001[Music] thank you [Music] foreign service center in Cottage Grove Minnesota at this time we'd like to acknowledge that the land on which We Gather is a land of the man of architon Dakota people I'm going to work within me than me dwellers of the Spirit Lake our first agenda item gives our roll call Dana will you call the roll Eric tessner here Louise Heinz here Pat Driscoll here Melinda Doles is absent Katie Schwartz here Simi petnick here Sharon Van Lear here Emmy Papa here Maddie distasio here Tomi omawade here thank you next will you please rise for the president of Allegiance stand one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all our next item is 3.0 and that is the approval of our agenda may I get a motion to approve our agenda
002so move second move by Pat [Music] okay I'm looking at y'all like you okay all those in favor I I are those opposed motion carried the next item on our agenda is 4.0 and that is our student District ambassadors and they will be presented this evening by our superintendent Julie Nielsen fabulous thank you today we had the opportunity to I have I believe our third meeting and it was a virtual meeting with our students and I think as Leaders we forgot how much fun it was to have students virtually and I know Emmy I had a little hard time getting on some students with their devices were actually showing us the ceiling and so we were kind of troubleshooting and when we got done we reminded ourselves that this is what a classroom could be
003like and so it was great to have the kids all back together and it is one of our favorite highlights to have students here with us and a reminder for the board and the people in the community that students get to select and sign up to be present at our board meeting so the first thing I'm going to ask our students to do and we'll just go one right down the row is just to introduce yourself your name your grade and your school and what makes you a good Ambassador and so I'm gonna have Emmy start and then we'll move to Maddie and Tommy so Emmy go ahead hi my name is Emmy Popoff I am from um Elementary School Cottage Grove Elementary and I am in fifth grade and Emmy what makes you a
004good ambassador I feel I make a good Ambassador because I will listen to others feelings and how they are feeling I will listen to how what their ideas are and make sure that they are heard and able to get join in thank you I'm Maddie distasio I'm in seventh grade and I go to Oatman Middle School I think that I'm a good student ambassador because a lot of people like my positive spirit and um I like to be a leader hi my name is tomiomiwade I am in 11th grade and I go to Woodbury High School what I think makes me a good student ambassador is kind of a joke that we have in my friend group is that I've tried every Club in our school at least once so I've played Sports I do
005soccer and track I'm in a lot of school activities like speech National Honor Society different things like that so I know a lot of different groups in my school and I think using that I'm able to share that with other Representatives and you may see Tomi sneak out just a little bit because if I recall she does have a speech practice that she needs to get to so um next we're going to have just Emmy talk a little bit Emmy about what you've been working on in school with your student ambassadors and what you have learned so far this year as a district ambassador so one of the things I've been working on in my Ambassador group is working on like what what does the school want what do we want like what is going
006good in our school what's going bad what should we change so we're basically working on hearing students voices and making sure that they are feeling like they are welcomed into our school and one of the things that I like is that we have like all these inclusion activities and we make sure that everyone here is voices at hers is heard and I feel like I've learned as an ambassador is that our voices are heard when we are at these meetings so they try their best to be able to get us um what we need or what we are feeling that we could change and maybe it may be for you I'm going to have you re open the mic there um why don't you tell everybody who's here in the school board um what some
007of your favorite things are about Cottage Grove Elementary School in terms of your classes and what you like to do okay so when I'm in my classroom I like to have the morning meetings because I get to learn more about everyone and what they prefer and how they're feeling with their classroom and some every day we do like an activity so I like how our teacher is making sure that we are active and not bored and she makes sure that she checks in on us and makes sure that we are okay make sure that we need if we need to take a walk if we need to take a break she makes sure that we are okay and I like how our principal is nice and make sure we are okay as well thank you
008Emmy Maddie do you want to talk a little bit about what you're working on in school and then um our afternoon our morning session today um we have been working on like what makes a good student what makes a good um what makes a good staff member what makes just like a good person in general and we also have been doing like why why are some of our like behavior issues in all the grade levels um sometimes like different um and this morning we talked about um we talked about like three things that our group had in common and Maddie that was your uh welcome and inclusion right you had to come up with three things um and I think one of them was like sports um liked food I was like well that's an
009original one liked food I forget what the food was um but what thing did you talk about next I know you talked about your experience in school and I know you got to hear from high schoolers as well we also talked about um like things that could make our classrooms and school like better or some things that could help your learning um some of the high schools requested like more um that you could like use the Pod more often and more seating in the Pod um some people also requested like flexible seating great and Tommy um so what we've been working on on in our school we've kind of been trying to find ways to increase awareness about student ambassadors like at least in our school because as we're like representatives of the people at
010our school it's good to hear what they think so that we can bring those back to meetings and share and be like a good representation of everyone so we actually put our we created we created a Google form and we put it on our school's website so that students can put feedback of what they think we should talk about at our meetings or things they have concerns about um we've also been trying to think of ways to implement like projects or like concerns that we have talked about in our meetings and then share those with different clubs that we think will be able to address those so yeah really just increasing awareness about student ambassadors and finding ways for people who aren't an ambassador to also participate in our process and tell me what would
011you say about being a district Ambassador when our students come together they tend to go into grade level so we have our elementaries at tables Middle School our high school tends to be the most interactive once they got to know each other they're all talking and so what have you found to be the most valuable as a a high schooler um I think the very various meeting that we came here I was I didn't under I didn't realize how excited I was to like see the other high schoolers because I mean obviously when I'm at my school I'm with the other kids in my class and I see them every day but the kids from other high schoolers or other high schools it was just so interesting to interact with them and then being with
012other grade levels it's been a while since I've been in middle school it's been a while since I've been in elementary school so getting to hear what things are like now when I've been out of those classrooms for three four years is very intriguing um and maybe just to close up I know Tomi you talked about today with our group and event that you are going to be part of next Friday do you want to just share that with our board and the community yeah so Eastridge is hosting on the 24th next Friday from 6 to 9 p.m a black influence event a lot of the bsus from different high schools have been working hard to put together performances for that event there's going to be food entertainment I will be performing a piece I
013wrote during the event so you guys should all everyone should come on Friday next Friday and I will just wrap up I spent uh quite a bit of time with the elementary group and um you're right Tommy I think as we watch our students progress from elementary to middle and high school the value is what's important um what people notice um they were asked what's one thing you feel every Elementary every elementary school should have and why and Emmy do you remember what uh you may not have been in there Emmy you probably were still locked out of the meeting was every Monday we should have ice cream and that would really motivate kids to come to school so we like all ideas big and small and small with us I know that Tommy will
014need to sneak out in a little bit and I think Maddie and Emmy would like to hang in there as long as possible but we also have given them permission to dismiss themselves and thank you to the parents for bringing them in thank you Julie [Applause] and thank you young people for sharing and to you parents these are some fabulous kids I just want and you should be very very proud of them thank you the next item on our agenda is 5.0 commitment to the board comments to the board excuse me at this time individuals may speak to the school board on any item relating to South Washington County Schools the board will not respond to or discuss your comments character abuse or specific complaints identifying staff students or task force members will not be
015permitted the students may be asked to prepare a response to your concerns speakers are permitted to speak up to three minutes in total at three minutes the microphones will be turned off and we will move on to the next agenda item tonight we have two people who have signed up our items all consent items are considered routine and non-controversial by the school board and will be approved by a single motion prior to this meeting board members have had the opportunity to review each of these items and could have requested that any item be moved to the action items for individual consideration can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda items don't move second moved by Eric seconded by Louise all in favor say aye aye those opposed all right next on our agenda
016is 7.0 uh and that's the information items and we will deal with 7.1 uh demographics update and that will be presented this evening by our Executive Director of Finance and operations Dan Pine good evening chair Van Lear school board members student Representatives super 10 Nielsen we're going to talk about numbers for about the next 60 minutes so hold on to your hats after the August 20 22 bond election we we began another information Journey we conducted Community listening sessions to get feedback on the election we had surveys done I've surveyed 500 random sample to find out their feelings on our elections and our Long Reach facility plan we also started had a new demographic study done as we move forward to our next long rehability plan we wanted to make sure you know what the
017numbers look like tonight we're going to have the results of the study done by Hazel Reinhardt Consulting and and Hazel Reinhardt will be presenting the results of her first study um it was a lot of experience I should probably tell you a little bit about it but I do know that she was our state's first demographer and that's quite an honor some things will be a little different from the previous demographic study done by Davis demographics um one one thing that you'll notice too is we're we're looking five years out and the last study we did we were bringing numbers that were 10 years out not to say that one way is right or wrong but we did get feedback from the community that it's hard for people in these times to look too far
018ahead so we figured that if we get some good numbers or or some ideas for the next five years that we can put together a plan based on that with that I'll turn over to Hazel and she will present the results of her study thank you very much Dan um Madam chair board member superintendent it's my pleasure to be here I think somehow the top of this slide is not showing because I don't think I simply said County Public Schools uh it's my pleasure to be here and as I often say I'm more enthusiastic about this than any of the listeners so I'll try to be mindful of that uh the first thing I want to talk about a little bit is that we're in a very different environment than we were a few years
019ago and it's it really behooves us to recognize that as we think about the future the I think probably the most important change that has been occurring and affects School enrollment because after all School enrollment or going to school is compulsory by age and hence it's a subset of of the general population but the number of births in the United States and Minnesota have been decreasing because of lower levels of fertility and by that we mean simply that women are having fewer children at the by the time they end their childbearing years and it has resulted in a decrease in bursts even though the number of women has increased and the consensus among demographers is that the pandemic will result in fewer births and incidentally we never recovered bursts that were lost with the Great
020Recession of 2008 later so we've we've had a declining fertility rate now in 2020 in the U.S bursts were the lowest they've been since 1979. so that's a long time but Bruce we're up one percent in 2021 we don't know about Minnesota our department of health is a little slow in getting these numbers out and especially since the pandemic and then to remember that fertility rates vary by race ethnicity the other thing is that we have less Mobility that is people move move about less following the second world war for many many many many years at least 20 percent of all Americans changed their address every year now that dropped very sharply to 8.4 percent in the last year so we're just having less Mobility people are staying in their home staying in their places
021much longer and of course that topic that I often say we're so tired of talking about the Aging of the population and some of us especially since it it happens to all of us uh but it's a very significant thing because once a population grows old it can never get young again and that is what is happening to us is that we're growing old and we're not alone it's a it's a global phenomena and maybe you are read in the paper which is very significant that China posted more deaths than births this past year and that is really a sign that that population simply can't grow when that happens but it has some very short-term implications different demand for mix and housing smaller percentage of households have children which affects School enrollment or I like
022to say you're you're not going to get out of of chauffeuring your children for play dates because there aren't going to be many kids in the neighborhood then Minnesota is back to a pattern of net out migration and by that I mean that more people are leaving the state of Minnesota every year than move to it so that it's our growth rate is very very low right now and then of course subject of competition for students that is a public policy supported by public policy and we have many state funded forms of competition and it is it is increasing every year it's not decreasing it's increasing every year now let's look at covid because that is something we have to deal with as well in Minnesota and in the U.S us Public School enrollment decreased
023in in the 2021 school year Kendra it was marked by kindergarten classes being smaller as students attended no school simply kept at home where hopes homeschooled or attended a non-public school the other Elementary grades were also harder hit Middle School and High School enrollment was less affected and now we've had a recent study out that shows that in the United States we have lost 1 million public school kids from the pandemic and can't seem to find where they are can't they don't seem to be in home schools at least as reported non-public and the like so everybody's scratching their head as to what happened so what happened in this school district well I would say that the effect given your size was pretty minimal a lot of districts were much harder hit however you've had
024some post-pandemic changes that are a little curious kindergarten was below its expected size in the pandemic year 2021. you had a decline in enrollment of 218 students which was new phenomenal for you and you had a net migration in migration that was reduced to a mere 97 students so it it really it had some effect but compared to your size of enrollment pretty minimal students shifted to other options homeschool increased everywhere but what's interesting here is to me is in this District non-public enrollment in Charter School enrollment increased after the pandemic year in 2021-22 and again in 22-23 so with that kind of background let's look a little bit at enrollment history it tells us something about what's going on and what we might anticipate your enrollment excluding Early Childhood increased by 1 316 students
025or 7.6 percent in this 10-year period from 2012 uh 13. now that has been affected by a one-time event your purchase of Valley Crossing School and because it's a one-time event I don't think there's another school you can purchase in this next 10 years so that that won't happen again resident enrollment also increases increased by a little higher percentage and your non-resident students make up 2.6 percent of your enrollment which is a very very low percentage in the metro area very low percentage um and you have a net loss of students to other public options especially it's been going on for some time Not Unusual it's not a high percentage but it's present market share of 82.3 percent of what I estimate to be the school age population the district and this is a very
026high percentage for a Twin Cities area Metro School District very very high and then competition for students increased during the pandemic and here I'm looking at South Washington public schools here compared to the state of Minnesota as a whole for 2021 on these education choices and you can see that you have a smaller percentage of of your entire uh enrolled student body enrolled anywhere who are residents of the district then the state as a whole and you can see open enrollment accounts for nine percent of all enrolled students in Minnesota are moving one place or another they're they're not happy with the school district they live in there so in essence they're changing the boundaries and you can see it one only 1.8 percent of your students in 2021 were non-residents and only 2.6 percent
027of your resident students left in this week so that's uh through open enrollment as far as Charter Schools should prove the percentage is pretty equal to the state and then you can see the difference in the capture rate and It capture rate here in the Twin Cities metro area excluding Minneapolis and St Paul is more around 71 72 percent so you can see uh that how much higher yours is here we've we want to take a look at our enrollment and I just want to clarify that while it excludes Early Childhood it includes the alc and and next and really uh what we want to take a look at here is the non-residence and in fact 10 years later you have slightly fewer non-residents than you had 10 years earlier and then you'll note that
028large number 687 in the 2016-17 school year that was the year you acquired Valley Crossing you got non-resident students that year and most of them left and went back to their District of residence in the following year uh one of the things that demographers like to look at because this is is the same phenomena that we would look at in in a total population uh we look at change we look at the two components of change and basically there are only two uh one is natural increase decrease in the general population its birth versus deaths in a school enrollment it's the difference in the size of the incoming kindergarten class compared with the previous year's grade 12. okay and a negative number means that that incoming glass class was or kindergarten was smaller than the
029previous year's grade 12. and then net migration measures movement across District boundaries and or the movement between non-public Public Schools Charter Schools uh whatever so again you can see that 1 316 is the is the change in the 10-year period and that change is is the uh results from natural increased decrease in net migration so you can see that change between the fall of 2015 and the fall of 2016 at 766 which again is influenced by Valley Crossing and you can see the 950 because some of these are your own resident students but that was a separate District so you see those numbers and then you can see that that in that 10-year period your enrollment if you will think about it depressed by 2 400 students because kindergartens were smaller than the outgoing grade
03012. that's an important concept because that's going to continue and that puts downward pressure on enrollment and then you you see what the net migration was and then here we can look at enrollment numbers and and I just want to highlight what what I tend to look at I look at that top row across at kindergarten to see how much it has changed and again we see that between the 2015-16 year and 2016-17 we had the jump in kindergarten again Valley Crossing and then since that kindergarten even though we've had a lot of growth in the district has not increased very much then if I looked another thing I look at is the rightmost column the most recent year to look at the and here we can clearly see that there's a difference in the
031size of grades as between kindergarten Elementary and the high school grades and that's a good predictor right there that we're going to continue to have natural decrease because those classes will conduct large classes will continue to graduate out of the system and then if you look at the diagonal that's how we calculate net migration going from the kindergarten of 2012-13 1153 in first grade there was one thousand two hundred fifteen of them then there's 1278 and on and on until grade 10 this year and they're 1 509 which shows us the effect of net migration on that grade which as I call a cohort but like that so with that kind of sense of background let's turn ourselves attention to the projections there are a couple of things that are really important here one is
032I want to just State some underlying assumptions one is that the decline in Resident bursts in Minnesota and Washington County will result in smaller kindergartens in the next several years and I'll show you the numbers on that in other words I don't think you're going to escape that phenomena and then I made the assumption that Washington County share of Minnesota resident bursts will increase in the next five years now if you're only thinking about a five-year projection this really doesn't matter because this is this assumption affects the second five years of a 10-year projection as the first five years of that projection number all those children have been born okay and the other assumption I made is that your share of Washington County's residents will increase a little bit in the next five years and
033then excluding the pandemic year I would argue that we have seen survival rates associated with substantial increase in housing units so that we have survival rates that we can apply and have confidence in that they will be good predictors of what continued housing unit growth will be like so this is another very very important it's resident bursts that term has a very specific meaning it means on the birth certificate the mother provided an address it could be coded to Washington County Minnesota without regard to where the child was born and then it's also coded to a municipality but at this moment you can't get any of that data from the State Health Department because they're very preoccupied with other things uh now in this 14 years are shown here 2006 to 2020 the peak birth
034year in that period was in 2007 in the state and you will see in Washington County the largest birth year of these 14 was 2006. and if you look at that bursts have declined resident bursts in Washington County have declined since 2006 virtually every year even though you've hit the county has had substantial population in now as we turn to the Future I'm looking at what the Minnesota Democrat Center has projected for zero-year-olds again doesn't affect the first five years of the projections but it affects the second five years and these projections were made about Based on 2015-16 data and as you can see they over projected the number of births in 2017 2018 2019 2020. in fact the projection 420 was seventy thousand three twenty five an actual verse were 63 451. so I
035felt going forward I have to I have to adjust those numbers downward but I didn't want to take the pandemic effect in it so I based it on 2019 and adjusted it downward by 90 so that it's 93.8 percent of the projection projected number and that you see in the right uh at 65 000 something now the important thing here is look at how flat those numbers are so in other words we can't expect any kind of lift to kindergarten that that as we move forward it's just a flat number so so that we have that context now now births are reported on a calendar year basis and you have to be five years of age on September 1st to enter school in Minnesota so I want to adjust this calendar year to this Academic
036Year in about a third of all children are born in the last September 1st to December 31st I make that adjustment and I call it the kindergarten pool and the pool I'm going to use for you is Washington County as a proxy and then the percentages you see is the percentage your kindergarten is of that Washington County Pool and again you can see how that increased between 15 and 16 from 4215 to 4637 again Valley Crossing primarily is the reason and then you see it moved around dipped in the pandemic year to 43.23 and has rebounded but it has not reached the 48 percent so the Assumption I'm making here is a key one I'm looking in the projections to look at that kindergarten birth ratio and I chose two assumptions here one would be
037a low one it's the average of the three years prior to the pandemic plus the past year so I'm picking up the higher percentages there and that averages to 47.5 percent and then I I chose another one somewhat arbitrarily moving it up a whole percentage point to 48.5 in that assumption that your share will increase then longer term I I looked at the past 14 years in Washington County resident bursts increased from 4.03 to 4.20 percent of Minnesota resident bursts I looked at the five-year average was which was an increase of 2.19 and I applied that to the next five years so you can see as we especially I know you said you're not going to look at the net the second five years but these are the assumptions that make a big difference in
038the second five years in in other ways they're they're giving you a little more growth so it's then very simple I had the pool and I have these percentages and it's a simple thing of multiplying them and and uh I I here's I want to go back to this one what I want to call your attention to is that we have three years of pools here to the kindergarten of 2025-26 and notice how those numbers are going down not dramatically per se but going down so I've now created the pooled bolded number of courses 2022-23 I'm multiplying these percentages by the pool and you can see of the kindergarten projections that result and then as a way of comparison I've looked at at how many kindergarten students you had in the past 10 years 12
039759 and as you can see projection thirteen thousand forty five or thirteen thousand three nineteen so I'm projecting more kindergarten students than you had in the past now we want to look at the diagonal the migration now here's some really interesting numbers you can look at the bottom line you can see that big migration number between the fall of 15 and the fall of 16 and you can see its effect and the kindergarten to first grade all those Elementary grades what that brought in the other thing that's very interesting here and and this is fairly typical of Minnesota school system is that you have a net inflow at grade eight from grade eight to nine the entry of high school and you can see those numbers and then interestingly starting in the fall of 2016
040to fall of 2017 you start to have a net out migration between grades five and six which means at the end of Elementary and before the start of middle school now again none of these numbers are large okay but the significance to me is that when you could have thought of of having picking up somewhere 65 70 kids at the transition into high school that's really cut about in half with what's lost at the in the transition to Middle School or would you pardon can I ask you can ask it now uh so my question is between 15 and 16 and then the next these are Falls now remember fall not the schooly fall right sorry yeah the Falls yeah um so you said for the 15 to 16 that is the increase the increase
041in the elementary years is Valley Crossing coming in and then the decrease between five and six is that the students from Valley Crossing leaving well I can't I can't answer that question we know that many of them left uh what on until we would answer your question we need to look at resident enrollment or non-resident enrollment grade by grade to know whether this is concentrated among non-residents or not okay but my point is That Remains the Same it doesn't matter whether they are residents or non-residents it sort of cuts in half of the number that you would have said oh we can account sort of for this many well we're coming in at High School and then I want to draw your attention to the large netian migration of uh 21 to 22 484 students
042and that marks here a pretty exceptional uh increase in single-family housing units the previous year 336 I want to avoid the pandemic year fall of 1819 371 so we have a string of of a pretty large net in migration to focus on now we saw the raw numbers when they're converted to percentages the percent that survived to the next grade if you will [Music] we call them survival rates which accounts both for migration and death although death is very low among school-aged children and you can see with the exception of five to six all of these numbers are above 1.000 and at one point zero zero zero I'm assuming we know that the same number of students moved on to the next higher grade so what this tells us is kindergarten to first grade in
043in the low assumption you get 3.9 percent bump in the high you get four percent Bond see how that works and what's interesting and because of course of the alc you have a high percentage between 11 and 12. okay so if you will know in the cohort survival method which is the traditional way of projecting population we have made assumptions about kindergarten which are based on births and and like and we have migration assumptions or survival rates and in applying them I it's basically marrying if you will the hot the low and the high of each of those assumptions so what do we see in 10 years well we had eighteen thousand six hundred six enrolled in 22-23 so 10 years out I'm projecting 19274 to 19938 or a 3.6 percent to 7.2 percent enrollment
044increase now what I want to call your attention to is that 7.2 is very very similar to what you had in the past 10 years which was a 7.6 okay now I'll talk a little bit I don't I don't think it's going to be at the higher end but I can see what it is now in these projections we know that the kindergarten is projected to be smaller than the previous year's grade 12 so natural decrease continues and it's going to be larger than it was in the past because we've got some large cohorts going out and that migration continued projected to continue in its comparable to what we've had in the projection show this is cut off here 400 to 450 a year okay so here's what the numbers look like and as you
045can see in these that uh here the the assumptions about kindergarten have the largest effect because the two lowest ones have the low kindergarten projection and the two highest projections have the high kindergarten okay and if it were the migration it would be just the opposite and then I've divided these as as as you structure your schools k568 912 both a five-year and again I want to stress in the five years all children have been born for the K-5 in six eight in the first five years not even the assumptions made in kindergarten affect those students this is simply the number in the grades now and the migration rates and at the high school level you have you go out eight years before you have any effect of any kindergarten assumption so that's totally a
046function of kids currently enrolled as the age with the survival rates or net in migration now what could make these projections too high well projected kindergarten could be too high more students could choose other education options projected in migration too high too low I think the only thing could be of projected kindergarten is too low I don't think the other other factors will be there now one of the challenges in this district is this rapid growth in housing and I just want to share with you I've been doing me this for 30 years already and about 15 17 years ago I stumbled upon a way of overlaying School enrollment with housing and tax records I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread but I found out that the relationship between housing and K-12
047enrollment is a very complex one and while housing it you might think of it it is like DNA you need it there but it is not a very good predictor of school enrollment and especially in a district like yours which now has thousands of existing housing units and even though you're adding a large number it's a very small percentage to what already exists and it's very dangerous to make the assumption that the new units will automatically translate into additional enrollment because over and over again when you have natural decrease you have these other phenomena you don't doesn't translate immediately to it so what I have learned and I've done this in four states Minnesota Wisconsin Illinois and Colorado is that unit type affects school age child per unit yield and the most important unit type
048is single family detached units that the newer single-family units yield more students per unit than older units so what's the new unit well I have to tell you is about anything built 2000 and later now you say that's already 23 years old but it marks a shift in the type of unit in both square footage and certain amenities um that as single-family detached units sell student yield usually increases if the units are relatively new the turnover it usually decreases if they're older units Okay so uh for example I live in a single family home that was built in 1957. three bedrooms not going to produce many kids that type of unit uh the market value this is very counter-intuitive people think that uh affordable units and what makes something affordable varies from District to district
049will have more school-aged children no it's the middle and even the very most expensive units that yield the most school-aged children so what it says to me is that families choose what they can afford in the district and they move toward the most expensive housing in that District whether it's 250 000 or 750 000. my experience in Minnesota is that after units reach about 1.5 million then you tend not you have a decline in school age kids going to public school they tend to go to private school after that so these things so I say these states and single family detached varies by school district and by attendance area within school districts and I've not worked in a single District where every attendance area had the same yield if you will now what's interesting townhouses
050apartments and Condominiums are very consistent across all school districts across those States and a townhouse which you your nomenclature is a multi-family here uh the yield 0.22 they need a hundred units to get uh 22 students Apartments very consistent 0.11 to 0.15 and Condominiums have almost no school-aged children 0.02 to 0.05 which is off the chart here so let's look at what happens here we have this discussion here of whether these are actually five-year periods the point of this is that I think we have two equal periods here in time maybe they're two four-year periods but 2019 to 2022 are represents units that have already been built okay in 2023 to 2026 represents what local officials project will be built and my point in this simply is that across the board this says that the
051housing growth will slow somewhat not not tremendously but somewhat and then I looked at okay how do we come to understand this less than perfect relationship between housing and students so I look at your resident enrollment between 2018-19 and 2020 223 and the increase was exactly 238 students president students in that time period you had a natural decrease of 1050 students resident students you had a net in migration of we still had a plus but then when we look at residents attending elsewhere we have 1746 not a large number not a large percentage neither of them are but they do add up and then when we consider that in 2018-19 that comparable number attending elsewhere was 1269 which we assume some of those are may still be uh about and then I look at you
052in this time period you had an additional housing units of 5758 and I took a Year's lag time you could finesse this around and say oh maybe a third of them uh you know should be moved to another year of which 3090 were single family and I'm estimating from these units based on 0.50 to 0.55 for single family detached the 0.22 for multi-family and the 0.11 for apartments that that would have yielded 1931 to 2086. students Okay so you can see that that number I don't doubt that that number of students were in those units maybe even some more but they didn't translate into additional enrollment because of natural decrease and the number of students leaving the district for other education options so moral of the story here additional housing units even those with school-aged
053children do not automatically translate into additional enrollment and the issues are both methodological and in the assumptions you make so with that uh I want to say thank you for indulging me to talk probably longer than you are interested in listening uh I know that you're looking at only five years and I've presented 10 just remember what I've said about five years all those kids are born greatest impact on K5 Middle School not impacted by those kindergarten assumptions in the first five years and high school takes a long long time to be impacted by those assumptions and continued housing growth I think the the survival rates we've seen especially the last year bringing in 480 some students we said that projections are showing 400 to 450. which I think is is is adequate to cover
054the additional housing that's projected and so with that uh when you do this kind of work you're never 100 right but I do think we're reasonably close here so I want to thank you very much and Dan is giving me the hook here no no no no no yeah thank you Hazel for that's a lot to digest I'm telling you uh board members do you have questions you were a girl oh for one side go ahead to me um I just had a question you had mentioned in your presentation um that one thing that was different about our district versus other districts was that our private and Charter School net out migration increased post pandemic um and so I'm assuming that in other districts that it occurred it occurred immediately in the pandemic uh there
055I don't know there's a new piece of research out and I don't know if you've seen it or not the one that that makes the estimate of uh of one million missing public school kids but it appears in from that research which focused heavily on the state of Michigan that no matter what decision the public school system made they lost students if they made one decision it sent them to home schools if they made the other it sent them to private schools so uh it's just I like to point out what what I hope people will focus on to say okay why is this happening now in that post-pandemic we've had this little uptick again I want to stress as a percent of your enrollment this is minuscule but you know we do know every
056student represents dollars so um my follow-up maybe is for you Dan I'm not sure but you know on cfac WE you're always presenting enrollment projections and you and you talk a lot about cohort survival rate and that's what you use to project out our budget how do your cohort survival numbers align with um Hazel's covert Survivor numbers uh well if you can just wait 10 minutes it's actually one of my slides so I can probably show you but it's uh my numbers are lower okay at this point and is and I would say that for someone who's dealing with the finances being conservative is a good strategy no I don't think as as particularly conservative okay any other questions none okay thank you Hazel next is 7.2 Financial update and that will also be presented
057this evening by our Executive Director of Finance and operations Dan Pine so wait till this comes up um good evening again one more informational item concerning our budget it's our financial update so every month we give a financial update sometimes it's actual action you have to take for instance hopefully next month or we're in the revised budget to you and then a couple months the the preliminary budget for the next year then Levy information things like that this time of year we're kind of looking at how's our enrollment doing as if you've not heard enough about enrollment I can tell you more about enrollment um but actually you know what's what's going on with the budget and you know that back in 20 early 2021 we School Board passed a three-year budget reduction plan and
058that included you know about nine million dollars of reductions in the general fund budget and an increase of about three hundred thousand dollars in the revenue budget and we split it into three years um most of the dollars were seeking an increase of 6.6 million in operating Levy and that thanks to the the voters of the district passed and we were able to utilize those funds for the next 10 years they also had approved adjustments in this current year 2223 of about 7.8 million and adjustments in the budget for next year of about 7.8 million so we implemented those changes in the 2122 budget and we were able to present a balanced budget 2223 budget was also came out balanced we're using a projected enrollment of 18 631 students and I say students and and
059I talk in adms every daily membership but generally it's an average of one of students in school enrolled in school because that's how we're paid as of February 1st of this year we are projecting about 18 694 which has increased about 61.63 students and as you recall on average we're paid about 10 500 per student that number's going up a little bit based on other factors of categorical Aid um our revenue is affected by the basic formula which we'll talk about a little bit and this is the largest portion of our Revenue was to Simply multiply the number of students by the basic formula the basic formula which is the called the general education formula allowance this current year 6863 dollars per student back in the year 2000 it was 4966 now anyway this is
060like the starting point that we've been taking as we look what happens over time if that amount would have just been adjusted for inflation those years they would be 8126 right now but it's not adjusted for inflation it's it's determined every two years by the legislature and sometimes um they had a couple freezes sometimes they don't increase at all other times they increase it at a rate less than inflation and that results in a deficit to inflation of about thirteen hundred dollars per student as far as enrollment goes um a lot of Hazel's numbers so she's she uses kind of the butts in the seat method and I use when the kids are enrolled she takes the fall counts I take the average counts for the whole year but 1920 was actually our largest enrollment
061about 18 754. um the full pandemic school year of 2021 as she talked earlier saw a drop of to 18502 at the drop of 1.34 percent was less than most Metro school districts as we talked as Hazel talked earlier and then back in 2122 we rose up to 18 558 and right now we're projected about eighteen thousand six ninety four so we're still lagging about 60 students behind that High Mark in 1920. this is simply a chart that you can look at in more detail we're not going to go over each one it's very similar to the charts that you saw she did and this is how I project enrollment uh basically the same way she does although she puts a few other factors I try to keep any emotion out of the equation big
062surprise right but we we basically I just basically say what happened between these grades in this shoot in in this period of time and I take 10 years worth of information calculates her core survival rates and plug them into the next four years so as you can see I'm here and then on this chart too I like to look at where the high class is just to kind of see if we have a bubble coming or if a bubble is leaving um but if you look on this one projecting 18694 and 2023 and then you can see my projections based solely on a cohort survival method um of 18788 and 24 18 939 19. the point being so then I took Hazel's numbers and I thought when I take her numbers if you look in
063the report and say Dan where'd you get that number at you have to add 300 to her numbers because she doesn't include Pre-K Early Childhood special ed and the VPK so I took her numbers and added 300 to hers and you can see that I'm even more conservative than she is because I'm projecting 18788 and 24. she's predicting 18972 and and therefore but they're pretty close so you can see that um my method is even more conservative and that probably comes down to kindergarten because albeit the numbers have gone down a little bit you know you know we're at 48 of the births and they've dropped a little bit down um I'd probably use about 45 of the bursts and it has been difficult to get numbers Lately from the health department but um I
064think one thing that we don't really notice a lot of I mean didn't really point out but if you look at the numbers and you look at the population of our County it's about 260 000 people and our district is about 110 now 112 000. about 38 of the population but we're picking up 45 to 50 percent of the bursts into our Public Schools so it could be a lot of things I asked her if she knew any reason that was and one thing she has noticed because she studies Stillwater also this school district that the Lake Elmo houses don't produce a lot of public school kids and someone else pointed out to me well maybe we just have more people younger families down here but to pull in 45 to 50 percent of the
065of the kids into public schools when we only have 38 of the population is kind of a phenomenon anyway so we take some of these numbers we'll talk about financial forecasts a little bit um so a year ago we were telling you we I was um that I thought the fund balance be about seven percent at the end of 21-22 it came in about 10 percent um the budget we're in right now was balanced and it's supposed to leave us a fund balance about 10 percent there's a few things that have happened that have increased costs and there's a few things that happen to increase some revenues too but um basically we're looking at an extra 1.5 million dollars in services and that's mostly attributable to increased costs and utilities gas and water and such
066electricity and then snow events are our snow removal budget is already about 100 hundred thousand above budget already and hopefully it won't snow anymore and then we did settle some contracts with a very large group the Paras and we wanted you know for labor retention reasons and and just having a good contract Zone but that that cost us about 1.5 million more than we normally would have budgeted so right now it's too early to predict what's going to happen next financial year 23 24. mainly because of the funding sources I'll talk about that for a little bit in a little bit um and contract settlements we have over 200 million dollars in contracts 200 worth of contracts to settle in the next fiscal year the main reason about I say about funding sources is because
067the legislative actions this session is a funding session as you probably all know um going into the year the state is with about a 17 billion dollar Surplus the governor has presented his budget his budget increased the basic formula that we talked about earlier four percent in year one and two percent in year two but there are bills out there that increase it by five percent in each year uh when you look at the formula numbers just consider one percent it's about 1.4 million dollars in new revenue for the district um the governor also the budget also funds half of the special education processity for each District for that for us to be about 10 million dollars if that passed and there are bills out there that actually fund um almost the whole cross soap
068city so basically stay tuned and we'll let you know what's going on with that with that that's your update and of course we'll take any questions or any questions information only so okay yeah you answered my most important one it's okay okay thank you Dan thank you next item on our agenda is 8.0 which are action items 8.1 are the proposed policy changes and that will be presented by our superintendent Julie Nielsen thank you uh this evening we have 11 policies that have been reviewed and revised to reflect updates in the Minnesota statutes definition of terms legal references as well as cross-references our board policy committee members reviewed the policies and made recommendations for board information and subsequent action the school board members at our last meeting on February 2nd had the opportunity to review
069each of the policies individually at that time we also allowed for public comment and there was no public comment and so this evening I am asking for approval on the 11 policies in your board packet thank you can I get a motion to approve the changes so move d by Pat and seconded by Katie is there any discussion or comments seeing none all those in favor aye aye opposed motion carry next is 8.2 and that is our 23 24 school calendar and that also will be presented this evening by our superintendent Julie Nielsen thank you again our district calendar for 23 24 and we know that we have families waiting on our district calendar from the last board meeting there is only one change and that change does not have an impact on students what
070you will note on the district calendar it is up originally we had an atps day alternative teacher pay performance system day for our staff and it was set to be held on August 25th and we have since moved that to September 25th and that originally was a no school day for K-12 and so staff members will be using that September 25th day as an opportunity to reflect on where kids are at to talk about their school Improvement plans and what goals they're going to be setting for the school year so that is the only change from our last meeting so with that I am asking for approval of the 23-24 school year calendar okay may I get a motion to approve the 2324 calendar so moved second move by Louise and second by Simi is
071there any discussion okay all those in favor aye aye those opposed motion carried next we have 8.3 and that is the Minnesota State High School league Grant application that will be presented this evening by our assistant superintendent Christine Schaefer good evening School Board chair Van Lear superintendent Nielsen school board members and student Representatives if you recall we requested approval for the State High School league Foundation Grant back in October of 2022 and that was part a of the application tonight we are requesting Part B of the application and Part B is for funds for activities directors to work with student captains and student leaders in Fine Arts activities and Athletics so as part of this application the high school league requires board of directors requires the board of directly resolution to request the funds from
072the foundation Park High School Woodbury High School and East Ridge High School have requested a grant of five thousand dollars in category B student leadership training the funds will be used to continue the high school's leadership development programming which includes activities such as bringing in speakers to talk with students about leadership having book studies about leadership and this again is for all leaders Fine Arts activities and Athletics so at this time I would like to seek approval of the resolution to request funds from the Minnesota State High School league thank you Christine can I get a motion to approve the grant so moved first and seconded by Katie this is a roll call resolution and Dana Eric tessmer yes Louise Heinz yes Pat Driscoll yes Katie Schwartz yes Timmy petnick yes Sharon Van Lear yes
073motion passes thank you thank you next is 8.4 and that is our achievement and integration point plan and that will be presented this evening by our assistant superintendent Kelly Jensen PowerPoint up so we're ready to go but thank you all right good evening board chair Van Lear board member superintendent Nielsen and student ambassadors tonight we are here to ask for approval of our achievement integration plan in accordance with Minnesota statute 124d 861. Mr McGee our director of diversity equity and inclusion department will provide a brief recap of the information that was presented at the workshop meeting and then we'll be back to answer any questions you may have great thank you all right as a reminder achievement and integration is a program that was established in Minnesota Legislature to pursue racial and economic integration and
074increase student academic achievement create Equitable educational opportunities and reduce academic disparities based on students diverse racial ethnic and economic backgrounds this was uh initially adopted in Minnesota State Legislature in 2013 and it essentially replaced uh the Integra integration Revenue program which was established in the 90s swashco participates in the achievement and integration program as an adjoining district and we've established a multi-district collaboration with 196 Roosevelt Rosemont Apple Valley Eagan as well as District 834 which is Stillwater uh by participating in this program swashco receives about 3.3 million dollars in Revenue it is not a well the funding is not received based on achievement of goals but we get the revenue by being having our plan be approved by mde and being part of the program according to the state in the program uh each plan
075must contain three types of goals one as achievement disparity so we're looking at reducing the disparities in academic achievement among all students and this excludes uh the categories of gender disability and English Learners as there's other funding and programming for students that qualify for those Services number two is teacher Equity reducing the disparities in Equitable access to effective and diverse teachers among all students once again this is not including the categories of gender disability or English learner status and finally integration increasing racial and economic integration both in our district and with surrounding districts where you're going to see uh proposed this year and for the next three years are three goals our goals fall into three categories academics relationships and empowerment now we know that all three of these goals um they spill into each
076other they we know that relationships uh have a proven effect uh positive impact on student academic achievement but we also have an academic specific goal so goal number one swashco students will demonstrate self-efficacy engagement and Proficiency in the academic expectations required to apply for a four-year college or university goal number two our relationship goal swashco students staff and families have access to culturally affirming spaces and programming meant to build meaningful relationships in schools and communities and finally goal number three empowerment swashco students staff and families are empowered to frequently and efficiently access resources and programming offered by our district within these goals and as you can see it laid out in the plan there are multiple key indicators of progress these the state has made it so that we are able to update those key
077indicators as we go through the next three years if we find that there's an indicator that this is not the measure that we want and so we're working right now very closely with our teaching and learning department and to combine our efforts with mtss and is also with our executive cabinet as we're going through the strategic planning process we want to make sure that what we're doing in achievement and integration is a supplement to what's already happening in our district not uh it's on standalone so the next steps for achievement and integration plan um we're bringing it to the board tonight for approval uh once approved we will be submitting to the state this needs to be submitted to the state with board approval by March 15th uh so I'm happy that we're ahead of
078the game here because the next step for us will then be to have a corresponding budget that also needs to be submitted to mde with this time if there are any questions before we can move into the vote I'll take those now can I get a motion to approve the plan first moved by Katie second by semi are there any discussion or comments I have a few questions if if you don't mind um 3.3 million can you explain in a little bit of detail as far as where that money goes what it's spent on yeah so according to uh the way the budget is set up for achievement integration a minimum of 80 percent of that budget needs to be spent on direct student services in our district most of that is an avid and
079for FTE whether that's for cultural Liaisons academic success coaches uh paying for FTE for Avid tutors AVID coordinator and Avid elective teacher so most of the funding for achievement and integration goes into direct student services can you explain what Avid is please Avid advancement via individual determination did I get that right okay um Avid is a program that we've had in the school district for a number of years um it is meant to empower students with strategies for um learning strategies for empowerment strategies that will help them in either college or post High School career paths okay I do have a few other questions uh if you can bear with me I appreciate it in regards to the mentor and I was just reviewing the um the PowerPoint from the last meeting because I I
080was not at that meeting in regards to the mentorship program for teachers of color can you explain a little bit more about what that is yeah so and actually I'm glad you brought that out so that's not actually something that's uh funded through achievement integration but it is part uh it's built into our key indicators of progress okay so we uh currently received a grant from pellsbeeb that is specifically for Recruitment and Retention of teachers of color so when you look at uh when you talk about specifically the mentorship for teachers of color we're looking at setting up um in addition to the mentorship that we already provide for all of our year one year two and year three teachers we provide mentorship coaching probationary professional development this would be a supplement to that knowing
081that often teachers of color are maybe one of few in a site and there's often a feeling of isolation that's been expressed both here and in many Metro districts so this is an additional layer of support for those teachers but it's a supplement to the mentorship program that we already have in place pellsby uh it's the the licensing agency for the state of Minnesota for both uh teacher and administrator licenses okay uh in regard I don't know if you have these numbers but in regards to uh student population and the proportion of students that I guess would be considered students of color for I I guess would be the proper term what is the proportion of teachers that meet that category as far you know or close closely um I don't have that with me
082right now I would say uh typically our um past couple years I think we've been somewhere three to five percent but I I don't want to say something false from from understand so if you could allow me to uh come back to that question uh but we're in single digits for sure okay or Abby and how does that how does that align with other school districts as far as their proportion of students does anybody know I mean I know these are kind of out of the blue questions but I don't have that with me right now um we are I can say we're in not wildly out of the norm in the Metro um to get specifics I would have to go back into that research do we ever do uh do we ever do
083eggs interviews with teachers of color that leave to find out why they're leaving let's turn that over to Abby once again okay so we don't really have a good idea as to why teachers that meet that category are leaving I mean um well we didn't say that teachers of color are leaving one of our difficulties retaining them um or difficulties hiring them or both so one of the things to keep in mind with this current achievement integration plan is we are about to enter our Baseline year and so I mean there are across the board um less teachers in our district uh partially due to the pandemic so one of the things that we're going to be doing in 2023 is taking our Baseline then to determine what will our projections be for growth um
084as a key indicator of that of goal number two okay uh in regards to one of the goals I believe was um or measurements rather was um to achieve less suspensions for bypoc students is that correct uh that is one of the key indicators okay um that is a good goal I would love to see that I'd love to see some less suspensions for all kids um my concern is how you're going to achieve that goal and I spoke to superintendent Nielsen and I know she spoke about I can't remember exactly the term restorative restorative practices and relationships with kids there you go restorative practices can you explain that a little bit better for me uh restorative practices of the suspension restorative practices so what does that mean when we look at decreasing suspensions we
085don't want to over inflate that by just saying you know what let's stop suspending students what we want to do is enact procedures and policies and and behaviors that will reduce the behaviors that lead to suspension across the board for all students so an example of a restorative uh process would be one of the this year is our first year of our racial harm response protocol now we know that there are some actions uh that would all that are racially harmful that also constitute as bullying or as harassment we have to um address those uh based on our student handbook however we don't want to just stop at punishment or punitive we want to look at and really explore why might students be exhibiting certain behaviors and then pooling whatever resources we have to address
086those student behaviors so we don't have the recidivism of students potentially going back and repeating the same harmful so when we're looking at a decrease in suspensions it is a truly a decrease in the behaviors that lead to suspensions so we're not we're not altering the criteria for a student being suspended there there's no um proposal that we change the handbook at this time this is strictly looking at employing actions that will decrease the behaviors that lead to suspension okay when you Abby mentioned four percent teachers of color what percentage of students so when we talk about trying a student trying to find somebody that they identify with that will also possibly help with suspensions there's a huge gap between we wanted to be really intentional with that language because we know that it's not
087that students can only connect with somebody that is the same race or ethnicity so we also put culturally in there because we know that our the experiences that we have also make us more or less susceptible to having similarities or dissimilarities when it comes to Intercultural communication so we do want to make sure that our hiring practices are Equitable we want to make sure that our hiring practices are in service of trying to create a staff that is representative of our community and also know with the staff that we have we want to empower them with the skills and resources to be able to connect with all students all the time I think at one point uh Katie when we first uh were on the board what and and Abby you correct me if I'm
088wrong I think we our goal was to increase the um teachers of color by eight percent and I think we came in at five didn't we five percent or are we yeah those numbers could have been closer to a couple years ago um right around right now we fall right around four percent total for teachers of color and I think the difficulty uh with hiring the teachers had something to do with the licensures coming from other states they were there there was some type of uh glitter complication that they had put in place and I think that there are a number of factors that may lead to um you know shortage of uh teachers that don't identify as white however one of the things that we do want to do to address that is to
089there's a stat that was thrown out about how teachers are teach in the communities where they live and so if we have students that are being shown an example of what it can be to you know the positives of what it can be to be a teacher or an educator in our in our district that's how we get the ball rolling on a grow your own program for instance right now uh we're looking at what do we do to retain the teachers and the staff how are there ways that we can Empower staff that maybe don't have a license to um Aid in getting their full license um but like I said there's a number of reasons why we may or may not have uh teachers of color in this District because we're in a
090baseline year that's something that we're going to investigate and explore and try to respond to [Music] a non-white teacher until I was like 20 years old so I really appreciate the intentionality behind this because I think it's really um sometimes it can be really challenging to be in a space where um no one in a position of authority has any understanding of what your life experiences are so I really appreciate this and I'm glad we're focusing on this for the next few years I got a couple more questions if you don't mind um you talked about culturally affirming space can you could you would you mind giving me a definition on that or I guess what's the district's official definition so we don't have like an adopted definition of culturally affirming space but generally it's
091a space for all students all students feel seen known included and cared for um so to see your race or your ethnicity or your culture which those are not all EX synonymous terms uh reflected in the materials that we use in our teaching whether or not you have a teacher that looks sounds or has an experience that is exactly similar to you we want to ensure that the spaces that our students are in all of our students that they're seen that they are heard that they are affirmed for who they are that we don't ask students to change for adults that we do what we can to get to know who they are as Learners and as people and then adjust our instruction accordingly appreciate that I have one question oh are you done nope
092you go ahead I'll I'll take a break I have one one question for you um I know this is achievement and integration and all I hear is integration but I want to know about achievement especially in the elementary I know that our reading scores there's a huge gap and are we addressing that with this money or is there other money that's taking care of that so it's important to remember that achievement integration money is supplemental so we have uh reading programming in our Elementary uh now one of the things that we're doing to supplement that reading programming in our elementary schools is the use of academic success coaches who will be used to specifically to do interventions reading math and or behavioral interventions for students um specifically students at our sites that have the highest
093rate of free and reduced lunch eligibility and also looking at race and ethnicity the racial ethnicity diversity within our schools as well okay thank you yeah James um when you talk about like what the the funding going for academic success coaches are we spending any funding or is this already baked into the funding we do for um you know for example like classroom materials or books or whatever that are more um appealing to a wider range of kids um so there there's a portion of all of this funding that is for materials um but like I said a majority of this is for FTE but there there are some things you know for instance we will purchase student materials that they might be able if they forgot a notebook or a pencil they can go
094to a culture liaison or to one of our multi-cultural spaces if there's the need that they have because there's a trusted adult there for them but by and large the funding is for direct student services mostly through Avid and FTE excuse me I would offer to that during our curriculum revision is part of the resource review so it's embedded in everything teaching and learning does and then it could be supplemented with information from the a I plan but our normal capital budget all of that that is a criteria as part of that yep yeah I got another one for you yeah um it indicates uh in the plan that that staff will be required to attend three trainings every year yeah cultural competency can you describe one of those trainings for me yeah so these
095uh staff and so we focus a lot um a lot of staff development is like geared toward teachers but we also know that we have like 50 of our staff that are non-teachers and we want to make sure that they are empowered with the same resources that teachers have to make sure that students feel safe affirmed valued in all the spaces they're in so the the PD that we've done in the past and that will continue uh for specifically our non-instructional staff uh really revolves around the skill sets of um almost like customer and public service do we know how to have effective Intercultural communication with each other we're focused on self-awareness self-management responsible decision making relationship skills and social awareness so when we're training our instructional and non-instructional staff and cultural competency it's really
096around those five areas to ensure that they know themselves they know the things that they're bringing to the table when they come into the workplace and that they've got the skill set to be able to interact effectively both with colleagues and with students and with families as well okay and then one of the one of the measure measured measurements rather sorry involves that was listed involves family and students in the bipod community that can demonstrate a yearly increase in understanding of student rights and opportunities how do you measure that it's a great question so one of the things that actually came out in our strategic planning process is do all of our families know all of the things that are available to them and so one of the things I go back to is we
097focus a lot on K-12 there's a lot of there's a ton of programming from birth and Beyond 12th grade both through Community Education we offer adult ESL adult GED Services there are a lot of things that our community can take advantage of and we know that not all of them know that it exists and so when we talk about empowering our families we want to use part of our time and our funding to go out into the community to connect our community with the things that um are theirs the other part of this is you know for students who want to be involved in activities uh students who are looking for extracurricular opportunities we want to make sure that there are no bear or as we want to eliminate as many barriers as we can
098to students being able to participate in extracurricular activities as well but I guess my question Still Remains how do you measure that I'm sorry yeah no that's okay yeah I mean that's a hard question to answer well it really I mean it's a sentiment score right and so we can look at engagement we can look at our families accessing our website our families accessing um our online registration and are we going out into the community what's our rate of connecting with families this may also come out in survey data in terms of perception because a lot of this whether or not it exists we also want to make sure that our families know that it exists and they can feel the impact this um is one of the one of the benefits to our achievement
099and integration plan being able to adapt as we go means that we can really align the the efforts with strategic planning so that we don't have to over survey our community we can because these are common themes that are coming out both in strategic planning and in achievement integration we can combine those efforts it may be a survey I can't say for sure because we want to land first what exactly is it that we want to measure then we'll get to the methodology but it could be measured in sentiment score on a survey that goes out to our community okay thank you I appreciate it yeah any more any additional questions [Music] you've forgotten before okay you're my girl um okay all those in favor aye aye Arlo post thank you with their opposed Eric
100okay motion carried next is thank you next is uh 9.0 and that's our superintendent's report that will be given by Julie Nielsen I'm going to talk quickly because our kids are they're not really realizing this was that long of a meeting and they're being mesmerized by all the numbers right kids um I do just want to clarify we've heard a couple of times about free and reduced lunch and I think it was shared that we're at 15 and actually we go back and use the school district report card from mde and that's about what it says we are but currently today we are at 25 percent and so when we think about our free and reduced lunch we're about one in four so 25 percent just to update I've heard that number a couple of
101times this evening also Emmy next to me reminded that she was happy to say because she doesn't have school tomorrow it is a K-5 um prep day and she's going to sleep in tomorrow and then of course Monday February 20th is a no school day for President's Day I also wanted to take February is Minnesota school board recognition month and we'd like to recognize our elected board members who give their time and energy in support of high quality public schooling for our students school board members in South Washington County schools are entrusted by this community with responsibility for an annual budget of over 336 million and with our early Learners over 19 500 students birthed to age 21 3 500 employees and 26 buildings departments and programs school boards are charged with making decisions that
102can be difficult and require sifting through a great deal of information South Washington County schools during my time has faced a number of situations from budget reductions to an operating referendum to our August Bond referendum and now working through strategic planning driver shortages and transportation and planning for the future of the district with a facility plan we'd like to take this time to thank each of you for your time and role in serving as a South Washington County School Board member on behalf of the executive cabinet we say thank you with a little bundt cake from our very own Bundt Cake Cake Shop along with an msba certificate and so on behalf of the cabinet thank you to Eric Pat Melinda who is not able to be with us today Louise Simi Katie and Sharon
103thank you for your service [Applause] with that um we move into 10.0 our future meeting dates we have a school board Workshop meeting on March 2nd 2023 at 6 pm and a business meeting on March 23rd 2023 at six o'clock P.M our meetings will be held at the district service center and with that 11.0 we are adjourned [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]