every year so it it's um we've given them a chance and they failed twice and so in my opinion we we need to
020address that part i think some of the things i would look for in this on these august meetings that they're hosting are are they inviting kids from all different sectors of activities you know instead of just inviting the things that are usually seen football players and basketball players and things like that there could be certain things certain ways of them showing movement in the right direction but the video specifically shows their unwillingness to do something unless their feet are to the fire and their feet are to the fire right now and if we take the fire away it's going to be a small flame when we say something again for a third year in my opinion dr green do you want to jump in the um no disrespect scott we don't have any leverage i
021mean i don't we don't have any leverage and i think that this is in natalie i'm not sure al when when was the first time you made the comment about this video in a board meeting that had to do with activities and then willie's response had to do with something else so it's not just been one year yeah we were at city hall at the time right i'm certain of that so so i again i think it's uh at some point you just simply say you know the problem is that we've got this group of people who are blink who are are trying to what do you call that when you you for focus somebody on something else they're trying to clean somebody else's house when their own house is dirty misdirection the misdirection is
022the people in the stands the people from foley the people from holding fort all those people that did that stuff which was very individual and very contained they put something out statewide nationally and said we don't care about those people i was going to use another word but i decided not to we don't care about it and so i i think they need to understand how how detrimental that is to the perception of students of color who are unrepresented um if you go back to uh brown versus board of education and the clark and clark research what did it do to them so when i opened when i look at the video as a student of 17 or 16 i don't see myself what am i supposed to think and what am i supposed to
023think about the people who don't do anything about it who don't interrupt that kind of racism so um you know i i'm a bit i'm a bit frustrated not with you al because i understand what this resolution and my response is you know does we have to do something different and if you want to do something let's organize a group of people to to get out of the state high school league and form a different way to do it and let's go down that path and that's crazy by the way but i'd say in it anyway let's go down that path and if that gets traction then that's leverage because they no longer exist but that's like taking on the ncaa i guess the one thing one thing that i can be certain of is
024that in those past years where we voiced our frustrations i can be certain that that frustration was passed on to the minnesota state high school league and it wasn't only in our meeting that it was being talked about but there were phone calls made afterwards and and so it isn't something where they were blindly just moving forward it truly was a intentional decision to not do anything that's disappointing and hurtful natalie um so we already have a motion right in a second and now we're discussing yeah so i i won't be able to vote for us to do whatever we're doing to this indefinitely table um postpone whatever we're talking about here um i instead what i would like to see and this is just this is where my feelings and and injustice led heart
025is uh leading me right now is to again table it until the next meeting and redo it to just deal with um with the things they haven't addressed and make it shorter but still make the resolution and here's why i say that you know when there was a resolution in saint cloud city hall of a welcoming and just community that resolution was then taken and adopted by other communities in minnesota that were fighting against the same issues we were fighting against in our community so although one resolution from one district may not be all the weight there are a lot of districts looking at what we're doing and feeling what we're feeling and maybe not having the expertise that we're bringing into the situation by already having this long history of talking with them so
026i think we have a i think we have a role to play in bringing the resolution not this resolution but one that still addresses the concerns we have can i ask what you would take out of this because i i look at this resolution natalie and it's it's saying what we see and it's asking them to follow through on what they promised to do and then restating our wishes improving access and opportunity for all students advocating for funding equity for poor and smaller districts improving inclusivity and eliminate eliminating abusive and racist incidents at its member schools improve its promotion and exposure for lower lower profile activities those are really the four things that we're asking for so i don't i don't know that i would change it i mean i think if we're going to
027move forward with it i just move forward with it and and and do so i mean if that's if the board feels that way i'm more than willing to withdraw the motion that i made natalie that's me giving them the benefit of the doubt which is probably not the right idea but um based on the email that we did received from the high school league saying here's the things we're going to do but we don't know the way they're going to do them we don't know if they'll align with these things so i would be more than fine with leaving it as is as well thanks al i think the dangerous part is if we stop watching or we stop talking about it whether we move this forward or don't move this forward the moment
028we're not paying attention or talking about it that that concerns me and i know you've been at this a very long time no i i i think it's kind of interesting you know uh when the civil office of civil rights came after us we explained to them everything that we were doing and how we were doing it whatever they adopted that found us problematic and said report to us every month or or if whatever that to ensure that this is going on and how long did we i know tracy would know how long she said to file reports so i would think pass the resolution and ask them the only thing i would add to it is that they should report out regularly and i don't know what that regularly means and how they're accomplishing
029in the task and what their kind of things they're meeting with out in interland dr green don't you think that we would i i don't know the office of civil rights had authority over us we don't have authority over the minnesota state high school league oh we do but but i'm sorry every year every year when we join the minnesota state high school league and we watch the why we play video these discussions occur so i don't think there's a danger of us dropping it i mean if we pass this resolution and then next year they come forward with the same way we play video and never really did anything with the committees i i think we would have a pretty solid argument well my if i may yeah please my comment is we should
030ask for some kind of a report every three months from now not not wait a year because the year goes by and and they have some very talented people down there that can develop a significant written report on why they didn't get done what they were trying to get done so uh there it's it's the activity that i'm more interested in than the accomplishment i don't think they're going to be able to stop racism and stop stuff at games but i but they ought to be standing out there when it happens and and and having people throw stuff at them i guess because they're saying you can't do this they're not doing that they're not interrupting it they're just standing by watching it and saying oh those people are bad and they have authority and
031responsibility to do something i think anyway but i'm not sure and again i think authority would lie in your willingness to i mean i don't know i had a group of students in this room that just took me on about hats this seems to be a rather significant issue right now that ought to be demanded that our students ought to be involved in it saying why are you letting us do this do you want to jump in for the final word i'm not going to say anymore one suggestion oh scott's been waiting i think you're just jumping in right now okay yeah so she's not doing a wrap-up so you'll still turn to talking one suggestion if i may offer for your consideration would be um to use this as one of the authentic engagement
032pieces around student voice the board has requested that our students have opportunity to interact with you in meaningful ways and to have our ads put out in the middle of or the beginning of august hey who will come do this on august 4th with you know less than a week's notice and for us to have 16 students from a variety of activities of racial and cultural and ethnic backgrounds our students are engaged and they're going to be going to these meetings and perhaps they are the people who are holding the state high school league accountable and coming back and reporting and having conversation with us my thought is our district our student body is 55 non-white if we don't do it who's gonna it's i mean we're the ones that are facing the issue yes
033there's other districts too that that i bet would to natalie's comment um agree with this and possibly adopt it themselves natalie did you want to jump in yeah i know we can't make them report you know we can suggest to them but what we can do is put a report on our agendas every quarter and then if they don't say anything to us or do anything they'll be like hey guess what they did nothing but like the next quarter we could have some of the kids that participated come and tell us about that and and so you know that's our way of holding them accountable is saying there's going to be public information given every quarter this year until we see another while we play video and that will keep it in in the public's
034mind and really i i think enlarge the fire a little bit i'm thinking back to last year and with the the incidents with new prague and i don't know that i ever heard anything of the school boards this early i'm sorry that the state high school league really doing anything about it it was member schools who said that they were going to no longer play new prague and include new preg in their schedule but i didn't there isn't anything real solid out there from the from the state high school league in in reaction to it other than just kind of saying oh this is going on and they did come out and say that they do not support any incidents of racism in the schools and this can't this can't happen but the reaction was
035i think part of the reason those schools said we're not no longer going to play new preg was the reaction from the minnesota state high school league was weak there was no teeth in it dr green i didn't think i was going to say anymore i want this if a kid takes a drink and the only thing they really have going for them is their involvement in sports that keeps them in school the state high school league takes them out of sports instantly and if they do it a second time they're out for four whatever numbers of games they have allowed a group of people to i mean if we do nothing about this what does it say to students of color but if we do something about it what should they say about us
036hey those people stood up for us or whatever i just think that they're they have a great deal of power for students and the only thing and i've watched a number of kids who the only thing they had going for them was was sports and and he kept them in school kept them doing something and they took it away from a couple of kids who well whatever i think we should pass it and i think natalie's point about putting it on the agenda and i think your point about having the students come back and talk to us about it would be useful it does say student engagement the students have something to do with this thing and so okay so madam chair i will withdraw my motion to withdraw the resolution and does that pull
037the second off or do i need are we okay you sold me on that last part and made me cry a little bit that we need to stand up and be the voice for those students has been very helpful to me in this process because sometimes when you get a little focused on what you think is right that you don't hear that justice call and confrontation and come out of it as activists and that's that says a lot to me about this school board and i would love to hear from the students okay do we have a second second okay any further discussion just exact point of clarification so we would be passing this and sending it publicly now correct okay and then we want to review it every three months and i guess i'm
038just like how would we hold ourselves accountable just a couple other thoughts ahead is one if we table it it comes up every meeting right if we just keep tabling and so it's in our minutes and they see it and they see it and they see it or postponing until a time of your choice i'm all for the motion i'm all for the the amendment i just thought matter of logistics next time we bring this up it we're gonna have to create another agenda item which is fine and maybe the agenda item is bringing these students and having them report to us what they've learned but we're going to have to be pretty mindful of keeping us alive um and one way of doing that is not voting out but tabling on every every meeting
039or a postponing until time of uh your choice so i'd accept the friendly amendment so that i just that's kind of when thrown out there i wanted is to to so we so we keep this alive because if we just send it out now what's next is my question does that make sense oh i see i i would oh i should can it may i yeah and then natalie i think we send it and set it on the agenda for review and hold the administration accountable for ensuring that it comes back to us at the appropriate time and not tabling it i i don't want to do that that would be my wish but your point about making sure it gets back to us is important does that make sense now yeah i support moving
040forward and um you know we'll hear from the students and i don't think anybody here is going to forget that we want to hear back natalie we're good okay any further discussion okay so dr green will you uh take uh a vote on your motion and al second less screen is yes al dahlgren yes scott andreason yes natalie copeland yes zach dorhold yes shannon hawes yes okay thank you next we're moving on to our next action item yep go ahead so for this we will have to have a signed copy so do we want to do that on one at the meeting here tonight can we sign it yeah yeah and we'll have to get it to jan okay and then it'll go a copy of it'll go to the minnesota state high school league
041and a copy to the msd i would think those two okay and if they're interested as to why come to watch the video the meeting okay next up we have the approval of the 2022 through 2025 strategic plan uh presented tonight we'll we have dr laurie putnam superintendent donna roper executive director of research assessments and enrollment and ryan cox a director of innovation and instructional technology welcome back good evening thank you chair house members of the board we are excited to do a review of the strategic plan i know the last time we took a look at it it was a little bit late in the evening um so we want to we're just going to go through it again we may not go into as uh deep depth of um as as we did
042last time um but we are going to share some of the changes that we are um or some of the adjustments we've made based on your feedback already um so we will go over that tonight um so this is our to propose 20 22 25 strategic plan if you head on to the next slide you'll see again our mission and core values the next slide shows an overview of what you can expect this evening which will be a review of the strategic plan we'll we'll give you updates on where we came um we'll do again an overview of the of the updates on the proposed outcomes and outputs for 2124 and then we'll share the recommendations again the strategic plan is based on the world's best workforce which has five pillars all leading to high
043achievement for all students and our strategic plan has five focus areas the first one is strategic focus area one positive climate and culture again the left hand column it shows the objectives and then the right hand column shows the strategic initiatives which are the the strategies we'll use to meet those objectives which then of course feed into that larger focus area the gray highlights mean they're the ones that we've been focusing on and have data that we shared and are glad to review and then when we get to the 22-25 you'll see the highlight uh change in color and that means that we're proposing to focus on that this year and you'll see some of the outputs and outcomes that we are using for that thanks superintendent putnam chair haas members of the board happy
044to be back with you this evening to review again some of the data we collected for the strategic plan and this evening i just want to say that you know the data provided is our best efforts to measure our defined priorities in the 21 24 strategic plan and you know after sharing with you last time and hearing your feedback we're really excited to say we're focusing forward and excited about our next steps toward improvement already so we appreciated that feedback feedback and we've begun to consider ways that we can broaden our understanding of success by what we're choosing to use in our measurement plans so i just want to set that out there up front that these are kind of narrow as you you recall the last time we were together some people noted you
045know would there be additional things we could look at and we are definitely committed to doing that so in this slide positive climate and culture this objective we have you know the data points from our climate survey and then of course our next steps we're going to be focusing on adding work around restorative practices and our sips and our departments are already you know working on defining additional metrics that we will bring forward as they become ready but you can kind of see what we put down for 2025. again we will still use data from the climate survey but we will look to broadening that as well and so the next slide if we want to go to the next objective which is 1.1 b and again we're really excited about continuing those welcome audits
046as our next steps expanding our access to the eeocs and increasing participation in our climate surveys as well as identifying additional ways to measure welcoming climates and sense of belonging and you'll see all that as we continue to work on our improvement plans and identify those metrics throughout the year the next slide just details again the happiness advantage strategies and we're really excited about this one because we do have some heavy work happening in the area of staff engagement that will help us measure in this area a little bit more precisely i guess you could say we're developing some really strategic goals in this area that will be coming out in the next 2025 strategic plan so continuing those happiness advantage um strategies looking at some innovation with our staff decision making protocols being shared
047leadership teams continuing to work together on those and continuing to gather staff voice yep and so we will continue to just keep moving those metrics forward and flushing out additional ones to bring a more broad rounded look at those areas and so you can see that we are recommending that we add a strategic initiative for the 2225 plan year and that that is the opportunity to expand student voice so the next slide shows you some of the the ways that we would do that including through advisories and the opportunity for feedback around decisions that impact student learning climate and overall well-being and ryan and his some some folks who have partnered with him have found some really creative innovative ways to make that process more flat to democratize it and really use technology to to
048leverage the opportunity for voice on concerns that we identify as adults and then to give students space to identify their own and so we're really excited we'll be bringing that forward in the in the coming months but very excited about that opportunity and then of course we'll be doing a superintendent student advisory our principals will have them um and then we are continuing to seek ways to engage student voice authentically with you as a board and we will pause there if you have questions or would you prefer us to keep going chair haas keep going okay so in my campaign door knocking stuff i've talked to some teachers and community members specifically about restorative practices so i know it's been kind of buzzword-y and kind of out there for quite some time in education but
049some of the concerns that i heard and um i've been to my own training and restorative practices and have read a lot about it it basically like you can't and i know you guys already know this but like if it's a if it's a one-off program or like go to this one conference and then let's come back and it's not a culture of restorative practices like there's just no reason to even pretend that you're doing it um that because it doesn't the the data doesn't really or the or the um the outcomes aren't really sustainable if you do it in one classroom but you don't do it with another i know some teachers have not just in this district but teachers i talk to in general say the part that they've felt that's missing is
050that teacher student restorative relationship and now we've talked about that a little bit here on the board but like you know a teacher has to send feels they have to send a kid out of the classroom they go to um vice principal for instance and then the vice principal talks to them and then sends them back to class but then they never have that moment with their teacher they come back during the middle of teaching so what's the teacher supposed to do right just stop and say okay let's have a sort of circle me and you while the rest of the 28 kids don't do anything um so that would i would love to learn more about that and it may not be right now um but how are how is it a culture of
051restorative practices all over 742 how are we implementing that and then specifically how are we restoring those those hard teachers student relationships when it's especially when it's a student who's consistently um having issues with one teacher thank you natalie for raising my it's a foreshadowing for sure because when we get to the student discipline presentation that's coming up in a couple agenda items out carol who whose team leads the implementation of restorative practices um we'll be going through uh some of that quite in depth actually this evening so um if if at the end of that she that you haven't heard the answers that you're looking for um please let us know and we'll gladly revisit that yeah thanks i mean these people are on it i'll tell you what great lead-in i didn't even
052pay or do that either strategic focus area two is on instruction that produces positive outcomes um that you can see we have outcomes and we had two of those that we were working on um and i will turn that over to donna to do a brief overview of the data that we had shared last time thank you and i think for this strategic initiative you know obviously we focused on domain three for professional learning of the teacher observations you can see the results in the middle there and then the next steps again focusing on inclusive decision making protocols for material selection because obviously rent the in the first column i'm sorry the renovation of media materials is an ongoing process so we're going to continue to review our materials to make sure that they are
053providing students with access to materials where they are able to see themselves in those learning resources and then again looking forward really looking to broaden some of the measures we're using in this area next year we will be looking at domain 2 which is in the positive relationships domain and we are shooting high for ninety percent of students or ninety percent of teachers scoring a three or better in these domains and then again on this slide just to remind everyone there was a slight change there was a correction to the growth measures this this is a really i think important strategic initiative because obviously it's about our achievement and outcomes and i am really excited about what we're doing in this area with continuous improvement um and for this year we just have the star
054results at this time but mca results will be coming when we look at our star measure we we did we did really fairly well when in terms of growth and again we've talked about the um the next steps which are moving us towards a more comprehensive balanced approach to student assessment that work will kick off this year and again all of our schools are putting together their continuous improvement plans departments will have continuous improvement plans aligned to the strategic initiatives allowing us to really lift up those you know authentic responses that folks are having to meet the needs of all learners out there so we're excited to move this work any questions on focus area 2 we're talking about looking at library books and such as that at are we looking at the possibility of
055getting into censorship i know that's part of the political campaign is some people want to censor what's in our libraries is that involved here or what my oh i'll take that one um so what we did uh was we had one of our media specialists who took on a a special assignment or special role this last year and what she did was she went uh literally building by building and pulled data out of out of destiny which is our library management software tells us what books we have age of books you know what's in what's out those kind of things and she pulled every every piece of data she could and broke it down into numbers of years so we saw that x percent of our books were ordered 20 years ago or more 10
056years ago or more looked at some of those examples and just some of the the overall ages then she also pulled samples of books out that were ordered 20 or more years ago that just culturally aren't relevant anymore in some situations some of the content some of the images are just it's just books that were were more than 20 years old and just and just not not what we wanted on our shelves anymore so it's not about censorship as much as going through and updating the books and getting getting just more of the material involved or more the material in hand for our kids uh that they they can see themselves and they can see more up-to-date content that helps it sounds like you're trying to get rid of obsolete stuff in some cases yeah
057we call it weeding at the media centers they call that weeding of books where that you go through and you pull ones that are torn that they're damaged we found books with with stamps where where people hadn't shut the book out for a large number of years and so you start taking those less relevant books out and getting books that the kids are a little more interested in today in 2022 okay um how about censorship regarding being politically correct uh people out there pushing for politically correct sure stuff sure uh we are we are looking for books that that um our kids can connect with um in terms of politics that's not something that was ever brought up in any kind of conversations it's very data uh rich in terms of of the age of
058the books and what books were pulled and what's not basically it's on a spreadsheet it's i don't really hear anyone asking for books to be pulled that aren't politically correct i usually hear the term age appropriate that the books that the students are reading the the material within them is age appropriate for those students and as far as censorship goes we censor the heck out of our libraries and we should if not then we have to have some pretty bad stuff in those libraries and you know what i'm talking about um we always have censored and we always will censor what goes into the libraries to make them age appropriate for the students in our schools it's not a public library it's a school library and there's a very big difference in that thank you
059strategic focus area 3 is on program evaluation and resource allocation for 2124. 3.1 a was around implementing a system for assessing the effectiveness of programs and initiatives and as i reported last time we've done that for two consecutive years we have an established process that we use and feel very confident that we are continually assessing both the metrics and the outcomes of those initiatives so we are making the recommendation um to change that and so i'm going to turn that over to ryan thank you uh so the exciting piece around strategic area three called innovation is is to kind of circle back to the the conversation we had last time was around the first the definition uh mike i mentioned like i mentioned last time we had a number of teachers 50 plus teachers in
060june that came together we called it innovative cohorts um and they came together and and one of the first tasks we did was we actually talked about what innovation is uh it's it's a term that's thrown around a lot uh you'll see it you know in businesses and and higher education and government and whatnot and so we really wanted to get a sense of what what we want to look at as a definition a shared definition um and it's we emphasized in that conversation that it's not about the the bright shiny it's not about the the the doing something new just for new sake and so the definition that they came up with talked about the fact that it is and we use the objective piece we use their definition that create a culture of
061innovation where all stakeholders respond to challenges through taking risks leveraging lessons learned through failure and finding solutions through collaboration and then we went on to talk about what it means to be an innovative teacher innovator in this district and we talked about what we call the four c's which you've heard us probably talk about in the past around technology which is communication collaboration critical thinking creativity and we added things like curiosity uh to that piece as well asking um probably one of the most important questions our students can leave here with is what if they can walk out of here and they can they can ponder that what if um think about science what if think about literature what if um and so that curiosity piece was added by these these amazing i think was
06252 teachers over apollo on june 7th so the strategic initiative piece 3.1 a 3.1 b specifically a implement systems for assessing the effect excuse me 3.1 b respond to identified challenges to the development of authentic solutions and partnership with stakeholders superintendent putnam alluded a little bit to this earlier with student voice that we are exploring ways that we can we can encourage what's called ideation which is not just asking someone how they feel about a topic but asking them for their shared solutions around the topic um uh you know it might be uh challenge a what we're looking for how to make 742 better what are some of the examples of of ideas that you've got and then not just leaving it there but then pulling those students together to actually create solutions with us
063so it's it's not a it's not how do you feel about this topic it's what are your ideas this team rises up to the highest level of those ideas and then it is it's okay let's solve those problems together so it's an action item not just sharing of feelings or thoughts so those kind of ideas same ideas we're going through with the um innovation with teachers we've got we've taken a survey and so far nearly every teacher from june 7th has indicated they want to continue this work um i think all but one is actually indicated yes they want to continue and the one that did not actually i believe it was a time factor so that's that's exciting and we have recently even engaged our principals and district leadership in conversation and book study
064and we're excited to see what's going to go [Music] any questions for us on strategic focus area 3. okay we'll move on to strategic focus area 4 which is career and post-secondary education options you can see here the strategic initiatives that we focused on moving through um for the next slide you can see um it was on thank you providing career and work skills related curriculum and instruction to all pk 12 students you can see how we tackled that from a k-12 pku but p isn't on there the k-12 experience and then some of the next steps that we'll do for 2025 for those targeted outcomes the strategic area focus area 4.2 was around engaging higher education business and community partners to create increased opportunities for 612 students again you can see the ways that
065we did that through career and college advisory the epic course which is in our high schools and then we will continue to implement those with the goal of having 100 of our students exposed or participating in career and work-related work skills related curriculum we would like to add on to both 4.1 and 4.2 and to ensure that our 8th through 12th grade students have personal action plans tied to high school course enrollment which is then tied to post-secondary goals we certainly understand that students are growing and developing and as they gain new skills and knowledge about themselves and the world around them those will change but we see it as our responsibility then to adapt those plans and help them navigate as they as they change and grow also the 4.2 is around expanding relevant
066rigorous career-related offerings in grades 9-12 we've already saw some of those courses beginning to be offered this year like law enforcement construction and geometry and hope to increase those offerings as the in the years to come and not just hope but we will because it's in our plan um and then um that by the year of 2025 that we can guarantee that to our students and families and community that students graduating from our high schools will leave us with either a hands-on work experience an opportunity for an internship externship or a mentorship or earn college credit or industry certification so that students are leaving us with the opportunity to to really grab hold of of something after they leave school whether it's college or career and they're moving forward as productive uh citizens and whether
067they're in our community or another hopefully they stay with us and then you can see um some of the ways that we'll do that are just laid out around the first one was of course student portfolios for those individual learning plans and the course proposals on the next slide and this course guides you'll see those every december we start the process in october so you'll hear that throughout the fall and then registration dictates which courses we're able to offer and we will continue to report out on that as we do and the final one is taking a look at expanding those that career and college advisory that we do with our local partner business partners and employers and higher education partners so that is our recommendation for the 2225 strategic plan looking for any questions
068or concerns you may have all right so moving on to the final one which is focus area 5 family and community engagement you can see that there were three areas that we were focusing on um donna do you want to walk us through some of that data sure the the 5.18 create school-based connections that bring together families educators and communities our outcomes looked pretty good on that this year but we are still looking to do better through keeping some of our welcome conferences and adding some community education volunteer recruitment and really focusing on our family and community engagement plans in the coming year and um we are shooting to have 90 or more of our parents who engage with our schools actively feeling as though they are partners in partnership with schools with their schools
069so we will continue to work on that and we hope to increase volunteer hours and also increase access to the early education and early literacy resources for families on the second objective 5.1 or 2a which is creating systems and procedures which was really highly focused this year on work that we did in the welcome center and just in our enrollment process with our procedures and just navigating the system we feel like we did have some improvements made in those areas but we want to continue to work on that in the coming year by just maybe making some improvements in our tools and in our process again and just increasing access to the pathway information at key points and again we'll be looking at ways to really measure this in multiple ways in the coming year
070not only using the climate survey but potentially some other things as well and then you may recall we decided the third one we were recommending uh just to eliminate that objective because we really feel that we have um in place um uh some really high focus on gathering boys from our parents stakeholders through committees and just through some of our new innovation ideas and so going forward we're going to continue with 51a and 52a in the 2022-2025 strategic plan and so we will look forward to bringing you more on that next time any questions on number five we are looking for your approval for the 2225 strategic plan um and i appreciate you taking the time to go through this with us um twice now thank you so we're looking for a motion to approve
071i would move that we approve the 225 strategic plan with a comment of well done second i have a motion by dr green in a second by al any further discussion natalie i just want to i know how hard you guys have worked on the welcome center and i got to brag about you guys uh internationally this week so um i am belong to a group called welcoming america which is welcoming refugees and immigrants um in all communities across america and now internationally as well in australia and um there's kind of like a list serve where if someone's having an issue and they don't know how to solve it then they put it out there and they said has anybody had a success in welcoming refugee and immigrant family families to large school districts i'm
072like well yes we do so i may be sending an email to miss ion omar hi ion and then whoever else may want to present with her because we've been you guys have been asked and i'll send you the email later to present a national webinar on the work that we've done here over the past years so there's many people on that list serve that said i want the information i want the information some of them have already emailed me somewhere i believe but uh it's just exciting to be able to be to see times when we're years ahead of where some of our other friends who are doing the same work in in education are so well done we'll pass that on to our team sounds good okay are we ready for a vote
073dr green you asking me yeah we're ready yup we have a motion in a second no further discussion less screen is yes al dahlgren yes scott andreason yes natalie copeland yes zach dorhold yes shannon hawes yes all right thank you guys okay last action item for the night is the approval of the 2022-2023 student and family handbooks presented by dr mike rivard assistant superintendent of elementary education kane nelson assistant superintendent of secondary education and joel heitkamp superintendent intern thank you chair haws thank you dr putnam and board members i have a huge role to play here that i'm going to introduce these fine gentlemen who have done some great work with this project so as chair has said joel has been working on his superintendency license and this was one of his projects this summer
074so we've been working in partnership and i'm going to turn it over to them at this time all right good evening chair haas dr putnam board members and cabinet members um as assistant superintendent assistant superintendent uh nelson shared i am doing some intern hours i'm also the principal at south junior high this evening dr rivard and i will share with you our recommendations for the 2022-2023 student handbooks for your approval uh as outlined on the screen is our meeting schedule and process as you can see we met as level specific groups over multiple days to have a thorough overview of the handbook and we engaged multiple perspectives to have all areas covered we met as a level like we met as these level-like groups um with specific departments and stakeholders to make this a comprehensive
075process and ensure all voices were at the table this was our secondary committee made up of district administrators district directors and school principals again this group met over four different meetings to provide the recommendations that i will share after dr rivard shares an update on elementary good evening chair haws and superintendent jet and members of the board at the elementary level we reviewed the handbook over a one-month period in late winter in early spring it's always an exciting event when we do that our committee was made up also of district administrators directors and school principals and you can see those members on our screen principal high camp and i will highlight some of the changes to the student handbooks and we'll ask that you save your any questions just you might have to the end
076of the presentation so the first one i'll highlight is that we did consider family engagement in our conferences and we've proposed changes in our handbook that will allow for a variety of formats for family parent conferences during this past year schools saw examples of increased attendance for family teacher conferences due to a virtual format while we don't expect that we'll that'll be the norm for our conferences and that will be moving to virtual we do want to make sure that that hybrid approach and offering alternatives as a parents when possible may increase our engagements with those families we also want to recognize that many of our schools now are doing home visits with families and going out in person to have contact with them and many of our staff members are doing that we've also
077seen great success with this strategy for family engagement and we'll also continue to explore other family engagement ideas as they bubble up from the building level another change that you will note in the handbook is the inclusion of coven 19 in our guidance for families related to illnesses we have now included this illness in with other contagious diseases and are asking families to contact their school nurse for a return to school plan for their individual child we've also made some slight but important changes in the language that we use for our safety protocols these small changes are a result of some of the wonderful work that gary gangey and our epact committee has done we previously were using the word containment and you'll note that that's been taken off through our work with first responders
078we discovered that containment is a term that has meaning contrary to how we use it within the school setting specifically our firefighters use the word containment and that has a special meaning for them is their responding and rescuing so as a school staff and knowing that we have communication that would be going on amongst all of the providers and school staff we thought we should pull that language out school staff and students will receive training for our safety protocols using the language that you noted up on the screen all right many of the uh specific secondary proposed changes are those that had already been um worked on and discussed by many members of our team uh our secondary team has taken this work and made these uh changes to the secondary handbook and i'll review
079uh the the four that you see in front of you um right now first one in regards to dress code changes um policy 504 is one that's been worked on for many months uh with the previous approval at the july meeting and again this evening this new language has now been updated the update can be found in the most recent version of the secondary handbook that was shared with all of you prior to this evening this is a new addition to the handbook and was made to reflect the state statute that allows for these flexible learning days this edition also outlines our secondary schools process for when these days are called as many of you know we are allowed up to five of these throughout the course of a year the section highlights the expectations
080of staff and students on these flexible elearning days these expectations include the learning platform staff will use which is schoology when learning activities need to be posted by 10 o'clock in the morning and that all teachers will be available for student questions throughout the remainder of the school day the new language also calls out student expectations regarding turning in assignments that being one week after the called flexible learning day in regards to student fees this is an important note that this language was put into the handbook because we wanted our students and families to be aware that a fee should never be a barrier to participation and that this was a practice that we had done for for a really long time and we felt it was important that it was called out in the
081handbook our schools secondary schools use multiple means to access funds when it's needed and some examples are specifically at the middle level we have racked random acts of kindness funds and leaf is a big partner to make that not a barrier as well the last recommendation from our secondary team tonight is in regarding to grading and reporting during the pandemic failing grades were changed to nc's or no credit in place of an f when reporting grades a student's transcript would then reflect that a specific class was not passed with that nc and that signified that that uh no credit occurred uh during the pandemic given where we're at now the team is proposing the change of nc back to f on student report card um grading and reporting and with that uh dr rivard and
082i are here for questions anybody have any questions scott you know it's kind of an interesting idea going from ncaa back to af uh what's some of the logic behind that now i believe the main logic was that the the nc was um was directly linked to the pandemic so that when a student in high school specifically showed their transcript to someone else whether it was a college or some other post-secondary opportunity that it would reflect that that that struggle for that class happened during a time of struggle for lots of individuals and our team felt like we've kind of moved through that now and going back to a more traditional style of grading was important and scott we did get guidance from the minnesota department of education related to looking at making those changes
083so that was seen across the state as something that all districts are looking to implement there you go um earlier today i sent through a sheet with a whole bunch of changes and i'm not going to go through there was about 30 25 changes or so on there i'm not going to go through them a lot of them were just typos or missing words or words out of context things like that but i'm going to ask that you go through those look at them and at least i guess if there's something that you need to feel or need to talk to me about on those let me know um there wasn't anything in there that was like changing anything it's just um for for example i have a lot of like awkward wording um meals
084in the high school book it reflects this that it's done electronically meal payments and in the elementary one it talks about when you bring money to school and it i think we use skyward in all of them now don't we for so they should the handbook should reflect skyward so it's things like that that still need to get cleaned up in there and i have a second page here that's for the senior high i didn't have as much time to go through that one but that one we've gone through that one a lot more extensively in the last few years but i did have some questions on page two mckinley is listed and i'm wondering oh it's it it shows uh tech high school apollo high school mckinley and i chose south junior high north
085junior high and kennedy community school and i just i think isn't mckinley mckinley area learning center or something we should put the full name in there yes that's correct academic expectations on page eight number one for the high school portion it doesn't have a header it doesn't say anything about high school and then it says refer to the section on scholastic eligibility and i couldn't find anything anywhere on scholastic eligibility um i don't know where that is that is it on the website or is it it should be at the end so i didn't see it yeah i'm not sure joe will we'll see if it's it got cut off and what was sent or if it got somehow disappeared i'm not sure yeah there was no header or 36 what's that on page 36
08636 okay then for for junior high on that on page eight it says uh the student must maintain a passing grade and then it says d minus is that is that true we that's all we expect for athletic eligibility is a d minus that's following minnesota state high school league guidance too yes it seems to me like when a kid's got a d minus they should be taken out of their sport and put back into the classroom until they can get up to that's a passing a passing grade a man would be a c just know that uh when a student does get that far we have a process in place for support um at the junior high level um so it's on it's it's one of the things that we task our activity coordinators
087with to monitor um and support and and we call it academic probation so you're getting close would it be better for us to be a little more vague on that instead of telling all the kids as they read the book that they just have to maintain a d minus just leave it at passing grade i think that's definitely something we could further discuss i don't know i just i saw that and i was like are you kidding me um page nine uh address or contact info chain info changes says that in order to change your address or your contact information you need to call the welcome center is that true or do can they call the office at the school if they call it our specific office we can help them navigate there's an also
088an electronic form that our secretaries will help process but it does all go through the welcome center yes okay because the only contact it says to contact the welcome center social media use in the use of images section it mentions the the images can be used in a number of ways but nowhere does it mention in any of the handbooks that they can be used on social media posts district social media posts and we do a ton of it that was a section i believe that was what was written through tracy with it says our district website but it doesn't say social media posts okay we can add that yeah thank you page 15 diplomas there's a mistake i'm sorry i'm going through these individually because i didn't get this to you um page 15
089there's a mistake where and diplomas it says that if a student is homeschooled if 51 or more of their education was provided by us they can get a diploma from the school but then it says the math doesn't add up for the if they didn't and it should be i believe 50 percent or less if 50 or less was achieved we can add that word that needs to be corrected uh page 17 the conflict with food was in both books uh pets and animals it says that there should be no pets or animals in our schools and then we have the whole support animal section where we do allow them in and i'm wondering if it shouldn't reference under pets and animals that support animals are an exception since they are an animal and page
09024 talks about school board it says that we meet the first wednesday and the third wednesday but it doesn't say a time i'm wondering if it shouldn't just add the time 6 30 because that's the same all the time sure i'll give you this absolutely thank you um and i'll give you this first page those are my comments [Music] so with those minor changes do are we okay to i am 100 comfortable that they will take that information into account before they do the final production of okay and that that we're comfortable actually approving this tonight okay and i and minor i don't want to dismiss that thank you for your uh word for word reading natalie yeah i was going to bring him the same thing about scholastic eligibility and i think what's off
091maybe it seems is the table of contents versus what's actually in the document because they don't seem to line up so like scholastic eligibility should be under us but it's not so maybe just to check the the uh order there would be great thanks god did you have a question or comment um yes you're talking about support animals we have a lot of different religions in our school school system is this going to be offensive to some of the different religions or is it okay well we have a policy on support animals the americans with disabilities act covers support animals so that's what i would refer back to but okay so we're looking do you want to say an administration is recommending approval of this handbook so we're looking for a motion i would move
092approval of the 2223 student handbooks both elementary and secondary second any further discussion all right dr green can you call the vote uh less screen is abstained scott andreason yes natalie copeland yes l dahlgren yes zach dorhold shannon hawes yes thank you okay next we're moving on to reports board of education standing committee reports have has anybody bet since last time i don't think so okay that was quick okay and then we have future agenda items august regular board beating next time we'll have the 2022-2023 back-to-school overview overview presentation a citizens appreciation award presented by the saint called police department and some policy readings at this time does any board member want to suggest a future agenda item board policy development and governance will review the request and report on their recommendations okay natalie if
093it matters i just want to say here that we did want future agenda items to include a quarterly report about minnesota state high school league perfect thank you thank you okay so that adjourns our regular board meeting it is 801 pm and we're moving on to the board of education work session first up is discipline data year in review presentation presented by dr mike revord assistant superintendent of elementary education and carol botter executive director student services and special education perfect timing i was throwing out for a moment i didn't notice carol was behind me so that's good it's good to see good evening chair has dr putnam and other school board members this evening carol and i would like to review the disciplined data from the 2021 22 school year we'd request that you save
094any questions you may have to the end of the presentation the saint cloud area schools recognizes that expected school behavior is outlined in our code of conduct is critical to academic success we know that teaching students expected student behavior ensures a safe and welcoming school climate our staff students and families partner together as we know that effective school discipline includes the establishment of high expectations for engagement a school culture that will create a sense of belonging and a response for failure to meet behavior expectations that include supports interventions and responses and those things all relate to our strategic plan as we began the process of reviewing the 2122 school year data we did want to step back and consider the challenges of the last two years on students while many smaller studies have occurred we
095look to the us department of education's recent collection of perception data to provide us with some context of what has been occurring across the united states the information comes from the institute of educational services or ies which is the statistics research and evaluation arm of the us department of ed their goal is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and they've been collecting this perception data during the last two years related to the pandemic in numerous age areas but tonight i wanted to include behavior and mental health and some of the information that they have gathered they have been surveying approximately 2 400 public elementary middle and high schools and they've sampled this through a monthly data collection 870 public schools completed the spring 2022 survey and some of the
096information that you see up on this slide is reflective of that recent data so we have filtered the data by school level as you look at the data on the slide as we are reporting on information in district 742 in the same manner i we talk about elementary middle school and high school as you can see in our table that's being displayed in the middle perception data from school leaders across the country has indicated that 25 to 40 percent saw an increase in bullying threats of physical aggression and actual fights at all levels these are incidents that are most likely resulting in school suspension and the data for district 742 we will also review that in a few minutes we note in this table on the right a more significant increase in behaviors that interrupt
097learning in classrooms or absence of students and sometimes those will be seen as lesser type of fence or office discipline referrals versus the table that's displayed in the middle the arrows are there as just an example of maybe something you look at as a possibility of concerns as we look across the country all the numbers are elevated though versus what you might perceive during previous school years our next piece of data is also from the department of education and it's the same survey and it's something that we speak about frequently as a school staff as we consider interventions and responses for students according to administrators participating in a survey we see a 70 percent increase in students who have sought out mental health services since the beginning of the pandemic this is a startling number
098and also leads us to also consider those students or families who may have not possibly sought out mental health help but are in desperate need of their of that type of response of note not related to our students but the data collected also illustrated the challenges for our staff as 29 percent of the respondents in this u.s data saw an increase in the the principal saw an increase in their staff seeking out mental health intervention a 29 increase so we can use this information if we choose as a backdrop to our own discipline data review of district 742 for this past school year and i'll start that right now so insane cloud we most often measure discipline based on major office discipline referrals and many of you are familiar with that term office discipline referrals
099are the result of behaviors that can vary from physical contact at our primary age students while they're lining up so if you think of our kindergartners and some pushing and shoving that may happen while they're lining up that oftentimes can result in an office discipline referral where a principal may choose to speak with them about better line basics but it can also be up to physical aggression and behaviors that are significantly impactful of the safety of our students the data above is disaggregated by school levels high school all middle schools and all elementary schools and shows the average number of office discipline referrals a school administrator would see per day as you may expect with a number being an average or a mean a school administrator will see fluctuations on how each school day may
100look throughout the school year of note 20 the 2020-21 school year was impacted dramatically by the remote learning model that was implemented during this academic year and our numbers decreased rather significantly and that would be the 2021 year as it's illustrated all major office discipline referrals will have a response our code of conduct outlines these as skill-based supports restorative practices and administrative actions we embrace in district 742 of the primary function of school discipline as teaching and re-teaching expectations this is illustrated in our slide as you see that the primary response to odrs or office discipline referrals continues to be reteaching school-wide expectations so on our bar graph that's the one that's reaching up towards 4 600. across our schools our second most utilized response is lunch detention where we re-teach school-wide expectation as a
101skill-based support but we also add that administrative action of loss of lunch with their peers conferencing with administrators and restorative practices are all responses that help our students learn from our stakes this year we didn't notice an increase in technology restrictions as a response to office discipline referrals as there was continued increasing to the access that students had to their devices and that was across all grade levels as you can see we have a number of responses that allow our staff to be adaptive adjust their interventions to students behaviors based on their their developmental level and or other variables while always operating within the code of conduct and those responses are what you would see it down on the bottom and of course a little bit challenging to read right now so hopefully you're what
102you received from us you're able to review those so as we know out-of-school suspensions do occur in our schools and out-of-school suspensions are used when there is a major behavioral infraction that disrupts the educational setting when it targets others and or impacts the safeties of others excluding the 2019-20 school year and the 20 20 21 school year due to the episodes that we had with remote learning we have seen a 28 increase in our out on our out of school suspension from the lows of 2019 to this year so this is concerning for school staff as we recognize how students have struggled this school year across all grade levels in regulating their emotions and their behaviors as we have returned to an in-school learning environment of note though the number of out-of-school suspensions for this
103past year 2021-22 is 22 lower than our base school year which is 2017-2018 the unique student box that you see in the lower right hand corner that shows the number of individual students who have experienced an out-of-school suspension during the 2021-22 school year and all the previous years so an example that may help with that is during the 2022 school year there's 599 students who were experienced the 889 suspensions as we address the equitable response to student behavior we continue to see an over-representation of students of color who have experienced an out-of-school suspension in comparison to our overall population and that's noted by the blue bar which represents our black or african american students since our mid-year review in january we have noted that our black and african american students saw a three percentage point
104decrease in their representation in this area however we recognize the important work of interrupting this trend district 742 administrators are working with our student services and equity department and we will be re-examining our practices for the 2022-23 school year as we bring more focus on our responses seeking alternative interventions to student behaviors and addressing those mental health concerns we talked about at the beginning of the presentation and while all the school suspensions are used we also have in-school suspensions that we wanted to review this evening as a school district we have increased the number of in-school suspensions as a response to major incidents of misbehavior our in-school suspensions often allow for guidance counselors and other support staff to provide intervention academic help and restorative justice practices in which the students can talk with other students
105about their disruptive behavior its causes and its consequences while still remaining in the school instead of being on an out of school suspension as we put these practices into place we've seen a 25 percent increase from our 2017-18 school year and using an in-school suspension response the over-representation of students of color though as noted in the auto school as noted in the out-of-school suspension data is also seen in our in-school suspension data this year we also decided to report data comparing our special education and non-special education students as well as freeing reduced lunch students versus non-frl students our frl data will be seen in the next slide in the 2021-22 school year approximately 22 percent of our district 7 4 students were identified as receiving special education services for our special education student group we
106see an increase though during these last five years in their representation as students who have experienced and out of school or in school suspension so our illustration here has the out-of-school suspensions on the left and the in-school suspensions on the right and the the bar graft showing the blue those are students who would have been identified with special education needs this year we are also examining in and out of school suspension trends for students who qualify for free or reduced lunch over the last five years we recognize this data as impacted by all by this by all students being eligible for free meals during the 21 22 school year the trend data continues to reflect that students who qualify for free or reduced lunch programming are more represented as having experience and in our out-of-school
107suspension as a district leadership team we continue to reflect on and seek out the best responses to student discipline referrals and we do have a comprehensive intervention model that karen carroll will now speak to good evening chair has superintendent putnam i'm going to speak tonight on the majority of strategies that we have in place for to address student discipline it won't be all of them but if you have questions about other things that we have done in the past i'm happy to answer those questions for you and i want to start but just by saying that we have three different levels of strategies that we use to teach teachers how to manage their classrooms teach administrators how to manage school discipline and the first one that we start with is our district guidance for school
108discipline and so the things that we look at to ground all of our work around school discipline is one the pupil fair dismissal act that's our minnesota statute around school discipline and then of course our school board policy number 506 we review that annually with you and then our code of conduct our rights and responsibilities which is our handbook that all administrators use that outlines the majority of possible infractions that could occur and then it outlines how to handle those infractions so that we are consistently across the district utilizing the strategies that we have developed and that one school on one side of town isn't doing something different than the other school the fourth item that we talk about um and we started this about four or five years ago when we first started with
109the minnesota department of human rights when they said you're suspending too many students what are you going to do saint cloud school district and at that time we started a book study on the book called don't suspend me and it was a study about how we could look at alternatives to suspension what are the other things that we can do to keep kids in school instead of sending them home because oftentimes at home they are obviously not getting the support that they really need they're telling us something their behavior is always telling us something it's telling us a story about either what's happening in their world outside of school maybe what's happening in their world in school something that they just can't manage in school and so our job is really to dig underneath that
110and figure out what is it that is going to support that student in the best way and we have amazing behavior support teams that do that and i'll talk about them in just a little bit our next level thank you mike um of support um to organize ourselves is what's called our building guidance for school behavior and these are our school-wide expectations that every single school in the district formulates every year with their pbis teams and so what happens is on the left hand side they develop their three words of expectation so this happens to be talahi school-wide expectations and you may have seen these before and so talahi has their three words of safe responsible and respectful and so everything that they do all of the communications they do across the school has those
111three words we're safe we're respectful we're responsible and so the teachers utilize that in the in their classrooms on the communications that they have and the lessons that they have with kids and um soon every student in the school and we check this for fidelity in the spring when we do our pbis tests um to see if kids do it so we randomly ask kids what are your your expectations around keeping your school safe and they are so good at saying they'll they'll just tell us they're safe responsible and respectful and then across the top of this and i don't expect you to see every word on there it's not important that you see every word but i just want to show you what this looks like across the top it's every environment in the
112school so it's the classroom it's the lunchroom it's the hallways it's the media center any place that kids visit throughout their day in the school they describe teachers teach them what does expected behavior look like in those areas and so at the elementary school this is how they start their school year they go through their day and they teach school or teach kids what their expected behavior should look like in every one of these locations a little bit different at middle school in middle school and high school they might do this in their advisories where they talk about what are the expectations not only in my classroom but what are the expectations when we travel to lunch when we travel to the gym etc okay the third way that we give guidance is this is
113an example of of south since joel's still here yes thank you joel for sharing this with us tonight um this is the student support continuum so i mentioned these wonderful behavior teams that we have and so we have behavior resource specialists we have behavior support specialists we have school counselors we have triage therapists we have mental health advocates we have all these wonderful highly skilled folks that help us out with anything that happens in schools and so what this student support continuum does is it outlines in the yellow column on the left it outlines what a teacher would manage in their classroom so what is the expected behavior in your classroom and then how do you manage that throughout and then in the middle is the um the student support team so all of those
114highly skilled people i mentioned one of them might help to manage the behavior if a student needs regulation and may need to come out of the classroom for a short time one of those trained folks might be helping and then in the red column on the right is administration handled what are the kinds of things that would come to the administrator so we always start with that least restrictive first and help kids stay in their classroom as much as we can and then we go to that that medium support in which we are offering more guidance from an adult and then that third one would say oh we've tried we've been doing this reteaching now what do we need to do for that accountability piece as well so that's and every teacher and staff member
115is taught this throughout the school our next slide this triangle i i know that you all have seen several times and again it's not important about the words on here i just want to talk to you a little bit about this so this is our pbis triangle our positive behavior intervention and supports triangle and what this tells us that in that green zone across the bottom it's universal it's everything that we do for every student so it's all the proactive training that we do with students it's that teaching of that expectations from talahi that you saw earlier it's all of the typical kind of rule setting and how do we function in our classroom that falls in that tier one that green zone and our expectation is usually about eighty percent of our kids can
116fall in that green zone and function very well every single day we then move up to that yellow zone which is our tier two zone and typically we say this says ten to twenty percent we usually say about fifteen percent of our students may fall in there and those students would require that adult engagement that i had mentioned earlier so they might come out of the classroom for a brief time or they might have more intensive social skill training or they might have a referral to perhaps chemical health or maybe even a triage therapist if we need connection to outside resources and then in that red zone that tier three that's about five percent of our students and those kids are our most intensive students those students might be out of their classroom for majority
117of the day they might be with a case manager they might be in a program such as one of our pride programs in our middle schools a program that's within the school but might be some students might be supported in a more intensive way so their transitions are less throughout the school so that and i want you to think of just one more thing on that sorry mike one more thing on that is that i want you to think of the the pbis so we've been training in pbis we were one of the first schools with our first district tech was one of our first schools in the district about 15 years ago already probably closer to 17 years now and then we trained every single school after that and pbis is really the bookshelf
118if you think of it as that bookshelf and then we're going to talk about what are those strategies what are the books on that bookshelf that support this whole triangle and trying to keep our kids in supporting our kids in that different tier as we go and of course we want most of our kids to be in the green that's always our goal to support them to keep them in the green zone as much as we can thank you mike okay so our first book on that bookshelf is our social emotional learning and that encompasses i love this piece because social emotional learning is really about teaching the five competencies of self-awareness self-management responsible decision-making relationship skills and social awareness so in our elementary schools this lessons around this and there are many different lessons
119on this may be taught in their um their homeroom in their morning circles so maybe they're just struggling with um staying on task let's say as a whole class off task and so there might be a lesson on self-management how do i keep myself engaged what is the work that i need to be doing right now how do i follow directions and so the teacher is choosing lessons that fit in one of those five competency areas and then the blue circles on the outside of this wheel which is um this is printed from castle by the way and you know really says that we have to be able to do this as a classroom and then we have to be able to do this as a whole school and then we also need the support
120of homes and communities as we do this work as well it can't be just from inside school it really has to be across our community i love that that image okay another book on our bookshelf is student support rooms so student support rooms are set up so that students can take proactive breaks and it really what this does is really balance their structure around their academic piece and then balance it with the physical stimuli that they need some students don't ever need to visit the student support room other students we try to build in a proactive break if a student at 10 o'clock during math every morning is seeming like they just are going to fall right off of their chair we might build a plan a mini behavior intervention plan we call them so
121that a student can go to the student support room and take that break and that break might be something they just might color for a little bit or they might talk to someone about what's going on at that moment or they might do 10 jumping jacks depending on what it is that they need to regulate again and it's usually it's designed that it's a short break so that a student isn't out of class more than about 10 minutes tops and then they get that break they're just resetting their brain and they go back into their regular classroom again this year we have a beautiful thing going on that we have hired these rooms are supported by what is called the behavior resource specialist so these are adults that are trained they have a psychology background
122or a mental health background so that they can help students directly with what's going on and they actually have experience in doing that we also have hired the behavior resource specialists on the special education side this year as well so every school will have a behavior resource specialist and a room outfitted so kids can come and take those proactive breaks now is there ever a reactive break yes sometimes if administrators are busy and there's multiple things going on in the building they might say can you support student a and have them and you know help them de-escalate so they can get back to school back to class rather while i'm managing something else in the building and so there are reactive breaks too but it's set up to mostly be proactive okay another book um
123called more excuse me called motor rooms um these are rooms that are set up and you can see these beautiful pictures these are at quarry view and these are simply set up for kids to take breaks and they run the little ones will just run and jump and slide and swing just to get their sensory pieces back in order and just use some of that energy and again it's not a half hour break it might be a five to ten minute break let's go and then we go and they set the timer and they're in there jumping and running and crawling through and um and on the way and i've witnessed this one i just love this those early childhood folks are so smart with everything that they do and they're they're counting the lines
124on the floor as they get there and they're noticing all the colors that are on the wall as they get there and so they're already trying to distract if you will and reset their brain even before they get to these rooms okay another book on the shelf is our sensory rooms and these are just a little bit different than the motor room what these are set up as these were set up by our occupational therapist and our occupational therapist there's a program on an ipad so the student goes in and depending on if they need more sensory input to calm or they need more sensory input to stimulate the ipad they get they choose how am i feeling right now and they choose the program on the ipad that they need in order to help
125them and they're taught all of these skills mind you the littler they are obviously we're what we have adults walking through with them and so you can see in this picture they have all sorts of things that they might crawl under those hoops near the cupboard um they might have on there that let's do five jumping jacks or some burpees whatever it is that puts compression on their hands their feet their joints to help them to calm themselves and it's a wonderful thing that the ots occupational therapist they came up with this idea and it has been really really great for kids to help them calm okay that was some of the books on our bookshelf now for this year you saw the data that mike presented obviously and we have work to do we
126we have work to do we need to support continue to support kids in all of the ways that i mentioned but we also need to continue to dig underneath to figure out you know is it something in the structure of their day that they need support with is it something that um really is a could it be a disability could it be a mental health concern you know what are those pieces that are going to that we need to really evaluate for kids and so natalie i heard you talk earlier about restorative practices so let me tell you a little bit about that this year we had our first formal training we've had people trained in restorative practices before but like you mentioned it was that maybe three or four people go this year and
127then those people might stay with us and might not but it didn't spread the information didn't spread and so what we did this year we brought in a gentleman who trained all secondary leadership teams so we're focusing on secondary for restorative practices this year and they um this gentleman each school brought a leadership team that we're going to be the trainers for their schools to spread it out and we went in with the intention of it won't do us any good to train one or two people because we can't get to enough kids so our whole school everything we do has to be connected in so whether that be pbis and or proactive breaks or sensory rooms or motor rooms it all has to be connected back to restorative practices it was a wonderful training
128for two days in june it was it was really really good i was there and teachers the feedback from administrators and teachers was very very good so they're making plans of how they're going to roll that out throughout their schools and then in the early part of october the trainer is coming back again and we're going to be very specifically training on that circle component most of you have probably heard of restorative practice or restorative justice circles and so those circles don't have to be a big circle all of us don't have to sit in a circle it can be that repair that natalie was talking about earlier that repair of maybe it's just you and me we we have to repair what happened in our classroom so we've got to figure that out and
129um and so i'm really excited about that trainer to come back and do that and again we're going to spread it out school-wide so um a little bit at a time we're going to get there and then conscious discipline we have been treating elementary schools in conscious discipline for about five five or six years now i would say maybe six and we were very fortunate we wrote a grant for four conscious discipline shannon davison and amy partnered on it and we ended up we're very fortunate through mde we ended up getting a 150 000 grant for conscious discipline and so we are going to be hiring a coach just for conscious discipline so not only are do we have training for staff but we're able to with the grant able to buy them supplies and
130training materials and then also this person who i believe will be a coordinator we haven't hired that person yet we just found out about the grant and so we will be that person will go out and coach people in their classrooms so that they can have a good follow-through on what that looks like and help teachers support them and their classroom management skills okay mental health supports then this year with some astra funds we were able to hire new mental health supports called mental health advocates and a mental health advocate will be at every one of our secondary schools and possibly one of our elementary schools and what we're trying to do is align that with our greater minnesota mental health supports so that if kids are seen by greater minnesota mental health supports then
131different kids are seen by our mental health advocates and those mental health advocates can also be resources and liaisons out to the community too so if they're seeing something that you know perhaps the student really needs a higher level of care that they will be that person to do some of that support in conjunction with our triage team okay the next one we're going to focus on is targeted supports for physical aggression and odr office disciplinary referrals at the secondary so our cap program our community accountability and prevention program we have has been located in different locations throughout the districts over the years this past year it was at westwood in one of their wings and this next year we're moving it to roosevelt so with our high school and our elementary level four programs
132moving over to catherine johnson cap will be over at roosevelt and so we have staffed it in a different way i'm really excited about this we have a general ed teacher we have a special education teacher we have a behavior resource specialist we have um two mental health advocates that i was just describing and then we have a half time dean who is going to also support our rise program which is our middle level alternative program which will be housed at the boys and girls club just behind roosevelt so that dean will support both programs as we go and then with that we are currently because we have new staff new location we're developing and in design right now about what that looks like for schools so how do kids get sent to cap it's
133considered an intervention it's not considered an in-school suspension or an out-of-school suspension it's an intervention and so we are talking about you know how do we support our kids that have that high physical physical aggression that you saw in our data in the high physical altercations we know that they might not be getting the support at home and this way they can get the support instructionally behaviorally socially emotionally if we have them attend our program so that more to come on that i'm really excited about the opportunity for our kids at that program and like i said we're in design phases right now and we'll be rolling that out to schools for the start of the school year um our next one our bus supervision and safety so this was really great too and this
134is this is somewhat new i will say in terms of providing an additional adult on buses so not only will we be teaching pbis on the bus and verbal de-escalation skills with our bus drivers this fall will also be providing on routes that our administrators have identified as routes that there is more incidences happening on so what are those kinds of things that happening there might be physical aggression on the bus there might be um [Music] oh threatening language on a bus there might be i'm i'm consistently up and running around instead of staying in my seat and so we'll cover those all in how to manage those with the bus drivers but in addition we felt the need to have an additional adult and so schools are going to provide either their behavior resource
135specialist maybe a behavior support specialist um maybe a para educator we do have some para educators currently on our vans and our buses for kids with medical needs and so we're just looking at maybe replicating that a little bit so we can just support kids in a better way and then i also heard earlier that increase in student voice is that it's so important that we ask kids what they're thinking and what they're feeling they know and they're so honest and they can tell us about what's happening in school they can give us the information that we really need to make really good decisions on their behalf and support their learning again and so i am i'm hopeful and i look forward to gathering that information from students and also from staff too right staff
136are um you know they're advocates they're great advocates for our kids and so being on the ground every day they know what's happening too so those are our our focus it looks like a lot for 22 23 but we're really excited because our data indicated to us we really need to be doing things in a not only a better way but maybe a different way too to support kids and so this is a good start for us i think do you have any questions for micorai regarding our practices or our data scott um you mentioned the pbis uh pyramid um that red group at the top of the pyramid are those uh folks that often end up over to roosevelt or catherine johnson they that's a great question and they might they might depending on
137what the needs are and so this student might be a you know a tier three or a level three special education student who is within their general education setting but most of the time they're serviced in the special education classroom and so our goal always although i'm really excited about our new building our goal is always to keep kids as often as we can in their general ed setting with their peers and educate them with their peers but yes there might be if if they can no longer be supported or we can't get them what they need there they would then be eligible if they are on an iep because there are kids in that red zone that are not on an iep and so if they are on an iep they might be received
138better support at catherine johnson if they're not on an iep and they're in that red zone then we need to be catching those kids and wrapping our arms around them and saying what is it that one what is it that you need two what are the pieces that we can offer you as support is it chemical health is it a triage referral so you can get outside assessment completed what are those significant community connections and partnerships that we can offer at that point and if and also we would complete a special education evaluation at that point too if they are in that red zone to see to figure out more about their learning okay thank you um kids on buses do we have video on all of our buses now where we can actually see
139what's going on i do believe we have video on the majority of the buses but i will maybe have mike answer that or maybe even gary would chime in on that yeah if gary's available i'd ask that he would answer that question i believe the answer is going to be the vast majority although there's some technical difficulties that can occur on any day gary did you want to field that question yes yeah we have we have a video on on all of our buses full-size buses and um also all of our contractors do as well uh who reviews the video or is it only if there's a problem that they go back and look or because it sounds like you've got some sort of a system for picking out which routes are going to need
140help we do that's a great question too so the review of the video depending on what the incident is and so i know that mike has reviewed video and laurie has reviewed video i have reviewed video gary um gets the video most often first directly from our our either our own bus district or from our providers as well and and again depending on the incident we review it and then we manage it from there but oftentimes our drivers will alert us that there's something happening on the bus prior to something major happening which we have to review video so they'll do a bus what's called a bus write-up it's like an incident report to say what's happening and they do the re-teaching as well to say i need you to stay in your seat i
141need you to stay in your seat don't hang out the window and then if that is happening often they will turn in that report to our dean who is that transportation and then that dean routes that to the schools so that the administration at the schools can manage that with the student okay um i was thinking about an incident that happened in a mobile home park in saint joe where a child was off the bus and got run over and killed but i don't think we did anything wrong on that if i remember right i don't recall that incident i'm not aware of that mike are you aware don't no i don't recall that yes yep that was um prior the year prior to me coming to kennedy um gary or tracy you guys would
142have been involved in that review of that i think scott's question is where we found what what might have been the any changes if we needed to make any to our practices it wasn't a writer that incident was a number of years ago and um i don't remember the specific details around that or where there was any video are related to that but we could we could get that information gary if i remember that incident correctly it was a younger sibling of a student who came out to meet the bus and the parent wasn't necessarily aware that the child had come out and didn't see where that kid had gone and that they were accidentally hit by the bus so it wasn't one of our students getting off the bus i don't think they were
143hit by the bus that they're hit by a car collection too now but i i just i don't remember the specifics scott said he thought they could have been hit by a car and that's possible that they got a around the bus or something but somehow that child got hit but it was uh it wasn't really related to the it was more like a a toddler type kid really young kid that got out and away from a parent out of a parent's eye yeah i think you're right he didn't fall in the district anyway carol can you tell me about the the school-wide expectations where they had the three words did you say each school has their own and yes and then each year they develop their own expectations how do so how who how
144what's the involvement do we involve the staff the students how do we create the three words and then and then communicate them sure mike do you want to talk about how old hill did that i can speak a little bit from experience and also what other elementary schools do is that your leadership team are often very much part of that along with possibly your ptsa so oak hill is an example has historically been respect for self respect for others and respect for environment and i think if you went to any of the other elementary schools you would see the same flavor maybe different words and then as carol talked about utilizing those three goals that you're going to have you're going to apply those across all of your settings so what is respect for self
145and others look like in the bathroom area what does respect for self and others look like as you're playing on the playground equipment so do they change they certainly do but the more that you can have the same words and the the same goals happening the more likely you'll have as children move through the grade levels that they'll be able to embrace them and as they move then on to south or north they'll see something fairly similar thank you i liked it it was i like the categories and you know how this applies wherever i am in the building outside the building now i'll speak for a couple of seconds on one of the earliest slides on here you had 43 office discipline referrals and then you said per day and that made me look
146at that slide completely differently but can you talk a little bit about what the 43 office discipline referrals would consist of and what's in that number and again again it's like four per school right no that would be four across all of the sites so 43 per day and if i can go back to the slate or slide excuse me that might help me in explaining because i'll have it in front of me so as you as you look at this slide in 2018 just up in the top left-hand corner those high school slides for 2018 all high schools averaged about when you took all high schools the sum would be 52 per day so you would divide that across the five high schools um or as we were speaking to a little bit earlier
147was mckinley but those that was included in that data set so there would be an average of 10 at each of the schools because you're dividing that by five sites as you move across and you see this is where it gets a little bit more challenging at all of our elementary schools which includes eight sites because kennedy is included as we disaggregate the kindergarten through fifth grade because donna helped with this they averaged five across all schools as i mentioned when presenting that slide as you can imagine during september 7th september 8th september 9th at the beginning of the school year you don't have as many office and office discipline referrals as a school principal or as a building administrator or building leader so those that's a mean number that's an average number so as
148you move into the school year oftentimes you'll see data that we presented throughout the years where october or november our office discipline referrals may increase or after we come back from the winter holiday break we go through our pbis matrix again in january and then you might see an elevation of office discipline referrals in february so what you're seeing there is just an average of school administrators work with kids for office discipline referrals per day and now if i can jump in for the since you were talking about the high school specifically since it most worked most directly with that recently um so you know the 43 from last year you know so you take 12 at each of the you know mckinley tech and apollo we had just talked with justin as gallery today
149and he said the most common are attendance and cell phone technology violations right so then we so you ask what is in that it could be anything however our data will show you its attendance violation so either truancy or skipping so even truancy right a child isn't coming to school for whatever reason that is an office discipline referral or technology misuse cell phones and now at the elementary level what you'd probably see a lot of incidents would be related to non-compliance but as carol so eloquently illustrated oftentimes that is non-compliance that has occurred over and over with a parent or with a child who might be really struggling that day most often time a teacher is going to work with a student who might be struggling with non-compliance kind of in that yellow column that
150carol had went over related to how we work with students each day but if students continue to maybe struggle another piece you might see at an elementary level is some physical contact or physical aggression where students might be a little bit more aggressive out on the playground in some of those areas but those all end up getting included as a referral as an office discipline referral but as you would know it on the following slide we're going to respond to those very often often with reteaching school-wide expectations which is synonymous with what carol is talking about for our pbis matrix as a school principal you're going to be utilizing that pbis matrix as you're re teaching students what the expectations are i i know when we redid the when we rewrote the discipline policy it's
151been several years now but i remember a lot of really long meetings and a lot of really long discussions about student behavior in the classroom and how it just it's not acceptable to have any student disrupting the classroom and taking classroom time away from the students who are there to learn and especially not on a continuous basis and so i know we went back and forth and back and forth on exactly how those issues should be solved whether that student should stay in the classroom whether they should be taken out of the classroom and i see a lot of that here i don't know that we've ever really come to a conclusion on that and i know that special ed laws and and statutes get in the way too because you have to do certain
152things with students that have ieps and that was an issue that we went around and around with back in that first time but can you go to the slide where the pbis pyramid was uh this this pyramid to me um you know and again i'm going to say that there was a large disparity there was a large disparity in the number of black students that were disciplined versus the percentage of black students in the schools i mean there was a dis disproportionate a disparate application or a disparate number of students that were being suspended or removed from classrooms and but then again i go back to those discussions that we had and really no student no matter their color they don't have the right to disrupt a classroom and keep a teacher from teaching so
153something has to be done about it and so it that becomes it becomes really difficult because you can't just say well you're you know because of your color you can stay that doesn't work i think we have to remove students based on their behavior but this this pyramid right here when i look at it i i flip it over and then i put it side by side with maslow's pyramid and i kind of go those kids that are in the top here are in the bottom of maslow's they're the ones where they're fighting for safety they they don't know if they're going to get fed over the weekend they're not worried about behaving in a classroom that's the last thing on their mind the green portion on this pyramid are the ones that are in
154the very top on maslow's and that they're coming to school and they want to learn they're engaged they want to learn that those kids don't have a chance in heck of going to the principal's office because they're going to do whatever they're asked to do and and told there's no confrontation on from those kids so to me those two work side by side i mean it's just flip mazda flip this one over or flip mass those over and that's what it is and unfortunately in our district we have with the demographics of our district we all i mean i think that we could all agree that most students who are in the lower levels of the maslow pyramid a lot of those students come from low pover they come from poverty they live in inner
155cities poverty situations mom and dad may have problems beyond their control uh if there is a mom or a dad or who knows i mean they may be homeless they who who knows but there's a lot of kids in inner city situations that are living in those lower levels of maslow's pyramid there's a lot of the the kids who are living in the top aren't living in those situations they're living in situations that are much different and so i guess i don't know where i'm going with this other than a lot of the black population within our schools live in those inner city environments and poverty is much more pervasive in our black community than it is in our white community and when you have if we're looking for applying that to a maslow's type
156pyramid and we're saying that a lot of those kids are they're in survival mode there would be no question in my mind as to why they would appear more in office discipline referrals or in suspensions and and acting out within our schools then to me that would be an expectation almost and so although there's a disparate application i think there are there's a foundation found there's foundational reasons as to why that disparate application of those things are there if i'm saying that in the right way but that's my thoughts on that anyway natalie first of all i want to say we saw this presentation a couple months ago at the achievement committee and you all have done some really great work to take our advice and especially the books on the bookshelf thing that that
157made a lot of sense carol thank you i have a lot of thoughts first of all i really appreciate that you put in there that beginning part about what's happening in our world and it just like i was reading over this and reading over it and reading over it last night and then texted lori and said like i'm literally tearing up because people are hurting and people that we're already hurting are hurting even more in our community and in our in our world and we all know that but it comes out and and how our kids are responding and for folks that need more mental health you know for some folks that just isn't even an option whether they don't have health insurance or whatever it's just such speaking of desperate outcomes who gets to
158access mental health is is uh is a whole another ball game what i do love is that kids can access mental health through our schools and i've seen that it's not based on your health insurance or on how much you make or don't make and so i really appreciate that part i have some questions so i saw on your responses page of here's what we here's how we responded to major odrs that our apology was at 282 so up in my house apology is the thing that happens every time that somebody hurts somebody else um and we talk about the five points of apology and you know like you don't just say sorry brother you know like you know you have to say what happened how are you going to change um so what surprises
159me i guess that 282 times is based on the re like it could it be apology and another thing great question part of the challenge with skyward which is our database system is when you choose an action as a building principle or as a support for students who are struggling with an odr you can only choose one so oftentimes you may choose the one that makes either the most application at the time i would say if you talk to all principals in our school district a conference or a phone call to a parent is going to happen all the time or a contact's going to occur yet as an item on our bar chart it would be a lower number it's because prior to that they have done a restorative practice circle or prior to
160that they have re-taught social school-wide expectations so that's kind of why okay great thank you i'm wanting to make sure that when we give lunch detention does that take um our younger kids away from recess the lunch detention data is primarily second secondary i don't i don't believe across our elementary buildings i can i can i can say that it's not occurring it used to occur but we we've really tried to pull back on that um i do believe it it would be possible that you might see a classroom teacher utilize that as an intervention with a student on their own um to be transparent that you might see a classroom teacher do that for a day to say stay in and we're going to work on some homework that you may have missed but
161it is a utilization of an action that we would do now with elementary students we very much acknowledge the need for our kindergarteners through fifth graders to be outside having fun getting their energy wonderful um when our students go to in-school suspension because i i see that basically we've traded percentages of oss for iss which makes sense to me that we want our school our kids in school that's the whole point of what we're doing here right instead of uh out of school when they're in in school suspension can you remind me on the main things that they're doing there sure so um usually it's a break from and typically at secondary it's a break from the class that they had the incident in usually and so they might if an incident occurred in science
162class they may be out of that science class the next day but they are also responsible for that academic piece so they might be in schoology and doing their assignments they might also be working with someone on the behavior support team to get feedback on what has occurred okay great um next to touch on the thing i texted lori about the free and reduced lunch percentages for out of school and in school suspension if we can pull those up this is where i just stared at it for a long time and it reminded me of when our preschool for all folks came in and talked about how they are they're going to be working with the whole family for either job loss or low in employment let me just say i understand this isn't our
163role i understand we are to teach kids you know and um we're not necessarily equipped or it's not even our job to help families who are unemployed or underemployed and unemployment is really low so it seems that underemployment is driving frl pre-reduced lunch here in our community i guess what i want to say is there has to be more than just us that's looking at this like i just feel like like our cities you know our our mayors our city councils our um our counties i know they know these things but it's like this is the reality and then if our these are students that graduate then it's not really a wonder why then that some of the crime rates happen like this is this is just a continuation of when kids are on that
164lower level of basil's hierarchy of needs they continue into adults that are on that level as well so i don't have the answer here if i did that'd be awesome but i guess i'm just putting a call out there like this represents our community and we we need more than the school district really taking a look at what poverty is doing to our community um and you know the the question i think al brings up a great point why are black students more likely to be in poverty than than um students that are white and i think we have to acknowledge history there and the reality of how many how many hundreds of years folks who are awake got to amass wealth versus versus black families and that's that's what we're dealing with today the
165last question on that is so i see 80 percent of our in-school and out-of-school suspension kids um are in free and reduced lunch so how does that measure up to our percentage of how many kids in the district rfrl my last estimate or what i heard was 54 percent but i would look to miss skalaroo to confirm that number of how many children or families are on free and reduced lunch and i know that's varied through the last few years mike would you say i actually don't have those percentages right in front of me and i don't know if gary gets those regularly i could pull up the defense we just had confirmation back here from donna sorry amy we just had confirmation donna's sitting right here we just had a look behind us and
166she said it's 57 currently so i just want to point that out that's a huge gap 57 to 80 and so yes we need to talk about why the same thing that the state came after us for those are still issues and we're still dealing with those but i i guess i don't i i don't see us as much we talk about all the time and we do as much as we can but sometimes i feel like even the state is not really saying what's happening here that it's both and that it may be a student's color it may be that they're an iep and their frl so it's those it's a triple threat sort of a thing okay um in regards to social emotional learning i just want to point out here that social
167sel or social emotional learning is one of the things that some folks who are running for our school board and other school boards around our community are saying is evil and when you look at that wonderful graph that you love that i love that's literally the soft skills that employers are like hey we need your help on this because when our students are graduating they're not having these and so i just want to point out that we're that's all on that um restorative practices so thank you so much for that in-depth look of how it's going to be scaffolded um can you explain to me how the trainers then will train the staff at their schools is that like in our first weeks or how will that happen the original trainer that we had in
168june we'll be back and i believe the date is either october 12th or october 14th i have one of those dates are popping in my head and so he will be back to train the same groups of folks on that circle part and then it's going to be a discussion at the schools about what does this look like in our building they did some of that in june already about how they roll that out and then they'll make determinations during their professional development time their their plt time perhaps on wednesdays to utilize that time maybe it's a faculty meeting and each school will probably do that just a little bit different how they'll roll that out to their teams that's carol i have two more um so you you touched on the fact that cap
169and rise are going to be used a lot utilized a lot for students dealing with physical aggression issues so i know that that is one of the hard lines for us that you know uh physical harm is immediate iss or oss so how will that work um is it that the child gets is uh in school or out of school suspension and then they go to cap or rise or back to the school is that kind of the the path and that's exactly what we are developing now we're designing that pattern much like the flow chart that we saw for south we were designing a flow chart too for schools to make decisions about who does go-to cap and how long is it is it a three-day stay is it a five-day stay you know
170what is that level of offense and then how do we figure out what that student needs in order to get them back to their general insight so more to come on that for sure exciting i wish we didn't have kids that had to go there but i'm glad that that we do have multiple multi-system tier of support whatever that thing is um mtss there you go the last thing i want to say is something that i can hear some folks in our community say that either haven't been in schools for a long time or haven't had kids in schools for a long time usually is the folks all here say this in door knocking or community events um like a one-off like we have to get the kids out of school that don't want to
171learn and i'm just going to address that to any community folks who are listening or any folks who might have that kind of idea about our kids that there are no kids that don't want to succeed zero every single 10 000 one of our students want to 60 but like al said when they come to school fighting for basic survival the last thing they care about is the science test so as a community we we need help as a school district we need help as a community to everyone come alongside our folks who are struggling because otherwise this is this is what we'll see um yeah so i just thank you for continuing to be honest about where we are and then continuing to take those steps forward and at every turn we believe that
172kids deserve all kids deserve a wonderful education and this is what this looks like so thank you yeah oh dr green i got a little confused which happens often lately but when you're talking about the students in the red with ieps and can you talk closer to the mic why not oh you're talking about students in the red with ieps and students in the red without ieps i'm assuming iep means special education correct or not yep individual educational program yeah and so the students who are in the red without that are not don't have that um category of special ed um but though as you talked about them um you were talking about it sounded like you were saying or using the same kind of strategy supports for all of the students who wind up
173in the red is that did i was that correct yes and i will say and so the kids that are in the so-called the red zone at that tip of that triangle are kids that have um six or more office disciplinary referrals typically so there could be a student on an iep that is in that zone as well because of that number or it could be a student who is not on an iep at this time and has six disciplinary referrals and really dependent upon you know we look at every individual student and so they might come to that multi-tiered system of i'm going to call it success team and um in and that team looks at where is that student functioning behaviorally where are they functioning academically socially emotionally and then make a decision
174is this a student that we really feel is um we can't really move out of that red zone without some significant support and then we would do an evaluation for special education to see if there is something else to see if there is a disability as a barrier for them and so yes they would initially be receiving those same kinds of support but a student on an iep has a case manager and so that case manager is following all of those pieces that academic that behavior that social very closely where a student on an uh not on an iep might be followed more closely by someone who is on that behavior support team so a school counselor a behavior resource specialist maybe a greater minnesota mental health they'd be followed more in that direction but
175both are receiving the support that you indicated right it sounded like that maybe that what you've said is that you you have to move them into a different kind of a category the other one thing the concept of free and reduced lunch and the concept of race in discipline issues and maslow's thing is there a way and this is for donna to figure out if all of the students are in that category they're all not failing some are some aren't is there some way to figure out and i'll tell you why the thing with maslow's whatever his name was uh i recall in college looking at a very different model applied to african-american people we're americans of african slave descent because the hierarchy maslow's hierarchy was not necessarily functional for us and so that in
176spite of some of the craziness some people still succeeded and that was trying to help us figure out a way to study the kids who were successful in spite of and see if there was something about them that would might be useful for other students who were in the same category with the same set of general circumstances but who were not being successful i was at a recruiting session at the university of northern iowa they were pulling two students from our school one from apollo one from tech they offered both of them a full ride division one scholarship for football one of the students had a scholarship offer from somewhere else and took that one the other student had that singular offer and refused it um and the point was it he was afraid to
177leave his homies full ride division one scholarship and most people don't really understand what that means but it's big money so is there i mean if as we look at our research concepts i know we should continue to look at what the barriers are to some students and try to study those who fail who are are failing but there are some people in spite of bull whips who learn to read anyway there are some people in spite of all of this craziness and all of this crap still managed to succeed and their a discussion with them might be helpful for developing some strategies to help other students who might be like them the other point i'll jump to something else is that we often i've seen [Music] student voice in this today four or five
178different times and i wondered if the student where the student voice was in developing our mission statement in in fostering safe welcoming school climates in developing those things those words and if the student voice is more important than the parent voice who's not living in the school or the and maybe just uh to say yes i agree with a self and the safe welcoming school well some people don't agree with it obvious based on their actions the other is the restorative concept maybe use offense instead of defense that we that we move into the school with restorative concepts before a problem arises say this is how we operate here this is what we'd like to do this is how we think we can help you be uh do whatever and be a better student or
179be a better whatever you want to be there's a there's a sense of hopelessness in some free and reduced lunch students hopelessness which is in concept of broke is different than poverty poverty quote for for those in it is forever and you get what you can get now and don't worry about saving for later or practicing or trying to get stuff going on we have to flip that over i think and maybe try and figure out a way to use the strategies we have in the beginning as offense uh because restorative justice is uh you know i was in corrections when that we first started that it was tough because the people were in a hole we got we got a guy that's stealing from people and and in a bloody victim in a room
180talking about forgive me you know and the victim doesn't have a chance in that one you know you better uh and so it's just a matter of saying if we can if we can with our because we have them in elementary school and i looked at the talahi thing why don't we just carry we could just carry that through to south and re-teach it and especially to tech and apollo this is what we'd how we'd like you to act this is how we'd like you to treat other people why is that such a i mean i and and to ask them is is it agreeable to you to try that it is it possible that might stop a fight in in and i don't know uh uh you know i've been out of school a
181long time and and those days are well my fighting days were are long gone but i still was in situations where that occurs but but it just uh we've been doing this for so long that it might be time to just look at a the possibility of doing something a little bit different no not a little bit different really different and see if something else works and that if we study success and then figure out what's different about the kid who's in the same pot same place but is successful and why and ask them why and that's where the student voice might come in we had those student voices that tech and apollo or a tech we did anyway and uh it got thrown out i mean those kids explained exactly why they were successful
182[Music] stuff here and i'm going to give it to you in in you know it's kind of ramblings that i do so i don't want to keep rambling thank you dr green thank you al i have a question um a lot of the data that was in this is averages over the course of the school year but my observations there are certain times of the year where i mean you can almost pinpoint the weeks where the majority of the fights have occurred and a lot of the violence occurs within the schools do we pinpoint that and change our strategies surrounding those weeks especially in the high schools yes absolutely and joel's back there nodding his head so i would even invite joel to come to come share that as well um but you know for
183we have been very uh deliberate about uh making sure that all of us our administrators particularly our support staff are present the weeks before and after break we know that that's a a high behavior time right when when students know that there's going to be some destabilization in their environments we also make some adjustments depending on the time of the year um to passing so we might say no passing at the you know the first or last 10 minutes of a class just to try to to eliminate some of the congestion in the hall so that students don't leave that last 10 minutes and then not find their way back so that there's there's less of that um joel what else might you add to that i see you back there yeah just some other
184examples we we see a lot as we end the year right when we get close to that end of the year um i can speak specifically for south we were super intentional around how we dismiss at the end of the day i'm going to a staggered dismissal to slow the flow of students into the hallway um you know dr putnam shared we went to even limiting passes at certain times of the day unless they were you know emergency needs just to again eliminate those opportunities for students to engage in in physical or or destructive behavior joel can i ask did you do anything differently at specific times of the year around positive supports i can think of a few that you guys do consistently so i just was curious yeah you know we look at
185um engaging in the in the positive side of it around the end of trimesters where we uh celebrate our students with student of the month celebrations where we invite families to engage our academic achievers at the end of the end of the trimesters with positive um grading and reporting in that way are there others that i'm missing that you're thinking of just knowing that like november and december tend to be some challenging months i know you guys always do some school-wide events um like schoolwide like turkey bingo or yeah we even engaged in december because the summer's always a hard month we called it fun summer and just had fun dress-up days every day just something to keep kids focused on that positive something to engage them in a fun and positive way um so
186every day had a had a new theme leading into the winter break zach and then natalie where i need you to hang on there a second so [Music] probably the top concern that parents and community members approached me about the past years been north junior high from little bias that live the neighborhood that's where my kids will will attend and you were at south um similar behaviors and junior highs are a mess everywhere you go we know this um but in your opinion having been through it what would you say you've seen that works or that we've done different recently that you have some faith in that's what i think a lot of parents need to hear right now absolutely if it's okay i'm going to share what we've piloted in the last year um
187i was able in my first year as principal to have an assistant principal come from talahi and talahi had implemented a uh a proactive approach or uh um i should say this an approach that uh that had us push in rather than a pull-out model of student i mean we implemented that itself um using our new database system called educlimber um so now if the teacher sees something in the classroom before it gets to that point of having to have the student leave the space um it takes about we've timed it um it takes less than 20 seconds to put a request in and that when that teacher puts in that request because they see something happening in that space it immediately shoots out a notification to myself and our entire administrative behavior team's phones
188because we always have those with us and so with our walkie talkie it's our expectation that within 30 seconds to a minute someone is saying i've got that one right and we have a member of our team going directly to that space and intervening before it gets to that point where the teacher's like i can't do it anymore um and and we saw um such a positive interaction it allows the teacher to keep that relationship which is always hard and you know when we do those restoratives quite often but we we noticed we didn't have to do quite as many because we were able to intervene in that moment and curve that behavior before it went too far we call it the student support request form at south junior high and our teachers engage through
189like i said educlaimer it's a system we use and yeah when it's built into your culture what happens is the students know that they're not going to be able to escape the situation or that adult necessarily and for some children that's what they're looking for and they know that if mr heikam's going to be responding i'm going to have to go out with mrs potter to solve this problem it decreases the likelihood that maybe i'm possibly going to have that continued misbehavior so there is great success and we've seen that at the elementary level the other really nice piece is that because we're using that education climber system um all that that is still tracked so while you may not see it in skyward as office discipline referrals we can still pull up that student
190we can see every one of those requests that was made we can we can look at trends to see is it all with the same teacher or is it random across the board is it all for the same behavior and our our mtss team that meets weekly at the building level is reviewing that data we can pull up our top ten um we can we can give a range so maybe a kiddo has a whole bunch but they haven't had any since october right and now we're into march that that kiddo may still show up on our list but we can narrow that time frame to see who's struggling right now whose needs aren't being met right now and how can we respond to that student the other thing i just would want to add
191about that that we one of our new protocols when we look at decisions or what are the unintended consequences of any decision and i think a positive unintended consequence when we set out with or when joel and his team set out with this is we don't have they don't have urgent calls for help over the radio right and so and everybody hears that everybody within eight feet hears that call for for this this this and that that can create its own um driver in terms of adult response and adult energy and adult you know as adults we shape the behavior of the students around us and so you know that it's a very calm environment because they get it on their phone it's as simple as someone saying i got that one and that's all
192we hear on the radio and we know someone's going the rest of our secondaries are adopting or looking to adopt this model this year also i think probably the last point i would make is that while probably the majority of us in the room enjoyed when we knew winter break was coming or when we knew spring break was coming for many of our students and that's across all levels get anxious or worried or concerned when they see breaks coming from for multiple reasons and oftentimes we'll see some of the behaviors i'll elevate during that time too so we're very conscious of that across all staff and bargaining groups so that we know that we're being caring especially during those times the students are struggling with what made to come for those one or two weeks
193off where they're not with their teachers and other staff we do an extra push during those times to make sure those needs are being met i can easily say that all of our secondary schools have food pantries or we call them the school store right but enough everything's free um at south specifically i can tell you we have a qr code that links to a google form that keeps it anonymous for that student well it keeps it between the student and and one of our team members right it's not out there for everyone but a student can say these are the things i need and by the end of the day we hand them a bag and it's a simple it's it's they don't have to go to anybody that gets accessed everywhere and we
194do a really hard push making sure that qr code is visible so they can scan it with their phone scan it with their chromebook and have access to that specifically around those it's available all the time but we do a hard push during those other hard times he has teachers in his school that have cupboards that kids come to because without any forms just show up because i was subbing in there was a couple kids that came to the same place every day and said whatever the teacher said was okay they went to the cupboard and got what they needed so it's it's always we have good people that are that meet needs in a lot of different ways move on thank you very much next we're moving on to proposed revised board policy 698
195which is formerly 614 and 618 this is the second reading comprehensive balanced approach to district-wide student assessment plan and we have donna roper executive director of research assessments and enrollment and laurie posh executive director of learning and teaching okay superintendent putnam chair has school board members happy to be here this evening this is the second reading of the district wide comprehensive balanced assessment plan policy and you may remember it's been a while but june 15th we were here presenting to you on the rationale for why we are hoping to adopt this new policy again it establishes the responsibility for creating the components of the district-wide comprehensive balanced assessment plan and establishes parameters for elements of the plan i'm not going to read through the whole thing but i'm just going to remind you about some
196of the impetus for this as we think about the levels of assessment in our system and we think about what the research says about learning theory and coupling that with our current assessment plan we know that a comprehensive and balanced approach is something our strategic plan asks us to do or invites us to do as well as directions that state states are moving towards and that the research supports and so we are hoping to get your approval this evening and with that it will kick off the work of a district-wide assessment design team that is made up of representatives from all the different stratas of learning in the organization from pre-k all the way to high school and the alternative programs we want to include our students voice as well in this process this team
197will be providing a deliverable at the end of the year that it will be in the shape of a biennial assessment plan um and so i i leave that big picture there for you and i invite any questions that you might have on this policy and hopefully it's clear enough now i do have some questions on this one um and it has to come back for a third reading so we can't sign off on it tonight um i have to apologize last time i didn't get a chance to read it before i normally i do and i don't know what i was thinking but i didn't read through it before and it's really hard to follow it when you're watching it being presented but today i kind of i went back and i was reading
198through this and i kept asking myself why this needs to be a policy and why it isn't just an administrative procedure instead it just it seemed to me like there was so much in here that's two-year cycles and this and that and it's like that's more administrative than it is policy and so i going back to what the purpose of the policy is i mean i don't maybe convince me that it needs to be a policy i guess is what i'm saying because i'm not so sure that it does but then if you're removing a couple policies maybe it does so i think the um the main impetus for creating this was um really to push us to think more about purpose and use and how we are [Music] reviewing sort of comprehensively progress and
199success and growth of of learning you know for our students um there was policy 614 was just the testing plan it was literally that was related to you know state mandated procedures around administering standardized tests and um we know that a coherent comprehensive consistent efficient balanced assessment plan includes assessments all the way from the classroom all the way up to the state assessment and that there's kind of a through line and and so adding um a policy that recognizes the need for us to consider um the whole picture not just the standardized data points but in addition to that performance assessments perhaps common summative assessments perhaps other data points that um [Music] that our professional educators might value that that matter perhaps in telling of the picture about how our kids are doing and so
200um the impetus for this policy was just to say we really want to be able to take a comprehensive look at the entire system at all the different levels of assessment to make sure that we have the right data that we need at all those different levels to inform to evaluate you know and and answer the questions that come up from various stakeholder groups um there are other districts that have a similar policy to this we're not the first district to have a policy like this um and you know i the biennial the purpose of it being biennial is that so often when you're trying to measure growth over time it takes time so we we would we would need to look at you know the measures across time to know are they giving us
201good good data i guess that's where i get a little bit lost is when normally policies aren't biennial normally policies are a continuum and the biennial portion is the procedure the administrative procedure that would be associated with that policy and when that stuff is in the policy and there was a lot of we're going to do this or we're going to try this we're going to do this and then it's like okay well if we want to change that now it's got to come back for three readings and it kind of locks us into a specific way of doing things versus a general statement of what we're trying to do and then giving the freedom and flexibility of developing procedures on how we're going to accomplish that um if that makes any sense i i
202don't know so the policy yeah i would say the policy is is not biennial but the plan that we produce would be something we would bring every every two years instead of every year primarily because of you know needing to give any new measure that we might introduce enough time to know if it's it's really meeting our needs so that that that's where the biennial plan comes in the policy itself is just the policy that is establishing you know components of it that we're going to be comprehensive and look systemically and and like i said there are other districts across the state that have adopted a policy similar to this in place of just the testing procedures which are embedded in here natalie yeah i had some similar feelings to al but then i think
203what i looked at was the fact that this is if we would not have this you'd have to go back to two policies 6 14 and 6 18. like this is combining one to one policy right taking 614 and 618 out of the mix so and putting this one in there instead i think 618 is one that we probably will need to bring back because the work that this committee this design team does will work on defining and tackling some of the the language in so 618 is not being necessarily replaced 614 is the work that we do under 698 is going to help us really solidify what we want in 618. that okay that makes me even more confused then because 618 is assessment of student achievement so we'd still have that and then
204we would have where is this one that we're doing today what is this one called yeah and part of it is we we can't yank something without having something in place right so we aren't going to remove what we're currently doing we're going to continue with the plan we have while we do this work of creating the comprehensive plan um you know in addition to that so but okay so here's my question so 618 is assessment of student achievement six this new one is comprehensive balanced assessment plan so there's a so you're wanting to delineate the difference between the achievement of students and the way we assess the achievement of students can i add a little bit um as we were looking at these policies and 6 14 and 6 18 came up for review
205and donna brings to us a wealth of knowledge in the um the use of assessments to really inform our instruction so as we looked at 614 and we looked at 618 we realized that there actually was a lot of procedural pieces in those two policies so we wanted to design a new system of looking at our assessments we wanted to really take that comprehensive look of where are all of our policies at we know by statute we have to have a district assessment team so we wanted to make sure that we called that out in policy to make sure that we knew that we were establishing that district-wide assessment team as we looked at it a little bit further we realized that we couldn't really replace 618 at this time but that as we do
206the work we may come back and say there might be some tweaks to 618 or 618 might be a policy that we can get rid of because it's all covered in here so there are some as we begin the work there are some things that might appear procedural in here but really our guidance pieces that we want to make sure don't get lost in this work i don't know if that helps at all so it may be that 6 18 goes away but not today or it may be that it doesn't go away it changes to something else or so okay all right i understand that thank you and so you understand that i'm not questioning what you're trying to do and i'm not questioning the validity of what's here i'm questioning whether or not
207you want to have it bound by policy or if you want to have the flexibility of having more of an administrative procedure so that you can make changes on the fly i did catch that out yeah okay yeah and i think what we decided is to begin this work to make sure it's really comprehensive we actually did want a lot of it in policy to start and and this might be outlined but hey tracy you're really good at writing policies have you had a chance to look at it or have has tracy had a chance to look through just to see if this fits within what would be considered policy versus administrative procedure i have not worked with the team on this particular policy but i'm happy to do that i wonder if that wouldn't
208be a good idea just for another set of eyes i i i'm not trying to make it difficult like i really i want it to work appreciate that and happy to happy to set up time with tracy i value very much the perspective so i think you know some of us had the same question so donna has gone through this many times with us explaining it to us too so i think that's a good idea okay that's all i got thanks okay thank you then we're moving on to our next policy we have proposed revised board policy 203.2 this is the first reading order to 202 sorry skipped one trying to move us along faster board policy 202 first reading school board officers and are you presenting this one yes thank you chair has this
209will probably be the last time that i'm presenting board policies as we transition this responsibility decay but we began these before key take came on board the other thing i want to say about the 200s is that all of the 200s govern a board operations and board business so our administration was asked by board development to to review these and bring these forward to you which we are happy to do but please know that there are any recommendations we made make or simply those and they are here for your discussion and the ease of your governance capacity so 202 discusses school board officers and there are just a few minor changes uh the first you will see on page one where we are the the name of the the procedural manual the owl was just
210is inaccurate and it's called the administrator handbook and so that's where all procedures are kept and so for accuracy sake we are recommending that be corrected um it goes through the responsibilities and everything else aligns with msba the only thing that was it was interesting was that there's a a different date in terms of clerk responsibilities msba says september 15. our board policy said november 30. between amy jan and i we did some research and were unable to to identify why november 30 was selected um september 15 has been the on the long-standing date for msba and so barring no other explanation for why that might might be the case we are recommending that the board aligns with the msba policy otherwise there are no additional recommended changes okay we'll move on to the next
211one now we have proposed uh revised sport policy 203.2 for first reading order of the regular school board meeting and dr mike rivard good evening chair haws dr putnam and members of the board i'm going to quickly review our board policy 203.2 which is the order of regular school board meetings uh we do not have major recommendations for changes what we do have is within the order under roman numeral 3 that it reflects what our board is doing and that was outlined as and shared with you so you'll notice just a few highlighted areas that reflect the order of our agendas any questions or concerns you want to roll into the next one then proposed revised board policy 205 first reading open closed special and emergency meetings i sure can this one there is only
212one area and it's on page seven and it's related to our opportunities for our coaches to respond when they are being non-renewed our previous policy was not totally in line with msba's recommendation to include this last sentence under 7b indicating that the existence of a parent complaint must not be the sole reason for the school board not to renew a coaching contract it is outlined later as part of minnesota statute and we've included that in our recommendation to the board any questions or concerns related to that one [Music] no thank you okay then next we have um proposed revised board policy 206 public participation in school board meetings complaints about persons at school board meetings and data privacy considerations first reading and our way back to you again yes thank you so much um 206
213has a few recommended adjustments uh the first being under the general statement of time it is it is the recommendation that we change the word citizens to people just to be inclusive of all members of our community who may want to provide input to the to the board so you'll see that represented throughout not only 206 but any other places in the 200s where it is noted and we 206 goes through the right to privacy it defines where where that is um and then the up the public's opportunity to be heard so that of course addresses the procedural items for agendas so in those wishing to come to speak to the board we do have a recommended change under procedure agenda a1 that rather than requiring a person to provide their name and address for
214safety or privacy's sake that the person would instead provide their city of residence and again that follows under number two or instead of saying that they would just say their name and their city of residence and that that would be an expectation for people coming to public input and then under nine just some clarification that um that due to the need to maintain data privacy and we'll see what the penalties are for violation of the school board and the school district of data privacy in a moment it's very serious that public input is not live broadcast because then we can't take back any of those potential violations of data privacy rather the public input whether provided in writing or verbal would be summarized at each meeting by the board chair so currently the chair provides
215a summary of written public input we would just be adding that verbal piece so for the transparency sake that folks who are coming for that public input our community would still know what was the the public input was provided but then we aren't at risk of violating data privacy laws um so then the policy goes through complaints open forum and then here of course is the violation for those data privacy concerns so those are the recommended changes so the one about the chair summarizing that would be something new that we aren't currently doing that would be correct okay so it would take place as it usually does and then madam chair would take a summary of what people said and what might have come in we need to be a comment section and then right
216if you guys if you um adopt this we need to work out the mechanism of what that looks like um so that whether it's you know the written input is is summarized ahead of time because chair the chair has had the opportunity to receive that and then um to share it back out we need to figure out how to operationalize um something that's happening live time while a chair is trying to run a meeting so whether it's one of the administration providing a summary to the chair to read or if we then provide that the following meeting and that operational piece still needs to be determined and we are certainly open to the board's guidance whatever you are looking for in that regard um but um that would of course be at your discretion is
217this for transparency sake is this what we're hoping to that is correct okay thank you changing citizens to people is recommended by administration and board development okay um are we allowing anyone from anywhere to speak so if someone comes up from the twin cities to speak at our meeting on a particular issue we're gonna allow them to speak or you have you have the board has yes okay so we're not going to go with residents or at this time we have not um required that i know even as recently as as at the last board meeting we i think we had uh someone providing public input who did not live in in our district so in the past um we have not done that i think um you know this has been in board policy
218that that people would share even their address um and we you know that hasn't been practiced so perhaps even just adding that so that people are are identifying where they're coming from might be helpful to you as you consider input yeah i think the reason that that that the address was in there was in case there was a a lot of i'm just going to say i can envision a time when the board does something and it becomes national news and there's you know 50 people that come up from the twin cities to protest and they all want to come up and give input at our meetings and and that isn't really what we're here for we're here to hear from the residents of our district so i'm wondering if residents wouldn't be a better
219choice of word than people and you know and and i don't think that residence is any less you know i don't you could say that it would be discriminatory again they're not discriminatory but it would be not taking into consideration homeless students or homeless families or something but we're also asking them to give their city of residence so we're violating our own our own stuff right there but i guess i would prefer to see residents who wish to have a subject discussed we can always listen to whoever we want to so if someone comes up and they're not a resident of our district we could still listen to them if we choose to but if it's uh if there's a reason why we don't want to you know if there's a reason for for just
220for the sake of our meeting and the the ability for us to conduct business that we'd be able to have something in there that would not just say people anybody come on um we got i think we're jumping on this dr green and then scott and then i have a comment i just would suggest that we look at what other districts do uh because the uh the the change right now would send up a antenna and uh since we haven't really had problem with it in the past um maybe the concern would be that we are careful in what we do so that we don't you know that we're boring it changed in what from citizens to people or oh people i think the purpose of going from citizen to people is so that people
221because we have a number of people in our community who are not citizens residence is a better word than citizen because it does suggest local people takes it a step further so i i think resident but that we don't have to deny somebody the opportunity to say to tell us something they want to i think the real concern is that we not set up a situation where we're sending people notice that you can't talk to us by saying uh well no i don't know i think i'd expand it to resident and then see how that goes if somebody wants to say we're not letting people from california come and talk to us let's ride with that and see what happens currently we're asking for address publicly i think asking for address is okay but city
222is sufficient publicly i think the way it was written it was like there was two requests but the first request for address privately would be good at least we can get in touch with people if we have something to follow up on but uh the public exposure uh city is enough we're we're not requiring people to give their address are we well just say their city i haven't been um i think we that that was a concern many some years ago that people were having to state their address which was put them kind of a vulnerable situation and i i don't think they should have to do that we could say um contact information you want to if you're looking for contact or give it's handed off to somebody and i know that gary tends
223to walk around and check with people who need responses i think it would be good to say provide contact information but not not not publicly but provide i i um on a side note i worry about the universally um applying a rule to whether or not we would allow somebody outside of our district to comment or not that we wouldn't be consistent or fair um and so maybe if it's who decides is it the chair or is it the full board and if it's a group of people that we would like they're agreeing with us or disagreeing with us i don't know if we would be able to be consistent um i'd like you to make the decision because you get the big bucks oh i think i on the surface i think it's well
224that would be good but is that is it just open-ended to be determined at that moment if we have 50 people show up then then we say uh-uh we did that with gymnastics we gave a certain amount of time but the idea of having someone state their address was to determine whether or not they were a resident of the district um right but we didn't dismiss them so we've still allowed it but then so they said what city they lived in and then we still allowed them to talk so despite they lived in cold spring or something okay um there is we typically have yes yes the limiting like the gymnastics or any other topic thereof that's somewhere in one of the policies too says that the share has the right to limit and we've
225universally applied the 30-minute rule and then also i wanted to add that we have number four okay that we have um sometimes we have co-ops so like gymnastics or wherever were you your child is participating in a co-op sport that involves direction 742 but you are not a resident and just adding that that is a little bit of a twist on that but if we changed it to the word resident what are we implying then instead of people person if you're saying we're implying that public input is for residents of the district if we want to make an exception and allow a sac rapids parent to speak about their daughter's gymnastics who because she she's on the crush athletic here on the crush gymnastics team i think that's absolutely fine the board can do that
226but it doesn't open the door for anyone to speak on anything at any time i think it's kind of forward thinking actually in the what's going out there on there that i kind of like the idea that we put resident in there then zach and then natalie just for what it's worth we we get to do what we want here as a board there are no state requirements for how boards conduct forums you saw a lot of changes that restricted this over the past year they got to do that and the data privacy thing has come up like with the address some still have it it was an msba policy some have taken it out so i'd throw that out there natalie i think if i think it's absolutely the wrong time to be putting
227only resident in here like i don't think personally i would never put president in there but what you see going on in some of our neighboring districts watching the becker school district board meeting yesterday um or monday whenever it was they have limited it to only becker residents because they did not want to hear advocates for the lgbtq community from statewide organizations so that i don't think that i know that's not who we are and yet i think limiting it only to residents really i would never support that because it limits the voice for advocates and i understand it also doesn't limit the voice for somebody i might not want to hear from but that's part of governing is hearing from people you do and don't want to hear from so it just really seems
228weird to me it seemed weird to me at the time when when the there's only 30 minutes available for the gymnastics folks like those parents were pissed off like i was sitting there because i was running for the board at the time and in my personal opinion as a board member we should never silence the community from talking to us and the community may not just be residents it may be someone who experienced something at a game an away game that feels they want to come talk to us for some reason you know and they live in a different area it just it doesn't seem we could do it but but doing it has such a very bad taste in my mouth for other folks who have done that it was also interesting in the
229becker school district meeting to know that there's the there's five minutes for the person to speak and then they allow board members to converse back and forth with them it's a whole other realm um i don't know if that's good or bad it just i'm just saying that we do it a little bit differently but i i would please like us to have people in there instead of residents for that reason just this second reading first reading let's uh let's let that summer for a while i think natalie's got good points we all do so maybe we'll simmer for a while we might come up with a better and and just a comment on why we don't engage in discussion with them is because we're not fully prepared to to have a thorough understanding of
230it so it would be doing it a disservice to be reactive rather than informed yep and i and i do want to say i was chair at the time i believe and i don't think we ever cut off gymnastics parents we let them go we let them go at one meeting for two and a half hours if i remember correctly we let them go and let them talk and talk and talk and talk and at some point you do cut it off because they're all saying the same thing they're all reading from the same script but i mean we don't we we don't have a history of cutting people off i agree but i will i am going to say though we've we've never cut people off that i don't never is a big word
231and i cut you off you know that the fact that we wouldn't allow groups from minneapolis to come up here and i mean that's part of the reason that i think that we would want to have that control is i don't want to get into that type of a situation with our board where it it almost takes the meeting out of our control because you can have groups coming forward that don't represent the people in your district they don't represent the parents and the students of your district they're representing a cause from a large metropolitan area or a national special interest group and there are a lot of ways to contact people within a district and it doesn't have to be through community input at one of our meetings and i just i don't want
232to lose control of a meeting and through something like that i think that we need to maintain that control i think we need to keep things local fairly local within what we do so i i see it completely different than you do natalie and that's not the first time that's ever happened [Laughter] natalie the tricky thing is and i'm just gonna use again our lgbtq community there are places like out front minnesota that are a statewide organization that the director may not live in our community but they're doing programming in our community and they're fighting for the rights of lgbtq folks which board that board was trying to silence so that that's why it just seems to me like where we need to take the good and the bad no matter where they're coming from
233if people really feel like they need to speak i think we should listen to them i i think i already said all that and i think who's really wise is less we should let it lie because we don't agree and that's just the way it goes it's not the first time les was right and i was wrong i think that um limiting the times to 30 minutes has been fairly applied um in different groups and in situations like clark field where it was like okay this is bigger than that then there were offsets of community input opportunities at tech high school and i don't know what that meeting was called um yeah okay i'm not turning my mic can i get a clarification on the the chair saying recapping all community input or community input
234that's not here right before the meeting starts i didn't understand that what we um the the gist of what where the recommendation is is that currently when you receive when we receive written input the can we keep going here is that the chair will like we'll provide like you'll summarize you say we've received written input um at the start of the meeting um for since we don't um publicly broadcast public input for transparency sake the recommendation was to say and in fact in in the board's policy it says the subject to be covered or the issue to be addressed so um if if the board were to enforce the policy and somebody comes and says my subject is x then during your recap of of community input you know the board received three written and
235two public statements but we don't have a community input button on the website anymore is that what you're saying no and maybe gary could comment on that um that was we did that during colvid right in the website well you can email us but i don't think we're [Music] do you know what i'm talking about or tracy yeah i think yeah i think i'm gonna defer to tanic she she has some information on this as well yes that was uh during uh covet when we had the meetings you know public input in person it had to be virtual so we did create a fillable form that the community could give input in that form and then it was shared to board members prior to the board meeting um so that they saw what the what
236the questions or the comments were and then just as if it were in person the questions uh were were sent to administration by the subject matter expert so now we need to write you yeah you're right shannon it's not that form is no longer on the website right so we no longer receive community input that is written i think so go ahead al i think a good compromise on this i i don't think that we're trying to hide from the public what what's being said in community input it has to do with not wanting to run into a violation of okay so wouldn't a fair compromise be that we don't live stream public input but we always have it available on our recordings because then we can go back and we can blank out anything
237that would be a violation of data privacy natalie i mean this is something that the community members have said that they're angry or frustrated about the lack of transparency they want to see what the public comments are i i don't love the idea of ever broadcasting the public comments just because somebody's gonna have to redact that and then that's gonna have to be checked by how many people because it's students and i don't love that idea i see why that idea might be the right idea but i'm i like better the idea of having the chair say this is the this is the summarization of what happened basically before the meeting these are the topics they're be like you used to say these are topics and they were moved on to administration we did that
238during covet yeah i would support that rather than live complicating the live streaming of it i've been on the board for 10 years and i don't have very call of data privacy violation at a public comment period so i i mean i don't see that as being something that's just unwielding that we have to go back and fix data privacy violations they just flat out don't occur prior to um right prior to us putting the community input at both board meetings when we were back at city hall and apollo or city hall in here community input was only done at apollo which wasn't a live streamed or recorded and so when we were at city hall when it was live streamed or recorded there wasn't community input and that was the concern there and i
239i personally say that there still is a concern i i understand that and i recognize that but in the name of transparency the best thing that we could possibly do is make it available as it comes to us i mean unless we're trying to hide something and i don't think we're trying to hide anything other than data privacy and we we have the ability to go in there and just erase that part of the tape if someone violates it so from a standpoint of a recording i don't i don't think that we have a really good argument against showing it and then that would solve all the problems but you're right in the past we did that because one was broadcast and the other isn't this one now we're now we're doing live streams and
240we're doing it at every meeting so there's more accessibility to us for public input that's a good thing but i don't see any reason why we can't show it as long as we have the ability to edit out anything that would be a data privacy violation yeah my two sense is that they're here to address the board rather than the community and when we live stream it but dr green i um i don't agree with uh providing people with a televised public forum durant uh the people we haven't had trouble i think most people come to talk to us and they want us to know how they feel about certain kinds of things and want us to do things um i think that you invite a different group of people when you provide a television
241opportunity i think anyway it seems to be working rather well that we get the input we need and that if we list what public input there has been oh and if somebody wants to i mean i don't know why i just can't it seems not a good idea to provide a public forum for someone to talk about something that's not related to what we about them saying to us this is what you this is the decision you ought to make and here's why um seems whatever you're right but then in the name of honesty we should state it that way we shouldn't hide behind the data privacy oh no i wouldn't if our reason for doing it is that we don't want to provide a public forum yeah i mean i think we don't want
242to provide a public obvious we said for the reason we didn't have public input at the um at the televised meeting was because of that and we said that right no no i'm not giving you a public forum uh before the televised meeting because that's what some people wanted they didn't want to talk to us they want to talk to the community i guess but it it essentially results in people sitting there and saying i want you to have this information because i think it's important for your decision making even the coveted mask thing which was pretty heated still was basically respectful the thing that wasn't respectful was the selling wilson wilson school you know which went really off the chart but uh so i think again i think we ought to i mean i'm
243kind of mixed about this and i'd like to let it give it some time i'm not disagreeing i mean there's a lot of reasons for and against i think if we just sort of back up a little bit you know there's the old bruce watkins uh deal let me make sure you have all the information you need before you make a decision so he pulls stuff off the table i think we with this the first reading and creates the causes the juices to flow and we can then engage this topic this has been a topic for many preceding board members as well because i can remember talking to jerry von korf about it because i got stuck at that every other meeting that's when community input is and that upset me because it was confusing
244to the public and one was on a wednesday and one was on a thursday and and people would show up and that we'd be like sorry that's two weeks ago and that was frustrating so when we came to sort of a universal uh situation i like how it is now that you every meeting you get an opportunity to address the board not the community then we need to be honest and insane i don't transparent right i don't know it's honest to hide behind data privacy concerns if our i don't feel it's honest to hide behind data privacy concerns if our concern is providing a public forum then we should just say that we provide a forum for people to address the board but we do not provide a forum for people to address the community
245i don't even know if we have to say that basically but but that's we provide this form for people to address the school board about school board related issues let it go with that yeah and those are the words that i say is to prior to opening the school board meeting we provide an opportunity for members of the public to address the school board members of the public well you have taken us to a new level on your own see could i blame jeff because i think i got those words [Laughter] yes natalie i'm wondering if it needs to be that madam chair would say what just happened which seems like an interesting administrative thing or would it be enough to to notate it in board minutes would that be enough for people who just
246want to know what was said i i don't know the answer to that but the board minutes are recapping the board meeting and community input is not part of the board meeting you're so smart you are not i mean when you talk about recapping you're not trying to summarize what people said i i don't want to do that i think that's a bad idea yeah i i think that's not what i meant well before we were doing that of sorts because um we didn't have in-person community input opportunities so when we were here or virtual and so there was a button for community input then we were saying we got 10 community inputs this past since our last board meeting three of them were on mass and four of them were on pass fail grading
247or whatever it was so we were recapping those i don't know why but we were just worried but that opportunity doesn't exist anymore because we're not on colbid wasn't that useful we learned some things from covet and we got more input because that button was there might be useful i think there's a legality and there's some i remember talking to gary and there was some type of legality or something about then how we what we did with that i don't know if it but i it was a while ago it was a year or two ago i had asked for something on the board agenda future board agendas to to have someone report when somebody had an issue and it went to an administrator to respond to it that did we get back the way
248the response resolved itself i mean that that if we're telling people we're handing it to administrator then we ought to get the information back about how it was handled and what happened and we weren't i didn't recall any of that that would be nice that would be useful at least because i mean gary was very meticulous about making sure he got the information from people but that i didn't get you know if somebody responded to a person as one of our administrators would respond to people who sent the board a complaint and then they would respond and send us a copy of their response just like to know what i said said to them you know that would be useful i think i think every once in a while that happens when it's not uh
249it's not a full board thing but you um you know you're i get an email about bussing or something it was and then gary um helped resolve the situation and then came back and recapped so i mean there's a little bit of that going on that's those things about uh which i meant to say they're very thorough when something happened on a bus we get very thorough reports about what happened how it was handled in in the resolution of it it all was very clear that that doesn't necessarily need to be with community input so much as people were depending on what they're asking about so okay okay so i think am i correct if i summarize this that um we probably have a majority of consensus that we should say that you're addressing the
250we're we're not talking about data privacy you're addressing the board not the community and then in that case we like the word we don't know what we like resident people public by members of the public okay and we like that they're gonna say their city not their address no matter what they're about talk fast yeah sometimes they address shouldn't be public but the address should be for gary so we can get back in touch with someone if we have to okay okay so we're not asking them to announce their city that they live in the city it's fine you should okay you're right you know they haven't enough it's a fair it's meaningful yeah i agree oh sure yeah i think that makes sense okay we will take that feedback and bring it back to
251you for second read okay one more proposed revive board policy 208 first reading development adoption and implementation of policies presented by dr putnam fake thank you so much um so this the purpose of the policy is to emphasize the importance of the policy making role of the school board and provides the means for it to continue to be an ongoing effort um there are just a few um word changes to align with msba the policies shall be the basis for guidelines instead of the formulation of procedures and again that's msba's recommendation um again in the case of the msba is in an emergency um again just wordsmithing um and then just clarity about that we don't have a policy manual rather we have school district policies and a copy of the school district policy so
252it's just taking out the word manuals which is again an alignment with msba [Music] and then again the um and paragraph e on the final um adding the the keeping in mind the mission and then superintendent or designee and the org designee is is is our is just in alignment with the other policies that the board has established my comments are going to be around section b 55b yep that one i think that's a really poorly it's a really poorly written paragraph because it has been revised from the time when there was a policy book in the district office to the time when everything is online and they've tried to finagle the words around to make it make sense it seems to me it should just say each every each school board member and each
253member every member of the public shall have access to the school district policies a copy of the school district policies shall be available in that that sentence right there can be moved to the end or taken out but it's reflected on the district website it's a copy of the full copy of the school district policies will be posted on the school district website and that that whole part unless it's a statute then then that last sentence but i'd put it in order it's like every member of the school board and public everybody everybody has access to the school district policies they're on the website and if we have to have a sentence that says that there's a hard copy of them in the superintendent's office we can do so but it's it's really written weird
254perfect we can um it does reflect what the msba policy says so let's just double check that it's not statute that we have a written copy and we will adjust it so that the order flows i think it probably is statute that you have to have a hard copy and okay in the superintendent so then justice that shouldn't be what we're telling the public okay for the public the the and in in our policy we're telling the public but it's just there's a copy of the policies on our school district website all right we're hour ahead of last time [Laughter] okay meeting is adjourned it is 10 35 pm have a good night thanks for watching we'll be back august 17th you