001foreign [Music] foreign uh hi everyone it is Thursday February 2 2023 at 6 p.m we are at the district service center in Cottage Grove Minnesota we would like to sorry we would like to acknowledge that the land on which We Gather is the land of the Milwaukee and Dakota people middlewakaton means dwellers of the Spirit Lake our first item on the agenda is 1.0 call to order roll call Dana Melinda Doles Pat Driscoll here Louise Heinz is absent Katie Schwartz Eric tessmer is absent Sharon vanleer is absent Simmy petnick here next please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance next we have 3.0 approval of the agenda can I get a motion to approve uh moved by Melinda seconded by Katie those in favor say aye any opposed all right uh motion passes next is 4.0
002Workshop items uh 4.1 is the achievement and integration plan being introduced by Kelly Jansen assistant superintendent all right thank you um every three years districts who are participating in the achievement integration program must develop a new plan that is approved by the school board then submitted to the Department of Education and tonight James mcgree James McGee our director of diversity equity and inclusion is here to do a first reading of our plan to provide an opportunity for feedback and clarification which may inform any edits and then we'll review the final draft to the February 16th regular meeting good evening there we go hi uh executive cabinet School Board superintendent Nielsen thank you for allowing me to be here to talk about achievement integration and what it means for our school district um so I want
003to start by talking about what achievement immigration in what it is not achievement integration it comes from the legislation um regarding racial and economic integration for school districts um so what you're going to see in this plan is not the whole of the equity work that we do in South Washington County Schools we're not going to be talking specifically about English language Learners or special education for instance the purpose of achievement and integration is specifically for racial and ethnic integration as well as for social economic integration sorry I'm too many things here you got me so uh as every three years as Kelly said uh we come to the school board to propose our achievement and integration plan a school board does need to approve the plan before it's submitted to mde an additional layer
004that we are required to do um as an adjoining District to a racially isolated district and I'm going to talk more about that in a moment we do need to seek input on our goals and strategies from the American Indian parent advisory committee that we have set up in South Washington County down one more there we go so um this year we've set up a uh or for the next three years a multi-district collaboration with District 196. that's uh Rosemont Apple Valley in Eagan we're also partnering with uh in continuing to partner with Stillwater School District they are a voluntary participant because we share a border with 196 we are considered an adjoining district and so we have proposals and integration plans in place where we will be combining efforts uh some of the things
005that we've done in the past are offering Avid summer programming for students that are for our high school Avid students from swashco and Stillwater and other districts to come and get Avid Credit in the summer and I will be working with uh both um American Indian parent advisory committees later this week to make sure that we've got input and guidance on the integration efforts between our districts so in legislation there's three types of goals that all achievement and integration plans must address first uh and this one is big for us because we are an educational institute is the achievement disparity uh in academics uh we'll be specifically looking at opportunity and achievement gaps by race ethnicity and social economic status the next domain that we must hit is teacher equity and what this looks like
006in Minnesota is ensuring that we have Recruitment and Retention efforts to try to make our teaching Workforce more representative of the students that we serve and finally our integration efforts this is making sure that we don't have uh schools that are isolated by income or by race that we have integration efforts to ensure that all of our spaces are inclusion or inclusive and affirming of all of our students actually we go back one for a moment what you're going to see so I'm going to propose three goals and walk us through three goals tonight uh what you're going to see are kind of big umbrella goals um one of the things that stood out to me in the last achievement integration plan were some of the goals were things that I would consider maybe more
007measures or indicators um what we're going to be doing uh or what we're proposing to do for the next three years is to have these big overarching goals with multiple key indicators of progress to go along with the strategies that we're going to employ I want to reiterate this is not the whole of our Equity efforts this is not the whole of our Dei however the Dei department is the one that is responsible for managing this plan we're going to be the ones that continue to report on world's best Workforce we're the ones that have collaborated with teaching and learning services our parent groups and all of our other departments to ensure that the work of equity is not just solely in Dei that we're all responsible for educational equity so the first goal that
008we're proposing is our academic specific goal so watchful students will demonstrate self-efficacy engagement and Proficiency in academic expectations required to apply for a four-year college or university now if that's pinging anything for you it was for me too when I first wrote it the reason why we worded it this way is such we don't believe that college is necessarily the correct path for every student we believe that there are students that are well suited for trade schools for two-year Associates programs for entrepreneurship for uh post-secondary careers that we probably haven't envisioned yet however we know as an educational institute if we have truly done our job to prepare them educationally if they have the skills to apply for a four-year college or university we have opened as many doors and eliminated as many educational barriers
009as we can so when it comes to being able to compute being able to read being able to be a critical thinker all of the tenants of our profile of a graduate we want to ensure that we have opened as many educational doors for students possible this is the domain where we have the most strategies this is the domain where we have the most student contact and direct student service what it might look like or what it does look like these are just a couple uh strategies the full plan will include all of these strategies that we intend to continue to measure over the three years however we will talk specifically about our Avid elective course we will talk about pedagogy like Avid strategies or social emotional learning or culturally and linguistically responsive teaching these
010things that we continue to train teachers at all of our schools we train staff at all of our schools in all of our departments in these strategies to ensure that students have culturally affirming spaces our Young Scholars Program which is opening Pathways to students from marginalized Community communities who typically have not been represented in Talent Development or gifted education and then also partnering with Community Education to ensure that if students are struggling in the traditional setting do we have ways to get them into Credit Recovery do we have an eye on Pastor graduation and are we making sure that our pastor graduation are not dependent on your race or social economic status so those are things that we'll be looking and measuring closely over this three-year plan now in terms of key indicators of progress
011once again this is one of our bigger goals we're going to have many key indicators of Prague progress these are just a couple samples uh in the previous plan there was a goal regarding uh representation in AP classes what we want to do is expand that and make sure that we're looking at all of our rigorous programming that we have both representation and support for students to be in those classes but we'll also be looking at third grade reading we'll be looking at the academic success coaches providing interventions for elementary students to ensure that even from the very beginning of their school career that we've got things in place that we've got strategies in place to ensure that students academically have the resources and support they need to eventually be able to apply for a
012four-year college or university so if the first goal was around academics goal number two really revolves around relationships some of the key strategies in our relationship goal for students include the use of our culture liaison program uh the uh efficient and effective use of our inclusion our Multicultural or wellness centers at schools that students are able to access when they need to regulate or when they need to feel in community with people who see them for who they are as a cultural being we also have efforts in place right now for recruitment of Staff of color as well as retention of Staff of color we've also received a grant for mentorship for new teachers of color because there's not um we made minimal progress in the last plan and we want to ensure that we
013don't do the same things over and over again and expect a different result so in the over the next three years we will be increasing those efforts not just with achievement and integration funding but we also have grants in place as well so ways that we'll measure this we are going to continue to look at our office referrals we want to look at out of school suspensions we want to ensure that the spaces that we're setting up our theory of action says if students feel affirmed and validated in the spaces that they are that we will see a decrease in uh suspension in uh office referrals in tardiness in truancy we want to see students in school we want them in our spaces we want to see an increase of our teachers of color uh
014study after study shows that even having one teacher who culturally is similar to you increases our chances of graduation by something like 10 to 13 percent just by having a teacher that can connect with you on a cultural basis and finally we want to make sure that all of our spaces are affirming and like I said this is not the whole of our Equity efforts we seek to include all of our students across cultural identities across identifiers across ability disability gender and achievement integration has a specific eye on making sure that our students are not discriminated against because of their race ethnicity or social economic status so classrooms buses lunch spaces common areas we want to ensure that all of those spaces are culturally affirming for our students goal number one had to do with
015academics goal number two relationships goal number three is about empowerment of our community we offer a lot as a school district when I got into education my scope was K-12 I did not understand how robust Our Community Education programming is how we service students After High School how we offer programming for adults in need of ESL service or adults in need of GED service there are things that we provide that sometimes our community either can't access or doesn't even know exists so this is where our culture Liaisons our academic success coaches and the other people in our Dei Department are going to make concerted efforts to go into our community to connect our community with resources that would benefit them this is also where we're going to see staff development not just for teachers we
016know that in to in order to be a truly culturally affirming School District everybody is responsible for the work so we're committed once again to having all staff be continually trained in cultural competency in customer service in how do we connect with people as public servants yeah I'm sorry so this is our first read this is a overview I did not give you all of the details of strategies and key indicators of progress because uh what I want to gain from this body is um do we agree with the direction looking at academics specifically looking at relationships specifically and looking at empowerment of our community specifically not the whole of everything we do however as something that we can control with what's in our scope with achievement integration we think that these three buckets are
017something that we can really make a dent in in terms of um achievement gaps opportunity gaps and service gaps in our community um I'll take whatever feedback we get tonight I'm going to continue to go to our parent groups to get feedback on key indicators and some of the details of the the plan we'll be coming back to the regular meeting on February 16th for the school board to approve so we can then submit uh to mde so if there are any questions I think this would be the time or if there's anything that I can clarify go for it uh I just want to make sure that in this point for a lot of the community and people and legislatures looking at that as well and going to help out with grants and things
018like that so um just want to make sure that's in the plan because I couldn't really see it until you said it sure wasn't really on there so yeah I didn't want to go too far into the weeds with everybody but yeah so as the A and I play in the world's best Workforce link that is one of the world's best Workforce uh goals as well uh the specific strategy that we have linked to that is the use of our academic success coaches at five of our elementary schools as we become more uh aligned and coherent with our mtss and our reading programming we now have the stability to create common intervention processes for reading but also for Math and social emotional uh or behavioral interventions that might be as well so our academic success
019coaches were in the process right now of approving a a slight adjustment in their job description that will include working with our teaching and learning Services director specifically regarding literacy interventions in supporting the new literacy program that we're using in our elementary schools um yeah I like how you talked about not just pushing for the four-year degree because there are other options for students and I like that we are letting them know that there is something other than just going into the four-year degree trades we really need people to go into the trades we've seen that um and then also that we're doing the community outreach really trying to let people know what we have what we offer and because if we can get parents that may not speak English then you know the chances
020of their student doing better because they can assist them with some of this stuff um is going to help as well so yeah I like the plan I like how it's laid out I like the goals versus really just having a number that we're trying to meet because sometimes it's hard to meet that number but there is progress it's just we didn't get as far as that number said so I like this thank you disparity and integration goal um besides just making sure that kids are enrolled and passing you know I buy pot kids and students with the free and reduced lunch are we looking at other Advanced academic programs as well like making sure we have children that are enrolled in passing in pseo classes and like college in the classroom and different programs
021yep so I'm working really closely with our secondary TLS director right now to so we're broadly defining um Advanced coursework because it's not just AP it is uh pseo it's College in the schools our concurrent courses uh yeah so we're looking at all of those as options because we know if we limit it to one then we've kind of pigeonholed uh some of the possibilities and Katie as you were saying like we don't want to limit the options that we have for students especially as we're trying to emphasize voice and choice and agency for our students in terms of where they want to go so we'll be looking at all of those measures to add them all to the slides uh well I did initially and then I was cut that down a little bit
022yes but we will be measuring all of those and not just grouping all of our students color into one bipod group because we know that the needs of different communities vary so we don't want to make any of our student communities a monolith we will be looking at representation by race and ethnicity specifically as we go through this and so when we get back to reporting at world's best Workforce I'll be able to share some of that I probably won't go into all of the granulars but when we are things that are standing out to us or if there's things that you're wanting to see that's some of the data that we're committed to deep diving on because we want to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all of our student communities and
023not lumping them together as one monolith to follow up on that um so when you talk about you know um Asian students because I'm Asian um are we able to see like Indian students versus among students versus because I know that different um I mean Asia's half the planet right so the disparities within within there are are going to be noticeable but I don't know do we have the capability or do we have do we get the data that allow us to dig to Target more effectively for those students so right now we don't have like an official trigger for measuring or for uh self-selecting ethnicity however as we are trying to be intentional about getting to know our students that's when we can be specific with strategies um and as we're setting up Community
024groups you know right now we have a Hmong parent advisory committee and we realize yeah well that's that does that's not speaking to the needs of all of our Asian American and Pacific Islanders students so making sure that we have representation at the table from all of our student groups where it may not come out in the the standardized data because that's not something we measure we can speak to that we are going into our communities and getting feedback from specific either ethnicity or cultural groups on what are the needs what are the things that you're seeing um so reporting that might look a little different because we won't be able to break it down that granular however we are committed to looking at as many student groups as possible looking at ethnicity and and
025other different cultural measures and so when we've gone out to um these communities who have traditionally not been served by our schools have we found it challenging for us to um have them trust have trust in the in the school district or have them believe what the school district says to them or have we have we been able to build like the relationships that allow allow them to feel like what we're doing is is actually going to be helpful for them it's hard to say um because I don't I would not want to presume to speak for everybody what I can speak to is the experiences that I've had so far setting up both our Dei Advisory Group which has representation from multiple races and ethnicities as well as some of our parent Affinity groups
026um I don't want to I don't want to overstate that yes we have everybody's on board because we have some issues facing our district much like other districts in the state in the metro area we're not immune to the the so-called achievement Gap um what I'd be more interested in seeing is uh are our perceptions of trust changing over time and that is one of the measures that we have in our community empowerment we want to go into our community and say hey the things that we say we're doing are you feeling it are is it making a difference in in your perception of the school are you feeling safe are you feeling affirmed um so right now I can't speak for everybody what I will say is that is one of the things that
027we're going to try to measure and it hopefully we'll be in line with some of the things that might come out in our strategic plan as well making sure that our schools are safe and Firming spaces for everybody I think that sounds great it sounds great and we need to be held to it and that's why we're going to continue to come back to our communities and like we don't we're not just going for feedback from our parent advisories just to get the plan approved and submitted to mde we're going to continue to come back and continue to report on these measures because we want that Community voice present in the things that we're doing every day and then I for this um three-year plan as you've laid out does it allow for like what
028happens if a year from now you get in and like a parent as you're doing the work you find that like uh what we have this is not the right structure we've we've picked the wrong goal or something does this have the flexibility for us to adapt yes okay I know I was actually a little surprised I thought that it was a little more um rigid than it actually is so the way that the state has set it up for us we can continue to analyze yeah or is the goal that we set and we just seemed like a good idea at the time uh the last goal or the last plan was adopted spring of 2020. and the adjustments that had to be made and what our expectations are uh right you know the
029plan that was essentially written before the pandemic started uh to where we are now there were adjustments that had to be made and so yes the state does allow for us to come back and say you know we've looked at this we'd like to change this and we can do that as often as we need um I was just going to add some I think your question also are we going to be able to drill down into race and ethnicity yeah yeah and um I believe it was two years ago if not just one year ago that the Department of Education actually now asks a lot more detail as it relates to that so once that once those students starts coming through and that's collected annually then we'll be able to do that cross-check with
030our AP classes and success like that so we're hopeful in the future we'll be able to drill down for you know into the Asian you know group there are definitely more options within that so any other questions all right thank you very much Daniel for the time all right moving along we have 5.0 information items and 5.1 is the community survey being presented by our superintendent Julie Nielsen thank you this evening we have with us coming to the stage Peter Leatherman thank you for being here Peter uh Peter is part of the Morris Leatherman company and we contracted with Mr Leatherman and their company to help conduct our community survey I know in conversation with the board we have talked about doing a community survey every two to three years in either good times or
031bad times but having a consistent measure over time and many school districts regularly schedule a community survey like this in our particular case after the failed referendum in August obviously our leadership team took time to reflect but we also needed to drill in deeper and thanks to Peter and his team they were busy during the month of December December 1st through the 16th I'm sure Peter made most of the calls uh 500 community members so he will share information about the demographics and the information they learned along with the closing part of the presentation will include some of the implications and takeaways as we move forward with our long-range facility planning as a school district so welcome this evening Peter everybody hear me okay this works all right it's a pleasure to be here with
032you this evening to go over the results I'm going to put up is it on the screen if I oh there it is lovely we'll go through the methodology first and just so everybody knows what we undertook for the district we spoke with 500 randomly selected residents across the district the interviews were conducted between December 1st and the 16th of December the average interview time was 14 minutes non-response rate was five percent and the 500 samples plus or minus four and a half percent and 95 out of 100 cases margin of error is always driven by the size of the sample not the percent of the universe so 500 in the district 500 in Washington County 500 in the state of Minnesota plus or minus four and a half percent is the statistical caveat put
033up some demographics just so you can see the profile and the demographics are done for two purposes first we can look at updated census information and make sure that we on these key demographics of households with children renters those sorts of things we're within the margin of error for the census secondarily then as we get into the analysis we can look at differences or I got a computer I got that or it's super all right so the Denver gravity so we can look at differences between the different groups also so the first set of bars is how long has the resident lived in the South Washington School District 21 had been here for five years or less 38 for over 20 years median comes in the typical resident's been here about 15 15 and a
034half years 18 indicated that they had preschoolers 29 percent had a child attending South wash and then 61 percent were empty nesters and empty nesters does not imply an age that means lack of presence of a child so we could have a 32 year old uh without a child that's an empty nester for the purpose of the survey so as you think about the results basically six out of every 10 people we talk to have really no contact or anything with the school district either with a child or a preschooler or an infant 13 indicated they were renters um basically a nice bell-shaped curve for the homeowners this is always over people always over assess how much their home is valued comes in roughly on this one at about 360 thousand continuing the top bar
035is an indicator throughout the survey and it's been an indicator now in all our surveys and School District work we've done uh since November and that's the financial situation of the household back in the day we used to ask folks their income we no longer do that this question it's a four-part question we ask folks about their income versus their expenses and how they're matching up in December 46 percent indicate they're financially stressed 53 percent said they were financially comfortable to give you some idea of how this is ebbed and flowed over the pandemic and where we are at currently before the pandemic the norm was about 28 percent okay over the course of the pandemic at yoyote everywhere between 50 between 35 and 50 percent um to give you also an example in 2008-2009
036the start of the recession uh the high we had was 65 so that's kind of even at it during a recession uh we still had one-third indicating they were financially comfortable the pandemic we never got to the level of 65 percent uh we often wondered we actually went in and did a survey when you owned your phone bank you can go on and ask questions that you're just interested in and then talking to people it was simply because the their income might have been impacted but so were their expenses they weren't going on vacation during the pandemic you weren't going to sporting events so while income had an impact it was mitigated by the some of the expenses saved by people now what has happened over the course of 2022 is the financially stressed at
037the start of the year we were down at about 32 33 almost normal and then everything that's happened this year with inflation the cost of gas everything that's half happen we now are up into the actually the current Norm everything coming off the computer this January is that 50 or higher financially stressed um so where we go with this is going to be interesting I'll be doing another Statewide I'll be sharing with school district in March to see if it continues but it does appear to be on the rise right now of the financial concern across the state across the metro area the location 56 percent we're in Woodbury 34 Cottage Grove five percent Saint Paul Park four percent Newport and one percent in the remaining areas and then finally uh the demographics on the
038age of the respondent 21 were 18 to 34 year olds well 31 percent were over the age of 55. median on this one comes in roughly at about 47 years old as a typical resident and then we have an even split 50 50 male female normally before I go on the results ask any questions on methodology demographics I don't know is this generally representative of our community or we just or we don't know like people just like Census Data looking at updated census so on the keys on households with children renters households with seniors looking at the geographic distribution when we look at registered voter lists all within the plus or minus four and a half percent I'm very confident it's a representative okay and then the one question I did have is you said
039like 60 of people were empty nesters is that typical for the state as a whole or across the state the norm is 30 uh the census number I think is 31 percent have uh a child under the age of 18. so I mean it it varies I mean you get into Minneapolis St Paul it's about 20 percent um the higher growth areas in the exorbitant areas you can hit 40 45 percent um so it really does vary on demographics all right well right off the bat we asked atmospheric questions to gauge how people are feeling about the district for those that have heard me speak before the purpose of this is after doing this 30 years you realize you need to make sure that everybody that the atmospherics in their District are good in order
040to go forward with a referendum on Election Day you want people to walk into a voting booth and make a simple cost benefit analysis what's being asked for and how much does it cost and not bring additional baggage so that's why we're asking these questions about financial management communication and everything we started out broad how they rate the quality of Education now I put up the data from 15 and 17 and for all of these charts I warn you against drawing a straight line from 17 to the result in 22. there's been a lot of zigs and zags across the way especially during the pandemic but on this first chart you're mirroring what we found since the pandemic happened with the quality of education and that is the shift from excellent to good you can
041see it's not a shift from favorable to unfavorable it's a softening of the enthusiastic rating of excellent and this this doesn't matter if we're in Edina the wabik it is across the state this concern um so in in 2017 we had 88 favorable this time we have 89 percent favorable statistically unchanged you can see though the shift 11 Point drop the excellent rating before the pandemic the norm was about 20 percent we're now down to 12 percent as an as a as an excellent rating on the quality of Education it has not rebounded coming out this happened about fall of 2020 and it's remained the same um the overarching concern and quality of Education two open-ended what do folks like most about the school district uh 24 right off the top say teachers and then
042I'll put them in two other collapse into two other categories so teachers are the Personnel side then you have the what's being taught in the schools the variety of programs and the broad curriculum that's 20 and then the quality of the academics either excellent or good X academic 17 so they're all within the margin of error all three of them and this varies from District to District some districts are very driven by programs some are very driven by Personnel some are very driven by the test scores those sorts of things basically all three are equally important here for your folks if we ask what they like most we always follow up with what's the most serious issue facing the first look at this chart I always tell a client to look and see do you
043have anything that hits 25 30 percent one in four one in three people coalescing around a response in an open-ended uh indicates that you have a major concern you do not have anything that hits that level you have two items that are in the High Teens um one is unique one is not unique the one that's unique is high taxes and we're going to see this specifically when we ask about taxes the high tax category has gone up precipitously across the metro and across the state since everybody got their property tax statements back in November everybody got their their increased assessment last year but I don't know if they necessarily thought of the correlation of the increase in taxes and so we really do have quite a shift in people's concern on taxes to give
044you an example this summer high taxes the norm on this in an open-ended was 5 now since November the norm is 15 okay so there's been a tripling just in three months on the concern on high taxes as a top of the mine response large class sizes at 17 then we have lack of funding at 13 lack of discipline at 10 poor spending at nine and then going down the list to three other items but you do have the the two counterpoints here with the lack of funding and the concern on taxes if we go down to the bottom those the nothing those are the boosters they're positive throughout the survey the typical the Norman boosters before the pandemic was ten percent we're now down to five percent so yours is about double about one
045in ten people and they're consistent throughout they are favorable towards the quality of Education they're favorable to potential Bond referendum uh everything that's your booster Court in the district yeah so since there was such a high pressure percentage of empty nesters that were in this survey is there any way of knowing like the correlation with the empty nesters saying that the taxes are higher compared to people that have actual students in the district yes I have the parent results too okay yep yeah on this one I can give you that here uh parents to 14 indicated high taxes was the most serious issue so it was more non-parents than parents but not statistically significant yes this is this is open-ended so they tell us and we collapse it we break it down in a few
046charts and look at the differences between total taxes and school taxes so yeah I'll I'll show that to you okay great are they following the school board and administration um no they're not uh they're even following it less and this is a very common theme than we've seen during the course of the pandemic um in 2017 well if you go back to 15 you had 62 percent and this is self-classified saying very or somewhat uh closely uh then it's 50 now it's 45 we've seen a pretty consistent theme across the state on this also and especially amongst non-parents not being as focused on local government I mean if you think about it it makes sense there's been National issues international issues there's economic issues and they just haven't been focused and this is even if
047we do a city survey and ask folks are they following along with that they're just not nearly as engaged with local as they have been in the past we went through and and on this chart I guarantee you uh this is not a straight line there are zigzags here there are different points during the pandemic where ratings were higher and they were right now but this is where you net out and actually where you net out is basically unchanged five years later um the board 6429 the norm on that right now is 55.40 so you're above the norm on the district and administration 64-26 about two and a half to one Norm on that right now is two to one and on teachers it's always the closer you get to the children the more adored
048folks are 89 to five you can see that's the high point that we have so on the governance and administration you're above the Norms on both of those items um at this point in time what about some specific perceptions for folks to agree with or disagree with first off do they believe the schools are a good value for the investment yes Still Remains almost 90 percent indicate that is the case do they trust you to do what's right for the children yes that's down three points it's not statistically significant this one has really yo-yo'd all over the place during the pandemic as different decisions were forced to have been made it Nets out now the norm is in the low 70s right now on trust of school boards and administrations to do right have you
049spent taxpayers money effectively and efficiently it's actually a statistically significant increase from 2017. it's at up from 58 to 64 percent Norm on this right now is where you were at in 2017 at 58 percent do you do a good job of communicating important issues to the community and this is going to be a theme and it links into the referendum on Communications that is down it's down seven points from 70 7 to 70. Norm on this right now is in the mid about 76 77 percent so you are below the norm on Communications and do you consider property tax increase only as the last resort well you just actually had a property tax request so it's not surprising that that has the highest amount of disagreement at this time with 35 percent the norm
050on this varies just depending on how far out we are from a property tax request for the public three perceptions that we tested that we had not tested in the past are you are they satisfied with the decision making this along with the trust has been all over the place um over the last three years where you're at right now is 73 to 17 better than four to one the norm on this is three to one and there have been many points during the pandemic where it was actually a one-to-one it was a 50 50 split in in districts how do they feel you do involving the community this one you're at the norm um the norm has dropped before this this one was definitely impacted by the pandemic simply because it was hard to
051involve the community there well because you couldn't meet in person and and things like that so what was a 75 Norm dropped into a 65 percent um so you're right at the norm we're seeing right now 68 percent and the last question I always call this the dipping or toe in the water referendum the question is the schools are a good and a good value in the investment and i would support a property tax increase to protect that investment we haven't said if it's a bond referendum or an operating Levy if it's ten dollars a month ten dollars a year what's the core opposition in concept and the 31 percent is on the higher side ideally at the outset we'd want that to be in about 25 percent to give you a context for it
052so it is it is on the higher side and we're going to see a foundational reason here in a couple minutes on the opposition what's an overall evaluation then of the financial management uh 57 percent favorable 39 percent unfavorable so the norm on this one is 50 half districts are 50 are above half or below um so when we look at as an entirety you still do have Financial credibility you have political Capital when it comes to financial management this this is the along with the financial situation of the household people's perception we ask first their perception check check check hello okay uh uh the perception of total property taxes first 60 percent said their total property taxes are high 37 percent said average nobody said low and three percent were unsure okay on all
053right I'm okay all right on school taxes 52 said High 39 about average eight percent are unsure if we go to Total taxes the threshold we're looking at in the high category is 50 do a majority of people think their property taxes are high you can see you're at 60 percent you are a very hostile property tax climate right now um I would love to have had Data before November when the new statements came out and to see the impact of that but that's the current state you're in now the good news for the district is they don't blame you we can well they don't blame you because perception of total school taxes goes down eight points if they did were concerned about school taxes it would go up I always joke back in the
054good old days when I started doing this in 94 we used to ask who do you blame for high property taxes uh cities and counties became very unhappy when we did that so now we've modified it that we just asked it this way so we don't know the impetus of their concern but it is not focused on the school district per se with this drop in the perception of the total of the school taxes versus total property taxes all right let's talk about August 9th first off did they feel informed about the bond proposal not really ten percent indicated they were very informed 45 said somewhat informed and 30 45 said not to or not at all keep in mind now we're going to see that about 33 percent voted um so less than a
055third of those that voted even thought that they were very informed about what they were voting about okay so information is going to play an impact here in the survey 35 indicated yes they voted 63 percent said no they didn't and 2 percent couldn't remember um kind of it's you know that they just don't want that's kind of like do you recycle um they don't want to say they don't want to lie but they don't want to tell you they didn't vote or they didn't recycle um is is what that is it's the Halo question we call it in the industry so of the 63 percent that said they didn't vote we've simply asked them why you can see 24 indicated no time or they were busy and then I'm going to point down to
056the 13 that said they forgot that is almost all parents that indicated that on the on the non-parent side the dominant answer was they did not have enough information and then obviously they didn't have children no stakeholder 11 indicated not interested 11 age or illness uh four percent thought it would pass but you have this pretty and this split happens especially this happens in a November election that's why August referendum are very difficult it's hard enough to get parents to vote in November in August it's even more difficult to get them to vote looking at opponents there wasn't a lot of misremembering on how they voted it's almost represents the the actual result typically uh folks don't want to tell us that they oppose something except especially parents but that wasn't the case of the
05735 percent that indicated they voted it was a 33-65 split now we asked them the opponents an open-ended question they could tell us anything what was the major reason for opposition now they can tell us six things we're coding the number one thing out of their mouth at the top of the list was taxes were too high 31 23 percent talked about poor spending 13 mentioned the inflation inflation and poor economy 13 lack of information and then you kind of get down to the plan specific okay cost too high it wasn't needed doing too much okay it was much more macro at the outset for the opponents on the reason for opposition we then asked six items and asked did it have a was it a major factor in your opposition a minor factor or
058not a factor at all what's a rate on the chart is major and minor doesn't add to 100 because we I don't I didn't put up the not a factor you can see the pandemic and the economic situation 83 percent indicated it was a major factor of opponents 86 percent total their property taxes were already too high 75 percent major factor then we get down to plan specific no compelling need and we're going to talk about that in a little more in more depth a little bit later at 66 percent disagreement with the solutions at 65 percent then we get down to no negative consequences that that's that's the lack of need going once again nothing bad was going to happen and especially in this time this economic uncertainty if they don't think there's logical
059consequences there's something bad is going to happen people are not going to support and then the 48 percent indicating that not enough information was a major factor that typically is at the bottom of the list but that typically is only about 20 to 25 indicating that that it's an impact so that's what that was August 9th are they following what's happened since no they're still really not following what's happens yep yep sorry um with this um the property tax is too high do you think I mean this is really asking you to suppose um but given what you said about the shift you've seen in property tax sentiment based on the November statement coming out how much of that do you think would be attributable to like people's recency bias of getting their November statement
060I I do believe that that is higher than it actually was on Election Day for a reason for opposition I I can't quantify that not having any data before that um but to have property taxes at the level the the high being at 60 percent at the outset to not know what it was but I I do think that that factor is in play on this yes so are they following the current discussions no not really either um seven percent following very closely a total of 44 following at least somewhat closely what about the overall just the perception now keep in mind that we have 57 that aren't following the discussions but this kind of TAPS into the feeling they have towards the district okay so do they think you're doing a good job of
061involving the community yes 67 do they think you're going to come up with a plan that benefits students and staff yes 66 the one issue and it's it's the overarching tax and that is is it will be fair to taxpayers now fair to one person is not fair to another person but it Nets out that and this is every District when we break this out about the discussions it's always the concern of how much is this going to cost before I'm going to be able to make a judgment on that I have a quick question so when the this is the one that it gets me so the following discussions now is still they're not but right before that it's that they didn't have enough information among the opponents yes right yeah so Norma I
062mean is it normal for people to say I'm not paying attention but I don't have enough I mean is that the norm in when you do this yeah and you're good you're going to see reasons when we get into the communication section too because you have a significant change in how people are getting their information um and it's it's non-district control I've just give you a high I'll give you you know the cliff knob it's the Grapevine is alive and Lush and dominant now here as the number one source of information um and so what's ever in the Grapevine you know it grapevines can be poisonous and they could be fruitful um in that sense now yours is not poisonous because we don't see you know I know a poisonous Grapevine when we go through
063and look at the evaluations of administration and property taxes and everything like that um but you know you have a multi-pronged communication yes they're not paying attention but you do you know they have to at least have enough information to be able to know to vote and your universe is never a hundred percent you know right now what we found this last round of um and it was the 2022 gubernatorial election this November but I had quite a few clients that we did brush fire surveys so about four to six weeks out late September first week of October and we go out and test about the specific plan that they have out there now it's hard to cut through the Clutter okay but even at that point you know at superintendents weeping they had less
064than 50 percent of people even aware that was a referent in five weeks okay so your Universe I was tell them you're never going to have a hundred percent if you can get to 60 65 percent that is a job well done um to have people focused on it but it's harder to engage there's so much clutter out there to cut through um that it's It's Not Unusual anymore to have this juxtaposition so we say so when we talk about not being informed do we dig down into I mean I know it shows here like where they get most of their information but is there more like where they got like yeah we've got the primary source of information and how they would prefer to receive information okay and then the individual sources and then
065we can dig down with with it among groups and when we talk about the social media was there an ass like was it from like the district social media or was it from like a neighborhood or we don't dig that deep we'll get it we do dig that you do that I I will separate it out if it's noted by people okay okay all right what's their perception over the past five years on housing growth and student enrollment 69 percent believe housing growth has increased over the past five years 64 percent indicates student they believe student enrollment has increased over the past five years so the history you have two-thirds indicating that it has that has increased what's their expectation for the next five years and it continues what they expected the overall folks expect
066to have continued what has happened in the past five years 63 percent in both indicate that yes housing growth will continue and student enrollment growth will continue this is one of the issues that you have in the communication that did not get through in the discussion for the bond referendum does the district have enough space for five years from now 44 say yes 36 percent say no and 20 percent are unsure so the perception is that housing and student enrollment has grown they expect it to continue to grow and they're confused on whether the facilities are adequate to handle that growth in the next five years I mean only a third said no you do not have enough space for five years from now so that I guess in a sense you have to show
067them you don't have to convince them that it happened or that it's going to continue to happen you have to show them okay you believe this is happening here's the reality of where the buildings and facilities are at two questions that were new uh just asking about the importance the first one is it important to limit the boundary the impacts of boundary changes not surprisingly boundary changes are school start times boundary changes uh to uh two of my least favorite things uh in a survey but you do continue you have 76 percent that it's at least somewhat important 34 very important and then this one I'll tell you the parents the parents are at 85 percent very somewhat important 42 percent very important on the next one do we have um for this boundary change
068one do did people give any indication right because they they talk about tax burden right but there's going to have to be some sort of trade-off between how how money gets spent or how money gets allocated right and so if you don't shift boundaries and children continue to move into that boundary something has to give right so either you spend money or you end up having to shift the boundary so did they give any indication of like where they would like the inflection point of where they would shift we'd have got that that in depth in that I mean that would be part of the communication and the discussion and the facilities planning on what that is and what that balance is um you know with this is just pitted and I mean both of
069these two questions are just are they important you will have a caveat of there will be less important if it costs more okay in that sense you can already see though just in saying so on this one it's 76 percent of the community say at least somewhat important it's 85 percent of parents which indicates then that amongst non-parents it's in the mid 60s mid to low 60s so it's not as effective argument for 60 percent of your population okay then similarly the question how important is it to you that Elementary School students attend an elementary school City that they live on this one not as important as limiting boundary changes 63 percent indicate barrier somewhat 34 percent not two or not at all amongst parents is 76 saying various somewhat important 38 percent very important
070so on both of these the the very somewhat important are being driven by parents both of them over 10 points higher in importance on both but keep in mind that's 30 percent of the overall population referendum predisposition this question is simply if you heard the district was going to ask for a property tax increase are you for all against all or are you for some and against others at the outset you're at a minus eight you have eight percent more opposition than core support that's on the higher end of of being able to be successful this year typically we like to see that at five percent or less minus five or less very few districts are actually a plus at the outset but eight percent means you have to take that many more persuadables um
071because there's you but you know 49 of persuadables in play um so it's it's not um insurmountable but it is something to keep in the back of your mind that core opposition is about five points higher and we noticed that earlier on in that first question on supporting a property tax increase uh both of those above Five Points higher no no all right let's make a deal question what would be a reasonable property tax increase for a bond referendum 34 percent say nothing that's up a little bit we always that's you have five percent Minnesota nice they didn't want to tell us nothing before in the previous one but we asked for a dollar amount and then they'll say okay I really don't support anything uh that number is actually under 35 percent and that's
072we always want that under 35. if we look at the chart for those willing to accept a property tax increase comes in right at about 15 bucks a month on the average house 28 percent are at 10 bucks a month 27 percent or at twenty dollars or more a month so about fifteen dollars a month on the average now is that set in stone it's not set in stone there's elasticity in that number it can go up or it can go down depending on the type of components that are going to be included which is why we went through a list and asked would you support a property tax increase for these purposes at the top there's you have some very clear sections here of a hierarchy of support and opposition at the very top
073secured entrances at 67 percent high school classroom editions at 66 High School stem spaces 64. Middle School class Edition 63 and then at high school CTE spaces and Performing Arts spaces 60 and 59. we then go down to the low 50s on the elementary school additions the flex spaces kitchen and cafeteria restrooms additional El spaces and El program playgrounds and then three that actually have more opposition and concept than support the district service center the purchase of land and athletic facilities it's not it's not surprising to me the order okay of how this Bears out um it's you know Athletics is always going to be at the bottom of the list regardless whatever it is District it is purchasing land right now is going to be at the bottom of the list right now because
074of economic circumstances you're now the fourth district I've tested in the last eight weeks on purchase of land and it's at the bottom when people are concerned on economics their macroeconomics they're not so concerned about the future planning for potential schools further out so the purchase of land the district service center not surprised what does surprise me it doesn't surprise me it's at the top but the secured entrances is actually right right now the norm on that is 82 percent we're supporting a property tax increase ever since Newtown Connecticut and that doesn't mean that folks think their District's not safe when the same survey we'll ask in the 95 percent will say yeah they provide a safe learning environment 82 percent of support a property tax increase because after Newtown Connecticut and now after Uvalde
075you can never be too safe on security so that is much lower than we typically see but as a whole I would say that there's lukewarm's support um for at levels to go beyond that fifteen dollars a month um you know in order to have that elasticity um you need to have some items that have 80 75 80 support and concept and you just don't have those items uh being discussed right now and that's really being driven by the overall property tax climate and the financial situation of the household so when we ask for an overall evaluation on the idea of the improvements 60 percent say they sound like a good idea 35 percent say a bad idea you can see the intensity is equal between good idea and bad idea so it Nets out
076as a good idea uh within the parameters of cost is going to be the primary factor now we tested just the awareness of five facts and obviously this is concerning in light of a referendum that those numbers are so low only one has a majority of people knowing the fact and that's here the sixth largest District at 52 percent but then it's four out of ten that East Ridge is over capacity 39 about 8 000 new homes 38 percent about adding 3 500 students and 15 schools are projected to be over capacity in the next 10 years 35 percent and this goes back to that chart on opposition if they don't understand the problem they won't support the solution they don't see the need and the lack of awareness of these facts obviously I mean
077these facts show need to people so people are operating in an information vacuum on a lot of this Peter and with you know the large percent of the empty nesters that were surveyed in this far as the empty nesters whose kids are grown and out and they're not going to be using the schools anymore compared to empty nesters that just started their family yet as far as their opposition level I can cut the data by age sometimes we I'm just going to double check before I answer that um I do ask if they're alumni parents so if they've ever had children in the district and so out of 303 side of the 60 percent 38 percent had children in the South Washington public schools in the past so roughly 100. doing it off the top
078of my head roughly about 20 21 our alumni parents that have had kids in The District in the past they often though are not as supportive yeah though they would be they would be more supportive and then grandparents can be more supportive it's the it's the 55 to 64 year olds um they're they're done raising the kids they paid their time they're worried about retirement and all of those sorts of things that's the least supportive group in the age demographic foreign all right how do folks tell us they got their information this is open-ended 21 say a district website 19 the local newspaper which is very high um in in comparison is local newspapers have continued to Wither in the Vine sorry did anyone tell you what the paper that they were reading is like
079is it the Pioneer Press is it Star Tribune is it I could look I could look at the surveys we just collapse them down into categorize this specific uh 18 Word of Mouth 14 a newsletter 14 social media the word of mouth number is double the metro area that's normally less than 10 percent as a primary as a principal source of information social media is triple the metro area Norm of five percent because this is principal source of information a lot of people don't want to admit that their principal source of information is social media especially in life because social media has an age bias but now it has a political bias uh all of those things in so both of those those so I always say non-traditional information sources make up almost a third
080of people's principal source of information now how do they prefer to receive information now this one is really interesting because they almost double down this is like small town you actually had 10 percent say I prefer to get my information this is like I'm up in Cook County doing a survey right now instead of Washington County and then on social media 13 indicating that that's how they prefer to receive their information the district website leads as a preference at 27 if we just look at this as print versus electronic uh you have 27 percent the website 13 social media mailings at nine percent of about 49 saying some some uh version of electronic on the print side 16 newsletter six percent mailings fourteen percent uh local newspaper about 36 print so it tips to electronic
081but it's still uh elected there's still a significant number of people that want something in their hands um and you do have this unusual 23 percent that want it from other people or from social media as their preferred source of information do they tell you what sites for the social media or like they they do we just collapse it down into the broad we're gonna on this one we go Facebook next door Twitter um and this is is it a major source minor Source or not a source so the district website leads them as a major source 39 with a reach of 62 percent but you can see the Grapevine now 76 percent friends and family 33 percent a major source and then as a second Dairy the second highest Source tied with the website
082is other parents at 62 percent with 18 percent you actually have teachers with four almost 40 percent um the local newspaper 56 e-newsletter 49 uh Facebook 35 reach next door 34 percent reach 22 percent on Twitter nine percent on YouTube and Twitter is double uh the norm on that one so you do have a very uh you have a lot of people using social media out here than we typically see can I ask so for things like Facebook next door Twitter do we know um and I guess I'm thinking probably primarily of Facebook um there's like people who you know your Facebook friends who will say whatever in your feed and they'll link articles in your feed and then there's like groups that you would belong to where you know like your local community group
083or your buy nothing group or whatever do we know how people are using social media like are they using it as like okay these are what my friends are posting about this or are they out like on these Community sites where people are having more active presumably more active discussions not to that level the question is simply do you use it do you consider it to be a major source of information for news about the school district okay so that's that's the caveat on that so it's not broken down by the district's Facebook page or a neighborhood District website but not the difference between neighborhood or District social media I can tell you in districts that have split it out it's the neighborhood Facebook it's the neighborhood next door accounts that are much highly more
084highly used than District Facebook yeah when we break broken it out in other districts all right what can we say first the atmospherics overall the atmospherics in the district are following the trends across the Metro like I talked about that dip in enthusiasm the enthusiastic you know as as minnesotans it's always difficult to get us excited about a lot of things okay oftentimes good is good enough um and so you see the same Trend people not moving to a the unfavorable category just the softer good category the ratings on the financial management the board and administration are at or above the metro area Norms as I noted the communication and engagement ratings are below the metro area norms and the side cut off here but well that residents don't necessarily blame the district the pop
085property tax climate is very hostile and it's it's good to know that they don't blame the school district but at the end of the day unless the city is putting forward a park Bond you're really the only opportunity folks to get to vote no on a property tax increase for some reason cities and counties don't like that to happen a lot what about August 9th there were very there was a very very low level of residence felt informed about the bond referendum too busy or forgot were the most common responses among parents that didn't vote not enough information was most common response among non-parents that didn't vote and the three reasons for opposition the pandemic economic and the property tax concerns those were the dominant concerns the macro level when he got down to the
086micro it was a lack of compelling need and I think that that's been reinforced uh perhaps that you it's not that you don't have the compelling need except people weren't aware of what the need was and then the disagreement about the solution being offered what about going forward as I talked about residents do believe that housing and student enrollment growth has happened and will continue but only one-third of residents believe the district does not have sufficient space to meet this growth so the story has to be told you have to show folks and realizing that 60 percent don't have kids and if we look at I say of 22 percent that did you have about a just over short of a majority of people that probably have not been in a South Washington School District
087building um either currently or with past children so you do need to show people even after the bond referendum less than 50 percent of the residents were are aware about the facts about growth and its impact on school capacity and as you move forward um there's support for something but it has to be more scaled back um and that that median property tax increase where I oftentimes talk about elasticity there's not a lot of elasticity right now and a lot of that is being driven by the property tax climate here and the financial situation of the households so I would recommend keeping it in bounds of the fifteen dollars a month and as you go through those priorities that we laid out really there were three kind of clear themes here the Safety and Security
088needs and then space needs at both the district's middle schools schools so I'd be happy to answer any questions we haven't talked about yet it's a lot to digest I mean there's a lot of a lot of information when I do these presentations I feel like you all are drinking through a fire hose and that I simply say share any comments or questions with the superintendent and then I'll get six on Monday but yeah and that's perfectly fine yeah I was gonna say I know I will once I I mean I've looked at it once and this is a sign I will look at it again and I will have questions but um I generally am opposed to surveys I've told you that multiple times that we've done these um but I did think it
089was important to do it this time just because we did see so much opposition so I did want to see so I am glad that we have this information some of it is shocking and some of it I'm not surprised by um but yeah I think I just need to dig in deeper but thank you it was a great presentation and we got a lot a lot of good information that's going to take some time to look over and digest but and we'll we'll write up a report and then there was a parent balloon like I've been talking about in the survey but to make the charts even more busy I just let's focus on the overall and the report will go through differences looking at the overall looking at the parent balloon and then
090statistically significant differences on on all sorts of things but if you have specific questions as and I think as Peter has shared we had the chance a couple weeks ago to review the presentation as he was preparing for the board so we got to hear this but I think um in our Reflections as an administrative team as well we just talked about the overall communication and without that kind of local newspaper you know we've already talked about the need to do mailings out to our community because not everyone is going to our website so we looked at the survey results also as an opportunity for us to improve and we know that there are things that we can do differently and we'll do differently as we move forward but this certainly has provided a nice
091base of what our community has to say and the level of support as we move forward and again that will be this is one component and a very important component and then at the next board meeting we will hear the demographic update so that will be kind of two parts before we set back off so thank you Julie when you send out the Friday email to all the district families will this presentation be attached into that for families to link to the board summary is always attached so John can make sure that as part of that we include that but we always have a point it's not tomorrow though staff go or excuse me families went out today and so I believe it's in two weeks Sean so it's every other week so this will
092be out there again in two weeks and yes we want people to be able to take a look at it and certainly we have tried in our meetings with our legislators this week meetings with City Council Members to communicate that this was the day we were going to be sharing this information so thank you Peter I'm really sorry uh I was waiting for I don't know who um so nobody else has any questions right Pat Melinda Kitty okay uh next up is thank you very much Peter um next is 5.2 an update on Transportation presented by Dan Pine our Executive Director of Finance and operations foreign music for my presentation what do I hit the up well good evening um school board members Vice chairped Nick and um members of the cabinet and our audience
093um our transportation department has been working very hard to transport about 12 000 students a day we have run into bus driver shortages causing us to convene a a steering committee to address what the future of Transportation in our school district will look like so tonight I was oops tonight I will give you an update on where we're at with our transportations during committee and what we're looking at so before we start we'll talk about our current reality so we do about 100 am and 100 PM general education bus routes and that's serviced by about 106 full-time daily drivers and six consistent daily substitute drivers in addition to our general education bus routes we have about 72 special education routes we bought six a.m to 6 p.m with our own District staff and we contract
094out about routes for special ed to at this point Hastings Bus company or also known as Big River we have 7 A.M and 7 PM open routes meaning that we have no permanent drivers assigned those are covered by our mechanics and office staff all our mechanics are certified to drive buses and they often two of them actually pull full routes and then do their mechanic work after they're done causing us to pay quite a bit in overtime but we're very grateful for their dedication office staff often has to cover leaving sometimes one person to answer the phone for a hundred routes at this point we have 1am and 1 pm route that are canceled due to a lack of a driver about 170 students are affected by this or without transportation as a result of
095the canceled route and as of just this week we are now Contracting 1 am and 1 pm general education route at this point the Contracting cost is about double what we normally spend and if we had to annualize that it would double our 4 million dollar general education budget and of course with all this our activity bus scene is very limited and we often have to contract out any kind of activity bussing just some information so you know that school districts in Minnesota required transport students who live two miles or more from their school we do a little bit more than what's required by law we provide transportation to elementaries to live outside of one mile from their school we transport middle school students who live outside of 1.5 miles from our school and our
096high school students and our high school students we transport live outside the two miles from the school still happening oh okay each Elementary general education bus has a capacity about 77 students that's if you put three kids in a seat and as you probably know you're not going to fit three high school or middle schoolers in the seat so we put about two kids in those seats so they have a capacity a practical capacity about 52 students so as we look what's going on we're working hard to ensure that most of our families do not feel the transported Transportation issues that we continue to face but we all know we have an aging driver Workforce thus we have a potential for a larger number of retirements in the next coming years and we know every
097day we have mechanics driving school buses they serve as our cushion what absences or illnesses arise and that are off of our office staff members also Drive buses when needed we are actively recruiting drivers every day at a minimum the hiring process for a new driver takes about a month from interview to driving because if they don't if they don't have their CDL they need to be trained they need to be tested it takes about a month to get all that going First State Statute all Transportation eligible students are to be routed meaning that if they fall outside that two miles they have to be routed and we have utilized an opt-out option for high school students with some success but not big success and an opt out would mean if a family said you
098know we qualify for transportation but we don't need it that allows us to change our routing um but it's tough for parents to do that because they're always kind of worried well if I opt out I'll never get it back you know we promise them that it if you qualify and you opt out and you find out you need Transportation we'll get you back in there but it's it's a risky thing that some people feel that so some of the options we're considering in transportation moving to an opt-in system so when I talked about opt out yeah we route everybody you have to opt out this way if you need Transportation you opt in it'll give us a much better idea of our ridership um implementing it a different way that we measure the distances
099many districts use a radius model in which you you take a point in the middle of the building of the school we know we have 23 schools that we that we transport to and you draw a circle at one mile one half mile two mile depending on the age and what we decided in policy and that's how you determine what the boundaries are right now our district policy has us figure out our boundaries by by driving from the bus drop-off point to the driveway of the house that's being bus or the house of the student that's being bust we feel that the radius method will allow for Less confusion less debate on how far people live away from the school we're also evaluating how changing the distances using the current non-busting zones are impacting Transportation
100routes for example if we switch the one mile one 1.5 mile and the 2.0 miles if we need to switch say Elementary to a different to a a different distance if we switch Middle School to a different distance how many routes would how many less routes would we need and would that help out in our staffing crisis we're also debating or considering putting in a tracking system which is common for many districts um and that that will give us an idea of our load counts for bus ridership one of the problems that obviously is the cost it's you know we're a big district and this kind of system would cost um uh with with everything being done over a hundred thousand dollars a year it would allow us um it would require an ID badge
101system so that every student would have a badge ID in which they would um swipe into the bus but it does give us much more accurate load counts are there things we're concerning um you know that we have we have to bus people right now we're busting elementary students are more than Middle School mile and a half in high school two miles but we also have what's called hazardous areas they may be closer than those boundaries but we bust them because they may have to cross um a roadway that's over 30 miles an hour the minutes across some other hazards so we're working with the city Traffic Engineers and the Washington County Traffic Engineers um and creating safe relative schools and that's a combination of of sometimes sidewalks sometimes better thoroughfares and the designs of
102the roads that will take a while to evaluate all those we actually utilize an extraordinary Hazard traffic committee which our policy calls for us to convene that committee and that committee will include those engineers and will include our safety our safety people and our bus safety people and we'll review all our walking areas to see if there's any opportunities there to create safer routes to school and we're also meeting with the bus driver union leaders to gather new ideas and see what what their thoughts are and how we can solve this this Staffing shortage crisis so what's our timeline for this process well February 15th we're going to have the transportation routing steering committee meet again in that meeting we'll discuss the opt-in transportation system we'll receive an update on the extraordinary Hazard subcommittee work
103we'll consider some mileage options we'll discuss radius measurement system and we'll learn about the availability of Transportation contractors um March 14th or April 11th will be the opt-in window for school bus transportation for next school year that will give us our information on what needs to be routed um during March we'll survey and have Community meetings to share Transportation information with parents um so April and May we'll be looking at possible policy changes because right now our transportation policy dictates how we do things like deciding what the distances are what the Hazardous areas are and how we measure um we will talk to the board on May 14th with with a possible policy changes the board will make their decision and the policy changes and that will dictate how we do our routing for next
104year and um we'll communicate with any changes to families that are affected by the routing changes so that's our update on the transportation situation right now it's it's there's really no good news in the whole situation we are constantly having issues every day trying to staff all the routes that we have any questions one question so I know the two miles is within statute that we have to boss is the ha are the hazards or is that a hazards um are determined by the extraordinary hazards of the committee so those are established right now we're just going to look at all the areas and see if there's any changes can be made but statute calls for this committee to determine hazardous routes but it doesn't get that detail I mean it's it has to be
105each district has to decide what the hazards are so they determine what are the hazards in our district yeah wheat yes and then we'll work with the counties and say to see if we can put in I mean like that tunnel in Woodbury I mean that would eliminate that kind of like those kind of ideas yeah or even over I mean think about it we have a walkway over Highway 61 right now um but yeah I've seen that many many districts with a lot more walkovers but there's the statute doesn't address speed limits or anything like that and how long would it so if there's a hazard how long would it take us to be able to do like a walkway over I mean how many I'm guessing it wouldn't be by next school year
106correct the hazard um study we'll take a take a while it's just not going to be immediate media changes to that so that's not going to be something we can do for next year that's more probably not unless there's some obvious ones that don't make sense anymore yeah I I just think the radius thing seems unfair I I don't like it because you can't fly your kid to school you know you know you have to take the route that just seems unfair to me I think unfortunately as we work through specific situations it's using which door to get to which door and so then it becomes this argument and I think that's the consistency of the radius model is there's a pin drop there's a circle drawn and that's the area and I think what
107we see is depending upon exact location or bus stop then there's this back and forth with is it within that range or not and the radius makes it very clean cut because our transportation department does spend a lot of time going out and driving and you know double checking some of these especially as we start the school year with the radius option um would that include our specialty programs as well or would they still always have busting no their busting is determined by the idps of the students I'm talking more like more like your um I guess that's a board decision on the busing of the those programs at this point they are a bust now that that boundary doesn't affect those but they follow the same rule so if they're within two miles they
108don't get bust yeah I guess so you'd have to do for each yeah you can you draw the radius and then the ones inside there so if they live across the street from Valley they're not or belly Crossing might not be good but if they live across the street from nuevas they're not going to be a bus just because they go but if they live outside of the two miles to the way this then they would right for one and mile because it's an elementary school but otherwise they're not but any special there's nothing different for their busing than there is for no there isn't I did I get a little thrown off by it only because they have three different areas and they live all over the place where all the other schools have
109a specific boundary of students within a mile they still walk to school right just like anybody else but I think we've gotten the question about changing routes moving bus drivers a lot of questions like that what people have to remember is we're a three-tiered system and each tier we bust approximately 4 000 students and so in that tier for a driver it's all three levels and so they do a middle school run they drop off they go to the next run and when we talked about that ability to perhaps move drivers we also are concerned with safety because drivers get used to students they know who's getting on their bus and if every day we have these sub drivers showing up not knowing the students we worry about that as well as well as contractually
110we know that we have an obligation with our bus drivers in terms of the routes the routes that they bid on and then are assigned um I had a question about the opt-in system versus the opt out so I have opted out one of my children from busing this year but I didn't opt out the other one to your point about apprehension about what happens when like his sister doesn't drive into school right um for the opt-in system are we do we know how many um how many people are going to miss that right we just heard from Peter that maybe people aren't always connected the way that we would like them to be and so are we do we think we're going to end up with like a lot of scrambling at the end
111when people realize oh wait I I forgot to opt in what do I do now or like is that going to cause us more angst than we than it's worth I could I can try to answer that if you yeah so we're going to have a really detailed campaign with that and it will be both from a district and a school just you know schools be sharing those different you know toolkits and things like that with families and newsletters things like that also I think that you know if they don't opt in within that the reason that you stop that in April is so that then now you can start making phone calls you can start you know the the personal relationships you know your you know calls from your schools from the district things
112like that and so um you know you want to get that through a survey because we've got a lot of students but but I mean there's there's time built into that so that we don't run into what you're talking about foreign if you know the answer so do we have an idea like especially at the high school level kids who they take the bus normally but then okay I've got these two weeks where I have to stay after school and then I'm not taking the bus and like does that sort of um variability of student writing patterns like how big of an impact does that have on our bus our ability to Route efficient busing well when you put the last part in that there's a big effect on efficient bus routing um we route
113everybody that's eligible so that's why the tracking system will be nice because we actually see who's actually writing but it's it's a very difficult task there's no easy way to do it and we want to provide the transformation but obviously some students will start doing activities and they won't take the bus but they still need to have that opportunity so there's I don't think there's any real easy answer to that I think right now we have to realize that our method of load counts is Counting kids on a particular day there is nothing nothing that is automatic about it so it's really difficult when you say okay drivers on this particular day you're going to do your load counts I think that Carrie Olson our director shared that in one of the Eastridge routes there's
114a route for 130 plus students and getting off of the bus might be 20 25 30 kids and so we would have that load count every single day if we had something that was more automatic and didn't rely on bus drivers counting writing it down and then transferring it when they got back to the office and so that's what Dan Dan is talking about that system that is something that we need so we can more closely monitor our load counts and then our efficiency of buses and there'll be some good advantages of that system too where parents will be able to attract the buses and things like that um and even looking at that we can also look at maybe having some of the older students walk further to the bus stop and we can
115have more less bus stops and that way we could probably get more Riders on there too more of a somewhat like a city bus system is the opt and opt out is it going to be like I can I drive my son to school right now but I don't pick him up is that going to be an option that you can opt in to okay so it's not going to be all or nothing okay perfect well Sean's the one with the experience on the on the opt-in so this is new to us but Sean did it in Robbinsdale so he's as you get you to have the duel I I've done that before and yes so the the the questions on the questionnaire or the survey would be do you want to opt you know
116opt into am you know busing and PM busing so it's kind of a it's a dual kind of a thing and that helps with the routing you know both ways so so the the questions will certainly be do you need it at all do you need it in the morning do you need in the afternoon and then you get into daycares and things like that because I think too especially for like high school I know there's kids that do probably something every day after school but they have to get there in the morning and then they have an activity you know especially if you're a three sport athlete or something like that or clubs and so it would be nice to know how many kids actually need it one way or the other because I
117know this one right now the one we did this year was you just opted out there wasn't an option for Amazon wasn't it yeah I think the important part too is that is that you know families can always opt back in as as Dan said you know I mean we're we're bringing kids to school and we're required to do that and so if there's if there's things that happen over the course of a year job changes you know certain situations change you call the transportation department and they get put on a bus so I mean I mean I think that's a really important part to you know that will be in the messaging as well do we do anything like okay well actually I have two questions so before I come to my second question
118my first question is when we talked about like getting more accurate load counts on a daily basis would that lead to us potentially re-tooling routes mid-year for efficiency or you know like I don't know I'll just say that as we look at a potential for next year of you know making any adjustment with the distances it takes a lot of time to go back and do those recalculations I think Kerry said her team spent I don't know how much time just on one of those and so I think it's difficult once we get going that doesn't mean that it's not possible but we would have to shut down a wing of our transportation allow them to do the rerouting while we kept the existing routing going oh no I wasn't I wasn't saying I was
119just curious if that was the intention of this um but then the other question I had was around um like a lot of high schoolers they'll get their driver's license at some point and they get a parking permit um do we have any mechanism for when kids get a parking permit they get like a like a hey do you still want to do you want to look at your transportation do you want to opt in do you want to opt out whatever like I mean I realized most children don't have cars right but maybe I don't know I mean I think that's something that our committee would have to look at you know I think that the the other part of the opt-in is that you know you have to do it before routes are
120are created right so that so that you're creating those efficiencies with that and so I think that if it's an ongoing situation like that we really would have to kind of and see me as I heard you talking I was thinking if we had the ability to monitor who was getting on and off the buses every day and we saw that ridership for a particular student or students that they just weren't writing I think what's the reach out then is there a Blackboard connector something that we can do you know we've noticed that your child has not been writing for the last 20 days is there any update you'd like to provide us with so you know when we can track the load count and who's getting on and off by name I think that
121that will be a really nice database to pull from so that we can be as efficient with who's riding and who's not so if we did go to some type of badge system like that and a child doesn't opt out but needed bus transportation one day would they be turned away without that badge or could they still take the bus like say if something happened with you know their transportation that day and they needed to take the bus we would figure that part out I'm sure there are rules about that and I think once our students get up and going our kids are pretty used to having badges I mean many of us wear badges all the time and is there going to be that occasion when you forget your badge or lose it yeah
122and you know I don't know enough about the systems we're looking at whether that for some kids it's easier just to put it on your backpack a little tag on your backpack or something so I think there could be multiple ways but we will have to figure out just like the kids that might come through without lunch money if you don't come through with your lunch badge no what do we do so yeah my last question is what how many more drivers would we need now to be appropriately staffed for the number of students and routes that we have like how short is our shortage uh 12 I'd say um seems to go up every day but so we'll say 15. the ant's usually really conservative he said 12 I'm going to go 15 to
12320. because we know that we also have the daily illnesses and the daily call-ins and it's been really tough because it's really tough having our all of our mechanics and office staff out driving buses are those just drivers for our district students or does that include the other schools and in the district that aren't so wash close goals that we provide transportation yes it includes them because we're we're required to transport them know this but our our bus drivers paid well I like compared to other districts or other bus drivers yeah um in looking at comparing to say the the contractor that we use are we have a pay that lasts for like 75 days Abby is that it so it goes up you know two dollars in the first 75 days um so our
124end our our wages we know it's higher than our contractors what they told us and then we also have benefits um so we're we're maybe a dollar Below in North St Paul I believe um the ones I've seen oh yeah I got the look um you know just looking at the postings I see out there um we're about a dollar behind but we don't know what the benefits are we have very good what do you need Abby to get benefits as a bus driver 25 hours a week and you get full health insurance benefits and the bus drivers I've talked to when we look at that that age the age of the workforce that is the critical component of the work that is really what they're looking for is that benefit any other questions all
125right thanks Dan thank you all right we're on to 5.3 Staffing update introduced by superintendent Julie Nelson thank you I feel like I'll be introducing a lot but I'm not going to be talking this whole time at least as part of our standard work we wanted to provide the board and the community a look inside our staffing process when we when January rolls over and now we're into February this is our staffing time as you heard tonight there were in the survey questions about class size we hear the same thing and I think what we know about class sizes kids don't come in specific numbers you know when kids enroll they don't come in a specific package of 10 or 15 or 25 into one school we know that course registration varies we know that
126the sizes of our schools vary we know that course offerings vary tonight Abby Baker is going to kick us off talking about just the overall Staffing process and the timeline and then our assistant superintendents as part of the additional teachers that were added with our covet dollars are Esser dollars I had asked them when that occurred as part of Staffing last year that we would monitor to see did those additional staff members that were added did it have an impact on our overall class size and so they're here to report back to the board this evening about class size and some of the things that go into the overall scheduling what I realized is I reviewed the presentation is I was definitely cut out for the elementary I understand the elementary you will hear Kelly
127and Christine talk about onesies double tins and triple tins and then I got thrown a little bit but I think they have a great example to share with the board in terms of the complications that go into course registering and overall class size and so Abby if you would go ahead and kick us off yes thank you we'll start by looking at the overall Staffing timeline as we enter February we are really ramping up our staffing process it'll be a busy next few months when it comes to teacher Staffing in February it starts with human resources meeting with principal some of the things we look at is teacher licensing we reviewed to make sure teachers are licensed properly for their subject areas we look at teachers that are on tier one license tier two license
128and ofps we're also reviewing teachers that are in job targets and performance issues at that time as well one of the big deadlines in February is February 15th as we have intensive retirement and leaves of absence requests due these aren't final numbers these are just intents so that helps us as we start looking at numbers and looking at positions that are going to be open going into the next school year so we can get a better idea of what we're looking at um in March the preliminary Staffing projections begin when we look at enrollment and we start looking at final section counts due for elementary in March also is that final retirement leave-in absence request deadline in March 15th and that's when we really have a good picture of who will be departing our organization
129or taking a leave of absence for the following year that's when we can really start looking at those Staffing projections once we get enrollments section counts and then we have a better picture of who will be returning for the following school year in March we also post pool positions so what that means is we take a look at more difficult to fill positions so those are positions in our special education department or both resource and center-based teachers School psyches speech language Pathologists some of our general education teaching positions such as business facts technology education if we have openings in those areas we do a pool position so we can start getting a good solid group of external candidates that when we go to post externally we already have started the recruiting process because we know
130those are more difficult to fill positions so we post those in March in April evaluations for probationary teachers are due so we're looking at their third evaluation at that point and then we send notification to released and displaced teachers in April and then as you're aware we do releases at the April board meeting as well toward the end of April we start round one for internal bidding and those are for current teachers after around one internal bidding is done we roll right into round two of internal bidding at the beginning of May and then after the both rounds of internal bidding is when we can post positions externally and that happens in the middle of May I'll now turned over to Dr Perkins to go in more detail about elementary scheduling in class size all
131right thank you Abby for elementary um superintendent Nielsen uh mentioned that we took some covet dollars and we lowered uh we added the FTE to Elementary and so on the slide it says the Staffing is determined by a formula where we take the projected enrollment and divide by 26 with the covert dollars this year we were able to divide that by 25 and that's how we were able to make the adjustment there other impacts that uh can impact the enrollment and Staffing are the identities and traditional transfers and also any open enrollment that are coming in we look at those numbers in addition to the magnet lotteries and we began to look at sections for each school and make sure they're properly staffed going into the school year typical elementary school day six and a
132half hours out of that six and a half hours you have a hour for Specialists and 30 minutes for lunch and recess and then at least five hours of what we call Core instructional classroom instruction and then on the screen you see how that five hours is broken down we have 30 minutes what we call social emotional learning which takes place before at the first part of the school day and also toward the closing end of the school day we have 90 to 120 Minutes of literacy instruction and the variation is there because in the primary K-2 is 120 and then the intermediate three through five is 90 minutes and that additional 30 minutes goes into science for those intermediate grades 75 to 90 minutes for Math and then 30 minutes for science social studies
133Health 30 minutes for what I need which is intervention time to get students additional boosts or acceleration and if that is also needed next slide on this particular slide you see the average class size compared to the total enrollment for each of the 16 elementary schools in our district for example that bubble closest to the left Liberty Ridge Elementary School which is our large Elementary School it has 813 students with an average class size of 26.6 students for that for that school in the middle you see Pine Hill Elementary School 540 students enrolled with an average class size of 25.17 and then you see Newport toward the end 255 enrolled students enrolled with an average class size of 19.62 you see some outliers there multi-age which is part of Valley Crossing um that's in the
134middle so it's not an outlet but that in that program we have 555 students with an average class size of 25.23 but then you see Valley Crossing Gateway at the very very top which is uh this is standing alone 147 students in that program and the average class size is 29.4 and then toward the bottom you see Valley Crossing single grade that's just one section that's 19 students and that um section next slide on this slide you will notice that the average class size is highlighted per grade level so kindergarten 22.57 and it goes all the way up to grade five or 25.96 that next column identifies the grade level ranges between for kindergarten all the way to grade 5 across those 16 schools one school may have 17.75 and then school might have 24
135so it can be anywhere between that range between between those 16 schools and you see those grade level ranges for every grade level that last column is the district threshold which we consider when we are looking at Staffing and for schools identifying they need more Staffing we look at that threshold and and look at the potential to add Staffing now it does not mean that because they go one over that threshold we add an FTE but like I said we do take the whole thresholds into consideration toward the bottom of this uh slide you see the district average total which is 3 23.79 and so this is at the time of Staffing now the next slide uh same information but we schools add in compensatory education FTE or discretionary FTE to address the class size
136and you can look at the district average drops to 23.01 once we add those additional FTE to lower class size and then the class size averages across each grade level they also drop a little bit lower this is a more I would say accurate representation of where our schools sit if you were to walk into those schools tomorrow the next slide in the last laugh Elementary is you see the different uh the magnet programs the first section is new Avis Frontiers which is our Spanish Immersion in kindergarten they have an average class size of 24 and then you can see the average class size is all the way up to grade five compared to the district thresholds the next two uh tables are Valley Crossing and these representations are the multi-age which is a larger
137table and then the smaller table would be Gateway and once again you see the average class sizes for those grade levels compared to the district thresholds and with that I will pass it to my colleagues to talk about secondary all right so um secondary scheduling is a little bit more complicated at our middle schools and high schools we have you know between 700 a thousand kids at our middle schools 2 000 students in each of our big high schools and so the the secondary scheduling is based on student registration so student registration is happening right now um just probably getting to the end of it because of course as Abby mentioned we're moving into Staffing so we need to know how many courses we need who needs to teach those courses to get into Staffing
138so that's ending right about now and that will really determine the courses that the high schools offer um and I know Kelly's going to get into an example of these things that I'm going to describe right now but when principals look at student registration they look at each course and how many students have registered for them then they look at are there any courses that we need to crash meaning are there any classes that are below roughly 25. of course taking into consideration core content classes or taking into consideration courses like AP classes or IB classes or courses that we really do want to offer those to students we might run them at a little bit of a lower number um also as Julie mentioned earlier we have what are called Singletons so those are
139courses only offered once like choir or music classes or some AP classes so if a student wants to take one of those their schedule really needs to be built around that one course and when it's offered um Singleton or a double 10 also it might only be offered twice and so again that student's schedule needs to work around that and so remember with all of those things they're trying to make 2 000 students choices work and give them what they'd like to take now when students register they are asked to put down I don't know three four five alternates so that if we do crash classes they go into the next alternate that they chose so we try to build the best schedules we can for what students are asking for and at the middle
140school and high school as you can see we take the total number of enrollment for Middle School divide that by 33.5 for Staffing and high school of 34.5 and so that is where they start to build the schedule so now I'll hand it over to Kelly who's going to get into a little more detail and show you like that a crash portion secondary scheduling um so this demonstrates a micro view of the schedule board in the old days we used to have the boards up on the wall with magnets and we'd build the schedule so at the top you have six periods per trimester three trimesters and then on the left is where you would have all of the teachers in your building so all of the teachers in your building um on the left
141and so this could range probably from 45 in our middle schools to 85.90 perhaps at the um the high school level and then when you start to build the courses that the students have asked for then are placed in the center are placed for that teacher across you'll notice on the bottom then is the number 2000 and that's a typical high school or whatever the enrollment is at that school and that's there because every period you need to have at least 2 000 seats for those kids to sit in and so every period you need to make sure that those classes that are offered are going to have enough space for those 2000 kids and this is where secondary scheduling gets a little bit more complicated because even though we schedule at that clean 33
142and a half or 34 and a half we know that it's not that clean when when students start to register if there was no choice we told students what they had then there would be an even distribution and it would be great but that wouldn't be great if you ask our students because the one thing that they say is that they want choice in their schedules so you'll have as Christine mentioned those classes that have 28 and then you'll have those classes that have 150 requests so you can have five sections so there's a little bit more flexibility in where that goes in terms of the year but wherever we put that Singleton we really need to make sure that that student gets that class so we use some tools to help us try to
143do this um Infinite Campus lets us run what's called a conflict Matrix and it tells us all of the students that have requested more than one Singleton or what classes they've suggested that we shouldn't put in the same hour so it gives us all of this data to begin to sit down and build this schedule um Singleton schedule Singleton classes are scheduled first so that student a student then gets loaded into it and they get locked we say so when we start to scramble things that student's not going to move from that Singleton so that we can make sure that that one that one course that they requested they have to make sure that they stay in that spot and then double tins are are next so we're going to do our best to kind
144of show you on a this is a one trimester um one student kind of scheduling the courses that are named by a color are considered those Singleton courses we didn't want to simplify it and say it's this or that and then those courses that are double tender named by an animal um the other thing we want to point out so as Julie mentioned the kova dollars last year was our first year to give our Master schedulers what we called margin of error or a buffer and we did try to we did try to staff them at a plus three percent of their enrollment so that gave them a little bit of wiggle room because we know it isn't that clean divisor so we have our graduate and our graduate has requested the blue class the
145red class the cats the dogs and then history in English and this is pretty typical especially for some of our our students who are on in a multiple AP classes music classes high-level language classes so as we get into those types of schedules this is pretty typical of a of a kiddo who has has selected these courses so as I mentioned we'd put the student in the blue class and we'd load them in there we'd lock it and then we'd put the student in the red class and we'd load them there and we'd lock it and then cats and then dogs and so you can see we only have two spaces where his history and his English can fit and even though there's five sections of that because 150 kids asked for it it still
146limits where those can go in his schedule and so you can kind of see that this done on a on a really large scale makes scheduling super complicated um and you're probably asking why are we telling you this and we just we really wanted you to see why our classes range so much or pretend what we may consider so much but also we are hopeful that we can find some data that that three percent is helping with that range to be a little bit less that our low classes average would be up and our high class average would come down is our goal so with that this is our Middle School classes I should probably pause if there's any questions on the scheduling piece but yeah I do have so when we talk about crashing
147a course now that we have online do the three schools then get together and are like okay I have to crash this course can we do yes okay we did that with for a few subjects some of the world languages but yes we do that so we can so we can try to still offer whatever that is for students in all three high schools and we also look at that when we're considering this poor kid's schedule where he has like no room I mean do we consider some of those like say he really didn't have the option for sixth hour but there was an online are we making these kids aware that would you be okay with or are they saying I am okay if I have to take it online yeah absolutely online's always
148an option as long as we're offering it online and so online scheduling is just as if not more complicated than this Katie that's how my daughter yeah and my daughter's doing it too I was more broader yes yes good question so yes that has really offered a lot more flexibility and students to take more courses because you're right so we haven't crashed some that we would have if it wasn't for online okay so then do we fit an online we fit an online into a class period though however are we no online can go anywhere in the student schedule so we should just schedule them so if they had four or three online classes we'd schedule them three wherever they around their other yep and then if they had only one so it gives a
149little more flexibility a lot more flexibility but it's a little there's still that complex because not your going over to the online versus just and not to mention as I'm sure we're all aware if that student has it period one two and four or two three and four where's that kiddo going to go and that's the facility conversation that we're having so right now they're in the media center for all those online courses because it can't be as clean as period one and period six or where the online class is going to fit in this kid's schedule no my kid just tries to drive home every day but that's my kid but oh go ahead um so you don't put the online classes in the schedule We Do master schedule not in the master schedule
150because the online school is like its own school they have their own master schedule okay so kids can if they prefer online can take three classes in online yeah they register yes okay all right I get it so good explain to me the um alternates work as far as if a student puts down I just struggle with this with my own student last week but um as far as if you're putting alternates down is that mainly just for your electives or would you ever I mean because kids have to take their core courses too right usually just for electives yes because we know that students have to have their core classes but if a student gets their schedule back like I think this actually happened for my daughter and she was missing a core class
151then you need to go see the concert and they need to fit you in somewhere because they know you have to have your core classes but yes the alternates are for electives so when some of those electives are required right yes you're right you've already had all the like math you need but you want to take this other math would that still be a core course or would that be considered elective then an elective if you have all your math classes yes so when you like if there's one school where enrollment is fine and then there's another school where a class should be crashed because there's not enough enough students in it um but there's if there's not a an online offering like how do we how do we manage between like the attention like
152if there's I don't know like 15 kids who sign up for whatever at Woodbury but at East Ridge 30 kids sign up so it runs fine there and it doesn't you know do we is there any mechanism for us to I don't know somehow combine them I I don't I don't know right I mean we've talked about we've been asked the question can we transport as you heard about the transportation conversation we can't really do that right now um but that's why online has really been helpful with that we tried post pandemic to do a streaming so we had a teacher it just really didn't work out really well so but we did try it was I think two schools that did try a streaming for an elective class and it just it really didn't
153work out super well yeah take a course at that Park they can transport themselves correct if it's a course that their school doesn't offer right now we don't do that with IB there there might be a couple of kids that do that but in general no we don't we don't have students that do that IB is considered for idts though so they would IDT to park yeah to take IB and the other thing that we have to consider is that um years ago there was a class and I knew the person who had their daughter in there and I think there were 18 to 19 students in there which is below you know what we could we'd consider to crash but if all of those students want that class and now they go out to
154pseo we have to take a look at the cost of having kids go outside as well so I mean there's a lot that goes into I mean this is one student's schedule and think about 2 000 students we're scheduling for so and I think it's really just to show the complexity the scheduling portion wasn't part it was really about what's the outcome but the outcome depends on all of these things sorry so when does this um like a preliminary schedule so first maybe I need to back up because I might not when do the teachers get the new teachers get slotted in and when do the students get slotted in to this schedule or the schedule on the previous page so right now they're looking at creating the framework of the schedule and then that
155will determine what teachers we need for Staffing so in the next couple of months all that needs to be figured out yes but the teachers are determined by what the students ask for yes it's happening right now High School ended last Friday I was going to say middle schools nearly done for ninth grade and I think that's something that we try to tell parents and families like we want you to be able to change your mind we get it that like you're a kid and this happens but yet if we knew right away what you wanted it really makes this more possible you know but if you you decide to change your mind it's not as easy as just going into the counseling office and saying I I decided I didn't want to take this
156and now I want to take this like we'd love to accommodate those requests and I'm sure our counselors work super hard to do that but we only offer what people ask for you know we're not a college course where it's like here's our schedule and then you have to fit into it it's you tell us what you want and we build your schedule so So to that end Our Hope was with that three percent margin of error that our range would decrease and we were really excited that it did um so this what you see here is uh the kind of the trend of our Middle School classes um what it the average of the lows means so every course was listed and we removed the outliers so banned those types of courses um every
157course was listed with their their low and they're high so American history 9 had 21 as their low and 37 as their high so this graph is then an average of all of those lows and an average of all of those highs and you can kind of see the trend and then this last year as we mentioned with that three percent we were we did decrease the range um a little bit so the low end came up which is okay and the high end came down a little bit and then as far as average class size similar removal of those outliers the light blue line is then just how we staff that total enrollment divided by the number of sections we offer and then the dark blue is kind of all of the class averages
158and then taking the average of all of those so this is the Middle School kind of trend on that all right and then here are the high school graphs as well as you can see our range also got smaller from now 24 to 33. and also then the averages so the average of all of our courses is about 32.6 and then the average of those is 29. and when I met with high school principals today they said their courses run anywhere from 25 to 40. again depending upon what class it is like for example College in the schools is a requirement some of them you can't have more than 23 students but AP Calculus if they only have enough for one they might run at 40. so it just really depends I have a question
159when we talked about using covet dollars those are one time dollars so just because we're doing it this year doesn't mean we can do it next year right because that's just one-time money and when it's gone it's gone and that's what we're looking at now too right like to Julie's Point what data do we have that It produced what we wanted to produce and then what are we going to to make a budget neutral now if this is something we want to believe in and what we do then what would we need to do to make that budget neutral so what what are we willing to swap right in order to make yes this happen right and uh you know Katie that was part of our whole budget adjustment process when we came back to
160the board one or two times to give you that update on where we were at we have been much more conscious about dollars that come in with grants and different funding that is that are one-time dollars it gets us in trouble very quickly because whatever is added it all is always a value to someone um you know to our students and then it's really hard to cut it when the money goes away and so that's why we had things labeled that were part of our covet dollars any other questions all right thanks that was actually very informative I really appreciate that um next is 5.4 the first reading of the proposed calendar for 2020 324 presented by superintendent Julie Nielsen thank you I think I have the last two items and I don't know about
161all of you but it's been hot in here and I feel like my throat my throat is so dry right now but I'm going to keep going I'm going to charge ahead um and I I'm sure people don't realize the work that goes into a School District calendar I always thought it was easy as when the calendar said come to work you come to work and when it says stay home you stay home but it is much more complex than that and so I bring the first reading the calendar forward there may be a slight change or two before we go to final approval so I will certainly keep you updated but what I'd like to do is just to start and I brought my calendar for this year too so I can talk just
162a little bit about last year to this year as we look at the month of August one thing we try to intentionally do is to push back our probationary teacher and our ability to hire and onboard any new staff to as late as possible one of the very first drafts of the calendar I want to say that we had our probationary Academy like the week of August 7th and 8th so what you see in August and I'll just start with August you see that we have a teacher work work day on August 18th that is a flex work day and what that means is we know that our teachers come in before the school year starts at all times early morning after hour is whatever it is putting in that extra time in their classroom
163and so that day is built into the front side so that starting that day is when everyone gets paid and so that's the teacher what we're calling a teacher work day but it's a flexible day then as we roll into the week of August 21st you'll see that is when we have our new teacher orientation which the green and the Reds remain fairly consistent from previous years you'll see we have a little bit of an overlap with the new teacher along with the probationary Academy so the first three days of that week currently on August 24th it is an elementary at PPS day we do have an atpps meeting next week with Tim Bunnell and we'll be talking about what those days will look like for staff and So currently the elementary ATP state is
164set up for August 24th all of our staff would return on August 28th which is typically the welcome back to school with their school or program or Department the 29th is typically when we would do a district along with District professional development and then of course the 30th is a workshop day a little different than last year we had both of our elementary K-5 assessment days prior to the start of the school year and what you'll see in this calendar is one of the assessment days is August 31st and at that same time our secondary will be having their atbps day and then as we roll into September many of you are aware that a couple of years ago on that first day of school our invitation was for sixth and ninth graders to come
165in so they could kind of have the school to themselves and I think we have heard such great feedback I think the board has heard that as well so that day would continue for sixth and ninth grade and the committee also felt that it was important to do a one of the K-5 assessment days on that particular day so on that particular day the only students in session would be Sixth and 9th then all of our students would start back to school on Wednesday September 6th as we look through the month of September that remains fairly consistent with a new no school day September 25th and I believe the board is aware that when we look at no school days professional development days there are set days in contract so one of the thing that
166we're one of the things that we're always doing is going back and looking at instructional days student days and counting those by month so that takes care of September or September in October we plan to have our recommending October 6th be a K-5 prep day on that particular day there would be no school for K-5 students and our other students would be in session and then as we head into that MEA as I believe it's called yet you'll see the 19th and 20th but you'll also see that because of a difference in days that the 18th is a no school day for K-5 and so that is added on to that and um I believe that was a little different than this this year November 7th we made a change based on information that we
167received November 7th which is election day will be a PD day for our staff and so while students won't be in session because so many of the elections are held within our schools it would be a day for professional development for our staff November 22nd um would be a teacher work workshop day with the employee holiday being the 23rd and the 24th of November December is a fairly clean month as we look at the yellow the number of student contact days with winter break starting December 22nd you will see that some of the 12-month contracts have employee holidays so the 25th and 26th because of where Christmas Falls and then of course the 29th and the first as well employee holidays and then the committee felt strongly to keep in place that January 2nd day
168that was a K-12 Workshop day we had great feedback about just being able to take winter break and then come back and regather with colleagues and get ready for the month of January January 15th Martin Luther King holiday which is a 12-month employee holiday as well and then to end the month of January January 29th we would have a K-12 professional development day again in February similar to in October a K-5 prep day on February 16th followed with the Monday February 19th off for President's Day looking at March and I know that Perdana over there was getting questions months ago about that spring break that remains consistent not the exact dates but the same time spring break March 4th through the 8th with the teacher work day on March 11th um and then as we
169look into March and employee holiday on March 29th and that is by contract which is why that remains as an employee holiday and so there would be no school on um March 29th and then in the month of April um after we did the counts we know that that is a really long stretch as we look at heading into spring while we love the light it's a long stretch without any breaks and so because of the number of days we determined that that particular week had the least impact as it related to testing so April 26 would be a no school day and then we will roll into month of May with only the employee holiday on May 27th and then our last day of school June 5th for everyone and then eight to bpsa
170teacher Workshop day on excuse me work day on June 7th and something to point out we are not planning to change that April when we have testing days that will remain consistent with how we've done testing days in the past we just don't have those testing days out yet and I don't believe next year we're hosting the SEC we have the SEC this year but that's always one too that we would take a look at asynchronous our synchronous for our high schools so with that any questions and I would welcome anybody else we had teacher Union leadership we had departments professional development I believe we met four or five times went out and got feedback even from our District Parent ambassadors a number of groups in finalizing this calendar so with the um act day
171in October and then whatever it will be in April those would be then flex days for the high schoolers who are not taking those tests correct okay so like in October right now and I don't believe that day was marked but October 18th you'll see 9th and 12th graders are doing asynchronous learning while our 10th and 11th graders are doing the pre-act and the ACT test and then just because this comes up every year elections we have to have them in the schools we can't say no you can't have an election here that is it's not an option we are pulling it comes up every morning we are polling locations and I think we have tried multiple things and I think this year after the feedback we received we thought that it's a great day
172to do professional development with our staff any other questions so please spend a little time looking at it if you have any questions before approval and um we're hoping to clean up that month of August should it change I will make sure that I communicate with the board thank you so much uh next is 5.5 the first reading of proposed policy changes presented by our superintendent Julie Nielsen all right here we go um we have 12 12 different policies 10 different policies um Coming forth this evening are the policies being brought forth have been reviewed and revised and reflect updates in Minnesota statutes definitions of terms legal references and cross-references many of the policies you see here tonight are annual update policies we like this time of the year to be spent so some of
173them you will see that there are no proposed changes so with that I will start with policy 410 Family and Medical Leave in that policy as reviewed by the policy committee there are some grammatical and legal updates you will see that there are clear definitions around veterans and the military as well as the employer the change in wording to school district and um as well as some just slight wording changes from in this policy it had semester and we are actually trimester so cleaning up some of the language along with some of the cross-references as well as legal references policy 413 harassment and violence that policy was revised one year ago and so I'll try to point out if they were updated last year at this almost very same time and so for that one
174there are no proposed changes policy 414 mandated reporting of child neglect or physical or sexual abuse for that one there was some significant grammatical as well as legal changes and so as you look through that policy you will see that there have been updates to the Minnesota statutes on the language there as well as some of the definitions